Free Speech - of the general variety - has long been considered an American value. Idiomatically it has been broader than protection from government censorship.

Free Speech - of the general variety - has long been considered an American value. Idiomatically it has been broader than protection from government censorship. If your rebuttal to someone is to ignore widely-known idiom to focus on a particular detail that does nothing to undermine their actual point, please reconsider whether that was really a contribution worth making.