The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. I’m your co-host, Michael Fox, and this is The Battle for Free Speech. So as promised, this is the first of a number of bonus episodes we’ll be rolling out in the coming weeks. Today, I speak with Fara Dabhoiwala. He’s a professor of history at Princeton University, and he’s the author of the book, What Is Free Speech: The History of a Dangerous Idea. That book was published last year by Penguin Random House and Harvard University Press. And if you’ve listened to this podcast series, you have heard his voice before because I go to him for analysis and insight in numerous episodes. That’s because he’s a wealth of knowledge on this subject, but also because his book in many ways challenges the status quo about our understanding of free speech. In this podcast series, I feel like I was able to only just barely scratch the surface on so many questions, particularly about the beginnings of what we understand as free speech in the United States and elsewhere, and also the difference between free speech in the United States and abroad.

So today I’m bringing you my conversation with him in its entirety. I know you will appreciate it.

Well, Fara, I just want to start off. Thank you so much, so much for your time and for being here.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

A pleasure to talk to you, Mike.

Michael Fox:

Fara, can you start with by just introducing yourself and tell me a little bit about why this became such an interest for you, why you wrote this book?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Well, I’m a historian at Princeton, but I used to teach at Oxford University in England. And more than 10 years ago now, I published a different book on the history of Western attitudes to sex and what I call the sexual revolution of the 18th century. And that was a very popular book and I went around the world talking about it. And in the course of that, almost immediately, I was censored in various ways. I was deplatformed, I got into trouble for saying things on the radio, and then it all culminated in my book being translated into Chinese. And when it was translated into Chinese, it was censored. And then I went to China and traveled around talking about it. And at that point, my interest shifted from my own experience of being silenced to the extraordinary things that were happening in China already 10 years ago, which was, as a historian, I realized every single apparatus of censorship ever invented in the history of the world was now simultaneously being deployed to muzzle free speech in China, as well as some totally new ones that the Communist Party had developed to deal with the internet.

And of course, 10 years ago, everyone still generally believed the internet was a technology of freedom that would set people free. And before long, surely the Chinese would also experience it that way. And my experience traveling around taught me that actually that was a very naive idea and the opposite was happening. So I came back from that trip really shocked by the way in which a modern dictatorship like China can operate to muzzle free speech and silence dissent at every level, believing myself in free speech and starting to think, well, why do we have such different views about this? Where does first of all, this Western belief in free speech come from? And given that we all believe in it, and I do very strongly myself, why can we never agree on what it means? I mean, within our cultures, we’re fighting about that all the time and across cultures now, this is a really important political transnational problem in the world, but it’s not just a political series of questions and problems.

It’s also a historical problem because people didn’t always believe in free speech. Anyway, so that’s where I started. I though in 2015, oh my goodness, it’s peak free speech time now. I should hurry up and write this book before the moment passes. And sadly, the moment has not passed. It’s just got worse and worse. But I can explain why that is, which is part of the interest of the subject.

Michael Fox:

Yeah, that’s exactly what I was going to ask you. How did we get into this mess? And obviously through reading your book, I’m just fascinated by the Cato letters and all this, but if you could give me a little bit of how do we get to this point?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Well, it’s taken us 300 years to get to this point because the modern idea of free speech really is invented about 300 years ago. But the reason it’s such a hot topic right now, let me just deal with that. The reason it’s such a hot topic right now is because we’re living through a giant communications revolution. I mean, the internet has completely transformed how humans communicate at every level about every subject. And every time that’s happened in the past, in the 18th century with print, in the 19th century and the 20th century with new forms of print and the telegraph and broadcasting and all the rest of it, every time there’s been a new communications revolution, people have needed to think about free speech harder and in different ways. And so that’s part of what’s happening right now. Do you want to come back to me about the history?

Michael Fox:

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Let’s dive all the way back in the history and we’ll bring it up to the present. Talk to me about those beginnings of what free speech meant in those days.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Yeah. So really the first thing you need to understand about free speech is it’s on the one hand, a very old idea. There are various forms of freedom of expression that go right back to the classical period. On the other hand, our current sense of it is really quite recent because older ideas of free speech are always very restricted. They had to do with speech in an emergency, the idea of scholars communicating peacefully amongst themselves. But what’s always lacking in all those earlier notions is a notion of political free speech, that everyone has the right to speak out on matters of public concern. That’s really the core of our modern idea. One reason that’s lacking before the 18th century is that people have a very sophisticated understanding of what words really are. That’s to say words are not different from actions. Words are a type of action in the world.

Everyone in the past knew this. They also know that words, although often trivial and harmless and fleeting, sometimes can have really potent consequences in the world. And thirdly, they know that sometimes those potent consequences can be dangerous and harmful. And they’re particularly focused on the harm to individuals from lies and slanders and defamation, which is something that everyone sees is a real problem. And people all the time in the pre-modern world are going to court to defend themselves against the bad words, the slanders, the lies of others. And the second way in which they are focused on this is the dangers, the problems of untruth and misinformation and conspiracy theories. Everyone knows in the past, and it’s a documented fact, that first of all, lies and misinformation spread very quickly, much more quickly than the truth, and that they can, if left unchecked, cause riots and political disorder and pogroms and massacres and bloodshed on a horrible scale.

Everyone in the European past knew this. Happens time and again. And so because of these insights into the power of words, they are very keen to control technologies of print when those are invented and they’re keen to regulate speech in all sorts of ways. Okay, so that’s the background. Then what happens in the early 18th century, and it happens first in England, is that for contingent religious and political reasons there the government cannot anymore agree on exactly how to regulate the printing press. There’s been a political and religious revolution. And so the normal forms of prior censorship whereby you go to the church with anything controversial on a spiritual subject and ask them to sign off on it before you print it, that doesn’t work anymore. Anyway, I won’t go into the reasons, but what you get is this explosion of new kinds of printing because now for the first time people are allowed to just put it out there.

You can still be punished and prosecuted if you publish something that is beyond the pale, but still it’s a different form of regulation. And so in London, which is the epicenter of this, you get an explosion of political pamphlets, newspapers, a much more fast-paced, a different kind of media world than has ever existed before. And the reason for this is partly also that this is the first age of permanent political parties. In England, the Wigs and the Tories are constantly, they’re popular parties. They’re appealing to the people. And so they use this new technology right from the outset to start to attack each other. And as part of that, they are constantly shouting back and forth across the partisan landscape that the other side is lying and abusing words and misinforming the public. They on the other hand are trying to tell the truth. Anyway, it’s a situation very analogous, very evocative of our own age.

And in this new landscape, people get addicted to fast-paced news and newspapers and so on. They like it and they celebrate that this has come about because of the liberty of the press. So the liberty of the press comes this new slogan that everyone loves to be in favor of, but that doesn’t mean that anything goes. On the other hand, they can also see actually very sharply, acutely, that this new technology has also made worse all the problems of mass communication that have always existed. I mean, the first law against false news in the English speaking world dates back to 1275. These are not new problems at all. So in the 18th century, people see that, for example, print has only made worse the problem of lies. There’s a great quote by Jonathan Swift, the great writer of the early 18th century, which is basically that truth is slow and lies are false.

It goes like this, falsehood flies and truth comes limping after it like a man who’s though of a good repartee long after the party’s over. It’s still true. And Daniel Defoe, his co-journalist and writer, brilliant novelist as well, complains that newspapers have created an explosion of “false news, forgery, infamy, and absurdity, masquerading as fact.” So everyone who looks into this and understands how the world works knows that this has just made things worse. And the final aspect of that, that all people in the know are aware of is that this new media world is hugely corrupt. It’s not about spreading truth so much about making money. Everyone is trying to make money out of the print revolution. It’s hard to do, many newspapers go under, but everyone wants to make it big. They’re always primarily concerned with selling advertising, getting sales, and above all, getting sponsorship by a politician.

And so the world of journalism is hugely corrupt. People are writing for money. Newspapers are being bought and sold all the time, and this is not a neutral marketplace of ideas at all on the contrary. So in this world, liberty speech, everyone agrees is great, but because of all these problems, they also agree that liberty speech is easily abused and they call that licentiousness. Licentience is bad, liberty is good. But the problem with this balancing model of saying liberty speech is good as far as it goes, but you shouldn’t abuse it, is that everyone can also see this lies entirely in the eye of the beholder. It’s a subjective judgment. And that’s why no one is able to put forward a really cogent theory of free speech. Everyone can see that, for example, opposition politicians are always banging on about freedom of speech and all for it and maximally for it.

And then the moment they get into power, they start censoring their opponents as heavily as they can. So there’s no worked out theory of free speech. And into this moment come these two journalists called John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon who put forward the first much more hard-edged theory of free speech in which they describe what we might call the origins of the absolutist view of free speech. And their argument, which they put forward in an anonymous newspaper column called Cato’s Letters, which is immensely successful and has a very long afterlife, is that liberty of speech is the foundation of all liberty and that governors are always trying to abuse power and aggregate more power to themselves. Governors are in fact always trying to turn into tyrants. On the other hand, the people are always noble and virtuous and able to see that. And so you should allow the people maximum freedom of expression in order that they can keep a check on their tyrants, their governors, and call them to account.

And so they claim this, they claim that liberty’s speech is the foundation of all liberty because the moment you see it being reduced even a tiny bit, then you know you’re on a slippery slide to tyranny because that’s the first thing that tyrannical governors try to do. Now, everyone has always known that Cater’s letters is a tremendously influential text in the history of free speech. Cater’s letters is this not just about free speech, it’s a series of essays putting forward simple understandings of important Republican thinkers like Locke and Machiavelli. And in the Americas, in North America, it becomes the most important political text for the Patriot movement in the middle and later 18th century. So the founders of the United States take this as gospel truth and they import these slogans from Katie’s letters into the Declarations of Rights about free speech in 1776 and then into the First Amendment.

So it has a very long afterlife. It’s very powerful. Everyone’s always known about this, but when I started reading it, two things revealed themselves to me that no one had ever really noticed before, and they’re really quite astonishing. The first is this is a theory full of holes. This is not a coherent, sincere doctrine of free speech. It’s in fact an attempt to justify the practices of these two hack journalists themselves in attacking the government and calling for the lynching of stock market profiteers and the overthrow of the current administration. They are justifying themselves by saying, “Well, of course, freedom of speech can never be abridged and there’s no such thing as liable.” That’s another thing they try and claim that if you attack someone and you spread lies about them, then the people will just see that they’re lies and that will just have no effect at all.

On the other hand, if you criticize someone and it’s true, then it’ll stick. And so really there’s no such thing as liable. It’s a very dodgy argument, but they make it with great passion. So the first thing is they don’t pay attention to any of those things that everyone else around them notices, that this is a deeply corrupt media world, that the newspapers themselves are writing and the journalists are writing for money, that the people don’t always agree on everything, that truth is difficult to establish, and that lies can spread dangerously if you allow them to. None of those things are there at all. So it’s full of holes. The second thing, even more remarkably, that I discovered is that they themselves are not writing in good faith. They’re not just writing to defend themselves. They are deeply, deeply complicit in this corruption and political partisanship of the age.

They are writing basically to be noticed by the government and then to be paid off by the government. And the lead author, Thomas Gordon, he does exactly that. He writes Cater’s letters about the people are always right, the people should never be suppressed. And then the government reaches out to him and say, “Hey, you are quite a good writer, but why are you wasting your time with this muckraking rabble-rousing stuff? Why don’t you come work for us?” And he says, “Oh yes, that sounds quite interesting. Thank you so much.” And he starts writing simultaneously for the government press, exactly the opposite. The governors know what they’re doing. People are often being misled by dangerous hack journalists. Misinformation is rife. And then finally he jumps ship and they shut down Cater’s letters and he makes a deal with the government and he becomes the prime minister’s chief propagandist.

He goes rich and famous over the next 20 years as a spin doctor on the establishment side. So anyway, these were remarkable discoveries and they really also I think are important, not just historically, but in showing up that from the outset, theories of free speech are very difficult to make watertight. They often are concocted in bad faith, and yet what lasts is powerful rhetoric. And so over time, no one knows about Thomas Gordon’s own corruption, but his text lives on and it’s very powerfully still read as an epitome of wisdom and truth and foundation for why we should think of free speech in a particular way.

Michael Fox:

Why has this concept, this absolutist concept and these concepts of free speech at all costs, particularly in the United States, why has this remained so powerful over the centuries up until today?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Well, one of the revelations of my book is that actually Americans didn’t always think exactly as they do now about free speech, that for most of American history, actually from 1789 all the way to the 1960s, Americans had views that were quite similar to those in the rest of the world, a more balanced understanding of free speech as a matter of both of rights and of responsibilities as something that required attending to the public good, something that required looking at the role of the mass media, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s only because of the Cold War really that they diverged into a more hard line libertarian outlook, the results of which we’re living through today. But more fundamentally, I think the reason that these slogans are so attractive is that everyone wants simplicity and everyone likes the idea that the rules of free speech should be simple and straightforward.

And everyone can also see that if you take a balancing approach that on the one hand talks about this as a right and on the other hand talks about the possible harms and thinks about the public good and gives powers to regulate and so on, that this can lead to all sorts of serious problems of subjective interpretation, of censorship on grounds that we don’t agree with. That creates all sorts of problems that you can see playing out in countries around the world that take that approach. If you look at Britain, for example, right now, it’s a mess.

So that’s not a good solution. It’s not a perfect solution either. I happen to think that that approach is more intellectually justified, but I don’t think that it is problem free at all. And so the alternative of just saying, “Well, this is a simple matter. We just need to make the rules as simple and as hard edged as possible has an obvious intellectual appeal.” I think there’s also a really interesting psychology here, which I experienced myself when I was censored in trivial ways at the start of this project, which is no one likes to be told that they can’t say something. No one likes to be told to shut up. So the reverse psychology here, again, makes this a wonderful slogan to appeal to. If you feel censored, you feel aggrieved in a way that other rights maybe don’t quite have that immediate emotional purchase.

Michael Fox:

I thought one of the themes, the essential themes of your book, which I found fascinating, is that freedom of expression, freedom of speech isn’t just about the words that are used, the individuals that are speaking, but it’s also about power, the different groups and structures and systems that exist in order for some people to be able to speak and others not to speak. Can you speak a little bit about that?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

So another problem with laws about free speech is that if you think about communication and free speech in a sophisticated way, you need to acknowledge that speech is always exquisitely contextual. It’s never just about the words, the action in the world. Voltaire once said, “I write in order to act.” Let me just remind people, this is an action in the world, but the outcome of that action, the impact in the world is different, not just according to the words, but according to who is speaking, who is the audience, what is the context, what is the intention, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Me saying something to you in a bar in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere is a completely different speech act, even if I use the same words as the president of the United States standing up and broadcasting this around the world repeatedly over and over again.

Just to take a trivial example, and that’s a problem, this exquisite contextual understanding of what’s happening when someone says something. We can navigate that in real life. We can navigate that face-to-face pretty well. We know when someone’s joking or when they’re saying something seriously, we know if we’re aligned in our understanding of what this conversation is about. When we’re not, that’s when miscommunication occurs. Online miscommunication is much easier than face-to-face. The larger the setting number of people involved, the greater the problems of miscommunication. But basically we know this is a matter of judgment on all sorts of levels. And the problem is laws are predicated pretty much on the opposite set of principles. That is to say consistency, transparency, everyone has the right to be treated the same. And if you think that for the same action, and if you think that the action is basically saying X, Y, Z, then it doesn’t seem right that people should be treated differently or that these other contextual elements should be brought into the frame.

And again, then you come into the problem that it becomes very subjective to judge exactly what’s happening, what the effects are. Anyway, so that’s the problem with laws, but it also points to the complication of the real issues, right? Free speech is a great noble ideal, but communication is really quite a complicated thing. And if we don’t attend to that, if we just push it all aside as American free speech jurisprudence increasingly does for the sake of simplicity, then we’re throwing out with the bath water, we’re throwing out also the baby, which is the fact that speech is an action and it’s an action that can cause harm. Now we need to take a minimalist approach to making laws. We need to take a maximalist approach to rights, but still there is something called truth. Sometimes the truth is very important. There are ways in which communication can cause harm.

We’ve known this throughout history, see it time and again. If we just ignore that completely, we’re opening up a whole set of different problems, which is where the absolutist doctrine leads us.

Michael Fox:

This is the thing for me that I find shocking, surprising, is that every time we’re talking about free speech or people are speaking about free speech, it’s as if this question of hate speech, truth, fake news, disinformation, intentional disinformation, particularly in the United States, it’s like this huge elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. It’s just there and then people go, “Oh yeah, well there’s a…” And then we end up in this same cycle where then obviously, as you’ve mentioned, that’s the stuff that goes viral, right? It’s the lies, disinformation. This is why Brazil has really cracked down hard on that, particularly around the election time and why the United States is of course calling Supreme Court justice censorship judges and things like that. Where does fake news fit into this question of free speech or where should it fit into this question of free speech or how are some countries handling this vis-a-vis how the United States is handling in a different way?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Yeah. So one of the problems with free speech and one of the reasons why we’re in such a mess today is that our approach to it is really way too simplistic. There’s a reason why, because everyone wants the rules to be simple and just to be about individual rights, but it’s not enough. And so one thing we might start by acknowledging is that free speech can be many different things. There are many different forms of free speech. For example, free speech for writers of fiction or artists or comedians is one thing, and free speech in the political sphere is another thing because for artists and comedians, the aim of their freedom of expression is to amuse people, to make them laugh or to enlighten them, to spin worlds that will blow their minds. But in doing so, the literal truth is actually not really that important.

The literal truth is something that you play with in art and comedy, and rightly so. So we need to think about what the free speech is for. Now, in the case of democratic discourse of citizens trying to deliberate around the public good and about politics more generally, truth is actually very important. And the foundation of our democratic discourse has always been that we deliberate in good faith and that we don’t spread lies and misinformation because that way we are going to end up with a corrupted public sphere. So there, if we’re talking about freedom of speech, we do need to have truth somewhere in our sights as part of the aim and the purpose of the speech. Now, already in the 19th century, people started to see, here’s another way in which our notions of free speech are too simplistic. They started to see that thinking about free speech just in terms of the rights of the individual on the one hand and the powers of the state and the government on the other hand was not sufficient.

Why is it not sufficient? Because if you’re thinking about the sphere of political discourse, the marketplace of ideas, if you like, then what also is very important and shapes that whole sphere is the power of the media, the power of the mass media, the power of the private media. And already in the 19th century and into the 20th century, people who thought about this in sophisticated ways, including in the United States, focused on that as a real problem because from early on, people could see that the incentives, the motives, the aims of the mass media, not primarily to educate the public or to advance truth, they are on the contrary to sell advertising and to increase the power and the wealth of their owners. So out of that comes a very powerful socialist and communist critique, but also conservative and across the political spectrum, people can see this as a problem.

And so if you fast forward to the 1930s and 40s, this is something that Roosevelt and the administrations and indeed the Supreme Court of that era are very highly focused on. If you read First Amendment jurisprudence of that era, it’s full of people saying, “Well, it’s completely insufficient to think of this in simplistic way of just about individuals versus government. The real problem of our age is how to tackle the power of the mass media.” And out of that comes an attempt to reconsider free speech as also a matter of the public good, and indeed as people conceptualize it at the time of the right to truthful information on the part of citizens. This is also, of course, a time where people everywhere are thinking about this against the backdrop of The 1930s in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and they can see how powerful propaganda is and that vehicles of mass communication are not neutral.

They are instruments of power. Anyway, so out of that comes a jurisprudence, which feeds into, for example, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which after all an American document drawn up under Eleanor Roosevelt. If you look at that document’s definition of freedom of expression, it channels what is then the mainstream American and European view, which is on the one hand, freedom of expression is a right. On the other hand, it can never be abused to harm the rights of others. So it’s a balance between rights and responsibilities, and it includes the right to truthful information. And out of that also came a huge effort to impose on or remind the mass media of the age of their responsibilities. So out of that come ways of rethinking what mass media could be, public broadcasting, subscription models, all sorts of ways in which we might have a better alignment between the incentives of the media and the incentives and the needs of the public, but also journalism school, the professionalization, especially in America, and the taken seriously by news organizations of their responsibilities, fact checking, making sure that you’re not telling lies to the public and correcting things as necessary.

It’s hard. It takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of effort, but people generally in what we now disdainfully call the legacy media were very heavily invested in that project because they saw what the stakes were. The stakes were a healthy public sphere with truthful information. I’m afraid what’s happened in the internet revolution and the communications revolution of our own time is that model has been destroyed by a new ecosystem where these things are simply not attended to at all. And we as a public have lost sight of the fact that we used always, including in the United States, to regulate mass media in the public interest for the public good for precisely this reason. That happened to broadcasting, it happened to television, the FCC was set up for that purpose. All markets, even in the United States are regulated. Again, this doesn’t mean by the government, precisely regulated at arm’s length by non-governmental organizations that are supposed to be nonpartisan or at the very least bipartisan, the FTC, the FCC.

All that is now under assault by right-wing authoritarians whose project is made easier by the fact that our public discourse is now being overwhelmed by greedy social media companies that take no account at all of the public good insofar as it contravenes their profits.

Michael Fox:

You mentioned as well this weaponization of the discourse of free speech. Everyone should have it, but then how it’s used over time is usually the powerful and eliminating free speech from folks that are marginalized or minorities. And I think we’re at this even hyper moment because social media has this image of appearing as though anyone can say whatever you want to, but you still have the algorithms. It’s controlled by some people and not by others. So how dangerous is this moment? And if you could just speak for a moment about this use, this weaponization of the discourse of free speech, either in the past or currently still.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Well, sadly, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan. It was a weaponized slogan at the outset in the early 18th century and that has never gone away. We see that today. I mean, the worst senses are often the people shouting most loudly that they ask for free speech. Trump is a great example of that. The moment that we’re in is really very dangerous political moment because of the ways in which social media. Social media is really an old-fashioned anachronistic term for the mass media of our age. It’s not social, it’s political discourse and every other kind of discourse.

The difficulty with that is really manifold. One is, as that nomenclature already indicates, we’ve now shifted to a moment where all discourse happens in the same medium, on the same level. So pictures of cats, jokes, serious political debate all happening in the same sewer, and that muddles the rules and how the audience understands what’s going on. And it makes it much easier for untruth to spread, for sloganeering to take over from fact-based, evidence-based argument. So that’s one intrinsic difficulty with the medium. But the deeper problem is that these social media companies to begin with had some sense of the public good and of moderation and of applying standards of truth, for example, and not allowing someone who’s just attempted a coup against the elected president of the United States as Trump tried to do and whipped up people on social media to attack the capital.

It seems a long time ago, but that could get you banned on de-platformed and rightly so. In the political moment that we are in now, of course, all of these companies are rolling all that back and hiding behind the slogan of free speech to moderate as little as possible because again, it’s politically inconvenient. It’s also expensive. They never put a huge amount of effort into it. They always try to get away with as little as possible. And finally, it plays into a political discourse which is increasingly dominated by populist rabble rousing. There’s an understanding that this is good politics on the part of right-wing politicians that chimes with good business model of just allowing anything to go. And at the heart of this, in terms of the technologies, as it were, of our mass communication now, first of all, these media companies, the online media companies are the most powerful publishers the world has ever seen, but they’re not treated as publishers.

No one thinks of them as publishers. Governments fail to think of them as publishers. We as citizens are no better. They are publishers. The reason that’s important is that it focuses on two things. First of all, that they are constantly censoring discourse. Their algorithms amplify certain voices and certain messages and they suppress and silence others. That’s what publishers do. They make judgements automatically or otherwise about what they want people to see. So in that sense, they are deeply influential on public discourse. They also, of course, when it suits them, don’t stand up for free speech. When they are issued with a take down notice by an unsavory overseas government, they obey the law. So what can they do? They say, “We’re just trying to obey the law.” I would feel slightly less contemptuous of them if they did sometimes stand up for what we would think of as real free speech in countries under unsavory regimes, but they don’t.

Michael Fox:

Or just the situation in the United States and students protesting at universities and university freedoms and things like that. Oliver Wendell Holmes, I wanted to touch very briefly on his marketplace of ideas because I feel like this is this mythic idea, this concept that people bring up again and again every place and how everyone uses this as the reason why free speech works in the United States. What’s your analysis of that today? What do people actually have to understand about this idea and what it means for us today?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

It’s a wonderful ideal and he’s a wonderfully readable writer of opinions, Holmes. One of the interesting things about Holmes that I discovered was that he was too high-minded to read newspapers. He didn’t really engage in the mass media of his age. And so he was able to take this Olympian view of the marketplace of ideas and how it might work. I think he also, to be fair to him, he wasn’t sure this would work out, but he was willing to let the experiment run out. It’s a noble American ideal. They’re always saying it’s an experiment. Oh, well, it’s slightly annoying to an outsider. Slavery, oh, it’s just an experiment. Oh, genocide of the unions. Oh, we’re just doing an experiment here. Anyway, back to your question, a marketplace of ideas is a fantastic ideal, but think about what it really means. It would mean that each of us is independently able to walk around a marketplace where all ideas are given equal weight and airing, that we are all equally reasonable in our approach, and that we’re equally able to judge truth against falsehood somehow intrinsically, and that we’re all doing so in good faith and that all the arguments being put to us are being put in good faith and in reasoned ways.

That’s absolutely the opposite. And we could go on. There are many other ways in which we could flesh out this as an ideal. It’s actually the opposite of the kind of shit-filled sewer of public discourse through which we have to wade every day with our very different levels of understanding of things, our very different perspectives and backgrounds and abilities to judge the truth. No one has an intrinsic ability to judge the truth. That’s a presumption that is there in many free speech doctrines, but it’s actually conclusively debunked by history and by science. What we require is attention to how as a society might create a better marketplace of ideas. And I’m afraid just throwing everything into the jumble of social media and allowing private companies basically to determine how they can best keep people hooked on their platforms is not the best way of creating, especially a political sphere of debate.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. Would you say that there’s a battle today over the definition of free speech, the absolutism versus a more balanced approach or at least going back to what we understood, say free speech in the 1960s where people can get out and protest and now kind of a free for all of absolutism?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

I mean, free speech has always been about power, both in the theory and in practice. We see that today, what voices are silenced or elevated is about power. It’s a noble ideal because everyone can appeal to it and throughout history, as my book shows, those without power and those who attempted to be silenced have also appealed to it from abolitionists and early feminists onwards into the present day. So that’s the good side of why it’s a dangerous idea. And we should all be shouting from the rooftops that right now free speech rights are being trampled upon. The First Amendment is being completely disregarded in the United States and the rest of it. But I think that the real global battle here is about how to deal with the communications revolution that we’re living through and how to deal with the power of media companies, the unfettered transnational power basically of American media companies.

And I think that the minimalist approach that the Europeans have taken to this is really an encouraging way forward. Again, it’s being faced by massive amounts of corporate and political opposition from the United States. It’s always in danger of being watered down. Nonetheless, what they have said and what the Brazilians are also trying to do is basically to ask these companies, it’s not censorship, it’s to ask these companies to be transparent upfront about their moderating practices. They are publishers, they’re constantly censoring. Tell us what the rules are, A, secondly, apply those rules consistently and fairly. Thirdly, show us the public that you are doing that consistently and fairly. Report back, commensurate with the power. The Europeans have this in their legislation. I don’t know if the Brazilians do, but proportionate to the power of your platform, you have a greater obligation because you have greater power, you have a greater obligation to report on how these rules are being followed.

And that’s not imposing any kind of censorship from the outside. It’s just asking them to be transparent about what they’re doing. I would go further as a citizen and require them to uphold standards of truth in political discourse and to do more about curbing misinformation and so on. But as a first step, we really do need to tackle the power in our societies. Americans are very bad at tackling corporate power of any kind. The First Amendment has always been weaponized by corporations and by people with money to claim that money equals speech and corporate power should never be limited. But even Americans, I hope, will see and try and do something about this big problem of our time.

Michael Fox:

Fara, last question is, could you just speak a little bit about what free speech meant for the abolitionist movement back in the 1800s?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

Frederick Douglass once said, I think something like the Civil War would never have happened if American politicians had taken government had taken the First Amendment as seriously as it took the rights of states. And by that, he was alluding to the fact that abolitionists before the Civil War were routinely appealing to their right of freedom of expression to make their case. And they were met with violence both in the north and the south and by the presumption that what they were saying was completely beyond the pale was dangerous and harmful and couldn’t be allowed. It’s a good example of how our understanding of the First Amendment has evolved, our understanding of harm has evolved. When I say that harmful speech is something that societies should be allowed to take a view on and potentially to regulate public discourse about, I don’t mean that those things are set in stone and they’re always self-evident.

I mean that instead of shouting about censorship and free speech, we should be having a discussion about what is harmful and as a society trying to take a view on that and that view will evolve. So abolitionists are shut up violently and otherwise and out of that develop even stronger passionate view that they have a right to speak out. The same is true of early feminists who are told. Actually this comes out of the abolitionist movement. First American feminists are told when they are leading the campaign for abolition that they may not sit with men or address men on equal terms and out of that develop the view that actually there’s something wrong here. Their voices deserve to be heard. And so the early women’s movement starts not primarily as a campaign for the vote, but simply for the most basic right of all, which is to speak out and be heard by the public.

Michael Fox:

Fara, is the United States really such an outlier in the world in terms of its understanding, absolutist understanding of free speech?

Fara Dabhoiwala:

It’s an outlier at the moment in the jurisprudence of free speech in the way that the laws are drawn up. I don’t think it’s an outlier in the sense that actually even absolutists or self-proclaimed absolutists are always drawing limits and balancing harms against rights. The Supreme Court does that all the time, even when it’s supposedly not. So in that sense, not. But I think the difficulty that United States has is that it has a very ancient constitution. It’s a bit like having a very ancient car. You can be proud of it, but it’s not necessarily roadworthy in the 21st century. And there are very few citizens’ rights in that. Indeed, even the First Amendment is not a right of citizens. It’s another big flaw that Americans tend to overlook. It’s only a prohibition on the government censoring anything. In the private sphere, people get sacked and fired all the time for expressing their views, political or otherwise.

So it’s not a right of citizens. But the fact that there are very few other rights in the Bill of Rights and in the Constitution and that this one happens to be named first, and because we all love free speech, of course, it’s given it this elevated popular kind of supremacy, which means it’s the ultimate legal Trump card. There’s nothing that can trump the First Amendment. So that’s why it’s especially been weaponized by anti-regulation corporate forces, by people who want more money in politics and all sorts of ways, because there’s no legal comeback against it. Once you can define something as free speech in an American courtroom, you’re home and dry. And that’s not necessarily the best way of balancing the right free speech, which is a great thing against other important rights and indeed the common good.

Michael Fox:

Fara, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate your time. This has been fantastic.

Fara Dabhoiwala:

It’s great to talk to you, Mike. Thank you.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. I hope you enjoyed our conversation. As I mentioned before, this is the first bonus episode of this series. There are more on the way. Please watch out for those in your feed. This is the battle for free speech. This podcast is co-hosted by myself and Marc Steiner. This show is produced by The Real News. You can find out more about my work and this show on my Patreon. That’s patreon.com/mfox. And as always, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com. Thanks so much again for listening to this podcast. See you next time.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Speaker 1:

A few weeks ago, the US State Department released this video over X.

Speaker 2:

It’s 1823. The map of the Americas is being redrawn. Spain has spent centuries amassing a new world empire stretching from Patagonia to California. Now their grip was slipping fast.

Speaker 1:

The video is narrated by Kevin Marino Cabrera, the US ambassador to Panama, and it’s highly polished with images, map graphics, animations, and dramatic music.

Speaker 2:

Monroe then declared a decree to Congress, among the boldest diplomatic statements in American history.

Speaker 3:

The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintained, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.

Speaker 1:

The text of the post reads, “The Monroe Doctrine has shaped US foreign policy for over two centuries. American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

Speaker 2:

But these were defensive applications, keeping European powers out, not asserting American control over the hemisphere’s affairs. That changed in 1895 when Secretary of State Richard Olney invoked the doctrine, declaring that the United States was practically sovereign over the Western hemisphere and demanded for its submit to American arbitration. He had redefined the doctrine. It was no longer just a warning. It was now a claim to regional primacy.

Speaker 1:

The video is remarkable because it doesn’t mince words or attempt to paint a rosy picture of the United States. In five minutes and 31 seconds, it just lays out the justification for the US imperialism that has cast a shadow over the region for the last two centuries up until today.

Speaker 2:

Three years later, war with Spain erupted and when the smoke cleared, it transformed the hemisphere. The United States expelled Spain from Cuba, seized Puerto Rico, and stepped into the world stage as a genuine imperial power with dominance over the Caribbean. Just four years later, that dominance was tested again. German and British warships sailed into Venezuelan waters and blockaded its ports over unpaid debts. Roosevelt intervened and declared if a Latin American nation fell into chaos or instability, the US would step it and manage it. The doctrine has started as a shield. Roosevelt had just turned it into a mandate.

Speaker 1:

This was all a good thing, the video seems to say. A natural course of history that the US should be proud of and the rest of the region should just accept. And all this backstory is a lengthy setup for the video to then make the case that Trump’s actions in Latin America are nothing more than a continuation of the same model of imperialist intervention that the US has carried out since its inception, or at least since the beginning of the 20th century when Roosevelt declared his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

Speaker 2:

Fast-forward to the modern era where the doctrine has found its latest champion in President Trump. Through the execution of Operation Absolute Resolve, the United States seized Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, transporting him to American soil to answer for charges of narcoterrorism. This calculated maneuver delivered a resident signal across the hemisphere, punctuated by President Trump’s own declaration.

Speaker 4:

Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.

Speaker 1:

It’s a fascinating piece of propaganda that tries to place Trump’s actions as the logical next step in the long trajectory of US imperialism in the region.

Speaker 2:

Over two centuries, Monroe’s declaration had shaped US foreign policy across administrations and throughout fundamentally different geopolitical eras. Well, began as a warning to European powers evolved into a framework for regional dominance, one that remains the cornerstone of American strategy in the hemisphere today.

Speaker 5:

What is extraordinary about that video is that it says what has never really been said about the Monroe Doctrine by US officials, which is that the Monroe doctrine has served as a pretext for US intervention in the region and is essentially there to ensure that the US has a great deal of political influence and economic influence over the entire Latin America and Caribbean.

Speaker 1:

That is Alexander Main. I reached out to him to get his take on this video. He’s an old friend and the director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington DC.

Speaker 2:

When Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba in 1962, Kennedy didn’t need to invent a new framework. He simply invoked the doctrine. The weapons had to go.

Speaker 5:

This video is saying that there is such a thing as the US Empire, something that most US officials have never wanted to publicly recognize and saying that that is a good thing and that more needs to be done to ensure that the US can be an effective empire over the entire Western hemisphere.

Speaker 1:

Key to this video, Alex says, is the idea that brute military force must be deployed to achieve this imperialistic doctrine. And right now that is being done under the pretext of a new sort of war on terror. There’s no clear definition of exactly who or what narco-terrorist is, but that might be part of the point. Alex says that much like the Cold War’s fight against communism, the vague image of the narco-terrorist boogeyman allows US authorities and their allies to go after left-leaning opponents with force.

Speaker 5:

We’re seeing something similar now, and I think this is really what the US is going to be relying on under the Trump administration. They’re going to be relying more and more on military action and the threat of military action in order to advance this vision of complete political domination over the region.

Speaker 1:

In Brazil, high stakes elections are coming up in October. Advisors for leftist president Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva saw the timing and content of this video as a direct threat against the president’s reelection campaign, a sign that the Trump administration has its sights on Latin America’s largest country. According to Brazilian columnist Valdo Cruz, Lulu’s advisors compared Trump’s foreign policy team led by Cuban American Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Madagascar Penguins piloting Air Force One. It’s a reference to the Madagascar cartoon.

Speaker 6:

Attention, this is your captain speaking. I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is we’ll be landing immediately. Bad news is we’re crash landing.

Speaker 1:

That is where we are at, a new definitive Monroe doctrine for the Western hemisphere, and it’s being fueled by brute US military force in the region as we have already seen unfold in unprecedented terms over the last year. And the Trump administration isn’t just using those actions and threats abroad. They’re now going after progressive individuals and groups in the United States accusing them of being pawns of foreign nations. People have even been subpoenaed.

Speaker 7:

There’s nothing organic about it. It is funded, it is organized, and Cuba is a part of that network and in some cases a critical part of that network.

Speaker 1:

It’s like something out of the McCarthy era or the Cold War. It’s a fabricated witch hunt. And as we will look at today, it’s being supported by artificial intelligence, but people across Latin America are also organizing against the threats. All of that in a minute. This is Under the Shadow, an investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad in the past and the very present. This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. I’m your host, Michael Fox, longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist, the producer and host of the podcast’s Brazil on Fire: Stories of Resistance and my new series, The Battle for Free Speech. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America. I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad, and most often sadly, it is not for the better.

Invasions, coups, sanctions, support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. It still does. This is season two of Under the Shadow: Trump’s attack, episode 13, American Dominance.

Okay, let me just first say that I’m so excited to be diving back into this season of Under the Shadow. If you have been following this podcast, you’ll know that I was largely absent this summer. I was busy cranking out my podcast about Trump’s attack on free speech rights today in the United States. It’s called The Battle for Free Speech. It’s now out completely. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I’ll add a link in the show notes. In July, we shared an episode from that podcast on the Under the Shadow feed about the battle underway in Brazil right now ahead of the general election in October. I think it’s really good. Before that, my last Under the Shadow episode was about Honduras Gate back in May, so it’s been a while. Today, I want to catch up on several important developments related to US intervention and the pushback against it in the region, including the latest boat strikes, the State Department’s war on Cuba, and the recent Pan-American Congress in Uruguay.

These all fall under the rubric of where we started at the top with the video about the Dunro Doctrine and Trump’s promise that American dominance in the Western hemisphere will “never be questioned again.” In this episode, I’ll look at ways that this is unfolding, both abroad and inside the United States, and also how progressive leaders in the region are very much continuing to question American dominance and organizing against Trump’s rhetoric and threats. Okay, we begin in the abnormally warm waters of the Caribbean and Pacific oceans.

These waters have been central to Trump’s military attack on the region, and this week marks a sad anniversary.

Speaker 8:

When you come out and when you leave the room, you’ll see that we just over the last few minutes literally shot out a boat, a drug carrying boat, a lot of drugs in that boat, and you’ll be seeing that and you’ll be reading about that. It just happened moments ago.

Speaker 1:

On September 2nd, 2025, one year ago this week, Donald Trump announced the first airstrike on a boat in the Caribbean. Trump said the boat allegedly carried drugs off the coast of Venezuela. He later posted on True Social a video of the airstrike, black and white labeled unclassified. A missile hits the boat and it explodes. The White House said without providing evidence that it killed 11 alleged narco terrorists. If you remember, this is where I began this podcast series, because for me, it marked a clear break with the decades of US foreign policy in the region. The US attack on that boat in early September was the very first time the United States had launched a unilateral airstrike or carried out a deadly military operation on its own in Latin America in nearly four decades, not since the 1989 invasion of Panama. According to Trump’s national security strategy published in December 2025, his administration was planning to ramp up US intervention in the Americas with his new Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

He has made good on that promise. With the US invasion of Venezuela, the oil blockade of Cuba, the shield of the America’s initiative and the boat strikes, the administration labeled those strikes Operation Southern Spear. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth joined Fox News Live to gush about the boat strike.

Speaker 9:

So we’ve got assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us, and it won’t stop with just this strike. Anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate, and it’s important for the American people to protect our homeland and protect our hemisphere.

Speaker 1:

Hegseth was right about one thing. That strike was just the beginning. They’ve been ongoing since last year. There was a two-month lull, which miraculously coincided with the World Cup competition in the United States and Trump’s grand 4th of July 250th anniversary celebration. But in recent weeks, the US military has kickstarted the strikes again. This news report is from August 26th this year.

Speaker 10:

The human rights groups are condemning the latest round of US military attacks on a high speed boat in the Caribbean, which the Pentagon says killed four narco-terrorists. This is now the second strike this week as the White House targets vessels accused of transporting deadly drugs into the US for the past year.

Speaker 1:

But the whole justification for the first strike last September and everyone sense that they’re fighting drug trafficking is just false. This has never been about fighting drug trafficking. Most of the cocaine trafficked into the United States doesn’t come from Venezuela and it doesn’t travel across the Caribbean, but the Pacific. Fentanyl’s the same thing. It’s not made in nor trafficked from Venezuela despite Trump’s discourse.

Trump’s campaign has been about sending a message, even if it means carrying out extra judicial killings in international waters against innocent people, because it’s become clear that many of the boats they’ve hit haven’t been operated by narco terrorists, but fishermen. And contrary to Trump and Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s claims, other Trump administration officials admit that the strikes haven’t decreased the amount of drugs being run into the United States. In late July, the Washington Post reported that both Pentagon and DEA officials had said the boat strikes hadn’t impacted the supply of cocaine in the United States. Drug traffickers just developed new strategies. They were taking different routes, bigger boats, or relying more on planes from clandestine airstrips. One DEA official who asked to remain anonymous told the Post, “When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side. They always find the weak spots and exploit them.” Nevertheless, the boat strikes have continued.

Welcome to the closing session, hosted by the Secretary of War and Chairman of the America’s Counter-Cartel Coalition, the Honorable Pete Hegseth. Pete Hegseth spoke about this during a Counter-Cartel Coalition conference in Panama City on August 12th.

Speaker 9:

We have knocked the narco terrorists and the maritime domain on their heels. We forced them to adjust their tactics, techniques, and procedures, their TTPs, and operate outside of their comfort zones. We are retaking the open seas and our maritime borders. This is a bad time to get in a drug boat in the Western Hemisphere.

Speaker 11:

In one year now, at least 68 publicly acknowledged strikes on alleged drug trafficking vessels right in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, extraditionally killing over 228 civilians.

Speaker 1:

Jake Johnston is the director of international research at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. He also runs SIEPR’s US Escalation in Latin America Tracker, which he has updated almost daily since last year. I just want to pause here for a moment to underscore that number. More than 228 civilians, and that is a number that’s likely to only continue to grow. Just to put that into context, before the September 11th attacks, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the deadliest terror attack in the history of the United States.

Speaker 12:

If it seemed like war yesterday, the reinforcement showed up tonight. At the center of it all, of course, is the bombed out shell of the federal office building, and in its shadow, the exhausted, who for a day and a half now have sifted through its debris and counted its dead and seen up close why they call it terror.

Speaker 1:

168 people were killed in that bombing on the Alfred P. Murrow Federal Building. It shocked the nation. Yet the United States has unleashed a round of terror attacks over the last year in international waters in the Caribbean and Pacific, which have killed far more people than the second most deadly terror attack in the history of the US. In fact, the US drug boat terror campaign is deadlier than both the Oklahoma City bombing and the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting combined. Now, it might seem strange that I’m making this comparison. The US government has carried out the boat strikes, individual perpetrators carried out these other attacks, but I think it’s an important comparison to make. All are acts of terror, all are illegitimate uses of violence without any legal founding. The US boat strikes aren’t operations against enemy combatants in a time of war. The US government hasn’t carried out a trial against the victims or offered any proof that the people killed in these raids are actually drug traffickers.

Their actions are illegal under international law, and the result in all cases is the same, the extra judicial killing of innocent people, which undermines the basis of the rule of law in the United States, the United Nations, and most democratic countries around the world, that you are innocent until proven guilty. Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

What is the sort of takeaway after a year? I mean, this is an assault on the rule of law. This is assault on international law. And I think you can see over the course of the year how these strikes serve this broader purpose of normalizing, rationalizing and sort of gaining at least some public acceptance of just the sort of trampling of international law. And now we have transitioned, or at least the US is saying they’re transitioning from these boat strikes to land strikes. It’s there. We’ve already seen, in fact, some strikes on land in Ecuador, or hitting a dairy farm, reports of torture of the farm workers who were there. And so you can see how this can extend and expand. You can see how the erosion of international law comes right back here to home, and you have ICE agents killing US citizens in the streets with impunity, and these things are connected.

These developments are connected, and they certainly mutually reinforce each other through this administration’s policies.

Speaker 1:

Ecuador has been collaborating with the US military under the Counter Cartel Coalition, which I looked at in episode eight of this series, and not just on that dairy farm strike. The United States has also taken some concerning actions against boats off the Ecuadorian coast.

Speaker 11:

This started earlier this year, the bombing of at least three fishing vessels off the coast of Ecuador, which took place in a very different manner than these other boat strikes we were talking about where SOUTCOM was posting smut on the internet about them blowing up boats. These ones were totally unacknowledged, and the reports that we’ve had from investigative outlets that have looked into it, local press in Ecuador, human rights organizations, et cetera, one of the boats first off is still missing and all the crew members are still missing.

Speaker 1:

People from some of those boats were killed and others have been returned to the country, but that was only after being abducted on the high seas.

Speaker 11:

Onto a nondescript boat in the middle of the ocean with gringo looking guys with US flags on their uniforms and being taken to El Salvador of all places before facing torture and abuse and then eventually being released back to Ecuador where they face no charges, it should be noted. And you mentioned in each of these cases, the reporting indicates that Ecuador and Coast Guards actually stopped the vessels and cleared them prior to them being bombed, right? Obviously, there’s been reporting, the Washington Post reported a few weeks ago that this was part of a clandestine CIA operation. The New York Times has come out with reports suggesting that the potential involvement of private military contractors. So there’s tremendous questions that remain exactly about who is responsible, who is involved, why this was happening. But what seems quite clear is that US intelligence is operating out of El Salvador, a CIA base that was white active during the Dirty Wars in the ’80s.

Speaker 1:

Jack here is referring to what we learned from reporting in the Washington Post in mid-August, which broke the news that a covert CIA program based in El Salvador was likely behind the Ecuadorian boat attacks. According to the Post, a plane operating out of El Salvador’s small Ilopango International Airport was likely responsible for the attacks during the 1980s. This airport was also a launching pad for US operations in nearby Nicaragua.

Speaker 11:

This didn’t come out of nowhere, right? I mean, it is really based in the past, and a lot of the people who are involved in this are really rooted in those previous episodes of right-wing dictatorship and US interventionism in the region. And so in a lot of ways, it is a return to that earlier period.

Speaker 1:

There is another country in the region whose conflict with the United States hearkens back to US intervention of the past, Cuba. So back in episode seven, we looked in depth into the US actions against Cuba, and in particular, the devastating oil blockade which is strangling the country, and it’s still ongoing. The situation in the country has only deteriorated. It’s ironic because the United States brags about how they’re sending aid to the country, and yet the US is solely to blame for the crisis. The US government could fix the problem almost overnight by just lifting the embargo, both the oil blockade and the larger embargo that the US has had in place in some shape or form for more than 65 years. Belly of the Beast is a Cuban investigative journalism outlet based in Havana. I spoke with Belly of the Beast Liz Fernandez in my previous Cuba episode of this series.

A couple of weeks ago, they released this great video report titled Helping Cuba While Destroying Its Economy. The word helping is in quotes. Here’s a clip. It starts with Belly of the Beast journalist Johan Rodriguez standing on a Cuban street.

Speaker 13:

Good news for us here in Cuba. The United States is here to help.

Speaker 1:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears on screen. In Spanish, he says, “I want to tell you that we in the United States offer to help you not only alleviate the current crisis, but also to build a better future.”

Speaker 13:

A better future deliver in cardboard boxes.

Speaker 10:

This is the first of a hundred million dollar humanitarian aid package promised by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Speaker 13:

The US government is donating 700 boxes of food and hygiene products. Each one is supposed to last 10 days. That’s nice, although it might be even nicer if they had simply lifted the oil blockade.

Speaker 1:

The video cuts to numerous Cubans who are suffering. “They give us 20, 24 hours without electricity,” says one elderly resident. “It’s the whole day cooking with coals, “says a woman. “I haven’t had water for three and a half months,” says another woman.

Speaker 13:

The boxes of aid are welcome because people here are desperate. If someone breaks your legs and offers you an aspirin, you’ll take aspirin, but when you wear soft, your legs are still broken.

Speaker 1:

That is the state in Cuba right now, a country on life support. The United States could fix it, but it doesn’t want to. It wants the people to suffer an indirect way to try and force regime change, or at least that has been the stated policy since the beginning of the embargo in the 1960s. And the Trump administration is blatant about its motives. On July 20th, the US State Department released a 100-page report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. It essentially accused Cuba of infiltrating the US left over the last half century and being behind a host of progressive organizing, everything from Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests to pro-Palestine encampments on university campuses and “the rise of Antifa.” It’s incredible because it makes the United States look like it’s in the crosshairs of this tiny Caribbean country, the US, a country that is nearly 90 times larger than Cuba and has a GDP that is more than 300 times the size of the islands.

The report makes no mention of the countless US attempts to overthrow or assassinate Fidel Castro, undo the Cuban Revolution, and above all, the decades long US blockade on the country. Instead, the document paints the United States as the victim of a Cuban plot to overthrow US capitalism and Western society.

The summary for the report reads, “Cuba’s assault on the United States was never at root a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself, waged in part via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.” Let me just repeat that. Persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance. I’m not exactly sure what that inheritance is, but the report paints activist and leftist organizations in the United States as willing pawns in Cuba’s evil plans to subvert the United States. The document reads, “Through its cultivation of American activists, its infiltration of American universities, its sprawling influence and espionage networks, and its position as the spiritual hub of the Third World Revolution, becoming a pilgrimage destination for generations of new left activists and intellectuals, Cuba has played an instrumental role in shaping America’s radical left from the 1960s through to today.” It singles out organizations like the Vencerimos Brigade, Pastors for Peace and the Anti-War Group Code Pink as essentially Cuban front groups.

It’s a ridiculous claim because these are solidarity organizations that literally carry humanitarian aid to countries harmed by US policies. And this idea in the Cuban report assumes that everyone in the United States should just be on board with US administrations that punish other countries and peoples for not bowing to Uncle Sam. The document also accuses the New York Political Education and Community Center at the People’s Forum and the National Lawyers Guild of being influenced by Cuba. The document states, “From its very first years of existence, the National Lawyers Guild operated as a defacto communist front group designed to organize and agitate for revolution in the United States. It’s interesting that the document also spends three and a half pages discussing the Democratic socialists of America’s support for Cuba. At a time when DSA is growing and actually winning primaries ahead of the US November midterm elections, it’s clear that Marco Rubio’s State Department is interested in doing all it can to paint that group as Cuban influenced.

The document sums up all of this by saying, “These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history.” Too bad that statement is not only totally conspiratorial, it is also not based on reality.

Speaker 14:

And it was shocking on every page to see the way in which the State Department’s report was reiterating the same claims, and many of them very fraudulent claims, that had been leveled against American solidarity activists in the 1960s and 1970s.

Speaker 1:

Bailey of the Beast recently interviewed historian Tayshon Latner about this report in his 2018 book, Cuban Revolution in America. Latner writes about how generations of activists in the United States have found inspiration in Cuba, but he says that if State Department officials were reading his book, they completely missed the point and blew it out of context.

Speaker 14:

But in reading Rubio’s report, it was enormously clear that they were reiterating, you could almost say regurgitating the same claims and some of the same material that had been circulating in the 1960s and 1970s. The FBI and the CIA both produced copious reports that claimed to, let’s not say prove, because I don’t know if even they themselves would’ve used that terminology, but they tried to demonstrate a linkage between American solidarity movements and the Cuban revolution.

Speaker 1:

That is what they’re doing now. Even before the report came out, the Trump administration was already investigating activists for traveling to Cuba in March for the Nuestra America convoy. Their solidarity groups brought 20 tons of humanitarian aid to the Caribbean Island. In May, roughly 40 US activists were subpoenaed, including progressive influencer Hassan Peiker and Code Pink founder Mydia Benjamin, who I’ve spoken with in this podcast. In the days following this Cuba Reports release, several groups that were mentioned in the document were also subpoenaed to testify before Congress, including the People’s Forum, Breakthrough News, and the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.

Speaker 5:

Are you agents of foreign influence?

Speaker 7:

I’m an agent of my own conscience.

Speaker 1:

Manolo de Los Santos is the director of the People’s Forum. He responded to the Trump administration’s allegations against his organization on MS Now in late July.

Speaker 7:

I’ve been moved constantly by the belief that the United States has to do better and that we can change the reality in this country. If we were to accept what this committee is demanding from us, it essentially would be to accept that people in the United States have no right to protest, no right to organize, no right to express their differences with the US government. The Trump administration is mired in a series of failures. It has been incapable of convincing the American people that deporting millions of immigrants is the right thing to do. And therefore it goes after the people who organize the defense of immigrant families. The fact that we stand with the Palestinian people, that we say no to a blockade against Cuba, these are not fringe positions. These are the positions of majority of Americans right now. It’s our consciousness that’s moving us to say that these things are wrong in our society.

Speaker 1:

Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

Yeah, it’s a great example of our interventionist foreign policy blowing back at home and seeing these connections. I mean, this is pretty clearly for the Trump administration, part of going after its domestic opposition ahead of midterm elections, consolidating its own political power, but of course at the same time, justifying its illegal blockade and siege of Cuba in doing so.

Speaker 1:

Here’s the thing. I read through the report shortly after it was released and one thing stood out for me above everything else. It was like the report was grasping at straws, like it was trying to string together a random hodgepodge of people and groups to make the case that Cuba had infiltrated the United States and was responsible for leftist descent going back decades. It seemed like it was generated with artificial intelligence. So I tested it. I ran it through some of those sites online where you can see how much a document was likely created using AI. One of the results came back with a 96% chance that it was made with artificial intelligence. ChatGPT told me the likelihood that “AI was substantially involved in producing or editing this report was high, roughly 80 to 90%.” Now, I’m not saying that it was completely AI generated.

I don’t believe that, but the State Department did likely use substantial artificial intelligence in research gathering, writing, and editing. Okay, you might be saying so what? A lot of people are using artificial intelligence today. Well, here’s the problem. AI we know has the tendency not to argue with us, but to give us back what we want to hear. It helps us to find information that will support our beliefs or our objective regardless of if they’re based on fact or not. It’s called AI bias. And look, it’s one thing if AI is being used to write an email to a friend or to help me pick out my clothes. I think I look good in blue. Thank you. Those have very little, if any, geopolitical implications. It’s another entirely, however, if you’re using this to develop an official government document that will guide public policy and which will be used to attack your political opponents, that is dangerous and it means that AI is being weaponized to benefit a certain political class and silence dissent.

In other words, government censorship. There has been limited discussion about the possibility that Marco Rubio’s Cuba document was likely created with the help of AI, and I wanted to get a deeper sense of the implications. What does that actually mean? So I reached out to Tal Hagen.

Speaker 15:

There we go.

Speaker 1:

All right, fantastic. Okay, so Tal, this is what I’m trying to figure out today. You might remember him from my episode about disinformation and deep fakes on Venezuela earlier this year. He is an online AI watchdog. He’s now the director of Otis, which provides human-run intelligence services. Anyway, he’s an expert on artificial intelligence, and I wanted to get his analysis of what it means when AI is being used to develop policy like this. And let me just say that I didn’t ask him specifically about the Cuba document because I wanted his objective opinion about the concerns over the use of AI in these circumstances. Because we know that if you go on a ChatGPT and you’re chatting with ChatGP and you’re saying, oftentimes it’s going to give you back what you want. Do we see the same thing in reports and documents where if you’re looking for something, if you’re trying to find something, the document that is produced through AI has the possibility of also giving you what you’re looking for because you’re asking it to go out there and find stuff that would make your statement true.

That make sense?

Speaker 15:

Yeah. At the end of the day, something that we need to understand with AI is that AI always agrees with us. It always wants to give you a simple, fast answer as quick as it doesn’t argue with you.

Speaker 1:

Tao says that you can test this by asking AI something in two different ways. One where you’re trying to get it to agree with you about something and the other where you’re playing a devil’s advocate and you’re trying to get it to agree with you about the exact opposite thing. Depending on how you phrase your question, you can get either result.

Speaker 15:

But AI almost always will give you what you want.

Speaker 1:

But Tao says that doesn’t necessarily make it untrue or false.

Speaker 15:

For example, maybe I’ve collected all the evidence and then I’ve asked AI to compile that into a comprehensive report for me. It’s still my information. I just asked AI to help me build it. So it’s not an AI made report, it’s an AI enhanced report. So that also complicates things because just because it was AI generated doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.

Speaker 1:

It also doesn’t mean that it was. For instance, Tao says, “It all depends on the input or information that you give the AI tool.”

Speaker 15:

Sometimes it also has access to the web, but it doesn’t actually understand what’s true, what’s false, and especially in evolving crises when things are just happening right now, whatever is on the web, that becomes the truth. And I’ve seen AI mess this up a lot. And so the bias is from what information you even provided in those documentations because when you provide me with documentation, I will ask you, “How do you know this is true? How do you know this is true? Where’s this from?” The AI doesn’t ask you that. It just assumes that everything you’ve given it is correct. It doesn’t start refuting your sources.

Speaker 1:

Tao says many officials and government departments, not just in the United States, are now using AI.

Speaker 15:

A lot of the governments, agencies, and individuals are using AI now to craft their official responses. We know there was some government official on Twitter who put out a post and he accidentally left in the prompt of making it sound better.

Speaker 6:

Madam Speaker, another concern relates to expectations.

Speaker 1:

There was also this Canadian politician who read an AI prompt in the New Brunswick legislature.

Speaker 6:

Here’s a more natural flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points. Madam Speaker –

Speaker 15:

The US government released photos of their war room and you could see them using AI, like writing different types of prompts.

Speaker 1:

Should we be concerned about governments, entities that are creating policy and an increasing use of AI and what that might mean for the policies that they’re creating?

Speaker 15:

Even when you’re writing in the Chachemia and you’re creating what you want or you’re creating a policy decision with AI, you are creating the report. But the problem is that your critical thinking skills are diluted because you are asking AI simple questions, you’re asking it to do the heavy labor. And if you say, “Find me an issue, find me an issue and then solve that issue,” you’re not the one solving that issue and it’s solving an issue just based on general information from the public. The problem with AI when it’s used by many different individuals is it replaces your own critical thinking where you no longer are researching the work, you are just editing it.That’s essentially what it becomes. You become an editor, you stop being a researcher. And so instead of you looking at all these different sources, trying to understand what the truth is here, what’s the facts and what’s the narrative being driven, you’re allowing the AI to just compile random pieces of information through its token generation and that’s the result that you’re

Speaker 4:

Getting. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again and we will make America great again. Thank you. God bless you. Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 15:

It’s why we like things that rhyme. The reason that a lot of political slogans are rhymes is because things that sound good are right. If it sounds good, it’s right. It’s why when you look at the comment section of a right-wing activist or a left-wing activist, all of its supporters say, “This sounds amazing. This is so good because they’re hearing what they want to hear.” And so even though the policy that they’re writing or they’re talking about might be complete and utter bullshit, it sounds good, but it’s not based on factual information. The same thing is happening with AI where it sounds good to the user, but they don’t actually know what it’s based on. And so they’re essentially being driven by just a random algorithm.

Speaker 1:

In other words, ask AI to give you a report that says Cuba has infiltrated the US left and is behind protest movements in the United States going back decades and it will do your bidding. We can’t know for sure, but that likely sums up Marco Rubio’s Cuba report. With or without AI, this Cuba report is a dangerous weapon that is now being deployed against progressives and opponents of the Trump administration. Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

I mean, I think just about everybody who read it laughed, but it is serious because this is about justifying war crimes. I mean, what we’re doing to Cuba right now is an active war. It is illegal and is an act of war. And yet here we are justifying it and at the same time sort of demonizing the opposition, the domestic opposition to those very actions.

Speaker 1:

The opposition to Trump’s policies has also been organizing abroad. On August 21st, 150 leaders from 15 countries from across the hemisphere and Europe met in Montevideo Uruguay for this year’s Pan-American Congress. It’s an event founded three years ago with the stated goal of fostering “solidarity among peoples and sovereignty among nations.” It’s been an important event for organizing the left in the region. The first two summits were held in Columbia and Mexico, both then countries run by progressive governments. SIEPR’s Alex Main, who I spoke with at the top, attended the conference.

Speaker 5:

The bulk of the people that were there are lawmakers who are doing their best to try to push forward progressive policies despite often being the minority and despite dealing with increasingly authoritarian right-wing governments. So they had a lot to share.

Speaker 16:

Good afternoon everybody. I’m Congresswoman Primila Jayapal. I represent the great state of Washington in the United States. I’m the first Indian American woman in the United States Congress. We are here, my esteemed colleague, Chuy Garcia and I, because we want to be very clear about two things. Number one, we oppose the Trump administration’s Don Roe foreign policy doctrine. We oppose the unilateral executive actions that Donald Trump has been taking without our congressional authority for both strikes, extra judicial killings in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean. We oppose the use of military might, of economic tariffs to try to bully and coerce nations into actions that do not benefit the people of those sovereign nations. And we oppose the election interference of the United States in other nations’ elections.

Speaker 1:

Talk of President Donald Trump’s onslaught on the region was front and center, as were discussions about how to push back. Uruguayan Congresswoman Ines Cortez spoke to the press.

Speaker 16:

She said,

Speaker 1:

“Above all, the issue that cuts across the different workshops and debates is the current situation in which we still have the United States interfering in the local politics of each of our countries more than ever.”.

The former Honduran Minister of Defense and the former presidential candidate for Honduras’ leftist Libre Party, Rixi Moncada, said they must stand for national sovereignty and a multipolar world. She said, “The United States is a military technological and financial power, but the world is no longer unipolar. China, India, Brazil, Russia, the BRICS, they’re all participating in defining the new international order. Multipolarity is a reality and our stance must not be to trade one form of subordination for another. The Latin American dilemma is not Washington versus Beijing. We want relations with all the nations and peoples of the planet to engage with everyone, to submit to no one. There were also discussions among progressive leaders from Trump allied countries where democracy is being rolled back and there’s a breakdown of the rule of law and respect for institutions. Alex Main said the meeting went a long way in helping to build solidarity between progressive leaders from across the region and leftist leaders in the United States.

Speaker 5:

For instance, in Ecuador, and we’re beginning to see this in Columbia and also in Honduras, both those countries of course are now governed by right-wing governments since quite recently. So yeah, I think it was important for the US delegates to be hearing from these other countries in the region. They’re all impacted in different ways by the Trump administration’s policy, by the so-called Don Roe doctrine, which is really very heavily interventionist. And they heard about US electoral interference. They heard about the US support for the expansion of militarization in the region and this pretext of a war on so-called narco-terrorism to, in a lot of places, bend the laws or declare sort of states of emergency and deploy the military and engage in egregious violations of human rights. So there was a lot to take away for these US delegates.

Speaker 1:

Alex explained that on top of the Congress people who were in attendance, you had staffers for Senator Bernie Sanders and Chicago Congressman Jonathan Jackson, as well as a number of delegates who won primaries and who will likely be elected to Congress in November.

Speaker 5:

Three of them belonging to the Democratic Socialists of America, the other one supported by the Democratic Socialists of America. I think it was very productive, and I think certainly the US delegates left Montevideo with commitments to themselves to do a lot more on Latin America that is of course suffering a new era of extremely aggressive interventionism from the current Trump administration.

Speaker 1:

But it wasn’t all about the United States. Alex says there were meetings about the impact of artificial intelligence on these countries, a session about green industrial development, multilateralism, and of course, democracy, peace, and security.

Speaker 5:

That is what was kind of important about these sessions is that there was a lot of information sharing, experience sharing, and people talking about various policy ideas that can be implemented sometimes at the congressional level. But also, the pendulum is bound to swing back in the other direction in spite of the best efforts of the Trump administration and some of the other more authoritarian governments in the region.

I absolutely came away with a sense of hope from the conference in Montevideo because one, you had a lot of strong leaders from the region that despite the rise of authoritarianism everywhere are not giving up. In fact, they are optimistic about the future and about returning to power. They know it’s in many cases going to be a tough process because in some instances, democracy, the rule of law and so on have to be reestablished. So it’s going to take very strong people’s movements to do that, but they really seem up to the task. And what was also very encouraging was just the amount of young leaders from the region, a new generation of progressive leaders that have very big plans for their countries and for the region, and in particular for regional integration between Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Speaker 1:

The final declaration referenced Simon Bolivar’s historic Panama Congress, which took place 200 years ago this year. It read, “Today, August 23rd, we therefore unite to combat the renewed doctrine of domination in all its forms, defending the rights and freedoms won across centuries of struggle for self-determination, collaborate from respective legislatures to advance our own vision of hemispheric cooperation based on solidarity between peoples and sovereignty among nations. They plan to meet again in Brazil next year.” Hi folks, that is all for this episode of Under the Shadow. I’m now getting back on track and I will be bringing you much more in the coming weeks, both about Trump’s shadow looming over the upcoming Brazilian elections and the shocking revelations in the wake of the arrest of Argentine right-wing election fixer Fernando Serimedo. If you can’t wait for my reporting on Brazil, I’ve just released a 10-minute video from Sao Paulo.

I’ll add a link in the show notes. Also, please check out Belly of the Beasts reporting. They are so, so good at what they do. Many thanks to the team for allowing me to use clips from their footage. I’ve added links in the show notes. In the meantime, as always, you can find me on Patreon, that’s patreon.com/mfox. There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. You can find a ton of content there exclusively for my supporters. As always, if you’re looking for more information, news, and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both on communities within the United States and abroad, please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily indispensable reporting. The theme music is by my band Monte Perdido.

You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing music playing right now is off our 2024 album, Ofrenda. I hope you check it out. Under the shadows of co-production of The Real News and NACLA, it’s produced in partnership with Global Exchange. This episode was written, researched, reported, and produced by me, Michael Fox. The script was edited by Heather Geis. Thanks for listening. See you next time.