Michael: Free speech is a weapon for the powerful. That’s the narrative we hear everywhere today. But what if history’s greatest liberators—from escaped slaves to anti-colonial revolutionaries—proved the exact opposite? What if free speech has always been the ultimate tool of the powerless? Kevin: That’s a bold opening, Michael. Because you’re right, the common wisdom, especially online, is that unrestricted speech primarily benefits those who want to punch down. The idea that it’s actually the key for the marginalized to fight back feels… counter-intuitive right now. Michael: It’s the provocative heart of a massive, incredibly well-regarded book we're diving into today: Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media by Jacob Mchangama. Kevin: And Mchangama isn't just an academic. He's a Danish human rights lawyer with a multicultural background who founded a think tank on this very topic. He lives and breathes this stuff, which I think gives the book a real sense of urgency. It’s not just a history lesson. Michael: Exactly. He argues this isn't just a Western concept; it's a global story. And it starts with this powerful, almost paradoxical idea of speech as the ultimate liberator.

Michael: Let's talk about one of the most powerful examples in the book: the fight against slavery in the United States. In the 1830s, the American South was, for all intents and purposes, a totalitarian state when it came to the topic of slavery. Kevin: What do you mean by that? I think of totalitarianism as more of a 20th-century thing, with states like the Soviet Union. Michael: Mchangama calls it the "Slaver's Veto." Southern states passed draconian laws making it a crime, sometimes punishable by death, to circulate any "incendiary" literature about abolition. Postmasters in the South would literally go through the mail and burn any pamphlets from the North. They even pressured the federal government to pass a national mail censorship law. Kevin: Hold on, so the South was essentially demanding a nationwide 'safe space' from ideas they didn't like? That sounds… eerily familiar. Michael: It's the exact same logic. The argument was that abolitionist speech was dangerous, that it would incite violence and threaten their way of life. They were trying to create an intellectual iron curtain. And this is where the power of free speech as a weapon for the oppressed becomes so clear. Abolitionists had very little political power. What they had was the printing press and their voices. Kevin: So who were the key figures pushing back? Michael: Figures like Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave who became one ofthe most powerful orators of the 19th century. He was constantly mobbed and attacked for speaking, but he never stopped. He had this incredible quote that Mchangama highlights: "Slavery cannot tolerate free speech. Five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the South." For him, speech wasn't an abstract principle; it was the battering ram against the fortress of slavery. Kevin: That gives me chills. He saw a direct cause-and-effect. If people could just talk about it freely, the whole evil system would collapse. Michael: Precisely. And it wasn't just men. The book tells the incredible story of the Grimké sisters, Angelina and Sarah. They were daughters of a prominent South Carolina slave-owning family who became fierce abolitionists. In 1838, Angelina was speaking at the newly built Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia, a hub for abolitionist thought. Kevin: In the North, so she should have been safe, right? Michael: You'd think so. But a pro-slavery mob surrounded the building, throwing rocks and shouting. Angelina refused to stop speaking, even as the windows shattered around her. She told the crowd, "What if the mob should now burst in upon us and commit violence upon our persons? Would this be anything new?… What if they should slake their vengeance in our blood? Would this be anything new?" The next day, the mob returned and burned Pennsylvania Hall to the ground. Kevin: Wow. But doesn't that prove the Southern slave-owners' point? That this kind of speech does lead to violence? That's the exact fear people have today about extremist rhetoric. Michael: That's the critical question, and Mchangama's answer is nuanced. The violence came from those trying to suppress the speech, not from the speakers themselves. The abolitionists argued that the alternative—silence—was a guarantee of perpetual slavery. The risk of speaking was immense, but the certainty of oppression without it was absolute. They chose to speak. And ultimately, despite the violence and the censorship, they won the war of ideas. Books like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin became unstoppable bestsellers that changed the conscience of a nation. Kevin: So the very act of trying to silence the speech just proved how powerful and threatening the ideas were. The suppression backfired. Michael: It became a Streisand effect of monumental proportions. The more the South tried to shut down the conversation, the more Northerners, who might not have even cared about abolition, became defenders of free speech itself. They realized if the government could censor mail about slavery, it could censor mail about anything. The commitment to the principle of free speech served as a firewall.

Kevin: Okay, so speech is the weapon of the oppressed. I get it, and those stories are incredibly powerful. But the book's title goes from Socrates to Social Media, and Mchangama points out a darker, more cyclical pattern. What happens when the revolutionaries win? Michael: This is where the book gets really profound, and a bit tragic. Mchangama introduces a concept you could call "free speech entropy." The natural tendency, once a group achieves power, is for their commitment to free speech to decay. The very tool that got them to the top suddenly looks dangerous in the hands of their new opponents. Kevin: The classic "free speech for me, but not for thee." Michael: Exactly. And there's no more stunning example than the Russian Revolution. In early 1917, after the Tsar fell, Russia was flooded with free expression. Lenin himself, upon returning from exile, declared it "the freest country in the world." He used that freedom to spread Bolshevik propaganda relentlessly. Kevin: And then what happened? Michael: The moment the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, literally their first legislative act was the "Decree on the Press." It gave the state the power to shut down any newspaper that incited "resistance to the government" or spread "slanderous distortions of fact." Within months, they had shut down hundreds of opposition papers and created the Cheka, the secret police, to enforce ideological purity. The "freest country in the world" became a silent tomb. Kevin: That’s terrifyingly fast. So the justification was to protect the revolution from its enemies? Michael: Yes, and this is where we get to what Mchangama calls the "Weimar Fallacy." This is a hugely important point for today's debates. Kevin: Hold on, that's a huge point. Because the 'Weimar' argument is used all the time to justify shutting down extremist speech online. The idea is that the Weimar Republic was too tolerant of Nazi propaganda, and their failure to censor Hitler allowed him to rise. Michael: And Mchangama argues that this is a fundamental misreading of history. The Weimar Republic was not a free speech paradise. In fact, it passed increasingly draconian laws to combat political extremism. Newspapers were banned hundreds of times. Hitler himself was banned from public speaking in several German states for years. Kevin: Really? So they did try to silence him? Michael: They did, and it often backfired spectacularly. The bans turned Hitler into a martyr and made him even more popular. But here’s the most crucial part: how did the Nazis ultimately destroy German democracy? They didn't do it by winning a debate in a free marketplace of ideas. They did it by exploiting Article 48—the Weimar Constitution's emergency powers clause. After the Reichstag fire, they used the pretext of "national security" to suspend all civil liberties, including freedom of speech, press, and assembly. The very tools of restriction, meant to save democracy, became the weapons used to kill it. Kevin: So the argument that "more censorship would have saved Weimar" is historically backward. The Nazis used the state's power to censor as the very mechanism to establish their dictatorship. Michael: Precisely. They turned the state's shield into a sword. And this pattern repeats. Mchangama shows how even figures we admire, champions of free speech, can fall into this trap. Even the philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn, a huge free speech advocate, argued in 1948 that radio wasn't entitled to First Amendment protection because it "corrupts both our morals and our intelligence." Kevin: Wow. So even the good guys get tempted to start drawing lines once a new, scary technology comes along. It's the printing press, it's the radio, and now it's the internet. Michael: It's a deep-seated human impulse. When you're in power, or you believe your cause is righteous, the speech of your opponents doesn't sound like debate. It sounds like a threat. A danger. And the temptation to silence it, for the "greater good," is immense.

Kevin: So we're caught in this tragic loop. The oppressed need free speech to gain power, but once anyone gets power, their first instinct is to pull up the ladder behind them by restricting speech. It’s a cycle of liberation followed by suppression. Michael: It is. And it forces us to confront a really uncomfortable truth. The fight for free speech is never truly won. It’s a constant struggle, not just against external forces, but against our own intolerant impulses. Mchangama puts it perfectly in a line that has really stuck with me. He says, "To impose silence and call it tolerance does not make it so." Kevin: That’s powerful. True tolerance requires listening, not silencing. Michael: Right. The real struggle isn't just against the tyrant of the day, but against the tyrant inside all of us that wants to silence ideas we hate. The book is a 2,500-year-long warning that once you grant the state, or any powerful entity, the authority to decide which ideas are too "dangerous" to be heard, that authority will inevitably be turned against causes you hold dear. History shows it, time and time again. Kevin: It makes you wonder, when we demand that a platform ban someone we despise, are we acting as defenders of democracy, or are we just the next group in line to pick up the censor's pen? Michael: A question worth thinking about. This is Aibrary, signing off.