Free speech has a holiday most Americans have never celebrated. The third full week of October is National Free Speech Week, and as Lathan Watts notes in a piece for American Thinker, there are no appliance sales or happy hour specials to mark the occasion. The absence of festivities isn’t the point, though. The point is that rights survive only when each generation takes up their defense โ and by one measure, the rising generation is struggling with the assignment.
Watts points to a recent Buckley Institute survey that found nearly half of American college students โ 45 percent โ believe physical violence can be justified to stop what they call “hate speech.” That number alone would be cause for concern among civil libertarians. The follow-up finding is stranger still: 72 percent of the students who said violence can be justified to stop hate speech also agreed that the First Amendment protects hate speech.
Watts flags the contradiction plainly, inviting readers to slow down over it. The students appear to hold two ideas at once โ that the Constitution shields hateful expression from government interference, and that private individuals may answer such expression with force. Read together, the survey results suggest a generation that has absorbed the text of the First Amendment without absorbing its logic.
The trouble with an undefined term
A large part of the problem, in Watts’s telling, is definitional. “Hate speech” is rarely spelled out with any precision, and when someone does attempt a definition, the explanation tends to lean on even vaguer language. The result, he argues, is a concept that collapses into “any speech that I hate” โ and a private right of enforcement that follows from it. The students’ implicit logic, as he frames it: the government can’t silence you for offending me, but I can.
He invokes Robert Frost’s standard for education โ the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence โ and concludes that some students are earning degrees without getting educated. He also borrows from Ralph Waldo Emerson to describe a broader cultural habit: the vulgar mistake of feeling persecuted whenever one is contradicted. In an era where speech is treated as violence and violence as speech, that reflex can make a violent response feel justified.
The piece places a recent tragedy in that frame, referencing Erika Kirk and the murder of her husband for his speech โ not by the government, but by a fellow citizen. Watts poses the question directly: what solace is it that the state did not silence a speaker, when a peer does?
Paine’s warning and the shifting winds of orthodoxy
Watts reaches back to Thomas Paine for the core of his argument. Paine’s admonition was that anyone who would secure his own liberty must guard even his enemy from oppression, because violating that duty establishes a precedent that will eventually reach back to himself. The First Amendment protects unpopular speech for exactly this reason, Watts writes: popular opinion moves quickly, and no one can predict which of today’s orthodoxies will be heresy tomorrow.
He offers a partial explanation for the survey results. Young people raised inside algorithm-driven social media may be so ideologically siloed that they rarely encounter an opposing view in any sustained way. Having little practice answering speech with speech, they reach for something else โ and in doing so, he warns, they set the very precedent that could one day be turned against them.
The essay lightens the mood with a reference to The Princess Bride, in which Inigo Montoya tells his employer Vizzini, “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.” Watts applies the line to both “free speech” and “hate speech,” and adds a Vizzini-ism of his own: the notion that these students’ own views could someday be branded hateful is, in the character’s word, inconceivable.
Why it matters beyond campus
The survey is a campus snapshot, but Watts treats it as a warning for the country. Civil discourse, he writes, is the bedrock of democracy, and the pursuit of truth requires debate. He is explicit that the right of the speaker does not depend on the sensibilities of the listener โ and that this holds whether the threat is government censorship or the heckler’s veto.
Silencing speech, in his account, cheats both sides: the speaker and the listener lose the chance to learn from each other, to understand each other, or to change their minds. American political conversation has always had a raucous streak, and the rhetoric of 21st-century influencers may lack the polish of the country’s oratorical forebears. But in Watts’s view, free speech is no less deserving of protection now than it was when the Constitution was ratified.
The piece closes on that note of urgency โ and on a bit of irony, arguing that the right to speak freely is most crucial to the republic at precisely the moment a large share of its youngest citizens say violence is an acceptable response to words.
Source: www.americanthinker.com โ https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/how-can-we-defend-free-speech-if-we-can-t-define-it/