Jessica - I think your perspective is right on the mark around how the right wing is so fragile that it has to create a reality distortion bubble around itself because their belief system is now built on so many falsehoods that it cannot stand up to serious scrutiny anymore. It’s sad, and it’s dangerous and those who foster the perpetual stream of lies undermine democracy… but you know that. I would also say that Greg would whole heartedly agree with you on this. But perhaps not on the potential antidotes. Remember - his book was based on an article in The Atlantic that was written in 2015 (long before Trumpism took hold). And the examples they use in the book were from his experience as a truly non-partisan freedom of speech advocate on campuses. Despite Greg being personally liberal, he has found that many more of his cases were defending students and professors whose politically conservative speech was being suppressed. As he would tell you, the trouble with defending free speech is that you never find yourself defending someone’s right to say something popular. FIRE’s big case this past week was against a conservative group at Stanford Law who tried to ‘cancel’ a student for mocking them with posters on campus. Greg and FIRE stepped in quickly and instantly showed with hypocrisy and fragility of the right — but cases like that don’t get the same hype as when they are defending conservative students.
If there’s anything we should learn from 4 years of Trump, it’s the Orwellian upside-down and opposite way he was able to manipulate language and turn truth into opinion, fantasy into fact and vaporized any ambiguous rule that stood in their way. Speech codes are terrifying because the speech they control is dictated by whoever happens to be in charge at the moment. In our imagination we can make the crazies be quiet - we cannot. We could, however, remove the sweeping protections from liability that the giant internet companies enjoy - and start letting people who have been damaged or died because of false and dangerous content to sue. We could also start tracking a prosecuting people who make online death threats - like all rights free speech is not absolute.
