Whatever you think of the supposed war on right-wing speech, it so far has not been fought principally in the courtroom but on the servers of profit-motivated corporations more concerned with monthly active users than democratic principles. Today, the flashy speech fights take place on college campuses or, more often and more significantly, on the social networks that have largely privatized and monetized public discourse. In the great free speech cases of the 20th century, the government tried to limit the speech of publicly despised groups. The marketplace has indeed changed, but not really in the Overton window way Randazza means. “If you can’t win in the marketplace of ideas, you try to change the marketplace.” “There is a war on right-wing speech,” Randazza, whose own politics are a mishmash (he favors widespread economic redistribution and universal health care but voted for Gary Johnson in 2016), told me. This vexes Randazza to the point that he’s willing to argue a position that liberals see as a naked attempt by the far right to preserve its ability to publish dangerous ideas and cynical falsehoods on platforms that aren’t obligated to host them. But regardless of politics, the rules around speech have changed in a real and tangible way, and have done so largely beyond the bounds of democratic government. At the moment, the people who claim to be most threatened by those companies' actions are on the right. And most of that chaotic speech - yours, mine, everyone’s - is now happening in private spaces ruled by massive, unaccountable technology companies. False speech, and speech many of us find hateful, proliferates in a way that would be unimaginable to those who waged the foundational First Amendment fights of the 20th century. The advent of the internet ignited a big bang of speech, the consequences of which America hasn’t yet reckoned with. In so doing, he’s become the legal face of the burning conservative conviction, fanned vigorously by President Trump, that the real victims of speech suppression today are on the right. They include the Infowars goblin Alex Jones the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin Gawker bête noire Chuck Johnson the white supremacist writer Jared Taylor the white supremacist politician Paul Nehlen an anonymous planner of the deadly 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally and the Twitter activist Cernovich, who is Randazza’s friend. But more recently, he’s become better known as a free speech advocate for a who’s who of internet-famous right-wingers, people who run the gamut from trollish to hateful to worse. For a long time, that calling led Randazza to represent some of the biggest names in porn:, Bang Bros, Corbin Fisher.
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