I don’t think I believe in freedom of speech anymore.

There. I said it.

I can already imagine somebody reading that and immediately preparing the lecture.

“But freedom of speech means…”

Yeah, okay. I know what it means. You don’t have to tell me twice.

That isn’t really what I’m talking about anymore.

What bothers me is the way people talk about freedom of speech as though it is this universal belief we all share. After years of watching the internet, politics, celebrity culture and cancellation discourse, I don’t believe that.

Most people seem to defend someone’s freedom of speech when they care about that particular person. Their politics might align. They might belong to the same community. Maybe they simply like them.

When somebody they hate gets into trouble, the conversation suddenly becomes about consequences and who is entitled to a platform.

Some of those arguments can make sense depending on the situation.

I still wish people would admit how selective all of this is.

My own feelings about speech are probably selective too. I’m not presenting myself as some perfect freedom of speech absolutist. I think that is partly why the romantic version of the idea stopped making sense to me.

Jimmy Kimmel is probably one of the reasons this blog exists

I don’t think I’m ever going to completely let go of the Jimmy Kimmel situation.

I’m serious.

I also have no interest in spending half this article reproducing everything Jimmy Kimmel said or turning this into a political explainer. That is not how I write.

You can look it up.

I’m talking about how I experienced the whole thing.

Charlie Kirk had just been killed in an incredibly public way. Footage spread everywhere. People actually saw what happened.

That matters to me.

There is a different emotional context when somebody’s death becomes something people can physically watch. I’m not saying his death was equivalent to 9/11. The comparison in my head comes from the existence of footage and the disturbing experience of knowing that people around the world watched a human being die.

It also happened on September 10, which is Suicide Prevention Day, one day before September 11.

The entire thing already felt horrible.

People were grieving. They had also been exposed to graphic footage of what happened.

Then Jimmy Kimmel started commenting on the situation.

I found some of it incredibly weird.

Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you thought it was funny. You might think I’m being ridiculously sensitive.

Okay.

My reaction was still basically: Dude, why would you say that right now?

Let people fucking grieve.

Why pour salt in the wound?

Even if you don’t believe he was directly joking about Charlie Kirk’s death, I still found the timing bizarre. Sometimes I genuinely don’t understand why every horrifying event needs immediate comedy or commentary.

Something awful happened. Maybe leave it alone for five fucking minutes.

Then I watched everybody rush to Jimmy Kimmel’s defense.

Celebrities suddenly had a lot to say. SAG AFTRA had a lot to say. Freedom of expression became incredibly important.

Jimmy Kimmel eventually went back to work, and the whole consequence felt like a slap on the wrist to me.

I remember sitting there thinking, seriously? This is the freedom of speech emergency?

There are people whose ability to speak freely affects whether they stay safe. There are people who cannot freely access information.

Yet this was where so much cultural energy went.

That pissed me off.

It still does.

I think Jimmy Kimmel should have gone independent

This might be the strangest thing I took away from that entire situation.

If I were Jimmy Kimmel, I would have gone independent.

If I had his money, audience and connections, and a giant television network decided it didn’t want me anymore, my reaction would probably be:

Fine.

Bye.

I would build something myself.

Why wait for a giant corporation to decide when you are allowed to have your microphone back?

That whole situation made me think differently about platforms.

It also helped me understand why I wanted this blog.

I wanted somewhere that felt like mine. I wanted a place where I could write what I actually thought without sitting around waiting for somebody else to decide that my thoughts were acceptable enough.

Obviously, my website still exists through technology that other companies operate. I understand that.

I’m talking about the mentality.

Rely on yourself as much as you reasonably can.

Own copies of your work. Keep writing somewhere else if one place disappears. Build something you have some control over.

Nobody is guaranteed to come and protect you.

Stop assuming somebody will defend you

People are selective about who they defend.

Gina Carano is one of the examples I keep thinking about.

You don’t have to like Gina Carano. You don’t have to agree with everything she ever said either.

I’m interested in the difference in energy.

One person gets pushed out and people immediately start talking about consequences.

Another person gets pushed out and suddenly the entertainment industry becomes incredibly concerned about expression.

That discrepancy bothers me.

Now imagine somebody who isn’t Gina Carano or Jimmy Kimmel.

Imagine some random blogger with a few hundred readers.

They write something people hate. Somebody screenshots it. Suddenly they are being dogpiled or mass reported.

Who is releasing a statement for them?

Probably nobody.

Most people don’t even know they exist.

They have to defend themselves.

Accepting that has actually made me less afraid.

If nobody is guaranteed to rescue me, I don’t see much point in constructing my entire personality around keeping strangers happy.

If somebody tries to cancel me over something I write, okay.

I said what I said.

If I later realize I was wrong, maybe I’ll change my mind. If I still believe it, I’ll explain myself.

If somebody screenshots the article, whatever.

It still existed.

I’ll probably write about the drama in my diary too.

You are not going to break me because you got angry at something I wrote on the internet. I’m more stubborn than that.

Completely erasing someone is harder than it used to be

I can already imagine somebody asking how I would feel if somebody I loved were banned.

What if Amélie Nothomb suddenly couldn’t publish another book?

I would be devastated.

I also live in 2026, when blogs, self-publishing, websites, computers, flash drives, and paper all exist. People already know how to communicate without waiting for one massive institution to approve everything first, and I don’t think that knowledge is going anywhere.

If one publisher refuses somebody, other ways of publishing exist. If one network removes somebody, independent platforms still exist. That does not guarantee the same audience or income, and it could completely suck, but removing somebody from one platform is not the same as erasing their thoughts. I’m not trying to justify censorship. I’m saying those things are different.

If every online platform I use disappeared tomorrow, I would still have my diary, my computer, and a flash drive where I could save my writing. I would also still have my mind. Nobody owns that. Nobody can climb into my head and delete an opinion because they dislike it.

Obviously, even the mind itself can be taken from us. Alzheimer’s killed my grandmother, and I know there are illnesses that can destroy memory and thought. Maybe that is one reason I value my own mind so much while I have it.

Some random person online cannot take it away from me. Neither can Hollywood. Unless somebody invents actual mind reading, my thoughts are still private.

People also use freedom of speech as an excuse for everything

This is another part of the conversation that pisses me off.

Somebody says something horrible and immediately invokes freedom of speech.

Someone behaves like an asshole, gets criticized for it, and suddenly their rights are supposedly under attack.

Maybe I’m stupid.

Maybe somebody who studied political philosophy for seven years could tell me exactly why my opinion makes no sense.

Maybe my opinion doesn’t matter.

You know what?

I don’t really care.

I still think this.

I don’t understand how freedom of speech can be treated as sacred enough to excuse almost anything somebody says while people remain incredibly selective about whose speech they defend.

If somebody tells me I have to tolerate vile speech because people have the right to say horrible things, I’m going to notice when that principle mysteriously disappears once the speaker is somebody they despise.

I also wish people would stop throwing the phrase “freedom of speech” around as though it automatically makes shitty behavior acceptable.

Sometimes people seem to pick up the concept whenever it helps them and drop it when it becomes inconvenient.

That is one of the reasons I’ve become exhausted with the whole conversation.

I have limits too

I’m not pretending I support every conceivable form of expression.

There are things people create that disturb the shit out of me.

AO3 is an easy example.

I have found fanfiction there that genuinely made me wonder what the fuck I was reading. Some subjects make me deeply uncomfortable even when I know everything is fictional.

I understand that fiction can depict horrible things.

I also know that writing about something doesn’t automatically mean the writer approves of it.

That doesn’t prevent me from occasionally looking at something and wondering why anybody wanted to create it.

So maybe I’m a hypocrite too.

Fine.

I would rather admit that than pretend I have some completely pure commitment to unlimited expression.

Everybody eventually finds something that tests their own limits.

That is another reason unconditional freedom of speech feels unrealistic to me.

I also come from a different culture

The American conversation around banned books is another subject I don’t always fully understand.

Sometimes I understand the arguments. Sometimes I look at the debate and realize I grew up somewhere completely different.

Americans might view certain books as obvious parts of school education. My own education did not necessarily work that way.

The Diary of Anne Frank is one example.

Different countries focus on different histories and teach different books.

That doesn’t mean I support banning books.

It means I don’t automatically approach every American cultural argument with an American understanding of education.

Sometimes I think people forget how culturally specific these conversations can be.

Then I think about North Korea

This is where I start losing patience.

People can spend days talking about the freedom of speech of a wealthy American television personality.

Meanwhile, North Korea exists.

How many people passionately defending freedom of expression know anything about Liberty in North Korea?

How many have ever listened to defectors?

How many are curious about what happens to somebody who genuinely cannot access information freely?

I know people can care about multiple things.

I KNOW.

I’m talking about the amount of attention involved.

I don’t understand how somebody can be intensely interested in Jimmy Kimmel’s freedom of speech while having almost no curiosity about places where speech itself can put people in danger.

You don’t have to care equally about every country on Earth.

Pick one.

Learn about North Korea. Learn about Iran. Find somewhere that makes the concept of freedom matter to you beyond an American celebrity controversy.

That feels far more meaningful to me.

Iran is where this becomes extremely personal for me

Iran bothers me for similar reasons.

Mahsa Amini was twenty two years old.

Her death became connected to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Women protested. People took risks that somebody sitting safely behind a screen might never have to take.

I sometimes think back to the feminist internet culture I saw during the 2010s and wonder why Iran seemed so absent.

I know people were talking about Iranian women somewhere.

I’m describing what I personally saw.

I remember endless Tumblr activism and endless conversations about what everybody was supposed to care about.

Iran rarely felt like one of those huge cultural causes until something awful happened.

Then everybody noticed.

Eventually, the internet found something else.

Iranian women still had to continue living their lives after Western social media became interested in another topic.

That pisses me off.

I’m also not going to pretend I care equally about every international issue.

I don’t.

Afghanistan is not something I’m particularly interested in following right now.

Maybe somebody thinks that sounds horrible.

Fine.

I’m being honest.

Nobody can care intensely about everything happening on this planet.

My problem is the way selective attention sometimes gets presented as universal morality.

Watching ordinary Iranians has also challenged my own assumptions

I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos from Iran.

People go to cafés, study, run errands and try to live ordinary lives. Sometimes I catch myself thinking, wait, isn’t everything supposed to be completely destroyed?

That reaction reminds me how easily outsiders reduce an entire country to whatever reaches us through the news. A café vlog cannot show me everything happening in Iran, but neither can a news report. Both are fragments.

People continue living under repression. They make plans, go to work, meet friends and find small pieces of normality. None of that means political problems have disappeared. It means ordinary life does not stop existing just because a country is dealing with war, repression or instability.

I’ve never been to Iran, so I cannot tell you what everyday life there feels like. I’m watching somebody else’s footage and trying not to mistake it for the whole picture.

If somebody from Iran ever finds this blog, I genuinely want to know what I’m missing. Are these videos representative, or am I watching a tiny bubble? Should I be following different people? Would another news source give me a better understanding?

I would rather hear from somebody who knows the country and be told that I’m wrong than pretend I became an Iran expert because YouTube recommended me a few videos.

That is one reason independent voices matter to me. I want to hear Iranians talk about Iran. I want to hear North Korean defectors talk about North Korea. People who live through a country’s reality should have some role in shaping how outsiders understand it.

Palestine is another reason slogans exhaust me

People scream, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Okay.

Do you actually care about Palestinian people?

Do you care whether they can speak freely and whether journalists can do their jobs?

Do you care enough to learn anything about ordinary Palestinian lives?

Those questions interest me more than a slogan.

I’m not saying this because I want to attack everybody who supports Palestine.

I’m exhausted by activism becoming performance.

Somebody posts the approved sentence and feels like they participated.

Eventually, social media moves on.

The people who actually live there do not disappear when the trend does.

That disconnect bothers me.

I don’t understand why Hollywood still gets this much attention

People can barely afford groceries.

People are worried about rent and jobs. Many are politically exhausted.

A lot of people are trying to build some normal personal life without spending every waking hour consuming another crisis through their phone.

Meanwhile, Ukrainians are living through war.

Palestinians are trying to live.

Iranians are trying to live.

There are human beings dealing with things far bigger than whether a celebrity temporarily loses a television show.

Yet Hollywood still somehow becomes the center of these huge moral conversations.

I’m increasingly detached from it.

I’m trying to focus more on my own life.

I think a lot of people are.

There is only so much political outrage a person can absorb before everything starts becoming noise.

What interests me much more now is ordinary life.

I like seeing somebody in a difficult place still go out for coffee. I like seeing people keep working and finding little pieces of normality.

That kind of resilience means more to me than another celebrity statement.

Then Marjane Satrapi died

This is the part that genuinely gets to me.

Marjane Satrapi died.

Yes, there were tributes.

I know people cared.

I know she was not ignored by the entire world.

Then Hayden Panettiere died.

Then Dolly Parton died.

Suddenly I saw grief everywhere.

Another Rest in Peace Dolly post.

Another one.

Honestly, if I see one more right now, I might fucking scream.

May Dolly Parton rest in peace.

Seriously.

I’m not angry at Dolly Parton. I don’t think Hayden Panettiere’s life mattered less either.

I keep thinking:

HELLO?

WHERE WAS THIS ENERGY FOR MARJANE?

Why did her death feel so much smaller?

Why did so many people seem unaware of who she was?

How can somebody be interested in Iran or women’s freedom and have no idea who Marjane Satrapi was?

Her life mattered.

Persepolis mattered.

I wish more people had cared when she died.

I wish her death had introduced more people to her work. I wish more people had become curious about Iran because of her.

I don’t want anyone to mourn Dolly less.

I wanted Marjane to receive more attention.

That is what I mean.

I know somebody can make that sound horrible.

Someone can accuse me of comparing dead women or using Dolly’s death to complain about somebody else.

Okay.

I still know what I mean.

Marjane Satrapi’s life mattered to me.

Being less famous in American entertainment culture does not make somebody less significant.

Watching one death become a huge cultural event while another passes much more quietly really bothers me.

We do this with other deaths too

George Floyd became a global symbol.

His death mattered.

What happened to him mattered.

There were also other Black people whose deaths never became events that the entire world knew about, including Secoriea Turner, who was murdered at eight years old, and Kalecia “Pinky” Williams, who was sixteen when she died. There are many other examples. These are the ones that stayed with me.

Their families still lost somebody.

Their lives mattered too.

That discrepancy has always bothered me.

One person becomes the name everybody knows. Somebody else dies under circumstances that deserve attention too, and most people will never learn their name.

I know we cannot emotionally process every death in the world.

I know that.

I understand why one death becomes symbolic.

Understanding the explanation does not make the imbalance feel fair to me.

Some people become part of cultural memory.

Others disappear.

I hate that.

Selective might be the word that bothers me most

I keep coming back to selectivity because it seems to shape almost everything people say they believe about freedom.

Our speech principles are selective. So are our grief and our attention.

I do this too. There are countries I know very little about and causes I’m not emotionally invested in. I’m not pretending I wake up grieving every horrible thing happening on Earth. I would lose my fucking mind.

I just wish we were more honest about that. Our attention is limited, and our empathy has limits too. So when somebody presents their own selective causes as proof that they universally care about freedom, I get skeptical.

That is where I stopped believing in the version of freedom of speech people like to advertise.

Please save the 2015 Tumblr activist lecture

I already know somebody is going to try it.

You can send me every 2015 Tumblr activist argument you want. Give me the Rowan Blanchard, Yara Shahidi version of “here’s why you’re problematic.” Tell me I need to educate myself. Tell me my politics are wrong. Tell me I’m supposed to care about a completely different issue.

It is not going to work on me the way you think it will.

I’m twenty seven, and I have watched internet activism recycle itself for years. I’ve watched cancellations and hashtags come and go. I’ve watched people become obsessed with a cause, then move on as soon as the internet finds another one.

I have seen enough of that cycle.

Believe me, I wish I could innocently believe in some beautiful universal version of freedom of speech. I can’t.

Maybe that makes me cynical. Fine. That cynicism came from somewhere.

And no, this stubbornness is not entirely because I’m a Taurus sun.

Probably.

I’m also fucking tired

I think a lot of people are.

Political fatigue is real, and the economy is exhausting. People are trying to afford their lives. Eventually, you start protecting your own peace. I have.

I still care about things. Obviously. Nobody writes an article this fucking long because they don’t care.

I have detached from a lot of political culture because I don’t want my entire life to become one endless outrage cycle. I want to write, read, work and live my own life.

When something matters to me, I’ll talk about it. Iran matters to me. I used to be interested in North Korea. Marjane Satrapi still matters to me.

Those are the things I want to talk about right now. You don’t get to hand me a list of causes and decide that those are the subjects I’m morally required to care about.

Maybe I’m stupid. I still have an opinion.

Maybe I don’t understand every political theory. Maybe somebody with a doctorate could take my understanding of freedom of speech apart in five minutes. Maybe my opinion doesn’t matter.

You know what?

I don’t really care.

This is my blog. This is what I’ve seen, and this is how years of watching people argue about freedom have affected the way I understand it.

I’m not writing a Supreme Court decision. I’m trying to explain why something people describe as universal no longer feels universal to me.

Maybe I’ll think differently in ten years. Maybe I’ll reread this someday and wonder what the fuck I was talking about.

Fine.

I’m allowed to think while I’m still figuring things out. I’m allowed to have an imperfect opinion.

I’m going to protect my own voice

I don’t expect Hollywood to defend me.

I don’t expect SAG AFTRA to defend me.

I definitely don’t expect random strangers to suddenly discover their commitment to freedom of speech if I say something they hate.

I’m okay with that.

I have this blog.

I have my diary and my computer.

Most importantly, I have my mind.

You can disagree with me.

You can think my Jimmy Kimmel opinion is ridiculous.

You can think I’m insensitive for bringing up Marjane Satrapi while people are mourning Dolly Parton and Hayden Panettiere.

You can tell me I don’t understand Iran.

Maybe I don’t.

Write your own article.

Tell me why.

I’ll keep writing mine.

I don’t expect everybody to agree with me.

I don’t expect everybody to protect me either.

My voice does not stop existing because somebody else decided they disliked it.

You can close an account.

You can refuse to publish somebody.

You can criticize them.

Their thoughts still exist.

My thoughts are still mine.

You can send me every 2015 Tumblr activist argument in the book. You can call me stupid or screenshot this entire article.

None of that can erase what I’ve seen during my twenty seven years of life.

Believe me, I wish freedom of speech felt as universal as people claim it is.

To me, it doesn’t.

I still believe in having a voice and finding somewhere to keep it.

If nobody wants to hear something, I can write it in my diary.

If the internet disappears, I can save my work somewhere else.

My mind still belongs to me.

And as long as I can think and write, I’m going to fucking use it.