When I was growing up, we learned that the moral cornerstone of the First Amendment — the very essence of it — is that it’s about protecting the speech you don’t like.
If the Nazis aren’t allowed to march in Skokie (a major test case in the 1970s), then a treacherous principle gets laid down: that the rights protected by the First Amendment only go so far.
And once that principle is established, it can be used against anyone.
That, as we also learned, is why the First Amendment is the first amendment: If a society doesn’t have free speech, then its other rights will begin, over time, to fall away.So please understand: When I say that Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim’s “The Great Hack,” a documentary about data-mining, fake-news propaganda, and the 2016 election (it drops on Netflix on July 24), is an intelligent but infuriating piece of liberal hand-wringing,
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