An MSNBC commentator penned an op-ed in the Washington Post on Tuesday calling for what he described a "hate speech law," which generated severe pushback from free-speech advocates online.

MSNBC political analyst and former Obama State Department staffer Richard Stengel began his piece by saying how he understood the First Amendment standard as an "outlier" when comparing the U.S. to other countries, based on his travels abroad as a government official.

"Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?" Stengel wrote. "It’s a fair question. Yes, the First Amendment protects the 'thought that we hate,' but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw."

Stengel told Washington Post readers that the First Amendment "doesn’t just protect the good guys," pointing to Russia's interference in the 2016 election and its efforts to spread misinformation.

"The Russians understood that our free press and its reflex toward balance and fairness would enable Moscow to slip its destructive ideas into our media ecosystem," Stengel explained. "That's partly because the intellectual underpinning of the First Amendment was engineered for a simpler era. The amendment rests on the notion that the truth will win out in what Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called 'the marketplace of ideas.'"

He continued, "On the Internet, truth is not optimized. On the Web, it’s not enough to battle falsehood with truth; the truth doesn’t always win. In the age of social media, the marketplace model doesn’t work."

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Stengel then pointed to European nations that passed hate speech laws after World War II and acknowledged "there’s no agreed-upon definition of what hate speech actually is," but developed his own definition, which is "speech that attacks and insults people on the basis of race, religion, ethnic origin and sexual orientation." He also cited the shooters in Charleston, S.C., Orlando, Fla., and El Paso, Texas, as consumers of hate speech.

"Let the debate begin. Hate speech has a less violent, but nearly as damaging, impact in another way: It diminishes tolerance. It enables discrimination. Isn’t that, by definition, speech that undermines the values that the First Amendment was designed to protect: fairness, due process, equality before the law?" the MSNBC analyst asked. "Why shouldn’t the states experiment with their own version of hate speech statutes to penalize speech that deliberately insults people based on religion, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation?"

"All speech is not equal. And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I’m all for protecting 'thought that we hate,' but not speech that incites hate. It undermines the very values of a fair marketplace of ideas that the First Amendment is designed to protect."

Critics railed against the piece on social media, some invoking the Post's Trump-era slogan "Democracy dies in darkness."

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"In the paper that warns us 'democracy dies in darkness,' Richard Stengel says we should trust Middle East fascists over the Founders when it comes to free expression," The Federalist senior editor David Harsanyi reacted.

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The Washington Post did not immediately respond to Fox News' request for comment.