How often when you bring up topics these days that seem to be taboo when it comes to questioning or challenging do you hear "No one is stopping you from challenging?" I tend to see that from the leftists, establishment, and authoritarians in one form or another fairly early into any debate on such a subject.
These people are choosing to be willfully ignorant about the term known as coercion.
If there is a threat looming over someone's life that they are not willing to accept then they will remain silent and offer no challenge. The authoritarian will imply that they therefore chose to be silent.
The point isn't about the silence. The point is they are threatened into silence.
In the absence of the threat that is when a true choice is made.
If you must coerce people into silence then you are using a form of mental force. Forcing people to weigh the probabilities they will live, their family will live, etc. in wake of them choosing to speak what they deem to be the truth.
Good ideas don't require force.
Coercion is force.
These people will suddenly understand this concept if the tides turn and the same behavior in the form of coercion is applied to them.
I do not think if the tides turn we should repeat the same bad behavior that the other direction of the tide swing wielded.
I tend to think we should embrace the golden rule of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" and perhaps stop the flow of tides in the first place.
Get off the teeter totter.
Get off of the merry go round.
You can't defeat racism with racism.
You can't defeat bigotry with bigotry.
You can't defeat authoritarian coercion with coercion.
You just keep riding the merry go round and the teeter totter with such actions. All that changes is the target of the bad behavior.
"No one is stopping you from challenging"...
As long as there is coercion then that is exactly what they are doing.
"Don't like it, go and build your own"...
Then people do and the authoritarians do everything they can to shut that down, put barriers in front of it, and ridicule it...
They want you to think there is an option and a choice while they are doing as much as they can to make certain there is no option and no choice.