Free Speech

I’m increasingly uncomfortable with what passes for “free speech”.

Not because people have opinions, that’s healthy.
But because outrage, caricature, and cruelty are being dressed up as courage.

We’ve slid into a twilight zone where saying the most obnoxious, polarising thing possible is applauded as “telling it like it is”. It isn’t. It is performance. And it is becoming perversely profitable.

What we are witnessing is not a battle between left and right. It is a feedback loop.

Years of moralising doctrine have been met with unfiltered reactionary rhetoric, each side pulling the pendulum further from the centre, each escalation rewarded with more attention.

This is how adversarial politics produces adversarial leaders and adversarial societies. It always has.

But let’s be clear about the misdirection.
The problem isn’t skin colour.
It isn’t religion.
It isn’t sex or sexuality.

The common denominator is greed for power, status, belonging, clicks, followers, and votes.

Greed is the mindset that turns difference into threat and speech into a weapon. It convinces people there must be an “other” to blame.

There isn’t. There is only us.

Free speech was never meant to be freedom from responsibility. It was meant to allow ideas to be expressed without fear, not to normalise contempt, intellectual laziness, or the outsourcing of personal accountability.

We all have the absolute power to do what is human and right.
Use it, don’t give it away to those who trade in hate and fear.