Comment by adventured

> Taken to it's extremity, it's given us corporate personhood via Citizens United, and the codification of the principle that you (private or corporate personage) are entitled to speak freely at whatever volume you can afford to, including explicitly politicized speech.

Corporations had drastically greater power for 2/3 of the history of the US when it comes to being able to directly influence politics via money. That isn't an argument in favor of corporations being people, it's an argument in favor of the value of unvarnished free speech.

The US smashed the KKK - which was extremely powerful at one time - in part because we were able to have that debate in public thanks to our aggressive free speech and free press protections (they go hand in hand). If you create new levers of power, when the authoritarians get their hands on those levers, they will use them against you in the worst possible ways. You're not using logic and thinking ahead to the obvious consequences, you're feeling in the moment. The US has routinely been through radically worse (I can't emphasize that enough) than what's going on today; the 1970s saw much worse out of the extreme left and right, in terms of challenges to the use of speech. The whole point of free speech as we have it today, is to prevent those in power from arbitrarily silencing things they do not like.

If you don't stop and consider the consequences of giving speech control powers to eg someone much worse than Trump, then you aren't thinking through your position. See: the Patriot Act.