Free Speech

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When I was young, free speech advocates were liberals — very liberal. At the time, conservatives wanted to ban explicit images, and liberals fought figures like Jerry Falwell, arguing it shouldn't be a crime to possess images of consenting adults. Liberals won that fight; the Woody Harrelson film "US v Penthouse" tells that story.

When neo-Nazis sought to march in Skokie, Illinois, liberals of that era despised what the Nazis stood for but defended their right to speak and march anyway. They won, and the march happened. Today's liberals, by contrast, would likely try to stop a similar march on the grounds that it gives offense.

Modern liberalism operates under a long list of unwritten rules that take precedence over every other consideration, including the First Amendment. Deviate from any of these rules and the response is swift: relentless criticism aimed at destroying your reputation and livelihood. Your explanations don't matter — to true believers, they're just excuses. That your own free expression is being abridged in the process doesn't matter either. Adherence to the code comes first.

Liberals praise free speech in glowing terms right up until someone, somewhere, is offended — even if only one person, even if the offense is minor enough to be called a "microaggression." In this worldview, microaggressions are treated as equivalent to actual aggression. They also invoke the slogan "silence is violence," but silence is simply silence; a catchy rhyme doesn't make a claim true. The phrase that helped acquit O.J. Simpson — "if the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit" — was similarly persuasive and similarly misleading: leather golf gloves run tight and stretch with wear, and photos exist of Simpson wearing that exact style on the golf course.

Today, when people want to silence comedians, there's usually no crime to charge them with, so the goal becomes permanent banishment instead — using social media pressure to enforce an unspoken rule that any criticism of the offended party is off-limits.

Here is the centrist position: let comedians say what they want on a comedy stage. If you don't like it, don't watch. If a performer crosses into incitement — falsely shouting "fire" in a crowded venue, or calling for violence against the president — that can be prosecuted. If it's simply a matter of taste, change the channel.

If hurt feelings become the standard, eventually nothing will be sayable. Someone will always be offended by even the simplest statement. Carried to its logical extreme, this logic would eventually criminalize talking about the weather, since it might upset disaster survivors or orphans — or saying "goodbye," since for someone it was the last word a loved one ever spoke before dying — or even "hello," since for someone else it was the greeting a killer used to gain a victim's trust. Pushed far enough, a feelings-based standard has no natural stopping point, and that's the problem: there is no principled line between "too offensive" and "fine," only an ever-expanding list of grievances.

The UK illustrates where this leads. In 2025, roughly 12,000 people were arrested there for speech-related offenses — more than in China and Russia combined. In one widely reported case, police met a comedian at the airport to arrest him over a joke. Even authoritarian states don't typically criminalize hurt feelings at this scale, yet a self-described free country does. And the arrests don't undo any offense taken — the insult still happened. What's left is punishment for its own sake, in service of a code that treats etiquette violations as crimes, with no defined endpoint and no mechanism for ever scaling back.

America, by contrast, has narrow and well-established limits on speech, not whatever the most easily offended person among 370 million Americans happens to feel. Those limits are: serious threats of violence or incitement to imminent lawless action, provable to a high standard; obscenity, narrowly construed; defamation (libel and slander), though heavily limited by legal defenses; fraud; speech that constitutes criminal conduct, such as planning a murder; and child abuse material.

Outside those categories, you can say what you want without fear of arrest — hurt feelings are not an exception, however righteous the objection feels. And there's no carve-out for "safe zones" in public life that filter out unwelcome ideas; that kind of curation belongs on private property, not in the public square.