I would submit that voluntary self restraint amounts to appeasement in the face of a movement which fully intends to eradicate the freedom of speech–which is to say the freedom of thought in the public domain–entirely. They want to eradicate religion. They want to eradicate the principled use of reason, and the capacity for rational dialogue outright. It never favors them.
Appeasement, as Churchill said, is negotiating with a crocodile in the hope it will eat you last. But eat you it will, if not stopped. Witness the use the Nazis made of Jewish leaders in organizing the Holocaust. They told them they were safe, if they just released the names of all Jews in their districts. They complied, and were rewarded by getting sent to the gas chambers and work camps last. Some reward.
If we are unable to prevent the descent of America–and by logical extension the world–into Fascist/Communist/Fabian Statist tyranny, then no one is safe. You do not earn safety, merely a delay in your reckoning.
And I remember the doctor played by Daniel Day Lewis in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” saying that once you stop speaking your mind, once you stop standing up, you lose the habit. Everything becomes justifiable. Silence, somehow, always comes to seem more “prudent” than speaking up, than calling things intolerable and awful and wrong.
And as Benjamin Franklin said: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Do not appease bastards. Resist them early, constantly, and until you physically cannot do otherwise. That is the only choice of anyone possessing both courage and integrity. Speak up. Act. Never, never, never, never quit.