The Subtext: Free Speech with Jacob Mchangama Part 2

**Savannah** (0:00)
Welcome back, this is part two of our interview with Jacob Mchangama.
Hey everyone, today on the podcast, we have Jacob Mchangama, who is the founder and executive director of The Future of Free Speech. He is a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. If you listen to this interview and you're like, wow, I really want to talk about free speech more, then we have great news for you, because he is leading something called the Global Free Speech Summit here in Nashville on October 2nd to 3rd. And we're going to put the link to that in the show notes, and you can get your ticket and join us there, because I think Lee and I are going to go too. I really liked this conversation with Jacob and I hope you do too. Okay, so I want to go back a little bit to the recession piece because we got a lot of the history, but I want to hear from your point of view. What do you feel like are the driving factors towards the free speech recession globally and in the United States?

**Jacob Mchangama** (0:58)
Yeah, so I think there are probably a lot of contributing factors.
One thing is definitely technology. So there's this concept of elite panic. Every time the public sphere is expanded through new communications technology, those who are the institutional gatekeepers will tend to panic. You know, how can you let non-property people vote? How can you have women vote? How can you have religious minorities and so on?
That is a recurrent pattern throughout human history. Then I also think that the latter part, especially of the Cold War, free speech was sort of part of our identity in the West, right? It was what set us apart from other parts of the world. And so we were proud of free speech. Now it no longer serves that same form of social cohesion that those who are against free speech are those over there on the other side of the iron curtain.
So that's one thing. And I also think that the West has lost geopolitical power in absolute and relative terms to other countries. It was easy to see the West in the 1990s as so far ahead of everyone else that you had nothing to fear. Now suddenly China is way ahead of Europe in terms of AI, not far behind the US., maybe ahead of US in robotics and other technologies. And so you become afraid of countries. And once societies become afraid, they're much more likely to restrict free speech when they feel that national security is under threat. You saw that with the Trump administration that suddenly said, no, you're gonna pull access to anthropics most capable models, right? So that is something that you see again and again. Then in the United States, I think there's a, I think ironically, the fact that especially younger people have become much more concerned about the well-being of minorities, have led them to say, well, we think equal dignity is more important than free speech. And they've come not to see free speech as an important safeguard for minorities, and therefore less committed to it. It probably also plays in that, you know, if you were someone who experienced the 70s, for instance, free speech, you would have seen free speech as central to Vietnam War protests. So free speech and sort of, and if you were in the 60s, you would have seen free speech as essential to the Civil Rights Movement, you know, Pentagon Papers cases. So it was sort of pivotal at a moment where American democracy was expanded in many ways. But if you're a younger generation, your main experience with free speech might have been social media. And so suddenly all of the dark sides of free speech are much more prominent. And so it becomes easier to take all the benefits for granted, not really think about them because you haven't had to fight for free speech, and then zoom in on all the very visible dark sides and be concerned about those.

**Savannah** (4:47)
Yeah, that hits it on the head, at least for my experience of kind of engaging with it, I guess, a little bit more seriously, of just listening through and realizing, oh yeah, I think I've probably just taken this for granted, first of all, just because it's how I grew up and I've grown up here. And then I think the other part is that it rubs up against my value of the desiring justice and wanting people to be treated well and all of that. But I think that for you to talk about free speech as an umbrella that actually allows for that in the long term, I think that that's kind of helpful for me to be able to hold to both values at the same time.