They Don’t Want Freedom, They Want Sovereignty

Jason Arday was a pathological liar, a plagiarist, and an overall charlatan. Nathan Cofnas is a racist. Lindsey Graham was a warmonger and probably a closet case. Zohran Mamdani is a Marxist nepo baby with ties, and sympathies, to theocrats and theocracy.

Voila, I have just engaged in “free speech.” And because it’s free, none of you have any right to castigate me or try to exact penalties on me for saying any of this. Not without revealing yourselves as anti-”free speech culture.” I am indemnified, I am Sovereign. Right?

Wrong.

Today’s topic is one I’ve been circling for months, years, maybe this whole decade to a certain degree. I’ve lacked the vocabulary, really the neologism, to best contextualize it. I’ve talked around it, via articles variously about: the Overton Window, FAFO behavior, the rightlessness of error, the freedom to disassociate from bad actors or cranks, becoming “uncancelable,” and so on. But I never had right way in. I never had the exact verbiage I needed. Until now. We’re gonna talk about Sovereign Speech.

In reality, my opening paragraph is mostly a rhetorical device. But I’ll own the majority of those sentences cleanly, maybe minus the Graham slam (just because it’s speculative and trashy). The thing is, I’ve never said, and never will say, that I shouldn't suffer consequences or become a pariah for public statements. Freedom of speech and freedom of expression have never been about total indemnification from scrutiny or criticism. They’ve never even been about a general push to make unpopular statements sayable in most/all corners of public and private life.

Free speech/expression was always meant as, and will always be, a check on government power. A check against government censorship. That’s it, full stop. Not a rule for private employers, not a yardstick to judge your friends and enemies in selected or shared communities. That the concept has gotten so twisted, really perverted, by the internet in the 2020s means we need a new term for what so-called “free speech absolutists”—a fake identity in practice, but I’ll unpack that in a bit—are demanding.

I call it “Sovereign Speech.” It’s a weird, bastardized mix of the American 1st Amendment, notions of academic freedom, and Sovereign Citizen psychology. It’s important to remember that the 1st Amendment is United States law, yet many “absolutists,” whom I’ll heretofore address as “Sovereign Speech Advocates (SSAs), want that law applied globally. It’s telling that academic freedom is an largely informal and mutable concept meant to apply narrowly to universities, yet SSAs have turned fights about curriculum, faculty, and students into proving grounds for all of society. It’s informative that Sovereign Citizens think laws don’t apply to them, and, well…

Sovereign Speech (noun)

/ˈsɒv.rɪn spiːtʃ/

A rhetorical strategy and socio-political doctrine wherein a speaker demands total immunity from the social, reputational, professional, or financial consequences of their public expression. Unlike traditional concepts of freedom of speech—which protect individuals from direct state censorship or legal prosecution—Sovereign Speech posits that any negative reaction to expression (including criticism, loss of status/platform/employment, or voluntary disassociation) constitutes an illegitimate infringement on the speaker’s rights.

Coined as an analog to the Sovereign Citizen movement, whose adherents selectively cite legal terminology to claim exemption from statutory law while still demanding a mixture of standard and nonstandard legal protections. Similarly, practitioners of Sovereign Speech invoke first-amendment principles to secure an asymmetrical privilege: absolute freedom to express without reciprocity of judgment or association from others.

Core Characteristics include:

• Enforced Audience & Obligation: Conflates the right to speak with an entitlement to an audience, funding, employment, or platform. It interprets a listener’s decision to walk away or sever a contract as a form of “censorship.”

• Asymmetrical Protection: Positions the original utterance as protected “expression,” while framing any counter-speech, boycott, or negative review as “censorship” or “cancellation.”

• The Anti-Association Veto: Overrides the principle of free association by asserting that third parties (employers, institutions, event organizers) have a duty to maintain ties with a speaker regardless of conduct or reputational harm.

It’s my contention that “free speech culture,” as it’s called, is basically a fugazi. What SSAs mean when they invoke that term is Sovereign Speech, which is again a weird hodgepodge of 1A, academic freedom, and personal sovereignty. Given this, I think it’s important to label Sovereign Speech accurately. Not as a mere pejorative, but for linguistic accuracy. If “free speech” is legally defined across the board as freedom from the government, but SSAs are constantly invoking something they call “free speech” to argue against private employers having a right to fire people, or against private groups excommunicating members, then SSAs are talking past us all.

Let’s get back to Nathan Cofnas, our putative racist from earlier. I said I’d stand on this descriptor, and I will. Not to stack the deck against him, but as a descriptive fact of what his views and actions entail. I will add the qualifier “nonviolent,” if I must, but the man talks about himself as a possible leader or “Head” for a “Department of Eugenics and Race Science” at a major university in his ideal world. (He says this was a joke meant for private consumption, but does admit when pressed that it’s in-line with his real views and aspirations.) He is a firebrand for controversy, and he seems to relish in the attention his statements bring to his race realist ideology as well as his broader anti-DEI, anti-progressive/antiwoke political project. Few schools want him on staff.

And yet, the fact of his dismissal from Cambridge and the current issue of his suspension, pending investigation, at the University of Ghent, have become cause célèbres for the SSA crowd. To them, the decision of a university to penalize, sideline, or remove him is a horrible violation of his Sovereign Speech. One that they intend to fight by sending him money on Substack, uncritically promoting him and his work, playing obscurantist games around his views, and generally saying he’s being victimized by what they call the “woke mob” over nothing. A bit odd, all told.

I’ll say here by way of transparency that Cofnas’ situation has complications that others do not. He was the proximate originator of the scandal or expose regarding the late Jason Arday. Many view UGent’s decision to suspend and investigate him as directly and solely born of this exposure, a sort of vengeful tit-for-tat which many on the progressive end of the social and academic spectrums are pushing. Said progressives have been calling Arday’s exposure a miscarriage of justice, particularly after Arday’s death (widely assumed/implied to be a suicide). Most cases that SSAs latch onto don’t have details quite like these. That’s an important point to remember.

Now compare with Twitter, before it was X, and its decisions to ban or suppress certain accounts. SSAs would argue that the banning of people like Kanye “Ye” West, Alex Jones, and then-president Donald Trump were all violations of their speech rights. When Elon Musk took over Twitter and turned it into X, he rode in on the idea of championing “free speech.” Yet throughout this saga, few have found the language to properly challenge these premises. Is a private company not allowed to kick people out of its locality, or off of its service, as it sees fit? Free speech is about the government, after all. What does that have to do with a for-profit company running a club, in effect, on the internet? The language of Sovereign Speech helps us contextualize it, at least.

What about Karen Attiah? She’s probably the most high profile case of a journalist being fired for saying inflammatory, false, and otherwise inadvisable things in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. If not the most visible, certainly the most dogged in fighting to keep/reclaim her job. She won a binding arbitration as of today, August 24th, that says Attiah needs to be reinstated by her former employer the Washington Post. It is worth noting that this was a unionized contracted dispute, and that it was handled by an arbitrator rather than a judge. No court case, no legal precedents.

I’ve heard nary a peep from the SSAs about Attiah. Not when she was fired, not when she appealed to the union, not after her win today. I won’t assert as fact that no one who believes in Sovereign Speech for Cofnas, Jones, and Musk would also believe in it for Attiah. But I do think the politics make that unlikely. Attiah is a progressive who danced on the grave of a right-wing activist. SSAs are overwhelmingly aligned with conservatives, populists, hard libertarians, the Alt/Dissident Right and other such entities. Noted bipartisan civil liberties groups like FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) have even lamented how SSAs often play partisan games around speech rather than defending it equally for everyone.

I'll add here that this also puts the lie to claims of “absolutism” around speech. No one actually wants everyone to say anything and everything at all times. Everyone has limits. The government must be limited from throwing people in jail or preventing free journalism, free art, and so on. Individuals can decide who to associate with or not. But no one is an absolutist.

So people, the SSAs (Sovereign Speech Advocates) and others, are claiming to champion “free speech”…but are often really asking for something entirely different: Sovereignty. They aren’t seeking a open marketplace of ideas; they are demanding a personal diplomatic immunity that neuters everyone else’s right to respond or disassociate. This is likely to cause the very chilling effect that these people claim they don’t want. If “free speech culture” means total immunity from backlash, then expressing controversial opinions in a vacuum makes you untouchable whilst criticizing those opinions makes you a pariah. It’s an insane first mover advantage, and a total asymmetry. It would also mean that the supposed “more speech” that these people claim to want…would be systematically hobbled or staunched at every turn.

In truth, freedom of speech gives you the right to speak; it does not compel anyone to publish, fund, employ, or listen to you. By demanding immunity from social consequences, SSAs undermine the only real check on free speech, the key glue that makes it work in the first place. As I’ve stated before elsewhere: “Free speech only works if there are social consequences to compensate for the lack of legal consequences.“ That must necessarily include firings, social stigma, and all the rest.

The SSAs want a coercive veto on this bargain. One that actively strips other people of their right to freely disassociate from bad actors, cranks, or bigots. And as we’ve already seen, it’s not even a strictly principled or nonpartisan initiative. The factions defending Cofnas and scorning Attiah, or vice versa, rarely care about the foundational principle of free expression. They apply their calls for “freedom” (really Sovereignty) quite selectively indeed. They’ll demand absolute protection for their tribe while endorsing consequences for their opponents.

In this hypothetical future paradigm, what people say and how they’re penalized will be down solely to tribal affiliation, not facts or universal standards. I am personally fine with people deciding not to tolerate a racist nor a grave-dancer (I have no love for Attiah or Cofnas). I am not okay with people picking and choosing which person becomes worth championing based solely on who they voted for or who benefits. I am not okay with pretending that the people who want expansive speech sovereignty for themselves and their tribe are actually defending civil rights and civil liberties. I care about the truth, about upstanding behavior, and about accuracy in language.

Speaking of accuracy, let’s go back to Cofnas’ “joke” from earlier. He talks about wanting to be the leader of a race science department. He admits he wants this stuff studied and promoted. But he’s “joking” when he says it in an unflattering or too overt manner? That’s pure Schrodinger’s asshole tactics—say something outrageous and then decide retroactively whether you’re “joking” or serious. It’s also part of a larger phenomenon that I see people do, which is weaponizing the figleaf or pretext of comedy to inoculate themselves or their ideas from scrutiny. It’s disingenuous.

This isn’t unique to SSAs, race realists, or any other specific group. It’s a longstanding theme, and problem, in discourse. Tactical ambiguity is used to launder ideas that someone wants to say but is too craven to be honest and direct about. They make provocative, hateful, or incendiary statements, wait to see the reaction, and then retroactively decide whether they were “just raising questions,” “engaging in academic inquiry,” “making a joke,” “posting satire,” or whatever else. The ideas get out, but they don’t have to own them. Anyone who objects is just being uncool or humorless.

I think this same ambiguity is at play with the overall debate about speech. The SSAs want to muddy the waters by calling what they seek “free speech.” They’re latching onto a vaunted concept and expanding or perverting it well beyond the breaking point. I think they do this not only because they want sovereignty, but because they hate having to be responsible for their words and their values. Sovereign Speech demands that society treat outrageous or extreme statements as weightless, exempt from standard social judgment, while still granting them maximum reach.

I think we need to call Sovereign Speech what it is. Not just for accuracy, but so we can get back to real freedom. Free speech & expression is a legal concept that relates to governments. Not employers, not clubs, not social status. If we want to defend free speech, we have to define it correctly. And if Sovereign Speech Advocates want to push for their own thing, they need to drop the word games, the asshole tactics, and all their other tricks. They need to be honest about wanting sovereignty.

I’ll give the sovereign citizens credit on one narrow point: They openly admit to wanting a special set of rules. They’ll say it’s their right, that they’re appealing to Old Laws, and other nonsense, but they generally don’t deny what their end goals are: the absolute immunity to act as they will, with impunity. It’s time SSAs do the same. No more games. No more confusion or proprietary definitions of established terms.

Genuine free speech actually entails a dynamic, sometimes uncomfortable, public square where one’s speech meets counter-speech, and where free association remains voluntary on all sides. I can say what I want, within reason, you can criticize me, and the government can’t play censor or referee. If we decide to go our separate ways, or get fired, or lose friends, or whatever else, them’s the breaks. No one’s civil rights were violated by getting kicked off social media or fired from a plum, elite culture job.

Freedom of speech guarantees an open arena, not an armored shield. Real freedom requires accepting that if you choose to speak, others are equally free to judge, counter, or walk away. Stand up for freedom, recognize when others are just seeking sovereignty, and don’t let anyone get these twisted. Or we’ll never know what anyone’s talking about, nor how to adjudicate rights from wrongs.