Transcript
A (0:00)
Suddenly, free speech is being seen not as a competitive advantage for democracies against their authoritarian counterparts, but as a Trojan horse that allows the enemies of democracies, both from within and without, to chip away at the foundations of democracy.
B (0:18)
And now the good fight with Jasia 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 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 a conclusion that the only way to deal with the social media age is, is to prosecute people for speech they don't like, to 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 Changuma, who is the CEO of a great free speech organization in Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of the similarly named the Future of Free Speech, a new book that he co authored with Jeff Kosseff. We talk about what attacks on free speech 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 ask 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 they're succeeding is the reason to be less worried about their ability to actually impose their views on the American public today than there might have been 12, 13, 14 months ago when Donald Trump had just taken office to listen to that part of the conversation to support what we do here. To get full access to all of our podcasts, go to writing.yashamunk.com listen and follow the instructions to set up your premium feed. If you're a subscriber, your premium feed on your favorite podcasting app. If you have trouble setting up the feed, you can email supportubstack.com for help. That's writing. Jacob, welcome back to the podcast.
A (3:13)
Thank you so Much.
B (3:14)
Yasha, you know, you keep writing books about free speech and I keep having to have you back on the podcast. It's terrible.
