Consider the below statements. Do any of them resonate? Make you angry? Do some not even merit a response?
- Any group differences in outcomes can be traced to systemic racism.
- If systemic racism exists at all, it works against so-called privileged groups.
- Abortion is murder, period.
- The sanctity of human life is a made-up concept.
- Jews have a biblical right to Israel.
- Hitler was right about a few things.
- Masculinity is inherently toxic.
- If women ran the world, we would still be living in grass huts.
- The colonialists need to give back the land they stole.
- Indigenous people need to get over the fact that they were conquered.
- Providing sex is an obligation within a marriage.
- Any sexual coercion constitutes rape.
I can’t tell you exactly how I would respond to a dude who defended Hitler, but I know what I wouldn’t do: stalk him on social media, contact his employer to try to get him fired, or lobby my government representative to help criminalize such talk.
Does this make me a free speech absolutist? Not quite. Like Robert Jensen, a professor emeritus at the University of Austin and prolific blogger, I suspect that most people who call themselves free speech absolutists don’t actually mean it. They wouldn’t countenance speech like “Let’s go kill a few Germans this morning. Here, have a gun.” Instead, they’re prepared to “impose a high standard in evaluating any restriction on speech,” Jensen writes. “In complex cases where there are conflicts concerning competing values, [they] will default to the most expansive space possible for speech.”
In other words, they’re free speech maximalists. A more contemporary and nuanced variant of absolutism, the maximalist position grants special status to free speech and puts the burden of proof on those who wish to curtail it. While accepting some restrictions in time, place, and manner, free speech maximalism defaults to freedom of content. It aligns with the litmus test developed by US Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, which holds that government should limit its regulation of speech to speech that dovetails with lawless action. Let’s go kill a few Germans? Not kosher. The only good German is a dead one? Fair game.
Some pundits view this position as misguided. A 2025 Dispatch article titled “Is Free Speech Too Sacred?” laments America’s descent into an era of “free speech supramaximalism,” in which “not only must speech prevail over other regulation, but nearly everything is sooner or later described and defended as speech.”
A New Statesman essay about Elon Musk, written a few months before he acquired Twitter (now X), decries Musk’s “maximalist conception of free speech usually adopted by teenage boys and libertarian men in their early 20s, before they realise its limitations and grow out of it.” The implication: free speech maximalism is an unserious pitstop on the way to more mature thinking. Only testosterone-soaked young men, drunk on their first taste of freedom, would spend more than a minute on such a naïve view.
This 69-year-old woman disagrees. I grew into my passion for free speech during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the pressure to conform in both word and deed reached an intensity I had never witnessed before. Any concerns about the labyrinthine lockdown rules elicited retorts like “moral degenerate” or “mouth-breathing Trumptard.” (Ask me how I know.)
Unexpectedly jolted into awareness of free speech principles, I began reading John Stuart Mill and Jean-Paul Sartre and writing essays about freedom of expression in the Covid era. One thing led to another, and in 2025 the newly minted Free Speech Union of Canada found a spot for me on its organizing committee. What most of us in the group shared, along with age spots and facial wrinkles, was a maximalist position on free speech. Perhaps we’re all immature. Or maybe we’ve lived long enough to understand exactly what we lose when free speech goes AWOL.
But, but, what about hate speech? Free speech maximalism posits that you can’t regulate an inherently subjective concept. As Greg Lukianoff and Ricki Schlott note in the book The Cancelling of the American Mind, “as soon as you start legislating based on a concept as loosely defined and subjective as offense, you open the floodgates to every group and individual claim of offense.” This argument may well explain why Canada’s proposed Bill C9, the Combatting Hate Act, remains stalled after protracted parliamentary debate.
Is “You cannot change sex” hate speech or merely opinion? Is “You have a big Black butt” an offensive remark? It surely depends on who says it, how it’s said, and who hears it. One person may react to the big-butt comment with reflexive outrage, while another may simply shrug. When said tenderly to a lover, the statement may elicit a full-throated laugh. Offense is in the eye of the beholder.
A case in point: In 2017, the US Patent and Trademark Office refused to register the name “The Slants” (an Asian rock band) because of its derogatory, or hateful, connotations. The bandleader sued and the Supreme Court ultimately agreed that “giving offense is a particular viewpoint” and a law restricting expression on the basis of viewpoint violated the First Amendment.
And here’s the thing: when you embrace viewpoint diversity as an ideal, you tend to get less offended about things. You may profoundly disagree with a statement, but it won’t cause you to puff up in outrage. Someone can tell you that the sky is green or women can’t think logically or Hitler was right about some things and you allow the words to bounce off your emotional core. It’s a liberating habit of mind.
And if you do get offended? Big whoop. You’ll survive. During a recent bus trip from Whistler to Vancouver, my seatmate, a doctor, took it upon himself to share his candid opinions about women with me: they make poor leaders, they don’t have a head for advanced math, they can’t take a raunchy joke, they’re responsible for cancel culture, and society would work better if they stayed home. I survived. I wasn’t traumatized.
Truth be told, I quite enjoyed our conversation. He listened as much as he spoke. I even found a few grains of value in his arguments, and perhaps a couple of my retorts gave him pause. And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Humans of all stripes challenging and learning from each other.
And here I must pause to express disappointment in my own sex. Women, I have found, value free speech less than men do, and studies corroborate my perception. In one survey, 71 percent of men said they gave priority to free speech over social cohesion, while 59 percent of women held the opposite view. An article reporting on the survey affirmed that “across decades, topics, and studies, women are more censorious than men.” Boo.
Even with carte blanche to express ourselves, it’s impossibly difficult for us humans to lay bare our true thoughts. Self-censorship is baked into our DNA. Free speech maximalism serves as a counterweight to this force. It allows us to rise, even if timidly, above the lead blanket of social conformity draped over us by the finger-wagging classes. By exposing little bits of our true selves, we shed light on the glorious contradictions in the human condition – a benefit that serves not just angry young men, but women with age spots and everyone else.
To those concerned about the dangers of loosening our tongues, I offer Lukianoff’s bracing maxim: “You are not safer for knowing less about what people really think.”
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