Free Republic

Strange days, indeed, when America’s free press opposes free speech. “Free speech is killing us,” headlined a New York Times op-ed. Its author, New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz, argued that “hate speech” leads to violence. Worse, he claims it can cause totalitarianism and even genocide. To avoid this fate, Marantz says we must rethink the First Amendment, which would include government and private companies striving to limit “hate speech.” He agrees with a former American Civil Liberties Union official that one day in the not-so-distant future, legal “protection of hate speech” will “seem ridiculous in retrospect.” Some governments have...

Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?

When it comes to bad ideas, there’s always room at the bottom. Conservatives used to exasperatedly observe of gun-grabbing Democrats, “Imagine how they’d complain if someone tried to treat the First Amendment the way they treat the Second Amendment!” Hold my cappuccino, says Andrew Marantz of The New Yorker. Writing in the New York Times under the headline “Free Speech Is Killing Us” — and Marantz argues that is literally true — he argues that the gun-control program should be taken as a template for a speech-control program. He has come to this conclusion, he writes, after “having spent the...