Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was having protestors removed from a town hall meeting earlier this week, a move that would seem contradictory for the congresswoman who spent the last several years defending the right of protestors to not only disrupt meetings but also send bomb threats to public officials and riot in the Capitol.

“There’s no reason for screaming, yelling, ridiculous, outrageous, protesting that disrupts the entire event for every single person that is there,” she said at her town hall as one man was electrocuted by police officers. She said she wouldn’t “tolerate [protestors’] selfish attempts to disrupt an event that was for all of my constituents, not just the ones who could make the most noise.”

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Greene, of course, does not oppose protesting in general, and the nuances of her opinion on protestors have nothing to do with tactics. She loves protestors she agrees with and hates those she disagrees with. She spent years defending the most violent protestors in the country and she was, in fact, one of the people making headlines for shouting and making noise during former President Joe Biden’s State of the Union addresses.

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Greene was arguably the member of Cognress who spent the most time advocating for the January 6 rioters, who tore up the Capitol, built a makeshift noose, called for the death of then-Vice President Mike Pence, and ended up killing five people and injuring dozens of others that day, just because their guy didn’t win the election.

Instead of condemning those protestors’ “selfish attempts to disrupt” the peaceful transfer of power to former President Joe Biden, Greene prayed with an actor pretending to be an incarcerated January 6 rioter and held press conferences to complain about how the January 6 rioters were being treated like, well, other inmates in the D.C. prison system.

Greene whined for years about how people spreading misinformation were getting kicked off private social media platforms, going so far as to introduce a bill that would have allowed people to sue tech companies for suspending their accounts.

“Whatever happens with Twitter, we have got to protect Americans from the consequences of a very dangerous threat that’s called corporate communism,” she said, equating a private company deciding what’s allowed on its platform with “communism,” one of the right’s catch-all words for anything they don’t like.

And Greene is far from the only conservative to have spent years boo-hooing about the loss of free speech when anyone tried to limit the chaos and violence being spread by a minority of conservative protestors.

In 2021, as conservatives mounted protests at school board meetings across the country over COVID restrictions, teaching about the history of racism, and policies to support transgender students, they again bemoaned any restrictions on protestors as threats to the very concept of free speech.

When the National School Boards Association asked the Biden administration to help with the protestors who were sending violent threats, conservatives spent years equating that with labeling all protestors as “terrorists” and argued that the Biden administration was trying to silence their protests. The argument they were making was that even trying to stop protestors from sending death threats was a violation of their First Amendment right to free speech.

But those years of siding with protestors aren’t just over; movement conservatism has completely and abruptly changed its position on the value of protest now that it has control of a federal trifecta (the House, the Senate, and the White House). Now that the GOP is in the position of power and is therefore the target of protest, protestors are being snatched off the street and deported merely for expressing their opinions and getting tased at town hall meetings, while the adminsitration illegally pulls funding for research on topics they don’t like and bans journalists from covering the White House if they don’t submit to the Trump administration’s language policing.

And the GOP is revelling in showing how much power it has to stifle free speech. Take, for example, Rumeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University student who was kidnapped off the street after she wrote an op-ed for her school’s newspaper that was critical of Israel’s war on Gaza. She was legally in the United States and was simply practicing her free speech rights — the First Amendment protects everyone’s free speech, not just citizens’ — and Republicans saw that as reason enough to not just deport her but to have immigration officers ambush her on the street and ship her off to an ICE facility in Louisiana.

“If you come into the U.S. as a visitor and create a ruckus for us… We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said about her case.

This is more than just “Free speech for me but not for thee,” a common attitude among people who will defend their own right to speak out but then complain when anyone they disagree with speaks. This is one of the fundamental contradictions of liberal democracy, the paradox of tolerance. Authoritarians will use the tenets of liberalism when they don’t have power to protect their ability to gain power. Then, once they get power in a democracy, they will turn their backs on those same rights to prevent anyone from challenging their power.

That is, they’ll turn from the biggest crybabies in the world, whining about how they aren’t allowed to throw feces on the walls of the Capitol and spread misinformation on private social media platforms, into the most stonehearted defenders of lawless order, openly arguing about how it’s morally right to disappear people for the crime of writing an op-ed in a student newspaper or how public events like town halls are so sacred that anyone who speaks out of turn should be electrocuted on the spot.

The hypocrisy won’t stop just by pointing it out. Even when they take some of the most powerful roles in the world and they’re imprisoning people for disagreeing with their policy positions, they’ll still use the power that they have to remove the remaining barriers on speech that they agree with in order to consolidate and extend their power.

For example, the Trump administration has been trying to use negotiations for a high-tech trade agreement with the U.K. to get the latter to repeal its hate speech protections for LGBTQ+ people. For the Trump administration, a person’s right to say that gay men are all pedophiles who are coming for your children absolutely must be protected, even while they’re banning scientists from using entire lists of words in their research papers.

The paradox of tolerance opens a lot of larger questions about the solution, about the limits to free speech necessary for liberal democracies to preserve themselves. But in the shorter term, it requires us to recognize authoritarianism’s simultaneous whining and bullying for what they are: a two-pronged strategy to hijack control of the government’s machinery in order to eliminate human diversity.

Authoritarians have absolutely no shame about their hypocrisy on this matter because, for them, there is no hypocrisy. They’re advancing their policy goals and using whatever words and arguments they can make to get sympathy. It’s not that Greene was lying when she said that she supports free speech when talking about the January 6 rioters; it’s that she doesn’t think that truth matters at all in that context. What matters is building support for the rioters because they were on her side.

So, those of us who support democracy shouldn’t have any shame in opposing them on both fronts. Free speech can and should be protected, and violent acts should be opposed. There is nothing contradictory about prosecuting rioters while supporting peaceful protestors.

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