From Heer's defence of The Letter.

But the letter's "principles" are largely empty, while the concrete ones--e.g. "The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion"--are manifestly untrue. https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1281630988959768578

Its false equivalences--e.g. "restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society"--offer only the most jaundiced view of current events, likening angry tweets to Trump's nuclear-tipped oppression. Which also makes the timing conspicuously bad.

Thus, considering that, the hypocrisy of the signatories becomes the whole story. Bad ideas pushed by worse people pretending these are noble ideals we fall short of--when even their rare flashes of substance make objectively false claims.

But there's not much substance to begin with, contrary to Heer's assertions. It's all rhetoric. Rhetoric we've all seen before . Rhetoric which only ever seems to do the ideological work of reactionary interests. https://twitter.com/Quinnae_Moon/status/1281009334713901062

This is why I really roll my eyes at the "okay some bad dudes signed The Letter but the ideas are good!" defence. A) No they're not. B) The rhetoric strung together does specific ideological work that doesn't advance truly noble aims.

Loofbourow makes this point quite well. This text has such comprehensive subtext that it can hardly mean anything else. You can't will it away through individual initiative, anymore than you could redefine the word "chair" by yourself. https://twitter.com/Millicentsomer/status/1281414279413915649

That's what Heer refuses to grasp. The words do *work*, work that does little to aid the causes he cares about. They won't actually give us language to help genuinely marginalised voices, because anything that likens "caustic" counterspeech to state oppression isn't made for us.