“Obviously it is not desirable that a government department should have any power of censorship (except security censorship, which no one objects to in wartime) over books which are not officially sponsored.”
George Orwell, The Freedom of the Press, (written in 1944 but only published in 1972).
TLDR: Evaluating whether free speech constraints are justified or not requires the application of St. Augustine’s logic on just wars. This is because censorship, like war, is a grave interference with human freedom. It can be justified only if it meets strict criteria: proper authority, real danger, right intention, and proportional response. Otherwise, it risks becoming unjust coercion.
The key test to determine whether “just” criteria are being met rests on whether censorship is being introduced to defend an unjust or abnormal order from criticism, or to prevent/reverse the collapse of a just and peaceful order.
The arithmetic of the argument:
- Scenario 1 → Life is abnormal by government diktat, and dissent is silenced to preserve that abnormality → authoritarian drift.
- Scenario 2 → Life is normal, and speech is temporarily restricted to preserve normalcy and avoid collapse → stabilizing feedback loop.
In this piece, we explore whether the whataboutist frenzy over censorship in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination is creating a blind spot over when the usual rules should justly not apply.
It’s no secret that I orbit in the free speech community. I justify this based on the logic that, as a journalist who strives to hear out all perspectives, especially those that are underrepresented or that challenge groupthink, free speech rights are essential for me to be able to do my job. I am a member of Toby Young’s Free Speech Union. And I am networked with key names in this space.
It is an alignment that I have always justified on the basis that I don’t think it imposes on my ability to be objective. Indeed, whatever my personal feelings are at any given time (and they fluctuate a lot), I try to suppress any desire to publicly display my politics or “identity”-related allegiances, beyond those I cannot hide.
Whether that’s by avoiding posting flag emojis on my bio or adding She/Her to my bio. I see all these displays as non-neutral acts, too often inspired by knee-jerk reactionism, rather than strongly held convictions.
Critically, that means if I publicly defend someone like Liz Truss, it is not for party political reasons, but rather in the spirit of giving even those I don’t usually agree with a fair hearing if they have a point.
It is definitely not the same as a journalist turning up to report on a protest while simultaneously engaging in the protesting or counter-protesting very visibly. I think this is poor form.
But today, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the free speech community finds itself at a crossroads, burdened by the weight of its own contradictions. This is manifesting most acutely in some quarters in the perception that we can no longer “agree to disagree” as is usual practice in a liberal democracy.
It’s important to stress that while I’ve always been aligned with free speech values, I have never seen myself as an absolutist. I describe myself rather as a “free speech maximizer”. This means I agree that there should be some legal limitations, notably with respect to libel and incitement to violence. I also believe that while it is suboptimal for a society to police hate speech via acts of law, it is fair for societies to regulate hate speech via social stigma. Yet, I draw a line on the idea that people should be fired for expressing concern about legally protected human rights abuses that affect them directly.
Even then, however, many nuances need to be considered. Too often, there isn’t a blanket rule that can be applied to navigate the extremes, all the more so when societies are highly polarized. In practice, the whole concept of free speech — especially at the fringes — is riddled with moral and ethical complexity. This is why we’ve come to depend on the fuzzy and adaptable boundaries of an Overton window to police the parameters of what “is or isn’t acceptable”.
Yet, today, that Overton window is on the verge of moving to a place where the celebration of violence and murder is beginning to be viewed as acceptable.
Such a shift changes the framing of free speech rights significantly: our peaceful norms are suddenly at stake.
While it will be hard for many to understand, a free speech Rubicon is being crossed, and on the other side is a state of exception that justifies a temporary suspension of our liberties. Simply put, if the externalities of free speech begin to threaten the peaceful norms of the vast majority of society, preemptive censorship can become justified.
Specifically, we’re at a point where public praise or glorification of atrocities could encourage replication, and with that, equally brutal reprisals, which draw their own reprisals until things escalate to the point of social breakdown, or worse, civil war — just as happened in Ukraine.
How the debate is unfolding
On one side stand the maximalists, who insist that any curtailment of speech, even in the face of rising tensions, risks eroding the foundational principles of open discourse that define liberal societies.
They argue that invoking “hate speech” as a category for restriction is a slippery slope, often weaponized by those in power to silence dissent, much like the censors who once targeted rationalists for challenging prevailing norms.
Legitimate concerns here include the subjectivity of definitions. Hate speech, as one perspective in the debate notes, can devolve into merely “speech that someone hates because of hurty words,” echoing historical lessons from figures like Galileo, where offensive ideas were necessary to uncover truth. These voices warn that broadening restrictions could stifle the discovery of better ideas, asserting that in an ideological war, the best antidote is to let all voices compete so that superior ones prevail.
On the other side are those with a more moderate mindset, acknowledging that free speech, while vital, carries vulnerabilities that can be exploited in times of crisis, particularly when amplified by modern tools like algorithms and social media. This is all the more the case when they are tied to the dark arts of psychological manipulation, also known as psyops.
These critics point to real-world precedents, such as the role of repetitive hateful propaganda in escalating conflicts into atrocities, drawing parallels to historical events where mass messaging via radio incited widespread violence. The Rwandan genocide is a key example.
Here, the concerns are equally valid: unchecked repetition of divisive content can lead to mass formation psychosis, disconnecting people from reality and provoking real-world confrontations, as seen in cases where propaganda techniques — once reserved by democracies for foreign influence operations against authoritarians — may have been turned inwards by political factions.
The blowback problem
But there’s more to it than just that. The moderate position now hangs on whether the repeal of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act in 2012 proved a critical turning point in the demise of healthy free speech norms and the potential trigger for the wider spread culture wars. And if so, whether its reintroduction — as is currently being floated by the Trump administration — is an abuse of power or not.
Up until its repeal in 2012, the Act protected domestic U.S. populations from exposure to materials created by the U.S. State Department but intended for foreign audiences. It did so with little public awareness of the Act’s existence at all.
Oftentimes, such materials were consciously designed to be manipulative or even deceptive, for the purpose of achieving State Department objectives abroad, especially in theaters of war.
The logic for loosening the Act in 2012 seemed straightforward. The internet was making it impossible to compartmentalize U.S. government-produced content offshore.
Not only was the content already penetrating domestic markets — notably through diaspora communities — it was getting entangled with domestic news in subtle and confusing ways. It made sense for selective domestic audiences to understand which messages had originated from the U.S. State Department, and which had not.
At the same time, foreign propaganda was flowing through unimpeded, even as official counterpropaganda (aka counter-active measures) remained banned.
Others argued the Act was preventing agencies or government bodies from sharing such materials with U.S. citizens, journalists, scholars, or even Congress itself — all of whom they said had a right to study and scrutinize how U.S. foreign broadcasts operated.
By 2012, the Obama administration determined that U.S. media outfits that specialized in bombarding foreign autocracies with social justice-related messaging, such as Voice of America, should be free to disseminate their materials within the United States too. [FYI, did you know the director of VOA between 1986-1991 happened to be Tucker Carlson’s dad?]
Unsurprisingly, the proposal triggered much debate among those who saw the repeal of the Act as opening the door to “government propaganda” inside the U.S., and a pathway towards partisan hijacking of the information space.
These critics argued that guardrails should be maintained to avoid potential abuse, especially by partisan interests. To appease their concerns, a provision was introduced that banned U.S.-funded content from being actively pushed to the U.S. public. All such information had to be requested.
What legislators failed to foresee is that such provisions would do little to thwart so-called amplification and recommendation algorithms from pushing the content to unaware U.S. citizens regardless.
Vigilance was low because such tools had proven themselves remarkably effective at achieving U.S. foreign policy goals abroad, notably in the spontaneous uprisings of the Arab Spring from 2010-2012. Nobody appreciated that the tools could also be turned inwards on America itself, inadvertently amplifying messaging intended for repressed people abroad, not at home.
The outcome was a deluge of misleading and often contradictory information, and the blurring of the lines between fact and fiction — all the more so as the techniques were replicated by private sector digital marketing agencies selling stuff and criminal organizations pushing scams. The resulting news pollution began to confuse everyone. Including elites.
Philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger picked up on the situation early. He described the state of affairs as a War on Sensemaking, noting the information environment had become so distorted by clickbait, propaganda, polarization, and profit-driven media that it had become almost impossible to know what was true or important.
As sense-making collapsed, the psychic tension arising from the growing state of cognitive dissonance began to seek out remedies. Those most conflicted found themselves soothing that tension by adopting a “pick your own truth” framework and withdrawing from shared reality.
An even larger number of the ‘permanently online’ resorted to limiting themselves to the comfort of self-affirming echo chambers. Since these weeded out corrective or critical feedback, the result drove people further apart, while normalizing ever stranger ideas.
At the same time, the language of war and “resistance” began to percolate the internet and the minds of the most marginalized. Those daring to criticize the norms or politics of internet communities that indulged in grievance culture went from being considered the opposition to simply “the enemy”. Sympathizing communities became “allies”. Normies perplexed by changing attitudes and the breakdown of norms were accused of displaying “microaggressions” and “toxic attitudes”. Attempts to bring in alternative perspectives were deemed “existential threats to one’s identity”. Those hostile to people’s “lived experience” required “reeducation”. And, of course, “safe spaces” were called upon to protect the marginal from having to engage with those who might otherwise challenge their world views.
Even if the source of the internal conflict was ultimately the U.S. State Department’s own propaganda being repackaged and pushed upon its own people, there was no legal way to break the cycle without appearing to be censorious. Those who benefited from the chaos, notably hostile governments, radical political factions, criminal networks, or even those who had succumbed to the messaging and radically changed their world views, could maintain: “This wasn’t propagation by government, but by private platforms of ideas that suited them.”
The irony is that for decades, hostile authoritarian regimes had tried to penetrate the American psyche to woo it away from the core principles of liberty and freedom. Yet such efforts had been easily thwarted by the protective spells cast upon the American people by the feel-good magic of Hollywood studios, the Magic Kingdom, and, of course, Tom Cruise.
Now, America’s enemies were being handed all the rope they needed to hang not just America but the entire West itself via the very propaganda tools and algorithms the West itself had perfected. All they needed to destabilize the system was to refract the mind-control voodoo emanating from the State Department back at the West.
The cognitive security argument
And so it is that the free speech community now finds itself at an awkward juncture.
On one hand, there are those who believe any compromise is a compromise too much because if the rules applied when Biden was in charge, they should also apply to Trump.
On the other hand, some recognize that the restitution of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act is essential if the West is to be shielded from the disturbing consequences of our own disinformation coming back at us, and to settle once and for all what was or was not fake news all along.
Others go a step further.
They see the current moment as akin to wartime, where ideological battles are mirroring the destabilization tactics outlined in frameworks like Bezmenov’s demoralization-destabilization-crisis-normalization sequence. Such circumstances, they argue, justify societies temporarily suspending free speech freedoms to fend off collapse or foreign attack. Despite the optics, this is not an unreasonable position. As our opening quote highlights, even George Orwell accepted limitations at such times, albeit on the condition that the government was transparent with the public about the censorship in question.
While all sides raise justified alarms, the problem is that time is of the essence.
A protracted debate about the reasonable middle ground would be nice to have, but it is far from expedient. Tensions are escalating quickly. Rather than helping, extended discourse risks fracturing society into a vicious cycle of whataboutism, where each accuses the other of the same tactics they once decried, and none is any wiser about the false equivalence at hand.
Hence, uncharacteristically, I’m begrudgingly coming to believe that erring on the side of caution at such times is justified, both with respect to censoring incendiary hate speech to prevent future terrorist acts or moving the national guard in preemptively to put off violent uprisings.
Most notably, I’m coming to believe that the biggest blind spot of all is the presumption that both sides are equivalent when they’re not.
The difference might at first seem marginal in its variance. But remember, even a small miscalculation can make the difference between reaching your destination and not when charting trajectories over long distances. Once you see the variance and understand it, you begin to appreciate the horror it is capable of, if and when it is amplified on the wrong side.
You might push back that such logic would have justified the censorship of the Solidarity movement in 1980s Poland and even the imposition of martial law to quell chaos in 1981? We think not. The prevailing order that the regime was striving to protect then was not normal at all: even the working people of the country, who had usually defended communism, began to realize the socialist system wasn’t working for them at all.
The Kimmel test
To explain the difference, it’s worth looking more closely at the fallout over Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation this week.
On Wednesday, the late-night host was suspended indefinitely after remarks he made about Donald Trump’s response to the killing of Charlie Kirk.
In his monologue, Kimmel mocked Trump for focusing on White House renovations instead of grieving, likening his behavior to a child mourning a goldfish. While such satire was hardly out of step with the tone of late-night comedy, affiliates and ABC executives judged that the comments were insensitive and inflammatory. As a result, Jimmy Kimmel Live! was pulled from many markets, his slot replaced by syndicated programming, with no announced plan for his return.
Critics were quick to highlight the hypocrisy of right-wingers in calling for this action, arguing they were now guilty of the same overreach they themselves had protested against over Covid.
But here’s why they’re wrong. One must first distinguish between two different “states of exception.” During Covid, governments imposed lockdowns and vaccine mandates that curtailed protected rights such as freedom of movement and bodily autonomy. At the same time, voices critical of these measures were censored. In that scenario, free speech acted as an essential safeguard to test whether extraordinary state actions that suppressed broader human rights were justified. Suppressing that speech risked sliding into outright authoritarianism.
The present moment is different. Ordinary life is largely unaffected, and no sweeping mandates restrict daily freedoms. Instead, it is speech itself that stands at the center of the controversy. The worry is not that dissent might expose abuses of power, but rather that inflammatory rhetoric could act as tinder in an already volatile environment. Words, amplified by media and digital platforms, can function like psychological accelerants, radicalizing audiences, fueling rage, and heightening the risk of political violence. In this sense, unrestrained speech becomes not merely a matter of individual expression but a collective danger, capable of destabilizing the very framework of rights it ordinarily protects.
Thus, the contrast is stark. During Covid, censorship shielded state overreach and weakened democracy. In the current scenario, advocates of restraint argue that a narrowly tailored suspension of extreme or mocking speech may be the only way to preserve stability and prevent escalation into civil conflict. One silenced criticism to protect an authoritarian diktat; the other a temporary silence to protect social peace.
A further variance is that under Covid, censorship was enacted by authorities in an opaque and surreptitious way. That meant it was purposefully manipulative. It strove to mess with people’s minds on purpose.
The Trump administration’s censorship and extraordinary action, on the other hand, is being done in plain sight, transparently. It is seen as unfortunate but necessary.
Will the above logic prevent hypocrisy charges? I doubt it. The left will undoubtedly continue to argue that since their “hate speech” bans were seen as censorship, so should those of the Trump administration. They will also reject the logic of the state of exception on the basis that they believe the current order does not deserve to exist.
This, however, is an ideological standpoint that cannot coexist peacefully with fellow Americans who believe the order should be maintained. To avoid war, one belief will inevitably have to submit to the other, and the history books will have to trend towards one single cohesive narrative.
What is still unknown is which order will give in to which, and whether it will do so as a result of turning to armed conflict or through the superior logic of its arguments. What’s clear is that if those who reject the current order are truly oppressed, they will not give up their convictions just because hate speech has been temporarilly suppressed. If the order is as flawed as they claim, their movements will only swell over time. On the other hand, if their current convictions are merely a flash in the pan, or a mania brought on by a sudden onslaught of repetitive messaging that has disrupted their cognitive security, they will peter out.
This is evident in what has been happening among those whose criticism of illegal immigration has been suppressed for over a decade. Their grievances have proven longstanding. Indeed, the movement has only grown.
But the key point is that it doesn’t matter what side you are currently on. All — apart from those who want to impart pain and suffering on the world — stand to benefit from the suppression of violence and a call to come back to the negotiating table.
None of this implies that a surge of public opinion against adopting the norms of a persistent cultural minority should ever legitimize persecution of that minority. Failure to persuade the majority does not strip a community of its right to protection — especially when its practices impose no real harm on others. Indeed, the very test of a just order lies in its ability to safeguard those who live differently, even when their way of life does not prevail.
No longer agree to disagree
The current schism facing the West thus underscores the deep vulnerability at hand in liberal democracies: our commitment to free speech is a potential weakness in war, especially an ideological one where enemies don’t wear uniforms and battles unfold online.
Societies at peace can afford absolute expression, but in conflict — whether geographic or cultural — unfettered speech can be weaponized to sow chaos, as propaganda tools once barred from domestic use now proliferate.
The community’s struggle reflects this reality, with some refusing to accept limits even as evidence mounts that repetition and amplification can induce Rwanda-like effects, turning ideological spats into ethnic or cultural genocides. Here, the argument tilts toward recognizing that free speech, noble as it is, demands pragmatic boundaries to survive asymmetric threats, much like how capitalist systems suspend norms during existential crises.
Freedom to self-harm?
At its core, the issue isn’t just about violence but a modern twist on self-harm, where woke free speech mantras insist not only on protections from harm being inflicted upon minorities, or incitement to such harms, but more insidiously, on the right to harm oneself in the name of individual autonomy, but also to prevent others’ from trying to spare you from that harm.
This is a phenomenon constitutionalists likely never anticipated.
The new woke logic adds a new dimension to the classic positive versus negative liberty debate introduced by thinkers like Isaiah Berlin. Traditionally, negative liberty guards against external interference, while positive liberty enables self-realization.
In the contemporary era, however, certain strands of woke ideology can be seen as pushing both forms of liberty to the point they transform into illiberal extremes, in ways Berlin himself warned could become destructive.
On the one hand, negative liberty is recast as an absolute right to reject external limits, even when exercising that right causes harm to oneself or to dependents. On the other hand, positive liberty is radicalized into a claim that a minority, believing it knows what is best for society, may justly curtail the freedoms of the majority — whether in the name of lockdowns, climate policy, or other social causes — and shut itself off from different perspectives.
In both cases, liberty is not abandoned but inflated to a point where it undermines the social fabric: freedom becomes a justification for harm, either inwardly directed or outwardly imposed. This is precisely the danger Berlin identified — the tendency of liberty, when pushed to extremes, to turn against itself.
Recognizing where freedoms cross into negative-sum outcomes also helps clarify the proper boundaries of free speech. Censorship is not justified when speech challenges or critiques illiberal versions of liberty, whether negative or positive. But censorship does become justified when speech is used to ignite, promote, or normalize such distorted liberties, since doing so accelerates the very dynamic by which liberty erodes the conditions of its own survival.
At this point, we either accept that our darker impulses must be checked if we are to avoid destruction, or we indulge them under the illusion that unfettered freedom is sustainable — no matter the externalities — and stand to lose it all.
This is the crossroads society now stands at.
