Villains.

“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” But evil is often very beautiful and disguised as good.

The Devil is, the Bible tells us, an angel. Fallen perhaps, but still an angel and were we to see him, he would be not only beautiful but also ultimately persuasive.

Shakespeare has Richard III say “I am determined to prove a villain” but villains in real life are always and everywhere saviors of their country, their class or their people. Lest there be any doubt, remember that Lenin (and Stalin) after him delivered the Russian people from the Czars and the kulaks. Hitler delivered the German people from the Jews and the victors of World War 1. Pol Pot delivered Cambodia from capitalism and he corruption of cities. Mao delivered China from large landowners, ushering in agrarian reform. The fact that millions of their own countrymen died on the way to salvation is (as the intelligentsia will tell us) the cost of progress.

All the true horrors of the 20th Century were committed in the name the people. But these horrors cannot be committed by one man alone. He must have the support of the intelligentsia and the media. There must always be a megaphone to tell the people that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and truth is a lie.

Welcome to the US of A in the 21st Century. George Will identifies one participant who tells us that free speech is corruption.

For several decades, most of the ingenuity that liberal academics have invested in First Amendment analysis has aimed to justify limiting the core activity that the amendment was written to protect -- political speech. These analyses treat free speech as not an inherent good but as a merely instrumental good, something justified by serving other ends -- therefore something to be balanced against, and abridged to advance, other goods.

The good for which Zephyr Teachout would regulate speech is combating corruption, which, as she understands it, encompasses most of contemporary politics. A visiting law professor at Duke, writing in the Cornell Law Review ("The Anti-Corruption Principle"), she makes an astonishingly sweeping argument for emancipating government from First Amendment restrictions on its powers to regulate political speech -- speech about the government's composition and conduct.

What is corruption?

Teachout's capacious definition of corruption includes even an unseemly "attitude" of citizens as well as officeholders "toward public service." ...

She advocates, as proponents of an elastic Constitution often do, an "evolving standard," this time a standard about how we define, measure and condemn "self-serving" behavior, aka corruption. This standard might license Congress to restrict speech in order to combat:

"Unequal access" to the political process; "unfair deployment of wealth"; "undue influence" by this or that group; speech that is "distorting" or lacks "proportionality" or results in "drowned voices" or a "passive" or "dispirited" public or that causes a "loss of political integrity" or creates "moral failings for members of Congress." Such speech might not be constitutionally protected if we properly "refine the meaning of the privilege of political speech."

So, political speech is not a right but a privilege, something granted by government when government deems it consistent with what Teachout calls the "equally important" anti-corruption principle.

You can imagine how welcome this explanation of the need to end free speech will be received in academia.

I will not bother to mention, because - like Obama - I do not want to dredge up old issues - that Teachout is a visiting professor at Duke, the home of the Duke lacrosse team lynching.