First, much of the social pressure that critics complain about is itself speech. When activists denounce Yiannopoulos as a racist or Murray as a white nationalist, they are exercising their own right to free expression. Likewise when students hold protests or marches, launch social media campaigns, circulate petitions, boycott lectures, demand the resignation of professors and administrators, or object to the invitation of controversial speakers. Even heckling, though rude and annoying, is a form of expression.

More crucially, the existence of such social pushback helps protects Americans from the even more frightening prospect of official censorship. Here’s why. Speech is a powerful weapon that can cause grave harms, and the First Amendment does not entirely prohibit the government from suppressing speech to prevent those harms. But one of the central tenets of modern First Amendment law is that the government cannot suppress speech if those harms can be thwarted by alternative means. And the alternative that judges and scholars invoke most frequently is the mechanism of counter-speech.

As Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote in his celebrated 1927 opinion in Whitney v. California, “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

Counter-speech can take many forms. It can be an assertion of fact designed to rebut a speaker’s claim. It can be an expression of opinion that the speaker’s view is misguided, ignorant, offensive, or insulting. It can even be an accusation that the speaker is racist or sexist, or that the speaker’s expression constitutes an act of harassment, discrimination, or aggression.

In other words, much of the social pushback that critics complain about on campus and in public life—indeed, the entire phenomenon of political correctness—can plausibly be described as counter-speech. And because counter-speech is one of the mechanisms Americans rely on as an alternative to government censorship, such pushback is not only a legitimate part of our free speech system; it is indispensable....

Fine, the critics might say. But much of the social pressure on campus does not just demonize; it is designed to, and often does, chill unpopular speech. And given that courts frequently invoke the potential chilling effect of government action to invalidate it under the First Amendment, social pressure that has a potential chilling effect is also inconsistent with free speech.

The problem with this argument is that all counter-speech has a potential chilling effect. Any time people refute an assertion of fact by pointing to evidence that contradicts it, speakers may be hesitant to repeat that assertion. Whenever opponents challenge an opinion by showing that it is poorly reasoned, leads to undesirable results, or is motivated by bigotry or ignorance, speakers may feel less comfortable expressing that opinion in the future.


Put bluntly, the implicit goal of all argument is, ultimately, to quash the opposing view. We don’t dispute a proposition in the hope that others will continue to hold and express that belief. Unless we are playing devil’s advocate, we dispute it to establish that we are right and the other side is wrong. If we are successful enough, the opposing view will become so discredited that it is effectively, although not officially, silenced.

Such has been the fate of many ideas over the centuries, from claims that the earth is flat to declarations that slavery is God’s will to assertions that women should not be allowed to vote or own property. Each of these positions can still be asserted without fear of government punishment. But those who make them in earnest are deemed so discreditable that the claims themselves have mostly been removed from public debate. ”