Please would America stop calling itself a damned beacon.
It's a wealthy country employing a constitutional republican system which makes various choices each of which have consequences.
These choices have effects, some benign, some damaging. That is, every single choice brings both benefits and harms. Unavoidably.
It is not a system that is intrinsically virtuous or heroic and doesn't create a country that is intrinsically virtuous or heroic.
It creates a country with its feet firmly planted in the complicated, fallen world, in which we try to avoid doing damage as best as possible, and try to do as much good as we can. We usually have benign intentions. But the world's complexity means we cannot anticipate all of the outcomes of our choices, however benign our intent.
So the choice to minimise rules of speech brings with it both the benefits and harms of that approach. You can't segregate the benefits from the harms. They are both part of the package.
Free speech isn't a beacon. It's a system that encourages sensible ideas and fake news, praise and insults, brilliant thoughts and stupid ones, loyal ideas and subversive ones.
That's the system that the US has defined for itself. It brings with it benefits and costs. It hopes more benefits than costs but it won't always be so.
Beacon-thinking is virtue signalling. It's looking in the mirror and saying "how beautiful I am!" It's disregarding the warts and the wrinkles and the hair clumps sticking out of the ears. It's suggesting that you think others see you as you wish to see yourself.
How I long for a US which admits its imperfections without thinking it makes it ugly. It's a country like any other dealing with the difficulties the world throws in its direction and doing its best, and sometimes doing very well.
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