As Catharine MacKinnon put it about the First Amendment, “Legally, what was . . . a shield for radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.”1 She overstates the matter a bit but gets the mechanics right. In many important ways, restraints on censorship have come to be used to protect ingrained hierarchies of wealth and privilege rather than marginalized voices.
