The Good Fight Club: Who’s a Hypocrite About Free Speech?

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.6 • 907 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of The Good Fight Club, Yascha Mounk, Renée DiResta, Jacob Mchangama, and Jonathan Rauch discuss threats to free speech under Joe Biden vs Donald Trump, how to protect free speech, and the administration’s new compact for universities. Renée DiResta is an Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality. Jacob Mchangama is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University. He is also a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the author of Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media. Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution, and a member of the Persuasion Board of Advisors. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone. Email: [email protected] Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay. Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | Google X: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasion YouTube: Yascha Mounk, Persuasion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Say hello to the next generation of Zendesk AI agents, built to deliver resolutions for everyone.
0:05.3	Loved by over 10,000 companies, Zendesk AI agents easily deploy in minutes to resolve 30% of interactions instantly.
0:11.9	That's the Zendesk AI effect. Find out more at Zendesk.com.
0:15.6	Humanity produces more new knowledge every morning, literally, than in its first 200,000 years.
0:21.6	And the free speech is part of that, but you need two other elements.
0:26.6	You also need the discipline of facts.
0:29.6	You can't just make stuff up. You can't bullshit your way through.
0:33.6	And you need viewpoint diversity.
0:36.6	You need enough different ideas in the room so that you get generative conflict.
0:42.1	You can spot mistakes.
0:45.6	And now the Good Fight with Yasha Monk.
1:02.0	Welcome to this live recording of the Good Fight Club, coming to you directly from the Global Free Speech Summit, 2025 at Vanderbilt University. We have with us, please give them a big round of applause.
1:10.0	Jacob Mchangama, who is the executive director of the Future of Free Speech and the organizer of this conference.
1:22.6	We have René D.U. Rester, a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown,
1:28.3	and offer most recently of invisible rulers.
1:35.3	And we have Jonathan Rouch, a senior fellow at Brookings and a contributing writer at the Atlantic.
1:45.0	And persuasion, that is correct. Thank you, Jonathan.
1:48.0	So look, this summit is about free speech and we've had really interesting contributions, really great.
1:56.0	Speaches and conversations about free speech over the last 24 hours. there is, I think, a question about free speech,
2:03.6	which is hard to escape at the moment,
2:05.6	which is that virtually everybody who claims to care about free speech
2:09.6	seems to be a bit of a hypocrite.
	...

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