We're Free Speeching Ourselves To Death

The Right to Free Speech has become the Right To Lie and Its Killing Our Democracy

America’s style of Wild West “freedom of speech” isn’t saving democracy. It’s killing it—with 40 million people now trapped in a propaganda-fueled fantasyland.

In America, you can say just about anything, especially in terms of “political speech” which is so sacrosanct in our legal culture attempts to “censor” it must meet what the Courts call “strict scrutiny” with an overwhelming state interest.

And for most of my life and all of my academic life I thought that was the best thing EVER!

But reality is the graveyard of idealism and in terms of elections/politics “strict scrutiny” allows you can say anything you want, say something like Democrats mutilate children to whoever you want, for as long as you want, funded by whoever you want, to any limit they want (here’s looking at you Elon!)

You can say the sky is green, the moon is a hoax, or that JFK Jr. is coming back to run on the Trump ticket in 2024. You can stand in the middle of a public parking lot in a bald eagle costume screaming that vaccines are genocide and that the ghost of Anthony Fauci is whispering in your blood.

You can say things that drive other people to committing murder.

And nobody—not the government, not the cops, not even your cousin who majored in philosophy—can stop you.

We are, after all, the freest speeching country on the planet.

And it’s killing us.

I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean literally, killing us. As in: people are dying because we’ve decided that “freedom” means nobody gets to tell the truth from a lie anymore. We’ve created a sandbox so lawless that now, nearly 40 million Americans believe the COVID vaccine was a global depopulation plot. They believe the pandemic was fake. They believe Fauci personally injected them with microchips coded in Mandarin.

That’s not fringe lunacy. That’s half of Trump’s base. These people vote. They march. They storm the Capitol with zip ties and bear spray. And they’re not going away.

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Other Western Democracies Regulate Speech—And Still Have Democracy

Let’s talk about Germany for a second. Germany! You know, the one that has actual experience with what happens when hate speech goes mainstream.

In Germany, you can’t deny the Holocaust. You can’t glorify Nazism. You can’t post swastikas on Facebook and pretend it’s just ironic. They have laws—and those laws are based on the understanding that when you let lies run wild, they take the whole society with them.

France? Same deal. Hate speech? Illegal. Holocaust denial? Crime. Inciting racial or religious hatred? Bonjour, here’s your fine and possibly jail.

The UK? Grossly offensive messages online? That’s a chargeable offense under the Communications Act.

Canada? Promoting hatred against an identifiable group? The Mounties will politely cuff you.

But in America, we treat every Facebook post like it’s a Thomas Paine pamphlet. We call it “the marketplace of ideas,” but it’s more like a back alley swap meet for delusion and fascism. No returns, no refunds—just conspiracy theories and crypto scams.

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When Lies Become Policy

We are a country where a sitting Supreme Court justice’s wife was texting Mark Meadows during an actual coup attempt—and half the country thinks she’s a patriot.

We are a country where Tucker Carlson told his viewers for months that the vaccine was a conspiracy—then filed paperwork with Fox legal saying nobody could possibly take him seriously.

We are a country where 40 million people believe that Joe Biden personally opened the borders, ushered in millions of undocumented immigrants, and had them vote illegally in 2024.

Not 4 million. Not 400,000. Forty. Million. People.

We’re not talking about people with harmless weird ideas like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. We’re talking about mass psychosis on a scale that makes Jonestown look like a group therapy session.

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The American Experiment Is Now a Misinformation Lab

And yet we keep pretending this is all fine. We keep saying things like, “Well, bad speech should be answered with more speech.” As if some teenager in Kansas is going to fact-check Steve Bannon into submission on TikTok. As if a PhD in epidemiology can out-meme a YouTuber who thinks the moon landing was filmed on a Fauci-owned soundstage.

At a certain point, it’s not just speech. It’s sabotage.

And here’s the kicker: regulating speech is not tyranny. It’s policy. Sensible democracies do it all the time. They ban speech that incites violence, promotes hatred, or undermines the legitimacy of democratic institutions.

We, on the other hand, let a washed-up game show host get on Truth Social and claim he won the last election—and might already be President right now. Then we watch as people donate their Social Security checks to him in hopes he’ll save them from the Deep State.

And we call it “free speech.”

It’s not free. It’s costing us everything.

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If We Don’t Regulate the Lies, the Lies Will Regulate Us

The First Amendment was written in a time when your biggest platform was a printing press. It was never intended to protect your right to spread weaponized bullshit to 10 million followers in a nanosecond. It was never meant to give billionaires with fascist fantasies free rein to algorithmically poison the discourse until nobody knows what’s real.

We need to face a very uncomfortable truth: our unregulated speech culture is not a strength—it’s a vulnerability.

It’s not what makes us exceptional; it’s what makes us ungovernable.

And if we don’t figure out how to draw a line between freedom and delusion, between speech and sabotage, between debate and propaganda?

We’re not going to have a democracy to protect.

We’ll just have a very loud, very stupid autocracy where everyone is free to scream their own reality into the void—until someone with a flag and a gun decides which version becomes law.

In the end might will make the right and that is not a world you want to live in.