History is full of long stretches of dominance by noble ideas and despots, times of prosperity and of dark ages. Each of which must have seemed like they would never end to the people who lived through them. If you were a citizen of the Ottoman empire 1452, you probably didn't imagining life any other way. Ditto the height of the Roman empire. Ditto today.

Humans of all times have acclimated to their environment, their culture, and their politics. And while we've also always had historians and prophets proclaiming to know the future, through the tea leaves of the past or burning bushes, actually calling the advent of specific change at a specific time, with any degree of accuracy, has been and remains nearly impossible. It's just that kind of planet.

But it was a piece of fiction, rather than actual history, that made me think of this yesterday, as I watching the first episode of HBO's Game of Thrones prequel House of Dragons. It opens with the narration that the realm had been under sixty years of peaceful rule by King Jaehaerys Targaryen prior to the succession crisis of the plot. Sixty years.

And this story spawned not just an abstract meditation on the waxing and waning of peace and history, but on what's going on right now in the world we live in today, specifically with free speech.

I'm old enough to remember when it was the left of the west that carried the banner of free speech. That defended lurid and violent rap music, first-person shooter video games, raging against the machine, exposing big pharma, protesting wars of all kinds. The counter culture, the dissidents, the live-and-let-live ethos of free expression, and the "that's like just your opinion, maaaan".

I remember learning about the ACLU's Jewish attorneys suing the government for the right of neo-Nazis in 1977 to march the streets of Skokie, Illinois. Men of principle, defending the right of their sworn enemies to exercise constitutional freedoms, such that that right might protect causes they believed in at a later day.

That long stretch of peaceful rule and commitment to protecting free speech seems to have evaporated from much of the left today. In its place, we have the fig leaves of "misinformation" and "hate speech" failing to adequately cover the naked persecution of political adversaries. A fun-house mirror version of the right's old "won't somebody please think of the children" go-to argument for curbing free speech.

In case you haven't been following along in the last few weeks, let me catch you up. First, Brazil's left-wing judiciary just banned X from their internet because this one judge couldn't strong-arm the platform into banning his political enemies. Now he's decreed that any citizen that dares access X via VPN will risk a fine amounting to almost a year's median salary.

This barely two weeks after the European Union's Kommissar Thierry Buton threatened X with eviction from Europe, if Musk failed to censor "harmful content". Specifically referencing the grave danger of featuring an interview with one of the candidates for the US presidency, Donald Trump.

Finally, just two days ago, Robert Reich, the former US secretary of Labor under Clinton, called for the arrest of Elon Musk on a similar pretext of "misinformation" and "hate", echoing his fellow Brazilian and European censorship mongers.

Not exactly an idle threat, either, given the arrest of Telegram's CEO by French authorities on adjacent accusations of failing to collaborate with state authorities on moderation and policing of speech on that platform.

And while all this is going on, the UK is accelerating its existing crackdown on spicy memes, indignant Facebook posts, and other expressions of frustration over the country's handling of the mass migration issue that have been boiling over following a string of stabbings.

There are two common responses to this that seek to diminish the concern. One is to downplay these threats to free speech by playing up the danger posed by said "misinformation" and "hate speech". That's the "yeah, of course we believe in free speech, but IN THIS CASE...". I'd say that's probably the most common response I've heard from Canadians, Brits, and Europeans when I've voiced my concern over this issue.

The other is the more American response: This couldn't happen here. We have the first amendment! It'll protect us. Regardless of what bluster you hear from the likes of Reich and other would-be censors. And that's also been my go-to calming pill for coping with this alarming rise in authoritarian censorship around the western world, given that I live here.

But then I think of the sixty years of peaceful rule under Jaehaerys. And how we're just one succession crisis away from losing rights that have been taken for granted for several generations of Americans. It sounds paranoid, I know. Because any dystopian vision of the future usually does from the vantage point of a present that hasn't yet tipped.

Yet just cause you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. And I don't even think you have to be all that paranoid to see that they really are after free speech all over the west! From Canada to Britain, from Brazil to Brussels. The momentum is deeply authoritarian at the moment.

So I think you'd be right to worry that a grand turn of history is before us. But rather than throw up your hands, Private Hudson style, and say "Now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We're in some real pretty shit now, man!", I urge you to find your inner Corporal Hicks: "Let's move like we got a purpose".

The only way to defend free speech is to nuke the idea of benevolent censorship from orbit. Nobody has a monopoly on the truth, nobody can discern "misinformation" from truth consistently or without bias, and nobody can define "hate speech" in universally acceptable terms that don't recall blasphemy laws of centuries past. The alternative, betting on more speech to counter bad speech, isn't a guaranteed win every time, but it's by far the best option we've found so far.