Do Anarchists Support "Free Speech"?

Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g. "downsizing" for layoffs, "servicing the target" for bombing, in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning. In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth.

The concept of "free speech" is fundamentally flawed, and has historically been used to convince citizens of states that they have 'rights' that are gifted to them by the supposedly benevolent and generous state.

In reality, the state doesn't 'give' you rights; it controls them, limits them, denies you them.

When an authority grants you "free speech", what they've really done is take away your freedom to speak, and then allow certain people (typically the favored social class) to say certain things under certain conditions. There's nothing "free" about this. You're still forbidden from speech that would threaten the state or those it empowers. You're still legally viable for slandering powerful people that can afford as many lawyers as it takes to sue you into bankruptcy. You're still beaten to a bloody pulp for talking back to a cop. You'll still be imprisoned, enslaved and murdered by the state and its enforcers for being the wrong race or the wrong gender or the wrong sexuality or the wrong religion or the wrong class and daring to resist your oppressors.

Free speech is a lie told to us by our rulers to convince us we need to be ruled by them.

Anarchists are aware enough to realize the state does not grant us any kind of freedom. The entire existence of the state is predicated on taking freedom away from us to empower the rich minority that the state exists to serve.

So as anarchists; as people who don't want to be ruled, people who see the blatant lies our rulers tell us for what they are, it would make little sense for us to support an inherently Orwellian concept as "free speech". A much more honest word for this concept would be "controlled speech" or "state-approved speech".

Reading

https://lithub.com/when-fascists-weaponize-free-speech-absolutism/

https://qz.com/1053957/charlottesville-neo-nazis-and-the-case-against-free-speech-for-fascists/

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/06/why-fascist-speech-is-not-free-speech/