Remember when I said last week that we should all be rooting for nuclear war? I take it back. We should all be praying for it.

I just finished skimming this Cato Institute survey on free speech and tolerance and I’m an alcoholic now. Join me, won’t you, on a journey into the heart of American darkness.

Break that out into partisan groups and you’ve got a cool 51 percent of Dems, a clear majority, ready to make proper pronoun usage into a state or federal offense.

Depressing, no? Wait. It gets worse:

More than 60 percent of blacks and Latinos see no distinction between defending the right to offensive speech and offensive speech itself. And it’s not the only subject on which minorities are considerably more likely to support restrictions on speech:

Blacks and Latinos also support banning “hate speech” far more than whites do. Whites overall are opposed, 33/66, but blacks support it, 56/42, while Hispanics are in favor, 58/41. White Democrats specifically are narrowly opposed to banning hate speech, 45/55, while black Democrats are 20 net points in favor and Latino Democrats are 31 net points towards banning. That racial divide within the Democratic Party shows up elsewhere too:

Those results aren’t outliers. Other recent polls have showed stronger backing for speech restrictions among minorities too. You can rationalize that by saying that of course people who have felt the sting of racial invective more often than the majority has will be more aggressive about wanting to police it, but an illiberal response is an illiberal response.

The right has its own blind spots too, needless to say. There are some good results in the Cato data for religious liberty…

…annnnnnd some not so good ones:

And here’s another result that jibes with data from other surveys:

That number among Republicans will come down a bit after Trump’s presidency ends. I think.

In sum, buy gold. The full Cato survey is here; I encourage you to skim it all, wrapped in a warm blanket and held tenderly in the arms of a parent to reassure you that everything’s going to be okay.