What Freedom of Speech Is and Isn't

New Discourses

Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 26 September 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 128 Freedom of speech is a concept a lot of people appreciate but also struggle with. It can be challenging for people to distinguish between threats to their freedom of speech, cancellation, censorship, and, on the other hand, more speech being the answer to speech. Drawing from one of his oldest popular writings (https://newdiscourses.com/2020/01/freedom-of-speech-fallacy-demanding-heard/), host James Lindsay addresses the issue of freedom of speech in principle in this new episode of New Discourses Bullets. He breaks down the four component freedoms in freedom of speech: to speak, to hear, not to speak, and not to hear. He also distinguishes these from certain things that are not part of freedom of speech, including unprotected speech and a small variety of entitlement complexes that hide behind accusations of censorship. Join him to get clearer on this important issue. Latest from New Discourses Press! The Queering of the American Child: https://queeringbook.com/ Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames © 2025 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #NewDiscourses #JamesLindsay #FreeSpeech

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody. It's James Lindsay. You're listening to New Discourse's Bullets, where I give a short bullet point-like explanation of a single topic relevant to woke that we need to understand so we can defeat it.
0:21.8	I want to talk about freedom of speech. I think we need to talk about freedom of speech.
0:25.3	There's a lot of people throwing around, you know, you're censoring me. This is a censorship?
0:29.9	Well, is it? What is censorship? What are freedoms? What is what is the freedom of speech
0:34.0	entail? I mean, obviously we could talk about the First Amendment. We could
0:39.7	read the First Amendment and do it that way. But I just kind of want to talk about it in a more
0:42.9	general philosophical sense, what the freedom of speech is. I'm not going to really talk about
0:47.0	what it's for even. I think, you know, that's an admirable topic and worthy of diving into.
0:54.0	But I actually just want to break down the freedom of speech itself for people because a lot of people seem to be confused about it.
0:59.6	And they, you know, everything I don't like is cancellation or everything I don't like is censorship.
1:03.5	Now actually censorship exists and a lot of us have experienced it in the past few years.
1:09.4	It's real.
1:10.4	But that doesn't mean that everything having to do
1:12.6	with being talking in certain public places is censorship. And same thing with cancellation.
1:21.3	It's real. We've experienced it. But not everything is cancellation. So we've got to be discerning.
1:29.8	So the point of this, this is actually a message that I gave in a essay that I wrote a very long time ago with Helen Pluckrose.
1:37.7	I mean, this has to go back to 18, 17 maybe. It's a very long time ago. We broke down the freedom of speech. And basically,
1:48.1	the freedom of speech includes four fundamental rights. Okay. There are four parts to the freedom of
1:55.5	speech. And then there are lots of things people seem to think it does include that it does not include.
2:02.4	Okay, so what does the freedom of speech include?
2:07.4	Number one, you have the freedom to speak. You get to say things that you want to say.
2:13.8	There are actually reasonable limits on that. However, even in the very expansive First Amendment
	...

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