Tone policing is a weapon.

When your opponent repeatedly and deliberately promulgates vicious, demonstrably false rhetoric against your fellow human beings, when they use that as a pretense to harass, assault, and execute them, or when the despair it engenders in its targets brings them to the point of harming themselves instead, you are not the villain for fighting back.

If you're facing an enemy with zero regard for the lives, the dignity, or the fundamental rights of your fellow human beings, they will not suddenly gain it because you refrain from using four-letter words. You cannot fight evil with strongly worded letters, especially when you're forbidden by the very mores your enemy gleefully disregards from using the strongest in your repertoire.

There's only so much that most of us can do, so don't surrender the one tool you have, and do not comply meekly in advance because it's "mean" to fight.

"Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than 'politics.' They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away." -- Naomi Shulman.