The first hurdle that we all need to jump when it comes to securing, not only a state, but a culture of free speech is finally showing people that free speech is something that you can learn about.
Right now, I'd dare to say that well more than 99% of people think that opinions of free speech are simply indignant, verbal ejaculations meeting indignant, verbal ejaculations. Also, that opinions about punishments from unpopular speech, offensive speech, outright false speech, and downright hateful speech are all relative and valid. Moreso, that the lines to be drawn concerning the limits of acceptable speech are arbitrary.
Show of hands, how many of you have read one book entirely devoted to the issue of free speech in your lifetime? Not a pamphlet, not an article, a book. If not a book, I'll take speeches or essays like Join Milton's Areopagitica or Fredrick Douglass's A Plea for Free Speech in Boston. Charb's book Open Letter can be easily read in one sitting; so, no excuses.
There's real scholarship on this issue. Is it hard science? No. But, to think that hard science is the only way to realize truth, especially moral truth, is utterly false and myopic.
When you combine the insights of the aforementioned John Milton and Frederick Douglass with the likes of John Stuart Mill, Thomas Pains, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Aryeh Neier, Flemming Rose, Christopher Hitchens, Philip Gourevitch, Greg Lukianoff, Johnathan Haidt, Brendan O'Neill Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Rauch, hell--Penn and Teller, the arguments for free speech are covered on legal, cultural, philosophical, and ethical (both deontological and consequential) levels.
Most of the people who are actively supporting free speech tooth and nail know who these people are and have read what they have to say.
That's not to say that, even among these great people, there's a hard consensus. There's still debate about lines and whether or not lines should even exist; but, those debates are informed.
I have to admit that before 2015, it didn't even occur to me that free speech was actually an issue that went beyond personal values. Finally, I was introduced to a flood of books devoted to the issue. Most of my free time and some of my work time since then has been devoted to consuming what I can about this issue.
It's time for us to stop pretending that free speech was codified, without exception, in the First Amendment to the Constitution just because it sounded nice. It wasn't because the founders just liked the idea and ejaculated it all over the page; they had a foundation for it.
If you want to challange that principle, you better build your house upon as solid a rock as the free speech advocates have built ours.