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The Good Fight

Jacob Mchangama on the Global Free Speech Recession

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.7963 Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2026

⏱️ 52 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Yascha Mounk and Jacob Mchangama discuss how democracies and dictatorships alike have turned against online speech freedom. Jacob Mchangama is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University, as well as a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. His latest book, with Jeff Kosseff, is The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy's Most Essential Freedom. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jacob Mchangama discuss why we’re experiencing a global free speech recession despite technological advances, how hate speech laws are being weaponized against their original intent, and whether democracies can resist the authoritarian playbook for controlling online discourse. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone. Email: leonora.barclay@persuasion.community Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay. Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | Google X: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasion YouTube: Yascha Mounk, Persuasion LinkedIn: Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:23.1

Suddenly, free speech is being seen not as a competitive advantage for democracies against

0:28.9

their authoritarian counterparts, but as a Trojan horse that allows the enemies of democracies,

0:35.7

both from within and without, to chip away at the foundations of democracy.

0:40.3

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

0:48.3

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,

0:57.2

I see another outrageous story about limits and restrictions of free speech.

1:01.6

Sometimes here in the United States, sometimes in England or Germany or Brazil,

1:04.8

it seems as though we are not just in a democratic recession, but also in a free speech recession.

1:13.2

With even many very reasonable middle-over-road people coming to the conclusion,

1:17.6

but the only way to deal with the social media age is to prosecute people for speech they don't

1:25.4

like, to make sure that nobody can be anonymous on the internet,

1:29.8

to take very draconian measures to restrict quote-unquote misinformation.

1:35.8

So I invited back on the podcast, my friend Jacob Changama, who is the CEO of a great free speech organization in Nashville, Tennessee,

1:46.8

and the author of the similarly named The Future of Free Speech, a new book that he co-authored

1:52.2

with Jeff Kossif.

1:54.3

We talk about what attacks on free speech should look like today, particularly in the democratic

1:58.5

world.

1:59.5

Why it is that those are so

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