The op-ed comes closest to clarifying what speech is to be suppressed after casting ostensibly unworthy speech as that which marshals abstract argument against personal experience. The dice are quickly loaded with Baer’s choice of example: He leads readers to think of bygone instances of Holocaust denial, “where invidious but often well-publicized cranks confronted survivors with the absurd challenge to produce incontrovertible eyewitness evidence of their experience of the killing machines set up by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Not only was such evidence unavailable, but it also challenged the Jewish survivors to produce evidence of their own legitimacy in a discourse that had systematically denied their humanity.”

Grounding the op-ed in that example is odd for a few reasons.

While it is monstrous to tell a Holocaust survivor that the horrors he or she lived through did not happen, the paradigm of evidence-based empiricism seems preferable, for those intent on Holocaust deniers losing, than a paradigm where personal experience is paramount. After all, Holocaust survivors will not be with us much longer; those who feel sure the Holocaust never happened will outlive them.

What’s more, even though robust free-speech protections permitted anyone to deny the Holocaust in America, and protected neo-Nazis as they marched through Skokie (a free-speech precedent later marshaled to defend the speech of racial minorities), Holocaust denial stayed a highly stigmatized, fringe belief. The descendants of Holocaust survivors are not marginal victims kept down by bygone free speech. So the culture of relatively absolute free speech worked. Indeed, Holocaust denial is arguably less widespread in the country with no laws against it than some Western European countries that have long criminalized denying the Holocaust.

Nevertheless, Baer concludes from his example that “certain topics restrict speech as a public good.” So let’s grant the premise. Maybe there are certain topics like that.

Of course, we could as easily load the dice in the other direction, illustrating the danger of elevating personal experience over demands for evidence or abstract reasoning. Consider the marginalized son of Appalachian coal miners who goes off to college feeling sure, based on personal experience, that the climate is not changing. Few would disagree that having deeply held experience-based beliefs contradicted by evidence, and siding with the evidence, is part of what college should teach.

What’s more, free speech facilitates making experiential claims as much as reasoned claims, so even if your premise is that certain debates are setbacks for the public good, you might still champion robust speech protections so experiential claims are protected. Instead, the op-ed gives only the Holocaust example, making it seem monstrous to subject personal experience to the marketplace of ideas, then segues to the most specific account Baer offers of who and what should get censored, by his lights.