In short, from PopeHat -
Nearly 100 years ago Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., voting to uphold the Espionage Act conviction of a man who wrote and circulated anti-draft pamphlets during World War I, said “[t]he most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”
That flourish — now usually shortened to “shout fire in a crowded theater” — is the media’s go-to trope to support the proposition that some speech is illegal. But it’s empty rhetoric. I previously explained at length how Holmes said it in the context of the Supreme Court’s strong wartime pro-censorship push and subsequently retreated from it. That history illustrates its insidious nature. Holmes cynically used the phrase as a rhetorical device to justify jailing people for anti-war advocacy, an activity that is now (and was soon thereafter) unquestionably protected by the First Amendment.
https://www.thefire.org/popehat-on-the-medias-most-common-pr...
In practice I don’t think banning NoNewNormal now matters much. I prefer unbanned because I don’t like censorship, but this isn’t a slippery slope problem, Reddit has long been free falling into the latrine pit. I’ve had to go offsite with my old Reddit community. Efforts can be made, but I think the entire process here is useless.