The Last Generation That Has a Say

I read this as an opinion piece. It doesn't seem to me to aspire to convey new information. I don't think it's self-consciously engaged in presenting an argument, in which there are steps from point to point in a chain of reasoning. I don't find any passages in which the objections that someone thinking differently might raise are acknowledged and addressed. I think the particular opinion at the center of the essay is that the democritization of technology that has led to a very great democritization of opinion—as the equalization of individuals and media entities has proceeded in the Net—has lowered the tone of public debate. This seems to you particularly evident in the rhetoric on one side (not your favored side) of the two-party contest for the Presidency now ramping up.

In the first place, I'm not sure the history bears you out. I wonder if you have ever had occasion to read the newspapers and campaign oratory of, for example, 1864. Barack Obama, much vilified as he is, is not more vilified than was Abraham Lincoln. Mr Trump's form of anti-immigrant rhetoric is grotesquely distasteful in this nation of immigrants, but if you think about the "Know Nothing" anti-immigrant politics of the 1850s---which Mr Lincoln, Salmon P. Chase and other ardent anti-slavery Whigs carefully danced with and around in order to co-opt Know Nothingism into an anti-slavery but not anti-immigrant Republican Party---I think you will find yourself heartened to discover that we have been through, and survived, this form of xenophobia more than once, without "the Internet."

Your discussion of hate speech regulation would suit better our work next term, in the "Computers, Privacy and the Constitution" course, but let me say here that I don't think you've captured the real dispute between the First Amendment and hate speech regulation. The issue isn't First Amendment absolutism. The issue is whether more speech or less speech is the correct response to upwellings of hate or sedition or other anti-social communication. European hate speech regulation comes from statist origins in regimes that always used censorship, from the adoption of printing onwards, to shape opinion. American attitudes in the direction of "more speech" as the remedy for bad speech begin from the absence of any precedent anti-liberal tradition in American culture, as Louis Hartz famously noted more than fifty years ago. Many ways of expressing the American view could be cited, but this one seems most important to me:

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

which comes from Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address. If one adds from the same speech this:

[H]aving banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.

one has, I think, conveniently located in one place the key propositions from which a response to your opinion might be fashioned, and from which, at any rate, you might take the creative tension necessary for another, richer, draft.