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(I use this analogy not to invoke Godwin's law, but because it's the first example I could think of a once-ascendant ideology which is now widely condemned. Wokeness is not Nazism, not "like" Nazism, not "as bad as" Nazism.)
From Germany in 1933-45, Nazism was the thing. The Nazi party was in power, swastika flags flew everywhere, "Heil Hitler" was the official greeting. Since the end of the war, Nazism is perhaps the most widely reviled and condemned ideology in the world. Labelling someone a Nazi is such a reliable rhetorical kill-button that it's become a cliché, and yet still sees unironic use every day. In the Anglosphere and Western Europe, no public figure openly identifies as a Nazi. Even things with incidental connections to the Nazi regime (like the phrase "final solution", or the term "concentration camp", which the Nazis did not coin and which had an entirely legitimate meaning prior to the war) have become untouchable by association. In some cases this stigmatisation is enforced by law (e.g. for understandable reasons it's illegal to display a swastika in Germany), but not always: publicly wearing a swastika t-shirt in Boston is a legally protected act under the First Amendment, and yet one's likelihood of getting beaten up by a complete stranger for doing so is similar to the likelihood of same in Berlin.
Now imagine a counterfactual world wherein Nazism went into retreat, without being so aggressively stigmatised. After the war, the Nazi party was no longer in power, but politicians elected as party members during its peak make no especial effort to distance themselves from their electoral pasts: indeed, many politicians proudly self-identify as Nazis, and openly announce their intent to seek election under a Nazi platform. Academics with cushy university jobs hang swastika flags in their offices, and no one so much as raps them on the knuckles. While most Germans have gotten back into the habit of greeting each other with "Guten tag", a handful still use "Heil Hitler", and this is treated essentially as an amusing anachronistic idiosyncrasy, like someone who persists in referring to the internet as the "world wide web". Whenever Nazi atrocities are brought up in public, the reaction among those responsible is not solemn contrition but flippant dismissal: "ha ha, we sure did get a bit carried away, didn't we?" And whenever Jews complain that open expressions of support for this ideology make them uncomfortable, people roll their eyes and tell them to stop moaning. We had the Nuremberg trials, the party is no longer in power – what more do you want? Let the baby have its bottle.
In the above scenario, I doubt many would say that Nazism as an ideology had decisively lost. I think most would describe it as dormant, not extinct.
After the Sydney Sweeney "great jeans" thing, I observed that there has been a vibe shift, in that, while woke people are still free to publicly express pretty out-there opinions without it having much impact on their public standing, there's no longer any expectation for normies to play along, to mouth along with the catechism. On the surface, this might look like we've "beaten" woke. But as many other commenters below have pointed out, I think it's premature to be doing victory laps. Sure, I don't have to pretend to agree that American Eagle is covertly promoting white supremacy, and I won't get into trouble for denying that it is – but woke people can still explicitly state that and face no career repercussions of any kind. I don't have to pretend to support putting convicted male rapists in women's prisons, or the sterilisation of autistic teenagers by their thousands – but every June, without fail, my entire office (my entire city) gets festooned with flags celebrating both. (Lest you think I'm exaggerating, last weekend I walked past a mural depicting a trans-identified female with prominent mastectomy scars that was paid for with EU money).
Wokeness is not extinct: wokeness is dormant, and AOC knows this better than anyone. If she really wanted to distance herself from a permanently radioactive ideology, she couldn't afford to be half this flippant.
Heaven forbid anyone be allowed to hold and express political or ethical opinions that clash with yours! Where would American democracy be then?
The salient characteristic of "wokeness" that right-wingers had a legitimate case against - the thing that needed, needs, to be wiped out - is cancel culture. It was the unprecedented defection from American norms around freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and peaceful coexistence with people from the other side of the aisle. If there are still wokes out there cancelling people, that's one thing. But the fact that people still hold beliefs of the kind that wokeness sought to enforce by illegitimate means, that is not relevant. It's normal. It's the equivalent of non-murderous German nationalists, who do not deserve to automatically be tarred with the Nazi brush just because they pursue similar aims to those that the Nazis committed horrific crimes in pursuit of.
Then someone should probably have figured out a way to wipe it out. But they haven't, and the best defense available depends entirely on mirroring its tactics. There simply is not support for any other form of response, and people are never, ever going to accept "heads we cancel you, tails you tolerate us" as a stable equilibrium. And yet, in values-incoherent environments, that is precisely the deal on offer from all sides.
1990s-style maximal-free-speech norms were an unsustainable confluence of one-off factors, and they are gone now and are not going to come back. They have no constituency, and Free Speech ideology itself is variously either wildly unpopular or wildly hypocritical (CP? Revenge Porn? Malicious code? Copyright? Deepfake porn? The N-word, or slurs generally?). People, speaking generally, do not actually want Free Speech. They want "Free Speech" for speech within a standard deviation of what they consider good and normal, and speech outside that island of tolerance they do not want to see or to know about or for it to exist at all. This is all they have ever wanted or ever will want, and impressions to the contrary are artifacts of large-scale, coordinated, and evidently unsustainable lies. One of the most popular lies you're cutting across in your comment: "you shouldn't censor, because if you violate the taboo on censorship then others will turn around and censor you." But this only makes sense if they actually will turn around and censor you; if "free speech" goes dormant when you censor, it can either stay dormant forever, prove the maxim correct and render free speech to the past-tense, or it can wake up, at which point the argument is falsified and your initial censorship was the correct choice after all. Neither horn of the dilemma results in durable free-speech norms; the argument was never anything more than a feel-good deepity.
But they are tarred with the Nazi brush, observably, in the real world we actually live in. At some point, "deserve" is just a word you've made up to describe things that aren't going to happen. People notice this, and they stop playing along or pretending otherwise.
People want more good things and less bad things. Speech is a thing. The math is pretty simple.
One can be a free speech absolutist and still think CSAM should be illegal. The thing that makes it evil is the manner of its production, not its distribution.
Banning mere possession (with no before-the-fact knowledge of production) is already on shaky ground, free-speech-absolutist-wise. As soon as you cross into "This should be illegal because it resembles actual CSAM" you have to turn in your absolutist card.
Actually, you've probably already lost your card when you ban production, because CSAM includes material produced by sexting teens.
I think this is an extremely noncentral example of what people talk about when they talk about CSAM.
Central enough to produce real felony charges, apparently.
Could you provide a citation?
https://www.aclu.org/news/juvenile-justice/minnesota-prosecutor-charges-sexting-teenage-girl-child-pornography
https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/juvenile/sexting.htm
https://repository.uclawsf.edu/hastings_comm_ent_law_journal/vol32/iss1/1/
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-28255225
Such a case was also discussed somewhere on the motte but I couldn't immediately find it.
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