Speech, Truth, and Survival
Rebuilding the Ecosystem That Lets Progress Win
A while back, I found myself in a conversation with a turbonormie about the Home Depot cashier fired for celebrating an attempt on Trump’s life. I hadn’t mentioned free speech at all, but he seized the moment to meme: “Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences!” Cruel and thoughtless, but what stuck with me was how much my own ability to make a positive case for freedom of speech had atrophied.
Free speech arguments can feel rusty because like-minded people cluster into media ecosystems that either challenge assumptions (e.g., X) or soothe closed minds (e.g., Bluesky). Support for free speech is highly stratified by psychological traits like IQ and openness to experience. Smarter and more intellectually humble individuals are far more likely to support freedom of speech—even for groups1 they disagree with.
That’s my ideal—not to weaponize free speech for political ends. But debates often do, like Hunter Ash’s exchange with Yassine Meskhout. Meskhout cited Trump’s flag-burning comments as proof of hostility to free speech. Ash countered: banning flag-burning doesn’t suppress ideas, because anti-American or third-worldist aesthetics can find expression through other means. Use your words, not flame and kerosene!
Self-expression versus science
Amazon already offers hundreds of thousands of titles expressing either pro- or anti-American views. Debating flag-burning aesthetics is easy and pointless. Truly advancing knowledge—through falsifiable, replicable, predictive science—is harder, and no field of inquiry faces more suppression, taboo, and underfunding than efforts to quantify the origins of black African capabilities and behavior. From Aporia:
Bryan Pesta and colleagues recently asked a sample of Americans to rate the “tabooness” of 33 contentious scientific topics, and found that the genetic basis of the black-white IQ gap was the single most taboo topic. Likewise, Cory Clark and colleagues asked a sample of academics to say, for each of 10 contentious scientific statements, how much “scholars should be discouraged from testing the veracity of this statement”. They found that the level of discouragement was greatest for the statement, “Genetic differences explain non-trivial (10% or more) variance in race differences in intelligence test scores”.
Notice that censors don’t merely aim to suppress hereditarian views of black dysfunction—they also seek to block any investigation into a possible genetic contribution. In their effort to stop debate, opponents of free speech cripple humanity’s most beautiful tool for uncovering truth: evolution. Evolution isn’t just a biological process—it also describes how ideas adapt and improve.
Karl Popper talks about this. Just as species evolve through trial and error, knowledge advances by testing ideas, criticizing them, and rejecting the ones that don’t hold up. Falsifiability—the ability to disprove a hypothesis—is like natural selection for ideas. Without it, bad ideas stick around, and progress stalls. Free speech is key to this process, allowing the diversity of ideas needed for growth and discovery.
An example from Emil Kirkegaard shows the cost in bodies. Years before the deadly 1970 avalanche in Peru, American scientists warned about of Glacier 511’s instability. Local authorities, however, silenced the warnings and threatened truth-seekers for “causing panic”, prioritizing harm reduction over truth. Rejecting evolution cost over 30,000 lives—a trade of short-term hobbit harmony for long-term obscurantism.
Restoring institutional trust
A government that suppresses speech can be voted out or overthrown, but trust in institutions like The New York Times is far harder to rebuild—even if those institutions change. Public health experts who arbitrarily wielded medical authority to ban churchgoing and beach vacations while compelling attendance at George Floyd protests bear direct responsibility for the distrust that fuels vaccine hesitancy.
Healing crystals, charismatic gurus, and raw meat diets are no substitute for modern medical infrastructure. The establishment’s dishonesty on the issue of race makes the breakdown even more tragic. Richard Hanania makes a similar observation about the state of mainstream media: despite their ideological distortions on race and gender, the media’s accuracy, breadth, and competency on other issues is too useful to lose.
This “wilderness of ideas” that institutional distrust has created, to quote Ash again, is where free speech proves its worth. Institutions like The New York Times didn’t build their authority by shutting down comments on transgender-related articles, as they do now. Free speech builds trust not by demanding allegiance but by allowing disagreements to surface and showing how they are resolved—transparently and fairly.
People without technical expertise need to rely on institutions to make sense of the world. But that only works if those institutions show intellectual humility, not ideological rigidity. Trust in corporate media can regrow when audiences see them own their mistakes and allow tough, necessary conversations. Without that, skepticism hardens into rejection, and people lose the ability to tell truth from lies.
Free speech for a neofeudal age
Even in the early modern world, John Stuart Mill recognized that cultural pressures could stifle speech more effectively than laws. Today, that dynamic persists in a fragmented, neofeudal landscape of private platforms, algorithmic gatekeepers, and blurred public-private boundaries. Free speech in these decentralized times depends on a new triad—one that adds a protection beyond culture and government:
Legal protection from spooks
Cultural support for open discourse
Robust infrastructure for distribution and reach
Legal protections remain critical, particularly to address the ways government agencies censor speech through proxies. On this front, Orange Hitler’s six-minute pitch is a great start. His proposed executive orders would ban federal agencies from colluding with SPLC-like entities and prohibit former employees from agencies like the FBI, CIA, or NSA from joining companies that control massive user data.
Cultural support for open discourse means breaking the taboos that turn empirical questions into moral battles. Every conversation we choose to have—or avoid—casts a vote on whether we’re building an environment where unpopular truths can be tested, debated, and refined without the fear of reputational annihilation. As Nathan Cofnas strategizes in “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution”:
Cultural change doesn’t happen automatically in response to an individual stating a radical idea, even if it’s a true idea backed up with lots of evidence. You can’t just publish a book or a tweet and say, “there was no revolution, I guess we have to give up.” For an idea to spread, millions of people have to argue it out over Thanksgiving dinner tables, water coolers, and dorm room hookahs. Prominent figures have to take a stand in favor of the idea, and show that they are willing to pay a price for their conviction. The good news is that millions of people—including many academics—already know the truth about race. They need recognize what is at stake and start making their case.
Even if a thousand Thanksgiving dinner conversations bloom, free speech still requires a robust infrastructure to give all ideas a fair shot at reaching a broad audience. Without systems for distribution, discovery, and engagement—or a sustainable economic model to support them—we’re all posting into the void. Big platforms dominate public discourse and need different rules than smaller ones.
Like evolution, free speech thrives on competition but depends on an intact ecosystem to function. Legal protections, cultural courage, and robust platforms are its DNA, ensuring that ideas are tested—not for political advantage, but for truth. Freedom of speech filters out noise and error, uncovering the insights that drive progress. Without it, societies stagnate into dogma and fall behind their rivals.
De keersmaecker, J., Bostyn, D. H., & Roets, A. (2020) referenced older data on attitudes towards freedom of speech for racists, militarists, homosexuals, anti-religionists, communists, and anti-American-Muslim clergymen. They then conducted a similar study adding Christian fundamentalists, members of big business, and the Tea Party.
I agree in general with this article. And I agree that free speech has practical value aside from any aesthetic desirability. That being said...
"A while back, I found myself in a conversation with a turbonormie about the Home Depot cashier fired for celebrating an attempt on Trump’s life. I hadn’t mentioned free speech at all, but he seized the moment to meme: “Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences!” Cruel and thoughtless,"
...Let's be forgiving here. This man is likely used to hearing the left use precisely this argument to justify crushing right-leaning speech. And much of such speech that gets crushed falls well short of wishing death on a political enemy. It's entirely understandable for this man to have an emotional response of "Finally, *they* are getting a taste of their own rotten medicine. Finally, they are being hoisted by their own petard." There is an element of *justice*, of *fairness* to expressions like this one.
Yes, it's not ideal. But turning the other cheek in order to support a higher principle is not easy. If we're going to win over men like this one to consistently holding to a higher principle of free speech, then we will need to say to him "I get it. I get how it feels *good* and *just* to hold your enemies to the same standards that they have held you. In some ways, it is just. But the core problem is the standard itself isn't right in this case. The core issue is free speech really is invaluable. So we shouldn't seek to punish our enemies for offensive speech, while we rightly argue that we ourselves should be free to voice controversial opinions that some may find offensive."