The New War on Free Speech: Why Power Turns Everyone Into a Censor
5/11/20261 hr 19 min
Free speech was supposed to be the great settled achievement of liberal democracy. Then came social media, cancel culture, campus speech battles, hate-speech laws, authoritarian tech control, and a new era of governments pressuring platforms from every direction.
Michael Shermer speaks with free speech scholar Jacob Mchangama about why speech protections are weakening around the world—not only in dictatorships, but inside democracies. Their conversation moves from the First Amendment and January 6 to hate speech laws in Europe, Section 230, Elon Musk and X, online anonymity, social media bans for minors, and the enormous promise and danger of AI.
Mchangama argues that censorship is less a left-wing or right-wing impulse than a human one: once people gain power, the urge to silence enemies becomes almost irresistible. The real test of free speech is not whether we defend ideas we like, but whether we resist using state power against speech we despise.
Jacob Mchangama is the founder and executive director of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University. His new book is The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy's Most Essential Freedom.
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Jacob Mchangama· Guest0:29
And someone like Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice, voted, in the Brandenburg case, voted with the rest of the Supreme Court justices to say that the conviction of a member of the KKK, who in regalia and armed before cameras, uh, sort of said that if the government didn't do something about the Blacks and the Jews, they might do it themselves. He said that that should be constitutionally protected speech. Intrusive AI. That is, that we once thought that new technology would, would supercharge freedom and, and free speech, but it's also very clear that governments around the world have learned to reverse engineer the promise of these technologies, and that AI can create, and has created in some countries, levels of censorship and surveillance that would have been the envy of Stalin and Hitler. These universities, in many cases, had not lived up to the spirit of the First Amendment when it came to speech about gender identity, about, uh, anti-Black racism and so on, and had discouraged