Andrew Marantz: "Free Speech Is Killing Us"

sigh
This is in the now-popular genre I'm for free speech but..., aka I'm for free speech...but not really...
 My favorite:

“We need to protect the rights of speakers,” John A. Powell, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told me, “but what about protecting everyone else?” Mr. Powell was the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and he represented the Ku Klux Klan in federal court. “Racists should have rights,” he explained. “I also know, being black and having black relatives, what it means to have a cross burned on your lawn. It makes no sense for the law to be concerned about one and ignore the other.”

Well, professor Polwell, UC-Berkeley, former legal director of the ACLU*, I'd like to introduce you to a little decision we like to call Virginia v. Black. Burning a cross on your lawn is a "true threat," and and an act of harassment. You can have a cross burning club, and burn crosses to your heart's content as an "expression of shared ideology." But you can't do so on somebody else's lawn as an act of intimidation. A particularly bad example to use as one of this article's flagship examples, as First Amendment jurisprudence gets this case exactly right.
   And: anyone who thinks that Milo Yiannopolous is so dangerous that he ought to be banned from all social media is a dangerous, antiliberal totalitarian.
   This is exactly what you find when you scratch one of these "I'm for free speech but..." types. The first clause is mere defensive, throw-away preface. The substance is always in the ellipses, and it always shows that the prefatory statement simply isn't true.



* Of course the ACLU is no longer the ACLU, former bastion of liberalism. Now it's just another part of the antiliberal progressive Borg.