Was it okay to place Japanese in internment camps? Not going to wait for an answer, because the answer should clearly be no. Curtailing domestic liberties is not okay regardless the circumstances.
Never OK but sometimes necessary. I'm sure you can at least imagine a scenario where it's appropriate to curtail speech to save lives, e.g. taking away an enemy combatant's comms, even if they're American.
Liberty is always opposed to security. How free we are depends on how worried we are. That's always the case.
By the way, lets look at some other circumstances:
Suspension of habeas corpus. Abraham Lincoln, Civil War. Half of country wants to clock the other half. Total existential threat.
WWI. Schneck v. United States. Cornerstone and terrible case for limiting free speech in order to silence opposition to the bloody draft.
WWII:Japanese internment camps. Labor cracked down on for striking and shutting down most of the wartime manufacturing supply chain. Existential threat.
2001: 3 buildings hit with aircraft. All liberties around airtravel basically cancelled. Heavy intensification of SIGINT intensifies, birth of widespread dragnet surveillance programs.
2020: A bunch of people waltz into the Capitol pissed as all hell because their concerns were not taken seriously. Rest of country is just fine. Suggestions to yeet civil liberties because think of the Congresspeople who had to continue their meeting elsewhere!
One of these is not like the others. Further, Congress is getting what it deserved. With the way they've spent years delegating increasing chunks of lawmaking to the Executive branch, ain't it grand the way they get reminded of why checks and balances were there in the first place?
He means Schenck, not Schneck for anyone googling.
Obviously we disagree on what it means when an angry mob chants about hanging the VP, breaches one of the most secure buildings in the country, and swears to try again.
This is obviously not an existential threat to you, but it is to the majority of the country, and certainly to our institutions.
