Freedom of Speech Is Worth Offending For

Why Protecting Speech Must Include Unpopular Ideas

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

I grew up in Ghana for the first nineteen years of my life. Until I was sixteen, I knew only one president, Jerry John Rawlings. His name was synonymous with authority, power, and permanence. He ascended to the presidency through military coups and ruled for two decades. During his reign, the air was thick with fear and reverence, for one could never be sure where the boundary between loyalty and treason lay.

In those days, there existed a criminal libel law, a legal weapon that turned free expression into a dangerous gamble. To criticize the president or question the government was to risk your livelihood, your reputation, or even your freedom. It wasn’t that people didn’t think freely; it’s that they dared not speak freely. Words could land you in prison, and silence became the safest survival strategy.

When I arrived in the United States, I expected a different reality. America, the land of liberty, the home of the brave, was built on the idea that speech, even when offensive, is sacred. I believed that here, one could question power without fear, challenge consensus without penalty, and offend orthodoxy without persecution. Yet over time, I have witnessed a troubling erosion of this foundational freedom, a slow drift toward the very censorship I thought I had left behind.

The Fragile Foundation of Liberty

Freedom of speech is not merely one right among many, it is the right upon which all other rights depend. It is the lifeblood of democracy, the mechanism through which ideas compete, truth emerges, and tyranny is restrained.

When speech is free, power must justify itself. When speech is restricted, power justifies itself by force.

The framers of the American Constitution understood this. They placed the First Amendment first for a reason. It was a declaration that the government has no rightful role in deciding what may be said or thought. It was a revolutionary concept in a world long accustomed to kings and clerics policing the boundaries of acceptable opinion.

Yet today, in the very republic birthed by that revolutionary ideal, we see the rise of new censors, dressed not in uniforms, but in the soft garments of “safety,” “inclusion,” and “hate prevention.” We are told that certain words are “harmful,” certain questions “dangerous,” and certain opinions “beyond the pale.” The result? A generation of citizens conditioned to self-censor before the state even lifts a finger.

The COVID Censorship Complex

Nowhere has this modern censorship been more evident than during the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the guise of “protecting public health,” the Biden administration orchestrated an unprecedented campaign to control legal speech. Through back-channel communications and public pressure, government officials leaned on social media companies to silence voices that questioned lockdowns, vaccine mandates, or the origins of the virus.

What was once dismissed as “misinformation” has since been confirmed as fact. Yet the damage was done. Careers were ruined. Reputations destroyed. And perhaps most dangerously, a precedent was set: the government can now decide what is true, and compel private companies to enforce its narrative.

The fact that it took so little to build a “censorship industrial complex” should terrify every American. All it required was an emergency, real or perceived, to justify what many in power had always desired: control over thought itself.

A nation that silences dissent in the name of safety does not stay safe for long. It becomes a nation of whispers, not witnesses; of submission, not citizenship.

The Offense Clause of Liberty

Let us be clear: freedom of speech is not the freedom to be agreeable. It is the freedom to offend, to provoke, to challenge, and to question. It is precisely the speech that offends someone, somewhere, that tests whether we truly believe in liberty at all.

A right that exists only when popular is no right at all.

When a comedian is canceled for telling a joke, when a professor is fired for questioning orthodoxy, when a student is disciplined for expressing a conviction, these are not isolated incidents. They are warning lights flashing on the dashboard of our republic.

Speech codes, hate speech laws, and “safe spaces” may sound compassionate, but they are Trojan horses for tyranny. The moment we empower government to determine what constitutes “hate,” we give bureaucrats the authority to decide which truths are permissible. And as history teaches, once that power is granted, it is never surrendered willingly.

“Freedom is always one generation away from extinction.” — Ronald Reagan