From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

And on this week's show, our radical, paradoxical free speech tradition.

Whenever you write about free speech, obviously the free speech absolutists are going to come out of the woodwork,

and there are a lot of absolutists on the internet.

But I didn't expect it to be so unrelated to what I actually argued.

It's one thing to talk about all these nice and fluffy concepts of free speech and being able to say whatever you want,

but in the day-to-day reality of the United States, that just doesn't exist for many people.

John Stuart Mill argues for one simple principle, the harm principle.

The state, my neighbors, and everyone else should let me get on with my life,

as long as I don't harm anyone in the process.

John Stuart Mill was brilliant, but this is the point that I want to make.

He was wrong.

Why revisiting our assumptions about speech and democracy might save us from ourselves. It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week,

we're talking about free speech, the bedrock of our democracy.

Or is it?

It seems we're always being told that we're on the precipice of losing it all.

The speech, the rights, the freedom.

Battlegrounds constantly emerge under a variety of banners.

What can we teach our kids in school? What

politicians can say to primed crowds? What hell hath our old tweets wrought? But do we even have a firm

enough grip on the First Amendment to fight about it? Probably not. Of course, that doesn't mean the

arguments over it won't rage fast and furious. In

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