Who Still Believes in Free Speech?

On 31 January 2025, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention—a key US public health agency—ordered its scientists to halt research using words like ‘gender,’ ‘transgender,’ ‘pregnant person,’ ‘LGBT,’ ‘non-binary,’ and other terms tied to sex and identity. The list followed a new rule signed by President Trump just days earlier, mandating that all federal agencies recognise only two sexes: male and female. Backers called it a return to plain facts—and an overdue end to what they saw as state-funded progressive messaging. Critics saw it as the government deciding which words could and couldn’t be used. It was one of those rare moments where both sides had a point. Months earlier, right-wing users on X/Twitter had complained about being punished for criticising Musk’s call for more visas for foreign workers—losing reach or verification on the social platform. And it wasn’t the only time Musk was accused of quietly limiting users who crossed him, even though he allegedly bought Twitter to defend free speech.

These moves didn’t come out of nowhere. Both the buying of Twitter by Elon Musk and Trump’s order are part of a long-brewing pushback against a progressive left that, for years, held sway over cultural, academic, and scientific life—and hasn’t hesitated to silence, shame, or cancel those who dissent. Listing the bans and boycotts would fill a book. 'Free speech' still rings like a sacred phrase in the Western mind. But how many classical liberals are left—willing to defend speech from people they can’t stand?

Rational Dreams, Tribal Minds

From Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers like Milton, Spinoza, Locke, and Voltaire to the US Founders, the idea of free speech took shape over centuries. In 1791, James Madison gave it legal force through the American Constitution’s First Amendment. Together, these voices shaped free speech into the cornerstone of Western liberal values. The Enlightenment didn’t just praise free speech—it rested on the very belief that people are rational and the world could be improved through reason. Locke’s idea that the mind is a blank slate, shaped by learning, not fate, provided the cognitive counterpart to this vision. .

Today we know that some of those Enlightenment ideas were somewhat off the mark. People’s minds certainly aren’t blank slates—they are shaped not just by what we learn, but also by genes, biology, and hormones. And we’re not the calm, clear-headed thinkers those early-Modern thinkers hoped for. Rather, we are emotional beings who sometimes think. Even in modern, highly urbanised contexts, we still carry the instincts of our tribal past. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt shows, these instincts shape even our politics through deep moral foundations. For example, so-called ‘conservative’ individuals, at a fundamental level, tend to value loyalty and respect for authority—traits that once helped bind small groups for defence and order—while ‘liberals’ lean more toward care and fairness, rooted in our need to nurture kin and build trust with strangers. Both these sets of instincts helped our ancestors survive—but their complexities don’t always fit with open debate.

An overview of sensitive topics and 'values' among present-day Americans.

Free Speech in a Fractured World

That helps explain why so many people, on both left and right, are quick to silence voices they see as crossing a line. For some, hearing a different view doesn’t feel like debate—it feels like a threat. When the gut reacts, the mind often just tags along. The left has held sway over the cultural conversation for a while, and it’s easy to think the urge to shut others up is theirs alone. But as power shifts, we may find the right, whatever shape it takes, isn’t exactly guided by John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration either. Emerging thinkers on the Western right—like Curtis Yarvin, who calls for rule by a strong central state, or Bronze Age Pervert, who blends ancient hero worship with brute strength—push ideas well outside liberal democracy’s usual bounds. And on the left, some draw openly from writers like Herbert Marcuse, who argued in the 1960s that free speech should be limited if it helps powerful groups stay in charge—because, in his view, equal speech only makes it harder to challenge unfair power.

Classical liberalism, with its stress on free speech, thrived under specific conditions: more culturally and ethnically homogenous societies, a top-down public sphere where debate mostly stayed among elite groups, and gatekept platforms like newspapers that controlled what was said—and who got to say it. Today’s world is louder, faster, and more fractured. The slow erosion of shared norms and the fading of ethnic and cultural cohesion have been thrown into the whirlwind of online noise—where everyone can speak, and no one has to listen. People still claim to support free speech—until it touches their nerves. Support drops sharply on religion, gay rights, or race.

In the US, that drop is steepest among the young. One reason may lie in how younger people experience the world online. Social media makes virtual speech constant, public, and tied to personal identity. For the ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ left, offensive speech often feels like harm; for the ‘conservative’ right, opposing views can seem like threats to nation, faith, or tradition. Thus, enhanced exposure to virtual reality and interaction feeds different, but equally problematic speech-related taboos. And no matter how and how successfully those play out in ongoing culture wars, it is fairness and freedom in the use of speech itself that normally pay the price.

Statement

In today’s polarised West, free speech is praised in theory but often denied in practice. A recent federal speech restriction under Trump and right-wing backlash online mirror a wider trend: both left and right now pick and choose when to defend open speech. This shift marks the decline of classical liberal ideals rooted in Enlightenment thinking, which assumed rational minds and civil debate. But new research, tribal instincts, and rising ideological hardliners challenge that premise. Once shaped by slow media, trusted elites, and shared norms, free speech is now caught in a storm of noise—and losing ground fast.

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