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- [00:00]
A
If you listen to the Gist, you probably share a certain sense of curiosity, the kind that enjoys following an idea wherever it leads and asking bigger questions along the way. Which is why I want to recommend another podcast I think many of you would enjoy. In fact, some have enjoyed it because I've talked about it before. It's a great podcast called no Small Endeavor, hosted by Lee C. Camp, Liz, a professor of theology and ethics. And on the show he brings together scientists, writers, psychologists, and philosophers to explore a deceptively simple question, what does it mean to live a good life? Guests have included Malcolm Gladwell, happiness researcher Lori Santos, and other thinkers who've spent their careers studying how humans flourish. What I like about the show is the range of perspectives Lee brings to the table. Each conversation looks at life's big questions from a different angle, whether that's science, philosophy, faith, or culture. Need somewhere to start? Try the recent episode with conservationist Paul Rosalie, who has spent decades protecting the Amazon rainforest. It's a fascinating conversation about purpose, sacrifice, what it actually takes to devote your life to something bigger than yourself. Follow no Small Endeavor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. It's Monday, April 13, 2026 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca and Donald Trump has blast Pope as weak on crime. Yes, that is exactly the figure we turn to to get all these kids off the Circle K lot to crack down on shoplifting a little bit. What's he supposed to deploy the Swiss Guard to patrol subway stations? You know what, the Pope is a little not just weak on crime. I think he's in the middle of a crime syndicate. Here's a guy and the crime being identity theft. Apparently some guy named Robert Francis Prevost has now dressed in fancy garbage is calling himself Leo. And this is an identity theft. And the job he's in right now, every past person in the job has done the same thing. Little ID theft, chicanery, little Dread Pirate Roberts situation. Donald Trump also blasted the Pope for poor international relations. Whose? His or ours? I think people aren't coming to the United States as Taurus, but they're certainly going to the Vatican. In fact, I've looked up this crime stats for Vatican City where the Pope is actually in charge of very low no murders. Hasn't been a murder there. And don't believe the Dan Brown books. Hasn't been a murder there for many, many years. What I conclude is two things. One, the Pope's reaction was I don't fear Donald Trump. And I think we shouldn't either. He is a cartoonish figure. I know that we often say cartoonish but dangerous, or like Charlie Sykes says, a clown with a flamethrower still is a flamethrow grower. But I think we may have overestimated the man's ability to pull off an autocracy. And I base this not just on Trump and so much of what he's done, but the example said to occur in the world, Orban of Hungary, who just lost, what kind of autocrat loses a popular vote? And that, my friends, will be the subject of, of the spiel. But first, and on the show today, Jacob Machengam is a professor at Vanderbilt University. And in the first of two interviews, two parts of an interview, we will talk about his new book. He's a fascinating guy. He grew up in the Netherlands, came to the United States, understands the differences between how the Europeans and the Americans look at free speech. But he's very much a free speech advocate. He very much criticizes Europe and he does so in his book the Future of Free Speech Speech and in his conversation with me. Up next. I'm pleased to be joined now by Jakob Mitchengama, who is a professor at Vanderbilt and someone I've been hearing from and reading the works of for quite a while. He's an expert on free speech. I'm excited to have him on. The new book is called the Future of Free Speech, Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy's Most Essential Freedom. Welcome to the gist.
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B
Thank you so much, Mike. I've really been looking forward to this.
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A
So the global decline, you documented this at length and you were, I think, the leading voice who either coined the phrase or at least convinced me that there was this global recession in free speech. And part of the recession are things like the rise of autocracies and how China is pretty good at what it's doing when what it's doing, his censorship. But the recession also touched on what the traditionally free speech loving countries of the west have had begun to think about free speech, which contributed more or most alarmingly in your assessment?
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B
I'm actually most mostly alarmed about the developments in democracies. So think back to like the mid-90s, early 2000s. That was a time of intense optimism on behalf of democracy and freedom. There had been these previous waves of democratization that had brought democracy and freedom to all parts of the world. And then you had the World Wide Web and there was this sense that technology would supercharge these waves of freedom and democracy and that essentially censorship and authoritarianism would be consigned to the ash heap of history. Because how would you ever again be able to censor anyone? You know, famously, Bill Clinton talked about, you know, how Chinese efforts to censor the censorship the Internet would be like nailing Jello on a wall. And then came the Arab revolts. And, you know, it seemed like, yeah, okay, this is going in the right direction. You know, these deeply oppressed peoples, who for decades had lived under traditional censorship and propaganda, suddenly were able to use Silicon Valley products to organize protests that overthrew governments. But what was missed along the way was once was a that China had become pretty good at nailing jail to a wall. It had reverse engineered the technological promise. It now was able to use technology to supercharge censorship and surveillance at an unprecedented scale. But also that the free and equal and immediate access to speech that the Internet provided, especially as platforms became more centralized, also allowed criticism of institutional gatekeepers in democracies. And suddenly governments in democracies found that they were uncomfortable with that. And I think there were some specific incidents that drove what I call elite panic. So one was the Brexit referendum in the UK and then, of course, the 2016 presidential election in the United States. And the narrative that surrounded this in elite institutions, often in traditional media, was that it was essentially due to disinformation online that had led the people to be fooled into making these democratic decisions. It was not the genuine will of the people. And since then, you can say that in democracies, there's. The trajectory has very much been towards less free speech, and viewing free speech not as a competitive advantage against authoritarian states, which was the prevailing opinion 20 years, 15 years ago, but now as a Trojan horse that allows the enemies of democracies to weaponize free speech against democracy, both internal and external enemies.
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A
Right. So that answer spanned about from, let's say, mid-90s in the Clinton era through Arab Spring was 2012. And you mentioned 2016. Now, during that time, and in the book, there's a excellent juxtaposition of two statements by two UN Secretary generals. Secretaries General Kofi Annan being very optimistic about the democratization potential of the Internet. And then Antonio Gutierrez very, very much reflecting on a concern about, say, fake news and the ability of. Of. Of speech or technology to misinform people. But I also note that at the time when the Internet was being invented, it was an era of what we look back now and call techno optimism. And I think imbued in that phrase is the idea that we were very naive to be techno optimistic. And maybe also in that phrase is a criticism that we didn't do much to guard against down because we were naive and we hope that things would work out. So do you think that some of that was actually going on, Some of the criticism of the techno optimism is actually apt.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I. What you describe as techno optimism, this sort of idea that technology would, would bring about a sort of a nirvana, all upside, no downside, no trade offs, the end of history, that was obviously misguided. I still look back and I tend to think, and maybe I'm the only person left, that the benefits of the rollout, the democratization of speech outweigh the harms. I think that's a strong reason why all authoritarian states are moving towards digital sovereignty and don't want their citizens to be able to. To access the Internet. But it's certainly true that, you know, free speech comes with harms and costs, and those harms were not all, you know, were not top of mind during the most techno optimistic era. And some of them would not have been clear because, you know, if you go back to the 1990s or the early 2000s, the Internet was very different from what it looks like today. It was a much more decentralized space. You and I are old enough to remember the blockosphere. And the blockosphere was very different from the big centralized platforms that route much of the speech that we engage with today. And that has brought problems of his own. So in that sense, yes, there was a naivete. But I also think there's too much cynicism going around today where we take all the benefits of online speech for granted and then focus almost myopically on the harms, real and imagined.
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A
Yeah, and I agree with you. I agree with that assessment. You're not the only one. I definitely think this unprecedented flourishing of the ability to disseminate information, to read information and what a world we live in, that anything that someone writes, almost anything that someone writes on the other side of the world can be read. And there is a downside that anything can be misinformed information or, you know, a call to arms or some sort of terrorist manifestos. But it's just amazing to me as a kid who, as a undergraduate, you couldn't put me in a library because I'd get distracted by all the works. And now the library is with me all the time. So just a long way to say stipulated, stipulated, stipulated. But I do wonder. And what I was getting at with my question was in the mid-90s there were a few concomitant trends going on. More than trends, world shaping developments. Democracies were on the rise, autocracies and the old Soviet Union and the SO and the USSR ambit of the world was crumbling. The idea was that capitalism and democracy and free speech, these three things hand in hand would transform the world for the better. And I would say that there was perhaps a naivete against the need for guardrails, I guess, of the offshoots of those big trends that aren't always favorable. Right. So maybe to take capitalism, there was no real effort to inject a sort of non crony capitalism into the former Soviet states and therefore they devolved into, you know, mafia type fiefdoms. And I think something may have happened like that around free speech. The idea that they have more free speech, good, but it's not just an unalloyed good. And so how I understand why people would make that mistake. But, but how much, looking back, do we say that that was the Pandora's box, that if we had gotten it right then and taken it more seriously then and not just assume that good things would flow from these developments, we wouldn't be in the place we are now?
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B
No, I think that's a fair point. You know, you could also look, you know, Enlightenment, during the Enlightenment, there was a huge optimism about Enlightenment principles once they're put into place. Think France, you know, things could also go horribly wrong that did not, at least in my view, in, you know, invalidate the, in basic Enlightenment principles. Maybe there was a lack of sense of realism about how these, these principles would work in practice. And also that, you know, human beings are complex creatures. We don't, you know, we're not nourished by principles, by free speech. Maybe we're intellectually nourished, but we have other needs and we have conflicting ideals that hold sway over us. We have tendencies towards intolerance and so on. And some of those tendencies can be expressed ironically through free speech. And of course, even if you might look back at sort of the time before the Internet and say, well, there was a basic agreement about facts, there was obviously disputes, people disagreed, but there was maybe more agreement about basic facts. And that has splintered in our age. And I think that's true and that's a challenge. And every time there's a technological breakthrough that is a huge challenge that is hugely disruptive to human society and the institutions that we have built up to serve us at a given age, I still think the disruptions that we live through right now and the calculus might change because of AI, but are relatively mild compared to what you would live through if you lived through the printing press and the Reformation. But it's still disruptive, it's still unsettling. And then human beings tend to look for certainty, even if that certainty is sort of trying to impose some kind of top down control over the public sphere. That intended or unintended will then have consequences for the rights of free speech that you have worked so hard for.
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A
Right. So you chronicle how these Eastern European governments or the EU or others within the United States who saw the trend of the rise of misinformation and disinformation, a phrase that so often is conflated. And maybe they tried to do the right thing. They tried to see that I already said Pandora's back, but see that this was open, see that all these lies were flying around. And they tried to do what responsible parties would do, the kind of responsible parties who maybe go to conclaves among academics who worry about the future of democracies. What should we do? While acknowledging that more free speech is better than repressed free speech? We have this gigantic problem of lies being able to be disseminated and convince people to either vote for Brexit or think an election was stolen or whatever. This is the chapter of the book that I was perhaps most interested in, and it's perhaps the period that I find that you're most interested in, because I see you talking about it a lot, the missteps of trying to combat the misinformation. So is your assessment we just shouldn't have done it, or the way. The exact ways that we did it were wrong, or what our assumptions were, and who was doing the combating of misinformation got something wrong?
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B
Yeah. So in the chapter on disinformation, I open with going back in time in. In Paris in 1961, where there was this curfew aimed solely at Algerians, because there was the Algerian civil war at the time. Algerians were fighting for independence and. And so Algerians were protesting against this curfew. And Parisian police reacted extremely violently, killed maybe 30, maybe 100 Algerians, threw them into the Seine, shot them. But there was almost no accounts of what had happened in the heart of Paris. The French government actively suppressed this story. It falsified records and so on. And then I asked the question, could that have happened today? And my answer is clearly no, that would not have happened today. If, if a government in a democratic state today was to crack down violently on a peaceful protest, it would have been recorded in real time through mobile phones, through streaming, through social media, and it would have been impossible for the government to sweep such brutal events under the carpet. And I think that's sort of an attempt to sort of say these are the real benefits of the much more messy sphere that we live in today and the dangers of allowing governments to impose some kind of narrative control. Even if you have the best of intentions as a government, and I'm not sure that even democratic governments always have the best intentions, there will be very, very strong incentives to define mis and disinformation in ways that support whoever is in power. It's also true that if mis and disinformation has to a very large degree been sort of an elite exercise, if you like, so governments coming together with academic experts, even traditional media. So you could say demographics whose authority has been undermined by the democratization of online speech, which in and of itself gives them skewed incentives in this. But it also just, I think it furthers polarization if you have an elitist driven illiberal agenda in terms of narrative control. Now again, this does not mean that there are no problems with mis and disinformation and it doesn't mean that mis and disinformation cannot lead to real concrete harms. January 6th is a good example in this country. You saw the storming of democratic institutions in Brazil and you could find, you could, we could open up X right now and I'm sure we could find all kinds of examples of deluded ideas. But I think that what we need is actually to tap in and use some of the empowering tools that free speech gives us. I think crowdsource fact checking in what lies behind community notes, for instance, is something much more promising because it builds on trust and it's an organic bottom up approach to fighting mis and disinformation
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A
rather than like a censorship board or.
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B
Yeah, exactly. And I mean.
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A
And most democracies today show adjudicators of what is truth.
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B
Yes, and I really think, I really think it's, it's, it's a sort of Rubicon. Because when I go back and look at, let's say the Cold War, for instance, or even sort of up until a decade or two decades ago, a very, very bright dividing line between authoritarian states and democracies would be democracies do not outside limited categories like defamation, do not police truth. We have a free and open debate. Whereas if you're in the Soviet Union or in the Soviet bloc as such, there is a capital T, Truth. And that Capital T. Truth is determined by the party and if you deviate from that, you will be punished. Assuming that you even make it through the Maginot line of censorship that has been erected in these states. Those bright lines have been severely blurred and they are moving more and more in the direction of attempts at top down control. Very often sugar coated in language like voluntary codes or saying, well, tech platforms have a duty of care. But they all sort of revolve around ultimately governments, international institutions being the final arbiters of, of what constitutes mis and disinformation.
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A
Yeah. Or trusted to jawbone the tech platforms into compliance. And I mean other contexts wouldn't be celebrated.
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B
And what is interesting, of course, is I think it's fair to say that liberals on sort of the left have been the ones most concerned about mis and disinformation since 2016.
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A
Right. But, but that's a countermeasure to where the disinformation is coming from. Sure. The overall big picture, you know, why am I a liberal? And they could enunciate four reasons, five reasons. And then you look at the MAGA movement, which is awash. And disinformation is not that the left is free of it, but they would say this so gets in the way of our ultimate goal. We have to prioritize it as a problem with our society.
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B
But the problem then is then you have a Trump administration comes, comes into power where you have a hyper partisan chair of the FCC who now goes around saying, whoa, if broadcasters spread fake news, hey, they should lose their licenses. You have a president who sues, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and just about anyone else who he believes engages in fake news and there and sometimes
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A
even wins, as with the case of abc for different reasons, you know, to grease some sort of.
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B
He's able to intimidate people. And this is one of the most depressing things. You know, I moved to America because I am a strong believer in the American First Amendment tradition, which I prefer over to, over the sort of European conception of free speech that I grew up with. But, and the First Amendment provides the strongest constitutional protection of political speech in human history. But even, you know, you have big media institutions, universities, law firms who even though they could rely on the First Amendment to protect them, choose to bend over backwards due to intimidation. But what I'm saying here, it gets to a paradox because liberals who were critical or who wanted more muscular measures against mis and disinformation, well, this is exactly what the Trump administration now insists that it wants to do as well. And I think that demonstrates the importance of principled free speech in democracy. Power changes hands and plus, we're all fallible human beings. We're all deluded to a certain extent. And none of us are 100% fully principled. And all of us are very good at telling ourselves why our intolerance is justified. And that's why you need free speech.
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A
And I'll tell you what the future of free speech is. It's this conversation continuing tomorrow. Join us then. And now the spiel Viktor Orban has been defeated, which is a great thing for the world, for Hungary, for Ukraine, but also for the idea of the will of the people. Orban was of course not just a right wing, reactionary, even strong man, extremely conservative. He was an obstinate bully on the world stage and he was an intellectual hero to J.D. vance, Tucker Carlson, apparently Donald Trump and many others on the right. He was by all measures corrupt. He was not dedicated to a liberal democracy, quite the contrary. He proudly proclaimed Hungary to be an illiberal democracy. Liberal illiberal in this context means do the institutions behave democratically independent of the polling booth, do they behave without loyalty to one man or one party? And for a while Hungarians did like was what Orban was doing for their country. He had high ratings in the polls. Whether he manipulated things or not, before he even or his party controlled 80% of the media, though they still had the Internet. But voters in democracies, even democracies led by right wing figures, do usually after a time experience displeasure with their rulers. And when they do, they can vote them out. And this was the question, could they really do that with Viktor Orban? Viktor Orban got in the way of, of that cause and effect relationship. Supposedly it was seen that he was quite unpopular but was also going to stay. We were told he was a proto dictator, a fascist, or this was the big one, an autocrat. It comes as Trump publicly embraces Hungary's
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B
authoritarian Prime minister, Viktor Orban, hosting him at Mar A Lago.
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A
Some of the latest dark, darkest pronouncements from Donald Trump. In one speech he managed to get Hitler, Viktor Orban and Putin all in one.
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Orban the autocrat is a great model for western democracy.
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A
And then I moved there in 2009 and that was all before the rise of autocracy, before Viktor Orban, Hungary's current right wing prime minister, was elected. Here was John Oliver on his show a couple of weeks ago.
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B
Independent observers have deemed Hungarian elections since then. Free but not fair, which isn't interesting combination. You are free to vote for anyone you want, whether it's Orban or whoever, inevitably loses to him.
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A
But Orban did lose. What kind of autocracy is that? If the autocrat can lose the vote, is he an autocrat? And what kind of autocracy is it when reporters can repeatedly go into Hungary, report on the autocracy, do interviews inside the parliament, and not pay a price? Nor can anyone who expresses the opinions, this guy's an autocrat. What kind of autocracy lacks gulags, death squads, political prisoners in jail, or massive manipulation of the electoral process such that they can be voted out of office? Hungary had none of this. We were told the kind of autocracy was a different kind of autocracy, the kind only a smart, educated person who understands these kind of autocracies can really see. Here is Princeton professor Kim Lane Shepley. We tend to think of a coup,
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B
right, as happening with tanks in the streets, you know, and the military takeover and the announcement on radio that, you know, all civil liberties have died. That's not what autocracy looks like anymore. You don't get. You don't get phalanxes of tanks, you get phalanxes of lawyers.
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A
Shepley has also said, quote, if you went there, meaning hungry on vacation, you would never guess it's a dictatorship. That's weird. If you went to North Korea, or if you went to even the Dominican Republic, while Duarte let it. If you went to the Philippines when Duterte let it. I can't think of too many dictatorships that you could go to and not see strong signs that it was a dictatorship. Cuba, Venezuela, but not so with Hungary, apparently. She goes on to say, the way that Orban exercises control is through money. Orban has eliminated the system of welfare on unemployment insurance and so on, so that you only get those things if you pass his litmus test. Well, maybe the way to look at this form of dictatorship that doesn't use force but uses legal means, that seems dictatorial, that conditions its government aid more strictly, maybe even, you could say, far less fairly than predecessors. Maybe the way to think of that sort of dictatorship is that you have to be really smart enough to understand the true signs of a dictatorship that doesn't seem like a dictatorship. Or maybe the way to understand it is it's not a dictatorship, it's bad, It's a government we don't like. But these were words which once have meaning. The point isn't to educate us into new meanings. Maybe the point is to understand the meaning and to See if the current circumstances fit the definitions. And that's why I say, I will subscribe to the first political scientist or foreign affairs journalist who said, wow, we kind of got that one wrong. It is not an autocracy if the will of the people at the voting booth is honored. It's not an autocracy if you could just vote out the leader. It's not an autocracy if the strongman who manipulated the institutions didn't manipulate them so well that the people. And sure, maybe it's more than half the people, but the people could just say no, and that no is heard. And I have been thinking about this, obviously, pretty obviously because of not Viktor Orban, but because of Donald Trump. I am an American and Donald Trump is said to be all the things that Viktor Orban was accused of being. A fascist, a dictator and an autocrat. And one has to wonder the very sagacious political scientists who have fixed this label on Orban and choose to affix it on Trump, often by direct comparison to Orban. How careful are they? How correct are they? How committed are they to being extremely accurate? Or are they not trying to be exactly right, but directionally right, or right enough to increase their readership or to increase their status within the academy or to get people to pay attention or because they thought they were right? But did they think they were right because of calm, careful consideration? Or were they scared? A lot of us are scared. But then by being scared, were they corrected? And did some mechanism say, no, no, no, remember the definitions? Or did some other mechanism say, yeah, you're right to be scared. We're going to give you a lot of attention. We're going to flood your substack with subscribers. If you flee to Canada, it will be a front page story on the New York Times. And maybe under those circumstances, what you do is you invent a new category that only the truly sophisticated can see, like a magic eye painting of democracy. What's that other story where only the truly sophisticated could see that some sort of autocrat was naked? Can't remember it right off the top of my head. I would rather overreact than underreact to the threat of an autocrat. And overreacting means something like, we cannot let Donald Trump seize our institutions. I believe in that. I think that is what has gone on. The difference is the answer to the question, do you think Donald Trump will successfully seize these institutions? Not does he want to, but can he be stopped from doing it? I guess certain percentage of people will say, mike, you're blase. You're getting it wrong again. We know you have that thing in your head that makes you look at the bright side of life. You don't take threats seriously, but. No, I do take threats seriously. I'm taking the threat of Donald Trump seriously. I don't know. I'm going to throw this one out there. Maybe Jason Stanley and David Rothkop are kind of full of shit. I don't know. Maybe Donald Trump is a really bad leader, but far weaker than words like autocrat give him credit for. And maybe we spend so much time making the case that Trump is so much more pernicious and powerful than he really is, then the result is something other than taking Trump seriously and trying to stop him. The result of claiming that Donald Trump is so damn powerful is to give him power. You can see how that might work, can't you? So here is where I've reset my calibration, too. I have always thought that Donald Trump was going to lose in 2026, or at least his party will, in free and fair elections. I therefore, just based on that thought, talk of dictatorship or autocracy was seriously overblown. I also think that 2028 is going to be a free and fair election. Who wins? I don't know. I think in the United States that the will of the people will be respected and followed. I think there'll be some tinkering at the margins, and there always is. Parties will try to get an electoral advantage, but I think will of the people will be respected. If Viktor Orban, who is a lot better at this than Donald Trump ever was, has proved to be vulnerable to democracy, which they invented in Hungary about 30 years ago. If he is vulnerable, so too will a man 17 years his senior with far less knowledge about how his government works. Not a lawyer, less rigorous, a thinker who is never as popular. So will that guy fall to the will of the people? We don't live in an autocracy. He is not an autocrat. He's not a dictator on day one. He's not a dictator on day 1461. He's a cartoonish thug who's losing popularity and is about to lose at the polls, which will be counted accurately. Last word, John Oliver.
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B
Regardless of what happens on April 12, Orban's stranglehold on power should be alarming for us here in the States because he has clearly been an inspiration to American conservatives, to the point that J.D. vance is apparently planning to visit Hungary to show support for Orban ahead of their election. And that is because for them, Orban is not a cautionary tale. He is a blueprint.
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A
He means it as a cautionary tale. I play it as hopeful. I do so in the name of accuracy. That's it for today's show. Cory War produces the gist and Jeff Craig edits How to and many an other part of the show. Our booking coordinator is Ben Astaire. Kathleen Sykes runs the Just List. Good video there of John gans and Nicolas be debating libertarianism on Mike pesca.substack.com Michelle Pesca does it all. She's also a curator of the collected works of Lauren Hunter, a talented South Florida based painter who GPU do Peru. And thanks for listening.