Some people were encouraged by the small number of white supremacists who gathered on the anniversary of Charlottesville. It is indeed a good sign that this form of branding is less appealing than it was a year ago. The admirable goal of making racists afraid again may have won in Charlottesville. Alas, a more insidious More

So it appears Antifa has scared Trump’s army of emboldened Nazis back into their hidey holes, or at least that’s the spin the Resistance is putting on the deeply weird events of last Sunday. In case you missed it, what happened was, thousands of “anti-fascist” protestors converged on the streets of the nation’s capitol to deny a platform to (or just beat the snot out of) twenty or thirty racist idiots who were trying to assemble in Lafayette Square and stand around shouting racist slogans at each other. The organizer of this idiotic fiasco (i.e., the racist fiasco, not the protest thereof) was the same attention-seeking, racist idiot that had organized the original “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville in 2017. More

I am interested in the way in which First Amendment rights have descended into the court of popular opinion where it seems true and false are in the eye of the beholder and social media now has the authority to post or take down what those eyes can see. What is involved here is a radical change in mindset — though “mind” seems not at all to be involved here — contextualizing what both speech and authority might be in a cyberspace age. More