I guess I am reaching. But like I said, I'm looking for a "steelman argument"[1] in favor of the idea of a "safe zone"—a worst-case one-off emergency scenario where it might be warranted to have one.

If we can agree that it's warranted in that case, then it becomes a matter of agreeing exactly when it becomes unwarranted—which is a much more fact-based debate to have than one where one side just shouts "Freedom of Speech!" and the other side just shouts "Freedom from Persecution!" and neither side believes the other's bullshit one iota.

[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man

(Also, I think this is the most I've ever been downvoted for speaking in the classical hacker-vulnerability-probing "but what if a tornado of Hitlers hit the school?" style on HN. I'm not even using any inflammatory language or anything, whereas all the replies to me are acting as if I was some social-justice type spouting off about "my right to not hear some white cis male talk about the time he went to Vegas" or somesuch. It's interesting; is this one of those "if you try to take an orthogonal position then you're supporting neither side, so both sides see you as supporting their opponent and hate you" effects?)

The trouble here is that you're arguing from the enviable position of having a solution without a clear problem, and are trying to find a problem to justify it.

The concept got flipped in the chain here -- what is actually happening on these campuses is the establishment of "free speech zones", where a person can say what they like, and the establishment of rules that, on the rest of the campus, punishment will occur for saying things that could trigger or make someone feel unsafe.

So, what's happening is that an entire campus is made to be this "safe" area.

Is the assertion that there are so many people on any given university campus who might have a breakdown that the entire campus must walk on egg shells? Because that is the side of the debate you're arguing from.

We see what you're trying to do--the problem is that the general "think of the one terrible case" has been tarnished rather heavily in the last decades by people talking about "well, what if it stopped 9/11", or "well, what if it stopped the OKC bombing" and so on and so forth.

The idea of "well, in this one specific extraordinary case it's totally reasonable" is kinda played out among anyone with half a brain, because it's been used to justify so much bullshit.

Also, the entire dichotomy of warranted/unwarranted is suspect, but that's a different rabbit hole altogether.

2003 Rockford College, Christopher Hedges, at the very least, using a graduation speech to talk about the Iraq war and American empire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAmkMndtH24

And check out this article for an ironic inversion of politics in the short span of 12 years:

http://www.alternet.org/story/15982/the_silencing_of_dissent...

So you have people on the right were shocked and triggered, screaming at the speaker and pulling the power on his microphone, and people on the left demanded that hard truths must be spoken so suck it up. But I wonder if today he could do this speech without giving trigger warnings for colonialism and war. I wonder if a university would even give him the freedom up front to do a speech without vetting the topic so it couldn't surprise anyone. Is this a price we're willing to pay?