Here's the rub: the current polarization and championing of censorship have come from abuse of free speech protections.
We've had decades of Fox News and the like declaring things like "War on Christmas" and "War on Christianity" to make people in the majority feel like victims, presenting immigrants as subhumans that take jobs and commit crimes as they invade our country, and presenting trans people as deviant threats to our children, trying to make them all trans, too.
This is a completely fictional world, but such a large number of people have become believers that they've now been able to take over political power.
As a result, we get state laws that directly attack freedom of speech via book bans and scrubbing school curriculum of anything parents deem objectionable, which can include innocuous things like acknowledging gay people exist or that the civil war was fought over slavery. We also got our current administration, which has used lawsuits and other threats to attack any speech the president doesn't like.
I don't see where it gets better anytime soon - and I think it's a foregone conclusion that it's going to get a lot worse before they do get better, because a large cohort of people are cheering it on.
And before anyone chimes in that this is a both sides issue: I've yet to see actual legal action taken by the left wing to curtail speech. Instead, I've seen social pressure levied - largely in the form of freedom not to associate with individuals or businesses that engage in speech people find objectionable. This is the correct way to engage in an environment of free speech, even if I find it distasteful how far it's been taken and how petty it's been in some cases.
I'm not really advocating for censorship myself. Ultimately, I'm merely reflecting upon how an environment of nearly absolute adherence to free speech has been eroded by a number of bad actors utilizing propaganda and lies to chip away at that very free speech over the decades, bringing us to a point where we're sliding down the very same slope towards destruction of freedoms that free speech absolutism was intended to prevent. The whole exercise feels like a Catch-22, hence my prodding for something a little more concrete yet specific than "censorship = bad".