Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Free speech is often hailed as the crown jewel of democratic societies.
Rooted in the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and individual rights, it became enshrined in modern constitutions, most famously in the First Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights in 1791.
The principle was clear: Citizens must have the right to criticize power without fear of repression. From John Milton’s Areopagitica in 1644 to the American and French Revolutions, the idea of free speech was tied to resistance against tyranny.
But what happens when this virtue, designed to protect truth and dissent, is twisted into a shield for lies, propaganda, and violence?
When a democratic safeguard becomes a weapon wielded against democracy itself, free speech ceases to be a virtue. It becomes a vulnerability.
Historically, the justification for free expression rested on two pillars — first, truth-seeking. As John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty published in 1859 that the open contest of ideas was the surest path to knowledge. Even falsehoods had value, for they sharpened the truth.
Second, limiting tyranny: Democracies cannot survive without the ability of citizens to criticize leaders, policies, and institutions. Free speech was meant to protect dissenters against governments, not to protect those who would destroy democratic society itself.
Yet, from the very beginning, limits were recognized. Perjury, libel, incitement to violence, and treasonous speech were never included in the shield of liberty. The Founding Fathers did not believe in unbounded speech; they believed in protected speech that preserved the Republic.
In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently drawn boundaries, from Schenck v. United States in 1919, which introduced the idea of “clear and present danger,” to Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which set the modern test for incitement: Speech that is directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action.
Even in Athens, deemed by many people as the birthplace of democracy, citizens who undermined the city-state could be punished; isegoria, equal speech, was never limitless. The West has always understood that free speech carries responsibilities as well as rights.
In the modern West, however, free speech has morphed into something its framers would scarcely recognize: an absolutist shield for those who openly plot against democratic life. Hamas repeatedly being gifted a platform on outlets like the BBC and CNN, presented as though the terror group’s words belong in the same category as legitimate political actors, is not journalism; it is laundering barbarism through the language of “balance.”
Podcaster Joe Rogan, with one of the largest audiences in the world, casually suggesting that America should stop supporting Israel may sound like harmless opinion, but when amplified to hundreds of millions it legitimizes narratives that erase the Jewish People from our indigenous homeland and gives propaganda a veneer of credibility.
Hezbollah’s now-assassinated leader Hassan Nasrallah treated like a statesman in the obituary pages of the New York Times demonstrates how the free press, once meant to defend civilization, now risks romanticizing its destroyers.
Explicitly pro-Hamas chants in Western capitals, as well as genocidal slogans against Jews (“From the River to the Sea” and open calls for the eradication of the Jewish state, echo openly through city squares, often under the watch of police who, citing “protected expression,” stand by. What was once unthinkable — mass rallies for genocide — now passes as a civil liberty. This is not free speech as John Stuart Mill or James Madison envisioned it; this is license for intimidation, propaganda, and incitement under the protective umbrella of democracy.
But here is the revealing hypocrisy: The very same speech directed at any other minority would never be tolerated. Imagine crowds chanting for the elimination of Black people, or the expulsion of Mormons, or the eradication of Basques “from northeastern Spain to southwestern France.”
No police chief in the West would shrug and call it protected expression. Universities would not sponsor forums on whether African-Americans or Sikhs have the right to exist. Newsrooms would not offer sympathetic profiles of groups advocating violence against Latinos or Asians. There would be immediate outrage, firings, lawsuits, and condemnations.
Yet, when the target is Jews, or when the state under attack is Israel, suddenly the language of “free speech” is invoked. The double standard is glaring, and it exposes not courage in defending liberty, but cowardice in confronting antisemitism. Free speech becomes an alibi for hatred that would otherwise be recognized as beyond the pale.
And it is precisely this hypocrisy that exposes the hollowness of so-called free speech absolutism. Those who preach that all speech must be protected are quick to abandon their principle the moment a different minority is attacked. What they really defend is not freedom, but selective license — one standard for Jews, another for everyone else.
Free speech absolutists love to declare that “all speech must be protected” as though this is some moral high ground. But in reality, there is no such thing as an absolutist in society. Every human virtue, every right, every freedom has guard rails. Justice requires due process. Compassion must be balanced with fairness. Even democracy itself is hedged by constitutions, courts, and laws to prevent majority tyranny.
Why should speech be the one human activity that escapes limits?
The very people who claim to be absolutists reveal their hypocrisy the moment you test them. Would they allow perjury in court? Child pornography online? Fraud in the marketplace? Shouting fire in a crowded theater? Of course not. We already accept limits because we understand that without boundaries, rights corrode into weapons.
The stupidity of free speech absolutism lies in pretending that speech, unlike every other virtue, is harmless in its extreme form. But history shows the opposite: Speech is among the most dangerous forces in the world. It can mobilize nations, incite violence, topple governments, and unleash genocides.
Hitler did not need bullets first; he needed microphones. Hamas does not require tanks; it manipulates social media. The most destructive regimes and movements of modern history were not built on silence but on rhetoric, slogans, and propaganda. To insist that “all speech” is sacred, no matter its content, is not only naïve but suicidal.
Free speech is not holy in itself; it is holy because it serves truth and protects liberty. Strip away those guard rails, and it no longer serves either. When free speech ceases to safeguard democracy and instead becomes the vehicle for its enemies, it has stopped being a virtue. A society that cannot distinguish between dissent and destruction, between debate and incitement, between criticism and propaganda, has lost its moral compass. In the end, the absolutist is not a defender of freedom at all, but an enabler of its collapse.
Non-Western powers — many of them authoritarian regimes — have discovered how easy it is to exploit Western freedoms to advance their agendas. Iran, Qatar, Russia, and China all use social media platforms to spread disinformation, sow division, and normalize hatred of Israel and the Jews. Hamas does not need to buy tanks when it can buy social media accounts. Hezbollah does not need to control television networks when it can upload propaganda to YouTube and watch it be shared by well-meaning Westerners who believe they are exercising free speech.
These regimes know that the West’s commitment to openness makes it uniquely vulnerable, and they exploit it with ruthless precision. They brainwash Western audiences under the guise of “information,” knowing that Western governments and tech companies will often defend the activity as legitimate speech. The paradox deepens: Authoritarian states that allow no dissent at home use the liberties of free societies abroad to corrode the West from within.
The philosopher Karl Popper called this the paradox of tolerance: If a society is endlessly tolerant, even of the intolerant, then intolerance will eventually destroy the tolerant society. The line between defending liberty and enabling its annihilation is perilously thin.
And history offers chilling proof. In Weimar Germany, the Nazis exploited democratic freedoms to spread propaganda, intimidate opponents, and organize violence, all under the cover of free expression. Once they had power, they dismantled the very freedoms that enabled their rise. During the Cold War, Soviet-backed groups operated in Western democracies, using the shield of free speech to advance anti-democratic agendas. What we see today is not new; it is the old tactic of authoritarian movements using democratic openness as a weapon against democracy itself.
The modern media environment has only deepened the problem. Free speech rights belong to individuals, but platforming is a choice. CNN, the New York Times, or Joe Rogan are not compelled by law to give space to terrorists or their apologists. They choose to, often in the name of “neutrality.” But neutrality in the face of barbarism is not virtue; it is moral blindness.
When everything is flattened into “just another perspective,” even terrorism becomes a “point of view.” The result is that speech once clearly outside the bounds of civilized discourse is normalized, given oxygen, and then amplified to millions, if not billions.
In the cultural realm, the idea of free speech has been reframed as the right to “speak your truth” without consequence, no matter how corrosive or false. The emphasis on expression without responsibility has made it easier for destructive rhetoric to slip under the radar and cloak itself in the language of rights.
Law enforcement protecting pro-Hamas rallies in the UK, for instance, illustrates the paradox in stark form: The state ends up shielding those who would destroy it. This is not a new dilemma. Democracies have always wrestled with the line between rights and self-preservation. But the failure today is not legal; it is moral. We lack the clarity to say that not all speech is equal, not all ideas deserve a platform, not all chants deserve protection. To hide behind the rhetoric of free speech while tolerating those who openly advocate violence and destruction is to mistake weakness for virtue.
If the West is to survive as a civilization, it must remember why free speech was valued in the first place: to promote truth, empower dissent, and preserve democracy. That means drawing hard lines. No platforming of terror groups as legitimate voices. No legitimizing propaganda that seeks to dismantle nations. No disguising incitement to violence as “protest.”
Free speech was never meant to be a suicide pact. Speech that undermines the very foundation of liberty cannot be considered its expression. When free speech becomes the Trojan horse for tyranny, we must have the courage to say: This is no longer speech, it is sabotage.
The dark side of “free speech” is not free speech itself, but its abuse. Democracies that cannot distinguish between dissent and destruction risk handing civilization’s enemies the very tools to bury it. Free speech is a virtue only so long as it preserves the conditions for freedom. Once it becomes the mask for those who would annihilate it, it ceases to be a virtue at all.
The question is not whether we value free speech. The question is whether we value it enough to protect it from those who would use it to end freedom altogether.
Using speech to incite violence is clearly not protected, yet it has been in the case of calling From the river to the Sea, and Free Palestine, and Globalize the intifada. But when the people in power are not on our side, or your side, it is way too easy for them to ban speech they disagree with—as they did during Covid, as they do in Arab countries, as they are doing in Britain and Germany now. We must fight the lies with truth. Shutting down speech, labeling and banning speech we don’t like as “hate speech”—even if it is hateful, is wrong. The ADL labeling Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA a “right wing extremist group” is slanderous and harms Jews—as we are all lumped under the ADL umbrella. The ADL has been smearing people who point out some basic tenets of Islam as Islamophobes, or people who question transing children as Transphobes, not to mention extorting people, or trying to extort people like Kyrie Irving. This backfires and harms us.
Absolutely right.......Free speech is undoubtedly wonderful/Democratic, but unfortunately we're exposed to lots of HATE speech " from the river to the sea ", " by all means necessary " " globalized the intifada ", " genocide ", etc. And like you brilliantly stated, will definitely will incite HATE against Israel and Jews......and now, we can the results, antisemitism all over the world !!!!!.....