Apparently Ellen Pao was the one fighting for their free speech, albeit drawing the line at harassment. But all their ranting got her to resign, and now the hate subs are going down.
Unfortunately it would probably just drive the hate off to other sites - Voat seems to be popular. So I'm not sure how much good it would do in the long run, though it might make some of the less-hardcore Nazis etc decide it's not worth the trouble.
Voat is the most popular alternative but it can't handle the number of people who want to access it, it's down very frequently.
I don't mind them driving the minority of douchebags to somewhere else. They're always going to be dickheads so they might as well try and clear them out of reddit. At least they'll hopefully get rid of subreddits like coontown, that place is awful.