>> There are many Chinese activists living outside China for instance

Where do they live, where they're allowed to speak against the Chinese Communist Party? Not in Russia. Not in another dictatorship.

>> Plenty of people escaped the Soviet Union and became outspoken anti-communist activists, same thing.

Where did they escape to? Where could they have escaped to if America/Western Europe didn't exist? Who would have ever heard of Solzhenitsyn if he hadn't managed to get his work to America?

It's really ironic that I - a lifelong detractor of American foreign policy and imperialism - have to be the person to point this out, but: There is no place left in the world where you can speak your mind if America is truly censored by its own children/corporate compliance going forward. You may have grown up in a country where you were never allowed to speak your mind; in that case, you don't understand what is at risk if the American populace truly undergoes the kind of cleansing that e.g. Soviet Russia underwent w/r/t silencing wayward views.

The activists and dissidents and contra-thinkers you mentioned would probably not even exist without a free world outside those dictatorships who they could appeal to; but if that outside world that they adore didn't exist, no one would ever know about them. They'd be abolished, murdered, and everything they ever thought and wrote would be disappeared for all time. The only thing that allows them to speak is the stubborn, obstinate existence of a country in North America whose people largely refuse to kowtow to dictatorships.

Largely. And when they are wrong, and they often are, it's our own job (as American citizens) to take our government to task for it.

I've only become pro-American the more I understand about politics and speech in the rest of the world.

Also, it's not really OK for other countries to define themselves in terms of economic growth or imperialist conquest, while castigating the US, and using us as the "outside culture" that provides their material wealth and industrial processes while acting as if these things come from an automatic universal culture that they don't have to subscribe to. In other words, if a Jewish woman scientist in the US helps create a vaccine, or a sustained fusion reaction, people in Iran who believe in 7th century blood feuds as a basis for social life don't just get to dip in and take the progress for themselves as if it was handed out by Allah. Not without reckoning why they weren't able to produce those breakthrough ideas through their own social/economic/religious/military structures. It's not their right as a polity. Why? Because the smartest of their people already came here and worked on it. And the stupidest, most backwards, malevolent and hateful of their countrymen are running their country.

So yeah, tell me where these dissidents go and publish their works if we go away, or cease to exist?

I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I 100% agree that it would be an absolute disaster if America adopts even European levels of censorship, let alone Chinese. I am absolutely in favour of extremely free speech.

My point here is that yes, obviously, they could speak their mind once they got to America because of the attitudes of society and the local governments. They hadn't been permanently altered by their former societies refusal to use certain words, or present things in certain ways. That is, the kind of "mind control" assumed by the people who try to erase certain types of language, doesn't actually alter anyone's minds. It may appear that way if they're afraid to speak out but nothing has actually changed. People's opinions aren't altered by language policing, yet, the people who do it are convinced it does.

That's why I'm sort of confused by your post. You suggest that once language is "de-nuded" then it would take "generations" for people to be able to "think again outside the constraints on communication". This a strong Sapir-Whorf take, right? It's an assertion that the language you can use controls the boundaries of what you can think. And my point is that this hypothesis has been proven wrong a very long time ago.

I do think our thoughts are constrained by language - not necessarily by its unavailability, but definitely by societal norms that make it transgressive to say or think certain things. Even mentioning that certain thoughts you could say are transgressive makes you transgressive in a totalitarian culture. Thus a sign with 7 or 8 asterisks like gets people thrown in jail in Russia now. That's not because a dictat came from on high, it's because a system that coerces speech always attracts enforcers, who also raise their children to be enforcers; it is much harder to move from a system of repression to one of openness than the other way. Culture tends toward repression in every human lifespan to date except for one generation in the modern world, a few in the 18th and 19th centuries, and possibly a couple in ancient Rome and Greece. Civilization might tend toward open dialog in the very long run, but it's a much longer and slower climb, and setbacks - enforcement of language or "right" thinking - can be devastating and take thousands of years to correct.