Abstract
This article examines how liberals and conservatives conceptualize free speech by analyzing the works of Lenny Bruce and Milo Yiannopoulos. I find that conservatives and liberals have very different conceptions of what a legitimate citizen is, and this shapes their support for free speech claims. Liberals see rights as a mechanism for protecting minority groups; as such, they support speech claims when they are advanced by dissidents challenging entrenched hierarchies. In contrast, conservatives see law as beholden to the will of the majority; thus, they support speech claims when they are seen as challenging the power of subversive elites.
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