Free Speech Absolution is a Must.

Highlighting the state of censorship on multiple fronts.

If speaking freely costs you, the speech is not free. Freedom of speech by definition means freedom from consequence. The left’s major talking point to justify cancel culture is to claim it is “accountability culture” instead. They claim you have the right to say what you want, but everyone else has the right to ruin your livelihood and potentially harm you over it. Our opposition’s mind-numbing moral grandstanding determines what kind of speech is truthful and what needs to be dealt with. 

Evelyn Beatrice Hall crafted the famous phrase, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” We live in the polar opposite of this ideology, but a closer look would reveal the United States has never truly had freedom of speech to begin with. Federalists used the Sedition Act of 1798 to arrest private citizens for dissent, and political messages from abolition to anti-draft advocacy were criminalized in different locales throughout the next century and a half.

I am sympathetic to those on the right who would enact anti-blasphemy or anti-communist laws if given the chance, but realistically we are much closer to having Christianity be outlawed. Free speech absolution is the only outcome we can seek to have a bulwark against our own speech being criminalized. The FBI is raiding peaceful anti-abortion protesters, and children in Wisconsin have already been accused of sexual harassment by their public school district for the crime of not using preferred pronouns.

I want to say that we are in a better place today legally-speaking, yet the powerful corporations of our time did not exist at the founding. If the heads of said companies are told by the government that you need to be silenced, there is no law protecting you from having a voice. There is no difference in corporate censorship to government censorship. 

The average conservative should not have to fear losing his or her job because someone might be offended by their tweets or religious beliefs. Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, should be able to express what happened to him and his family how he pleases without losing his fortune. The targeting and banning of prominent accounts to influence elections is just the tip of the iceberg. Our culture is being worn down over time, our old fashioned American values lost. We cannot let the first amendment, even if it is just an idea to strive for, be a part of that vanishing.

We also cannot realistically expect every gigantic corporation to be bought out by someone who is at least sympathetic to our cause. Thankfully there are other ways to allow for free speech to be protected from the government, corporations, and raging mobs of the day. The most obvious sentiment is to declare the internet to be the modern equivalent of the town square. We would have to solidify through precedence that the rights of the corporations do not supersede the rights of the individual. 

We recently updated the Civil Rights Act to include gender expression, and there is no reason we can’t update it again to include political affiliation. The left consistently reminds us that how you are born is not equal to your beliefs, but there is no other way to protect Trump supporters, or even just republicans in general, from the animalistic left today. This would ideally protect our jobs and prevent the bureaucratic agencies from swarming people with our values. The only way to fight the systemic side of the equation is to wield potential lawsuits that they cannot risk losing. This applies to the government, corporations, and individuals on a power trip.

The fact of the matter is that we allowed ourselves to permanently play societal defense, and it will take real legislative accomplishments to bring us back to the even playing field. That even playing field will not be enough either, as we need to actually win if we want to save our home. That win could come in many different forms, but we must take advantage of the fact that the forces of good and evil are still restricted to the laws of our governing body for the time being. We have the House of Representatives to stall Biden’s further corruption, but 2024 will be the Hail Mary play to get us back to a functioning country.