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So to Speak Podcast Transcript: Is there a global free speech recession?
Nico Perrino: All right, folks, welcome back to So To Speak: The Free Speech Podcast, where every other week we take an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define your right to free speech. Today, we’re going to look at free speech through a global lens. Who better to do that with than FIRE Senior Scholar for Global Expression, Sarah McLaughlin? Sarah, welcome back to the show.
Sarah McLaughlin: Thanks, Nico.
Nico Perrino: You have a book coming out later this year.
Sarah McLaughlin: I do.
Nico Perrino: Let’s get closer to the microphone.
Sarah McLaughlin: Okay. Yes, I do have a book coming out later this year. It’s not gonna be at all relevant. It’s about authoritarianism in higher ed, so no news there on that front at all.
Nico Perrino: No authoritarianism in higher ed, is there?
Sarah McLaughlin: No developments on that front. No, it’s primarily looking at the relationship between China and global higher ed, but I think there’s a lot of relevant conversations to have at this point about how we’re going to keep authoritarianism out of higher education.
Nico Perrino: The book is due out August 19th. It’s available for preorder now, right?
Sarah McLaughlin: Yes, it is.
James Kirchick: What’s it called?
Sarah McLaughlin: Authoritarians in the Academy.
Nico Perrino: We’re also with Jacob Mchangama. He is a FIRE Senior Fellow and the Executive Director of the Future of Free Speech think tank at Vanderbilt University. He also has a book. You have one coming out, I believe, later this year, right Jacob? But you also have the paperback edition of Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media. Welcome back to the show. Tell us about these books.
Jacob Mchangama: Thank you so much for having me. I remember the first time I was on your podcast. It was in your tiny Manhattan apartment that you shared with someone, and we were recording on a coffee table. Well done for this podcast and you, Nico. Yes. So, you’re right. I have the paperback version of the history of free speech with a new epilogue.
It’s already obsolete or at least needs a lot of updating because I finished writing it, I think, in November of last year; and lots of things have happened, at least in this country. Some of the things that have happened, maybe I shouldn’t comment on because I’m on a green card and who knows. The other book that you mentioned is probably coming out in 2026. It’s a book that I’m coauthoring with Jeff Kosseff, a great First Amendment scholar on the future of free speech. So, that’s to come.
Nico Perrino: Well, maybe during this podcast we can figure out if there is a future for free speech.
Jacob Mchangama: Yeah.
Nico Perrino: But we’ll answer that question here in due course. Also joining us is James Kirchick, who’s been on the show before, another FIRE Senior Fellow. You’re a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, writer at large for Air Mail, and you had a 2022 New York Times bestseller that we covered on this show before. It’s called the Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. Welcome back.
James Kirchick: Thank you for having me.
Nico Perrino: So, I think where we should start, if we’re trying to assess the global landscape for free speech, is a survey that Jacob’s organization, The Future of Free Speech project, came out with this month, published findings from a global survey that answered the question, who in the world supports free speech, surveying what, 52,000 people about their support for free speech policies in 33 countries.
The survey goes beyond abstract support for free speech, asks respondents things like – do you think people should be able to criticize the government, insult the national flag, express support for same-sex relationships? A country that comes in at No. 1 in support for free speech, according to your survey, is Norway. After that –
Jacob Mchangama: My home country.
Nico Perrino: Denmark.
Jacob Mchangama: Yes.
Nico Perrino: Hungary, a little bit surprising; Sweden. Venezuela is No. 5, also a little bit surprising. The United States, we fell from third to ninth place. So, what’s happening here?
Jacob Mchangama: Yes.
Nico Perrino: Is the United States getting worse for free speech and everyone else is getting better? Or is everyone getting worse, just at different degrees? What’s happening?
Jacob Mchangama: So, overall, I think there are twice as many countries where we see decreases in support for free speech than increases. Many of them are not necessarily extremely dramatic drops, though some countries definitely are. For some reason, Japan sees a dramatic drop, Israel as well, which may be understandable given everything that’s going on, but concerning nonetheless.
Of course, it’s quite concerning to see the US drop from third to ninth. One of the things that jumps out to me is a drop among younger generations. I think this is not necessarily surprising. I think it’s something that you’ve also picked up on in some of your excellent surveys.
I think every generation, essentially, after the boomer generation has become less tolerant of controversial speech.
Generally, as you would expect, you see well-established democracies tend to have a larger support for free speech than others, but then you have some outliers, which I think is hopeful.
These are the hopeful messages that Hungary and Venezuela, two countries, where Hungary has for a very long time seen free speech being subverted in sort of not the traditional authoritarian ways where people get disappeared into torture dungeons but where cronies of Victor Orbán essentially own the media; and Venezuela, which is now more of a hardcore authoritarian dictatorship, you also see people there expressing broad support for free speech. So, I think that’s the hopeful message.
The negative message is that the US, which for around 80 years has been sort of the global champion of free speech, you see a drop in support for free speech. We should say that this survey was carried out before the new administration came into power. So, it doesn’t reflect the policies of the Trump administration.
But combined with what’s going on on the ground in this country and something that I think we’ll talk about later, seemingly the US government pulling away from its traditional role as the global champion of free speech, I think that’s quite concerning.
Nico Perrino: So, at the same time that your organization released your survey, which if I understand it, it’s just a survey of sentiment, right?
Jacob Mchangama: Yes, yes.
Nico Perrino: It’s not actually looking at policy.
Jacob Mchangama: Yeah.
Nico Perrino: Varieties of Democracy released its 2025 Democracy Report titled, “25 Years of Autocratization, Democracy Trumped?” The report stems from its global dataset of over 31 million data points for 202 countries from 1789 to 2024.
It found that freedom of expression is deteriorating in 44 countries in 2024, a quarter of all the countries in the world, the highest recorded so far and up from 35 last year. It reports that for more than a decade freedom of expression has been the worst affected aspect of democracy. It’s only improving in eight countries, while last year’s report found it improving in 11 countries.
It measures the deterioration across a number of different sectors, including declines in the safety for journalists, freedom of citizens to discuss political issues, as well as freedom of academic and cultural expression. They conclude by saying, “Compared to the situation in 2014, the losses are staggering.” I wanna pull Sarah and James into this conversation. Jacob is on the record saying we’re in a global free speech recession. Do you feel the same way, Sarah?
Sarah McLaughlin: Oh, absolutely. I think the numbers are clear. I think the evidence is clear, and I think we’re all globally feeling the squeeze. An idea that I’ve been really trying to combat in recent years with my writing is that just because you’re in a free country doesn’t mean that censorship in other countries is not going to affect you because I think this is a real misconception people have. They say, “Well, my country” – this is something I heard a lot from Americans – “My country has speech protections. So, what do I care if China censors speech?”
Well, there are a lot of reasons to care. The video games you play, you might not be able to say certain things in the chat. The movies you watch, they might be censored because the companies creating them want to make sure they’re in a good relationship with the Chinese government. Perhaps even censorship of reporting about viruses that are emerging –
Nico Perrino: Not relevant at all.
Sarah McLaughlin: – might ultimately come to affect you. So, I think what people need to realize is that this kind of global recession in freedom affects the people in those countries.
But it affects people outside them too. So, I think this is a problem for all of us.
Nico Perrino: James, do you agree?
James Kirchick: Well, I would actually go further than that and say, democracies don’t go to war with each other. So, there’s no better indication of democratic values, in my opinion, than free speech. So, if there’s no free speech in these countries or if it’s declining, it means that those governments can then get away with more corruption. They can behave irresponsibly on the international stage and whatnot. So, it’s more than just your video games or your IP or your data is being stolen by the Chinese.
The Chinese Communist Party is building up a massive military capability. The Chinese people don’t know about it. They have no right to complain about it. We’re hurdling towards a problem with that. So, that’s what I would absolutely endorse, what Sarah said about that. And I also agree with Jacob that it is very heartening to know that in Hungary and Venezuela, you see such massive support for free speech, particularly in Hungary where 15 years now Victor Orbán has been in power.
I think it’s a good sign that a large majority of people there seem to be unhappy with what’s going on. You can tell that by the polling results. Absolutely, in Venezuela even more so that the spirit of resistance is still alive, I think that’s a very important fact that we know.
One more thing, I think in terms of this falling support for free speech, I’m curious to know, all of you, how much you think it has to do with the emergence of this discourse about disinformation and misinformation. It’s such a subjective term. I’ve written about this, and I know you guys have as well. It’s increasingly clear that when people use those terms to describe information, it’s usually information they don’t like.
Nico Perrino: Yes.
James Kirchick: It’s not just false statements. I don’t agree with it. I’m gonna label it misinformation. At least in the West, I think that has become, and especially in the United States among these kinds of global elites, the people in think tanks and who go to Davos and whatnot, they’re obsessed with these concepts of misinformation and disinformation.
Oftentimes, most of the time, their solution is censorship. They don’t call it censorship because no one likes censorship, but they want to censor people. Donald Trump, his election victory to many people in this country was because of misinformation, disinformation, certainly in 2016, less so in 2024. But there are a lot of people, I think, who labor under this delusion that misinformation is a new thing, and it’s never been around before. It just sort of arose with the internet.
Sarah McLaughlin: Well, sort of a funny example of relevance, I think it was earlier this week or maybe last week, the press secretary – her name is escaping me right now.
Nico Perrino: Karoline Leavitt?
Sarah McLaughlin: Leavitt?
Nico Perrino: Yeah.
Sarah McLaughlin: She claimed that it was misinformation and a hoax, the Atlantic’s reporting about their editor’s inclusion in a – you can’t call it a war-planning chat. There’s another word.
James Kirchick: Yeah, I think misinformation –
Nico Perrino: Yeah, it was an attack plan.
James Kirchick: – it’s just like more syllables of a word than fake news. It’s really what it is. It’s another way to describe what you consider to be fake news.
Nico Perrino: There was a survey, I believe, a year or two ago. Jacob, you might remember it. I think it was the World Economic Forum, but it might be another one of those groups that asked, essentially, global elites, leaders of countries, leaders of think tanks, leaders of prestigious institutions, what the biggest global threat was at the time. They identified mis- and disinformation, even ahead of nuclear war or climate change.
Jacob Mchangama: And AI powered disinformation. That was the narrative. Remember, last year, 2024 was the super election year with maybe around 2 billion people eligible to vote around the world. There were these endless warnings from the traditional media, from politicians about how there was an imminent threat against global democracy, that it will be drowned out by disinformation that was supercharged by AI.
What happened? Well, we have quite a few results. People who are experts have looked at it, and there’s no evidence that AI-powered disinformation changed these elections, but there were lots of deep fakes. Lots of people played around with AI. But it didn’t change elections in India.
Věra Jourová, who’s an EU commissioner, likened AI disinformation to an atomic bomb that could change voter preferences. Of course, there’s no evidence that the European Parliamentary elections were affected by disinformation/misinformation, whether AI-generated or not. So, this is something that politicians, media, experts keep pounding on. And, of course, it’s true that there is misinformation. It’s true that there is disinformation. It’s also true that it can cause real-life harm.
But it’s also true that when you keep coming out with these existential warnings and they don’t materialize or they’re weaponized against specific narratives that you don’t like, it actually helps erode trust in institutions, in politicians, and the media. It makes the general public much more cynical about the information environment and want to “stick it” to elites.
So, I think that in many ways it’s a counterproductive way to handle a difficult information environment just sort of saying, well, right-wing populism is misinformation that we need to counter through top-down measures. But I don’t think it explains the entire sort of drop in support. I think there are lots of different factors.
Nico Perrino: Well, one could be hate speech, right?
Jacob Mchangama: Yeah. In the US you see – and, again, especially the younger generations – less supportive of being able to say things that’s offensive to minorities, for instance. We see that in a number of countries. I think in the US, for instance, younger generations who don’t have a living memory of the Civil Rights Movement or Vietnam War protests don’t associate free speech with some of these sort of very prominent victories and social progress, same sex marriage, all these things where free speech was instrumental.
They’ve sort of grown up in an age where free speech was ubiquitous on social media platforms. So, they’ve seen the ugly sides, the dark sides of free speech much more prevalently than others.
Nico Perrino: We don’t have a hate speech law in the United States. The First Amendment forbids it. But, Jacob, in the epilogue of your book, you write that in 2024, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the European Union all adopted new or proposed new and expanded laws against hate speech, slicing off more layers of previously protected speech.
James, I’ve been dying to get your perspective on Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference where he went to Europe and lectured Europeans about their free speech protections, often citing hate speech codes in places like Germany, for example. How do you look at that whole speech?
James Kirchick: Well, if the speech had been delivered in the debating club at a university in the United States, great. I agree with every word. My first book was called the End of Europe. It was about a lot of these issues, the lack of free speech rights in Europe, and I’ve written extensively about it myself. This maybe is beyond the scope of this podcast.
Nico Perrino: I think I know where you’re going with it. Let’s present that first, quickly though.
James Kirchick: The place to deliver that speech is not at the Munich Security Conference, which is a global security conference of democratic countries where they talk about security challenges from other powers, mainly Russia and China. For him to say that the biggest threat to Europe right now is not Russia or China, it’s the lack of free speech is just preposterous.
Russia is fighting a war on European soil. It’s the first major war on the European land mass since World War II. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives in this war. So, for him to claim because Germany bans – I don’t know – extreme forms of speech that represents a greater threat to European security than Russia, Personally, as Jamie Kirchick, I find that absurd, preposterous.
Nico Perrino: What do you make, though, of the argument that Europeans are passing laws that undermine the democratic values that they claim to uphold?
James Kirchick: Absolutely.
Nico Perrino: So, Jacob, for example, in your epilogue, which I’m using as a jumping off point to just talk about some concrete examples, you talk about how the European Union banned Russian state-sponsored media outlets, like Russia Today and Sputnik. You think that’s a bad thing. I’m curious if the whole table thinks that way.
James Kirchick: Can I add? I have a personal history with Russia Today. If you just Google my name and Russia Today, you will find in 2013, I was invited on their network to talk about something. I decided I wanted to talk about the anti-gay law that was then being passed in the Duma, and I started shouted at the host and the guests for two minutes. For some reason, they let me go on, and then they finally cut me off.
Nico Perrino: We’ve gotta cut that in if we find that.
James Kirchick: Sure.
Nico Perrino: Sam, producer, please cut that in.
James Kirchick: Not to toot my own horn, I only say that to emphasize that despite this long tortured history I have with that network, I believe it is wrong to be censoring it and to be taking it off the airwaves. What we’ve done in the United States is we’ve made them register as a foreign agent, which I think is fine.
Nico Perrino: I haven’t thought about that much.
James Kirchick: They are a Russian government-sponsored institution. We have laws that American citizens who work on behalf of foreign governments have to file. It’s called the Foreign Agent Registration Act. We can debate whether or not that’s appropriate, but to take them off the air entirely is just bad. It's a bad policy.
Jacob Mchangama: It was not only taking them off the air. It’s one thing to revoke your broadcasting license. But, essentially, the European Commission wrote Google and other social media platforms saying, hey, you need to de-index search results from this growing list of state-sponsored Russian media outlets.
Nico Perrino: So, we wouldn’t be able to find your clip on Russia Today if the United States did the same thing and de-indexed that search.
Jacob Mchangama: Yeah, right. I’m sure there are workarounds. But, also, if I wanted to share a clip from Russia, I think it’s incredibly valuable to go and look at Russian state sponsored media because you get an insight into what are the narratives driving it.
James Kirchick: Absolutely.
Jacob Mchangama: What is their genocidal rhetoric on Ukraine, the sort of hatred for Western liberal values – I think that’s incredible. Every European should look and study that, but if I were to share that and not explicitly distance myself from it, essentially, Facebook or whatever would need to remove it because I was sharing that information. That, I think, is just extreme.
When the No. 1 foreign policy guy in the European Union at the time went out and said, “By doing this, we’re not restricting freedom of expression, we’re protecting freedom of expression.” That, to me, sort of epitomized the European approach to free speech. It’s a very elitist conception of free speech in which you need responsible adults in the room to ensure that the public sphere is ordered and that European populations are not led astray by populists or Russian nefarious forces.
Nico Perrino: Sarah?
Sarah McLaughlin: To Jacob’s point, I regularly read China state media. Just this morning, I saw a piece. It was an op-ed criticizing the United States for destroying freedom of speech in higher education, which I have a lot of thoughts about coming from Chinese state media, but I think it gets to that point about what JD Vance was doing and saying.
We are losing a lot of credibility to be lecturing other countries right now on their free speech issues, and I think we’re about to start seeing a lot of it thrown back in our face. I know there have been reports about trade negotiations between the US and the UK and how the US has been reportedly bringing up the UK's many free speech issues.
I’m wondering. Are they gonna start bringing up some of ours too?
Nico Perrino: Well, I just heard a report. I think Mark Zuckerberg is petitioning Trump to try and de-fang some of these European regulations of the tech companies. I don’t know if it’s the Digital Services Act, which has speech implications, or something broader. But Europe much more closely polices tech companies and these social media platforms than the United States does.
I wonder if that’s gonna be something that President Trump’s gonna be able to lead on. At the same, of course, the United States is banning things like TikTok. Do you guys have any perspective on that? Maybe we can talk about the Digital Services Act. Jacob, you write that the Digital Services Act forces online platforms to quickly assess and remove illegal content, such as hate speech and other vaguely defining concerns, or face fines of up to 6% of their global revenue.
This seems catastrophic if you’re one of these platforms.
Jacob Mchangama: Well, it’s not catastrophic for the platforms because what they do is that they just err on the side of removal. So, their terms of service, their hate speech polices, for instance, they’re all just drafted much, much broader. Let’s say Germany is probably the most speech-restrictive country in Western Europe. So, they have their criminal laws, their battery of ever-expanding laws that criminalize hate speech and so on.
So, what Meta does, what YouTube does is, well, we’re just going to define it even broader. Then we’re gonna get our automated content moderation systems to remove anything that resembles that, and then we’ll err on the side of over-removal. This is something that the Future of Free Speech has documented in several reports.
We’ve shown that in Germany, Sweden, and France, I think it was, on YouTube and Facebook on the accounts of prominent politicians and media outlets, we’re able to sort of measure deleted comments. And 95%, I think, of deleted comments were perfectly lawful and most of them not even controversial. So, for the companies, it’s not necessarily catastrophic. I don’t think they necessarily care, or at least they’re very flexible depending on who’s in power and what their interests are.
It’s more catastrophic for the users. Those are the people that I really care about. Even under the First Amendment, the companies have First Amendment speech rights. So, that is important, but I’m more concerned about the billions of users around the world who use these platforms to communicate. In many countries around the world, they’re the only alternative to official propaganda and censorship.
Nico Perrino: Yeah, and I wanna get to the alternatives to official propaganda and censorship a little later in the conversation surrounding Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. Are we gonna get to a place where one of these companies, Sarah, just says, “Screw it. We’re not gonna be in your country anymore” because in China, many of them have caved in order to stay. But some have left.
Sarah McLaughlin: Some have left. I need to get my hands on the book. There’s a book coming out suggesting that Zuckerberg and Facebook perhaps misled people about how much they were willing to create censorship programs for the Chinese government. I don’t remember the name of that book at the moment, but I do think the great risk here is that we will kinda reach the place where we’ll have the lowest common denominator for all of us where a company will say, “These are the laws we have to deal with in this country. It’s very difficult for us to geo-block, for us to create separate rules for all of these different countries.”
“So, let’s just have the simplest more restrictive rules for everybody so we don’t have to figure out how to make sure we’re in compliance with the EU, with Australia, with Canada, with the US.” So, to me, that is the risk, the thing I’m most concerned about.
Nico Perrino: Yeah.
Jacob Mchangama: And Google actually had a secret project at one time where they were sort of working on a search engine that would sort of comply with Xi Jinping’s dictates. Some Google whistleblower came out with it, and they had to abandon it. But that shows that Silicon Valley, some of these companies, maybe the majority of them, are more attracted by profit than the animating civil libertarian free speech principles that Silicon Valley was once upon a time founded upon.
I think that’s in the nature of big global companies. You can’t expect them to sort of be the principled custodians of free speech. You can pressure them to be less bad, but you can’t expect them to be the vanguard of global free speech.
Nico Perrino: You write in your epilogue that Apple removed tens of thousands of apps from its Chinese app store, including those from foreign news outlets and gay dating services, in order to comply with the Cyberspace Administration of China. Microsoft Bing’s search engine censored sensitive topics in China more rigorously than some Chinese companies. This is the global censorship that crosses borders that you were speaking about earlier, Sarah.
Outside of the scope of the conversation a little bit, but I’m concerned about the same thing with regard to artificial intelligence here in the United States. You’re getting state-based regulation of each of these artificial intelligence platforms. If you’re a platform like ChatGPT, maybe not ChatGPT because it’s well capitalized, but maybe a smaller upstart AI company, do you just write your algorithms, create your artificial intelligence to meet the lowest common dominator, the most restrictive state law, as opposed to writing 50 different laws.
In the 1990s surrounding the internet with that emerging technology, you at least had a Federal framework for regulating the internet. Much of it was struck down at the Supreme Court in ACLU v. Reno. But you could see how this could play out on a global scale as well. Jamie, I don’t know if you had any thoughts on any of this.
James Kirchick: Well, as a writer, as someone who produces content, I am somewhat wary of AI, I think, for obvious reasons, which is that if you produce original content, then it can be used. And it can be basically stolen by AI. You can write an article, but they’ll just re-word it, and then it’s theirs. I don’t know where I fall…
Nico Perrino: The New York Times just won a pretty good motion –
James Kirchick: Yes.
Nico Perrino: – to dismiss against OpenAI, their lawsuit there.
James Kirchick: Right
Nico Perrino: I don’t know exactly where it was happening. I think it was the “motion to dismiss” stage.
James Kirchick: I consider myself a pretty stalwart First Amendment free speech advocate.
I also oppose plagiarism because it’s the biggest crime in my business. I think there’s a threat of that happening with a lot of the AI that’s being produced.
Jacob Mchangama: On that, Nico, we actually just, I think, yesterday we sent out – so, a year ago, we tested a number of the most dominant chatbots to see their rate of refusals on controversial topics, like create a Facebook post arguing for or against the participation of transgender people in women sports, for or against abortion. A year ago, the rate of refusal was quite high. The updated version showed that the dominant chatbots were actually less censorial.
Nico Perrino: Oh, interesting.
Jacob Mchangama: But if you take DeepSeek, the Chinese model, it’s obviously extremely censorial when it comes to Chinese topics. There are still sort of things that GPT and others will not generate.
So, it’s not a complete free-for-all, but at least it sort of moved, generally, in a more open direction.
Nico Perrino: Also, if I want information about Tiananmen Square, maybe I can go to ChatGPT.
Jacob Mchangama: You go to ChatGPT.
Nico Perrino: But if I want information about the races of the founding fathers, maybe I go to DeepSeek.
Jacob Mchangama: I checked this a few months ago. So, Gemini, Google, at one point, someone asked Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister, has he ever been called a fascist? He has many.
Nico Perrino: The Prime Minister of India, right?
Jacob Mchangama: Yeah, the Prime Minister of India. He has many. It didn’t make a value judgment. It just said, “Yes, he’s been called this.” The Indian government immediately went after Google saying, “This violates our laws.” So, up until a few months ago, at least, when you asked Gemini – maybe you can do a test now – has Narendra Modi been called a fascist, it says, “Well, I can’t help you with that.”
So, that sort of showed the world’s largest democracy putting pressure on a US tech company even within the borders of the US and outside the borders of India.
Sarah McLaughlin: Well, and they don’t even necessarily have to put pressure on them. I think the problem is that sometimes that pressure is just assumed, like Midjourney, the AI image-generating tool. They, at least as of last year, had a policy that you could not make satirical images of Xi Jinping. You could make satirical images of everybody else. This is a US-based company. They just wanted a chance of access to China’s market. So, that was a rule they made without ever having been told to, without getting an angry letter or a warning.
Nico Perrino: This is anticipatory obedience.
James Kirchick: Yeah.
Sarah McLaughlin: Yes, so obeying in advance, as they say.
Nico Perrino: We’ve seen a lot of that these days. You were mentioning Russia earlier, and I found this astonishing, Jacob. You report in your epilogue that in November of 2023 Russia declared the International LGBT movement – I don’t know if such a single entity exists as an extremist organization – virtually banning all forms of LGBTQ activism in that country.
Jacob Mchangama: You now have people who wear sort of rainbow symbols in Russia being arrested. If they post it on social media, they’re being arrested. We can get back to this with the Radio Free Europe thing. It’s one of the things that frustrate me the most. Russia and China are very, very actively cooperating when it comes to subverting free speech and human rights norms.
So, look at an organization called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. So, it’s basically a group of countries that include China, Russia, but also Central Asian states. They’re busy developing these conventions on countering extremism and terrorism with extremely wide and vague definitions of extremism and hate speech.
They use them internally to crack down. So, in Russia, more people have now been persecuted for speech under Putin than in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. That’s where we are, but they’re also pushing these norms at the United Nations. They’re pushing them to other countries. Once upon a time, until very recently, the backstop against this would be the United States. In 1941, FDR gave his vision for the four freedoms. The very first freedom was freedom of speech for everyone in the world.
His widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, fought for freedom of expression in international human rights conventions, fought a pitch battle against the Soviets who wanted to ban hate speech and misinformation and so on. The US has sort of consistently – well, it doesn’t have a perfect record around the world – but it has been the most vocal prominent voice for robust free speech protections.
This is something where I see the current administration retreating from, and I think that’s going to have very serious consequences for global free speech around the world, especially for embattled dissidence and the ability for independent media to hold their corrupt governments to some degree of accountability.
Nico Perrino: James, you were on this Russia beat earlier than most. You said 2013, right? You saw this coming.
James Kirchick: Yeah. Well, I started working at Radio Free Europe in 20 – are we talking about that now? Or do you wanna wait a little bit?
Nico Perrino: We can talk about it. Let’s do it, yeah.
James Kirchick: Yeah, I started working there in 2010. We should probably explain what Radio Free Europe is. It was founded by the CIA in the early years of the Cold War. It was funded secretly by the CIA until 1971 when the funding switched to Congress, and it’s been annually funded by Congress since then, and has always enjoyed wide bipartisan support. What it does is it provides fair and balanced – I know that term is very loaded – but objective news and information.
During the cold war, it was to those countries in the Eastern Bloc – so on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Since the downfall of communism, they have spread their mission to places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and they’re also big in Central Asia as well since that was mentioned. What the Trump administration did a couple weeks ago, it decided to not disperse the funds that Congress has appropriated for not just RFE/RL but the Voice of America, Radio Free Asia. There’s other international broadcasts.
Nico Perrino: This is like $860 million dollars.
James Kirchick: Yeah, high hundreds of millions, a lot. But as my boss at Radio Free Europe said at the time, the annual budget of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – Radio Liberty was to Russia – the annual budget was the cost of two Apache helicopters. So, to me, it’s like a rounding error in the Federal budget.
And what are you getting for it? You’re getting, going back to where we started, about the importance of freedom and democracy in other countries and how that affects the national interest of the United States. What all of our international broadcasting does, from Radio Martí, which broadcasts into Cuba, Radio Free Asia, which is broadcasting into North Korea and China, we have an amazing resource of educating citizens in these countries who lack access to accurate news and information because they live –
Sarah McLaughlin: Because of severe censorship.
James Kirchick: – because of severe censorship. We and the BBC and to some extent the French government – they have their own versions of this as well as – but it’s mainly the United States. We are promoting these liberal democratic values abroad. Unfortunately, in the case of RFE, for whatever reason – it’s still unclear – they reversed that decision.
So, RFE has basically been given a stay of execution, but they are proceeding. They are proceeding in shutting down Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle Eastern broadcast network, which is the Middle Eastern part of it.
Nico Perrino: Voice of America, according to the reporting, reached approximately 360 million listeners –
James Kirchick: Around the world.
Nico Perrino: – worldwide in nearly 50 languages. It’s gone silent. Its website hasn’t been updated since March 15.
James Kirchick: Yeah, I believe so.
Jacob Mchangama: If you wanna see sort of the dividend of that, I urge you to go and look at Václav Havel, the Czechoslovakian dissident and later president’s triumphant speech in Congress in 1990 –
James Kirchick: Yes.
Jacob Mchangama: – where he sort of says, “Four months ago, I was arrested by the most totalitarian government in Europe. Now I’m standing before you as the representative of a free democracy, a country with complete freedom of speech.” Havel was a huge supporter of Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. He said, “This was part and parcel of what brought communism down.” In fact, he brought the broadcasting headquarters, right?
James Kirchick: Yes.
Jacob Mchangama: Jamie, am I right – to Prague?
James Kirchick: Yes, from Munich to Prague. Not only that, he put them in the former communist parliament building.
Jacob Mchangama: He wrote a personal letter to President Clinton when there were sort of rumors of RFE scaling down its operation saying, “No, this is absolutely essential.” For dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, RFE and others were crucial because they would not only broadcast information that was not available to others, but they would also broadcast samizdat, so illegal writings by dissidents.
So, that would be spread, things that would’ve otherwise been censored, including Charter 77, this very influential manifesto that Havel and others wrote that protested the Czechoslovakian government’s crackdown on dissent. The very first demand and complaint they had was about its crackdown on free speech.
And there you actually saw that the principle of free speech in human rights that had been advocated by the US and Europe was combined with the practice of free speech through radio broadcast to great effect. I don’t think you can underestimate how the practice and principle of free speech culminated with the so-called Helsinki Effect that bred civil society organizations that gained powerful supporters on Capitol Hill and delegitimized communist governments who thought, well, we’re just signing this paper in 1975, 50 years ago this year, but it doesn’t mean anything.
But, actually, they walked into a trap, not one where they were sort of overthrown by weapons, but powerful ideas of liberty and free speech. That’s, essentially, what I fear the US is now abandoning.
Nico Perrino: But the Trump administration, James, says that it’s the voice of radical America and said Trump’s order would ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda. It cited coverage that was too favorable to former President Joe Biden as well as stories about White privilege, racial profiling, and transgender migrants seeking asylum. I’m reading from the Associated Press’ news report, which the administration might also call fake news.
James Kirchick: I believe they’re cherry-picking stories that came from VOA. You have to understand, they are broadcasting every year – I don’t know – hundreds of thousands of dispatches. So, you’re gonna take four or five and say this is radical leftwing. To say that RFE/RL is radical left – I’ll just tell one story. I had a great colleague. She was the head of our Moldovan service. We were talking about my favorite movie, which is The Lives of Others, which is about East Germany, also a very good movie about free speech.
It’s about a playwright in East Germany. It won the best foreign film, and she didn’t like it because it wasn’t anti-communist enough because it humanized – it’s about a Stasi officer who’s listening in on this playwright. Because the movie humanized the Stasi officer, she didn’t like it because she’s like there’s no evidence that any Stasi officer ever did anything to help a normal citizen.
I’m like, okay, that’s your view. You lived under communism. It’s not for me to argue with you about that but, clearly, not a radical leftist. All the people there have different political views. Obviously, people come from many different countries and other people who might be social democrats, sure. But there are also people who are maybe Eastern Orthodox Christians who might be more conservative. But the notion that this is radical leftwing is utterly preposterous. This was founded by the CIA to fight communism. That’s the legacy of all these organizations.
That’s what Radio Martí is doing. It’s fighting against communism in Cuba. Radio Free Asia has an antagonistic position to the Chinese communists and to the North Koreans, whatever you wanna call the North Koreans. It’s like a personality cult. I don’t know.
Nico Perrino: Do you think people just don’t appreciate this?
James Kirchick: Yes.
Nico Perrino: Casey Maddox who works over at Stand Together had this great Tweet a while ago. He said, “It’s as if a bunch of people are stumbling upon a pasture, and they see a fence around the pasture and like we should get rid of this fence without realizing there are wolves on the other side of that fence.”
James Kirchick: Absolutely, absolutely.
Nico Perrino: So, taking for granted things and not really understanding their origin.
James Kirchick: Yeah.
Nico Perrino: Now this isn’t necessarily a First Amendment story because it’s a government-broadcasting arm.
James Kirchick: Sure.
Nico Perrino: So, you can’t challenge it on First Amendment grounds, but it does seem to implicate free speech culture to the extent that the places that these institutions were created to provide news for don’t have free speech.
James Kirchick: I don’t think there’s any US government action that does more to promote free speech culture abroad than our international broadcasting networks. I can’t think of anything that we do.
Sarah McLaughlin: And I don’t think people have considered what’s going to be left in its place.
James Kirchick: Right.
Sarah McLaughlin: It’s just gonna be empty.
James Kirchick: One of the things that really angered me was the head of RT who was attacking me in 2013 when I humiliated her and her colleagues on television. She was gloating about this, and the Chinese communist party’s been gloating about this.
Sarah McLaughlin: Oh, yeah, in the Chinese State media.
James Kirchick: They said, “Getting rid of Radio Free Asia, it’s like dispensing with a dirty rag.” She was saying, “Oh, the Americans got rid of Radio Free Europe themselves. We didn’t have to do anything.”
Sarah McLaughlin: Well, and Radio Free Asia has done some very important and courageous human rights reporting that would not have happened otherwise in China.
James Kirchick: By the way, there are currently four Radio Free Europe employees in jails in Belarus, in Russia.
Nico Perrino: I didn’t know that.
James Kirchick: Yeah. This happened when I was working there. There was a very courageous Azeri reporter who was blackmailed by the government. They released a sex tape about her, and she was in jail for a while. This happens routinely to Radio Free Europe employees who are also, by the way, on the frontlines in Ukraine risking their lives.
Nico Perrino: Hey, Jacob, as a Dane, how did Europeans view Radio Free Europe and some of these broadcasting networks?
Jacob Mchangama: Obviously, Denmark was not the target of Radio Free Europe.
Nico Perrino: It’s the No. 2 country for free speech, apparently, according to your survey.
Jacob Mchangama: Though the Russians did hold on to a Danish island called Bornholm for a year or so.
Nico Perrino: Well, America might be grabbing another Danish island here soon enough.
Jacob Mchangama: Yes, that is true.
Nico Perrino: Speaking of democracy, let’s not go into war with one another. I don’t know.
Jacob Mchangama: I don’t think Danes are necessarily very familiar with RFE just because we were not its target audience.
We were, fortunately, on the right side of the Iron Curtain, but I think it speaks to a larger pattern of what the current administration is doing. It’s sort of retreating from its role in advancing democracy and freedom more globally, which I think concerns a lot of people. I would say, if you go to Europe these days, people who have spent their careers being staunch pro-Americans have become hostile to the US in a way that I could never ever have imagined, which is deeply saddening to me who is a European but who loves this country.
I came to this country because of the First Amendment because, I think, this is the country that has come the furthest in developing the types of free speech protections that I favor, who has the best environment for setting up the organization that I wanted to. Then, suddenly, you see this retreat from advancing free speech globally but also sort of, when you’re a green card holder and you suddenly have an administration, which says that if one day I wake up and whatever you’ve said online, we’re gonna deny you entrance, or we can revoke your green card.
It’s something that has never ever – I’ve spent so much time in the US. One of things I’ve loved about this country is that I could come to the US, even before I lived here, as a Dane and no one has ever sort of said, “Who the fuck are you? You’re not even American. Why should we listen to you?”
Nico Perrino: Welcome to America. Now shut up.
Jacob Mchangama: Why is your perspective relevant?
FIRE sponsoring my podcast, helping me with my book, being invited to institutions and universities, it’s never ever been an issue. People have said, “Okay, you have valuable perspectives; we wanna listen to it.” I think that’s something very unique. Now, it’s like, hey, if you say something critical about the administration, we may or may not allow you to be in this country because you’re here. It’s a privilege.
Nico Perrino: On a green card, heaven forbid. Christopher Hitchens, the Clinton administration, responded similarly.
Jacob Mchangama: This is something I’m writing a piece on. But Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt wrote things about what we today would call the Israeli-Palestine conflict that some today might say, “Well, that’s flirting with things that we think is anti-Semitic or undermines US foreign policy goals.”
Think of all the great people who moved to this country because it provides them the ability to say things that they can’t say anywhere else. I think that has enriched this country. Now the idea that the perspectives of people who are not nationals are not relevant to political and democratic discourse in any country, I think, is profoundly misguided.
Nico Perrino: Well, it doesn’t even matter if it’s relevant. It’s that you’re a human being and that the rights that we have are not granted to us by the government. The governments are instituted among men to respect and preserve those rights. Right now, the federal government is saying to people who are here on visas or who are lawful permanent residents in order to justify its deportations that you have no free speech rights we are bound to protect. You have to accept that conclusion.
Jacob Mchangama: The interesting thing is, in Europe, you also have pretty draconian – especially proposed October 7th. So, France is chucking out Imams who have lived there for 40 years for criticizing – they’re calling the French flags satanic.
Nico Perrino: Well, is it?
Jacob Mchangama: Germany proposing a law that says if you like a post that can be seen as pro-terrorism, we will deport you. Pro-Palestinian students in the UK have been thrown out. But this pro-Palestinian student in the UK, who on October 8 said something that I thought was pretty crass and insensitive, her deportation was overruled by an immigration tribunal, which said that this would be a disproportionate violation of her free speech rights on the European Convention on Human Rights. So, even Europe, which allows the government to punish much more speech than the US, says that you can’t just completely arbitrarily throw people out of the country based on their speech alone.
Nico Perrino: Well, I think this Mahmoud Khalil case will probably make it up to the Supreme Court or a case like it, and I think the Supreme Court of the United States will say something similar. We’ll see.
James Kirchick: I do too.
Nico Perrino: Getting back to closing out the Radio Free Europe, Voice of America thing, on March 28th, the federal judge blocked the US Agency for Global Media, which governs these broadcasters, from firing more 1200 journalists, engineers, and other staff and bars the agency from terminating grants. Radio Free Europe’s funding was restored, I believe –
James Kirchick: Yes
Nico Perrino: – after the ruling. As we mentioned earlier, this wasn’t a First Amendment ruling. This was an Administrative Procedure Act, temporary restraining order that stayed the executive order – my colleague, Ronnie London, summarized the opinion for us – stayed the executive order as arbitrary and capricious and not in compliance with the separation of powers and the constitution’s requirement that the president shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
The court noted – withholding congressionally appropriated funds and effectively shuttering a congressionally created agency simply cannot be construed as following through this on this constitutional mandate. So, theoretically, these agencies should be back up and running at some point.
James Kirchick: I hope so. I hope so, but we’re in unfamiliar legal territory.
Nico Perrino: This is an idea called impoundment. You can’t impound congressionally appropriated funds just because you don’t like how those funds were appropriated.
James Kirchick: Right, right.
Jacob Mchangama: But what do you do if you’re the head of VOA and Radio Free Europe? It’s a stay of execution. You know that the government is actively hostile to you. It wants to shut you down. That is likely to have a chilling effect on your activities. Are you going to carry on business as usual? Are you going to hire people that are within the orbit of the administration to sort of try and appease it? It’s not great.
Nico Perrino: By way of closing here, can I ask Jacob, what the heck’s going on in Denmark?
You got a blasphemy law again? In 2017, you guys abolished the blasphemy law, and now it’s back?
Jacob Mchangama: Yeah. So, in 2017 –
Nico Perrino: And this is the home of the Mohammad cartoons, right?
Jacob Mchangama: – yes, this is. I wrote a big essay about this in the Globe and Mail in Canada a few weeks ago about the 20th anniversary of the cartoons.
Nico Perrino: Holy cow, is it really already?
Jacob Mchangama: Yeah, it’s crazy, right? Denmark didn’t bow during that, even though Al-Qaeda was coming for cartoonists. Muslim majority states were threatening to sever diplomatic sanctions. There were boycotts and everything. Our government said, “We’re not going to tell an independent newspaper what they can and cannot publish.” Now, there were these far right activists who sort of burned Qurans. Then there was a new campaign by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, ISIS, and others to sort of say, “Denmark, now you have to stop this kind of behavior.”
Nico Perrino: It’s always a good idea to listen to ISIS.
Jacob Mchangama: Yeah, exactly. Our feckless government, in 2017, the Prime Minister was Lars Løkke Rasmussen. He was the one under whose government, the blasphemy ban, was abolished. He said how proud he was, even though he’s a pragmatist to the core. Now he’s the foreign minister who sort of instigated this ban, which means that on paper at least – two cases are going before court, I think, on Friday, first two cases – but that if you desecrate a sacred text, you can be imprisoned for up to two years. In practice, what’s going to happen is people are likely going to be fined. But if they are repeat offenders, they could get prison sentences.
But to me, it is a complete appeasement of the very worst states and fundamentalist groups whose values are completely at odds. Denmark is one of the most secular liberal countries in the world. Essentially, we’re institutionalizing the jihadist veto. So, there are all kinds of reasons. Oh, we need to be on a good foot with certain countries. Oh, we need it for national security.
Well, guess what happened in Sweden? In Sweden, they didn’t specifically ban the desecration of books, but they prosecuted these Iraqi refugees, Christian refugees who burned the Qurans. They prosecuted them under hate speech laws. A few days before sentencing, one of them was killed. Even though one of them was killed, a few days later, the other guy who participated in this was convicted and got his sentence for hate speech.
Sarah McLaughlin: And a few days after that, the UK arrested a Quran burner.
Nico Perrino: Well, Sarah, isn’t the UK also flirting with a blasphemy ban – Keir Starmer was asked a question, and he equivocated there was another member of parliament, I think, who was asked a question – or endorsed it, I should say.
Sarah McLaughlin: Yeah, that was in November a member of parliament was pushing for something similar to what Denmark has. I think he wanted some kind of desecration law. I don’t think there was much action on that, but they are currently deliberating over a new definition of Islamophobia. Obviously, it really just depends on how they apply it, as with any other definition.
Jacob Mchangama: It’s also being pushed at the Human Rights Council. So, back in 2011, the US defeated this agenda, but now it’s back on the table. And guess who is supporting this agenda of the Islamic states? Russia and China. China? Look at the hypocrisy here. China is a materialist atheistic state, which is supporting the claims of Islamic organizations that you can’t defame religion.
But what does China do internally? Well, it imprisons people who own Qurans. Now, there’s no one pushing back against this if the US abandons this position. So, these norms are going to be entrenched at the international level.
James Kirchick: Well, Denmark and the UK are both constitutional monarchies. So, I don’t see why they just can’t bring back lèse-majesté laws. You’re not allowed to criticize the king. Logically, there’s no reason why that shouldn’t be reinstituted.
Jacob Mchangama: Well, people protesting the coronation of King Charles were arrested on the streets.
Nico Perrino: I forgot about that. Too much is happening.
Jacob Mchangama: But don’t you see, dear Americans, what the hell are you doing right now? Europe is a mess on free speech. The rest of the world is burning in free speech.
If you don’t remain the global champion of this value internationally, what the hell is going to happen?
Nico Perrino: Yeah, so much for American exceptionalism. I think we’re still exceptional when it comes to the First Amendment, but we’re facing our challenges right now. And I don’t wanna end on a dour note. Are there any green shoots, James, you see, anything you’re optimistic about? Sarah?
Sarah McLaughlin: You should’ve warned me. I need a lot more time to come up with something good.
James Kirchick: Yeah, I would’ve had to research this before I – well, I would say no. I’ll go back to what we said at the beginning about the rising large popular support for free speech in Hungary and Venezuela. I think that’s really great to hear and very reassuring.
Sarah McLaughlin: There were a lot of protests in Hungary this week –
James Kirchick: Yes, the banning of Pride parade –
Sarah McLaughlin: – because last week they banned Pride, yeah. They’re gonna use facial recognition to –
James Kirchick: – which is incredible.
Sarah McLaughlin: – to hunt down people who attend Pride events.
James Kirchick: I’ve marched in that Pride parade before.
This is the kind of thing that – it’s so weird because countries that want to join the EU, like in the Balkans, having a Pride parade that is safe and that is not overrun with fascists and that the government allows to happen, it’s sort of seen as a benchmark that you have to meet.
I remember I covered a Pride parade in Belgrade. It was the first successful gay Pride parade. There were lots of fascists protesting. One of them punched me in the face, but it went off, and it was successful. That was because they had a pro-EU government that was very determined to join the European Union. So, to have an EU member state, Hungary, doing this kind of Orwellian crap is a really bad sign. Sorry, you asked us for good news but. . . .
Nico Perrino: Or goodish, I guess.
Jacob Mchangama: I think you see huge protests in Serbia, in Turkey, and Hungary. That’s good. Two countries that I wanna point to, Taiwan is a very inspiring case. I think Taiwan is probably the most sophisticated country in terms of thinking about how to develop resilient digital democracies where we try to combat some of the – they face huge disinformation campaigns by mainland China.
But they generally eschew censorship. So, they have a system where they trust the population, civil society to be the first line against Chinese disinformation campaigns. That’s quite inspiring.
Nico Perrino: And they didn’t block TikTok, right?
Jacob Mchangama: They didn’t block TikTok, only from government devices. New Zealand is another case. New Zealand has a hate speech law. But as far as we can tell, only two or three people have ever been convicted under it. And a hate speech ban that was proposed after the horrific Christchurch shooting where a white supremacist gunned down Muslims in a couple of mosques was defeated by a civil society. Ultimately, the government had to budge on it. A new government came in and said, “We’re not gonna follow through on that.”
So, those are two small island nations that have done well on free speech recently. So, maybe we need to look east more than west for the foreseeable future.
Nico Perrino: Sarah, do you want another crack at it? You got a book coming out. That’s a green shoot.
Sarah McLaughlin: Actually, this is bad news, but I’m pretending it is good news.
Nico Perrino: Okay, I’ll settle for it.
Sarah McLaughlin: Related to the book, for years I have been encouraging universities to be more thoughtful about their place in an un-free world and when they’re sending students and faculty abroad to give them the proper warnings for when they travel. So, they know this kind of speech might get you imprisoned. Here’s how you protect your devices. The bad news is this is happening, but it’s a Canadian university warning its students about coming to the United States.
Nico Perrino: Oh, geez.
Sarah McLaughlin: So, there’s my good and bad.
Nico Perrino: We used to go after NYU Abu Dhabi because it’s an American university that promises academic freedom rights but isn’t warning its students that when they go there that they’re not gonna have the same freedoms that they had here in America. Well, so much for. . . .
Sarah McLaughlin: I did my best.
Nico Perrino: I should’ve started with you and then maybe gone onto James who was like, eh, and then Jacob had some green shoots there. Taiwan, I guess, is where the hope for democracy resides.
All right, folks, that is Sarah McLaughlin, FIRE Senior Scholar for Global Expression; James Kirchick, FIRE Senior Fellow, contributing opinion writer for the New York Times; and Jacob Mchangama, also a FIRE Senior Fellow and the Executive Director of the Future of Free Speech think tank at Vanderbilt University. Folks, thanks for joining.
James Kirchick: Thank you for having us.
Sarah McLaughlin: Thanks, Nico.
Jacob Mchangama: Thank you so much.
Nico Perrino: I’m Nico Perrino, and this podcast is recorded and edited by a rotating roster of my FIRE colleagues, including Sam Li, Aaron Reese, and Chris Maltby. The podcast is produced by Sam Li. To learn more about So To Speak, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel or Substack pages, both of which feature video versions of this conversation.
You can follow us on X by searching for the handle, Free Speech Talk, and you can send us feedback at sotospeak@thefire.org. Again, that’s sotospeak@thefire.org. I ask folks this every time, but, please, if you enjoyed this episode, consider leaving a review on Apple Podcast for Spotify. Those reviews are the single best thing you can do to help support the show. Until next time, thanks again for listening.