I was pretty damned conservative twenty years ago. I was also pretty damned pro-censorship. I was willing to debate that books that I hadn't read should be restricted. I was a teenager. Like most teenagers, I was an idiot.
It was during my senior year of high school that I was introduced to the issue of the book Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors. This should have been a perfect target for censorship. I took a law class in which we were assigned to write our opinions about whether or not the book should be banned. The thing is, we were all writing our opinions without reading the book. It's available now; but, twenty years ago, due to lawsuits and other poor decisions by the American judiciary, it wasn't accessible to most kids in high school.
We knew that the book had been used by real murderers who saw the book as a how-to manual. There was a movie made about one of the lawsuits, which was shown to us in class, that was sympathetic to the side of censorship. I still found myself compelled to defend the book.
What isn't well known is that the book was written by a housewife in Florida who clearly only intended the book to be entertainment. To this day, I think that she did nothing wrong. If I cut off somebody's ear, and I cite Reservoir Dogs as my inspiration, Quentin Tarantino shouldn't be sued for that.
That was about twenty years ago. I still viewed free speech as an ancillary issue until the Charlie Hebdo shooting.
Before that happened, free speech was still an issue that existed mostly in my adrenal glands and not in my prefrontal cortex. I would have agreed with the idea that free speech is only violated by the state and not by the people.
I was always wrong.
It didn't just take the deaths of twelve people in Paris to wake me up. It took the fact that people apologized for the murderers. It's that there were seemingly millions of people who were willing to defend the murderers just because they murdered people who said offensive stuff.
I had to take the opposite view of everybody and anybody who defended the murderers. I think that that's the most basic response that anybody with a moral compass can have. It didn't matter that I had never read an issue of Charlie Hebdo (I have since), I decided that I was Charlie and I stand by that. If people are gunned down because of what they said, and your response is, "Well, what did they say?" you're a shit bag.
After all of this, I've become aware that I've read several books on free speech and most people don't even know that books on free speech exist.
Read Defending My Enemy. Read The Tyranny of Silence. Read A Duty to Offend. Read On Liberty. Read A Plea for Free Speech in Boston.
If you don't, I really don't care what your opinion on free speech is.
You're probably wrong.