Last month, suit-and-tie white supremacist Jared Taylor, founder of the race-realism rag American Renaissance, was scheduled to appear at the University of Alabama. For the talk—"Diversity: Is It Good for America?"—his sponsors, Students for America First, promoted it with a tweet including the hashtag "Defendthe1st." As it so happened, no free-speech showdown took place. The event was canceled a few days later after the group’s faculty adviser stepped down, rendering the group inactive.

As debates about the First Amendment have crowded op-ed sections, I was reminded of one that sprang up in my hometown in 1993. South Hadley, Massachusetts (pop. 17,000), is generally a quiet town, most notably home to Mt. Holyoke College, a picturesque New England campus with gothic-style architecture set off by trees that turn brilliant orange, red, and yellow come autumn. When I was 12, a clash over free speech erupted over, of all things, Coed Naked T-shirts, the crude brand that was all the rage in the ‘90s.

A high school senior, Jeffrey Pyle, wore the band version—Coed Naked Band: Do It to the Rhythm—to gym class, and the teacher, who believed it would "force" students to think about sex, told him not to wear it again. As it so happened, Jeffrey's father, Christopher Pyle, was a professor of constitutional law at Mt. Holyoke College, so the younger Pyle was well-acquainted with the law on the matter. He told his teacher that under Tinker v. Des Moines—a 1969 decision in favor of students' right to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War—he had the constitutional right to wear his Coed Naked T-shirt. "I don't get paid enough to listen to this crap," she retorted.

Pyle wore the T-shirt again and his younger brother, Jonathan, jumped into the fray, setting off detentions, meetings with the principal, newspaper editorials, a dress-code change, and even more nose-thumbing T-shirts to test the contours of the new policy, including the unsubtle “Coed Naked Censorship: They Do It in South Hadley,” each of which the school superintendent was called in to review. Assisted by the American Civil Liberties Union, Pyle, along with his father and younger brother, took the school administration to court, eventually winning the state’s public-school students some of the broadest free-speech protections in the country in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. The litigation ended up costing the town $80,000 for its refusal to comply with state law on the matter, which didn’t particularly endear the Pyles to the conservative-leaning local community. They received threatening phone calls, and the leader of the school committee (which my father served on) informed Christopher Pyle that they were the most hated family in South Hadley. The Pyle sons enjoyed the process so much, they both went on to become lawyers. Jeffrey now specializes in First Amendment litigation.

As happens when free-speech protections are strengthened, views that run afoul of the local community end up safeguarded, too. Last year, the school superintendent of Easthampton, Massachusetts, affirmed a student's right to wear a Confederate flag sweatshirt, despite local protest. And, of course, it was in part Mario Savio and the 1960s Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which protested anti-communist campus regulations on speech and political activities, that paved the way for the Jared Taylors of the American right.

In response to my recent article on free speech, some readers objected to my criticisms of de-platforming invited speakers, the practice of shutting down a talk, particularly by shouting down a speaker, pulling a fire alarm, or enacting violence. "What about Richard Spencer," one asked of the sieg-heiling ethno-state-boosting Jared Taylor Jr., who recently abandoned his own college tour after skirmishes with Antifa. "Didn't de-platforming work in shutting him down?"

It's a thorny question: How does one uphold free-speech principles and also counter the worldwide surge, from Charlottesville to Warsaw, in public displays by white supremacists? It's an increasingly relevant one, too. White-supremacist propaganda at colleges, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), increased by 258 percent between the fall of 2016 to the fall of 2017, with college Republicans like James Allsup and Nick Fuentes turning to the alt-right, the modern, Internet-savvy incarnation of white supremacy.

“Free speech takes a strong stomach... Hate speech is a great enthusiasm of those who teach critical social thought. It got nowhere in the courts, but everywhere in the court of public opinion.”

While many European countries enacted hate-speech laws post–World War II, America is unique in that it did not. Those who believe the U.S. should enact similar laws would be wise to consider their potential applications, particularly with a president who expresses admiration for the world's most notorious authoritarians. In Texas, a sheriff tried to arrest a woman for her "Fuck Trump" bumper sticker. Rudolph Giuliani once attempted to stop the Million Man March in Harlem on the grounds that it was hate-speech rhetoric. This is not to suggest that our free-speech laws perfectly protect citizens, as any number of examples demonstrate, but that it would be even worse if there were legal recourse for punishing speech.

In The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald documented how EU hate-speech laws are often used to suppress left points of view, including the conviction of French activists wearing pro-Palestinian T-shirts and the arrest of a British Muslim teen for a Facebook post decrying soldiers in Afghanistan. Curiously, none of these incidents was a cause for alarm among "free speech" warriors, but one recent incident was: In Scotland, Mark "Count Dankula" Meechan was arrested and fined £800 for a YouTube video in which he taught a pug to mimic a Nazi salute to phrases such as "gas the Jews." His punishment drew outcry from right-wing personalities like Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, and Lauren Southern and "classical liberals" like Dave Rubin, host of the YouTube show "The Rubin Report."

"This lunacy will come to the US too unless we get bolder in our fight against political correctness and the cultural Marxism that feeds it," tweeted Rubin. "Wake up before it's too late."

A month later, neo-Nazis, protected by 700 law-enforcement officers, held a white-supremacist rally in Newnan, Georgia, to celebrate Hitler's birthday. They concluded the night by burning an enormous swastika.

To sort through the old free speech/hate speech tensions, I called up both extremism and freedom-of-expression experts, including Christopher Pyle, who still teaches at Mt. Holyoke College. When I asked him if there was a free-speech crisis on campus, I expected at least a partial denunciation of left-wing outbursts, but his answer surprised me. "The First Amendment has never been stronger," he said. Pyle was neither oblivious to the cultural climate on today's campuses nor sympathetic with the demands of social-justice warriors, whom he deemed, along with their provocateurs, as silly. "More people think they have a right to not be offended today, but they're wrong," he said. "The First Amendment exists for ideas we hate; we don't need it for speech we like." As it so happened, he was teaching a course covering freedom of expression and invited me to sit in on classes the following week.

The Lessons of Free Speech on Campus

In a sunny second-floor classroom, 14 fresh-faced undergrads, clasping 1,651-page constitutional-law books tagged with colorful sticky notes, gathered in a circle for Prof. Pyle's Civil Liberties class. With the Socratic 78-year-old Pyle prodding them with questions and hypotheticals, the class, at turns jovial and sober, worked through legal precedents. In America, the Supreme Court has ruled, it is legal to picket a military funeral with "God Hates Fags" signs so long as it is on public grounds (Snyder v. Phelps); defy a local anti-bias ordinance by throwing a burning cross into a black family's backyard (R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul); and, famously, organize a Nazi march through a town where thousands of Holocaust survivors reside (Skokie v. Illinois). "Free speech takes a strong stomach," said Pyle at the end of one class. "Hate speech is a great enthusiasm of those who teach critical social thought. It got nowhere in the courts, but everywhere in the court of public opinion."

This is not to suggest that Pyle found the cause of incendiary college-campus crusaders to be noble. "Right-wing speakers take pleasure in baiting left-wing audiences into paroxysms of outrage," he said. "And the right-wing speakers want to be paid for doing so in the name of free speech. This is not civil discourse, which involves joining issue on issues that matter, in ways that are civil and move the discussion towards constructive ends. We have very little civil discourse in America today."

Of course, public opinion, left or right, that certain types of speech are inimical to civil discourse doesn't necessarily translate into censorship, as a mountain of court cases demonstrates. Still, there are incidences when unruly audiences shut down speeches, particularly outside the U.S. Last March, on a campus farther north, protesters pulled a fire alarm, shutting down a talk at the Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario by Faith Goldy, one of Canada's most prominent propagandists of the "white genocide" conspiracy theory. A foundational conceit of modern white supremacists, it theorizes that a powerful cabal of Jews is forcing assimilation of non-white populations—i.e. "multiculturalism"—to engineer the death of the white race. The subject of her talk was a more gently formulated variation on the form: "Ethnocide: Multiculturalism and European-Canadian Identity." The host for the talk was Lindsay Shepherd, a young graduate student who had her own brush with university politics and started a free-speech club called the Laurier Society for Open Inquiry. Shepherd, while no white nationalist herself, later stated that she wants "to talk about [issues like being white] neutrally," which apparently included presenting white-supremacist conspiracy theories as worthy discourse at a major university.

Goldy—who was fired from right-wing Rebel Media after appearing on a podcast of neo-Nazi hub Daily Stormer during Charlottesville's Unite the Right rally—has made a number of videos on the threat of multiculturalism to whites, such as "Immigrant Master Race," and she has characterized immigrants as either "low human capital leeching off the entitlement system" or high-IQ Ashkenazi Jews, Asians, and others edging whites out of higher education and jobs. On the alt-right podcast Millennial Woes, she giggled and recited the white-supremacist slogan Fourteen Words: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for our white children," adding, "I don't see that as controversial… We want to survive." The host, laughing, responded: "Let's put it this way: Those 14 words used to be more controversial than they are nowadays."

Some activists have hailed shutting down speeches by the likes of Goldy and Spencer by force as victories, but if they are, they are short-lived ones. "To shout down a speaker who has been duly invited to campus makes the speaker a martyr to political correctness," Jeffrey Pyle, now a partner at Prince Lobel in Boston, said when I called him up to talk about latter-day free-speech controversies. "It may feel good to shout down a speaker—same as to punch a Nazi. But I don't think it's a more effective strategy." Indeed, white supremacists have seized on free speech as an issue, shifting the focus away from the inhumane nature of their reprehensible ideology to more sanitized conversations around individual rights.

Extremism experts agree with Pyle, often repeating, like Marilyn Mayo, a senior research fellow at the ADL's Center on Extremism, the old refrain: The best way to fight hate speech is with better speech. "If you stifle their free speech, it adds fuel to their fire," said Timothy Zaal, a former neo-Nazi who now works for the Museum of Tolerance, with the caveat that if extremists are given a platform, there needs to be a credible, knowledgeable speaker to make the counter-argument. Christian Picciolini, another former neo-Nazi and founder of the extremist-disengagement organization Free Radicals, echoed this sentiment. "Violence against ugly ideas is not an answer," he said, allowing that there were times that called for self-defense. "These tactics are Band-Aids that often backfire and cause no real positive change."

These opinions are borne out in research. In their book Why Civil Resistance Works, Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth found that nonviolent resistance is more than twice as effective as violent activism. They attributed this to nonviolent action attracting allies, thus bringing about change more quickly, while violence repelled potential allies. This has played out in liberal discourse, with influential figures like The New Yorker's Jelani Cobb, Trevor Noah of The Daily Show, and Noam Chomsky sharply criticizing Antifa for furthering their opponents' political goals. A Berkeley student, Malini Ramaiyer, wrote an op-ed titled "How Violence Undermined the Berkeley Protest", in which she described a chaotic scene during which a Syrian Muslim student was misidentified as a Nazi and then beaten with a rod. As Jeffrey Pyle put it, "A woke mob is still a mob and can make mistakes."

There is also the position of public universities, which are legally required to host invited speakers, to consider. A plaintiff on behalf of Spencer successfully sued Auburn University for $29,000 for barring him from speaking there. The Westboro Baptist Church family, which is composed of a number of lawyers, make money by suing municipalities that ban their protests. Banning the speech of reprehensible figures can result in filling their coffers. For those seeking to counter the spread of white supremacist ideology, there are plenty of avenues with proven long-term results. In addition to disciplined nonviolent protests, which effectively market protesters as noble actors to a larger audience, researchers have found that tactics for reducing bigotry include brief non-judgmental conversations. Some have theorized that Antifa's violent tactics have hastened the recent coming apart of the alt-right movement, but it seems to have taken place in spite of their methods, not because of them, particularly after Americans witnessed hordes of angry young men demonstrating their free speech by screaming "blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us" by torchlight the night before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The unmasking and shaming of attendees, including the white supremacists who were caught on video brutally beating DeAndre Harris, that followed was effective enough to force many leaders underground and some to discuss rebranding the alt-right.

Of course, the question remains why right-wing trolls are getting invites to campuses and on YouTube and television shows in the first place. "The forbidden message is an attractive message," said Jeffrey Pyle. Milo Yiannopoulos's career was launched and extended merely on his ability to trigger libs with outrageous and vapid pronouncements. Shepherd's free-speech club chooses their speakers based on whether or not they are "polemical" and topics are "taboo," which would qualify any number of loonies: flat-earthers, Holocaust-deniers, and, well, white-supremacy conspiracy theorists.

After Goldy's Ontario event was shut down, she tweeted out a thank you to Shepherd, calling her a "bright light and deserving free speech icon, amid the darkness that now oppresses Canada's academic institutions." Shepherd posted a YouTube video, bidding Goodbye to the Left for being "intolerant" and "pro-censorship." "I found myself explaining the difference between 'white nationalism' and 'white supremacism' because there is a huge difference," Shepherd said. "The left wants to make it so that even if you acknowledge that there is a difference, there's something dangerous about you."

Whether she was aware or not, Shepherd seemed to be buying into a decades-long rebranding of white supremacists; Mayo says that the ADL classifies " white nationalism" as a subgroup of "white supremacism," not a separate ideology.

"Thirty years ago, we used the same tactic and would refer to our movement as 'White Pride' or 'White Separatist,' said Picciolini, who was once a leader in the skinhead group Hammerskin Nation, recounting that less palatable labels caused problems and turned off potential recruits. "We [would say] we didn't hate anyone, we were just interested in white civil rights. That was our public face. Behind closed doors, we were virulently racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic. The whole notion of 'white nationalist' or 'race realist' or 'identitarian' or 'alt-right' are based in the same racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic ideas we held. It is a marketing tactic and people should not be fooled."

From the Fringes to Your Television

The new media-savvy messengers of white-supremacist ideology have been remarkably effective in hustling euphemisms into the lexicon, particularly in mainstream conservative discourse. In discussing Donald Trump's dog whistles to white supremacists, Picciolini surprised Megyn Kelly on Today when he told her that "globalism" and "liberal media"—terms she'd used at Fox News—were massaged versionss of "the global Jewish conspiracy" and "the Jewish media." One of the newer additions is " cultural Marxism," a term with a convoluted backstory tinged with anti-Semitism that is used by the radical right, including neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer and Oslo mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered 77 people as publicity for his manifesto, which bemoaned the "rise of cultural Marxism/multiculturalism in the West." It has since been adopted, perhaps unwittingly, by more mainstream figures, like Dave Rubin, who is Jewish himself, and Jordan Peterson, who conflates the term with postmodernism, as well as The Daily Mail and The Daily Caller.

Capitalizing on the fuzziness of their coded speech, the new right has spun this plausible deniability off on hosts who either aren't attuned to the underlying message or simply don't care. Take, for example, the Rubin Report, a YouTube show purportedly devoted to "free speech" and "big ideas" with more than 700,000 subscribers. Host Dave Rubin positions himself as a "free agent" in the "marketplace of ideas," seeking to establish a "new center rooted in free speech, logic, and reason." To that end, he has invited on an eclectic, albeit right leaning, mix of guests, including mainstream public intellectuals like David Frum and Steven Pinker. But Rubin has made his antipathy for what he calls the "regressive left" and PC culture a common theme and so on the more extreme ends of the spectrum, he rarely, if ever, brings on a radical leftist. While Rubin frequently rails on identity politics, which he has called "evil," he often invites on some of the most toxic practitioners of pro-Trump, white-identity politics, like InfoWars' Paul Joseph Watson, who recycle black and immigrant crime stories, decry globalism and multiculturalism, and portray white identity as under attack. There they are offered the same deference and audience as some of the country’s leading public intellectuals.

"If you stifle their free speech, it adds fuel to their fire."

Rubin has expressed skepticism that white supremacism is on the rise, such as in this March 2017 interview with far-right activist Lauren Southern. "What portion of this do you actually think is real," he asked. Southern responded that white supremacism was a phenomenon so non-existent that "desperate" people had to "create" it, asserting that a Jewish organization was behind the Canadian Nazi party because they "wanted more, like, hate crimes." Southern then pushed the false distinction between white supremacists and white nationalists. "I see the white ethno-state as super utopian," she said. "It's a utopian idea, right?" Rubin didn't challenge the notion. A couple months later, the Italian Coast Guard detained Southern along with identitarian activists—who believe Europe should be for "Europeans"—after they threw flares at a Doctors Without Borders boat, which performs search-and-rescue missions for drowning refugees.

The previous year, Milo Yiannopoulos appeared on the Rubin Report, downplaying the alt-right as a mere mischief and fun, and asserting that the Jews do, indeed, control the media and banks. "If there's a racial supremacist movement, it's Black Lives Matters and it's very well-funded," said Yiannopoulos, hinting at an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that George Soros is behind the group. "There's no white-supremacist movement in this country."

Beyond letting guests making dubious racially charged claims in a friendly format, Rubin has personally advocated for some as well. In February 2017, when several political figures characterized Yiannopoulos as a white supremacist, Rubin came to his defense, tweeting: "I know Milo, have interviewed him several times and have never heard him espouse a white supremacist view." Later that year, Buzzfeed News revealed that Yiannopoulos had been secretly working with a range of white supremacists, including staffers at Daily Stormer and American Renaissance, to soft pedal their ideas into the mainstream. In the same month he denied the very existence of a white supremacist movement on the Rubin Report, Yiannopoulos was emailing with some of its most notorious leaders and throwing up Nazi salutes with Richard Spencer in a Dallas bar the month after. Mayo of the ADL told me that white supremacists would go to Yiannopoulos's college visits to recruit students with hostility toward identity politics into more extreme ideology.

Last November, Rubin welcomed on Stefan Molyneux, a controversial far-right personality who has been identified as a cult leader by experts in the field, spoken at men’s rights conferences, and has a number of absurdly extremist views, including that homosexuality is a result of child abuse. But he and Rubin mainly focused on one of his passions: scientific racism. When Rubin asked him about race and IQ, Molyneux looked to the camera, pitched all the episodes with "scientists" on his own YouTube show, and then launched into a soft-spoken monologue, ticking off the average IQs of various races and pinning rates of poverty and crime in poor black communities on genetics as settled science.

“It’s heartbreaking stuff,” Molyneux said, softening the tone he uses on his own show, where he frequently says stuff like “screaming racism at people because blacks are collectively less intelligent... is insane.” It seemed peculiar that Rubin chose to cover the subject of race and IQ with a guest known for pushing a narrative about black criminality without bringing on an actual scientist. Rubin frequently speaks of “the battle of ideas,” but the interview was no battle—he nodded along with almost every questionable pronouncement Molyneux put forth. The video racked up almost half a million views.

In a Politico article called "I Used to Be a Neo-Nazi; Charlottesville Terrifies Me," Zaal wrote of how easy it is today for "anyone with a smartphone" to fall in a rabbit hole of watching hours of videos from "more lightweight figures like alt-right YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson, who peddle the same racial paranoia without the overt Nazi ideology, feeding viewers their sick spin on the news." Right-wing YouTubers like Molyneux and Southern, who both recently appeared with duct tape over their mouths in a promotional video for a free-speech event in London, don't sport tattoos or use the same kind of virulently racist language as old-school figures, but they toe the line. "Lauren Southern, Paul Joseph Watson, and so many others are also pushing gateway drug rhetoric and ideas," says Picciolini, who recognizes it from his days in the white power movement. "This is dangerous because it's easy to agree with their veiled racism if you don't see it for what it is."

In his days as a white-supremacist propagandist, Zaal used to visit white neighborhoods first to distribute incendiary, anti-white pamphlets from the Nation of Islam, and then, after instilling that fear, follow up a week later with his own vague propaganda. This has echoes in today's social-media tactics of Southern, Watson, and Molyneux who alternate between linking Black Lives Matters with crimes by black people unaffiliated with the movement and then hitting on the theme that white people are hated over and over. A key driver behind Trump voters turned out to be anxiety over the perceived threat to their social position as whites and the new right has proven adept in exploiting this fear. "They're all the same," says Zaal. "They tend to copy one another and keep a tight control of their narrative. If that's not controlled media, I don't know what is. I believe a lot of these people are politically motivated. But moreso, I think they're financially motivated. They're making a lot of money."

There are, of course, both policy and flesh-and-blood implications for normalizing xenophobia and denying that white supremacism exists. Despite the growing threat of white-supremacist groups, the Trump administration renamed the "Countering Violent Extremism" program in the Department of Homeland Security to "Countering Islamic Extremism" and slashed funding. Last February, a member of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division murdered a gay, Jewish 19-year-old student. By the ADL's count, the number of people killed by white supremacists doubled to 18 in 2017. The FBI recorded a two-year rise in hate crimes in 2015 and 2016, after decades of decline. And then there is the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which has been executing warrantless raids, forcibly separating hundreds of immigrant children from their families, and turning a blind eye to rampant sexual abuse in detention facilities. In a wrenching new NBC Left documentary, Path to Radicalization: A Mother Turns to Hate, Billy Roper, who identifies as a non-white extinctionist, spoke to the newfound boldness of extremists under Trump. "Two years ago, when I would go to a white nationalist meeting, I would be the youngest in the room—now it's just the opposite," said Roper. "It's not a fringe movement anymore."

There is a magnitude of difference between protecting an individual's legal right to free speech and taking the further step of uncritically promoting white-supremacist propaganda in mainstream platforms. These are dog whistles made into megaphones. Even free-speech enthusiasts, like the Pyles, don't find speakers like Yiannopoulos to be worthy of an invite. "College campuses should have standards about who they should invite. I don't think Milo has [anything of value to say]," said Jeffrey Pyle. "He's a bigot, a troll, and a harasser. But if he is invited to campus, the proper and effective strategies are to shame people who invited him." When I visited Christopher Pyle in his office one morning, I asked him about a comment he had made to me implying that free speech doesn't necessarily improve culture. "Not when jackasses do it," he said. "For the vast majority of people, speech is expressive, not instrumental. It is used to please those with whom they agree, not persuade those with whom they don't. What passes for debate is not civil discourse; it is the juvenile scoring of points in order to please one's partisans, not expand the circle of agreement." Several years ago, he started a book on civil discourse, but then "Bush started torturing people" and he turned his attentions to the CIA, and after that Citizens United v. F.E.C. was decided. Two hundred pages of an unfinished book on civil discourse are sitting in a computer folder somewhere. Isn't it a relevant topic today? Pyle smiled. Not as pressing as torture and corporate money flooding politics.

The work of creating a more perfect union is a messy endeavor, with competing values often clashing and sometimes improving one another. After all, when the First Amendment was adopted in 1791, not every American was afforded its liberties. It would take the civil rights movements to fulfill the promise of free speech more honestly. Twenty-five years ago, when the Pyles waged their free-speech battle in the Massachusetts courts, town members were enraged about what they perceived as wasting town money on an academic exercise—the offending matter was mere vulgar T-shirts; the victims non-existent. But freedom of expression doesn’t always exist in a vacuum, absent of any other ethical obligations. We live in a country where for hundreds of years some humans were counted as less human than others—the bloody cost of which has been laid bare at a new lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, its legacy found in the bodies riddled by Dylann Roof’s bullets on the floor of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. That precipice is never far off. It is easier than many of us would like to admit to fall into a rabbit hole of hate and dehumanization of our neighbors, and the Internet has made that descent near effortless. Freedom of speech is not freedom of moral responsibility, and modern-day pamphleteers of white supremacist propaganda, whether they believe the ideology or not, bear it.

In their blinkered fight for the alt-right’s “free speech”—a battle rarely, if ever, waged by the same actors on behalf of liberals—Rubin, Shepherd, and a number of college groups around the country seem to be both unable to make the vital distinction between protecting and promoting hateful ideology and unwilling to learn about it. They seem to view white-supremacist ideas pushed by social-media trolls to be on the same plane of harmless offensiveness as a Coed Naked T-shirt, inured to their real-world implications. Of course, they all have the right, at least in America, to give a platform without a heckler’s veto or credible counterpoint to ethno-state propagandists and noxious conspiracy theorists, who can smile and speak politely while peddling black crime stories and racist pseudoscience. But why, in the name of civil discourse and individual rights, would they want to?