Ah, so the author cleverly toys with the readers’ understandable confusion when encountering the question. That’s not really a convincing argument but very clev

Ah, so the author cleverly toys with the readers’ understandable confusion when encountering the question. That’s not really a convincing argument but very clever. If I make that one sentence from the First Amendment into the sole law of the land there is no confusion at all. The president is obviously allowed to ban speech with executive orders. Why would anyone disagree with that? This is the setup of the Gedankenexperiment and since it is quite weird it is very understandable that many people would misunderstand it, especially since he is not very clear about that setup. I took it to mean that I’m supposed to interpret that sentence within the framework of US law but somehow without my understanding of constitutional law. That’s obviously impossible. It’s a nice rhetoric trick but certainly no argument. Differences in interpretation obviously matter but the example he picked is complete rubbish and certainly exaggerates the problem in a completely dishonest way.