Free speech as a concept means that the unpowerful, unpopular ideas are protected by the same laws that protect powerful unpopular ideas. If you want to protect

Free speech as a concept means that the unpowerful, unpopular ideas are protected by the same laws that protect powerful unpopular ideas. If you want to protect only the latter, you need to convince your culture that they want free political speech with exceptions. The whole point of lumping all speech together for the purposes of making it free is that the powerful can't make exceptions. Once you've said one kind of speech is coming from "the powerful," you've said that they are the ones deciding which ideas get to be exceptions! Surely we know better than to give the powerful more power as a means of protecting the powerless from them. Is it not contradictory to imagine that "the powerful" will not write these laws and decide how they are interpreted and enforced, when their ability to do those things is the definition of the set we, in this thought experiment, identify them as? In fact, the point you are making about unequal protection under imbalances of power is perhaps even an argument for maintaining an absolutist stance against reasonable exceptions - because that's an effective tactic for protecting something in a flawed political world that can turn those exceptions into things you didn't imagine when voicing support for them.