A humble rant about free speech, Charlie Kirk, & 'cancel culture'

There's so much confusion about free speech in America -- because there are two different forms of it.

There's 'constitutional free speech', to prevent gov't tyranny through censorship, as codified formally in 230+ years of constitutional law around the First Amendment.

Then there's 'cultural free speech' -- a set of informal cultural norms, traditions, and practices to encourage people to express their true beliefs & values to each other, without fear of reprisals, ostracism, or other non-gov't forms of punishment.

Constitutional free speech is grounded in clear rights, laws, precedents, & principles, centered around retraining gov't from meddling in public discourse. We should strongly protect constitutional free speech, and be very wary of gov't censorship -- whether directly, or through gov't collusion with Big Tech, social media, or AI companies.

However, cultural free speech is much more complicated, nuanced, and subject to renegotiation -- which is what we've been seeing over the last ten years, and especially in the last week.

Civilized people accept thousands of informal restraints on cultural free speech. For example, we use the power of informal social rewards and punishments to discourage

• kids from lying
  
• spouses from dissing each other
  
• journalists from acting like propagandists
  
• teachers from indoctrinating students
  
• companies from violating traditions and trust
  
• people from burning our flag
  
• sociopathic trolling on social media
  
• comedians from making false & incendiary claims
  
• politicians from demonizing their opponents to incite political violence among their supporters
  
  All of these are restraints on 'cultural free speech', and they could be seen as micro-versions of 'cancel culture', but they're widely supported, and they're not directly related to gov't censorship or First Amendment law.
  
  Yes, the First Amendment helps establish and reinforce the social norms around cultural free speech, and cultural free speech helps reinforce the willingness of citizens, politicians, & judges to protect our First Amendment rights.
  
  But I see a lot of people, on both Left and Right, confusing the two forms of our civilization's commitment to free speech.
  
  The tricky thing about cultural free speech is that it requires a high degree of public consensus and social trust. It requires political partisans to respect some basic grounds rules when dealing with each other, including a degree of mutual respect and civility. It requires a mutual détente that minimizes the use of 'cancel culture' tactics.
  
  Those ground rules around cultural free speech were seriously damaged by the Left's response to Trump's rise in 2016, by their treatment of fellow citizens during the Covid pandemic in 2020-2023, and by their demonization of everyone on the Right, for the last 10 years, as 'fascists', 'racists', 'sexists', 'Islamophobes', 'transphobes', & 'existential threats to democracy'.
  
  And the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week has utterly nuked the ground rules around cultural free speech in America.
  
  Leading Leftists repeatedly incited the assassination of the Right's leading advocate for cultural free speech, and then millions of Leftists celebrated, condoned, and defended his assassination, and demonized his views after his death. So, the Right is no longer willing to 'play nice' with the Left.
  
  That's what we're seeing. Not an attack on the First Amendment. But a long-overdue renegotiation between Left and Right of the norms and practices around cultural free speech. Given these special circumstances, and what they have revealed about the Left's true beliefs, values, and goals, many of the previous civilized norms around cultural free speech have been suspended.
  
  The burden is on the Left to apologize -- publicly, repeatedly, & profusely, with genuine remorse -- for their decade-long attacks on cultural free speech.
  
  If the Left can take a good hard look in the mirror, do some serious soul-searching, and tone down its rhetoric for the next few years, then maybe -- just maybe -- the Right can eventually forgive them, and we can re-establish a stronger, better, more honorable form of cultural free speech in America for the coming decades.
  
  Until then, the Right should still vigorously support and defend constitutional free speech. But there is no compelling reason for the Right to continue to respect norms of cultural free speech that the Left abandoned ten years ago.