This is the introduction to a booklet on free speech and censorship.

It isn’t that we don’t censor. We do.

But, like so much about our political scene, we willfully choose to overlook the stigma of censorship when it’s our side doing it.

We look upon our side as being virtuous, and it is, but we also favor news reports, for example, that favor us – that paint our soldiers as heroes and their soldiers as nefarious thugs.

Download On Free Speech and Censorship at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/On-Free-Speech-and-Censorship-4.pdf

Free speech is looked upon as being constitutionally protected but it can’t be used to mount an attack on another person’s human rights.

I can’t say to you I’m going to kill you. Threatening harm like that is against the law. You can think of it as an exception to free speech.

We can therefore say that we prize freedom of speech but with some important exceptions.

And that’s what we explore here.

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As a general matter, as we recover from a time of devolution, we need to be making finer and finer distinctions in our laws and social codes. We’ve gone through a period where our social thought and behavior has been purposefully dumbed down. Rap music illustrates that, as it was meant to. (1)

Now we’re on the rebound and we have to recreate so much of what we lost. The main thing I’m concerned with is restoring civil discourse. And I’ll have more to say on that later.

Thank you to three people I’ve bounced a lot of these ideas off of: Suzanne Maresca, Sitara Williamson, and Kathleen Mary Willis. Thank you especially for the listening that allowed me to get my ideas out on the table where the whole of it could become clear.

Footnotes

(1) See “The Secret Meeting that Changed Rap Music and Destroyed a Generation,” June 30, 2020, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2020/06/30/the-secret-meeting-that-changed-rap-music-and-destroyed-a-generation-4/

Download On Free Speech and Censorship at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/On-Free-Speech-and-Censorship-4.pdf