Laws should evolve to serve the people. If monsters like this are allowed to say, 'But it's legal,' it should not be legal. People like Nix are much worse than some racist frat boys, but I'm reminded of this:
"The way we interpret the First Amendment need not be simplistic and empty of nuance, and was not always so. The Supreme Court unanimously held over eighty years ago that “those words which by their very utterance inflict injury … are no essential part of any exposition of ideas.” And in 1952 the Court upheld an Illinois statute punishing “false or malicious defamation of racial and religious groups.” These rulings, while never officially reversed, have shrunk to historical trinkets. But they mark a range of the possible, where one can be a staunch defender of full-throated discourse but still recognize the difference between dialogue and vomitus."
Something I realised the other day, is that the campaign of dehumanization and extrajudicial punishment that the USA carried out against African Americans doesn't really have a name, like Fascism or Nazi-ism.
Yeah there's "slavery" and then "Jim Crow" but what do you call the stuff since the 1950s? Mostly it's referred to by the inverse, the Civil Rights Movement, but what did they move against?
And yet those "legal technicalities" are the difference between a free society like ours, and Russia.
As despicable as they may be, to give in to the allure of dehumanization and extrajudicial punishment is fascism incarnate.