The Right to Speech Vs. the Right to Censor

Milo Yiannopoulos is many things: a onetime editor at the alt-right website Breitbart, a gay and partly Jewish man who regularly disparaged gays and Jews, the self-described “most fabulous supervillain of the Internet” and, in his own words, a “free-speech warrior.” Yiannopoulos’ expert trolling earned him prominence on the far right, proof to many on that side that theirs was the true party of free speech–not politically correct liberals more worried about people’s feelings than about the First Amendment.

As it turns out, free speech has limits, even among the party of free speech. Shortly before he was set to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, video resurfaced of Yiannopoulos defending the idea of “13-year-olds” having sex with “older men,” and although he apologized, Yiannopoulos was swiftly disinvited, resigned from Breitbart under pressure and had a book deal with Simon & Schuster canceled. The left cheered at Yiannopoulos’ fall, while noting that it took praising pedophilia–not his long rap sheet of racist and sexist statements–before conservatives turned their backs. The country won’t miss Yiannopoulos. But his rise and fall shows that speech in America has been weaponized and privatized. Finding the proper balance between civil liberty and civility is going to prove increasingly elusive.

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