By my understanding, Popper didn’t mean the “paradox of tolerance” in quite the way you think. It wasn’t meant to be used preemptively. It basically meant: when some group starts resorting to actual, literal violence, actual, literal violence is justified to stop them. The classic example of this are the Nazis, who engaged in actual armed violence for about a decade before ever taking power.
To this point, Bari Weiss, to my knowledge, never committed violence, never harassed coworkers, never formed an angry mob to harass coworkers—she merely stated opinions that people didn’t like. What people are doing is defining anything they strongly disagree with as “intolerance” in order to justify their own intolerance against it. The cosmic joke is on them because they are gradually radicalizing themselves into the very people the paradox of tolerance is meant to protect us from.
Here’s what Popper actually had to say:
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
To me, it sounds like the people Popper is describing are exactly the people who misuse his ideas to justify censorship and violence. He isn’t talking about actually becoming the side that “denounces all argument”. He’s addressing people who are focused on peaceful discourse as their mode of resolving disagreements and reminding them—some people will escalate to violence and if you are unwilling to defend yourself, your values will become extinct. None of this justifies being the first side to take up arms against someone who hasn’t done so themselves.