Free speech really can be harmful, and its defenders should be willing to say so. Illustration by Post Typography

Fitzgerald’s is an Irish pub in Chapel Hill, near the campus of the University of North Carolina, that counts among its attractions cheap burgers, flip-cup tournaments, and jolly music. One night last year, the soundtrack included “Blurred Lines,” the 2013 Robin Thicke hit, in which a night-club Lothario delivers a breathy proposition to a “good girl”:

I hate these blurred lines I know you want it I know you want it I know you want it

A patron stepped into the d.j. booth to ask that the song be cut short—she later explained that she wanted to “create a safe space,” and that Thicke’s lyrics evoked threats of sexual violence. The d.j. rebuffed her, and in the days that followed she and her allies took to social media to voice their dissatisfaction, suggesting that the pub was promoting “rape culture.” Before long, Fitzgerald’s conceded defeat, apologizing to the patron on Facebook and promising that “Blurred Lines” would not be played there again and that the offending d.j. would never be invited back.

This was a small story, but something about it resonated: an account in the student paper, the Daily Tar Heel, was picked up by an irreverent site called Barstool Sports, which expressed its certainty that the complaining student was a “crazy ass feminist” who hated fun, and then by Yahoo News. The same month, Brendan Eich, the C.E.O. of the software company Mozilla, was forced to resign after critics discovered that he had donated a thousand dollars to supporters of Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage in California. And when Dan Cathy, the president of the fast-food chain Chick-fil-A, voiced his own opposition to same-sex marriage, in 2012, two big-city mayors—Rahm Emanuel, in Chicago, and Thomas Menino, in Boston—suggested that new Chick-fil-A restaurants would be unwelcome in their cities. Both later clarified that they would not block any of the company’s expansion plans. But the episode was further evidence, for those collecting it, that American free speech was being muffled by soft censorship.

“Is this the type of country we want to live in?” That is the question posed by Mary Katharine Ham and Guy Benson, a pair of waggish conservative commentators, as they ponder the fate of the d.j. who got fired for playing “Blurred Lines.” They are the authors of a new book titled “End of Discussion: How the Left’s Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun).” They argue that what might seem like hypersensitivity is actually a form of political combat. Borrowing from the language of soccer, they write, “America is turning into a country of floppers, figuratively grabbing our shins in fabricated agony over every little possible offense in hopes of working the refs.” Kirsten Powers, a liberal—though a heterodox one—and a Fox News pundit, delivers an even starker verdict in “The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech.” She detects, among those she might once have considered ideological allies, “an aggressive, illiberal impulse to silence people,” which often takes the form of meta-intolerance—that is, intolerance of any view that is judged to be intolerant.

Half a century ago, the defense of free speech was closely identified with groups like the Free Speech Movement, a confederation of activists who came together at the University of California, Berkeley, after a student was arrested for setting up a table of civil-rights literature, in defiance of anti-solicitation rules. Defending free speech meant defending Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman, and, later, Larry Flynt, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the 2 Live Crew. In a 1990 public-service announcement, Madonna, wearing red lingerie and an American flag, delivered a civics lesson, in verse: “Dr. King, Malcolm X / Freedom of speech is as good as sex.” She was urging young people to vote, in partnership with Rock the Vote, whose slogan was “Censorship is Un-American.”

But as the nineteen-nineties progressed, fights over obscenity subsided and fights over so-called political correctness intensified; “free speech” became a different kind of rallying cry, especially on college campuses. Often, “free speech” meant not the right to protest a war but the right to push back against campus restrictions designed to shield marginalized groups from, say, “racial and ethnic harassment”—that was the term used by Central Michigan University, in its speech code, which banned “demeaning” expressions. The campus speech wars have since grown broader but vaguer, and many prominent recent incidents, like the “Blurred Lines” dispute, don’t involve legal claims. Instead, there are open letters and social-media campaigns, rescinded invitations and cancelled events. Young people who might, a generation earlier, have sided with the 2 Live Crew now ask to be delivered from Robin Thicke. Powers, in her book, accuses fellow-liberals of having switched sides. “Liberals are supposed to believe in diversity, which should include diversity of thought and belief,” she writes. This is a rather paradoxical formulation. (Is it possible to believe in diversity of belief?) But then the current free-speech debate is rather paradoxical, too—it can be hard to tell the speakers from the censors.

The freedom of speech promised by the First Amendment has fluctuating limits—in general, elected politicians want more, and unelected ones (that is, judges) want fewer. In 1919, the Supreme Court ruled that speech could be regulated only if it presented “a clear and present danger,” and then, more narrowly, in 1969, only if it was likely to incite “imminent lawless action.” Each of these cases concerned a political protest: a socialist anti-conscription flyer, in the first, and a speech by a Klansman, in the second. Courts have generally allowed exceptions only for “content-neutral” regulations that restrict how people may speak, not what they can say. When private business or government funding is involved, the legal lines are more tangled. For decades, the Federal Communications Commission attempted to insure balanced news coverage with its fairness doctrine, which compelled broadcasters to present “discussion of conflicting views of public importance.” And when disputes arise on campus, courts typically distinguish between public institutions, which are bound by the First Amendment, and private ones, which may retain stronger rights to set their own rules.

For many modern free-speech advocates, the First Amendment is irrelevant: their main target is not repressive laws but shifting norms and values. In “End of Discussion,” Ham and Benson argue that the real problem is the politicization of everyday life. “Grievance mongering, apology demanding, and scalp collecting are modeled at the national level by ruthless professionals,” they write, “then replicated straight on down the line.” In their view, the effect of all this complaining is “an insidious strain of self-censorship” among regular folks. Ham and Benson have the requisite stories to tell, including a picturesque episode involving a Minnesota university that arranged to bring a camel to campus, as a stress-relief treatment, only to cancel the appearance after protests; one student explained online that “camels are associated with stereotypes that reinforce harmful Western (read: white) perceptions of Arab people.” What Ham and Benson want is to reënergize “the rich American tradition of a loud, raucous, messy, free speech free-for-all,” complete with camels and lecherous pop songs. It is this vision of how we should speak to one another—and not an abstract belief in the right to speak—that animates their book.