Freedom of speech is important because it is a foundational bedrock upon which other liberties are built and flourish. Without it, other liberties are undermine

Freedom of speech is important because it is a foundational bedrock upon which other liberties are built and flourish. Without it, other liberties are undermined and slowly eroded away. It is worth reminding people that one of the revolutionary facets of the US Constitution is that it was created to protect, not to establish, already existing natural rights. That seems to be the main issue I have seen with the current leaning towards nordic-europeanism in the intelligensia and academia, is that they have forgotten the foundational matter that the American revolution was about natural rights that exist completely independent of the decleration, the bill of rights, or the constitution themselves. In the end, freedom of speech is about natural rights, and natural rights by their nature are about individual freedom. Individual freedom is the true American Exceptionalism, that has been perverted and twisted into jingoistic vapid-nationalism by the oligarchs. The oligarchs then strawman against individual freedom (the main true threat to their power), by attacking the false narrative they created and pushed in the first place. Key reading for natural rights: John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Paine, Zeno of Citium (and the stoics in general), Martin Luther, gnostic religions in general, Hegel, Benjamin Tucker, Ludwig von Mises.