And someone like Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court Justice, voted in the Brandenburg case, voted with the rest of the Supreme Court justice to say that the conviction of a member of the KKK, who in regalia and armed before cameras, sort of said that if the government didn't do something about the blacks and the Jews, they might do it themselves.

He said that that should be constitutionally protected speech.

Intrusive AI.

That is that we once thought that new technology would supercharge freedom and free speech.

But it's also very clear that governments around the world have learned to reverse engineer the promise of these technologies.

And that AI can create and has

created in some countries levels of censorship and surveillance that would have been the envy

of Stalin and Hitler. These universities in many cases had not lived up to the spirit of the

First Amendment when it came to speech about gender identity,

about anti-black racism, and so on,

and had discouraged and punished and sanctioned students, faculty, and so on,

and adopted policies that were not in line with an analogy up to the First Amendment.

All right. Hey, everybody. It's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer show brought to you by, as always, Skeptic Society, Skeptic Magazine, and Big

Nerve, which is a company that offers prize money for the best ideas and challenges and debates that we can have.

So check it out. Go to skeptic.com and click around and find the magazine, find the society, and find big nerve and get involved with this.

Okay, my guest today is Jacob Machengama.

He's the founder and executive director of the future of free speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University. He's the host of the podcast. I guess it's an old podcast now, right? Clear and present danger, the history of the free speech. I've listened to all your episodes back in the day before you wrote your first book. I listened to all those. Those were great. They went for hours. I couldn't believe it. It was great. Maybe you're done with that now because you've written these books to cover all that stuff. Anyway, as you know, his writings on free speech have appeared in The Economist, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and many other outlets. He's the author of, here's what he was on for his previous episode, Free Speech,

a history from Socrates to social media. Yeah, it's an old topic. And he has a new book out now

co-authored with Jeff Kosef. It's the future of free speech reversing the global decline

of democracy's most essential freedom. You know, Jacob, after free speech, I thought, well, we're done. We don't have to worry about this subject anymore. Free speech is conquered. We can move on to other topics. We can go to the moon or whatever it is we're going to do next. And free speech is a given. Apparently, that's not the case because you have a new book out. Yeah, no. I think it's a while since I thought, since I took free speech for granted.

But I think that was really the vibe, maybe more so in the 90s to early 2000s,

when it seemed like most of the world was becoming free and democratic.

...