As it stands most people associate it with the right to behave like a dick in public.
In a country without free speech protections, expressing an unpopular opinion about a political party or hot topic can get you thrown in prison. Look at the Syrian Assad regime or the current Chinese administration. People are arrested for merely being negative in social media posts. I can totally see the US going in that direction.
You can be nonchalant about this if you want, be there are very good reasons people are getting up in arms about this erosion of our protections.
At least in prison they'll feed me or kill me, two things they'll otherwise refuse to do until you commit a crime.
Frankly, I would prefer a world where everyone agreed the government was shit but nobody could complain. It's better than people openly defending evil people and calling it the height of democracy. If that's democracy give me the PRC any day.
"Free speech" as a right seems pretty useless without material rights. Complaining about it isn't going to change anything. What does that even look like?
But we can trace all this crappy formulation of civics to the brain rot that is worshiping the enlightenment and founding fathers. Why is this still a thing in 2025? Nobody is putting a gun to your head to care about Jefferson or Locke or the actual basis of our society, Hobbes. We can chuck the entire concept of rights out the window and come up with agreements surrounding social behavior that actually reflect the society and culture we have today or want tomorrow.
What, exactly, do you think a right even is, if not an agreement that something cannot be done to people or cannot be taken away from them?
Without the right to say something, there is no legal way to organize or to demand any other right.
Edited to remove an unwarranted statement at the beginning of this comment.
Americans don't do this, though. They don't demand better. They accept shitty governance and say "at least I voted". And frankly I don't think they ever will.
So I say, fuck it, let's just all accept that government is shitty and mostly exists to squeeze us for money. We can finally stop acting like it's representative of us. When y'all finally have had enough riots will work just as fine as they did before.
That is an obviously wrong statement even if we only look at protests within the past 5 years.