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Since then, the anti-free-speech charge, applied broadly to cultural criticism and especially to feminist discourse, has proliferated. It is nurtured largely by men on the internet who used to nurse their grievances alone, in disparate, insular communities around the web mens rights forums, video game blogs. Gradually, these communities have drifted together into one great aggrieved, misogynist gyre and bonded over a common interest: pretending to care about freedom of speech so they can feel self-righteous while harassing marginalized people for having opinions.

At the online video conference VidCon a couple of weeks ago, the feminist cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian took the stage for a panel on womens experiences online, only to find the first two rows of seats stacked with her online harassers, leering up at her, filming her on their phones.

Ms. Sarkeesian has been relentlessly stalked, abused and threatened since 2012, when she started a Kickstarter campaign to fund a series of YouTube videos critiquing the representation of women in video games.

In retaliation, men have threatened to rape and murder her, dug up and disseminated her personal contact information, called in mass shooting threats to her public events and turned their obsession with shutting her up into a competitive sport. All of this, they insist, is in defense of freedom of speech, to which Ms. Sarkeesian, with her precise, rigorously argued opinions about the relative loincloth sizes of male and female video game avatars, somehow poses a threat.

It is not an enviable position to be in.

There are women who have said to me, or to people in my circles, that they dont want to be me, Ms. Sarkeesian told me. They dont want what happened to me to happen to them, and so they keep their head down and they stay quiet. Absence is invisible. We dont even know who has been lost how many were scared away before they even started. What about their speech?

Refusing to quit, as Ms. Sarkeesian has, yields often invisible professional consequences as well. Our videos on YouTube dont get promoted and supported in their algorithms the same way that hate videos about us do, because we cant have comments open, she said. That punishes us.

You can find disingenuous rhetoric about protecting free speech in the engine room of pretty much every digital-age culture war. The refrain has become so ubiquitous that its earned its own sarcastic homophone in progressive circles: freeze peach! Nothing is more important than the First Amendment, the internet men say, provided you interpret the First Amendment exactly the same way they do: as a magic spell that means no one you dont like is allowed to criticize you.

The law does not share that interpretation. The First Amendment only regulates the government, explained Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of First Amendment law at Harvard. Does she think there is any merit in telling a person that her critique of your art is infringing on your free speech? No.

Its been a surprisingly effective rhetorical strategy nonetheless. Americans are fiercely proud of our culture of (nearly) unfettered expression, though often not so clear on the actual parameters of the First Amendment. To defend speech is to plant a flag on the right side of history; to defend unpopular speech is to be a real rogue, a sophisticate, the kind of guy who gets it.

Freedom of speech is such a buzzword that people can rally around, Ms. Sarkeesian said, and that works really well in their favor. Theyre weaponizing free speech to maintain their cultural dominance.

The goal of Ms. Sarkeesians detractors was never really to protect the First Amendment. If it were, more than 8,000 of them wouldnt have signed an online petition to have her and the GamerGate target Zoe Quinn arrested that is, detained by the state in retaliation for speech for addressing the United Nations about online harassment. But they did. (Ms. Sarkeesian and Ms. Quinns crime, according to someone who is definitely a lawyer: pushing for a U.N. intervention (Foreign Agents) with the intent to limit internet free speech which violates the First Amendment of the U.S.)

If their goal was really to protect the First Amendment, they would have at least blinked when the White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, confirmed that President Trump is considering amending libel laws, presumably so he can prosecute journalists who hurt his feelings.

If the goal was really to destroy political correctness, as Mr. Trump promised was his top priority, they would have rallied behind Kathy Griffin and Stephen Colbert and Johnny Depp instead of by their own definition censoring them with at least as much fury as they generated on behalf of Milo Yiannopoulos and his suspended Twitter account (which was perfectly legal, as per the Twitter corporations speech rights).

If their goal was really to foster free public discourse, we would have seen deafening bipartisan support for Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, the Princeton African-American studies assistant professor and author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, who canceled two speaking engagements in late May after Fox News aired video of her calling President Trump a racist and sexist megalomaniac. Professor Taylor received more than 50 hate-filled and threatening emails, many racially charged, some containing specific threats of violence, including murder, she wrote in a statement.

Where were the brave knights of free speech when Professor Taylor was being intimidated into silence?

They were nowhere, of course (except, perhaps, on the other end of some of those emails), because their true goal has always been to ensure that if anyone is determining the ways that we collectively choose to restrict our own speech in the name of values, they are the ones setting the limits. They want to perform a factory reset to a time when people of color and women didnt tell white men what to do. And only one 2016 presidential candidate promised such a reset.

The election of Donald Trump and crying free speech to end any discussion of cultural sensitivity are not unrelated. Casting the dissent of marginalized groups as a First Amendment violation is the kind of pseudo-intellectual argument that seems reasonable to people who dont have enough skin in the game to bother paying attention. Discourse is good! Sunlight is the best disinfectant! The more airtime we give to irrational bigots on high-profile platforms the more assiduously we hear both sides, stay fair and balanced the sooner theyll be rejected by the public at large!

Unfortunately, as any scientist can tell you (for as long as we still have those), more often than not, sunlight makes things grow. Conflating criticism with censorship fosters a system in which all positions deserve equal consideration, no bad ideas can ever be put to rest, and lies are just as valid as the truth.

Its not hard to draw a straight line from internet culture warriors misappropriation of free speech to our current mass delusions over climate change, the Hyde Amendment, abstinence-only education, health care as a luxury and class as a meritocracy. Free speech rhetoric begot fake news, which begot alternative facts.

The right cannot lay claim to the First Amendment when its own president is actively hostile to it. Sometimes disinfectant is the best disinfectant.

Read more:
Save Free Speech From Trolls - New York Times