Free Speech Is Not the Highest Value - It's a Tool for Pursuing Truth and Common Good
Source: https://www.facebook.com/americanspectator/. "Is Free Speech Really the Highest Value? | The American Spectator | USA News and Politics." February 13, 2026. spectator.org
The Gist
The author argues that free speech isn't the most important American value - it's just a tool. Instead of treating all speech as equally valuable, we should use free speech to find truth and serve the common good, with religious liberty being more fundamental than unlimited expression.
Conclusion
Free speech should not be treated as the highest or most important value in American society, but rather as an instrumental good that serves the higher purposes of pursuing truth and the common good
Premises
- The Constitution's Preamble emphasizes the 'Blessings of Liberty' rather than liberty for its own sake, indicating liberty serves substantive ends
- In the First Amendment, religious liberty clauses come before the free speech clause, suggesting religious liberty has priority
- Free speech systems historically exist to help pursue objective Truth, not to validate individual subjective truths or opinions
- The common good should be the foremost goal of politics, with free speech being one good among many in that broader basket
- When speech becomes unmoored from the pursuit of truth, it loses its claim to full protection as legitimate speech
- Charlie Kirk exemplified the proper approach by using free speech as a tool to bring others closer to truth, not to glorify speech itself
Assumptions
- There exists an objective Truth that can be pursued through discourse
- The common good is a coherent concept that can guide political decisions
- Religious liberty and truth-seeking are more fundamental values than unrestricted expression
- Some forms of expression (like transgender claims) are objectively false rather than matters of opinion
- The Constitution's structure and ordering reflects a hierarchy of values