Free Speech vs. Self-Destruction

Saturday-Sunday, June 28-29, 2025

Free Speech vs. Self-Destruction

What if free speech is used by outsiders to persuade us that we should kill each other?

The United States, as well as the developed democratic societies generally, have opponents on the global stage who spend disproportionate portions of their government budgets on disseminating propaganda worldwide. Their efforts consist of suppressing criticism of their own governments, while attempting to obscure reality by diluting it in a sea of nonsense. Their main method is aggressive content generation, and they make use of the available technologies that have so captivated run-of-the-mill citizens.

The method is well understood, and has even been repeated by political players within our own political system as “flooding the information space with [BS].” The purpose of the method is to make average citizens confused about the difference between fact and fiction, between reality and lies. The aim is to make political discussion as frustrating and fruitless as possible.

Governments have always engaged in prettifying ugly situations so as to persuade the public in their favor—or at least against their opponents. But when the governments engaging in such beautification efforts are hostile powers with revisionist intentions, the question is whether they should be permitted access to domestic information channels at all. The obvious answer should be “No,” since the efforts are a form of psychological warfare.

Media access by hostile powers comes into obvious conflict with the principles of free speech, open debate, and the free exchange of ideas. You can’t contest ideas if you can’t hear them. And you can’t hear them if they are being intentionally washed away in floods of communications from those who would rather keep us in a perpetual state of confusion and uncertainty about what to do. They would rather have us at each other’s throats arguing about the shape of reality itself.

Some hostile foreign media have been effectively banned using legacy regulators. Russian TV channels like RT and Sputnik have failed to get licensure from the FCC, for instance. But the law banning TikTok, a known social-media psy-ops tool of the Chinese Communist Party, has not been enforced at all.

The idea that such hostile foreign media should enjoy free speech rights in the United States would seem obviously untenable. But when other arguments fail, “free speech” is a handy crowbar within the American system to exploit against itself.

The recent events in Iran indicate just what goes on behind the scenes. When the Iranian regime lost easy internet access for its bot farms, a lot of very vocal online Scottish independence activists suddenly went quiet.

On 12 June 2025, dozens of anonymous X (formerly Twitter) accounts advocating Scottish independence abruptly went silent. Many had posted hundreds of times per week, often using pro-independence slogans, anti-UK messaging, and identity cues like “NHS nurse” or “Glaswegian socialist.”

It’s instructive that so much effort is undertaken to undermine political stability in the UK by a relatively impoverished autocracy. It’s reasonable to conclude that countries with much larger economies and vastly larger budgets for propaganda regularly go wild to sow domestic political strife and confusion in every way conceivable.

It would be welcome if we had national leaders who cared about such things rather than merely trying to profit from them.