Sure, it's a slogan, but you don't really have any arguments against it. The nature of the argument is slippery-slope, or syllogistic: If freedom of speech disappears, then freedom of religion goes with it. There's actually a tight binding between these two in the USA, since the same clause of the Constitution protects both.
No country has ever had truest freedom of speech. That doesn't mean that freedom of speech is bad; it could just as well mean that no country has ever been out of the hands of aristocrats for long enough to forge a freedom of speech which trumps their desire to be immune from the lower classes. But you're critiquing a position which has not yet existed and implying that the world will collapse if that position is realized, again without evidence.
The phrase "turn everyone into mindless drones" is telltale; it shows that you currently believe that people are not mindless drones. To the contrary, though, it's even easier to imagine that people have been gaining more freedoms through the centuries, and that people are turning into more mindful creatures, with less droning behavior. Even if progressivism is wrong, certainly the communication technologies that we have invented have given the everyday person a power of speech that empowers them beyond what their ancestors had.
Speaking of power, the cheesy line I'll choose today is that power and responsibility are formally dual in any category of social relations; if X has power over Y to do Z, then Y has responsibilities to do Z for X. And yes, freedom of speech is an insistence that this power not be abridged from everyday citizens. That's not a bad thing at all; beyond the progressive metanarrative, the slow and steady task of decentralizing and dividing power amongst people is important.
To summarize, you are suffering from tropes three through five from the list of censorship tropes. [0]
[0] https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...
No country has ever had truest freedom of speech. That doesn't mean that freedom of speech is bad; it could just as well mean that no country has ever been out of the hands of aristocrats for long enough to forge a freedom of speech which trumps their desire to be immune from the lower classes. But you're critiquing a position which has not yet existed and implying that the world will collapse if that position is realized, again without evidence.
The phrase "turn everyone into mindless drones" is telltale; it shows that you currently believe that people are not mindless drones. To the contrary, though, it's even easier to imagine that people have been gaining more freedoms through the centuries, and that people are turning into more mindful creatures, with less droning behavior. Even if progressivism is wrong, certainly the communication technologies that we have invented have given the everyday person a power of speech that empowers them beyond what their ancestors had.
Speaking of power, the cheesy line I'll choose today is that power and responsibility are formally dual in any category of social relations; if X has power over Y to do Z, then Y has responsibilities to do Z for X. And yes, freedom of speech is an insistence that this power not be abridged from everyday citizens. That's not a bad thing at all; beyond the progressive metanarrative, the slow and steady task of decentralizing and dividing power amongst people is important.
To summarize, you are suffering from tropes three through five from the list of censorship tropes. [0]
[0] https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...