The Theatre Has Gone Dark

What We Talk About When We Talk About Free Speech

Or: how both sides learnt to stop worrying and love censorship when it suited them

There’s a Kierkegaard quote that’s been rattling around my head lately like a marble in an empty tin: “People hardly ever make use of freedom of thought. Instead, they demand freedom of speech as compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”

Bit brutal, that. Classic Danish melancholy. But watching the absolute circus that free speech has become in 2025—with everyone from tech billionaires to university administrators to sitting presidents claiming to be its champion whilst simultaneously trying to silence whoever disagrees with them—I’m beginning to think old Søren was onto something.

The Absolutists Who Aren’t

Let’s start with the obvious absurdity: Elon Musk calling himself a “free speech absolutist” whilst owning a platform where he controls the algorithms that determine whose speech gets amplified and whose gets buried in the digital equivalent of a mass grave. That’s not defending free speech. That’s just being honest about who holds the megaphone.

And look, I get it. After years of watching tech platforms cave to government pressure—both overt and the nudge-nudge-wink-wink variety—to suppress certain narratives, there’s a genuine appetite for someone to push back. When Trump signed his executive order about ending federal censorship in January 2025, it resonated because people have felt stifled. Republicans especially reported feeling unable to speak freely under Biden.

But here’s where it gets properly absurd: that same administration then allegedly used the FCC to pressure ABC into suspending Jimmy Kimmel’s show. The chilling thing isn’t just the suspension itself—it’s the method. No direct censorship order. Just a chairman making vague threats about broadcast licences not being “sacred cows” and networks needing to operate “in the public interest.”

Which, conveniently, is defined by… the chairman. One person.

So we’ve gone from “the government was secretly pressuring tech companies to censor content” to “the government is openly pressuring broadcasters to censor content” and somehow this is being sold as a victory for free speech.

You couldn’t make it up. Except someone did. Several someones, actually.

The University Industrial Complex of Silence

Then there are the universities, those supposed bastions of intellectual freedom, where increasingly students seem more interested in preventing speech than exercising it. Harvard—dear God, Harvard—has held the position as worst campus for free speech for two consecutive years. That’s not a typo. Harvard. The place that’s supposed to be producing the next generation of thinkers can’t even handle present-day thinking.

The numbers are properly grim: 55% of students say they find it difficult to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on campus. That’s the highest recorded difficulty for any issue. We’re not talking about students choosing not to engage—we’re talking about them feeling they can’t.

And it’s not just about political orthodoxy from one direction. According to research from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, students across the political spectrum are increasingly supportive of using disruptive tactics—including violence—to shut down controversial speakers. Violence. To prevent speech.

The irony is so thick you could spread it on toast.

The Marketplace of Ideas Has Been Privatised

Here’s what really gets me, though: when institutions abdicate their responsibility to host difficult conversations, market forces rush in to fill the void. And market forces, bless them, aren’t exactly known for their commitment to nuance.

Take Jubilee Media’s viral debate formats. Millions of views. Headlines everywhere. One progressive versus twenty conservatives. Flat earthers versus scientists. It’s the intellectual equivalent of cage fighting—designed not for enlightenment but for engagement metrics.

The CEO calls it “Disney for empathy.” I’d call it something else entirely. It’s not conversation; it’s performance. Everyone’s so entrenched in their positions, playing to their respective audiences, that actual dialogue becomes impossible. One participant literally said he doesn’t debate fascists—which, fine, principled stance and all that—but then what exactly are we doing here?

When universities cancel controversial programming because they’re afraid of protests, they’re not being cautious. They’re failing. Two Canadian film festivals last year pulled documentaries about Ukraine and Gaza because they feared backlash. A Zurich theatre cancelled a discussion about political terminology because peers objected to platforming right-wing voices.

These are spaces that should be robust enough to host uncomfortable ideas. Instead, they’re terrified of their own shadows.

The Power Question Nobody Wants to Answer

Here’s the thing that historian Fara Dabhoiwala gets right in his work: free speech has never been equally distributed. Never. The right to speak has always been bound up with power—who has it, who doesn’t, and who gets to decide.

When we talk about “free speech” in 2025, we’re really asking: who controls the narrative? And the uncomfortable truth is that it’s not “the people” in any meaningful sense. It’s tech billionaires deciding what algorithms prioritise. It’s government officials threatening licences. It’s university administrators choosing safety over substance. It’s activists on both sides weaponising cancellation against their enemies whilst crying persecution when it’s used against them.

The left spent years calling for platforms to remove “misinformation” and “harmful content,” only to watch that same machinery get turned against them when the political winds shifted. The right spent years crying censorship, then got into power and started threatening anyone who criticised them. Both sides have learnt absolutely nothing except that censorship is fine when they’re the ones doing it.

The Thought Police Are Coming from Inside the House

But here’s what worries me more than any of the political theatre: we’ve stopped thinking.

Kierkegaard’s jab wasn’t just about people being hypocritical. It was about intellectual laziness. We demand the right to speak without doing the harder work of actually having something worth saying. We perform our positions for our tribes. We collect applause from people who already agree with us. We mistake volume for substance.

Freedom of speech without freedom of thought is just noise. And increasingly, all we’ve got is noise.

Look at the Jubilee debates. Look at social media. Look at campus protests that shut down events without engaging with the ideas. Look at politicians on both sides who demand absolute loyalty and frame any criticism as betrayal. Nobody’s thinking. We’re all just… reacting. Performing. Shouting into our respective voids.

Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov once wrote that intellectual freedom—the freedom to receive and disseminate information, to engage in fearless discussion, free from authority and prejudice—is society’s immune system. Without it, we’re vulnerable to infection by “mass myths” that demagogues can weaponise into dictatorship.

We’re watching it happen in real time. Both sides are building their mythologies. Both sides are laying the groundwork for the kind of control they claim to oppose.

So What Now?

Here’s where I’m supposed to offer some hopeful conclusion. Some way forward. Some vision of how we reclaim genuine discourse.

But I’m not sure I have one.

What I do know is this: every time we cheer when someone we disagree with gets silenced, we’re building the scaffold for our own hanging. Every time we demand that institutions suppress “harmful” speech without interrogating who decides what’s harmful, we’re handing power to whoever happens to be holding the stamp.

The question we should be asking isn’t “do I have the right to free speech?” It’s “how is my exercise of that right contributing to the collective good?” And that’s a much harder question because it requires us to actually think about what we’re saying and why.

It requires us to tolerate—not agree with, but tolerate—perspectives that make us deeply uncomfortable. It requires us to trust that bad ideas are best countered with better ideas, not with silence. It requires faith that people are capable of hearing difficult truths and drawing their own conclusions.

And honestly? Looking at 2025? I’m not sure any of us believe that anymore.

Maybe that’s the real crisis. Not that free speech is under threat—it always has been, from one direction or another. But that we’ve collectively lost faith in its purpose. We don’t see it as a way to arrive at truth anymore. We see it as a weapon. A tool for victory.

And weapons, unlike ideas, are only useful when you’re willing to use them on someone else.

The theatre of civil discourse has gone dark. Both sides are claiming the lighting rig caught fire, and both sides are standing there holding matches. Meanwhile, the audience has wandered off to watch YouTube videos of people shouting at each other, because at least that’s honest about what it is.

Kierkegaard would have had a field day with this. Then again, he was Danish. Misery was basically their national sport.

But he’d also remind us that demanding the right to speak is meaningless if we’ve forgotten how to think. And right now, from where I’m sitting, we’ve replaced thinking with performing, discourse with tribal loyalty, and the pursuit of truth with the pursuit of victory.

And victory, it turns out, looks an awful lot like silence.

Just somebody else’s silence. Not ours. Never ours.

That’s the thing about censorship. Everyone’s opposed to it. Right up until they’re the ones holding the stamp.

The author would like to note that he wrote this entire piece without being censored, which proves absolutely nothing except that he hasn’t said anything important enough to threaten anyone with actual power. Make of that what you will.

Until Next Time