Cancelling Freedom of Speech

The suspension of The Jimmy Kimmel Show in the United States has been greeted by some as overdue accountability and by others as the latest blow against freedom of expression. For those inclined to shrug, it is worth pause in grave concern because this touches the very foundations of liberal democracy, which, since its birth in the Enlightenment, has rested on a fragile conviction that speech, even if offensive, unsettling, or wrong, must remain free, because the health of democracy depends on it.

From the eighteenth century onwards, liberal thinkers taught us that free speech is not a mere luxury but as a necessity for a democratic dispensation and belief tolerance. David Hume, writing in Of the Liberty of the Press (1741), argued that a free press was “the sacred flame of liberty” which alone preserved Britain from tyranny. Truth, he insisted, emerges not from decrees but from “argument amongst friends.”

Immanuel Kant, in his 1784 essay What is Enlightenment?, famously defined modernity as the moment when individuals are permitted the “public use of reason,”that is, to argue openly, even against their rulers. Kant was no libertine; he distrusted human passions and sought strong order in politics. Yet he recognised that only the testing of ideas in public could secure progress. To close the space for dissent was to infantilise citizens, reducing them from rational agents to dependants in need of guardianship, aka a dictator.

The liberal wager, then, was twofold: first, that individuals, given freedom, could discern truth from falsehood; and second, that democracy itself could survive only by protecting this space of contestation. John Stuart Mill sharpened this insight in On Liberty (1859). Even a false opinion, Mill wrote, is valuable, for it compels truth to defend itself, and prevents conviction from ossifying into dogma. To silence a man, he warned, is “to rob the human race.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, observing America in the 1830s, added another layer. The greatest danger to democracy, he noted, was not state censorship but the “tyranny of the majority,” meaning the tendency of public opinion to smother dissenting voices. “I know of no country where there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America,” he wrote. Tocqueville saw that formal rights were not enough; cultural tolerance of dissent was equally vital.

Measured against this liberal inheritance, the suspension of Kimmel is more than a programming decision. It is a symptom of what Tocqueville foresaw: the coercive weight of majority opinion, now amplified by corporate platforms eager to appease outrage. The irony is stark. In the United States, figures like Charlie Kirk have long enjoyed wide platforms from which to broadcast hatred, racism, homophobia, and Islamophobia. His rhetoric, fanning resentment and suspicion, was not mere abstraction. The murder of Riley June Kirk, a trans woman, has been traced directly to the climate of hostility stoked by his words and others like them. Here is the American paradox: incendiary speech that corrodes public trust and emboldens violence is tolerated, even rewarded, while satire that unsettles or offends is sanctioned.

The lesson is not that Kirk should be censored while Kimmel should be protected. Rather, it is that the line between dangerous and permissible speech is far harder to draw than either censors or their critics admit. Once we grant to institutions, the state, corporations, or public opinion, the authority to decide which voices to silence, the principle itself is lost.

South Africans know, perhaps more intimately than most, the dangers of state censorship. Under apartheid, the printed word, theatre, music, and public assembly were ruthlessly policed. To speak truth to power was to risk banning orders, exile, or imprisonment. It is one of the paradoxes of the new democracy that those who once wielded censorship now cloak themselves in the mantle of free speech when we consider the campaigns of certain Afrikaner organisations in the past decade. They have repeatedly taken to international platforms, especially in the United States, to spread the demonstrably false claim of a “white genocide” in South Africa. The rhetoric has been lurid, alleging a state-sanctioned extermination of farmers and feeding directly into the conspiratorial ecosystem of American far-right politics. These claims have been eagerly broadcast by sympathetic politicians and commentators abroad.

And yet, for all their falsehood and inflammatory potential, these organisations have not been cancelled. They enjoy the protection of South Africa’s constitution and the tolerance of its civil space. The contradiction is unavoidable: Afrikaner groups may propagate lies of existential violence without reprisal, but an American comedian can be suspended for remarks that, offensive or not, remain within the bounds of satire and debate. What explains the difference? Partly, it is the unevenness of institutional power. South Africa, scarred by its history, is hesitant to silence minority voices, even when they distort truth. The United States, in contrast, has developed a culture of corporate overcorrection, in which the swiftest path to safety is to excise the offending voice.

It is tempting to view cancellation as a form of accountability, a way of reminding public figures that words have consequences. And in a limited sense, that is true. But cancellation, unlike debate or rebuttal, does not engage with speech. It extinguishes it. It says not, “You are wrong! You may not speak!” This distinction matters because democracy is not secured by the correctness of opinions but by the freedom to contest them. Once the mechanism of silencing is legitimised, it can be turned against anyone. They come for the satirists today, the dissidents tomorrow, the citizens after, and so forth. The history of censorship teaches us that suppression rarely stops at the initial target.

The murder linked to Kirk’s rhetoric illustrates the hard edge of the dilemma. Speech can be dangerous. It can wound communities, embolden bigots, and, in extreme cases, inspire violence. But to respond with cancellation is to risk throwing out the liberal wager itself. Mill’s insight remains uncomfortably relevant. The danger of suppressing falsehood is greater than the danger of tolerating it, for suppression disarms society of the very tools it needs to resist and refute.

At stake, finally, is a vision of the citizen. Do we trust people to weigh arguments, to distinguish satire from incitement, falsehood from truth? Or do we imagine them as so vulnerable that words must be carefully rationed on their behalf? To cancel speech is, in the end, to cancel the democratic subject. It is to replace citizens with wards, guided not by reason but by guardians who decide what they may hear or say.

Hume’s optimism, Kant’s confidence in public reason, Mill’s insistence on liberty, Tocqueville’s warnings against conformity, all converge here. The life-blood of democracy is a messy creative chaos and an ongoing arguments rather than safety from offence and exposure. When free speech is silenced by cancellation, then democracy itself shrinks. 

The suspension of a television programme may appear trivial in the grand sweep of history. But it signals a deeper unease with the system of democracy. Liberal democracy is built on the discomfort of disagreement. To silence voices, whether by state decree, corporate policy, or mob outrage, is to betray that inheritance. The lesson of the past is not that words are harmless. It is that the suppression of words is more dangerous still. A democracy that cancels free speech cancels its own future.