Well, you can't have it both ways. I mean, if words are so powerless and feeble, why do

we care about paid speech or pornography or disinformation? On the other hand, if they

are so powerful, then we should acknowledge that the calendar speech is as powerful as

that hateful speech, whatever speech you're trying to censor. And I come down on the side

that words on both sides are enormously powerful. And that is precisely why they are protected.

Hello, welcome back to the Brendan O'Neill show with me, Brendan O'Neill.

And my special guest this week, Nadine Strussen, Nadine, welcome to the show.

I'm delighted to be back, Brendan.

I'm really delighted to have you on. I talk about and write about freedom of speech a lot.

But I thought I really wanted to have a new, longer-form discussion about where things are

at with freedom of speech at the moment in the US, also in Europe, in the UK as well.

And what better person to do that with than you? People will know that you were the president

of the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1990s and the 2000s, right through to 2008.

I think the first woman to lead the ACLU, people will also know that you've been writing about

freedom of speech for a very long time and campaigning on freedom of speech as well.

Your most recent book was Hate, why we should resist it with free speech, not censorship.

And I know you have another book coming out with the Oxford University Press this year,

free speech, what everyone needs to know. So hopefully I can ask you a bit about that later on

what we can expect in that book. But to kick things off, I want to ask you

how you would take the temperature of freedom of speech at the moment. It's always in a bit of

peril. We know you know better than anyone that freedom of speech must always be fought for. It's

never secure. But how do you think things are at the moment? Is there a crisis with freedom of speech?

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