First Freedom under assault
It didn't start with Antifa. But it has worsened. 

Around 1988, I researched racist hate groups. Among literature I considered was a pamphlet from People Against Racist Terror (PART). PART boasted they'd shut down an address by one Prof. William Shockley.

According to his Wikipedia page, Shockley had been a research scientist at Bell Labs, in the 1940s and '50s. He helped develop the transistor. 

Shockley was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He was one of three Bell scientists to receive a 1956 Nobel Prize. And he went on to a position at Stanford.

But later in life, Shockley endorsed Eugenics. He devoted himself to distasteful racial-genetics theories. He posited IQ levels to be of racial determination, and even suggested persons of lower intellectual capacity be paid to undergo sterilization.

I was revolted by Shockley's Eugenics proselytization, but I was no less aghast at PART's boasting of speech suppression. Stifling a citizen's First Amendment rights is as antithetical to American ideals as racism. 

In America, every man has the right to voice his arguments, whether they be fine or foul. Debate is healthy. The open exchange of ideas can expose the weakness of inferior ones, and make plain the superiority of others.

If banned and driven underground, ugly ideas can fester. They can seem plausible to uncritical listeners if not openly challenged. 

'The solution to bad speech is good speech,' long advised First Amendment theorists like Nat Hentoff. 

But in 2019, the Overton Window has been narrowed far beyond Shockley.

Now, keeping listeners from ever hearing legitimate messages is the goal. The hope is that boots-on-throats will profit totalitarian progressive advancement. 

Expression of any perspective not conformative to accepted progressive orthodoxy is undeservingly consigned to the same garbage yard as Eugenics. 

Patriotism, Constitutional regard, America First, and mainstream conservative thinking are cast as pernicious.

But those are not hostile fictions contrary to our nation's charter. They exist within reasonable parameters, and amplify traditional values and principles. Their enrich our Great Conversation.

Crushing others' freedom to communicate is an anti-intellectual exertion, in which the primacy of one voice is valued over an equally accessible 'marketplace of ideas' from which can come innumerable benefits.

Making impossible public speaking by ideological opposites, and otherwise denying First Amendment rights to citizens, is now a standard pursuit of Antifa.

Like PART in 1988, Antifa's masked rioters apparently believe their mission absolves them of censure for rights-deprivations. It may even be they do not believe adversaries deserve rights.

And just as their anti-free speech efforts are more expansive, so is the danger. Antifa's regular employ of physical violence, arson, and property destruction are criminal ploys predecessors seldom leveraged.

Ours is not a country in which popular revolution is justified. Unlike the time of our break from England, we are not oppressed by an unrepresentative monarchy.

The results of democratic elections aren't always to our liking. But losing is a possibility. We all know that, going in. 

No one side is superior, its desires to be adopted regardless of ballot outcome. Were that the case, elections would be unnecessary.

There is no moral argument to be made for raging against an orderly system through which men already enjoy the liberty to chart their country's course.

Antifa is not noble. They wield the same repressive cudgel as did a horde of barbarous despots before them.

Against speech. Liberty. Us.