We're in a Free Speech Golden Age

One of the grievances I’m perennially confused by are right-wing concerns about free speech suppression. I recently had an extensive 2.5 hour discussion with Hunter Ash, someone who is voting for Trump explicitly because he believes Kamala Harris (and the Dems in general) present a particularly pernicious threat to freedom of expression, while a second Trump presidency promises to safeguard it.

I was, and remain, extremely confused by this position. One of the judgment calls I had to make was to decide how deep into basic fundamentals Ash & I needed to get into. So I started the discussion with “what is free speech and why is it good?” and at the time, I thought we had enough of a shared understanding, but it became obvious throughout I was mistaken and had not gone deep enough into fundamentals. I want to remedy that in this post.

My affirmative belief is actually that we live in a historically unprecedented golden age of free expression, and I wouldn’t expect Kamala Harris to have a meaningful impact (positive or negative), at least not any different from your baseline normie politician. I also believe that it’s beyond dispute that Trump presents a unique danger to free speech, and the only way anyone can disagree would be if they have a vastly different definition of free expression than I do. So let’s start there.

When I say free speech, I’m referring to the overall capacity of an average individual to transmit and receive ideas. This framework encompasses all potential barriers to expression, whether they stem from governmental regulations, corporate policies, or societal norms of tolerance.

For example, had Galileo recanted heliocentrism because of his inability to find a willing publisher rather than under threat of physical torture, the outcome — in terms of free speech — is identical. The particular method of suppression, while potentially differing in moral implications, is irrelevant to this discussion. Same effect = same denunciation, regardless of how.

I’m a free speech maximalist for the same reasons that Ash nominally claims — a robust marketplace of ideas is the greatest mechanism humans have stumbled upon for unearthing Truth.¹ We need courage to speak up and challenge prevailing narratives, as well as the humility to listen to opposing viewpoints. Obviously this isn’t perfect; humans are prone to mass panics, hysterias, and sometimes we get things horrifically wrong. But despite these flaws, free and open discourse remains our best tool for correcting errors, dispelling myths, and advancing knowledge. The alternative — restricting the flow of ideas — is far more likely to entrench errors and stifle progress.

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The Law

Legally speaking, we’ve never had it better. I won’t be able to give this topic an encyclopedic dissection, so I’m going to rely on gross big picture generalities instead.

The First Amendment jurisprudence that we hold so darling today didn’t really burgeon until the late 1960s. One hundred years ago in the United States, you could literally be sent to prison for protesting against a war your own country is involved in and the Supreme Court would just nod along. Nowadays there just hasn’t been much appetite from the courts to roll back freedom of expression protections, and this is true on a relatively bipartisan basis. An illustrative example is a 7-2 decision in 2023 that split hairs over the exact mental state required for a true threat prosecution.

There is a notable aberration that I found most alarming, and it’s the narrow 5-4 decision in the 2010 Citizens United case. The only summary relevant here is that an organization wanted to screen a documentary critical of a politician, and the government literally prohibited them from doing so because it was within 60 days of an election. The feds didn’t do themselves any favor during oral argument when they bit the bullet and admitted they also had the authority to ban political books if they were published too close to an election. This was and remains one of the most brazen and unconscionable attempts by the government to stifle free expression, and it was particularly dispiriting for me seeing how many liberals supported this silencing at the time (maybe worth noting that the politician being criticized by the documentary was Hilary Clinton).

SCOTUS ruled correctly and struck down this prohibition, and the reaction was apoplectic. Keith Olbermann compared the decision to motherfucking Dred Scott, and there was no shortage of histrionic predictions about how big pocket donors (read: Republican donors) will irredeemably corrupt our elections by outright buying politicians. And then…people generally forgot about it, in large part because Obama proved that it wasn’t only Republicans that could raise fucktons of money, and that’s even starker this year with Kamala Harris raising $1.58 billion compared to Trump’s paltry $1 billion. [Edit:

(Not That) Bill O'Reilly

helpfully pointed out in the comments that a reference to overturning Citizens United is still part of the Democratic party platform]

The First Amendment is indeed a unique American artifact, but worldwide trends are similarly optimistic. It’s really easy to forget just how dire things used to be 100 years ago, considering that millions of people lived under totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, or the Empire of Japan. Muzzles were the absolute norm. Jumping forward 50 years ago, the clarity remains, even when you narrow your examination to just Western democracies. Until fairly recently, the UK used to have criminal libel laws, Ireland still had blasphemy laws, and France had a state monopoly on all television and radio stations until 1982. Yes, some backwards countries today will still execute you for mocking the king, or talking shit about Muhammad (PBUH), but they’re increasingly a regressive outlier rather than the norm.

Obviously there’s more to be done, but at this point we’re arguing about the rate of change rather than debating its direction.

The Trove

The law is good! But also, fuck the law because it’s becoming increasingly irrelevant thanks to technology.

Why would I claim that we’re living in a golden age of free expression? Sometimes I worry that whatever I’m about to say is way too obvious, because just look around you! Based on every conceivable metric, humanity has never before faced the intellectual bukkake we’re currently subjected to on a daily basis.

From a technological and economic standpoint, we’re at an apex that shows no signs of slowing down. Not that long ago, it required significant financial largesse or exclusive connections if you wanted your message to have any meaningful reach. The written word required crateloads of pulped fibers and indelible ink, and the assent of someone with the enormous capital to put it together into something legible. The bound finished product had to then be physically carted to a willing retailer or library, and then if you’re really lucky, an interested reader would find it among the stacks. Nowadays I can write a poem about my morning poop and virtually anyone on the entire planet could read it immediately, if they wanted to.

Radio and television broadcasting technology offered to bridge more gaps, but the limited number of spectrum frequencies was used as a justification by the State to dole out licenses and exercise control over the medium. Now, it’s an increasingly irrelevant medium.² The nominally independent movie studio system required far too much investment not to have cautious gatekeepers at the helm, but now I can watch or create any movie, any documentary, and any random mosquito control district meeting, instantly. There’s about 500 hours of video content uploaded on YouTube every minute.

Forget the slop and consider only the serious intellectual oeuvre. Copyright law indeed remains a barrier³ but Sci-Hub offers a trivial workaround which lets you download PDFs until they’re leaking out of your eyes. Even profit conscious universities express no aversion to blasting out thousands of hours of class lecture videos to the world, for free.

Just pause for a moment and regale yourself of what humanity has accomplished here. You could be living in the Ngong hills of Kenya and — so long as you had one bar of signal sometime within recent memory — could maintain immediate access to a trove that is practically indistinguishable from Borges’ mythical library. The imaginative is real, and has been for a while now.

Government censorship efforts are increasingly helpless wrangling with ubiquitous VPN access. Everyone’s favorite Canadian dissident Kulak had a detailed guide called The Anarchonomicon REAL Banned Book List that highlighted…a bunch of edgelord books that you could either trivially download or, at worst, might be inconvenient to track down a physical copy. The few legal regimes today like China who are still committed to speech suppression have had to dramatically step-up their efforts, to a monumental degree.

But for the vast majority of humans the overwhelming problem is, more than anything else, one of debilitating bounty.

The Culture

The culture of tolerance plays a crucial role in shaping free speech, though it’s much harder to pin down. Culture is elusive to quantify and also heavily overlaps with legal frameworks and technological advancements. Jailing anti-war protestors may be a legal decision, but it’s only possible if the broader culture around expression tolerates the “except if war” carveout. Similarly, now that anyone with access to a keyboard can shout into the void, concerns about suppression extend far beyond those with government-issued press credentials.

The analysis that best makes sense here is to consider subjects generally disfavored by The Establishment™️ and then consider to what extent their discussion is meaningfully hampered. One of the problems though is that it’s often difficult to distinguish suppression from unpopularity. Social media algorithms and information bubbles tie into this, but that subject is way beyond the scope of this essay and will need to be addressed in a separate post. For now, I’ll only consider the extent one can actively access what they’re looking for, rather than what they’ll passively encounter logging into Facebook.

Nazi propaganda is definitely disfavored. The neo-Nazi forum Stormfront has weathered various legal takedowns (from French and German authorities) along with a perennial public pressure campaign for its service providers to drop it as a client, but it’s still online. If you’re more an OG Nazi, you can still buy Mein Kampf off Amazon with 1-Click™️ right now. I don’t know what metric you’d use to argue that Nazi discourse is unduly impeded.

Vaccine skepticism is also disfavored, and yet Alex Berenson makes literally millions of dollars a year off of his Substack audience catering to an unquenchable thirst for misleading anti-vax arguments.⁴ If anyone is interested in writing about how terrible the covid vaccine is, they demonstrably have the infrastructure to not only broadcast their message but also make it a lucrative vocation. By the same token, anyone interested in reading about it has absolutely no shortage of options. Once again, I don’t know by what metric we’d use to argue this topic is suppressed from the standpoint of bandwidth.

One disfavored topic I readily concede is a problem is race & IQ. There is indeed a cultural taboo, particularly within academic circles, against discussing the heritability of intelligence [Edit: This was an incomplete assessment on my end. It might be true that the subject is taboo among social circles, but there’s no shortage of publishers and researchers quietly acknowledging reality without incident. See this comment from

Sasha Gusev

]. Not only does this needlessly hold back our understanding of biology, but the institutional aversion also clears the field for bona fide racists in search of a pretextual justification for their aesthetic bigotry. I agree this is a bad state of affairs, but shifting the culture isn’t a trivial task. It requires influence, credibility, and charisma. For these reasons, I would have far more hope with progressive geneticists like Kathryn Paige Harden at the helm of a shift than a presidency staffed by the dregs of 4chan.

Notching up on the ethereal, I can stipulate that the Great Awokening has had a terribly regressive impact on the free exchange of ideas. Unequivocally bad. But the good news is that the fever is showing signs of breaking already.

Musa al-Gharbi

has examined the trends and found “social justice” lingo has peaked around 2020 and 2021, and has been decreasing since. This is all hard to measure conclusively, but the best available evidence indicates that Woke intolerance is a receding episode.

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What Now?

It’s easy to get myopically fixated on trivialities and lose track of the bigger picture. The position humanity finds itself in today is historically unprecedented. We’ve never ever had it better legally or technologically or even culturally. Cultural tolerance has largely tracked towards a positive arc, despite some regrettable fits and starts in recent memory. If I could do the conversation with Ash again, this is the backdrop I would first start with, before diving into any specific controversies.

The very rough paraphrase of my 2.5 hour conversation with Ash would be:

Yassine: Here’s Trump saying that he’ll literally use the government to punish speech that’s critical of him.

Hunter: That’s not a big deal, broadcasting media isn’t as relevant nowadays, maybe he was joking, also he might not be able to get it done anyways. But here’s a 23 second clip of Hilary Clinton ominously saying she wants to “regulate social media”. And no, I can’t be more specific about what that means exactly despite how many years she’s been in political power.

As many hours as I’ve devoted to understanding Ash’s perspective, I can’t model it accurately unless it’s based on vibes rather than evidence. It’s true that conservatives nowadays are nominally much more explicit about claiming to be in favor of free speech, regardless of how it works out in practice. I hadn’t realized how prevalent this “vibe-cluster” argument was until I saw it explicitly embraced by Tech-Right bro Jason Calacanis during an interview by Tim Miller when they were discussing economic policy:

Tim Miller: We both agree that the deficit is a big problem that neither party is taking seriously. But we both agree that the entrepreneurship, capitalism, the economy during the Biden-Harris Administration has been basically fine.

Jason Calacanis: Been great.

Tim Miller: —and that the policies that they have put in place, have like maybe goosed inflation a little too much at the beginning?

Jason Calacanis: Big time.

Tim Miller: But besides that it's hard to come up with specific policies that are attacks on, you know, entrepreneurs.

Jason Calacanis: Um yeah it’s more The Vibes. People feel, you know, that they are not — if people donate a bunch of money to your party and then you spend a decade criticizing them, don’t be surprised if they flip.

Tim Miller: So their feelings are hurt. Chamath’s and Elon’s feelings are hurt is what you’re saying?

Jason Calacanis: I don’t speak for them. I'm just telling you how entrepreneurs feel writ-large.

Jaw-dropping transparency! It should go without saying that I care about real-life results much more than rhetoric.

I care about free speech, which is why I want Donald Trump to lose and be unseated from his cult leadership throne. He’s a legal threat because he directly, explicitly, and unabashedly threatens to use the government to punish speech he doesn’t like. He’s a technological threat in part just by being wildly unstable and in the midst of advancing dementia, but also because he has morphed the conservative movement into one that has forgotten how to build effective institutions. And he’s a cultural threat because he’s easily triggered into hysterics unless everyone around him constantly flatters and soothes him with delusional lies.

I have no affirmative case for Kamala Harris as a bulwark against suppression except to point to her long barren legislative record within this field, but also because I’ve outlined why I don’t think free speech is in particular jeopardy. I like Harris for the same reason I liked Biden in 2020 — they’re both boring normie politicians who will probably be “fine”, especially when compared to the unhinged alternative.

1. I also herald antagonistic debate in extremely high regard, and therefore hold an intense revulsion against anyone who responds to criticism with silencing. But that’s more of a principles argument and therefore outside the scope.

2. To be clear, we should’ve listened to Ronald Coase and privatized the spectrum a long time ago.

3. In fact I think one of the most oppressive current muzzles is copyright law, but my essay on abolishing intellectual property will have to wait another day.

4. As Scott Alexander said, one Berenson already churns out more anti-vax arguments than most people can ever possibly read, and yet Berenson’s constantly complaining about how censored he is.