Officially, there were only some small things like a house resolution that supported one-sided (minority only) hate crime protection, as well as some papers and op-eds that suggested that hate crime protection should only apply to minorities. These were about hate crimes, not hate speech, of course. It’s been a while, and I can’t find any records of statements from mainstream Dems.

What I saw in my personal experience was an army of trolls baiting this kind of response from left activists, with identity-focused activists readily complying, and with others then amplifying the message through retweets. Including many who should have known better, people I had formerly respected. There was zero condemnation or pushback on this from nearly anyone on the left, in fact there was often a sort of winking agreement with the message by the time it had trickled up to candidates and officials.

The worst offenders were the grifters in the “white fragility” consulting sphere, for obvious reasons.

Anyway, just because it’s more subtle doesn’t mean it’s not still an issue. Republicans are almost always less subtle about terrible things they believe or do; this does seem to be true in general. It’s only rarely that you can get Dem officials to say awful things like “turns out I’m really good at killing people” or “we came, we saw, he died.” This is made worse by the lack of a substantial platform or position statement in many campaigns nowadays, so it’s hard to identify what anyone really stands for at all.

Feel free to take your point on this, as I have no hard proof. But I and many others saw this happen first hand.