White supremacists don’t have much reason to fear a Justice Department headed by Jeff Sessions, while Trump’s rhetoric energizes them.

American gun laws alter the equation further. In Charlottesville, white supremacists marched with guns and other weapons, and this is not an anomaly. In Texas, armed militia members accompanied the This is Texas Freedom Force to an San Antonio city council meeting in protest of proposals to remove a Confederate statue from a local park. White supremacists have committed multiple acts of violence since Trump’s election in November: Jeremy Christian allegedly murdered two bystanders in Portland, Oregon, after they interfered with his racial harassment of two women; in Seattle, a supporter of Milo Yiannopoulos shot a left-wing counter-protester; in Charlottesville, James Fields drove into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one.

At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern recently noted that Charlottesville police had warned Judge Glen E. Conrad that white supremacist protesters would be carrying weapons—a warning Conrad eventually disregarded in favor of a free speech argument, rejecting the city’s suit to move the rally elsewhere. “Ironically, by protecting the free speech rights of the white supremacists, Conrad may have ultimately suppressed speech by ensuring an armed confrontation between the neo-Nazis and the counter-protesters would break out and that police would be powerless to stop it until blood was spilled,” they argued.

Finally, the Trump presidency itself provides white supremacists with the imprimatur of legitimacy. With a champion in the White House, the balance of power has tipped firmly in their favor. White supremacists don’t have much reason to fear a Justice Department headed by Jeff Sessions, while Trump’s rhetoric energizes them. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in,” former KKK leader David Duke said in Charlottesville, hours before Fields launched his deadly rampage.

If anything, this political climate chills free speech for those on the left, not white supremacists. “The ACLU argues that free speech is a necessary precondition for equality,” said Corbin. “But equality is actually a necessary precondition for truly free speech, and we don’t have that.” Separately, but similarly, Lithwick and Stern wrote, “Rallies with guns cannot be treated, for First Amendment purposes, in the same fashion as rallies with no guns.”

After the end of World War II, Germany tried to prevent the rebirth of the Nazi party by banning it. Strafgesetzbuch section 86a prohibits the display of Nazi symbols, films, and art. As an attempt to reckon with an inhumane past, the law makes sense. Two Chinese tourists were arrested earlier this month for performing a Nazi salute at the Reichstag, and yet few would say Germany is an unfree place when it comes to speech. It raises the interesting possibility that a true reckoning with horrific atrocities—whether these involve genocide or slavery—requires certain limits on speech.

But for all that, neo-Nazi groups still exist in Germany. They’ve become bolder, even, in response to an influx of mostly Muslim refugees from the Middle East. And though the ban does apply to iterations of the Nazi party, it hasn’t prevented the formation of parties like Alternative for Germany (AfD), which barely disguises its white supremacist sympathies. In a recent position paper, the group recommended canceling aid to asylum seekers and urged the German navy to return refugees to their home countries. “German interests must be guiding principles and not that whoever happens to be visiting here right now gets some sort of development program,” AfD spokesman Alexander Gauland said. “It’s not always America First. Sometimes it’s Germany First.”

And as Joshua Keating noted for Slate in 2015, the ban sometimes backfires in unexpected ways. “Nazi-era propaganda films—some of which are literally locked away in heavily guarded vaults—have become cult classics in Germany, not just among skinheads, who hold Rocky Horror-like screenings of some of them, but among curious cinephiles as well,” he wrote.

Still, Germany’s ban recognizes that speech can harm. We have witnessed the same phenomenon here: Crimes like Jeremy Christian’s correlate to a general rise in speech targeting minority groups. According to a 2016 report from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, hate crimes against Muslims spiked by 78 percent in 2015. As HuffPost reported at the time, that figure coincided with the launch of Trump’s xenophobic campaign for president. Hate crimes targeting LGBT people have also been linked to rhetoric that dehumanizes and stigmatizes.

This is all compelling proof that absolutists may have to re-examine their arguments. Above all, Trump’s presidency supports the notion that no law, even when it is enshrined in the Constitution, can alone justify an absolute position on free speech. That position has to be bolstered by strong cultural norms, including a consensus that the president must not legitimize and amplify the speech of those who openly bear the swastika and believe that other races are inferior to the white race. Free speech isn’t a pure and abstract good. Like all civil liberties, it is shaped by the context in which it occurs. The ACLU’s announcement may simply reflect an unsettling reality.