Refusing to Choose Is a Choice:

Adam Bates - Why I care that the keynote for the LP convention is... | Facebook:

Refusing to choose is a choice. It’s a choice in favor of the people who prey on others and who refuse to acknowledge the humanity of those they hate.

This party and this movement are beset by right wing cretins, and it's not because they love freedom more than people on the left. It's because our unwillingness to choose between the predators and their victims is a choice of its own, and these people are not stupid. They see what's happening and they see that nobody will fight for them. At least with the Democrats they have some proximity to power, some occasional protection. Here all they have is venom.

See also Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance:

If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

Rebecca Solnit: On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway:

Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naive version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?