Jacob Mchangama on the Global Free Speech Recession

Suddenly free speech is being seen uh not as a competitive advantage for uh democracies against their authoritarian counterparts, but as a Trojan horse that allows um the enemies of democracies, both from within and without, to uh chip away at the foundations of democracy. And now the good fight. with Yasha Monk perhaps this says something about my social media algorithm, but nearly every time that I try to learn about what's going on in the world, I see another outrageous story about limits and restrictions of free speech. Sometimes here in the United States, sometimes in England or Germany or Brazil, it it seems as though we are not just in a democratic recession, but also in a free speech recession, with even many very reasonable middle-of-the-road people coming to the conclusion that the only way to deal with the social media age is to prosecute people for speech they don't like, to

uh make sure that nobody can be anonymous on the internet to take very draconian measures to restrict quote unquote misinformation. So I invited back on the podcast my friend Jacob Changama, who is the CEO of a great free speech organization in Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of the simile named The Future of Free Speech, a new book that he co-authored. with Jeff Kosseff. We talk about what attacks on free speech should look like today, particularly in the democratic world, why it is that those are so popular and why it's a mistake to think that they can actually achieve the goals that their supporters have in mind for them. In the last part of this conversation,

I asked Jacob how we can fight back, how we can persuade sensible people that many of these forms of censorship will in fact backfire, that they are giving up much too much of our freedom for far too small an actual recompense. And I also asked him about the situation in the United States. Jacob and I agree that the Trump administration is attacking free speech despite claiming to defend this. The question is whether or not we're succeeding.

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