The First Amendment Is the Greatest Defense for the Powerless and Marginalized

NO ‘GOOD CENSORSHIP’

Many progressives insist the constitutional right to free speech is a “tool of the oppressor.” They could not be more wrong.

Published Apr. 28 2023 11:20PM EDT

230428-first-amendment-hero_ziejas — Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast

The prominent feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon in 2020 published a law review article making an argument that has become depressingly common—that the First Amendment has been transformed over the last century from “a shield of the powerless to a sword of the powerful,” including “authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis...