The best thing that could come out of The Great Moral Panic of 2017 would be laws that protect everyone's free speech rights.

Libertarian UCLA law prof Eugene Volokh discusses the termination of an insufferable Sociology professor who expressed joy in the Texas flooding disaster (because, you know, Texas voted for Trump.)

//I’ve talked before about “censorship envy,” one mechanism through which these sorts of speech restrictions can grow: “If my neighbor — and especially my political adversary — gets to ban speech he reviles,” the thinking goes, “why shouldn’t I get to do the same?”

If a university has a strong policy of protecting speech, including offensive speech, administrators can point to that policy as a means of resisting calls for firing a controversial faculty member, and they can appeal to people’s desire to see speakers on their own side protected, and use that desire to help protect speakers on all sides. But once the university starts firing some people for speech “that do[es] not reflect [the university’s] community views or values,” that makes it much harder to resist calls for more suppression. Indeed, at that point tolerating speech starts implicitly conveying the message that the speech does reflect the university’s community views or values — and to avoid that implication, the university would have to fire any speaker who offended some sufficiently influential constituency.

And what about students? If you know your professor was fired for his speech, how can you — someone of much lower status than even a visiting assistant professor — have any confidence that your controversial speech will be protected? Let’s say even that you want to speak sensibly and reasonably and think that your view isn’t nasty, ill-timed and largely unsubstantive the way that Storey’s was. Do you feel secure that the university will draw such a distinction? Or do you think that it will just give in to calls to discipline you or even expel you, the way it gave in to calls to fire Storey?

The slippery slope is a real phenomenon in a legal and political system in which so much is argued based on precedent, analogy and calls for equal treatment, including equal suppression. Is the desire to punish a jerk like Storey — emotionally understandable as the desire might be — really worth the damage that such firings can cause to free speech at American universities, including private ones?//