but it just bugs me that at the end of the day, whoever is in power gets to define “intolerance” and their definition might not match the majority’s. And the majority might not be right either…

This is to me one of the most primal liberal problems with thinking about politics. No, communists do not support some benevolent autocrat delineating acceptable speech, it must be democratically decided with a mind to Marxist analysis. “But what if people vote wrong?” Campaign against it! Educate them! “But what if people vote so overwhelmingly wrong that such a campaign is hopeless?” Then you are talking about a state that is so overwhelmingly compromised that it doesn’t fucking matter if your hypothetical Republicanist alternative tries to reign them in, because in liberal society there is already a massive extent to which popular consensus decides if you live in squalor or not based on what you say. That’s what “a reputation” is in liberal society.

The only thing to do is to educate people on what their own interests are. If there is some hypothetical world where people are just determined to vote themselves into hell, then that represents a failed project and a state that must be overthrown.

Some people would consider me intolerant for being against circumcision and piercing of infants’ ears, because those are deeply-held cultural traditions for some people.

There is a difference between speaking against something and banning it. This is ultimately just a question about the nature of reactionary religious practices, not “free speech” itself.

Reactionary and hate speech makes me fuckin sick. Yet I’m terrified that attempts to officially ban it just fuel persecution fetishes in people who practice it, and cause them to go further down their rabbit holes and drag more uncertain people with them.

While not as fundamental, this is another common trope among liberals, though I am glad that even radlibs have started to understand that deplatforming is good and works. Yes, the new circumstances fascists are put in give them new tools with which to recruit, but that’s the dialectical nature of reality. What matters is not that they have new tools but that those new tools are predicated on them being deprived of old tools that are much, much more powerful, and being able to call yourself a fascist in open society is much more powerful to recruit new fascists than some precious little song and dance about “look at who you aren’t allowed to criticize”.

I would like to further point out that your likely frames of reference – either America or states just to its left – overwhelmingly don’t prosecute what you and I would call hate speech, it is the social consensus around some of that hate speech being bad that pushes it to the fringes. It is the banning of it – which is something that should follow from that social consensus in a democratic government – that would for most intents and purposes stamp it out.

There’s also the matter of social programs and such for the alienated and dispossessed people who it might pick up or who have even already been caught up in it. The law does not need to be punitive, and many fascists are ultimately also a type of victim who the state can help out of their fascism if the state actually wanted to do so.