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Comment by strunz | Hacker News Reader

This has nothing to do with them being unable to support Republicans, it's them choosing not to support a Democratic nominee (which they've done for the past 50 years) because they don't want to anger the possible Republican nominee because the owner is afraid of retribution affecting his other businesses.

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As the cancel brigade often says: freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.

True, but said consequences are the possibility of a revenge streak of a petty US president called Trump. That is the real problem and story. And nobody really seems to dispute that possibility.

Trump fans boycotting Amazon is a consequence.

The US government punishing Amazon is not.

The first amendments limits the governemt in its actions, not the people.

And why should we be using cancel brigades' definitions? If freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences for your speech, then freedom of speech automatically exists everywhere and the concept is meaningless.

Obvious there is judgement for when consequences rise to the level of being coercive - someone giving you a dirty look is not, the de jure government sanctioning you is. But trying to define rights binary-axiomatically is really just creating lemmas for cryptofascism when the preconditions have been met but yet the rights are still missing (which is exactly what the cancel brigades are pushing).

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