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Hello and welcome to the bunkerunker, you'll need to know on news and politics. I'm Seth Teville.

Free speech could scarcely be more in the news, from the ever-present Elon Musk, remolding Twitter into X in his own image as a self-defined free speech absolutist, to European leaders being lectured by Vice President J.D. Vance about the supposed lack of free speech

in their own countries. And so today's guests couldn't be more timely. Farah Daboiwala is

Professor of History, the Princeton University. He's never afraid to tackle big topics.

His last book was about the origins of sex, and his new book is What is Free Speech,

the history of a dangerous idea, which tracks how the idea of free speech has changed over the

centuries, and how it's been claimed and contested by those with differing agendas.

Welcome to the bunker, Farrah.

Thank you, Seth. Great to be on.

I mean, I said this is a very timely book, but you explained at the start that your motivations

in writing it weren't necessarily topical.

That was something else and incidents a few years back.

Well, it seemed very topically at the time.

About 10 years ago, when I published that previous book, The Origins of Sex, which is the history of what I call the first sexual revolution.

It's a history of the idea of sexual freedom and the practice of sexual freedom, which emerges in the Asian-centric.

When I was doing publicity for that, quite soon I realized that I was being censored.

And in fact, in one case, I was invited to speak about the topic and then de-platformed because

it was supposed to take place in a church, and the clergy thought that my topic was not appropriate

for the space.

...