Free Speech Is the American Exception—but That Doesn't Mean We're Safe
America turns 250 years old this July.
That number is easy to say and hard to feel. Two and a half centuries. A country old enough to have a “founding” you can treat like distant mythology, but young enough that our founding principles are still alive and well in our political rhetoric, if sometimes lacking in practice.
Right now, those principles are being tested on the global stage.
People sometimes say America doesn’t have a single culture. We’re too big, too diverse, too loud, too fractured. But if there’s one trait that keeps resurfacing across regions and backgrounds, it’s this: Americans don’t like being told to shut up.
That’s not always graceful. It’s often obnoxious. But it’s also one of the rarest civic assets on earth. Whether we want to admit it or not, the rights we’ve come to think of as basic—especially freedom of speech—are increasingly becoming an American exception. They are not universal, they are not guaranteed, and across much of the West, they are being eroded into something far weaker: speech as a conditional privilege, constrained by the woke understanding of “hate,” “trauma,” and “harm.”
If you want a preview of that future, you don’t need to watch the latest dystopian film. You can watch ordinary interactions between citizens and police in the United Kingdom.
A street preacher stands in public, speaking about his faith. The police approach. Not because he threatened anyone, blocked traffic, or incited violence. The reason is both comically absurd and chilling: someone called in and said they felt uncomfortable.
In that framework, speech itself becomes a kind of ambient hazard, and the role of the state is to reduce hazards. Once “harm” is defined primarily by a bystander’s reported feelings, you’re no longer living under a stable rule of law. You’re living under the safe-space Stasi. The police are your state-prescribed mood stabilizer.
When it comes to speech acts, “harm” is nearly impossible to define. In practice, the working definition is usually just whatever undermines the left-wing narrative. The result is the kind of two-tiered speech enforcement we now see routinely in the UK: certain forms of expression are policed aggressively, while other forms—often louder, more disruptive, and explicitly political—are ignored or celebrated.
The natural American reaction is “That’s their problem.”
We have the First Amendment. We have a stronger speech culture. We escaped this kind of thinking nearly 250 years ago. But the internet changed the way power travels.
What happens in Europe does not stay in Europe, because global platforms are now the primary infrastructure of speech. When European regulators impose rules on American companies, the effects ripple outward: moderation standards, data access requirements, and financial penalties reshape how speech functions for everyone.
This is how censorship spreads in the modern world. Not through military coup, foreign invasion, or constitutional amendment, but through regulatory leverage in the global marketplace.
The European Union’s Digital Services Act is a prime example. Framed as a transparency and safety measure, it creates powerful incentives for platforms to comply with government-approved definitions of “harmful” or “misleading” speech. When noncompliance carries the threat of massive fines or exclusion from European markets, companies adapt.
Once a platform adapts at scale, it becomes difficult to maintain a separate, speech-maximalist system for Americans.
Europe doesn’t need to repeal our First Amendment. It only needs to make American companies choose between free speech and market access.
The First Amendment Isn’t a Slogan
The First Amendment isn’t just a sentimental artifact of the American Revolution. It’s the foundation of our system of government, comprising five core rights:
Freedom of religion
Freedom of speech
Freedom of the press
Freedom of assembly
The right to petition the government for redress of grievances
These rights reinforce one another, creating a 360º shield for individual liberty that’s stronger than the sum of its parts.
Freedom of religion is not merely the right to worship privately. It’s a protection against the state deciding which beliefs are legitimate. Governments, left to their own devices, would happily promote compliant religions and suppress rebellious “heresy.”
Freedom of speech does not include an exception for “hate speech,” the forbidden heresy of our time. The American principle only allows narrow exceptions, such as direct incitement to imminent violence. The legal category of “hate speech” is so corrosive because it presumes to read minds on both ends—the intent of the speaker, and the “harm” sustained by the listener. And, again, it’s always enforced selectively. Speech is “hateful” when the powerful dislike it—and righteous when they don’t.
Freedom of the press matters not because journalists are special, but because speech is meaningless without distribution. The founders understood that controlling printing presses was equivalent to controlling thought. Today, the new printing press is our digital infrastructure: platforms, networks, web hosting, search, and payments. If those mechanisms can be controlled or constrained, then “free speech” collapses into the freedom to mutter in isolation.
Freedom of assembly puts speech into action. Twitter mobs are one thing, but real-world gatherings get things done. Finally, the right to petition the government is the political endpoint of everything that precedes it: there must be an avenue for citizens to effectively use their rights to demand meaningful change.
But none of that works unless the earlier freedoms are intact. You cannot petition if your beliefs are forbidden, your speech is policed, your distribution is throttled, or your gatherings are shut down.
This is why the First Amendment is foundational. It’s the operating system for consent of the governed.
The Elites’ Obsession With Control
The urge to control the flow information isn’t new. It resurfaces whenever elites lose confidence in the public’s capacity to reason.
In the early twentieth century, rapid industrialization produced social upheaval and convinced a new class of technocratic planners that modern society was too complex for ordinary citizens to govern themselves.
Woodrow Wilson embodied this worldview. Long before his presidency, he argued that constitutional limits and legislative friction were obstacles to efficient administration. In his vision, governance should be handled by trained experts, insulated from public pressure.
Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion gave this impulse intellectual cover. He argued that the public was too fragmented and psychologically fragile to understand reality directly, and therefore required guidance from elites who could shape acceptable narratives.
Edward Bernays operationalized the idea, pioneering modern public relations and propaganda as tools for managing mass opinion—not through brute force, but through subtle influence.
Elites doubt the public’s capacity for self-governance, and so they take on an increasingly parental role. That mindset has survived, and thrived, to this day. It has spread into government bureaucracies, academic institutions, NGOs, and most recently, social media platforms that treat speech as something to be moderated for social stability.
Culture Matters More Than Law
The Constitution can restrain the government—to an extent. It cannot guarantee a culture that values liberty.
A society can preserve the First Amendment on paper while abandoning it in practice. Legal protections can be gradually eroded through loopholes, legal interpretation, and “emergency” measures that never disappear.
This is where education matters most.
The desire to speak freely comes naturally to most people, but so does the desire to restrict the speech of others. If you want citizens capable of sustaining liberty, you have to train them for it. That means cultivating resilience, agency, and the ability to debate.
A culture that treats ideas like pathogens will eventually demand quarantines. A culture that treats discomfort as trauma will demand censors. And a culture that trains children to report “harm” rather than navigate disagreement will raise adults incapable of self-government.
America’s best days are not guaranteed, but neither is decline inevitable. At its best, the American story is about refusing to accept inevitability. To only somewhat ironically quote Barack Obama, it’s about “Hope and Change.”
The real question as we settle into this 250th year is not whether we should feel optimistic or pessimistic. It’s this: Do we still believe ordinary citizens can handle freedom?
If we do, we’ll defend the First Amendment not just as law, but as our cultural inheritance. We’ll teach our kids to argue instead of report. To face discomfort instead of outsourcing it. To separate speech from violence and disagreement from danger.
I remain convinced that it’s still possible to raise a generation strong enough to resist the push for censorship. That work doesn’t start in Brussels or Washington. It starts in our homes, our schools, and our resolve that the right to speak is not a privilege.