By Manuel Buron Being as we are – dancing to the deranged of presidential advisers and court sentences, I mean – in Spain a strange controversy went unnoticed. A professor at the University of Texas is preparing, as every year, to teach. Among the mandatory readings of his subject includes – who can think of […]
By Marcelo Brito Originally published in 2022 with the title Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, Jacob Mchangama’s work is presented as what his subtitle promises: a global history of freedom of expression that starts in classical Greece and flows into the digital ecosystem. Mchangama, Danish lawyer, founder of the Justitia Idea […]
The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom Today, anyone who cares about freedom of expression needs to face a stark truth: the right to speak freely is under siege. Once celebrated as a cornerstone of democratic societies, free expression is now met with growing suspicion and retaliation across […]
By Jesús García Calero We live in a volatile time and it has become fashionable to organize summits against hatred. Democracies live on the defensive, powerless to safeguard their principles, with the public sphere crossed by the polarization and the arrival of a world without rules, where the … autocrats camp, and in which the […]
By Miguel Angel Aguilar The phrase “Freedom for what?” It was Lenin’s response to Fernando de los Ríos in 1920, when the Spanish socialist asked about freedom of the press and expression in Soviet Russia. This dialogue is narrated in the book My Journey to Soviet Russia. Now Lenin’s question that warned the socialist Fernando […]
By Jacob Mchangama On October 17, 1961, tens of thousands of Algerians marched through the streets of Paris in peaceful defiance of a discriminatory curfew imposed by the French state. Police opened fire, beat protesters, arrested them en masse—and, in some cases, threw people into the Seine, where they drowned. Historians later called it “the […]
Has Europe’s crackdown on free speech become a bigger threat to democracy than ‘the extremists’ it seeks to contain? By Jacob Mchangama On the morning of November 26, three armed police officers showed up at the Berlin apartment of American playwright C.J. Hopkins. They presented a warrant, seized his computer, and questioned both him and […]
By Jacob Mchangama [ . . . ] The Trump administration has moved with startling speed from trumpeting free speech to seeking to criminalize it. At first glance, that might seem to vindicate the arguments in the historian Fara Dabhoiwala’s new book, What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea. Dabhoiwala believes that […]
By Zachary Wolf Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment. While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a […]
By Jacob Mchangama Growing up in Denmark in the early 2000s, I rarely worried about my right to free speech. In this cozy haven of liberal values and secular democracy, speaking freely felt as natural as breathing. Few contested this state of affairs, least of all religious groups, whose influence had long since faded. That […]