White supremacy is terrorism, not just a different opinion

Deserving equal respect or legitimacy like any other opinion. Hate speech, inciting violence and actual violence are exceptions to protected speech under the 1st Amendment, not protected speech. So we need to quit making such false equivalencies and start treating it as such and doing something about it. From this Nation piece:

"This is where law enforcement, elected officials, the media, and much of the country get it wrong about white supremacy. The ideology is violence, and its adherents are by definition a threat. Their presence makes other people—people of color, people of targeted religions—unsafe. White supremacy is treated as a difference of political opinion instead of as terrorism. People who devote their lives to purging 'their country of nonwhites are a threat; their presence at a community event makes others unsafe. People may reasonably differ on political issues; whether or not people of color have a right to exist is not one such issue."

"We need to stop thinking of white supremacists as people with dissenting political opinions and start recognizing them as the violent terrorists-in-preparation they are. Our laws and our system embrace a panorama of ideas and viewpoints, but 'I want to kill and rid the country of people who look like you' is not one of those. Groups like AmIM take great pains to describe themselves as 'peaceful,' but every day we see more evidence that their ideology is anything but."