Is free speech the democracy crisis?

“Once you start clamping down on speech, it will have serious collateral damage. And we’re starting to see that now.” — Jacob Mchangama

The Jyllands-Posten editor who published those Mohammed cartoons in 2005 spent a decade under round-the-clock protection from Danish intelligence services. He’d commissioned artists to say it with their pens, but the mob came after him with AK-47s. Copenhagen-born Jacob Mchangama watched that happen in a country where free speech had been considered as natural as breathing, and has since dedicated his professional life to defending it. Thus The Future of Free Speech, Mchangama’s new book coauthored with Jeff Kosseff.

It’s also the reasoning behind his Future of Free Speech Institute at Vanderbilt, where Mchangama runs the only serious academic program dedicated to the proposition that democracy’s most essential freedom is in global retreat. The Varieties of Democracy dataset agrees. The number of countries where free speech is declining has increased dramatically; those where it’s strengthening are few. In 2000, Bill Clinton laughed at the idea that China might censor the internet — “that’s like nailing Jell-O to a wall.” Over the last quarter century, China has perfected that art.

The decline doesn’t come from a single ideological camp, which is Mchangama’s most politically inconvenient point. He suggests that the left has convinced itself that hate speech regulation, age verification for social media, and disinformation controls are acts of democratic hygiene. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is overtly shutting down free speech at a scale unmatched in recent American history. And then there’s the paradoxical possibility that anti-social-media liberals like Jonathan Haidt, in their fervor to take freedom of online expression from kids, are also contributing to today’s great recession in free speech. Left, right, and center. America, China, Denmark. Nobody, it seems, wants to allow us to say anything anymore.

Five Takeaways

•       The Editor Who Lived Under Protection: The editor of Jyllands-Posten who commissioned the 2005 Mohammed cartoons spent a decade under round-the-clock protection from Danish intelligence services. He had asked cartoonists to draw. They came after him with AK-47s. Ten years later came Charlie Hebdo — the French satirical magazine that had republished the cartoons as an act of solidarity, and saw twelve people murdered when two jihadists entered its offices. For Mchangama, growing up in Denmark where free speech felt as natural as breathing, this was the event that changed everything. The last place he expected an existential challenge to free speech was religion.

•       Democracy’s Varieties Are Shrinking: The Varieties of Democracy project — probably the most sophisticated dataset of free speech indicators — shows the trend line is clear: the number of countries where free speech has declined has increased dramatically, while those where it is being strengthened are few. Bill Clinton laughed in 2000 at the idea China might censor the internet — “that’s like nailing Jell-O to a wall.” China has since perfected the art. The internet’s original techno-optimistic promise — that censorship would be consigned to the ash heap of history — has been turned on its head. The recession of free speech has gone hand in hand with a wider democracy recession.

•       Four Hateful Men and the Minority Principle: The most important US Supreme Court decisions protecting free speech deal with extremely hateful people — viciously antisemitic speakers, members of the KKK. And very often, Black and Jewish civil rights organizations defended them on principle, because they knew: if you are a vulnerable and persecuted minority, you depend more than a majority on the ability to challenge power. You depend on a principled protection of free speech. That history has largely been forgotten. Free speech, Mchangama argues, can be under attack from the left, from the right, even from centrists. The Trump administration is restricting it. The woke left tried to. The answer is principled, consistent defence — regardless of who’s speaking.

•       Elite Panic Is the Historical Constant: Every time the public sphere is expanded through new communications technology, the traditional gatekeepers fret about the consequences of allowing the unwashed mob direct and unmediated access to information. The World Economic Forum declared disinformation the largest short-term threat to humanity ahead of the 2024 super-election year, when around two billion people were eligible to vote. Researchers studying those elections could not identify AI-generated disinformation as having shifted a single outcome. The AI disinformation apocalypse never materialized. Jonathan Haidt — who has done important earlier work on free speech and academic freedom — may be exhibiting motivated reasoning in his crusade for age verification. Elite panic looks the same from every century.

•       Creative AI vs. Intrusive AI: Mchangama distinguishes two faces of AI. Creative AI gives superpowers on demand — a PhD-level tutor for reading Homer, research agents that operate at a depth and scope previously unimaginable. Intrusive AI enables the most powerful surveillance and censorship regimes the world has ever seen. “If Hitler or Stalin had the powers that the Chinese Communist Party has now — that is a frightening thought in and of itself.” Preemptive safetyism is the wrong response: AI is a general-purpose technology. Filter it in the name of preventing disinformation and you hand governments and companies a filter over the entire ecosystem of ideas and information. The same logic as free speech. Applied to the most powerful communications technology ever built.

About the Guest

Jacob Mchangama is the founder and executive director of the Future of Free Speech at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Free Speech: A Global History from Socrates to Social Media and the coauthor, with Jeff Kosseff, of The Future of Free Speech.

References:

•       The Future of Free Speech by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026).

•       “The Timeless Fear of Corrupting the Youth,” Wall Street Journal, March 2026. By Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff.

•       Episode 2862: Truth Is Dead — Steven Rosenbaum on AI as a spectacularly good liar. Mchangama’s counter-argument on disinformation panic.

•       Upcoming: Gal Beckerman on How to Be a Dissident — the companion argument to Mchangama on what dissent actually requires.

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