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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech, a research professor at Vanderbilt University, and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). His book Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media is now available in paperback with a new epilogue. His most recent piece for Persuasion, on the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, is here.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jacob Mchangama discuss traditions of free speech throughout history, whether European laws are too restrictive, and concerning trends in the United States.
Note: This episode was recorded on February 24, 2025.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: You're somebody who does a lot to stand up for principles of free speech in a very principled way, calling out whoever is undermining free speech, whether they be on the left or the right—or on the center for that matter. How do you think the state of free speech is faring at the moment? How are we doing compared to most of the history of mankind, but also how are we doing to say 20 years ago?
Jacob Mchangama: Compared to most of the history of mankind, we're obviously doing really well in the sense that we have constitutional protections, we have international human rights norms, and, not least, we have communications technology that allows you and me to have a conversation in real time without censorship, even though we're on different continents. So the practical exercise of free speech is at a level unimaginable to Enlightenment philosophers who were dreaming about free speech. But when you look at where we are compared to say 15 or 20 years ago, I think we're in a much darker spot in the sense that there was this sense, I think, from really around the ‘70s until the early 2000s, that free speech was a competitive advantage for open democracies in their geopolitical struggles with authoritarian states. So you saw this very clearly when the U.S. and the European community, as it was at the time, were instrumental in putting free speech human rights into the Helsinki Accords that really empowered dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, pushed communications technology that allowed them to try and hold their Soviet overlords accountable.
Essentially they signed these protocols that their idea was to sort of say, okay, we're going to freeze the borders of Europe. But the Western idea was to say, well, we're going to introduce human rights language and then we're going to try and hold them accountable to these principles.
In Charter 77, the very famous dissident manifesto by Václav Havel and other Czechoslovakian dissidents, the very first complaint is the lack of free speech. And they reference Article 19 in the recently ratified International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. So, the Soviets clearly think, well, these are just empty words that we sign, but they become really powerful for dissident groups. One of the most powerful symbols of what happened was when Havel, in 1990, he had just a few months earlier been released from prison in Czechoslovakia and he stood before the U.S. Congress as a democratically elected president of Czechoslovakia as it was at the time. And he says, just a few months ago, I was a prisoner in one of the most totalitarian countries in the world. Now I stand before you as the president of a democratic country, a country with full freedom of speech. So that was a real emphasis among dissidents in the Soviet bloc that free speech was absolutely essential. You also see it in apartheid, by the way. Before Nelson Mandela wins the first free multiracial presidential election in South African history, he gives a speech in 1994 and he says, freedom of expression and media freedom were essential in undermining apartheid because it gave a voice to those who were silenced within South Africa. And we shouldn't forget that apartheid South Africa was incredibly censorial—they essentially had an index of censorship that banned books, and had hate speech laws that protected the white minority. And of course they were not beyond using torture and killing as someone like Steven Biko would find out.
So Mandela gives this very powerful speech and he says, in the new South Africa, free speech will be a cornerstone. And then, in the mid nineties, you have the popularization of the world wide web. And so, suddenly, this positive development is about to be supercharged because free speech and democracy will now be this unstoppable force aided by technology and essentially censorship and authoritarian regimes will be consigned to the ash heap of history.
Since the first live Q&A was really fun, we’ll try to make this a monthly feature! So please join me for the second iteration on Monday, March 31 at 6pm Eastern. I will once again try to answer any questions you may have—whether about my writing, the current state of the world, or what might happen next. Join us on Zoom here. —Yascha
Mounk: And it's really interesting that at the moment of this rise of the internet, the idea of its promise is deeply bound up with the idea of free speech. So, I've mentioned a couple of times on the podcast, but if we go back to the 1990s, all of the assumptions about it are that it's going to not just liberalize the world, democratize the world, but also make identity kind of less important in a certain way. That suddenly I'm going to be able to speak to somebody who shares my interests in Nigeria or in Korea or in Peru, and I'll realize that some of the prejudices I may have had about people in other countries, or just the lack of knowledge I have about them, crumbles away. Because, whereas it would have cost tens of dollars per minute to speak to them on the phone previously, now I can do that for free over the internet. Of course, it turns out that the effect of the internet in many ways goes in the opposite direction, that what people tend to do is to congregate with those who are most like them, and often to reinforce each other's preconceptions about each other.
But what's perhaps less explored is the way in which the internet changes views about free speech. Again, in the ‘90s, we might have thought the internet was going to show us how wonderful free speech is and how important that is and what a liberatory force it is. And I think we may have thought that the consensus would be even less censorship, even more embrace of free speech. But what's actually happened is that the forces that the internet inspired have so scared people that the consensus about free speech has become a lot more cautious in the last 30 years and not on the political extremes where you might have expected it, not on the deeply conservative right or the deeply sort of what are post-communist left, but actually in much of a political center as well.
Mchangama: Definitely, and, it's a gradual process. So, the animating spirit of the world wide web is this famous manifesto by John Perry Barlow called the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. And it has this very techno-utopian vision of what the internet can do. There'll be no state, no corporate entity that has any power to censor anyone. Anyone is free to speak with anyone at any time.
When Bill Clinton sort of gets an okay to enter into negotiations about getting China into the WTO, the World Trade Organization, he gives this speech, which I think also epitomizes the view at the time. He says, yeah, I know that the Chinese are trying to censor the internet. And he says, well, that's like nailing jello to a wall. So the assumption is that it'll be impossible for a country like China to impose censorship, ideological conformity. And I think China has had the last laugh so far. Even up to the Arab Spring, the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and so on, I think the internet was still seen, at least in democracies, largely as a force for good, something which allowed ordinary people to circumvent official propaganda and censorship. And we saw that that helped mobilize masses, put them out in the streets and topple dictators—well-entrenched dictators who had been in power for decades.
Mounk: It's easy to forget how quickly that consensus changed. My first job out of graduate school was as a preceptor in expository writing at Harvard and teaching this kind of first year class, which was on a substantive topic, but was also meant to teach incoming students how to write. The topic I chose was democracy in the digital age. I always tried to push against the grain of my students' preconceptions. At the time, my students completely assumed that the internet was, of course, an unalloyed force for good in the world and was going to democratize it, was going to bring good American values everywhere in the world. I saw my job in the course, beyond teaching students writing, as being to help students challenge those preconceptions and perhaps think a little bit more critically about some of the negative consequences, not because I was so deeply convinced of those, but because I thought that the debate was so one-sidedly in the other direction. Now, I think if you taught that course today, the assumption you would have to challenge the grain against is the exact opposite one. We've made a 180 degree turn in our thinking about this in about 10 years.
Mchangama: I think there are a number of reasons why. So one is the original vision of the internet or the World Wide Web and how it functioned was a much more decentralized internet. You had blogs and so on. You didn't initially have the big centralized platforms where huge, predominantly American, tech platforms have an outsized role and influence on what type of information is shared. Through their decisions, through how they tweak their algorithms, they can essentially determine who gets reach and not. And I think that has helped change the calculus. But I think the real game changer, especially in democracies, was Brexit and especially the 2016 presidential election where the idea was that these huge momentous events that sort of signal a shift in liberal democracies have come about through disinformation campaigns, through lies that pander to populist forces, not least in the U.S. where it sort of became a truth that Russian disinformation online had essentially contributed significantly to Trump's election victory. Then in Germany, the refugee crisis was a big moment when Angela Merkel said, wir schaffen das, and allowed migrants or refugees from Syria and Afghanistan to enter the country. That set off a huge backlash in Germany. And Germany, for historical reasons, is obviously very concerned about sentiments that can be seen as racist or demonizing minorities. And that sets in motion regulation in Europe to try and clamp down on the internet. And that changes the institutionalist perception of what social media and the online sphere is. Suddenly it's no longer this force for good that spreads democracy to the rest of the world. Instead, it's become sort of a Trojan horse for anti-democratic forces, both inside and outside the country, to erode democracy and its values from within.
Mounk: I'm really enjoying our tracing this contemporary history of thinking about free speech and the way you tell it is very plausible to me. I just remembered a moment where I was probably for the first time in my life speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival. It must have been the summer of 2017. And there was a presentation by somebody from Facebook, as it was then still called, speaking about public policy and Facebook and so on.
I remember him coming into this crowd that I think in previous years would have thought instinctively of the big tech companies as these great innovative entities that are making the world better. He was announcing a few things they were doing to address some of the concerns that had started to arise about Russian influence and about disinformation. He wasn't coming into the conversation completely naive. I think he assumed that there would be a somewhat critical reception. But the mood in that room was just so icy and so hostile and you could really see this representative of Facebook being completely rattled by it. It was just a completely different reception from the one that they had clearly gotten on previous occasions when they spoke to those kinds of crowds as I'm sure they had done many times. So you can really locate that moment. And that then gives rise to these concerns about disinformation and misinformation.
I think it's obvious that attitudes towards those tech companies, and the idea of free speech, have changed a lot in the last decade. What about the actual laws on the ground and what about the actual application of those laws? So JD Vance recently gave a famous, perhaps infamous, speech at the Munich Security Conference in which one of his big complaints, one of the things for which he was upbraiding European countries, was that they were not actually honoring free speech. Somebody had been arrested in the United Kingdom for holding a silent prayer about fetuses being aborted. Somebody had been visited by the police in Germany for posting negatively about politicians in the then-governing coalition and so on. How accurate is it that European laws on free speech are now quite restrictive? In what ways are they restrictive and to what extent is that different from how those laws operated 20 years ago?
Mchangama: Yeah, I think Vance had a very important point. It is true that Europe restricts free speech. It's true that elitist attitudes in Europe have become much more concerned, fearful of the masses, if you like. Maybe we can get back to why I think Vance's speech was still a missed opportunity and also quite hypocritical, as I wrote in Persuasion recently. Vance worked for an administration which has launched an assault on free speech itself. But be that as it may, I think he's absolutely right. So we talked about the German response to the backlash against the influx of refugees, and where already you’ve seen the AfD getting significant support on the basis of that. The first attempt was to sort of say, we need social media platforms to sign up to a voluntary code of conduct where they remove illegal hate speech. Then the government decided it was not happy with that. It adopted the so-called NETS-DG, the Network Enforcement Act in 2017, which essentially said that if you were an online network with two million users, you had to remove manifestly illegal content within 24 hours or risk fines of up to 50 million euros.
On top of that, Germany in particular has been increasingly aggressive about going after the individual person. It's not enough to just use the social media networks as choke points where you can say, well, we need you to be essentially the privatized censors of the government. You need to remove content ideally before it even is visible to people. We're also going to go after the people who post these kinds of things.
The New York Times documented in 2022 how there were thousands of cases where German police will show up in dawn raids, demand access to an apartment where someone somewhere has written something that is contrary to German law. And German law when it comes to speech crimes is pretty expansive. So it could be anything from public insults against politicians to a plethora of hate speech. It can be the use of banned symbols, which is also a growing list. Typically, they will not go to prison, but they will get a fine. And of course, the chilling effect of having the police show up, wake you out of bed, confiscate your devices, and then you have to show up in court where you'll be sentenced is quite alarming. So that's Germany. I think Germany is the country that has gone the furthest. France, though, is also, I think, a problematic case.
We all remember the attack on Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Now the response of the French government to that was initially very good. Hollande, the president at the time, was very firm in standing up for the rights of cartoonists, the tradition of republicans, and the secularism that animates France. And so has Macron after the murder of Samuel Paty, this teacher who showed cartoons in his classroom and who was beheaded by a jihadist five years ago. But at the same time, the French response has been to say, well, yes, we're going to defend the right to blaspheme, but we're going to crack down on hate speech. We're going to crack down on what they call the apology of terrorism. So anyone saying something that was not inciting terrorism, but might be sort of condoning terrorism. And so in France, you also have hundreds of cases of people being visited by the police, being arrested, some being put in prison for these statements. In fact, under Emmanuel Macron, and this was correct as of 11th November 2023, 34 civil society organizations have been banned by decree. And when I say decree, it's signed by the president, the minister of interior, and the prime minister. Only one of those had been overturned by Conseil d'État, the highest administrative court.
So, for instance, some of them are Muslim organizations where the government says, you're calling the French state anti-Muslim. You're accusing the French state of being anti-Muslim, of systematically subjecting the rights of Muslims. This incites the population against the French state. Also, you have not removed from your Facebook page comments by third parties that can be seen as hate speech.
And so you have this really, really disturbing development where a civil society organization which purports to fight for the rights of Muslims, and it may or may not have views that you and I find loathsome, but accuses the French state of discriminating against Muslims. And then the response of the French government is to ban it. And you've also seen sort of organizations on the far right, anarchists on the far left, even environmental organizations being targeted by these laws. And then all of this has been exacerbated post October 7th, where especially France and Germany have really cracked down on speech. And so where you saw in Germany a huge concern about the far right, now increasingly you also see pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the left and among its Muslim minority being targeted by this. Even Jews—for my book that I recently wrote, I interviewed this Israeli Jewish woman called Irene Heffetz. On four occasions, she's been arrested for protesting in Neukölln in Berlin, sort of a multicultural neighborhood with a banner which says something like, as an Israeli Jew, stop the genocide in Gaza. And of course, you can agree or disagree whether Israel's actions amount to a genocide, but that's a political statement. And she's been detained on charges of hate speech, not prosecuted but I think that says something about the state of free speech in Europe currently.
Mounk: So let me make a point and then ask a question. The point is an obvious one and I make it whenever I speak about free speech, but it's an important one, which is that the people who want to defend restrictions on free speech nearly always assume that it's going to favor them politically. And I think they nearly always are short sighted about that. That's obviously true for some of the voices that have been most active trying to restrict free speech in the United States over the last decades, which is the kind of campus left and progressives on campus. And it usually has an immediate reason for that assumption. If you're on a U.S. campus in 2025, if you’re on a U.S. campus in 2010, you could assume that the kind of speech codes that would be written would in fact favor you if you're a progressive activist, because these are spaces that are very left leaning, and the administrators are likely left leaning. And so it's probably true that they're going to be much more lenient towards views that code as left wing than towards views that code as right wing.
But to conclude from this that your cause is going to be served in any way by having nationwide political restrictions on free speech in a country that in many ways still skews quite conservative is of course incredibly naive. And we've seen over the course of the last few decades that the assumption by parts of the left that restrictionary speech laws are somehow going to favor them has been upended, not just by the fact that now Donald Trump is in office, and that's something that I want to get back to, of course, later in the conversation, but also in some of those debates on October 7th, where I will absolutely stand up for the right of people with whose views I may disagree to make the voices heard in a clear and loud way.
You've been very, very consistent at standing up for people whose speeches are threatened from across the political spectrum. Some organizations that are often criticized for not doing that, like FIRE, I think do it very consistently as well. Nearly every time that FIRE is criticized on social media for not having condemned some restriction of free speech that comes more from the right, there's a tweet from FIRE in which they condemn that very restriction earlier in the day. So I think it's very important to point out the way in which activists who want to advance restrictions on free speech because they think it's going to serve their goals often turn out to be mistaken. But I also have a question for you, Jacob, and perhaps it's a collective self-therapy question. So you were born and raised, I believe, in Denmark. You’ve been an activist for free speech there for a long time, have now relatively recently moved to the United States and clearly defend a conception of free speech that in today's context is seen as more American, a more absolute defense of free speech based on something like what the First Amendment is in the United States. And I, of course, was born and raised in Germany, lived in Europe until my early to mid-20s when I came to the United States for grad school and my PhD.
This is one of the areas in my life today where I feel the biggest cultural difference between where I come from and where I live. Perhaps guns are another issue in a different kind of way. But really it is on the topic of free speech that the basic background assumption of most people I speak to in Europe are so different from the basic background assumption of most people who are in the United States.
So why is it that we've ended up, you and me, with this more American conception of free speech? And what's the best case for it? I mean, to those who may be listening from a more European context where the need for some restrictions on free speech today just seems like an obvious thing—you’re seen as really politically exotic in Europe if you think that this is a problem and you're suspected of secretly really sympathizing with the far right because those are the only people who tend to complain about it. So if you are for a more fundamental freedom of free speech, it must be that you just want to be able to say terrible things on the internet. Why, being so immersed in both European culture of free speech or the lack of it and the American culture of free speech, have you ended up, as I read you, closer to the American side of it?
Mchangama: You're absolutely right. I was in Brussels a month ago at a conference with a lot of very important people and I was cast as sort of the person to defend an American conception of free speech and I was almost hissed off stage and called a liar by an MEP [Member of the European Parliament], a German MEP from the Greens, when I reminded her that Robert Habeck, the then vice chancellor of her party, had gotten several people in in trouble for posting memes about him online, Including really innocent memes like calling him a professional idiot or a poop emoji, stuff like that. Imagine if Donald Trump was able to prosecute every person who had called him something unflattering—that would be a lot of Americans getting knocks on their doors.
Let me sketch out two contrasting positions on free speech that go all the way back to ancient times. I have this thesis in my book that you have an elitist conception of free speech and an egalitarian conception of free speech. And the egalitarian conception of free speech essentially has its roots in the ancient Athenian democracy, where all freeborn male citizens had a right to speak and participate in political discussions. But, more broadly, you had this idea of parrhēsía, meaning fearless or uninhibited speech, which was accorded to everyone, even foreigners. Aristotle could set up shop in Athens and speak freely. And the Athenian conception of speech was derived from the focus on freedom and equality.
Then you have the Roman Republic and its conception of free speech, which was much more elitist. So they valued free speech, but unlike the Athenians, they didn't have a particular conception of free speech. So if you were in a Roman assembly, the ordinary citizens there did not have a right to address it. They didn't have a right to speak. They could just vote in favor or against whatever was put before them by the magistrate. So it was the elite who were to enjoy free speech on behalf of the masses. And you see that clearly in some of the writings by Cicero, for instance, where he says that one of the reasons why the Athenians’ power diminished was because they allowed the unwashed mob into the halls of power where they could make decisions. And these conceptions of free speech have been in tension ever since.
You see conflicts about them sort of flare up every time the public sphere is expanded through new communications technology or when previously marginalized voices are given a voice in affairs. I think it's a perfect analogy for what we're going through in the digital age in the sense that the traditional gatekeepers have had their positions challenged and suddenly you have the unwashed mob have a direct voice in the digital sphere. And so you have a clash between egalitarian and elitist free speech.
Mounk: Just help me draw out the relevance for today. Do I read you rightly that you've only been in the United States for a year or two, but you've already started calling Europeans elitists and saying that their conception of free speech is the relatively elitist one?
Mchangama: Yes, that is right. Essentially, I think the European one is where we feel most comfortable in saying, yes, free speech is a really important value. But in some ways, and I want to be a little bit provocative here, it's more of a privilege than the way the Americans see it. The Americans see it as an absolutely fundamental natural right. Those who exercise power on behalf of the people do not have the right to silence those people. Whereas in Europe we say, well, free speech, yes, it's important, but it has this clear utilitarian goal of contributing to enlightened discussions about things. And when it's abused for purposes that undermine our basic values, well, then we need to have structures in place that can ensure that we have the right balance between speech and abuse. So that might be the same way that the Romans saw a difference between liberty and licentiousness, whereas the Greeks did not.
Unlike what many think, the First Amendment has not always been this very robust defense of free speech that we know today. There was a time when it didn't even apply to the states, it only applied to the federal government. You have to get into the 1920s before it was even applied to the states. That means that in the 1830s, if you were to spread abolitionist ideals in the South, that would be punishable in some states by death. In the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, if you were a civil rights advocate, you risked being punished for peaceful protest. It was a crime in certain states to even argue for desegregation and so on. From the late ‘50s into the 1960s, the civil rights movement was a key driver in expanding the First Amendment. John Lewis, the great civil rights icon, said that without the First Amendment and free speech, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings. It's quite instructive to think of a case that if you're a civil libertarian you love, but if you're into elitist free speech you hate—the Brandenburg v. Ohio case from 1969. It really cements the very high threshold under the First Amendment before you can prohibit speech. It’s about this Ku Klux Klan leader who said in front of cameras in KKK regalia, who basically says, if the government doesn't do anything about the blacks and the Jews—using other terms—we'll just take the law into our own hands. He’s sort of punished under an Ohio law, but the Supreme Court, in a 9-0 decision says, well, no, you can only punish if there's incitement to imminent lawless action that's also likely to occur.
One of the justices in that case was Thurgood Marshall, the very first black Supreme Court justice who for a very long time had also brought cases before the Supreme Court. He realized, exactly as you said before, Yascha, that if you’re a minority and you're relying on speech restrictions to further your course, you're playing a very, very dangerous game, because you're only ever a political majority away from being the target rather than the beneficiary of these restrictions. So you need principled free speech to empower you to be able to speak truth to power. And that's the animating spirit of what the First Amendment means—to me at least.
Mounk: So, steel man this argument against what I imagine the response of my many smart European listeners is going to be. They're going to say, look, okay, that sounds fine in principle, but we're in this situation where these right-wing populists are rising. There's some amount of political violence, we have societies that are diversifying and many members of minority groups feel very vulnerable. If we allow this to run amok, it's going to victimize people, it's going to strengthen those political forces that mean ill to our democracy. Don't we need a militant democracy in order to preserve our democratic institutions? Otherwise, aren't we just a lamb looking at the wolf that's about to eat us for dinner and inviting him in? What's your response?
Mchangama: Well, how has it gone in Germany with an increasing raft of speech restrictions? Has it stopped the AfD from growing? For my book, I looked at the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Germany, which publishes very, very detailed statistics on radicalization and political violence and so on. And so 2019 was a bit of a horrific year in Germany with lots of neo-Nazi killings and so on. And that came after the NetzDG had been put into place to fight online hate speech—and every year since then, there's been a rise in the number of right-wing extremists and also a rise in the number of right-wing extremists who are willing to use violence according to these statistics. So it seems to me that this approach is not actually working.
You see the same thing in France. The far right has not had its wind taken out of its sails by cracking down on free speech. One of the things that got me into free speech was the whole cartoon affair in Denmark. And the argument there from Muslim groups and others was that, well, these cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad were punching down on a vulnerable minority, so we need restrictions on free speech. Well, guess what happened after October 7th? Who is the most likely minority group to be punished for speech? It's Muslims who are protesting against Israel. And there's certainly been anti-Semitism among some of those demonstrations, but even speech that does not veer into outright anti-Semitism risks being targeted now in European democracies.
That's a perfect example of a minority saying, hey, we want special speech protections and then it's going to come back and bite them. The same you could say for the left: Hey, in Germany, we need to crack down on the far right. But then if you're on the left and you're against Israel's actions in Gaza, you’re suddenly being arrested or you have a whole conference, including a Greek [finance] minister, just being shut down by police. I was interviewing this German lawyer who represents a lot of left-leaning clients and he was at this Palestinian congress in Berlin, which was shut down by police. He was with a Russian LGBT activist and he says this Russian LGBT activist said, yeah I recognize this scene. This is what happens in Moscow when we're trying to hold LGBT events.
Obviously, Germany has political pluralism. You've just had a free and fair election. Political opponents don't have to watch over their tea or fear falling out of windows. You don't have political prisoners. But it suggests to me that this idea being wedded to militant democracy tends not to work. Also, where do you draw the line? What if the AfD becomes the dominant party at the next election? Then all the restrictions that you put in place could potentially be used by the AfD.
I'm not an expert on the AfD, but my sense of general, of European far-right populist political parties, is that they talk a lot about free speech, but they're not very principled about it. Free speech mostly means their right to say what they want that governments don't like, but they will not defend the rights of their opponents. And they might actually be more willing to use speech restrictions than the governments who are in place, who do feel a need to balance free speech.
Mounk: So two thoughts here. One is that one of the things that those who call for restrictions on free speech tend to get wrong, I think, is just the structural analysis of who makes decisions about free speech. It’s a very strange feature of the debate about free speech over the last couple of decades that restrictions on free speech are often advocated genuinely, I think in good faith, by people who think this is the way to help vulnerable minorities in pluralistic societies. But by definition, who's going to be making decisions about what kind of speech falls under the purview of legitimate or at least permissible speech and what kind of speech can be censored? It's going to be people with a lot of power. Either it's going to be judges and politicians if the restriction on the speeches is straightforwardly political, or it's going to be CEOs and affluent employees of social media companies if it's left in private hands. So to think that in some structural, systematic, long-term way, they are going to always be on the side of the most vulnerable people in society is, I think, incredibly naive.
Now, the second thought I have is that there's a famous thing called the iron law of oligarchy in political science, the suggestion of which is that every society ends up with some people at the top of a steep hierarchy. Whether or not you believe that's that's true is a complicated topic perhaps for another podcast, but I wonder whether we can have something like the iron law of free speech restrictionists, which posits that the people who are in favor of restricting free speech are always going to be the people who see themselves explicitly or not as the establishment. That the people who have an interest in restricting free speech are always the people who actually feel that they're the ones who are in charge in society. While the people who truly are not in charge in society are by and large going to recognize that they cannot trust those who are.
I think one of the interesting things with the way in which the left has changed sides over the last 50 or 60 years when you go back to the Berkeley free speech movement and so on, really putting calls for more robust free speech at the center of student activism to the way in which the partisan valence of defense of free speech have shifted in this political moment—a good part of that is a shift in who is in power and who is part of the establishment. So perhaps we can have a second, not quite iron law to add here. Now, one of the ways in which we're seeing how naive these assumptions were is when you see the right coming to power. That's certainly the case when the right comes to power in places like India or Hungary, where Narendra Modi and Viktor Orbán have started to restrict free speech significantly. It is, to return to an earlier thing that you hinted at, potentially also the case in the United States, as the Trump administration is taking office. Tell us a little bit about that threat to free speech globally and particularly why it is that early on you intimated that Vance—although, according to you, had a good point in criticizing Europeans and some of their practices—was hypocritical based on some of the actions that his administration is starting to take in the United States.
Mchangama: First of all, even if you were a vulnerable and persecuted group at one point, it doesn't mean that once you're in power, you will be principled. Stalin was in exile, I think, in Siberia six or seven times. Lenin was chased around. Socialists were hounded across Europe. What happened when they came into power? Well, they established a brutal dictatorship where censorship was part and parcel of it. Christianity was a persecuted Jewish cult. When it became the state religion of the Roman Empire, it instituted mass censorship on an unprecedented scale. So this isn’t a new phenomenon that whoever comes into power tends to want to consolidate that power by restricting speech.
When it comes to the U.S., well, Donald Trump is suing his opponents. He has put in place people in the bureaucracy, like the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, who’s going after networks in ways that our previous FCC heads would not—basically for their editorial decisions, for airing news segments that are critical of Donald Trump or that Donald Trump didn't like. It was interesting to see Vance criticizing Sweden for prosecuting someone who had burned a Quran. I agreed with him on that, especially since a person who had burned a Quran was also killed by a likely jihadist. But then at the same time, Donald Trump has said that he wants people who burn the American flag to be imprisoned for one year and foreigners to be deported. And then when Vance was asked about this, he said, well, when I worry about restrictions on free speech, I'm not worrying about people who burn the American flag, that's a very important national symbol. What he’s worrying about is all these ideas that he doesn’t like. And so that's just a perfect example of the selectiveness. Another thing is that there's a very clear bias, at least to me, in the way that the government has suspended funding for various groups that work for press freedom, that work with dissidents in authoritarian countries. I think that means that the U.S. is retreating from the role that it played, for instance, during the Helsinki process, the way that it was a champion for internet freedom in the ‘90s, in the 2000s.
So the U.S. is not only sort of compromising the First Amendment under Donald Trump, it seems, but it's also retreating from being sort of the backbone of principled free speech at the global level at a time where authoritarian states are trying very hard to rewrite international norms and make authoritarianism something that should be unchallenged.
I think that is likely to have huge consequences for the state of free speech going forward. And this is again the tragedy of Europe because let's just imagine that Europe was able to step up. Well, it doesn't provide this compelling defense of free speech, because it provides a conception of free speech that is very malleable to authoritarian states. So you see that again and again when Germany adopted its NetzDG. Well, Russia did the same. All these other states did the same. They did it in bad faith. They implemented it in ways without the safeguards that you have in Germany, but they could basically say, well, you're doing this in Germany, so why shouldn't we be doing the same? You see it right now in Bangladesh and Pakistan, where these social media regulations are being put in place that reference the Digital Services Act, the European Union's attempt at platform regulation. They say, well, we’re just doing the same thing. So I think we face a very perilous time for global free speech and one where dissidents are being left alone, being abandoned essentially by democracies.
In the rest of this week’s conversation, Yascha and Jacob discuss recent attacks on free speech in the United States and what makes the Social Democrats in Denmark so successful. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
