We must defend all speech

... even that which we abhor. From the Post via The Hill this morning:

Opinion
Matt Bai

Why does defending awful speech matter? Now you know.
Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension shows how one person’s dissent is another person’s “hate speech.”

September 18, 2025

A lot of us across the political spectrum, I would guess, woke up Thursday morning in a country we didn’t quite recognize, as if reality had shifted literally overnight. At the start of the week, the attorney general of the United States proclaimed that certain “hate speech” — meaning things she found offensive — would no longer be protected by the First Amendment. Then, two days later, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission bullied Disney into suspending comedian Jimmy Kimmel and pulling him off the air, which the president hailed as “great news for America.”

I wonder how many conservative thinkers, some of whom clearly feel uneasy about this turn of events, will find the spine to denounce it. Former vice president Mike Pence was spotted Wednesday visiting the National Archives, where the entire Constitution is on display for the first time; maybe he, too, had the eerie sense that it was sitting in a casket, lying in state.

To my horrified friends on the left, though, I feel compelled to ask a different question. Now do you understand why all speech is worth defending?

Like some conservative writers and a handful of hardy liberals, I’ve written repeatedly over the past several years about the threat to free expression from the left. Since 2020, we’ve seen White journalists and academics punished just for repeating words that qualified as “hate speech”; the issuance of inoffensive language manuals by groups such as the American Medical Association and the Sierra Club; and the removal of books from library shelves and bookstores because they trafficked in uncomfortable stereotypes, or because the authors were said to be bad people.

Most often, whenever I’ve lent my voice to the chorus of others criticizing this madness, I’ve heard from my overeducated friends some version of the same lawyerly response: The First Amendment, they told me, applies to government intervention — not to the private decisions of universities or book publishers. If the people who run news organizations or who own the rights to “Green Eggs and Ham” want to do the right thing and spare us all from hurtful language and images (and spare themselves from employee walkouts and online mobs), why shouldn’t they be encouraged to exercise that freedom of choice? Wasn’t that just the market speaking?

No one was forcing W.W. Norton to un-publish a biography of Philip Roth just because someone publicly accused the author of sexual assault (and because the subject of the book was known in literary circles as a misogynist). No, the publisher, having been made aware of these allegations, was simply acting in good conscience. What did any of that have to do with repression?

Separately, I’ve often encountered another argument that’s particularly popular among the young and the academic: that free speech as a concept has been fetishized by the powerful, who use it mostly as a tool to oppress those with less resonant voices in society. Why was my right to say whatever popped into my head, they asked me, more sacred than someone else’s right to feel safe and included?

Well, to paraphrase one of my favorite lines from “Hamilton”: If you don’t know, now you know. Protecting speech from outside forces that would quash it — even when the speech is stupid and heinous, and even when the censorship is lawful — matters because the quashing never ends there.

One person’s dissent is another person’s “hate speech.” And once you start prescribing limits on language and ideology, then anyone with power is free to do the same — including, inevitably, ignorant people who find themselves in control of government.

Ironically, this was the view espoused by Vice President JD Vance when he lectured the Germans earlier this year about the folly of banning far-right groups — neo-Nazis, essentially — from their political process. But now that Vance’s friend has been savagely killed (as opposed to, say, millions of Jews), I guess he no longer views “hate speech” as legitimate discourse. I guess the Germans should tolerate offensive views, but here in America, we’re going to demand they be silenced and prosecute speakers if necessary.

What we need in this country is a rebirth of actual liberalism. I don’t mean that in the sense of the political label that Democrats have been running away from since the late 1980s. I mean it in the sense of the liberal consensus, as it was called, that both Republicans and Democrats of sound mind embraced for most of the 20th century. I mean it in the sense that the ACLU meant it, back in its glory days, when it fought to allow Nazis to march through the streets of Skokie, Illinois.

That kind of liberalism, at its core, is about fiercely defending our constitutional freedoms and a free exchange of ideas — no matter their merit or whom they might offend. There’s been very little of that liberalism among the intolerant left these past few years. And now we have its opposite in the Trumpian world, where the genre of “hate speech” created by the academic left is being used as a pretext for statist censorship.

If we choose not to protect some expression, then we really can’t protect any of it.

There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.
– John Green, author

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