There are two factors at play when we talk about free speech. 1. The legal protections which are currently very strong in the US 2. The culture of free speech

There are two factors at play when we talk about free speech. 1. The legal protections which are currently very strong in the US 2. The culture of free speech As much as we like to think of law as impartial, the legal regime is downstream of, and lags the cultural milieu. If we degrade free speech culture then the legal protections become weaker after a couple of decades. You can see this at FIRE which successfully overturned college speech codes in the nineties and aughts. The return of new forms of speech codes, and new attempts at bad laws attempting to stifle protected speech (Florida's STOP WOKE act). They'll get overturned for now, but we may have seen the high point of legal protections for speech as younger legal theorists who don't prize free speech progress in their careers. [1] [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/24/yale-law-school-silberman-protest/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/24/yale-law-...