The Way Out: Restoring a Culture of Civil Discourse

“If all mankind, minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

American culture in the past decade has strayed far from the moral clarity John Stuart Mill expressed in On Liberty.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination at Utah Valley University is the most prominent example, but incidents big and small have consumed free speech activities all over the country. 

Protests, including efforts to shut down opposing viewpoints, are not new in America. What is new is a growing acceptance of such tactics as legitimate – preferable even. 

A 2024 poll from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which is the nation’s most prominent free-speech advocacy organization, shows four-in-five Americans “agree to at least some degree with the idea that ‘words can be violence.’”

Of course, if words can be a form of violence, then countering “violent” words with actual violence is a logical response. Indeed, another poll from FIRE indicated one-third of college students say “using violence to stop campus speech” can be okay, the Wall Street Journal reported. And in a 2025 survey by Rutgers University and the Network Contagion Research Institute, “31% and 38% of respondents stated it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk and President Trump, respectively.”

Our country, then, is moving away from the long-held maxim that free speech is an inviolable virtue. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me seems as antiquated as turning a dial to change the TV station. 

We’re also coming up on our country’s 250th anniversary – a good time for a reminder that America has often wrestled with the boundaries of free speech, particularly that of a political nature, from the start. Before the Revolutionary War, dissent didn’t just provoke rebuttals; it often provoked fists or worse. Crowds enforced orthodoxy with tarring and feathering across the Colonies, with more than 70 recorded incidents in the decade leading up to the Declaration of Independence. One Loyalist magistrate named Thomas “Burnfoot” Brown was beaten, scalped, and had his feet burned so badly he lost toes — his ‘crime’ was speech and allegiance. Vigilante punishment worked as social control then, and it’s a cautionary tale now.

Even the Founders themselves split over where to draw the line. Benjamin Franklin argued the antidote to bad ideas is more debate, not less; James Madison insisted the “censorial power is in the people over the government, not the government over the people.” Yet only a few years later, President John Adams and the US Congress enacted the Sedition Act, which criminalized “false, scandalous, and malicious” writings against officials, in an early attempt to police political speech. 

Today’s arguments over words, institutional neutrality, and the cost of dissent aren’t new. They are recurring tests of whether we still believe truth emerges from open contest, not enforced consensus.

When the culture shifts, policy often follows it. That’s how politics works. That indeed appears to be what’s happening, and it’s coming from both parties. 

The Biden administration brazenly pressured private social media companies to censor users who published speech the administration did not like. And last month, Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the FCC, threatened a private company with retaliation if it did not take action against late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.

Let people argue about which was worse, it doesn’t really matter. The culture has shifted on free speech, and government policy is following that shift. That is dangerous. The consequences are unknowable and foreboding.

The only way out is the way we got in. A lot of smart people think that political leaders drive public attitudes, but that’s not generally true. In a system of government like ours, political leaders win when they reflect the prevailing public attitude that already exists: Donald Trump is president because, like him or not, he is the personification of a feeling and a mood present in a critical mass of the voting public.

So don’t look to political leaders to right the ship. They’re responding to their incentives, and those incentives come from the culture generally. The way out is to change the culture. And changing the culture happens slowly through millions of conversations and decisions carried out every single day, from the boardroom to the dinner table.

The First Amendment of the Constitution protects free speech from government interference, not private attempts to limit speech. But as private citizens and business leaders, we must promote a culture of civil discourse. 

We’ll leave you how we began, with a quote from John Stuart Mill:

“But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. If wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit: the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”