The Global Free Speech Recession
May/June 2026Interview with Danish human rights lawyer Jacob Mchangama
Growing up in Denmark, Jacob Mchangama took free speech for granted. After all, his liberal European country, secure in its democratic freedoms, saw itself as a poster child for enlightenment values.
But in 2005, when Mchangama was in his mid-20s, a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published 12 cartoons depicting Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. The newspaper said it was conducting a free speech experiment: How robust, really, were Denmark’s free speech norms and protections?
The reaction was fierce, and swiftly spread beyond Denmark’s borders. Muslims in many countries were outraged not just by the messages conveyed by these cartoons, but by the fact that Muhammad had been represented pictorially—something forbidden by the Quran. Some public protests turned violent, with rioters attacking Danish embassies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya. In Nigeria protesters burned churches and attacked Christians, killing more than 100 people during the days and weeks that followed.
“In Denmark there was a lot of cowardice,” says Mchangama. “Religious fanatics were willing to kill people for the sin of using pens, and suddenly a lot of people on the left—in the media, in politics, and in civil society—were saying, ‘Yeah, free speech is important, but you shouldn’t gratuitously offend people.’ People who saw themselves as heirs of the enlightenment suddenly became very defensive about free speech.”
The response to these cartoons, says Mchangama, led to a years-long global battle of values over the relationship between free speech and religion. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, representing 57 Muslim-majority countries, almost succeeded at the United Nations in its demand for a resolution calling for laws criminalizing “defamation of religion.”
This episode piqued Mchangama’s interest in the principle of free speech and ultimately determined the direction of his academic career. “If suddenly free speech could be under threat—in Denmark of all places, where speaking freely was as natural as breathing the air—then that was something that I was very interested in,” he says.
Today Mchangama is an internationally known advocate and scholar of free speech. He’s the founder and executive director of The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank located at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee, and is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Along with his academic writing, Mchangama is a frequent television commentator, and his articles have appeared in publications from the Washington Post to The Economist to the Wall Street Journal. His critically acclaimed book Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media was published in 2022. His most recent book, coauthored with Jeff Kessoff, is The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, April 2026).
Bettina Krause, editor of Liberty magazine, recently spoke with Mchangama about why he believes we should all be paying much more attention to the health of free speech.*
Bettina Krause: You say that we’re living today through a global free speech recession. What do you mean by that?
Jacob Mchangama: If we go back to the mid 1990s until the early 2000s, there was a lot of optimism and hope. It was the culmination of three decades in which democracy and freedom had spread to all corners of the world. Free speech had been key to that, whether it was the end of Communism or the end of apartheid. And of course, new technology such as the world wide web was now available. Everyone thought this would mean the end of authoritarianism as we knew it--because how can you censor anything in this new age of communication?
But if we fast-forward, we find that those hopes turned out to be quite naive. For one thing, authoritarian states have learned to reverse-engineer the original promise of technology. Countries such as China, Russia, or the Gulf States, have learned to use technology to supercharge both censorship and surveillance at scale.
But democracies, also, have contributed to this free speech recession. Where once democracies saw free speech as a competitive advantage against authoritarian states, today they tend to view it as a Trojan horse. They perceive free speech as dangerous—especially in our digital age—because it allows the enemies of democracies, both at home and abroad, to subvert the basic values of democracies.
So all these factors have come together, and we see very clearly laws, policies, and a cultural climate that is much more hostile to free speech than was the case 20 years ago.
Krause: You begin your most recent book with the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and all that followed. Why was that your starting point for a discussion of free speech?
Mchangama: The events on October 7—the massacre of some 1,200 Jewish civilians—and the response to that crystallized a tendency that was already apparent in many democracies. And that is the tendency toward viewing free speech as dangerous and wanting to be more militant in cracking down on speech.
Most people were horrified by the events of October 7—it was a very visible, even visceral, moment of anti-Semitism that in Europe, especially, was quite shocking given the history of the Holocaust. And this was not new. There had been recent outbursts of anti-Semitism in many European countries, in Australia, and elsewhere.
Then, in the aftermath of October 7, we saw demonstrations that were not limited to expressing support for the Palestinian side, but that sometimes veered into pro-Hamas chants and anti-Semitic outbursts.
Many governments said, “This is intolerable. We must show zero tolerance toward outbursts of anti-Semitism.” But their subsequent policies have resulted in a broader attack on free speech that hasn’t been limited to terrorism. In fact, in most of these democracies, terrorist speech was already criminalized.
This is a good example, I think, of good intentions leading to harmful outcomes; of the cure becoming worse than the disease in terms of democratic values.
Krause: I was in Australia late last year just a couple days after the Bondi Beach massacre in which 15, mostly Jewish, Australians were murdered. Part of the government’s immediate response was to propose stringent hate speech legislation. And for most of us, who’d like to see vile, repugnant speech curtailed, this seems like a reasonable idea.
Why is protecting hateful speech important within a democracy? Give us the elevator pitch for why the average person should accept that.
Mchangama: Within the very robust American free speech tradition there’s no prohibition against hate speech—in fact, the Constitution protects even vile racist speech, unless it reaches a threshold of “incitement to imminent lawless action.” In some of the key Supreme Court cases on this issue, White supremacists and anti-Semites have been defended by members of minority groups that had been targeted by this speech.
Take, for instance, the case of Brandenburg v. Ohio from 1969. A Ku Klux Klan member in uniform, armed, in front of a camera, basically says that Jews and Blacks should be thrown out of the country, or the KKK will have to do it. Now, this is obviously extremely hateful. It’s something that flirts with inciting violence. But this KKK member, Brandenburg, was defended by a Black woman and a Jewish man who were part of the American Civil Liberties Union team that brought the case. One of the Supreme Court justices in the case was Thurgood Marshall. He was the first Black Supreme Court justice in the United States, and he dedicated his life to fighting for equality and against racial segregation.
Marshall’s position, and that of the ACLU attorneys defending Brandenburg, was that restrictions on free speech will ultimately be defined and enforced by majorities. Even if you adopt hate speech laws with the best of intentions, they will almost by definition be malleable to the interests of whoever is in power. And if you’re the minority, what you depend on more than anything else is the ability to speak out against the majority, especially if you’re a persecuted minority.
Black civil rights groups and Jewish groups in the United States knew that it was essential to their own interests to defend free speech on a very principled and consistent basis. They’d seen what happened in many Southern states when arguments against hate speech would be used by majorities, by White supremacists, to say, “Well, these people who speak out against Jim Crow laws are inciting violence or agitating in a way that’s dangerous.”
And so that is the elevator pitch. It’s a very counterintuitive principle because we human beings are emotional. When we see something that we feel is just wrong—an expression of deep hatred and injustice—we intuitively want to clamp down on it.
But we need to recognize that we’re all different; we don’t all share the exact same values about what is or isn’t outrageous. And we jeopardize free speech as a principle if we allow its limits to be arbitrarily determined by whoever happens to be in power at any given time.
Krause: You quote James Madison in your book, who said something along the lines of “the ability to speak freely is the guardian of all other rights.” This magazine, Liberty, is focused on the First Amendment religion clauses. Should we be equally concerned with the First Amendment free speech clause?
Mchangama: Let’s say that you are very passionate about the environment, or religious freedom, or privacy, or tax policy. What is your most important tool or weapon in the fight to change society? Unless you’re a terrorist group who thinks that it’s OK to use violence, it’ll be speech. You want the ability to hold the government accountable. You want to be able to criticize policies that you think are wrong. You want to be able to advocate causes that you think are just and that will improve society. You want to be able to petition lawmakers. You want to be able to protest against egregious instances of what you perceive to be unjust, and you want to be able to mobilize public opinion in your favor. All of that depends on free speech.
So in that sense, I think free speech is the most important freedom in any society that wants to build on democracy, freedom, and tolerance. But of course, inherent in freedom is also risk. Freedom is fraught with dangers. There are no guarantees that free speech will always lead to positive outcomes. But you could say the same thing about democracy. If you want safety and predictability over everything else, then that is difficult to square with either free speech or with freedom more generally.
Krause: How does American free speech exceptionalism, as you call it in your book, differ from the European models of speech protection?
Mchangama: All European democracies criminalize hate speech. It’s even an obligation of European Union membership—and is one that the EU is working to expand even further.
The United States Supreme Court, on the other hand, has said that only expressions that constitute incitement to imminent lawless action, and are likely to produce such outcomes, can be prohibited. So that’s a very, very high bar.
Then when it comes to defamation law, the Supreme Court set out an “actual malice” test in the 1964 case of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. That’s a very high bar public figures must reach if they want to silence critics. Whereas in Italy, for instance, Prime Minister Meloni has used criminal defamation against some of her critics in response to relatively soft criticism. Americans have much stronger protections when it comes to criticizing public officials, even though the current president is doing his best to try to roll back those protections and challenging them with lawsuits against all and sundry.
The idea of viewpoint neutrality that underlies the First Amendment—that the government cannot punish particular viewpoints—is really exceptional to the United States. It’s not the case in most other democracies, and certainly not in Europe.
Krause: What do global communication technologies mean for the future of free speech? For instance, do actions taken by China or Russia—their approach to censoring or to controlling speech—impact the West?
Mchangama: That’s a great question. Let’s go to 2012—that’s an important year. It’s the year that Putin wins a—shall we say “flawed”—presidential election. And he’s quite frustrated because Facebook and VKontakte and other social media platforms have been used to mobilize protests against him. Because of this, Russia takes its first decisive step toward building what some researchers have called the Red Web. Russian leaders start with a suggestion that’s familiar to us in 2026. They say, “We need to have more control of websites in order to protect children.” Of course, their real purpose is to create a centralized system of censorship that can block content that is deemed undesirable by the government. And these efforts have only ramped up.
Also in 2012, in China, Xi Jinping comes to power, and shortly thereafter, a document is circulated within the Chinese Communist Party called Document #9. This sets out Xi’s very paranoid and authoritarian approach to navigating a world shaped by the internet; a world in which “dangerous viewpoints” can erode the monopoly the Chinese Communist Party has over the spread of ideas in China.
And so China and Russia have built up their capabilities to censor the online sphere. China is the most sophisticated country, and it builds the so-called Great Firewall. In the age of AI, China has gone even further, not only in censoring speech in real time but also in demanding that AI chatbots conform to “core socialist values.” This essentially means only ideas supportive of the Chinese Communist Party.
The repercussions of this are huge because Chinese technology is very sophisticated. It can be exported to other countries, and it can be embedded into technological systems. If you’re an authoritarian leader somewhere, you might say, “Well, China’s AI is almost as good as American AI. If I use China’s AI, I can get all the benefits in terms of productivity for my economy and competitiveness. But I can also censor all the voices that are critical of my rule.”
This is one of the main dangers of the United States increasingly pulling away from its traditional role of being a defender of free speech internationally. When the United States steps out of that role, that gives more power to China and Russia to influence international norms. And they will influence international norms in a more restrictive way, in a way that inverts the principle of free speech. Rather than protecting the ability of individuals and civil society to criticize the government, the logic becomes “Well, speech should essentially reflect the viewpoints of the state, because the state is the organizing principle of society. Therefore, opinions that contravene this vision are seditious, dangerous, and should be banned.”
*This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.