I think that part of the essay might have been about how addressing him as Mr. Firstname is actually more formal than Mr. Lastname, even though Firstname is not his family name

Could it be Turkish? Just stumbled on this section on the Wikipedia article on mononyms

Surnames were introduced in Turkey only after World War I, by the country’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, as part of his Westernization and modernization programs. Common people can be addressed semi-formally by their given name plus the title Bey or Hanım (without surname), whereas politicians are often known by surname only (Ecevit, Demirel).

Racism is still free speech which sucks but the alternative is high censorship and fear

This is incorrect, and only serves those who target marginalized groups.

I wanna make it very clear that the conclusion that restriction of hate speech is a slippery slope for freedom of speech is not a given or universally held position

You can absolutely introduce laws prohibiting hate speech without introducing high censorship or fear. Many countries have laws prohibiting hate speech, including most European countries and a majority of, what Wikipedia calls, developed democracies.

Even countries that don’t have limits for hate inducing speech towards marginalized groups, with reference to the importance of freedom of speech, rarely have complete freedom of speech.

As an example, the US limits to freedom of speech include “fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, and regulation of commercial speech such as advertising.”

The claim that intolerance to intolerance is dangerous, only serves the spread of intolerance.

The paradox of tolerance states that if a society’s practice of tolerance is inclusive of the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate, eliminating the tolerant and the practice of tolerance with them.

Rosenfeld contrasts the approach to hate speech between Western European democracies and the United States, pointing out that among Western European nations, extremely intolerant or fringe political materials (e.g. Holocaust denial) are characterized as inherently socially disruptive, and are subject to legal constraints on their circulation as such,[13] while the US has ruled that such materials are protected by the principle of freedom of speech and cannot be restricted, except when endorsements of violence or other illegal activities are made explicit.

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