What the lawyers paid for
I have been teaching First Amendment law for thirty-one years. Every semester I assign Skokie and every semester the room splits the same way. The students who defend the march do not understand what it cost. The students who oppose it do not understand what losing the principle costs.
Goldberger was Jewish. Neier, who approved the case, had fled Nazi Germany as a child. They defended the march because they understood, from inside their own history, that the power to silence your enemy is the power someone else will use to silence you. The Sedition Act jailed newspaper editors. The Espionage Act jailed Eugene Debs. McCarthyism destroyed careers on association alone. Every speech restriction in American history was enacted by people who believed they were protecting the public from dangerous ideas. Every one was eventually turned against the vulnerable.
The harm reductionists present devastating cases — doxxing, coordinated harassment. Harassment and true threats are already illegal under Brandenburg. The failure is enforcement, not scope. The platform structuralists correctly observe that three companies control discourse for three billion people. The answer is deconcentration — interoperability mandates, antitrust — not handing broader authority to the same institutions that cannot enforce narrow definitions.
Germany’s NetzDG law has been used to remove political satire. India’s hate speech statutes target Muslim critics. The jurisdiction does not matter. The mechanism is identical once built.
Where we concede ground: Algorithmic amplification changes the math in ways we have been slow to acknowledge.
What would change our mind: A narrow speech restriction, ten years old, that has not expanded or been used against dissenting groups.
Read the full synthesis: Who decides what you can’t say?