Everyone Loves Free Speech (Until They Don’t)
The hypocrisy, the hysteria, and the house party from hell
What happens to a principle when it’s tested by tragedy? We’re about to find out.
Free speech isn’t just some abstract legal concept—it’s the reason you and I can call a politician a fool without ending up in jail. Why we can criticise policies and voice our opinion. It’s the oxygen of democracy. It fuels dissent, drives progress, and makes space for ideas that challenge the powerful. And right alongside it sits a free press, the so-called “Fourth Estate,” whose job is to keep leaders sweating under the lights. Put them together and you have the cornerstone and the keystone of self-governance: one the foundation of individual liberty, the other the apex that locks the entire structure of accountability into place.
But let’s not kid ourselves. “Free” speech has never meant “say literally anything you want.” Every democracy draws lines. You can’t shout “fire!” in a crowded theatre if there is no fire. You can’t libel someone without consequences. You can’t make true threats. The argument has never been whether to draw lines, but where.
Some countries, burned by history, draw them with a thick black marker. Germany, for example. After Auschwitz, there was no way the Germans were going to treat Nazi propaganda like just another opinion. Swastikas? “Sieg Heil”? Holocaust denial? All illegal. Germans decided that protecting human dignity mattered more than letting hate masquerade as free expression. Other nations scarred by history—France, Austria, Poland, Thailand—have made similar trade-offs. Their message is clear: free speech matters, but not at the expense of repeating national nightmares.
The US? That’s a whole different ballgame.
The First Amendment is a wild thing. It protects the speech you love, and—more importantly—the speech you absolutely despise. In 1977, U.S. courts even allowed Neo-Nazis to march through a town full of Holocaust survivors. Disgusting? Absolutely. Legal? You bet. The American logic is simple: sunlight is the best disinfectant. Let the bad ideas crawl into the light so we can tear them apart. Don’t shove them underground where they fester.
Charlie Kirk himself once summed it up: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America… there’s ugly speech, gross speech, evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.”
Which makes what happened next so bitterly ironic.
Because when you strip away the flag-waving, America’s love affair with free speech is deeply conditional. Everyone’s a First Amendment warrior until the words cut against them.
On the left, the instinct is to police speech in the name of “safety.” Remember 2020? The Hunter Biden laptop story gets buried by Twitter and Facebook, mainstream media looks away, and intelligence officials whisper “probably Russian disinfo.” It wasn’t. Whether you backed Biden or not, that looked a lot like censorship dressed up as caution.
On the right, the hypocrisy runs just as deep. They howl about cancel culture, but hand them the wheel and suddenly Trump is calling the press “the enemy of the people,” laughing at assaults on journalists, and promising to “open up” libel laws so critics can be sued into silence. That’s not free speech—it’s information warfare. And into this swamp strolls Elon Musk, the self-anointed “free speech absolutist,” promising salvation and delivering something darker.
He promised to make Twitter a digital town square. Instead, he built his own private house party. He banned journalists who criticized him while re-platforming nut cases like Alex Jones and Andrew Tate, allowing misogyny, racism, and conspiracy theories to flourish. His platform, X, became a parody of free speech, where his own views are amplified and his AI, Grok, spread fascist rhetoric. Free speech, it turned out, was only welcome if it didn’t irritate the host. And just when you think the party couldn’t get any darker, reality crashes in. Enter Charlie Kirk—the man who preached that all speech is protected—gunned down on a university campus. Suddenly, the debate about free speech isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s blood on the floor.
The shock was instant. A young, polarising man, gunned down. Most people recoiled in horror. But a few trolls on the far left celebrated online. Disgusting? Yes. Illegal? No. That’s the dark underbelly of free speech: the right to be a monstrous human being.
Then came the hypocrisy, loud and raw.
Pam Bondi, the U.S. Attorney General, declared in her grief and fury: “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
Stop right there. That’s not the law. That’s not the Constitution. That’s rage talking. And it’s exactly the kind of overreach Kirk himself would have fought against.
Bondi backpedalled, but the damage was done. Suddenly, the right was willing to throw free speech under the bus. Allies of Kirk, in their anguish, betrayed his core belief.
And the purge rolled on. An MSNBC analyst suggested hateful words can lead to hateful actions—he was fired. TMZ got blasted for background laughter during a livestream, forced to apologise. A teacher, a lawyer, social media community managers —ordinary people—lost jobs over tasteless posts. The right had become the censor it always claimed to despise.
The backlash wasn't confined to the U.S. In London, far-right agitator Tommy Robinson held a massive rally “for free speech” in Kirk’s name. Elon Musk livestreamed in, calling the left “the party of murder.” Think about that: the billionaire owner of a global platform demonising half the population as killers. Free speech repackaged as a weapon of mass distraction—loud, messy, and designed to blind.
So where does that leave us?
In a dangerous place. A place where words are weapons, principles are conditional, and grief tempts us to hand over the very freedoms we claim to defend.
Here’s the hard truth: free speech is messy. It’s ugly. It means defending not just the poets and dissidents, but also the idiots and trolls. It means condemning hypocrisy on your own side as loudly as you condemn it on the other. It means remembering that the power to silence them today will be used to silence you tomorrow.
Charlie Kirk understood that. The best way to honour his memory is not to censor in his name, but to defend the principle he lived by—even when it’s hardest, even when it hurts. Because if we don’t, his assassination won’t just silence a man. It will silence the very idea that lets us speak at all.