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. An updated version will be made available as soon as possible.

Michael Fox: Okay. Max, can you hear me?

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, brother, you’re coming in loud and clear on this.

Michael Fox: All right, fantastic. Max, I want to tell you a story. It’s a tale of two countries, the United States and Brazil. They are the two countries with the largest populations and the largest economies in the Western hemisphere. Brazil is about the size of the lower 48 of the United States. And politically in both countries, something very similar has happened in recent years. In both countries, far right presidents come to power. In both those countries, the president spends several years unraveling democratic institutions and public policy. Then both those presidents run for reelection. Both the presidents lie about their country’s voting systems in order to undermine the elections and whip up their base. Both those presidents lose their reelections. They both claim fraud and then they both try to carry out a coup to stay in power. But that is where these two paths diverge. In the United States, President Donald Trump continues to peddle his lies about the election.
He creates his own social media platform and uses it to push his agenda. He returns to power in 2025. You know the story. In Brazil, however, the country’s supreme electoral court blocks former President Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years because of the lies he told about the country’s electoral system. It is not censorship. It’s a different interpretation of free speech, one that says the right to free expression must be balanced within the other rights in the country and the country’s democratic system. To quote Robert Frost, that has made all the difference.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Bolsonaro is basically being punished by something that he said about the electoral system.

Michael Fox: I’ve been speaking lately with Fabio de Sae Silva. He’s a Brazilian legal expert and an associate professor of international studies at the University of Oklahoma.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: And in the United States saying things, propagating lies and misinformation about the electoral system, I don’t think it would be punishable at all under any circumstance because of how strong the protection to free speech rights is in the United States. And in the past, I think a lot of people though of this as an advantage of the United States in comparison to other societies. But I think more recently there has been a rethinking of this and there has been an understanding that it’s not that other countries lack free speech rights. It’s just that they have other rights that they balance free speech rights against. And in the case of Brazil, because we all understood in the 2018 election that misinformation was a serious threat to democracy, the legal system began to offer a response.

Michael Fox: In 2023, Bolsonado was banned from running again. And if you’ve been following news on Brazil, you know that he was later sentenced to 27 years in jail. He’s currently under house arrest because of health issues. He was sentenced for his participation in a plot to carry out a coup and overturn his 2022 electoral loss and to even assassinate leftist President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva. In other words, in the United States, Trump is allowed to say what he wants, disparage the electoral system, create his own social media platform, spread as many lies as he likes, and he is awarded for it by being allowed to run again and win reelection where he is now presiding over an assault on free speech rights, the likes of which we have not seen in modern day history in the United States. Meanwhile, in Brazil, Bolsonado is banned from running and he is in jail.
And here’s the point. The roots of all of this, the roots of this difference are the two countries’ vision and interpretation of free speech.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: All these things that Bolsonado has been accused of at the center of them was speech because what the federal police points to in their investigation is that the attempted coup involved promoting publicly and even internationally this idea that the Brazilian elections had been defrauded. They associated with the attempt to co-ops the military to take over and nullify the elections basically. And also including maybe some more unorthodox activities such as assassinating the elected president and some judges. But just to stay in the first component of this criminal enterprise, it is something that involves limitations to speech in Brazilian law.

Michael Fox: In past episodes, we’ve been looking at the attacks on free speech in the United States. Today we look at how another country, Brazil, has pushed back on the fascist and far right wave with its own interpretation of free speech. And here’s the thing, Brazil’s understanding of free speech, as we will look at throughout this episode, is pretty similar to most of the rest of the world. The United States is the outlier, but Trump far right activists and owners of big tech platforms are trying to change that in order to push their absolutest interpretation of free speech abroad and undermine Brazilian democracy in the process. All of that in a minute. This is the Battle for Free Speech, a multi-part narrative podcast brought to you by The Real News. In this series, we take you on a journey to understand the important role free speech has played in US history and the fight being waged over it today.
I’m your co-host, Michael Fox, and I’m so excited to be joined today by Max Alvarez. He’s the editor-in-chief and co-executive director of The Real News and the host of the Working People Podcast. Max, seriously, thank you so much for joining me.

Maximillian Alvarez: So grateful to be here, brother, and grateful for all the incredible work that you and Marc and the whole team have been doing on this very, very necessary podcast. And also I’m just like a massive fan as you know of Under the Shadow and everything else that you do. So I’m very excited to finally be on one of the podcasts I’m going to be listening to from you.

Michael Fox: Aw, thanks Max. And in particular, I’m really excited to speak with you today because you are on the front lines of standing up for free speech, but also the working class and also covering the rise of the right. So you kind of straddle all of these things at the same time, which we’re going to be digging into today. All right. We are going to begin on our journey here. Let me just say this before we get started. So far in this podcast, we’ve looked back on the attacks on free speech and press freedoms today. Under the Trump administration, we’ve looked at movements using free speech to stand up for their rights. Today we’re going to look at how Trump and the far right are trying to push a US definition of free speech abroad in order to lift their agenda internationally and so much more.
I got into this a little bit in the beginning. Today’s episode is going to focus completely on Brazil and the role the United States is playing in the country. And today’s episode is a joint collaboration together with my podcasts, Under the Shadow and Brazil on Fire. Because as you will see, there are connections throughout. If you haven’t heard those, I suggest you go check them out.

Maximillian Alvarez: Oh my God. If you haven’t heard those, I envy you because you have a feast in front of you. Under the shadow, Brazil on Fire. They are so good and so essential. And they’re award winning contributions that I guarantee if you’re listening to this, you are going to love them. So go check them out. And I don’t say that just as a collaborator with Mike on producing these series, but as a devoted listener who always learns a lot from them.

Michael Fox: Thanks, Max. Three things to say before we get started. If you have been listening to this podcast series, The Battle for Free Speech, you know how this works. I go out, I do a ton of reporting. I bring that back to discuss it here. Two, I love time travel. I often say that podcasting for me is the closest thing we have to actually traveling in time. So my goal here is to take you to another time and place and I’m glad you’re along for the ride, Max. And three, I know Brazil well. My wife is Brazilian. I’ve lived here for years. I’m here now. And I say this so that you know that everything that we’re digging into today isn’t just based on my interviews for this podcast, but on my on the ground reporting on this over the last decade. And I seriously have been wanting to do an episode like this for a very long time, so I’m super excited.
Okay. Max, are you ready?

Maximillian Alvarez: Let’s do it, baby.

Michael Fox: Okay, here we go. I want to begin exactly one year ago today, July 9th, 2025. US President Donald Trump writes a letter to Brazilian President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva. In the letter, he announces that he’s levying a 50% tariff on all Brazilian goods. Among the reasons for this new tariff is the country’s legal case against Trump ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro, for attempting to carry out a coup amid the 2022 elections. He also chastises Brazil for allegedly violating free speech rights. In the letter, Trump denounces Brazil’s insidious attacks on free elections and the fundamental free speech rights of Americans. He also criticizes the Brazilian Supreme Court’s secret and unlawful censorship orders to US social media platforms. It’s incredible to see the Trump administration lecturing anyone on free speech, but that is how our most basic right is being weaponized today. Anyway, moving on. A few weeks after that letter, the US Embassy in Brazil releases a fact sheet explaining Trump’s new tariffs.

Artur Romeu: It was like a one and a half page document.

Michael Fox: And I spoke with Arturo Romeo about this. He’s a Brazilian journalist and the director of Reporters Without Borders for Latin America. And he says he’s reading this and they mention free speech, free expression or censorship like 10 times. It’s only a page and a half, but the entire thing, it gets into just repeating this line basically saying that the United States is tariffing Brazil because it was promoting censorship.

Artur Romeu: Free speech is being weaponized against freedom off expression.

Michael Fox: He describes this as the United States trying to make it look like a free speech champion.

Artur Romeu: But actually what your distorted vision of free speech is doing is fragmenting the diferent ideas behind what freedom of expression really is and mostly the social and collective dimension of freedom of expression. You are only saying that people should say whatever they want without any kind of interference. You are basically ignoring completely the fact that people live in a society and part of the freedom of expression right is related to receive pluralistic, diverse, reliable information.

Michael Fox: And I should just pause here to say that internationally, and this is really important, especially for our US audience. Internationally, many definitions of free speech include the right to receive reliable or truthful information. And that’s key because in the United States, that clearly is not part of the equation. Anyway, this is a really important distinction between how free speech is generally understood in the United States and elsewhere around the world. I got into this a bunch in the last episode. If you haven’t heard that, you can go back and check it out now, but the idea is this. In the US, your right to free speech is generally seen as absolute. In other words, you can pretty much say what you want without repercussions regardless of how bad it is or racist or homophobic or discriminatory. In every other country in the world, every one, your free speech rights are seen as balanced with other rights.
So your right to free speech isn’t more important than my right not to be harmed. For instance –

Brian Mier: The view followed in Germany, France, and especially for the case of this conversation, Brazil said according to the Constitution, all human rights are equally important.

Michael Fox: Brian Mier is a correspondent for a Telesur who’s lived in Brazil for more than 30 years. And I spoke with him about this. You

Brian Mier: Can’t say that one human right is more important than another human right. So you can’t have one human right that’s absolutist in its nature, free speech, that would enable someone to limit or deny other people’s human rights.

Michael Fox: For instance, in Brazil or in Germany, Nazism is a crime. It’s illegal to be a Nazi or to spread Nazi propaganda.

Brian Mier: Because it damages the peace of mind, the freedom to come and go as they please, the freedom to interact with the public of certain minority groups in Brazil, mainly Afro-Brazilians, Northeasterners, but also Jewish people as well. So in Brazil, this is called the harmony of rights according to the Brazilian Constitution. All rights are equally important. Freedom of a speech is a very important right, but it can’t be used to trample over some other group of people’s rights.

Michael Fox: That’s the idea and this distinction is really important. And let me just say that as I touched on last time, in the United States, we also had this kind of balancing definition of free speech until roughly the Cold War in the 1960s. And that’s when our current day libertarian absolutist view of free speech really took hold. What’s interesting is that we don’t even really realize this. We don’t know this past, right? And yet our definition now of free speech, absolutist definition within the United States is now being weaponized by Trump and his far right supporters and far right allies abroad to push their agenda as we will look into throughout this podcast. Before we move on, Max, do you see this? Have you been seeing this battle over free speech? And do you think that people understand this within the United States, understand how free speech kind of is being weaponized and this interpretation of free speech is being weaponized?

Maximillian Alvarez: Yes. And I would say that we are not only aware of the hypocrisy of these people using free speech to take our free speech away or to impose their will on Brazil or other countries because that’s what we’ve come to realize our country does. That’s as American as apple pie. That’s in fact what most of the world knows America to be. They don’t know it anymore as the America my parents knew it to be. And my dad came to this country for, his family came to this country for. So the world today does not know us as that. They know us as the place that the most powerful country and military empire in the world that has been going around the world undemocratically overthrowing democratically elected leaders, undemocratically invading other countries and bombing other countries and torturing people in the name of democracy and saying like, we’re spreading democracy to you, you’re welcome.
And now smash cut to 2026 these sort of fascist posters of Donald Trump are draping Washington DC and everything that we’re talking about on this series unfolding before our eyes. And I don’t think a lot of us know what free speech means in this context. And I think that is why the takeaway for this discussion and any discussion that we have about it is like, well, what are we going to fight for it to be?

Michael Fox: Yeah. Max, I really appreciate you wrapping in this question of how the United States has justified interventions abroad in the name of democracy and how what we’re seeing now is the justification for the tariffs in the name of free speech, which I think is a great connection. In order to understand all of this, Trump’s letter in particular, his pushback on Brazil and Trump’s rationale for imposing these tariffs, we need to back up a little bit. So we’re going to go back in time. We’re jumping in the time machine, Max. Here we go.

Maximillian Alvarez: Let’s go.

Michael Fox: The year is 2018. It’s the lead up to Brazil’s huge presidential elections. Former President Lula was the front runner, but he was jailed on trumped up charges of corruption. Bolsonaro is the Trump outsider candidate, longtime congressman, former captain under the Brazilian military dictatorship, something he is still vocally proud of. And he’s surging in the polls because of a slew of fake news and disinformation, the likes of which the country has never seen. Just one example. I was covering the election for numerous outlets and I went to this press conference for the then leftist candidate, Fernando Adaji. And in this press conference, it was just a couple of days before the first round vote and he had called it because his workers’ party had created a WhatsApp hotline to receive complaints of false or misleading news and memes being spread. They said that within 24 hours they’d received 15,000 messages.
24 hours, 15,000 messages. The day before I spoke with this street artist who told me, “Our election will not be decided by the candidate’s proposals or their speeches. It’ll be decided by the lies spread online. The Brazilian elections will be decided by the ability of some groups to push fake news and the ability of us, the voters, to discern what is and what is not real.” And that is exactly what happened. The voters could not discern. Most but not all of the fake news or misleading news were being pushed by Bolsonaro’s allies and supporters. The country was overwhelmed and unprepared for the disinformation campaign and so was the Supreme Electoral Court, which oversees the elections.
They were able to request that dozens of posts be taken down, but they just didn’t have the breadth of being able to handle a barrage of posts like this. In the end, the result. This is Bolsonaro’s, Brazil. The world’s fourth largest democracy has voted on a new president. Bolsonaro won the election with roughly 55% of the vote. I was covering the election outside of his home that night in Rio de Janeiro. And then Bolsonaro came into power and proceeded to run the country into the ground like I detailed in depth in Brazil on Fire, my podcast. He guided social programs, privatized state businesses, denied the COVID pandemic, pushed unproven drugs, attacked universities, much of which we saw under Trump in the United States as well. But in Brazil, and this is the reason why I’m bringing all this up now, the courts learned their lesson.

Fernando Paulino: Joseph’s system learned to create and to stimulate some vaccines for this information and misinformation during the electoral periods.

Michael Fox: Fernando Paulino is a communications professor at the University of Brazilia. He’s also the president of the Latin American Communication Researchers Association and a fan of heavy metal rock music, Max. In particular, he likes stuff from Rage Against the Machine, Metallica and Sipultra, who he said stand for free speech. And I think that’s like, I’m sorry for the aside, but I think it’s really cool because in our conversation we got into some of these questions about how this heavy metal music has stood up for free speech in time. Anyway, he says that the

Fernando Paulino: Judicial system using the constitutional principles established some procedures to avoid misinformation information during the campaign and also before the campaign because Jaibosonaro tried to disseminate misinformations information or in other words, fake news against the political and electoral system.

Michael Fox: The other thing that came out of the 2018 election was they created Brazil, the Brazilian courts created a precedent for making it illegal to promote conspiracy theories about the safety of the electoral system. And this is key. I spoke with Professor Fabio de Saisilva.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Because there was one candidate who started spreading videos, fake videos of Bambagi trying to vote for Bosona and the vote going for Adat at the time. And there was a case that was filed against him by the public prosecutor’s office for violating electoral laws. And that case got up to the Superior Electoral Court where the justices on that court ruled that if you spread conspiracy theories about the safety of our electoral mechanisms, you’re violating the law and you can even lose your seat if you have been elected.

Michael Fox: Let me just pause here to explain why this is so important for Brazil because I think a lot of people in the United States might not get this. Brazil, if you remember, is a country that returned to democracy again in just 1985. For the 21 years prior to this, from 1964 until 1985, it was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship that censored speech disappeared and killed hundreds and imprisoned and tortured thousands. That was not long ago. My wife was born under the dictatorship. For Brazilians, the right to free speech and every other right for that matter fall under the umbrella of their democracy. The democracy is most important. That’s what comes first. And that’s codified into their laws. It’s codified into their constitution. As Brian Meir mentioned earlier, their right to free speech doesn’t trump their right to free and fair elections. Okay, just want to say that fast-forward to the 2022 vote.

Speaker: Their politics couldn’t be more different, but both of Brazil’s main presidential candidates have gone into overdrive online.

Michael Fox: Campaigns try to push the same fake news and disinformation. You’ve got Bolsonado running for reelection against President Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva, who is now out of jail clearly. And so campaigns try to push the same fake news and disinformation in particular on behalf of Bolsonado, but the Supreme Electoral Council’s ready. They demand flag posts must be taken down within two hours and then just one hour when it got close to the election. Bolsonado tries to raise doubts about the country’s electoral system. Fabio de Saisilva says that the discourse was central to Bolsonado’s attempt to cause disruption in the country and to maybe open the space for military intervention.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: So it was very central to Bolsonago’s speech as well as to the activity of his supporters on social media. And what the Lula candidacy did and the public prosecutor’s office sometimes did was to take those cases to court saying, “We have a law that says that you can’t say those things and these people are saying those things.” And so what Mogayas did, he was presiding over the Superior Electoral Court, was to just try those cases and enforce the decisions sending communications to social media platforms, ordering the social media platforms to remove those forms of content. And so there were some profiles that were taken down during the elections for spreading that conspiracy theory all based on Brazilian law, just as he took down some posts against Bosonago by the Lula campaign that violated other aspects of Brazilian law. So that was happening on both sides.
The only difference was that the Bosonago campaign was using this to victimize itself and to say that it was being persecuted by this censorship judge.

Michael Fox: So later on when you hear that, and we’re going to be talking about it in this episode, but from the United States and from elsewhere, you hear people talking about this censorship judge or censorship that’s been happening.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: That accounts for a large number of the cases involving guys and this accusation of censorship.

Michael Fox: Because there are measures in place to stop fake news and disinformation from being spread and trying to roll that back amid this electoral moment. Max, let’s stop your pause really quick. I mean, is this all making sense? Do you have any questions?

Maximillian Alvarez: Sadly, it is making sense. I mean both in terms of why these things happened the way that they did and why they didn’t happen the same way here in the United States. I
Mean, because you talked about where the roads really diverged in the past five to six years especially with how we dealt with these attempted coups. Donald Trump is not in jail. Donald Trump was not barred from running for president. In fact, he used the presidency to outrun the legal system and proving that actually power wins over principle in America and has now thus taken all of our institutions to serve his will. But I think in terms of why we didn’t do that, I mean the answers are very complex, but I think what folks just need to know is that should we have a more stringent, robust kind of understanding of the people’s right to truthful information and the harm, the social harm, the harm to our society and our democracy and not our health and safety by treating lies and truth as having equal standing.
That problem that really showed the differences in how America and the USA and Brazil have treated this question in much deeper ways.

Michael Fox: Absolutely. Absolutely. Max, I want to bring in an important figure here. His name is Aleshande de Morais.
Fabio de Saisilva just mentioned him. He’s a member of the Brazilian Supreme Court and he presided over the Supreme Electoral Court during the 2022 elections. As you will hear today, he has been a major thorn in the side of Bolshonato and his supporters for years, but he’s not necessarily left wing. He’s a bit of a wild card. He was appointed by Michelle Temmer, who was the right wing president back in 2017. Bolsonado supporters understandably hate him. After President Lula, he’s pretty much public enemy number one for the right and they’ve actually compared him to Superman’s archenemy Lex Luther. I know you like that reference, Max. He kind of does actually look like him, which is the reason why they make this comparison. Mordaise is the top person who they have accused of censorship in recent years. Trump and his supporters have joined the campaign because Aleshander Morais has been the top Supreme Court judge in Brazil to push back on Bolsonaro’s measures during his presidency and the fake news over the last eight years and the power of US social media companies in Brazil, which we’ll get into in a second.
But as Fabio Desai Silva says, he didn’t ever do it alone.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: He was backed, for the most part, he was backed by two courts because he sat on the superior electoral court where he handled some cases that had to do with speech and he sits on the Supreme Court where he handled other of such cases. And like I said, he was for the most part backed by if not all the other justices in those courts by the vast majority of those justices.

Michael Fox: But he was always the most visible figure, Lex Luther, but a good guy if you like democracy. Anyway, he was also the judge charged with investigating what would become known as Bolshonato’s hate cabinet. And this is crazy, Max. I don’t know if you remember hearing about this, but imagine if you will, a troll farm inside the White House with connections to right-wing influencers within the United States who used their power, influence and social media prominence to attack political opponents. This is what you had in Bolshinado’s government.

Maximillian Alvarez: Wait, that’s what we got now, baby.

Michael Fox: That’s what we have now. Okay, true. But this is an actual entity. It’s like its own little office within Brazilia. Fabio de Sali Silva, talk to me about this.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: As far as we know, it was a relatively well organized and hierarchical structure where you had people whose job was to produce content. You had people then outside of the presidency, big influencers whose job was to disseminate the content.

Michael Fox: This is all coordinated so they would target someone and say, “We want to take this person out. ” And it wasn’t always someone on the left. In many cases, it was a bolsonado supporter who split with bolsonado or criticized bolsonado for some reason. And they say, “This is the enemy of the day.” And everyone would just pile on posting whatever they could about that person to intimidate them and make them stop criticizing bolsonada or whatever. And when you say it’s what we have now, in many ways it’s true because there is no doubt in my mind that this tactic is influenced not just by… It didn’t just come out of thin air in Brazil. Clearly the far right is organizing when it has to do with tactics and things like this.

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. And Bolsonaro is like government. It was like sort of a department within a government that was still trying to present itself as a government. In the United States, it’s Trump. And so the fish drops from the head down. So it’s just like Trump is the megaphone who owns his own social media platform who is sicking his entire government apparatus and his billionaire oligarch network to gobble up all the legacy media, destroy the ones that he doesn’t like, yada, yada, yada.

Michael Fox: So Ali Shander de Morais is the point person for the investigations. He coordinates this together with the federal police and they work to undo this and they do an incredible job at it. So they issue search and seizure warrants, arrest warrants. Some Bolsonaro influencers went to jail, others had their social media accounts blocked. And this is just another example of why Morais is so hated by Bolsonaro and his people. Anyway, 2022. Lulu wins the elections, but then Bolsonaro supporters hit the streets.

Maximillian Alvarez: The president’s office may have conceded a feat, but many of J. Bolsonaro’s millions of supporters have not

Michael Fox: They’re spurred on by Bolsonaro’s claims of fraud in the elections. They block roads across the country. They set up vigils in front of military barracks all across Brazil demanding that the military rise up to overturn the results and they stay there for more than two months and then on January 8th, 2023. Balsinado supporters invade the Brazilian Congress and Supreme Court. They attacked the buildings causing more than $3 million in damage in a copycat performance of January 6th, 2021, Washington.
I should probably also say that the police response, because we’re talking about free speech right now, but I should probably say that the police response to the Bolsonaro protests before January 8th was initially pretty lenient, like far more lenient than you would see in the United States if thousands of people decided to block roads all across the country and then set up vigils in front of military barracks, you probably wouldn’t see that like, “Okay, you can stay there.” But in Brazil, they basically let him do what they needed to do. But after January 8th, when it was clear that an attempted coup was underway, the response was far quicker than in the wake of January 6th in the United States.
They did away with the encampments. Hundreds were arrested in Brazilia. The Supreme Court would convict more than 1,400 people for their involved in the Capitol invasion in Brazilia. Hundreds are still in jail. I mention this all because like in the United States, many of the claims that Brazil has been imprisoning political opposition come from the legal response to the country’s capital invasion. In other words, some of the people that they call political prisoners are those people who are in jail or who were in jail or who were convicted by the Supreme Court for their role in the Capitol invasion. But again, this comes back to the idea of the importance of democracy in Brazil and particular Brazil’s interpretation of free speech. The point is here, you have a right to protest. You have a right to speak. You even have a right to protest for months.
You just don’t have a right to try to overthrow the country and don’t mess with the country’s democracy. June 30th, 2023, six months after Brazil’s capital invasion. The Supreme Electoral Court bans Bolsonaro from running for political office for eight years for spreading lies about the country’s electoral system. Five judges agreed that he used government channels and social media to spread misinformation about Brazil’s elections.
The ruling focused on this meeting that Bolsonaro held a few months before the election, where he told foreign ambassadors that the country’s electoral voting system was rigged and the elections could be manipulated. Of course, this was despite the fact that Brazil’s electoral system had long been internationally recognized as safe and secure. Brazilians celebrated the ruling across the country. It was the first time a Brazilian president had been borrowed from holding public office for election violations. Bolsonaro denounced the judgment against him calling it politically motivated. Max, can you ever imagine something like this happening in the United States?

Maximillian Alvarez: Now, no, but I think a lot of us had still had lingering hope that our institutions would hold and that we would prove ourselves capable of this as well, but we didn’t.

Michael Fox: So I just want to focus on this point I made at the very beginning of the episode right now to kind of tie this into where we were at the beginning. Remember how I mentioned that the two paths diverge between the United States and Brazil. Clearly I’m generalizing, but in many ways, this is one of those moments where you can really tell the difference. Bolsonaro is blocked from holding electoral office. Meanwhile, in the United States, Trump continues being Trump. It

Donald Trump [Recording]: Is great to be your president. It is great.

Michael Fox: In Brazil, something else is happening at the same time Bolsonaro is banned from holding office. There is a nationwide debate over a new bill that would regulate social media platforms as if they were television or radio. Tech platforms push back with all of their might. Telegram, for instance, sends millions of Brazilians a message telling them that if Brazil passes the law, it will “end freedom of expression.” Congressional leaders attack the message on the floor of the lower house. The head of the government coalition of the Senate, Randolph Rodriguez, told press, “To the heads of the big tech companies and their shareholders, Brazil will not be no man’s land. It’s a threat against Brazilian democracy. We need regulation. The big tech companies say they are tech companies, but more and more they’re acting like communication companies and our telecommunication sector has been regulated since 1964. Social media is the same.
Brazil had suddenly become the battleground over the power of tech companies to remain unregulated and free to push their agenda. At the time I sat down with David Nemer. He’s a Brazilian University of Virginia communications professor who studied social media platforms for years. And he told me that these platforms, as we’ve looked at in this podcast, they are not neutral.

David Nemer: These platforms are not just publishers. They are part of the message as well in curating the message.

Michael Fox: And this bill is really just about bringing transparency from big techs.

David Nemer: In terms of access to the algorithm, access to reports about the algorithm, understanding how these platforms behave. So we have a more transparent way of understanding how these platforms, like the role of these platforms in everyday life. This is why the big techs are playing hardball in Brazil because they know that if Brazil pisses this bell, then it sets the precedent and the other countries will follow as well.

Michael Fox: Sxzo that was enough for these tech firms to fight tooth and nail and the bill stalled in Congress. Max Brazilian lawmakers, they want to regulate the social media platform, say its censorship. Where do you stand on this? Do we need regulations for tech firms and social media platforms?

Maximillian Alvarez: I mean, absolutely. And when I say yes, we need regulation. I don’t want the current powers that be being the ones who to regulate it, nor do I want the ones who are in power before to be the ones regulating it. So do I think they need to be regulated? Yes. Do I think we need a better system of regulation and a better sort of societal understanding of what the hell regulation is and is for? Yes. But right now that ain’t going to happen in this country where the worst parts of capitalism will kill the best parts of democracy. Any semblance of an understanding of free speech that we have had as Americans that gets that free speech is important for a healthy democratic society has been eroded by this sort of individualistic consumer capitalist model of free speech for me is the only thing that matters.
Like my rights and my ability to say whatever I want whenever I want is the only point of free speech and no one can take that away. But it’s like Margaret Thatcher saying society doesn’t exist. There’s only a collection of individuals in pursuit of their own self-interest.
That’s what they have tried to make true in America. Out of the same country that birthed so many incredible contributions to democratic history, that same country has been overtaken by this democracy killing capitalist serving system.

Michael Fox: Well, no, and it’s interesting that you mentioned Margaret Thatcher because I got into this a little bit several episodes ago. We don’t think that, for instance, a financial system can be completely unregulated. You have to have rules. It can’t just be a free for all. There have to be certain rules or else what happens? You have massive monopolies. You have massive corporations with huge power, which we do right now, but still there needs to be regulations and all these things. And it works the same way with social media platforms and with communications. That’s why we have communications, telecommunications laws. That’s why TV and radio are regulated. Newspapers are regulated. The way that most people get their news nowadays is through social media. There has to be some form of regulation. It can’t just be a free for all, but these companies are using the discourse of free speech in order to push their vision for the world and really sell their agenda, really push their bottom line, their profit margin.
They don’t want to be regulated because they’re a business. And of course, now they’re in cahoots with Trump even more.

Maximillian Alvarez: America is the land of deregulation. And so when we say we need to regulate these companies and that we live in a more deregulated kind of society, I don’t know if people outside of America fully grasp how deregulated we are. I mean, look at the way that big tech has forced AI into our lives with like no regulations whatsoever. And look at the effects that it’s having on our society, on our politics, on our children, on our sense of truth. I mean, it’s such a big world changing technology that has been allowed to just kind of flood every device that we use and change society however it’s going to under a system where the companies that own and invest in these technologies are consolidating power and collaborating with state power to ultimately, like you said, serve their agenda. And their agenda is basically continue to twist and bend and force the world to be something that continuously delivers more and more power and wealth to them at our expense.

Michael Fox: So I want to underline something here that underscores the question at the heart of this debate and I think is really important. All of these tech companies are from abroad. None of them are in Brazil, mostly from the United States, but not all. And they’re all pushing their corporate agenda, wrapped in the discourse of free speech, but they’re companies. They’re concerned with profit like you were just talking about Max and yet they’re actually attacking the sovereignty of foreign countries in the name of free speech. There’s something just so wrong with this, but because of the way that this discourse kind of permeates into the mainstream or the way that it’s covered and the way that they sell it, that’s not the way that people read this. It’s usually seen, oh, well, Brazil is censoring speech, whatever else. But here’s the thing, Max, Brazil’s battle with the tech platforms is just heating up.
Fast forward one year August, 2024. Brazil’s dispute with tech billionaire Elon Musk is heating up. One of Brazil’s. Elon Musk. Richest man on earth, owner of Tesla SpaceX, old buddy of Trump’s, or I guess frenemy now perhaps. Of course, he ran Doge, Department of Government Efficiency in the first 120 days of Trump’s second term. Remember that he bought Twitter in 2022 and transformed it into X. So in August, 2024, he begins to butt heads with our friend, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Aleshandre Morais, who we introduced earlier. Mordais orders X to take down a number of users on Musk’s platform who are actively sharing fake news online and who in some cases are wanted by the Brazilian judiciary. They are all supporters of far right President Bolsonaro and here’s just one example of someone Morais ordered to be taken offline. Alen Lopez Do Santos. He’s a Brazilian blogger who fled to the United States after being under investigation in two Supreme Court inquiries for threatening justices, spreading false content online and financing anti-Democratic acts.
Musk refuses Mordeise’s order. He calls it censorship. His app X still works in the country, but he pulls his team out of Brazil so they can’t face reprisals from the Brazilian judiciary. In response on August 30th

Speaker: A Brazilian Supreme Court judge has ordered the immediate suspension of the social media platform X in Brazil, meaning people there can no longer acces or use it. Ex-owner Elon Musk failed to meet a deadline set by the court to name a new legal representative in the country. The Brazilian court and –

Michael Fox: Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes. I spoke with Fabio de Saisilv about this.

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Elon Musk is a businessman and like all businessmen, he doesn’t want to see his business regulated and this is what the Brazilian judiciary is doing indirectly to the extent that Mr. Musk’s platform is hosting speech that’s contrary to Brazilian law in different ways and the judiciary is pushing back against that.

Michael Fox: Again, these are corporations pushing their bottom line and Musk is also a free speed absolutist aligned with the far right. Aleshandani Morais pushes back defending his opinion. He says basically. Spread hate, racism, misogyny, and homophobia. David Nemer.

Donald Trump [Recording]: The Brazilian politicians have very specific interest in keeping Twitter the way it is. They prevail because of misinformation. They prevail because of hate speech that they promote and in Brazil, that’s not allowed. So they need a platform to create that sort of engagement and build their base. So it’s like a win-win situation for both of them.

Michael Fox: X was blocked for 40 days until the company finally gave in. Musk paid the fines and began taking down the accounts ordered removed by Morais. So in the end, X did everything that Morais wanted them to, but Musk created this whole problem for himself in the meantime and actually convinced thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of Brazilians that they should move to other platforms because during those 40 days, they couldn’t use Twitter. So a bunch of people started moving to Blue Sky or Mastodon or other places. Max, did you see this unfolding? Do you remember watching this?

Maximillian Alvarez: Not only do I remember watching it, I mean, I’ve lived through it and I’ve tried to navigate a media organization through it. Musk buying Twitter was a seismic change to our industry, the entire kind of way that our public discourse operated and who participated in it, right? I mean, the Twitter of old was in no way perfect. None of these platforms are, but it was a space where politicians, corporations, journalists, artists like public figures of all sorts kind of had access to each other in a way that they never had before and it is not that after Musk bought it. And I would actually just push back when you called Elon Musk a free speech absolutist, he is absolutely not a free speech absolutist. I mean, I think so many people on the right, particularly people in power on the right, like Musk embodies what in the internet age has come to be known as Wilhoit’s law, which boils down to this quote, which was actually left in a comment section on the internet, but it so succinctly articulated this problem that it’s become a meme in and of itself.
But Wilhoit’s law states that conservatism consists of exactly one proposition to which there must be in groups whom the law protects but does not bind alongside outgroups whom the law binds but does not protect. I think this applies not just to kind of like how people like Elon Musk see free speech. It’s always free speech for me and the people who agree with me and not for thee. Musk has censored plenty of people on X. Totally. Musk artificially alters the algorithm so that it’s artificially like visibilizing certain views over others.That’s the way that this stuff operates. And then you add on top of that, like you said, just the bare fact of these people are businessmen and capitalists whose primary goal is to get more money and power for themselves.

Michael Fox: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s so important because what we often see is so – called self-described free speech absolutists use that discourse to say that, “Oh, I believe in free speech for everybody and it’s part of this image,” which is exactly what Musk is. When he bought then Twitter, now X, his whole thing was, “Oh, I believe in free speech and everyone should have it. ” But in the end of the day, what they’re actually doing is canceling and censoring people that don’t believe in their viewpoint.

Maximillian Alvarez: And this is, again, the continuing line of how the sort of media ecosystem in America, it’s not just Musk and X. This is why the freaking Ellison family who just acquired Warner Brothers also has control of CBS and a controlling stake in the American owned TikTok. This is why Silicon Valley oligarch and Trump advisor Mark and Dreesen is the primary backer of Substack. This is why Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, right? This is why Mark Zuckerberg controls not just Facebook but Instagram and WhatsApp and threads and so much more. You can subvert the sort of democratic principles of a healthy public sphere in which truth wins out through debate, inquiry and honest, open discussion by buying all of the platforms and networks and artificially imposing your designs and desires on the discourse and subject everyone else who depends on it for their information.That’s kind of how things work in this country.

Michael Fox: And here’s the thing, it’s not just the tech platforms. Far right activists have also been pushing their agenda of free speech absolutism or quote free speech absoluism and using it to cry censorship against Brazil. Here’s an example. The

Speaker: Hearing of the subcommittee will come to order and I want to welcome our very distinguished witnesses and –

Michael Fox: May 7th, 2024. Republican leaders held a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington in the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It’s titled Brazil: A Crisis of Democracy Freedom and the Rule of Law. The hearing was chaired by New Jersey Republican Representative Chris Smith. He kicked off the meeting.

US Rep. Chris Smith: Since late 2022, Brazilians have been subject to grave human rights violations committed by Brazilian officials on a vast scale. Documented right violations in Brazil include the political abuse of legal procedures to persecute political opposition, including jailing opposition figures on sparious charges, violations of freedom of speech and media freedom, including persecution of journalists, the silencing of opposition media, banning individuals from social media, thinly veiled censorship laws claiming to fight disinformation and many violations of rule of law and judicial malfeasance.

Michael Fox: If you heard what he was saying, you would imagine that the country had been taken over by a tinpot dictatorship and not just saved from an attempted coup. Among the individuals invited to speak are Paolo Figueredo, the son of the former Brazilian dictator, Christopher Favlotsky, the Canadian founder of the video platform, Rumble, considered the right-wing YouTube. And unsurprisingly, they painted a terribly disturbing vision of Brazil as if the country had fallen into an authoritarian censorship regime.

Donald Trump [Recording]: There’s one single name behind every one of these decisions. That’s Alexander DeMaris. Remember this name. He’s the defacto dictator of Brazil.

Michael Fox: Rumble will never back down from our mission. We are the tip of the spear in this fight and we relish that. We urge everyone, especially the US State Department to join us. The other person invited to speak at the hearing, the only legal expert invited, in fact, Brazilian University of Oklahoma Professor Fabio Desai Silva. Remember, I’ve been speaking with him throughout the episode.

Speaker: In your assessment, how high was the risk of the coup succeeding had then President Bolsonaro managed to gain the support of these branches of the armed forces?

Fabio de Sa e Silva: Thank you, Congresswoman. It was very high. I believe when you draft a decree outlining what’s going to happen once the military take over, which in some versions of this drafting even included the arrest of Justice Mogais. I think you’re trying to anticipate what you’re going to do when push comes to shove.

Michael Fox: And Fabio told me that he was there to basically clarify that in Brazil

Fabio de Sa e Silva: It has been a violation of the law to articulate speech that’s intended to undermine confidence, public confidence in the electoral system if you don’t have any proof of that as well as to, as I was mentioning before, pit the military against civilian power and incentivize the military to take over because of the history of the country. So one of the reasons why I was there was precisely to share my knowledge of Brazilian law and to show to the people in Congress that You cannot say that the Brazilian judiciary is abusing its powers because it’s holding people accountable for committing those violations of the law. And even if in the United States, these things would not be necessarily a crime or could not be criminalized. In Brazil, it’s been well established in Brazilian law that you can’t do those things. You can’t convey those messages, especially if you are in office sitting in the president’s office and therefore having all that attention at your disposal as the chief executive in the country.

Michael Fox: So that was 2024 and that’s happening on Capitol Hill Max. These are the debates that are happening in Washington, which are then pushing this image that there is censorship happening in Brazil. And it’s the same thing we’ve seen from Trump time and time again and his people is that if you repeat a lie long enough, then it becomes truth. But the threats from Washington and Silicon Valley are ongoing.

Speaker: Also developing this morning, the Trump administration placing sanctions on a Brazilian Supreme Court justice over concerns of human rights violations and politicized prosecutions.

Michael Fox: Just last year, alongside the 50% tariff on Brazil that Trump levied that we started this episode, the United States also issued sanctions on Supreme Court Justice Alice Andre Morais and his wife.

Speaker: Well, look, Muris is an activist judge that abused his authority by engaging in a targeted and politically motivated effort designed to silence political critics through the issuance of secret orders, compelling online platforms, including US social media companies, banning the accounts of individuals for posting protected speech. The actions taken by Muris impact US persons and companies and the United States did not tolerate maligned foreign actors who abuse their positions of authority to undermine freedom of expression of American citizens.

Michael Fox: Mordeise called the sanctions illegal and deplorable. He said the court would not quote bow to cowardly and fruitless threats and that he would ignore the sanctions. The sanctions were later dropped in December of last year, shortly after Trump also removed the 50% tariff he levied on Brazil. But the thing is, is here again, it’s the use of this vision of literally fake news and a false narrative to spread these lies in order to undermine a Democratic country, Brian Meir.

Brian Mier: The American far right supported by these crypto fascist libertarians in Silicon Valley like Elon Musk has teamed up through Steve Bannon, the point man between the US far right and the Brazilian far right and the bolsonaros and their allies to try and force a change in Brazilian laws citing free speech absolutism to legalize Nazis in Brazil and other hate groups and to undo the hate speech legislation and things like that. And the reason the Silicon Valley tech fascist social media companies are interested in this is that it’s to eliminate any kind of liability for their platforms being used to disseminate hate speech. And so they’re interested in weakening Brazil’s regulatory atmosphere so that they can’t be held liable for crimes, currently crimes committed on their platforms by Brazilians.

Michael Fox: And the problem, Max, is that this is not the end of what the far right and the US campaign is planning against the government in Brazil. There are high stakes elections happening again this October. President Lula will be running against him is Bolsonaro’s senator son Flavia Bolsonaro.

Speaker: At the end of this last year, my father gave me the greatest mission of my life to run for president in his place in October 2026 elections.

Michael Fox: Flavio recently wrote to Marco Rubio and told him that if he won, he would be willing to place a transition team at the disposal of the Trump administration. Meanwhile, Trump is considering new tariffs on Brazil over the country’s financial system of payments and the US government has placed Brazil’s two largest gangs on the US foreign terrorist list. So it all is clearly leading up to the October vote. It’s clear that Trump and his people will be pulling out all the stops to influence the elections in the same way they’ve done all across so many other countries in Latin America. Brazil at this point is one of only a handful of countries still on the left in Latin America. All of the others have fallen to Trump’s sphere of influence and many are concerned that the US pressure is going to only get worse in the coming months and it will likely be using free speech as a weapon, using it in absolute free speech terms.
Brian Meir told me that they’ve been successful in Brazil with that language because it’s become a rallying cry for the far right.

Brian Mier: And so free speech is one of those things. It’s on their list of things that weaponizing anti-corruption, rhetoric against leftist politicians. And this take of free speech is definitely a weaponization of the concept of free speech.

Michael Fox: But he says it’s not necessarily an end in itself. It’s just a tactic for the far right to achieve its goals.

Brian Mier: That’s what it really comes down to. I don’t even know how much these tech fascists even believe in their own ideology. It’s just being spread around because the end goal from a business standpoint is to have total regulatory liberty or freedom. I feel bad calling it freedom, but total deregulation so that they can’t have any kind of scrutiny. They can’t be punished in any way for collectively brainwashing large segments of the population to supporting them and their goals.

Michael Fox: This is a really useful tool, this kind of absolutist free speech framework. And we’ve seen over these platforms, speech has become privatized. It’s not about our right to speak freely. What these tech platforms and absolutist free speeches are pushing is the censorship of other viewpoints of free speech in the name of their vision of free speech. It’s again, like I’ve talked about so oftentimes in this podcast, censorship in the name of free speech.

Maximillian Alvarez: So like the very reality of the world that we live in today kind of proves that free speech needs to mean more than just like my ability to say what I want when I want.
It’s much more complicated than that. These big tech oligarchs and the platforms that they own, the oligarchs who own the legacy media that we still have, they are proving that you can accomplish censorship in a number of ways while still sort of ostensibly bearing the flag of freedom of speech.

Michael Fox: Yes, absolutely. Max, I want to close on a couple of thoughts here that I think are really important for this discussion and also that shine a little bit of positive light on things that were where they are right now despite everything. First, in Brazil, according to recent surveys, roughly 60% of Brazilians are in favor of some form of social media regulation. According to a Nexus poll from this time last year, 80% of Brazilians believe social media companies should take more responsibility for the content they publish online. 60% of those surveys say they believed digital platforms should remove more posts than they do and 60% of Brazilians said that regulating these platforms is essential to tackling anti-democratic content and hate speech. There is a 2014 Brazilian law titled the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, which was really important when it came out and it can be used to hold companies accountable in some cases, in particular when they don’t apply with court orders to remove content, but that doesn’t specifically regulate tech companies or apply in other cases, but that’s one thing that can be used and is used.
The other thing that people are thinking about is how to democratize this space in particularly around what we want, public policy. So I spoke with Fernando Paulino. He’s a communications professor from the University of Brazilia. He’s the guy we heard up from up top and I love how he says this, Max. He said we should be thinking in terms not of freedom but of fairness.

Fernando Paulino: It’s important to establish these parameters, especially during electoral periods to organize fair competition. I think maybe we need to use this word as well, maybe the society needs more fair, more accountable, more equal principles to defend and promote democracy

Michael Fox: We talk about free and fair elections, but oftentimes there’s so many barriers to actually holding those elections, but the same thing works within the communication sphere in which in social media. How do we create equal principles to defend and promote democracy and to replace the authoritarian push that we’ve seen recently? And I think what’s important about this is also to look at something that Brazil’s been really successful at over the last 30, 40 years since democratization. Like I’ve mentioned in this episode, Brazilians really care about their democracy. And so one of the things that they’ve done really well since the end of the dictatorship is pushed to try and incorporate all sectors of society in the decision making of public policies

Fernando Paulino: To involve social organizations, universities, researchers, to expand the debate about communication and democracy. And I think especially in terms of the social media regulation and the internet context right now, this debate expanded a lot with more people involved in this discussion.

Michael Fox: And I think this is really, really important because what Trump and Silicon Valley tech moguls are largely demanding is corporate free speech, not free speech for everybody. They want speech that can be decided behind closed doors. They want speech where there’s hidden algorithms in which nobody knows what they are and they’re decided by Musk or some high end people within these social media firms. That is not free. That does not create a free media. That doesn’t create free speech. It’s the exact opposite. And so what Fernando talks about is the need for diversity when we build public policies around things like social media, online speech and regulations.
We need to think about how do we make these decisions in which more people are included, other voices are included, and not just rich powerful men from Silicon Valley. I think this is really important as we’re looking forward and trying to grapple with these questions, free speech, the whole idea of free speech is it has to be at the root of our democracy. And if it is leading us in the direction of less speech, if it is leading us in the direction not of democracy, but of authoritarianism, if it’s leading us in the direction of a space where less people have a voice and less people have the ability for their speech to be heard, then something is drastically wrong. And this goes back a little bit, Max, to what I was talking about in the last episode with Maryanne Franks.

Speaker: The First Amendment’s one job is to keep us from becoming a totalitarian society. That’s its primary job. Everything else is secondary. And if your free speech doctrine, if your free speech law isn’t keeping us from sliding into fascism, but is instead accelerating our path to fascism, then it’s not working.

Michael Fox: And I think we need to look at what do we want from our free speech? What do we want of our media sphere? And this is something that people in Brazil are trying to grapple with. When they weren’t able to pass the social media regulation law, then they started to piecemeal things. And so they started to look at, okay, well, let’s pass a law having to do with children and social media. Let’s look at this other case. And so they’re looking at how to break this apart and pass these smaller laws in order to still get in the direction they want to get into. We need to understand speech within democracy. And if that is being undermined as it clearly is right now and when countries like the United States are using the discourse of free speech to attack and undermine the Democratic principles of a foreign sovereign nation, we absolutely have a problem and we need to understand it like that.

Maximillian Alvarez: Mike, you said earlier that Brazilians are very proud of their democracy. I don’t think a lot of Americans are anymore. I think that we grew up to feel proud about it, but like right now there’s so little to be proud about. But also like I remember growing up again in the ’90s and early aughts and sort of being berated by older generations of how we didn’t know what these freedoms meant. We didn’t know what it meant to sacrifice and die for our country and the freedom of speech and freedom of religion and yada, yada, yada. And that was the sort of message that we got, but simultaneous with you should be grateful for all the rights that you have and go live the best life that you can with them. And like now is the moment where we got to fight for something and it’s not just something we got to fight for everything.
Everything that we hold dear is at risk of going away. Democracy and all the people who fought for that idea over the centuries is at risk and we are now the ones who have to pick up that fight. And I don’t know about you, brother, but like I’m ready to rumble. Like I said, I ain’t going down without a fight and I’m not giving up on these principles. This is too beautiful of a country. This is too important of an idea and people’s lives are worth too much to just give up on so that Jeff Bezos can have three more yachts and Elon Musk can have another trillion dollars and a space rocket to Mars. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That is unacceptable and I will not accept it. Neither will you and neither should anyone listening to this.

Michael Fox: Max, thank you so much for joining me, man. I really appreciate it. It’s been fantastic.

Maximillian Alvarez: Thanks for having me, brother. Sorry I talked so much.

Michael Fox: Folks, that is all for now. Thanks for listening. Next time we hop across the pond to Europe to take a deep look at their definition of free speech, how countries there are fighting disinformation and also grappling with these same questions of social media. That’s next time on The Battle for Free Speech. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and you like this series, please do us a favor. Go to your podcasting app and give us a like, a follow, a subscribe, or tell a friend about it and leave us a comment or a review. It really helps to spread the word about the show and the state of free speech in the United States today. This podcast is now on Blue Sky, not X. Just search for the Battle for Free Speech. If you’d like to find out more about the Battle for Free Speech and my work on other podcasts, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox, or you can follow the link in the show notes.
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. This really helps me to continue to do this important work. I’m adding links to all the people who I spoke with today in the show notes. A huge thanks and shout out to Max Alvarez. You can find his Working People Podcast wherever you listen. Also, 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. The Battle for Free Speech is a production of the Real News. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

MARC STEINER [FIELD]:  This place has changed so much. Wow. When we were kids, this is where the Black and Jewish world met, right here. Oh, because Jewish was this side, Jewish and then Baltimore’s 125th Street was Pennsylvania Avenue, and that was down that way. So, that’s where it all… wow.

MICHAEL FOX:  Late last summer when I was in Baltimore, you and I went over to Mondawmin Mall.

MARC STEINER:  That’s right.

MICHAEL FOX:  And you told me the story of your first political activism.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  All right. And if you could just set us up, where are we right now?

MARC STEINER [FIELD]:  We’re at the Mondawmin Mall on the Westside of Baltimore, and it looks really different than it did when I was a kid. It’s just all… they’ve redone the whole outside, probably inside as well. But this was a predominantly white mall, and we used to shop here. 

And my mom and I came down here, it was 1960, and we went down — I forget what we were shopping for, whatever we came for — And so we were there, and we’re looking over the railing. And as we looked over the railing, there [was this] line of Black college students, turned out to be Black college students, picketing the White Coffee Pot — Which was an appropriate name because it was segregated. They had restaurants all across the city.

So, I asked my mom — I was 13, not quite 14 — I asked my mom, could I join the picket line? And she said, in her English accent, all right, my dear, go ask the picket captain and see what he says. So we went downstairs and they said, sure. And that’s the first day I marched.

And so from that moment on, I was in the Civil Rights Movement, and then a couple years later I became the youngest person to be arrested in civil rights in Maryland. In Cambridge, Maryland, not Baltimore, but in Cambridge, which was like, we used to call that Maryland’s Mississippi, Eastern Shore, which is [where] one of the last lynchings in America took place, on the Eastern Shore. And so that was what opened up this world for me.

And I would say from 11 years old to like 17 when I was expelled from high school, my world was different. It was segregated, but my world was Black because of Boy Scouts, the street corner, the all-Black frat. It was middle-class Black guys. So, that was my world. 

And in Baltimore, people forget Baltimore is a Southern city. It’s a mixture of the industrial North with the immigrants coming from all across Europe and later from Latin America that was later from all across Europe, and it’s a Southern city. It’s a deeply segregated town. It’s still very divided. There are very few interracial neighborhoods in Baltimore, even to this day. Most neighborhoods are mostly Black or they’re white or they’re Latino.

MICHAEL FOX:  This is The Battle for Free Speech, a multipart narrative podcast series brought to you by The Real News. I’m Michael Fox, and today we’re going to spend the entire hour speaking with my co-host, Marc Steiner.

First, let me say that if you’ve been listening to this podcast, you will notice that he’s been absent lately. Unfortunately, he’s been dealing with some health issues and he had to take a step back. That is all the more reason why I’m so excited to get to speak with him today for the entire hour.

And let me just put this into context. In this podcast, we’ve looked at the attacks on free speech rights today in the United States. We looked at the history and how movements and organizations have stood up and used free speech in their work. We looked at how social media, AI, and disinformation are undermining our free speech and how people are responding in the United States and abroad.

In this final episode of the series, we’re going to focus on what free speech means within the context of one person who’s been through it all. That is my co-host, Marc Steiner. He turned 80 earlier this year. Today, I sit down with Marc to discuss all of these incredible layers of his life: community organizing, theater, education, journalism, what they all mean for him, and how they all add up to nearly seven decades standing up and fighting for free speech, and how they fit into the battle for free speech today. That is where we’re going to spend this hour. I’m so excited because the stories of his life are incredible. They’re often funny. And for me, they really take the idea of free speech to another level. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

MARC STEINER:  And the backstory is that A, my mother always raised us with clarity about race, that there’s no difference between races. We’re all the same. We’re all human beings. And when I was 11, I wanted to join the Boy Scouts, just dying to be a Boy Scout. Read all the books. My English grandmother and uncle sent me books about British Boy Scouts, and I was just really into it. 

And so, my mom and Mrs. Jackson, who is a Black woman who worked as a domestic in our home, were sitting at the end of the workday together, as they usually did, having coffee and cake before Mrs. Jackson left. And she was being picked up by her nephew, Mr. Dennis Foster. 

And so, they were eating, and I ran downstairs saying, Mom, Mom, I’ll be 11 years old next week. I got to join the Boy Scouts. You got to sign me up. And she said, all right, love, we’ll sign you up straight away. Beth Tfiloh, Monday morning, which is the local synagogue that we used to go to. And I said, Mom, I don’t want to be in a Jewish troop. I want to be in a troop with all kinds of kids, which didn’t exist. 

And Mr. Foster, who’s African American, put his coffee cup down, looked over the table and said, I’m a scout master. You can join my troop. And my mother, I remember, I could still see her face. She said, oh, that’s a lovely idea. And she knew exactly what that meant. 

And so that Monday he picked me up in his Mercury at the house and we drive off from Northwest Baltimore and past the golf course and went down to a street called Garrison Boulevard and into Walbrook Junction, which was the separating line between Black and white neighborhoods. And we kept on going down North Avenue, and all of a sudden the world became Black. Went down, made a right on Broadway, which is a deeply working-class Black neighborhood. Made a left on Ashland Avenue and ended up in front of the Faith Baptist Church. And there I joined an integrated troop, as I always say, because I integrated it. 

And so, I was a little Jewish boy in 1957 in segregated Baltimore in an all-Black Boy Scout troop where I learned firsthand about racism as a little boy. Whether it was the Boy Scout troops that we camped near in the Boy Scout camp, they were mostly white troops. And then one kid saying to me, what are you doing in a troop with all those Ns for? And I remember that just shocking, a Boy Scout would use that word. 

Or when we went out with Mr. Foster to get some ice cream or whatever and we stopped in front of an ice cream shop and kids got out of the car. And I remember sitting there in the car, and I’ll never forget his words. He looked in the window and said, Marc, wherever we can go, you can go. And those kind of things became foundational for me in understanding what kind of society we live in as a little boy, what we faced.

And so, that time when I was 13 and we were at Mondawmin Shopping Center and my mom said, well, ask the picket captain. And I went down there, and Skip Logan was the leader of the picket line — And he was also the head of the Civic Interest Group, which was Baltimore’s arm of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which is a major radical civil rights group — Said, sure, gave me a picket sign, and I started going to CIG meetings and became very active. 

They wouldn’t let me sit in until I was 16 because they didn’t want me getting arrested if I didn’t… And the first arrest I had was in Cambridge, Maryland, which we used to call Maryland’s Mississippi. It was rough. I was 16, arrested, and I was the youngest, whitest thing there. And they pulled me out and put me in this room, looked like a kitchen. And then all these cops, maybe, I don’t remember how many, six, eight cops surrounding the table, and wanted me to sign this document that said I was coerced by communists to come down to foment trouble among the negro population of Cambridge, Maryland.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow, Marc.

MARC STEINER:  And I refused to sign. And then it proceeded to get hot, and they poured hot coffee on my head and smacked me around and punched me around and hit me and all kinds of stuff. And I wouldn’t sign. 

And, it’s a digression, my mother, she was a tough lady. She was beautiful and tough. But she always told us, the three of us, the kids, to come home on your shield. That was her line to us. You are a Round, her maiden name. We never back down. You come home on your shield. So I didn’t sign [laughs].

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow.

MARC STEINER:  And so mom got me out, took me home, and I got fixed up. So, I continued on the picket line and continued working in Cambridge and going between Cambridge and Baltimore. The only trouble was that I started screwing up in school because I was so involved between the Civil Rights Movement and the street corner, I didn’t get much school time in [both laugh].

MICHAEL FOX:  What was it about Cambridge? What was it about Cambridge, Maryland, that was —

MARC STEINER:  Cambridge was, there were two focal points of the Civil Rights Movement in Maryland. One was Baltimore because it was the biggest city with the largest Black population, except for all-Black towns in Prince George’s County and some other places. And Cambridge, Maryland, which was the Eastern Shore of Maryland that you had to pass through going to Eastern Shore. Eastern Shore was literally like Mississippi. It was the Deep South in Maryland. So, our work was in both places. 

And in Cambridge, we were both picketing to integrate things, but we were sitting in, and we were registering people to vote. And the leader of that movement was a woman who became very famous in America just because she became a figure. Her name was Gloria Richardson.

GLORIA RICHARDSON [CLIP]:  Still we had segregated hospitals, housing, jobs…

MARC STEINER:  I interviewed her years later on my radio show in the ’90s. She was really old then. And I remember one of the greatest days of my life because I was in Cambridge, set the equipment up, about to do the interview. And she looked at me and said, I remember you. You were that little white boy. That was a great day. She actually remembered me. 

And so it was a rough place. And I really literally was beaten and tortured in the prison. They wanted me to sign a paper, I wouldn’t sign. But anyway, that was the civil rights era.

And I had a very weird teenagehood. It started out because I was a white boy in an all-Black Boy Scout troop on the East side of town, which was a working-class community. I started hanging out with this group of Black guys, two groups of Black guys. One was the Imperials who were the sons of Black doctors, lawyers, judges, middle-class guys, still close to some of them. 

And the other was the guys on the corner. That happened because when I was in junior high school in the seventh, eighth grade, I was friends with some of the Black guys in class, and it was newly integrated and majority of kids were white, but there was a huge population of Black students. And we became friends and I started hanging out with them, and that was the street corner. 

So, I had these two worlds I was part of. And I was also a member of the Young Socialist Alliance, which was a Trotskyist youth group that I joined when I was 15. And so, I was a young revolutionary.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, you also refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord’s Prayer in school, right?

MARC STEINER:  In the 10th grade when I got to City, which was a high school, I refused to take part in opening exercises, which then became part of a Supreme Court decision that I was mentioned in. So, you had a pledge of allegiance and you read the Lord’s Prayer, and I refused to do that. It was the Lord’s Prayer as well. I refused to do the Lord’s Prayer. And when they did opening exercises, I would leave the homeroom and stand out in the hallway till it was done and then have to walk back in. And the same thing when it came to giant student assemblies. I get up, walk out of the assembly with thousands of students, and walk back in after the opening exercises. 

So, I became a target. One day, there used to be these trucks that would be outside the school [at] lunchtime selling food to kids who didn’t want to eat in the cafeteria to go out to get food from these food trucks, and I was standing outside the pizza wagon. And these, I don’t remember, seven or nine white guys semicircled me around the wagon. And I looked back, and I said, OK, here we go, and I ordered my pizza. And the guy said, we don’t like no N lovers in the school. And I looked back and I said, sound like a personal problem to me, man. What you want me to do about it? And they came at me. And when they did, the pizza came out. I grabbed the hot pizza and pulled it out and threw it in his face. So, he had this hot pizza burning on his face.

MICHAEL FOX:  Oh my gosh.

MARC STEINER:  And these guys jumped at me and beat me up. And I walked back into the classroom after lunch and my shirt was torn. I was bloody and shit. The teachers told me, you need to go to the nurse. The guy sitting next to me was a guy named Stokes who was Black — Because our chairs were assigned by alphabetical order, so I was sitting next to Stokes since I’m Steiner. And Stokes said, what happened to you, man? I told him, he said, what? Next thing I knew after school, all these Black guys beat up all these white guys because of what happened to me. And I got suspended. And I cut school, got suspended. 

And then one morning the homeroom teacher said, Steiner, this is no damn standing. Go sit in your seat. And I said, Mr. Camps, if you can’t speak to me with a little respect don’t talk to me at all. And he said, what did you say? And he walked over to where I was sitting ,and he had his yardstick in his hand, and he picked it up. Said, what did you say, Steiner? When he raised the yardstick, I went boom, and hit him. And so all these teachers came in and grabbed my ass and took me down to the principal’s office, vice principal’s office, Mr. Yost and Dr. Greenberg, who was a vice principal who had graduated at that high school with my father in the class of ’29.

MICHAEL FOX:  Oh my gosh.

MARC STEINER:  Called the hospital where my dad had just gotten out of surgery. He was a surgeon. Pop had to come up to the place, and vice principal went, Al, this is Marc’s junior year at City. He opened up some whiteout, which was when people typed on typewriters had whiteout to cross things out, opened up a bottle of whiteout. Said, this is Marc’s junior year at City, whoosh. Get him out.

MICHAEL FOX:  Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, Marc.

MARC STEINER:  So, I was banned from all City Schools, and my junior year never existed. I was sent away. And I saw I was in the Civil Rights Movement. And it was after that that I got beaten up in the Eastern Shore and my parents came and got me and brought me back. But I kept staying in that. And my life was between [the] Civil Rights Movement and the street corner and some other radical groups I was part of, Young Socialist Alliance, Fellowship House, things like that. What I didn’t do was go to school.

MICHAEL FOX:  [Laughs] This Supreme Court case that you said that you were part of for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord’s Prayer and stuff, what was this court case?

MARC STEINER:  My name was only mentioned, it wasn’t my case. But there was a student in Baltimore who also refused to take part in opening exercises. His case went all the way up, and that’s the reason they took prayer out of schools.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow. Wow.

MARC STEINER:  And so it was me and two other guys in Baltimore who didn’t take part in the opening exercises. It wasn’t my case, though.

MICHAEL FOX:  Yeah. You know, what’s fascinating about this, Marc, is that when I was talking with Mary Anne Franks, she’s the professor, the law professor at George Washington University. She said that for her, one of the most — And I don’t remember the court case, I don’t remember if it was this one or another one — But she said that the court case in the Supreme Court which defended people’s right to not say the Pledge of Allegiance was exactly what the First Amendment should be. Because not only should it give us the right to speak out, but it should also give us the right to remain silent in moments that we don’t want to follow the doctrine of the US. And she said that is the example of what the First Amendment and what free speech should be in the United States. I thought, that’s so interesting. I didn’t realize that you had a similar experience.

MARC STEINER:  It was in some ways an isolating experience because I would walk out of the homeroom and I have to walk out of these assemblies that I said earlier. And it was jarring because I was like this target for being this weird kid.

MICHAEL FOX:  Why did you not say it? Why did you not participate in the assemblies?

MARC STEINER:  Because I believed that religion had no place in public schools as a kid. My father wasn’t real happy with it, but both my parents were atheists. Even though my mother converted to Judaism, they were both atheists. I was raised in this contradictory world where both my parents were atheists. And every twice a week — Because I was also kicked out of Jewish schools — When you were Jewish, if you didn’t go to Jewish school, you went to Jewish school twice a week in the afternoon. It’s like Hebrew lessons and everything else. And I was kicked out of there too. And so Mr. Manischewitz, who was a Holocaust survivor who taught there, would come to my house twice a week to teach me the Talmud, the Torah, Hebrew, Jewish history. And so I was steeped in that as a kid. 

Well, first, to me, it was Christianizing the prayer in school. And what about us who don’t believe in Jesus?

MICHAEL FOX:  How incredible was it that your mom supported your organizing? She supported your activism. Did she always remain steadfast in defending you and in supporting you standing up?

MARC STEINER:  Yeah. She was, always, she was a radical Brit. She came from a family of miners who ended up owning the coal mine in England. She was a radical as a young person. She was a member of the Communist Party in Britain for six months. Didn’t jive with her free spirit so she left. But she was always a little different than the rest. Everybody loved her, but she was a little different than the rest. She was an actor. And with my kids, we went out and caught butterflies and labeled them and found amphibians and reptiles in the rivers and brought them home and created terrariums. And she also liked her vodka [laughs]. Mom liked her vodka. She was a trip. She was a trip.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow. Marc, I want to move forward a little bit in the timeline. When you were banned from city schools in Baltimore, you ended up going, was it called Stockbridge?

MARC STEINER:  Yeah.

MICHAEL FOX:  Tell me about Stockbridge. And is it true that you actually shared a room with Arlo Guthrie?

MARC STEINER:  We were roommates. That was in our junior year. We still stay in touch. In our junior year. 

So, I ended up at Stockbridge because I couldn’t go to any public or private school in Baltimore because I also punched out… The kid showed me around friend school the day I was supposed to go to friends. I asked him a simple question. His father owned Glen Echo Amusement Park that we were picketing to integrate. When he said, we keep our Ns to a minimum, I said, what did you say? And that was it. That’s all she wrote. So, I couldn’t go anywhere.

So, when I ended up in Stockbridge, the headmaster came down to Baltimore to interview me. His name was Hans Maeder. And Hans was a Marcusian socialist who was in the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany in the ’30s and ’40s, and an educator. Interesting guy. Hans Maeder, M-A-E-D-E-R. I say Hans because we all called our teachers by their first name at Stockbridge. And we went out to Miller Brothers, which was then Baltimore’s fanciest restaurant. And so he asked me, this is 1963. He said, so tell me, Marc. I want to know who your heroes are. I said, Che Guevara and Malcolm X. And he said, oh, this is wonderful, you must come to my school. And I ended up in this co-educational interracial international boarding school in the Berkshires with this incredible radical faculty. And many of my best friends are still from that era, from my experience there. 

So, that’s why I ended up there. And I graduated in ’65 instead of ’64, but it’s all right. And it was a great experience. It saved my ass. It saved my ass, A, from the street corner because I was on the road to ending up in juvenile jail for other stuff. And it was a great place to have ended up. That county had a couple of really progressive schools for whatever reason. They flocked to Berkshire County.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow. Amazing. Amazing. 

Marc, were you at the March on Washington?

MARC STEINER:  ’63?

MICHAEL FOX:  Yeah.

MARC STEINER:  Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah absolutely there. Cause I was in the Civic Interest Group, which, as I said, was Baltimore’s arm of SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And we all took the bus down from Faith Baptist Church down to DC. It was an amazing day. It was hot as hell. I dressed the wrong way, but it was OK. 

So yeah, I was there because I was in the Civil Rights Movement. And so all of us who had been part of what was going on in Cambridge and in Baltimore and on Route 40, Freedom Riders, we were there. Yeah, we were there.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow. That’s such an iconic moment in US history. It’s almost hard to believe that actually even happened in real life because it’s so iconic.

MARC STEINER:  A quarter of a million people of all races together in Washington, DC, at one time.

MICHAEL FOX:  What did that feel like, Marc?

MARC STEINER:  It was amazing. Because you’re on demonstrations and you maybe have 20, 30 people with you when you’re on the picket line or we’re sitting in or whatever. It was very different. This is a mass of America from across America. That and being part of the Poor People’s Campaign in ’68 were amazing experiences just because of what they brought and the numbers of people from all different communities across the country being in DC at one time. It was amazing. It was a day I’ll never forget. It was huge for me because I wasn’t in school either. So I was a full-time activist and getting ready to be shipped off to Berkshire County [laughs].

MICHAEL FOX:  Talk to me a little bit about the Poor People’s Campaign, your organizing for it. I know that you were there in DC in those days. Tell me a little bit more about your role.

MARC STEINER:  Well, I was living in DC. We were founding Liberation News Service at the time and I was working with the Washington Free Press. And in SDS, there’s a thing called ERAP.

MICHAEL FOX:  Students for Democratic Society.

MARC STEINER:  I’m sorry, Students for Democratic Society, which was the leading radical left group on campuses across the country. And within SDS, there was a thing called ERAP, Economic and Research Action Project, which were people in SDS who went into poor communities to move into communities to organize. And so one of those communities was in Chicago in Uptown.

CLIP 1:  …Southern ghetto, a lot of people who’s migrated from the South to the North, do better jobs and stuff like that. We had a school set up to teach neighborhood people how the system works in the United States…

MARC STEINER:  And they had an organization there called the Young Patriots who were the equivalent of the Black Panthers in the poor white community. So, I got very close to them when I was in SDS and did a lot of work with them. And still one of the guys there, Hy Thurman, is back down. He’s still around. I’ve done a bunch of interviews with him about his work over the years. So, our job was to organize the poor white community into Resurrection City. And so we went all through poor white working class communities in the United States, especially in the Northeast, at least I did, and in Appalachia itself to organize them to come down to be part of Resurrection City.

CLIP 2:  Since the middle of May, the campsite of Resurrection City has housed the poor marchers campaigning in Washington. The murder earlier this year of Dr. Martin Luther King gave renewed intensity to the demands for equal opportunities as the underprivileged came to petition the power for a new deal and a new hope.

CLIP 3:  A lot of people knew the condition of some of these places. And I think that when they see and know the condition that a lot of people will be interested enough to try to make things better.

MARC STEINER:  It was interesting. Encampment of mostly white Southern poor that flew the battle flag of Dixie above their encampment because it was the rebel flag. Nobody gave a shit in the camps about that. And it was a pretty amazing experience. Here you have this encampment of Black folks from across America, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, poor whites, some Asians, some Chinese and Japanese people in this living together, eating together, cooking together, working together. And it made a statement that to this day, it’s what pushes me to do the work I do because you can see what is possible if you organize and fight.

CLIP 4:  We’re building our own house over there, and I want to tell you something. It looks better than anything that we have in Brownsville. We got our house better than anything in Flatbush, which is middle class.

CLIP 5:  It is working down in Resurrection City. And please listen to that. That beautiful thing down there is just the top of a movement that stretches from coast to coast.

CLIP 6:  This is the last chance, I think, for this country to sort of respond to the quiet and peaceful petitions of people for asking for very, very just solutions to very, very real problems.

MARC STEINER:  So, I was there until they tore down Resurrection City when they came in. And I had an apartment in DC because that’s where I was living. That and the Institute of Policy Studies became like refugee centers for people who were forced out of the Resurrection City.

The saddest part of it was there was no structure beyond that moment to keep it together, to create a movement that did change things, but could really have changed things had we had something to solidify it and make it come together. But many things came out of that in different parts of the country. It was a historically important moment in this country, critically important. It began when King was assassinated and his body laying in state in DC for a while, and it could have been a greater moment than it was, but it was an important moment in our history.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, I want to just pause for a second. All of this organizing activism, obviously this is a podcast about free speech, and I want to connect it up to free speech. What does all of this mean for you for free speech in your mind? How does free speech straddle all of these issues in terms of organizing in your teens and your 20s?

MARC STEINER:  The movement that began at Berkeley with Mario Savio, who was a civil rights worker. What’s important to take note here is that that movement exploded, and it was led by people who were white, who were civil rights workers in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, and then went back to their campuses. And so I always look at the free speech movement was birthed by the Civil Rights Movement. They were radicalized to fight when they go back. And that was one of the causes on their campuses that they fought for.

And it happened across America. Berkeley was the center, but I was at Maryland, the University of Maryland, ’65. And in ‘64, I was still at Stockbridge, but it became something I was just obsessed with. It was a movement that frightened the establishment because in part what it came from, the civil rights, but also because these academic establishments were these “state institutions” that controlled life on campus. This was the first major disruptions that took place in decades on campuses.

CLIP 7:  You could never believe such a thing could happen at the University of California where this many students have said they’ve had enough and they’re going to stand up right now. Thank you [applause].

MARC STEINER:  And that helped radicalize an entire movement, student movement in this country. That was the beginning of it. Without the free speech movements, there wouldn’t have been an SDS with that kind of power. So, it was a critical movement in changing America. And many of those students remained radicalized, organized, and continued on. And I think that’s what people forget even though the movement kind of waned and died, that particular movement, the people in it continued to push. Most universities were run by the wealth of this country, and these establishment figures who ran that wealth also ran our universities. That was the first major confrontation against that in that era.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, talk about the Washington Free Press and the Liberation News Service. How were you involved? What were those outlets?

MARC STEINER:  Well, I was involved first off with the Washington Free Press. After I was flunked out of college, I moved to Dupont Circle, which is a neighborhood in DC, which is around the corner from Washington Free Press. And I met the guys, the people from Washington Free Press. We hit it off immediately, and I started writing for them and working with them, and also with SDS at large in DC. We actually had… The radical movement had rented a building near Dupont Circle and Logan Circle, which was three stories. The different movements had their headquarters in that building.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow.

MARC STEINER:  I was there, a guy named Marshall Bloom and I organized a national conference of all the underground papers in the country to come to DC for a weeklong meeting because there were underground papers across America then. Every city had one. Everybody had one. Small cities, big cities, college towns, they were everywhere. And so we brought them together to start what became Liberation News Service, which really became an effective movement. We were collecting stories from across the globe, across the country, and giving it out to all the papers across the country to use and creating a communication between the underground papers and some college papers, Michigan, Chicago, Wisconsin, other places around the country. So, in its lifetime, it was a very effective group.

MICHAEL FOX:  I think it’s fascinating to think about how that communication was happening back then because right now everything is, oh, it’s all internet. You just send an email. It’s super easy.

MARC STEINER:  Oh, right. There’s no internet.

MICHAEL FOX:  Right. No. And so back in those days, what is this? Over telephone, you’re sending —

MARC STEINER:  Telephone and US mail.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow.

MARC STEINER:  Yeah. Telephone and US mail. That was the only way to communicate, only way it could happen.

MICHAEL FOX:  What was it about the media, the underground media and the writing? What is it that called your attention? Why did you want to get involved in this?

MARC STEINER:  The largest group created papers that were alternative weeklies speaking to a different population, against the war, for the Civil Rights Movement, for the radical movement, the countercultural movement that took place in the late ’60s, early ’70s. So, it had its audience, and in alliance with groups like The Black Panther newspaper and other Black and Latino newspapers around the country that were part of it as well. 

But it was this alternative press that made a big difference because people actually read it. It brought community together in ways that doesn’t exist right now. We’ve got this right here where we’re working at Real News, which in some ways is the grandchild of the underground press. But there were so many, every locality had one. I can’t think of a part of our country did not have a piece of the underground press. 

So, we were able with Liberation News Service to share stories around the country, to bring stories in from Europe and Asia and Africa and share them with the papers around the country and also bring people together to talk strategically about what it means to create a newspaper and underground press and how that’s an organizing tool.

It was a great period. It was the same period where we were involved in draft resistance. It was the same period where we were smuggling people out of the country into Canada to get out of the army that I was involved in as well. We actually thought the revolution was at hand. Little did we know [laughs]. It wasn’t about to happen. But it was a significant movement.

MICHAEL FOX:  Was there a backlash by elites, by the forces that be against the underground papers or was it so underground that it wasn’t a big deal?

MARC STEINER:  That’s a great question. What was the demise of the underground papers? That’d be a really interesting question to explore. Part of it was people drifting away and getting older and the movement dissipating and just not being there anymore. It could have been something as simple as that.

MICHAEL FOX:  But it’s at the same time as COINTELPRO was happening, right?

MARC STEINER:  Oh, no, no, no. Look man, here’s the story. I guess this was 1960, early ’68 maybe. And we had some telephone problems. So, we asked the local Washington company to come over and fix it. And they were doing that. And then the guy who was working on it said, hey, you want us to fix the other phones? And we went, sure. Which other phones do you mean? And he said, just half a block away at whatever the number was, 17 something P Street. We were 1719 P Street. And we said, oh, sure. You can take those out.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow.

MARC STEINER:  So, they were bugging [laughs]. So, the feds were collecting information on us literally across the road. There were no real indictments of the place, at least where we were in Washington. But when the movement got more militant and more aggressive and, like all my friends in SDS who became part of the Weather Underground, that was a different time, then they came after everybody. 

In ’68, I went to Cuba. January, February, March of ’68, I was in Cuba. They came after us who went there. They tried to seize our passports. They harassed us. They got me fired from a job, and one job wouldn’t fire me. That was a couple of years later when they came again. So, they did go after… If you were on the left and you were still active, they came over to silence you.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, fast forwarding a couple years, talk about the Tenants Union Group in Baltimore.

MARC STEINER:  So, as I said earlier, in SDS, there’s a group called ERAP. And these were people who went out, Tom Hayden, others, who was probably the most famous of the crew, went out to organize in different working-class communities across the United States. So, that was the early stages of people doing that. We weren’t part of ERAP, but we were just revolutionists and radicals who wanted to go introduce organizing. 

Baltimore had, because of the steel mills, because of the docks, a lot of people ended up taking jobs in those places, the auto plant, to organize internally inside unions in the workplace. And then people moved into the communities to continue the organizing in the community. So, we had collective houses across Baltimore in neighborhoods like Waverly, South Baltimore, Pig Town, across the city. And so, there were four of us who knew each other really well. And we moved down to South Baltimore and got really involved in both the South Baltimore voice and in creating their Tenants Union Group.

We went out to organize tenants of these slumlords, mostly white. Well, white and Blacks. There was a street called Charles Street, which is the main thoroughfare in Baltimore, but the bottom part of it in this part of Baltimore was the divide between Black and white working-class communities in South Baltimore. The Black community was called Sharp-Leadenhall, which before the Civil War was one of the oldest, biggest free Black communities in the country.

Anyway, so we began to organize. And other things were happening too. Radicals in Charles Village, was a neighborhood, and those of us organizing in Waverly, another white, Black working-class community, we created the People’s Free Medical Clinic with radical young doctors and nurses to serve the people. We created a People’s Free Grocery Store where my ex, still my dear friend, and my daughter lived above it. And it was a grocery store where there were no profits made, but were there to serve the people to give them food. They can buy food at cost. 

And we had a People’s Free Garage that was started by two people in the John Brown Collective that I was part of as well. After South Baltimore, I was part of the John Brown Collective. And the People’s Free Garage was a place where these two guys, Michael O’Brien and Gene Flanagan. Gene was a vet and Mike was just one of the big Irish boys. And they knew cars, and they started this garage where people could come fix their cars and work on their cars and be taught how to work on their cars. 

So, we had all these collective cooperative movements that we started in the city. So, it was really a center of radicalism that hasn’t gotten much play in terms of our history. 

And it was mostly really a working-class movement. It wasn’t just college kids but people who lived in the community who were radicalized in different ways so that in 1971 when the invasion of Laos happened, we organized a demonstration against the war. 

In that demonstration, there were a lot of Vietnam vets who were part of our work and other people as well. And what they didn’t expect, the police, was that they thought we’d be like college kids and run. The difference was it wasn’t that kind of group. It was a group of hard-fighting, hard-drinking, crazy working-class kids. So when the police attacked, we all stood and fought, and really fought. The headline I still have on my wall at home, which said 21 police sent to the hospital. And people got charges like assault and battery, intent to commit mayhem and murder and other things like that. And I was charged, but that’s another story, because I broke this cop’s nose when he tried to arrest me. 

So, it was a really center of radicalism, both in organizing and in militancy in the city. And it changed laws. I mean, TUG changed the tenant laws in Baltimore working with radical legal aid lawyers who were on the left working in legal aid. And we would organize rent strikes and put the money aside in case we had to give it back. But anyway, we actually changed the law to benefit the tenants of Baltimore through our work, through our rent strikes. 

So, it was a heady period in the early ’70s here. We were doing a lot of stuff. People’s Free Medical Clinic was unheard of. It was like doctors and nurses giving their time when they were not getting paid to work in a medical clinic for poor working class people in the city. So, it was a very special time to be part of. Nobody planned it that way. It just happened. We were just there and we just began to organize and work.

MICHAEL FOX:  There’s something I think that’s really important that is oftentimes missed or people don’t make this connection, and that is the deep roots between organizing, activism, standing up, and our right to free speech. And I don’t necessarily mean the free speech movement. I just mean our right to stand up and speak out. I feel like these are two different things. Someone might be, oh, First Amendment. Oh yeah, that’s over here. Or oh, that’s our right to speak. And then organizing activism or protesting, it’s as if they’re separate, but they’re not. 

You said something a couple of episodes ago that really stuck with me and you said free speech is organizing. It is coming together and taking action to actually organize. Can you talk a little bit about that?

MARC STEINER:  Free speech is at the root of the struggle for independence in the 18th century in this country. That’s where it began. You may have gone past that in terms of Marx and the wobblies and the rest, but the roots we’re in is very American.

And that we demand the right to say [what] we have to say and to organize and to stand up and speak. And if it’s done right, it can be a very scary opposition to those in power. And I think that’s what we saw. And I think there’s a movement afoot now to clamp down on free speech in this country. I see a lot of what we face in America today as a reaction to what we did 50 years ago that’s been building over these decades. And the fight to stop free speech is part of it. You’re seeing it across the country. On campuses today, many campuses are doing their best to shut down radical protestors on their campuses, to end the right to stand up and say what you have to say. It’s one of the fundamental rights in any democratic society. You can’t have it without it. It’s uncomfortable. It can be misused, but you have to have it.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, talk to me about theater and what theater means to you. It’s been a huge part of your life, but it’s something that when I go back and when I hear stories or you tell stories, it’s like the theater piece, which is so important and that you’ve worked in theater for years, those stories end up sidelined a little bit or I don’t hear that often. Talk to me about what does theater mean to you and how important has this been in your life and why?

MARC STEINER:  Theater’s always been part of my life since I was a teenager, especially once I got to Stockbridge, the high school I graduated from. But we had this Broadway theater guy as our acting teacher and stuff. 

But I think that theater of the streets and the underground theaters across America and the world played a vital role. We would do street theater against the Vietnam War where we would act out what’s happening to the Vietnamese and actually pulling people into it who are on the street. It didn’t always work so well because people resisted, but that was part of it. And we made the bridge between this is what happens to the Vietnamese people and we’re dressed like American soldiers. 

So, I think that there’s always been a radical left element in theater, especially in Europe and here in the United States. And I think that it has always played an important role. Things like the living stage in DC. The guerilla theater movements in New York and San Francisco and LA and Baltimore where we would act out things on the corner to show the world what was going on in Vietnam, to show the world what was going on in poor communities, to show the world the threat against our very democracy and rights to freedom in this country. I haven’t thought about this in a while. There were some brilliant theatrical minds who dove into this all over. 

And I think that, in retrospect, it had a greater effect than you think. Because you’re bringing theater into community and into the streets that make people stop, especially when you pull them into it, force them to be part of it. And they weren’t expecting that.

So what people don’t realize it doesn’t get much play, it got play in some books, is that theater has always been part of political movements, especially on the left. More on the left than the right for sure. And they were in the Civil Rights Movement. There was Freedom Theater and part of SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And the music was, the Freedom Singers as well. And we had Living Theater in New York City, which was a group nobody knows about anymore, but it was this incredible theater on the streets. They went out and did this incredible work, original work that really talked to issues and talked to people. They were an influence on me. 

I’ve been in theater forever. And I taught at Baltimore School for the Arts for 15 years. The sophomore ensemble was mine. And I worked in prison theater. I ran a therapy program for inmates under 21 in an adult prison. And a world famous actor came out of our group, Charles S. Dutton, who left us too soon. He became known as Roc, and he had a TV show called Roc. So, I started a theater company in the prison and we performed in the prison and guys flocked to it because I did theater classes twice a week inside jail. A good part of my life it was at the center of my work.

And being inspired by left theater in Paris, in London, New York, in Palestine-Israel where actors were crossing boundaries early, the Palestinian and Israelis coming together to do political theater. And those things are getting lost. And they’re very effective, and they become a voice that doesn’t get heard otherwise.

People don’t realize in SNCC, the Freedom Theater that performed all throughout the South. Nobody talks about that anymore, but they were doing these performances in churches, in cotton fields across the South. And political theater seems to have lost its power at this moment. It may resurrect itself. Always does. 

But it’s incredibly important because you’re doing… When we had guerilla theater in the streets around the Vietnam War, we did it all over Washington, DC, is where we had our Washington Guerilla Theater. And we would literally pull people out of the crowds and make them prisoners to give them the feeling, what it felt like to be a Vietnamese stuck in this hell of an American war. And in working-class communities, it gave people an outlet, a creative outlet they didn’t have before. We became from weirdo theater people into actually being part of the community.

MICHAEL FOX:  It’s incredible how, as you’re mentioning this, it comes to mind just how much theater is this deep form of communication because you’re not just telling a story, but you’re actually part of it. You’re actually acting it out. And particularly when it’s guerilla or when it’s on the street, you’re trying to incorporate other people. So, you’re literally being immersed in the story as if you are an actor, as if you’re actually living it yourself and how profound that is. It’s another form of communication, but even more active. But even more active.

MARC STEINER:  You had the Living Theater, you had the Diggers, you had the Art Workers’ Coalition, and Guerilla Action Group. You had all these groups around the country who were deeply involved in community life. And what they did was interpret people’s lives through the theater. Interpret what you’re going through through theater. To have a creative outlet to allow that to happen.

And they were part of a movement. We did that when we were organizing the Tenants Union Group. Besides changing the law, we actually created theater in the community about what it felt like to be evicted from your home. You interview people, get their stories, and you turn that into theater to tell people what they went through, the struggles they’ve gone through to tell that story. And we did that with Vietnam vets, took down their stories and then performed their stories to talk about what people went through. And there were very highly emotional pieces that really affected people because you were using… And some of the people who acted with us were Vietnam vets, [a lot of us] were not Vietnam vets. We were anti-war vets. 

But to tell that story and also to tell the story using the voices of Vietnamese, we turned some of that into radio theater as well. When I did my Vietnam documentary series, we did nine audio documentaries and some video, most of them were audio. We spent a lot of time with Vietnamese actors and bringing stories back to create stories that emotionally told the story of what it was like to live through that war from the Vietnamese side.

Political theater is not always popular with some people, but it’s important. If there’s anything I miss more than other stuff, it’s missing the theater. I miss the theater. I do. I might have to rectify that.

MICHAEL FOX:  That’s right. 

Marc, what was the first time that you were on air? Tell me the story of how your show began.

MARC STEINER:  Everything in my life has been an accident [Fox laughs]. Nothing completely planned, totally. So, it was 1992, ’93. I was trying to create a history of the Jewish people through their music. It was the history of Jewish music. And we did a couple of episodes. WJHU then was the public radio station of Baltimore. I raised some money, did a bunch of interviews, and I was trying to create this history of Jewish music. I was trying to make a bridge then because I was, having been a Zionist, I wasn’t part of the anti-Zionist movement, I was trying to build a bridge to tell the story. But anyway, so that’s how it began.

So, at the station, for various reasons, the series didn’t take off. But I went into the general manager’s office, David Craig, good guy. And he said to me, Marc, we’re thinking about starting maybe a talk radio thing on the station — It was a classical station then — And he said, you know Baltimore, you know politics, you know life, you know lots of stuff. What do you think about that? And out of my mouth came, I think you should let me be the host [Fox laughs]. He said, what? You don’t know radio? You’ve never even run a radio show. How could you be the host? I said, give me the mic. I’ll be the host. 

And so we went back and forth, and he opened a door he shouldn’t have opened. And I kept bugging him. I kept hocking him. Hocking is the Yiddish term for bugging somebody. I kept hocking him. And he finally said, OK, man, look, I’m taking All Things Considered off every Tuesday night from 7:00 to 8:30. No money. No producer. See what you can do. And I said, OK, I’ll take it.

And I did. And the first show I did was a debate on Norplant. Nobody knows what Norplant is anymore.

MICHAEL FOX:  No.

MARC STEINER:  Norplant was a controversial drug implanted in women’s arms to keep them from getting pregnant. And it was being used in inner city neighborhoods. So, I had this debate between four people, pro and con. That was the first show. 

And then it just grew from there. Every week, I would do a show a week on many different subjects. I did a show from inside prison, inside a juvenile center. I did shows on abortion rights. I did shows interviewing politicians. And we did a lot of community. We led a lot of broadcasting from the community itself. And then the show went from Tuesday nights to Tuesday and Thursday. And then it went from Tuesday and Thursday to Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. And then it went from Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And we just built the show out.

And then they decided to sell the station. Johns Hopkins wanted to sell the station. So, I helped lead the movement to buy the station. And we raised the money to buy the station. And I went to all these really wealthy people and raised money from listeners and raised 5 million bucks and bought the station. And then I was vice president for broadcast, and I went to a full-time talk show host as well, Monday through Friday, noon to 2:00. That’s how it started. And it opened a world for me that allowed me to bring voices to the air that wouldn’t be heard anywhere else.

[Overlapping radio clips play]

We did the work that other public radio stations did, public radio shows did. But we brought voices on from the left. We brought voices on from poor working-class communities. We brought voices on organizers, and we brought the traditional points on as well. But to me it was a balance that was missing from poor working communities, from organizers, and bringing issues up they didn’t want to bring up. 

And so, we built the show and it became very popular, and we ended up buying two other radio stations in Maryland. So, the broadcast went across the state into DC and up into Pennsylvania and into West Virginia and then became nationally known, and I eventually lost the internal wars where I was pushed out. That led to a revolt where people picketed the station for like six months, but never got back there. 

No public radio station had ever brought voices of color onto the station as the main part of the broadcast, and I did that, and to really broaden the audience in ways that didn’t exist before. It was a great part. It was great. It was a lot of work, but it radically changed radio in Baltimore, at least for that period.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, what should journalism be? Real journalism, for you?

MARC STEINER:  Oh, Lord… real journalism has to get under the headlines and under the news. Real journalism has to bring in voices that are not heard anywhere else. Not just your pontificators or paid a huge salary. I mean, they’re part of it as well. They’re going to be there, but you got to bring other voices in. You can’t be cozy with elected officials. Your job is to question elected officials, not to be their best friend. Your job is to bring the voices of the street, of the community, whatever that community is, to the airwaves. 

For me, in terms of racism and race in America, it means no matter what subject you’re talking about, whatever that is, whether it’s politics or theater or music or culture, whatever it is, you have to bring voices of color into the conversation, always. And in this city that meant Black voices, Latino voices, whatever that is, that you can’t let it be the domain of white men talking. And I know I’m a white man talking, but that’s not the point. The point is when you’re doing the work, you have to change it from the inside.

One of the attacks I got when I was in WYPR from the guy who took over the company and from some of the board members is there were too many Black people on the air. And that mindset’s there, and you have to fight it.

One of the great beauties of America, as we know, this country has its issues and they run deep, but we are the most multiracial, multicultural nation in the history of humankind. We have to make that part of our work. We have to let that resonate. We have to make that part of what we produce and do and work. We forget that. 

Yeah, racism runs deep. Class issues are pervasive. We’re fighting to save the environment. All that’s real, but we are an amazing place in many ways. And we forget that. For all its faults and all the fact that this country was founded by men who enslaved other human beings. The documents they wrote for white men belong to all of us. And so they had no idea they were birthing a democratic movement to upset the world, but they did. And I think those things are really important to remember.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, I listened to a talk you gave a while back, and in the talk you had a story about the question of what is communication? And there was a group of Native Americans there who had an incredible vision or understanding of what this was. Do you remember the story?

MARC STEINER:  I do. Exactly. It was something that changed my entire approach to my work. So, this one guy, Joe Waterman, he was an Arapaho holy man. They have four holy people in their nation. He was one of the four. We became very close. And we had a conversation in public and he asked the question, what is communication? And everybody had ideas, making sure you could say what you have to say and putting your ideas out there and being forceful and all those other things we would say. And he looked around the room and said, it’s one thing. It’s listening. Listening.

So, it was the beginning of my radio career, and I realized that’s the key to running conversations. That’s the key to producing something is listening to what other people have to say, not just listening to yourself, but hearing what they say and letting that kind of push the conversation and learn something new from it. You don’t have all the answers. Learn something new. 

So, whether it was me listening to a conservative person on the right or listening to a guerilla in El Salvador, listening to what they had to say and understanding that truth lives in every corner. Even though that can be on the left or right or wherever you are, that can be an anathema, it’s the only way to find the truth. It’s the only way to find out what’s really real. It’s to listen, and listen objectively to what people have to say and turn off your shit so you can hear it.

Did I say that word? Yes. I’m sorry.

MICHAEL FOX:  That’s awesome, Marc. I have a quote here from someone that I want to see if you can tell me what this means to you. George Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

MARC STEINER:  Yeah.

MICHAEL FOX:  What does that quote mean to you? Why is that quote important right now?

MARC STEINER:  It’s one of my favorite statements because if you control the interpretation of what’s happened before, you control people’s understanding of why we’re here now and where we’re going. It’s a constant debate and battle. You can’t give up the struggle to control that. You have to fight for it all the time. You can’t let them define what it means to understand why we’re here, understand the struggles that brought us here and where we’re going to take them. But I think it’s a really critical thing. It’s just like the other one I said, listening. They’re both equal parts of understanding how you communicate and understand why we’re here and who you are.

And that’s why history is so important. When I first started out academically, I wanted to be a PhD in history because I needed to understand the past and the contradictions of the past. And understand the contradictions, you understand that nothing’s written in stone. Existence is struggle. It always has been, always will be. Utopian perfection is a great idea, but then pass me the joint [laughs]. 

So, I think that that concept is extremely critical to our understanding, which is why when you’re doing a program, when you’re interviewing people, you really have to step back. And everything you do is fueled by your own life. You can’t help that. But you have to step back and really listen to what people are saying so you can bring out their truth so others can wrestle with it. And if they need confronting in that process, you confront it and push back.

Which is why when I think about what we do and how important it is, we have a critical role to play in bringing understanding to the world. The truth lives in every corner and you have to listen. No one has a hold on it.

MICHAEL FOX:  Marc, is there anything else to add that you think is important about your time organizing, your time in theater, your time on the radio and its relationship to our right to speak up, our right to stand up, to speak our voice and to push for a better America?

MARC STEINER:  I go back in my head to what happened in the South and the Civil Rights Movement, which was a terrifying moment and a moment of absolute oppression. The battle for free speech that took place in the South, as I said earlier, there’s no mistake that the people who launched that battle on the West Coast were civil rights workers first and brought that idea and intellect to the movement. And we’re facing a moment again, and it’s a little different. I think we’re politically facing the most dangerous moment in my lifetime politically where the right is seizing power across the country and the racist right is seizing power.

And that now the battle for free speech is more critical than ever. We cannot let them take it away, and we have to stand up to that, tell the stories we have to tell, put it out there in every medium we can find and fight for the right to speak our minds which will be taken away from us if we don’t. That’s what we face right now. Trump is not the problem. It’s those around him that created this monster that are the problem. 

So, now from the street corner to work at Real News to other places around the country, this is where the critical work is being done. The right to speak our mind is a fundamental right in this country. We can’t let it go. We can’t let it be taken away. We can’t be pushed into a corner to fear standing up to tell the truth and to speak out.

This is Mario Savio and free speech movement on steroids, what we face at this moment. The reason that we started the underground newspapers in the ’60s where we had the Washington Free Press, where we had all the other papers around the country, was because we pushed free speech to its limits, which we had to. And we have to do it again.

Look, I’m old. Who knows, I mean, when you hit 80, you can be here a year, six months, 10 years, 15, who the fuck knows. Pardon my French again. But we have in this battle is to save this future for our children. We can’t let our freedom of speech be taken away from us. It’s at the heart of all of our freedoms. 

I did a lot of work writing and research years back on the founding fathers of this country and writing the Constitution. And it dovetailed, unknowingly to me at the moment, with my relationship with the Indigenous world. When you read some of the stuff from the 18th century, a lot of the belief in democracy did not just come from England or France, from right here, among the Iroquois, among the five civilized tribes that were the most democratic nations on the planet Earth just about. They’re the ones who taught the white colonies what it meant to be free, what it meant to be a democracy, and what it meant to let people speak their minds and say what they had to say without being ridiculed. 

And I think that’s an important lesson for us to learn that authoritarianism was brought to us by some crazy people from overseas in Europe and other places, but the fundamental basic fights for freedom are here, and they’re based on the fights [for] the abolition of slavery. All those are the roots of our freedom of speech. And we have to be really strong to stand up, to fight, and keep that freedom and push back the oppressors who are at the door.

MICHAEL FOX:  Amazing, Marc. Thank you so much, my friend.

MARC STEINER:  Always good to talk with you, man. I really love doing stuff with you.

MICHAEL FOX:  You too.

MARC STEINER:  It’s always great.

MICHAEL FOX:  It’s fantastic.

MARC STEINER:  Your work, everything else. Yeah. Always.

MICHAEL FOX:  Hi, folks. Thanks for listening. I’m your host, Michael Fox. That is all for The Battle for Free Speech. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode, and I hope you enjoyed this series. It’s been such an honor and a pleasure making it. Thank you so much for listening and caring about this podcast. You can show your support by subscribing, leaving a comment or a review in your podcasting app, and by telling a friend. It really helps to spread the word about the show and the state of free speech in the United States today.

Before I go, let me just say that we will be rolling out some incredible bonus episodes in the coming weeks. Please check those out. We’ll be bringing you some full interviews with people who I featured in this podcast as well as some more on-the-ground reporting which I just wasn’t able to fit into the official series.

If you’d like to find more about The Battle for Free Speech and my work on other podcasts, you can find me at 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 in the United States and across Latin America. You can find links to more of Marc Steiner’s work in the show notes or just search for The Marc Steiner Show. He has a ton of content out there from over his many years of journalism.

As this is the final episode of this series, I want to thank everyone who sat down with me over the last year and everyone who I spoke with on the streets. I am grateful for your insight, knowledge, and understanding. A huge thanks to all my supporters on Patreon and everyone who kicked in over the last year to help fund my reporting for this podcast and my other work. In particular, Judy Hughes and Michael and Mary Anne Fox. You are amazing. Many thanks to my musician friends, Jordan Klein and Daniel Nuñez who helped me to create the theme music for this series. Other music was from Blue Dot Sessions and Epidemic Sound. Many, many thanks to my intern and research assistant on this podcast, Ben Schweiger. He just graduated from the University of Colorado. If you are listening and you need research support, please hire him. His LinkedIn is in the show notes. 

To the team at The Real News, y’all are amazing. Tremendous thanks to Stephen Frank for his excellent sound design and production work. Huge thanks to Kayla Rivara, Max Alvarez, Jocelyn Dombroski, and also Heather Geis for your stellar editorial support. David Hebden and Cameron Granadino in the studio, you guys are amazing. Rosette Sewali, James Daley, and Ryan Johnson, thank you for everything online. Jonathan Keen, thanks for believing in my work and this project. 

In particular, I want to send a special shout out to my co-hosts who joined me over these episodes including Taya Graham, Mansa Musa, Max Alvarez, and Laura Flanders. It was incredible to speak with each of you. Thank you so much for taking the time and for all that you do. 

And above all else, thank you Marc Steiner for joining me on this endeavor. It’s been a pleasure to develop this idea into fruition, and it’s been an honor to work with you on this series. I’ve learned so much. 

The Battle for Free Speech is a production of The Real News. 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 for listening. Please keep an eye out for those bonus episodes. See you next time.

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

Michael Fox: Hi folks. Just a quick heads up before we get started. There are a few curse words in this episode. Okay, here’s the show. And you can hear me all right?

Laura Flanders: I can hear you fine.

Michael Fox: Lovely. Okay. And I will begin. Last fall, I visited the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. It’s located on this big campus in the hills west of the city. And I was there to interview people about something that had happened just the week before. So this was October, October 2025. The month before on September 10th, Charlie Kirk was killed. Remember he was a young, far right US activist, Christian nationalist, founder of the conservative organization, Turning Point USA. And he used to do these speaking tours on US campuses where he would debate people in public and put forth his controversial, conspiratorial and office racist or sexist ideas. So back in Spain, following Charlie Kirk’s killing, a young far right Spanish activist named Vito Kiles decided he was going to do the same thing in Spain, in Kirk’s honor. He was going to visit universities across the country and hold Kirk style debates in public with controversial or incendiary rhetoric.

And he kicked off his tour at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. The problem was he never really kicked it off. See, the autonomous university is one of the most radically progressive universities in the country. It has staunchly defended the independence movement for the region of Catalunia. And the university actually told him he didn’t have permission to speak because of the chaos that could ensue. So he arrived anyway and so did anti-fascist protesters who filled the main plaza. They squared off with Qiles supporters holding Spanish flags. Both sides protested, shouted at each other until the Catalunia police force showed up. And then they pushed the groups back with batons and shields and riot police and shut it all down. The following week, I traveled to the university to ask students what they thought about what happened and about Vito’s plan to try and speak. So I spoke with this one journalism student. His name is Pune Velez.

He said, Vito Quiles came here to stand with a megaphone, to shout a few things, to give a speech and not to answer questions, he said. In fact, he told me that’s even worse than what Charlie Kirk did. Another student told me everyone can have their own thoughts, but to come to a university to do anything, you have to ask for permission. And from what I understand, he didn’t have permission to come here. And he was warned in fact not to come. Jugo Guillaro sees it differently. He’s a history student who was in the group of Qiles supporters with the Spanish flag. I wanted to have a debate, he said, to share ideas even if we didn’t agree because that’s really the spirit of the university and to keep that spirit. But then he said he ended up trying to separate people and almost got hit several times.

So here’s the thing. Most of the students I spoke with, but not all of them, told me that Vito Quiles wasn’t just trying to do a speaking tour in the name of free speech. He was using Charlie Kirk’s death as a way to push his far right vision of the world and a US style free speech definition across Spain. And they say his goal was to get exactly what happened. Chaos, protests, police violence, media attention. Can you introduce yourself real fast?

Sergio Villanueva: Yeah. So my name is Sergio Villanueva Barcelova. I’m associate professor in the University of Barcelona in the communication studies and media studies.

Michael Fox: And I spoke to him about this as well. And he said

Sergio Villanueva: Every time that a right wing politician watch some notoriety, he or she goes to the Autonomous University and she gets a riot. She gets public in media. She gets publicity. So Bitokiles went to that specific university because he knew that in that specific university there is this big contestation that is very politically affirmed and he would get that reaction. He wanted this. He wanted attention.

Michael Fox: And so he got it. I think it’s important to say that the next universities where he tried to also speak on his tour also blocked him from doing so. The University of Regents essentially wouldn’t give him permission because they said he wasn’t there to have an open debate. He was there to stir up trouble and to create a media attention. And I think this is interesting because again, it shows the difference in definitions of free speech in the United States and abroad. Charlie Kirk found the space to speak on university campuses in the United States despite his controversial and incendiary rhetoric, but not in Spain. And there’s a reason for that. One student I interviewed told me,

She said, “I believe that freedom of expression is the right to say whatever you want, but the limit is when you disrespect other groups of people that have a different ideology perhaps. You can debate with a person who’s different from you, but without disrespecting them, that you have freedom of expression until you disrespect the other or the other person’s ideology. In her opinion, Vito Kiles and others on the far right have a discourse that is disrespectful to others. They thrive on attacking, dividing and using others as scapegoats. And again, as I’ve looked at a lot in this podcast, this in the United States is protected speech under the First Amendment. Their free speech is seen as absolute, but in Brazil, Europe and elsewhere, the right to free speech is balanced amid other rights. So your right to free speech doesn’t trump my right not to be harmed by your speech.

But the far right and the powerful owners of US tech firms are hiding behind the discourse of free speech to push their incendiary rhetoric. And they’re doing it far beyond the borders of the United States. Spain is not the only place where far right activists or US tech firms are trying to push their agenda abroad into Europe and their US definition of free speech. But people are pushing back. All of that in a minute.
This is the Battle for Free Speech, a multi-part narrative podcast brought to you by The Real News. In this series, we take you on a journey to understand the important role free speech has played in US history and the fight being waged over it today. I’m your co-host, Michael Fox, and I’m honored to be joined today by Laura Flanders. She is the host of Laura Flanders and Friends, formerly known as the Laura Flanders Show on public television. And she has had a long illustrious career in journalism. Laura, thank you so much for joining me today.

Laura Flanders: Michael, it’s so great to be with you and I’m fascinated by that story you just told.

Michael Fox: It is crazy and I’m sure we will dive into more of this. Laura, I just want to say I’m so excited to chat with you in particular because you kind of have a foot in these two worlds in the United States, in Europe. You grew up in the UK. You’ve had most of your professional career in the United States. And I think that’s so important for understanding this conversation today, right? Because we’re talking about free speech in these two different worlds and the different definitions and also disinformation. What does that mean? I just wanted to start, Laura, what is your definition of free speech?

Laura Flanders: Well, before we get there, I think what your story illustrates and makes a think about and what you’re alluding to in terms of what are the distinctions between a kind of European sense of free speech and an American one takes me right back to the core distinction I think really between our two cultures. One being a culture of the individual with all of its wonderful assets. In the US, we have this supposedly invilable individual right to free speech and it sort of trumps everything not to use that word. In Europe, societies there actually think about the social. It’s not horrifying to imagine a collective and to think about collective rights. Now we can always take that too far and there’s certainly histories of abuse in both countries and I hope we get a chance to talk about that. But in broad strokes, what I’m reminded, I’ve been in Barcelona also when you go back to the history, the history’s everywhere on the walls of the Civil War and that sense of a collective struggle for freedom and for a different set of priorities.

Barcelona was at the heart of that Civil War struggle for an anti-fascist, anti-authoritarian style of government complete with communists and anarchists and the autonomous university has a lot of its roots in that strugle. So anyway, you’ve kicked us off in a really interesting place because I think as we’ll see through this conversation, that comes up over and over again that European governments have a long tradition of balancing individual rights with other rights for better and for ill as well here.

Michael Fox: That’s right. That’s right. Laura, thank you so much for grounding us in that because it’s so true. And I don’t think that enough people in the United States understand this core difference and also understand this idea of society as the whole outside of the United States. So thank you for grounding us in that. So this episode, we’re going to be traveling to Europe to understand how Europeans consider free speech and also look at kind of the threats from big tech moguls to push their agenda. And in particular, this episode, I really want to focus around disinformation, fake news, and the battle against it in particular that’s happening in Europe. So Laura, I want to continue our conversation in a place that you and I were just speaking about recently and that is Northern Ireland.

Audio Clip: In a capital city in the British Isles, people are forced to flee their homes by a mob, which was intent on causing havoc and setting fires.

Michael Fox: Violent riots and fires in Belfast in Northern Ireland just took off in mid-June. They rippled across the city for several days after a violent knife attack went viral over social media. The attacker was reportedly either from Sudan or Chad and his nationality sparked a wave of anti-immigrant violence. Migrant families were forced to flee their homes. And here’s the thing, Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform X, played a key role in fueling this violence. According to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a US and UK-based NGO, Musk’s role was “instrumental” in the Belfast riots. He helped to spread calls for protests from anti-immigrant activists and politicians on X. One of them read, “Only by protesting repeatedly and loudly will there be change?” According to the report, more than half of the more than 100 million views across three accounts came from Musk’s reach on the platform.

People responded to those posts on X with nearly 4,000 comments calling for lynchings and other offenses against immigrants. And the director of that organization Imran Ahmed said no individual played a bigger role in spreading this content on X than Musk himself. As the owner of X and its most followed user, Musk has unparalleled power to shape what people see online. With that power comes responsibility for the content and conduct his platform promotes. Laura, did you see this unfold? And what are your thoughts about Musk’s role here?

Laura Flanders: Well, it’s fascinating. You know, Michael, I started as a journalist in Northern Ireland. I don’t know whether you know that, but when I was like 23, I was in Belfast in the 1980s during the so – called troubles. The Irish of course called it the trouble with England and saw conflict in the streets of the sort that we saw in the story that you just told. So for many of us, it was like a flashback to that earlier era. And younger generations who had memories of that conflict where there were Molotov cocktails thrown and bombs in the streets and troops and guns and regular gunfire, I think almost sort of dug into their roots maybe to sort of revive some scene that they’d seen in the histories of their families. I was reminded in the context of this conversation of what the free speech situation was in the ’80s when British anti-terrorism law, again, this is the other side of the collective approach to speech rights in the name of protecting the British, especially the interests of the British in Northern Ireland that were being contested by a liberation nationalist independence movement at that time led by Sinfeig and the Irish Republican Army in the name of protecting certain people from other people.

The government of Margaret Thatcher passed these Prevention of Terrorism Act laws that restricted broadcasting rights for Sinfeigh, the political party that represented the nationalist’s point of view.

Audio Clip: Hello and good morning. Yesterday, the government banned all British television and radio stations from broadcasting interviews with members of Xinfein. How are their supporters? But will it reduce terrorism or merely curb press freedom?

Laura Flanders: And they literally were not allowed on the broadcast airwaves. Now this is pre-internet, pre-YouTube, any of that. But you had this ridiculous scenario that I remember where the broadcasters got around this ban by hiring actors to say the words of the politicians. So it didn’t stop the ideas getting out there. I just made an absurdity out of the situation. And it did reduce the number of interviews that were conducted with Sinfeig politicians who had members of parliament elected to parliament by, I don’t know, I’ve seen statistics of 60 to 85% because broadcasters just didn’t want to deal with it. So they have an example of very heavy handed use of censorship by the government in the name of protecting some people from other people. And this was a period of a lot of violence. Most of it in Northern Ireland, which was at the time occupied by British troops, just to remind people.

So I’m thinking, okay, well there you have the government censoring a whole political party and point of view and its representatives. Today, it’s not the government that’s causing the problem, let’s say. It’s the owner of a for – profit privately held monopoly business. And I think you can say that X is kind of a monopoly in the sense of it holds disproportionate power, sort of uncontestable power in that sphere of commentary social media, which is worse, which is better. I mean, it’s really a very good question. And when you asked me to defin free speech and I savvily avoided answering your question, I think it’s partly because I could agree with the Barcelona students who you interviewed who said anybody has a right to say anything. They just don’t have a right to say it without contestation. They don’t have a right to say it and not be confronted by another point of view.

That’s all fine and good until you get to the point of this kind of monopoly control, this corporate control. In principle, I left the UK and came to the US because it was a land of greater freedom and independence, less sort of nanny England control of life in general. But now we’re in kind of musky United States. We’re in musky world where that control is being exerted not by the nanny state, but by corporations with a private interest, a profit motive to stir up a certain kind of conflict. So we can talk more about that, but you’ve really hit at a very fascinating place, Northern Ireland, to discuss this question of speech.

Michael Fox: This brings me back to what I was speaking with my co-host Mark Steiner in an earlier episode about how speech, when it was censored throughout the history of the United States and elsewhere, it’s always been the powerful censoring the voices, the marginalized, the poor, the black and brown, the people fighting to stand up, to rise up. And this is what reminds me when you mentioned Margaret Thatcher censoring Xin Fin and censoring the speech coming out of Ireland, it is the powerful censoring the people who do not have power. That is where you see speech. And it’s the same thing now. It is the powerful, although it’s coming from a corporation, it’s coming from Musk. It is the powerful that are doing this against others.

Laura Flanders: Although interesting, they are not so much censoring as exploiting this free speech right in the name of their corporation as an individual. And I think that’s where it all gets very complicated because they are presenting themselves as bastions of free speech, opposing censorship and sort of calling the bluff of governments that say they defend free speech. We can’t possibly talk about the history of Ireland and England without mentioning that the whole Irish language was banned under British colonial rule. So the control through language control is a part of this picture too.

Michael Fox: Absolutely. And that is exactly what this woman who I spoke with this week told me about. Her name is Jude Ferrell. She’s Irish. She’s actually a former tech worker. She worked at Google for several years. And I wanted to speak with her because last year she founded this organization, Your Tech: Their Deaths, to protest against big tech in Ireland and in particular the role of big tech in supporting the genocide in Palestine. And

Jude Ferrell: It’s a grassroots led initiative, but it’s very much so brick by brick. And a small committed group of people can impact change. And that is in Irish blood, that is in our DNA.

Michael Fox: And in fact, when she spoke, she had just left a protest in Dublin against an Israeli tech company, Sneak Technology that’s trying to sign a contract with one of Ireland’s largest banks. Anyway, about the Belfast riots, she told me it was easy for these big tech companies and Elon Musk to put the blame on immigrants.

Jude Ferrell: There is a very big issue in Ireland with a cost of living crisis, with public transport, with infrastructure, with healthcare, with education.For all this money the imperialist assets are throwing in here. Ireland is really, really struggling. And it’s very easy for social media to target immigrants, which you can’t be Irish and be racist. And

Michael Fox: I just love this quote. “We are a nation that is built on immigration, “she said.

Jude Ferrell: “We had to leave Ireland due to our own genocide thanks to the British, to our own manmade famine thanks to the British. And we went to the places like America and Australia and built those countries. You cannot be Irish and be racist. But fear is a very powerful tool to use on social media and Irish people are struggling.

Michael Fox: And this is what we saw. And I just want to give a little context about Ireland today and big tech because I don’t think a lot of people understand this. Remember first that Belfast is a city in Northern Ireland. So politically it’s actually part of the UK. But regardless, Ireland and Northern Ireland have become major tech hubs over the last two decades. More than 10% of the Irish GDP comes from the tech industry. They provide more than 160,000 jobs across the country. Although AI is already taking its toll and roughly, I think the figures from earlier this year is that 20,000 people have lost their jobs to AI just recently. Almost all of the major tech companies have their European headquarters here. And in fact, some people have even called Ireland Europe’s Silicon Valley. These tech platforms chose Ireland because they speak English clearly and because the country’s low corporate tax rate.
And Jude told me in the beginning they were really excited that these tech companies chose them. She says she was really happy to work for Google, but those times have clearly changed. She says today she is really worried about the discourse from the tech billionaires and so – called free speech absolutists infecting Ireland and Europe because they have this international reach and there are no regulations coming out of the United States. So one of the things I think that she said that was really interesting is that your future, America, is linked to ours.

Jude Ferrell: So if you fuck shit up, you fuck it up for everybody. And it’s the same with the United Kingdom. It’s the same with America. It’s same with Germany. You cannot view big tech or freedom of speech in isolation. It would be the biggest and the most naive error for any of us to take that aproach. What happens in imperialist countries like the United States trickles down to us here in Ireland.

Michael Fox: And she also told me about how, this is what you were just speaking to Laura, is that how important free speech is for her, but not the absolutist free speech that we hear about from the United States or from Musk. Not free speech where you’re inciting hatred on others, but that free speech is the most important thing in Ireland.

Jude Ferrell: Ireland, we lost our language. It was illegal to speak to learn Irish. And that impact we see generations later. And we’re only starting to understand the impact. It’s like we’ve got a hangover from our own oppression, the silencing of our religion, the silencing of our language, of our culture. So yeah, free speech is incredibly important in Ireland.

Michael Fox: So free speech, but not the freedom for the big tech platforms to run ram shot over everyone in defense of their quest for evermore power and money. Laura, how do you see all this? What does all this mean as these tech companies are arriving in Ireland and what Ireland means within this context for Europe?

Laura Flanders: Well, this takes us down a different trajectory. At least my mind goes to a different, most kind of conspiratorial place. And just for what it’s worth, I think, Ireland, Barcelona. You’ve talked about right-wing activists in these two places. What are these two places have in common? Ireland North and South has been a place of progressive activism for different reasons coming from different roots in some cases, but progressive activism for sure. If you think of the conflict, if you think of the genocide in Palestine over the last few years, it’s been Ireland that has led the United Nations along with South Africa and a few others in the calling out of the genocide and the supporting of resolutions of the United Nations that use that language and call for the prosecution of Israeli leaders.

Audio Clip: To do nothing is not neutrality. It is complicity.

Laura Flanders: Barcelona, interestingly, had one of the most anti-monopoly, anti-corporate, anti-gig economy regimes until recently with the election about a Kalao years ago. Barcelona, going back to those roots in the Civil War, has been a place of progressive foment and really strong anti-capitalist collectivist experimentation, let’s just say. It’s very proud of its cooperatives and its collectives, as I’m sure you found out. So I think, well, why are these people focusing in these places? And I can’t help but get curious about what their political motivations might be. So I’ll just say I was in Ireland recently and with respect to immigration, at least according to public opinion polls, you have majorities not just supporting immigration, but saying that they appreciate migrants. So they’re taking on, I think, a big challenge, the Bannons and Musks and Peter Thiels of the world, but it’s a challenge they seem to be up to and up for.

I just saw a report that Peter Thiel is holding a conference in Dublin convening some of the same people he convenes in this country to talk about world dominance through AI. All of this is not exactly an answer to your question, but it’s the kind of thoughts I’m having prompted by your interviews and your reporting. So thank you.

Michael Fox: Yeah. Well, there’s two very interesting things. First, so Jude told me when I asked her about kind of the far right and this discourse and immigrants and kind of the rise in the country, she said actually their bark is worse than their bite.

Jude Ferrell: I think they’re like one of those yappy little dogs. They don’t have much power or control in Ireland yet, thankfully.

Michael Fox: And in fact, what we saw in the big fuel protests that were happening back in April, big protests around the country, people standing up. She said the right was also trying to steer this in the direction of blaming immigrants and blaming immigration and people just weren’t having it. They were shut down fairly fast. So that’s on the positive side. People are standing up against that narrative.

Laura Flanders: I think one thing that’s different, the two cultures going back once again, is in the US you have our two-party system and that makes it much easier to say we’re great, you’re terrible, we’re wonderful, you’re evil, you’re the threat to all things good. In Europe, generally in Ireland certainly you have a multi-party system and you may have far right parties, but you have other parties too. There’s a much more diversity of discourse and you have, of course, a long history of multiple media at each other’s throats. People are used to weighing different opinions and the idea of one enormous megaphone influencing an important and large part of the population I think is harder to pull off there than it is here.

Michael Fox: Yeah. And you mentioned Peter Thiel, Laura, which is really important because he was going to hold his event in Ireland. And of course for people that don’t remember, he’s the Silicon Valley tech financier, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir. And he was planning this international conference of his secret organization known as Dialogue. And then they wanted to talk about World War III battlefield technologies and also how to build a cult, which were some of the things that were on the agenda. Anyway, the meeting was going to take place in this upscale hotel in Ireland, but Jude and her organization and several other groups started to organize against it. They held some protests. They were going to hold more protests over the next week. And in the end, the meeting was canceled just a couple days ago. Ah,

Laura Flanders: There you go. Popular action, go for it. They didn’t even need to protest. They just needed to say they were going

Michael Fox: To protest. Exactly. Excellent. Exactly.

Jude Ferrell: It’s not just Peter Thiel. It’s not just Palantir, but it is the audacity and arrogance of individuals like Thiel that they think that they would be welcome in any country when we know that they are entirely focused on their own power and privilege. They are not using technology or data for the good of humankind. They’re only using it to fill their own coffers.

Michael Fox: This is just one of those moments that I think we need to pause to remember that sometimes A, standing up against these things, standing up online, but also getting active, getting organized and people getting out in the streets can have an impact against what we’re seeing right now.

Laura Flanders: Well, that brings me back to our US media. How come I didn’t know that? I’ve been looking at that story. Where is it? This is why the real new This is programs like mine, independent media is so important to bring people the stories not just of the threats and the dangers, but also the victories of people’s movements. So just a little self-promotion for us.

Michael Fox: Love it. Laura, I wanted to say one more thing about that Ireland that I did not know before I move on. Jude told me that the term boycott, did you know that that was coined in Ireland?

Laura Flanders: Yes, I actually did.

Michael Fox: It’s amazing. So apparently this was when tenant farmers demanded a rent reduction in the 1880s from a British captain named Charles Boycott. That’s so cool. So cool. So anyway, again, it’s kind of a reminder of the excitement and the power and the organizing of Ireland and just gives us a little bit of hope I think. Collective

Laura Flanders: Spirit. Collective spirit.

Michael Fox: That’s right. That’s right. Laura, I want to dig a little bit deeper into this question of fake news and disinformation and the attempts to fight it. And I just want to say very quickly that I kind of feel like there’s this elephant in the room in the United States that no one’s discussing because around the US elections, 2024, pretty much all the social media platforms suddenly said, “You know what? I don’t think we’re going to fact check anymore. I think that Trump is now in office and we don’t really need to do this. ” And so it’s this thing where everybody realizes that there’s a bunch of misinformation and disinformation and fake news out there, but at least from the tech billionaires and from Silicon Valley, there’s nothing being done about this. And let me just also say that not only is there nothing being done, but Musk continues to push his narrative.

And in Ireland, that wasn’t the first time that Musk was throwing his weight around. And I just have a couple of statistics that I wanted to throw out. So first off, just remember he has 240 million followers on X. It’s the most, he’s the highest number of followers on the platform. According to a report from the European Council on Foreign Relations in recent years, he has attacked prime ministers, calling them criminal tyrants or traders. He’s backed far right parties, fabricated statistics, and reorganized X’s algorithm to amplify right-wing voices and suppress democratic accounts. In Germany, he boosted the far right party before the 2025 election and spread fabricated quotes. He posts attacks against the press roughly three times a day. And here’s the thing, he has his agenda. And of course, in the name of free speech, he is then pushing his own agenda out there.

But Europe has been pushing back in more ways than one. One way was in Ireland. The other way is the attempts to battle this information by another very unique way. And Laura, I want to take us to Finland right now.

Laura Flanders: All right, let’s go.

Michael Fox: So Finland is a Nordic country. It’s in Northern Europe, just to the east of Sweden. About a third of the country lies above the Arctic Circle and it shares a border that is 830 miles long with Russia. Russia actually controlled Finland for most of the 1800s. And that’s important because Finland has faced a barrage of Russian propaganda, troll farms and fake news in recent years, in particular beginning around the time of the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. And what Finland did is pretty revolutionary. So as we’ve looked at this in this podcast, countries have tried to battle fake news and disinformation by taking content down or going after troll farms. Like in the case of Brazil, they’ve protested and tried to regulate speech in other parts of Europe. And in Finland, they’ve tried to battle against disinformation with education. So by teaching –

Laura Flanders: Shock horror.

Michael Fox: Exactly. So by teaching the young and old to how to distinguish between facts and opinion and propaganda, how to spot it, how to critically assess where the information is coming from and what are the reputable sites and what aren’t. And before I get into this, I just want to say that this is not new in Finland. So I’m just going to give a really quick history lesson here, Laura. Remember that this country, Finland, like much of Europe, was devastated by World War II. Almost 100,000 Finns died. They fought a bloody Soviet invasion from the East.

Audio Clip: The big boulder is being press into service as part of a roadblock or tank obstacle. And here in the depths of the Caribbean woods, Finnish artillery lays down a protective barrage beyond the Manaheim line.

Michael Fox: They lost parts of their territory to the Soviet Union and then they fought alongside the Axis Powers, Germany and Italy. So they were on the losing side of the war.

Audio Clip: A Finnish communique reports that 600 Russian planes bombed Helsinki last night causing fires and heavy damage. The raid lasted nearly 12 hours, the longest and heaviest air attack of

Michael Fox: The war. Anyway, the point is this, that was a time of tremendous propaganda used by all sides, in particular from Nazi Germany. And in Finland, they were just inundated with it. And when the war ended, they began to teach what they called then communication education in schools, which also came alongside the rise of film and cinema.

Saara Salomaa: Because people have always been worried about new media. And in 1950s, they were very worried about what will happen to young people when they see all kinds of garbage in cinema. And that’s how it started. And then it has been modified over the years.

Michael Fox: They now call this media education and media literacy. And Finland outlined a national policy around this in 2013. It was the first European country to do so. And I spoke with Sara Saloma about all of this.

Saara Salomaa: I work at the Finnish Arts and Culture Agency, which is a national body responsible for media education and promoting media literacy.

Michael Fox: She told me that in her life she actually wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, Laura, but that she took a class in college about this and she got hooked. And so she ended up doing her PhD on media education for kindergarten teachers.

Saara Salomaa: So I didn’t totally give up on kindergarten, but my work is now targeting all people in Finland.

Michael Fox: So she coordinates media education across Finland. And here’s what she told me. First, it isn’t just about one class. It’s something they do across all grades from kindergarten up to high school and also for adults and even seniors. And it doesn’t just happen in schools, but also libraries and NGOs. And it kind of crosses multiple disciplines. So they incorporate this in many, many different ways. I asked her the difference between media education and media literacy because I was confused about this. And she explained that media literacy are the skills you need to learn to analyze media. And media education is the actions that promote media literacy. So how to learn this. And so she explained that it’s not just discerning fact from opinion, but understanding the social perspective of media. So what’s being said, who’s being said? And I asked her to take a step back and just explain to me what this looks like actually in a classroom on a typical day.

Saara Salomaa: It’s hard to say what is a typical school day in Finland because our municipalities, schools and teachers all have a great freedom to choose how they implement our national curriculum. But if I think about, for example, 13 year olds, a media literacy lesson would be about reading a text and trying to discern what is a fact and what is opinion, for example.

Michael Fox: Or looking at a video or ads and trying to understand what’s behind the ads, like what’s the hidden message. And this is where I want to go right now to explain this a little bit more. We’re going to travel to Helsinki Finland’s capital late 2024, November. It’s cold and snowing outside. So put on your jacket, Laura.

Laura Flanders: All right, here we go.

Michael Fox: Inside the room, a teacher passes out these pages of different images to groups of teenage students sitting around desks. They’re analyzing what the media content is trying to say, who produced it, where it’s coming from.

Teacher says, “Who has produced the material that you watch? How do you produce it? Do you have your own ethical responsibility?” I think these questions are really important everywhere. One of the students said, school has taught me to interpret media as messages written in between lines. For example, through ads or fake pictures.” She says she started to look at it from a slightly different perspective more critically in terms of propaganda and disinformation. And here’s the thing, it’s not just one subject. It’s something that’s incorporated across all aspects, all subjects. And Laura, for me, I just feel like this is so important because you would imagine that this would just be a no-brainer. Everything, our entire lives is inundated today with media.

Audio Clip: In today’s fragmented media environment, it can be hard to know which news sources you can trust. Even I don’t always know where to turn if only there

Michael Fox: Was something. In social media, it’s every place. And yet we never step back and kind of analyze critically. I looked at some of the figures and the stats in the United States around media literacy. Is that happening in the states? And from what I found, it’s roughly half of the states have passed some laws mandating some form of media literacy, but it’s really incipient. It’s really early on. They’re trying to figure this out.

Laura Flanders: Michael, it’s so interesting because what I’ve been looking at a lot recently are these age-specific digital access bans.

Audio Clip: Yes.

Laura Flanders: So in Australia, you have a ban on under 16s. In the UK, you had the Labor Party leader Starmer talking about a ban on under 16s using social media, things like TikTok and X and so on. Facebook, I think even YouTube. And the aproach is very much, let’s keep people off these platforms. And conveniently enough, in order to assess people’s ages, it all involves uploading biometric data to the web so that there’s yet more information that these huge corporations have on all of us. Biometric meaning eyes and fingers and whatever else they can use. They’re even proposing having AI assess photographs to see what age people are. You can imagine the mistakes. But the whole approach is how do we keep people off this platform rather than how do we regulate the platform? What you are providing is yet another idea is why don’t we just make people smarter?

Why don’t we just educate people? And that it seems to me is a classic collectivist in a good way approach of let’s actually inform people and give them the tools to assess this. And frankly, I think younger generations are going to be smarter about all of this than we are because they’ve seen the damage that it’s doing to their fellows. And I don’t know about you, but I know a lot of high schoolers and middle schoolers who are simply going off social media themselves because they don’t want to be tortured the way that they’ve seen their friends be tortured. So I think this is an interesting third way. And gosh, wow, how far we are from Finland.

Michael Fox: In so many ways, how far we are. Yeah. In fact, there was a stat in this one organization that had done a report about media literacy, the push for media literacy in the United States. And they said that more than 80% of students in the US would like to have media literacy classes taught. And it makes sense.

Laura Flanders: Yeah. I used to host a radio show that still is out there. It’s fabulous. Now hosted by Janine Jackson for FAIR, the Fairness and Accuracy and Reporting, the media watch groups called Counterspin. And we would sometimes go to classrooms and do simply a one-off demonstration, have people pick up their local paper or look at the news for a week and just say, okay, who got to speak? Who got to apear? How many sources were cited? How much space was used by ads versus by print? People loved it. Kids loved it. And it was the kind of thing anybody could do anywhere. Any teacher could actually initiate such a thing. People at FAIR could help. But it’s a fascinating exercise just to have people think twice about what they’re reading and listening and watching.

Michael Fox: Yeah. That’s awesome, Laura. And this was one of the questions I asked Sada. I said, “What does success look like for this? What does this look like really? ” And she said, “It’s actually kind of hard.”

Saara Salomaa: Because we don’t have a parallel version of Finland in which media literacy was never taught.

Michael Fox: I love this. But she said one of the ways is the fact that they’ve had several governments in power, the left and now the right is in power right now. And none of these governments have pushed to try and roll this back.

Saara Salomaa: Both of these governments, they have had media literacy in the program of government. So I think that is success story that regardless of what kind of political parties are in power, they still want to promote media literacy in Finland. Of course, if you would ask very right-wing politicians and very left-wing politicians what they mean with media literacy, that can be a different story. But on the other hand, they are not handpicking the initiatives themselves.

Michael Fox: And they also have something going for them in that their curriculum around media literacy isn’t governed by necessarily the government that’s in power. It’s a 10-year-long plan that they set up. So it’s not one government that can come in and then derail things and whatnot.

Saara Salomaa: And here I also think that it’s very important to stress that media literacy is not there to dictate what to think, but it’s supposed to be teaching how to think.

Audio Clip: Yeah.

Michael Fox: She also brought up several things that I think are important now. She said they’re facing many challenges, in particular reaching immigrant communities, poor communities in Finland. And the other thing is, of course, AI, which is making everything so much more complicated.

Saara Salomaa: Things are moving very quickly and it was kind of surprise for me how the big tech companies, how they took a side in the US elections and then US government.

Audio Clip: The golden age of America begins right now.

Saara Salomaa: And this has now been a topic of discussion very much in Europe that should we actually trust any US tech companies or should we try to get rid of US tech companies as soon as possible? Our chessboard is constantly changing. In media education, we have to run really fast even to stay where we are.

Laura Flanders: Well, I love her idea that there’s no alternate Finland to have as your control because that’s what we have in this country too. We’re constantly told we have free choice when it comes to media, but we don’t really. We have a limited array of options. So it’s not like you can just say, “I hate those networks. I’m going to go pick another one.” So that’s another way in which our media diet is presented to us as this wonderful universe of freedom, but it’s really not. It’s really who has the power, money to get to your eyeballs and that isn’t everyone.

Michael Fox: Exactly. So Sada said in closing that this was not a silver bullet.

Saara Salomaa: We can provide people possibilities to learn and to discuss these topics, to understand that not all the information is the same. So there are more and less reliable sources and they can develop practices that help them to recognize this information, for example. But at the same time, we need to also strengthen people’s trust in trustworthy media.

Michael Fox: It’s one answer to the threat and there need to be multiple answers. And that is the direction that I want to go into right now because as the United States has always pushed for deregulation and as we see Musk and Silicon Valley tech barons always talking about how regulation is actually another form of censorship, Europe has been pushing to fight with regulation. And I think it’s important to just underline this point before we dive into this, is that in the United States, this question of tech barons talking about regulation as censorship is kind of repeated daily. It’s the same thing as the absolutist free speech thing. But we have a ton of regulation in the United States. Television, radio, newspapers, print, all the legacy media. It’s all regulated. It’s all there. So why not tech companies and social media?

Laura Flanders: It’s useful to go back and see, well, how did it get regulated?

Audio Clip: I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of a privileged fuel. And

Laura Flanders: For much of it, we’re talking broadcasting. It got regulated in the 1930s and ’40s under the FDR administration and just before when you had a rise of right-wing demagogues using what was then the most influential media, namely radio, to stir up fascist movements in this country, movements that we forget we ever had. But it wasn’t like it just suddenly got regulated. It got regulated as an effort to protect democratic values and a democratic society when a threat was observed in a growing media. So in that case, it was radio and then those broadcasting regulations were extended, some of them, to television. We’ve had a huge fight around new technology, whether it’s online or online or social media technology where the tech companies have done their best as they would to keep themselves free of regulation and to present themselves as these bastions of free speech.

Well, that’s the same thing that the fascist demagogues in the ’30s presented themselves as bastions of free speech. European law again takes us back to where we began in the sense that they do guarantee under their Ministry of Injustice Acts, they do guarantee that there is a right to free speech, an individual right to freedom of expression, but they give a little bit of wiggle room and say the restrictions are allowed in the defense of a democratic society. So a democratic society trumps your right to call someone a name in public and to rally crowds to take out unwanted folks in your community or whatever. So again, it’s that balancing act that the Europeans are explicitly doing even in their law in a way that we don’t. And where we do in regulatory law, the public’s not educated about it. And instead we get this very binary black white attitude to free speech.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of over binaries in general and get very suspicious whenever they crop up.

Michael Fox: Amen. Absolutely, Laura.

Laura Flanders: Let’s live in the squishy middle.

Michael Fox: Amen. I love it. I love it. I want to underscore really quick the links that tech platforms have gone to to push their agenda and to stop the possibility of regulation. According to a 2025 investigation led by the Brazilian media outlet Ajen Shepublica together with Reporters Without Borders and several other outlets and journalists across numerous countries, between 2019 and 2025, big tech companies carried out nearly 3,000 lobbying actions across 10 countries and the European Union. It involved more than 1,400 company representatives and 2,500 public officials. Among the tactics were disinformation campaigns, funding supposed independent groups to oppose legislation, hiring former public officials to lobby in favor of the companies and arguing that national laws don’t apply. So the tech companies have gone to very unfair extreme lengths to push their agenda to ensure that regulations are not imposed on them. And specifically for this podcast, of course, they’ve been using all of this in the name of free speech, supposed free speech to defend their right to be unregulated under the guise that regulation means censorship.

Laura Flanders: It’s interesting because it has its parallel, of course, in the world of economics where you have governments at the local level often doing things like trying to ban big box stores, Walmarts or name it, and those same corporations saying this is a violation of our rights. They’re using the same argument we’ve seen over years, their power versus community power. This is the fight we’re in. And I don’t think there’s a more important fight in our lifetime.

Michael Fox: Absolutely. Absolutely. But the EU has moved forward.

Audio Clip: Hate speech and disinformation online. This is what we’re all fed up with, right? In the European Union, a groundbreaking new law is coming into effect this week to tackle exactly these problems.

Michael Fox: The European Union approved the Digital Services Act in 2022 and the European Media Freedom Act, which went into effect in August 2025. And of course these aren’t perfect, but they are steps in the right direction. And this is complicated, really complex legislation. I’m going to try and sum it up in about a minute or two here, Laura.

Laura Flanders: Good luck.

Michael Fox: But broadly, the Digital Services Act aims to increase transparency and accountability for big tech companies.

Audio Clip: Nothing in the DSA forces or asks or requests a platform to remove lawful content. The only thing that is being asked is illegal content. Content that is illegal in real life has no place online.

Michael Fox: And the European Media Freedom Act creates a set of rules to protect media pluralism and independence in the EU. So protecting media companies, journalists, and outlets that are already there. Anyway, I sat down and spoke with Eva Nenadic.

Iva Nenadic: Here I’m the scientific coordinator of the Center for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom.

Michael Fox: At the European University Institute just outside of Florence, Italy. She’s been a journalist for 10 years. She’s now a professor and she really knows her stuff because she’s actually been working in developing the framework around fighting disinformation through these acts since 2018. And I just want to say really fast that usually when we start to talk about regulation, myself included, my eyes kind of glaze over and I start looking out the window. It’s hard to stay focused when we’re talking about regulation because it’s something that’s so complex and confusing. But this stuff has real world impacts.This is really important and we need to understand it. So first off, tech platforms, social media AI, some of it is the most powerful technology information revolution we’ve ever seen and yet it’s a free for all. And so Eva told me that the goal is to try and reign in the online lawlessness and the power of big tech.

Iva Nenadic: Innovation is important, is relevant. It will sustain the Europe as we want to have, but at the same time, we cannot just unleash the wild west of innovation that doesn’t take any accountability or responsibility for the societal implications that these technologies, the way they are designed, but also the way they are used and misused.

Michael Fox: That is the logic of this legislation. Just to remind people, the EU is made up of 27 member countries and that this legislation is what they call regulation. So it means that they create regulation and then they send that to these countries to apply it harmoniously across the EU. I’m trying to envision in my head how this is done, how you could even do this in one country. And here we’re talking about 27 countries, so I can’t even imagine. But the biggest takeaways here are the Digital Services Act. Remember, this is about creating more transparency and accountability. The platforms are mandated to carry out yearly strategic risk assessments over what’s considered illegal speech, problematic, harmful speech. Large online platforms now have the legal obligation to provide access to their data to independent researchers.

Iva Nenadic: So this is really a game changer compared to what we’ve had before where European researchers were really struggling to get acces to platform data. And this was preventing us really from understanding what the risks are, what potential implications of any kind of action or activity by big tech are here in Europe.

Michael Fox: Regarding disinformation and particularly around the online discourse during elections, this is something that they’ve been, like I mentioned, they’ve been trying to tackle for almost a decade and it’s really complicated. And she gave one example why. I don’t know if you remember this, Laura, but disinformation isn’t just used for political purposes, but often monetary purposes. And she told me about this story of the Macedonian teenager during Trump’s 2016 electoral campaign.

Audio Clip: Dmitri is 18 years old and he says that in the past six months he’s made more than $60,000 writing, posting and sharing fake news articles about the American election.

Michael Fox: NBC did this story. It was titled Fake News, how a parting Macedonian teen earns thousands publishing lies. Her point was that –

Iva Nenadic: Monetization can also be an incentive for disinformation. Doesn’t need to be just political. It can also be very economic.

Michael Fox: And so part of what they’re trying to do, the Media Services Act handles disinformation in kind of a self-regulatory framework. It loops back to the risk assessment. So they have to assess risk once a year. And then the companies have to show that they’re taking action against this risk to regulate things on the platform. Of course, the Digital Services Act, it can’t tell these companies what they should and should not do in terms of taking things down or not taking things down, but it’s pushing these tech platforms in a direction that they actually have to take actions. And there is a policing mechanism around this that these companies can be fined.

Audio Clip: If at some point we come to a non-compliance decision confirming the breach under the Digital Services Act, this could lead to fines going up to 6% of the company’s global annual turnover.

Michael Fox: So that’s the Digital Services Act. And then there’s the European Media Freedom Act, which is essentially about really protecting the legacy media companies against the power and the growth of these tech firms. Because the way that Eva explained it to me is that these other companies are already regulated. Newspaper, television, radio, they already have their own regulations. They’re doing what they’re supposed to.

Iva Nenadic: So big tech companies that do not comply to the same level of regulation and they barely have any professional standards in operating should not be the ones who kind of censor media if you want me to simplify this very much.

Michael Fox: And so the idea is kind of protecting media content and giving these media outlets more power within this to receive special treatment on these platforms. They should be allowed to register. They should be able to receive preempted information or informed if anything is supposed to be removed. And so the idea is trying to move in a direction of what she calls, what Eva Nenedice calls more democracy.

Iva Nenadic: I think the very history and constitutional understanding of freedom of expression or free speech is different between the EU and the US. I think in some foundations it’s the same. So we are both striving… To have healthy democracy and the foundation for healthy democracy is free speech.

Michael Fox: Open communication, academic freedom, the freedom for people to voice their opinions, but –

Iva Nenadic: Instead, what we are increasingly having nowadays is extreme fragmentation and polarization. One of the paradigmatic shifts that have led us somehow to this is the very change of the basic infrastructure of the information environment. Because what we are seeing and how these platforms operate social media and now also moving to generative AI with gen AI applications, they are fragmenting information environment. They are separating us first in small groups through social media of like – minded people. And now with generative AI, we are shifting to what we call audience of one, where we interact with these systems in a very isolated, individualized bubbles. This is not compatible with democratic needs of a shared information ecosystem. And so this is in basics, in design is wrong.

Michael Fox: What she told me is just like we’ve been talking, Laura, what we’re increasingly seeing is this fragmentation, this polarization. Everyone’s broken into these two sides of us versus them. And it’s because of the very structure and infrastructure of these big tech platforms that this is happening.

Laura Flanders: Well, I want to take on the word big and them, because when you talk about big platforms, we know we’re talking about this big five players in this world, in this field that we’re talking about. We talk about them. There’s not so many of them. There’s a small number. I think that’s the problem. And I don’t think that any amount of regulation by government, even governments representing 27 countries or government representing 50 states is any match for a corporation that has more revenues and more private profits than many of the countries or states that we’re talking about put together. So I want to come back to inequality, corporate power and the sort of initiative that I think we have to get much more serious about. We can regulate ourselves as much as we can and engage in no end of fights with these guys about who is more for free speech.

I think it’s a losing battle, frankly. I think that what we need to see is more legal action to break up monopolies of the sort that Lena Khan was pursuing in the Biden administration. It’ll be interesting to see what she does collaborating with Zora Mamdani in New York as New York becomes like Ireland, a tech hub for some of these media companies. But I think that at the end of the day, we’re going to need to grapple with the ownership of these companies and the size of them. And I really don’t want to end these conversations, Mike, without talking about Bernie Sanders American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which is just one example of a different approach to regulation. Rather than regulating these companies, let’s put 50% in this case, he proposes 50% of their stock assets into a sovereign wealth fund for the American people.

I think you could go further. I think you could find other ways of breaking up these huge corporations. They are running, let’s not forget, on our intelligence. It’s not artificial intelligence, it’s human intelligence, it’s ours, it’s stolen. And we not only deserve some profit from the wealth that they’ve stolen from us, but we have some right to control. And I just don’t think there’s a way to regulate companies as big as these. Not when it comes to where they put their big box stores, not where it comes to how much of our data they siphon up and how they use it. So I’m sorry to come on sounding such a naysayer to the Europeans. I think they’re doing the best thing they can. But if it’s little us versus enormous monopoly, both of them, it’s an unfair battle. In the 1800s, in the 19th century, we had massive fights to break up monopoly business at the level of manufacturing.

We are in a new economy now and we need to have those fights all over again for our sake, for the sake of our intelligence, our democracy, and for our planet. Because the other front of this conversation is these AI companies and their use of our water and air and land to process the data that they’re taking from us at no charge stealing.

Michael Fox: Absolutely, Laura. Absolutely. And I think this is interesting because it’s something that Mark Steier and I have talked about in the past about the time of antitrust and the breaking up of monopolies and how important this is and how we have to come back to this. What’s terrifying for me right now is we’re actually seeing the consolidation of media companies. Yeah,

Laura Flanders: We’re going in the opposite direction.

Michael Fox: Exactly. But that is where we need to be. And I so appreciate you bringing that back and tying this in, particularly as we near the close of this conversation.

Laura Flanders: And honestly, I don’t want to dismiss the importance of those regulations pass by Europe. They are important. They did make a difference. You can tell they made a difference because they scared the heck out of the companies. Microsoft, Google, they all freaked out. So clearly there is some bite to their bark, but I think the bigger problem is inequality and control.

Michael Fox: Yeah, absolutely. Laura, I want to just mention some closing thoughts that have been really important for me in doing this episode and also kind of closing thoughts because this is in a way kind of one of the last episodes of this podcast series. And so I have a couple things that I want to mention and I’m so glad to be doing this with you today. But first I want to go back to Barcelona and back to Cerco Villenueva. So he’s the communications professor I spoke with at the top. And he said something that I think is really important. And this is particular in terms of understanding fake news and disinformation and why it’s so complicated and why it’s so hard to push back on and why it’s so powerful for Trump of others on the far right is he said that it’s hard to combat it because it generates an emotional response.

Sergio Villanueva: This automatic answer is very difficult to train. So some author will say, yes, we can train that by education. I think education has a small part to do, but we need to be aware of how our brain works. So we need to have cognitive science knowledge.

Michael Fox: So he says we have to train our mind around this. We need to live in a constant state of skepticism. And that’s hard. And he told me this just beautiful metaphor, Laura, that’s used by the American psychologist, Jonathan Hate.

Sergio Villanueva: Jonathan Hate explains that our brain is like an elephant that has a jokey. A jokey that writes the elephant. So the automatic brain is the elephant and the jokey is difficult to manage to direct and to drive an elephant. And that jockey has to use a lot of energy to make rational cognitive processes. So I would say that try to train your jockey to be constantly active.

Michael Fox: And that’s kind of like what we’re seeing in terms of trying to handle the amount of fake news. And that’s why it goes so viral so fast. The other thing he said, Laura, is that it is not all bad. Social media is not all bad. The new media ecosystem is not all bad. And I really, as someone who has a teenage daughter and who is trying to grapple with social media means today and having worked on this entire podcast, it was important for me to hear this. So he says young people are living in a different media ecosystem.

Sergio Villanueva: And we cannot teach them how to navigate because we don’t know how to navigate in their ecosystem. So it’s a mutual learning process and we have to be very open to be taught by them.

Michael Fox: Now some youth are actually using AI, using social media in these creative ways to build new stories, to build new myths, new waves of understanding morality. But oftentimes we’re just not seeing it. Maybe we’re not on the same platforms or we’re not following the same stuff because everyone is kind of in their own silo. But there’s this one example that he gave and this is about the Puchina avocado. Have you ever heard of this?

Laura Flanders: No, I’m dying to hear.

Michael Fox: Okay. It is crazy and it’s hilarious. So basically in recent days after he told me about this, I went online and I started looking. It’s mainly on TikTok and they’re all these little one or two minute stories or tales that all start off with the legend of the Puchina avocado. And this is all in Spanish. And so people create their own AI videos. And it could be like I watched one that was like the legend of the Puchina avocado and the football game. And it’s like creating these tiny little myths. And they’re hilarious because they’re clearly done to be funny, but they also have these moral underpinnings. And it’s fascinating because people, they see it and then they copy it and they make their own. So there’s done with AI, there’s done with other forms of AI, these images. And you see this little avocado walking on a football field or little avocado.

It’s crazy, but they really are creating this whole new system of stories.

Sergio Villanueva: And you get into it and you get into a whole world. Histories that are cross values, new heroes, new heroines, new anti-heroes that we are not aware. Yeah, it’s crazy. And I guess this is in Spanish. In English, there are other similar phenomenon like this.

Michael Fox: And it’s really, really beautiful.

Laura Flanders: So how about this, Michael? Instead of a ban on under 16s on the internet, how about we have a ban on over 16s? We can listen, we can learn, but we can’t put more stuff up there. Wouldn’t be good for our businesses you and I, but hey, we could take a pause. I think we might learn something and we might learn something beautiful. How do you spell puchaina?

Michael Fox: P-U-C-H-A-I-N-A. I can send you a link and I will put a link in the show notes to where people can find this. It’s really cool. It’s really cool. The one other thing I want to mention today is one of the things that I’ve really gotten from this whole experience researching, investigating and working on this podcast over the last year, Laura, is how much we are increasingly living in a divided world and that powerful people like Trump and those in Silicon Valley use that division for their gains. It’s us versus them. And that more and more, what I come back to is the need for us to find common ground, to find our common place to return to our society, kind of what you were talking at the top. Democracy is about us being able to listen to each other and having conversations not always agree, but also disagree.

And for me, no one’s asked me what my definition of free speech is in this podcast just yet, but what I – Free speech, Michael. Thank you, Laura. Thank you. What I come back to, for me, free speech, we need to be able to listen. Free speech does not work if we’re not listening. And I mean, I feel really strongly about that. After a year, we have to have the right to speak our voice and we should be required to listen as well. And there is something that I think was really beautiful and really profound from my conversation with Sata from Finland because she talked about this concept that they put in their policy. It’s actually included in their policy booklets around media education, media literacy. And it’s a Finnish concept called. I know I did not pronounce that right and I apologize for those in Finland.

It’s similar to apparently the German concept of buldung and there is no real translation for it in English, but the idea is it’s a holistic process of self-cultivation.

Saara Salomaa: But also with Civistis comes also the kind of tolerance. It doesn’t mean that you would accept everything, but you understand that there are different points of view and different perspectives to many aspects.

Michael Fox: She says, for them, it’s like this key aspect of democracy because facts are important, but they can be used and they can be biased. But Civisti needs to always ground us in society. It’s the way we have to relate with each other in the world. It’s empathy. And I saw it described in one place as a kind heart and a critical mind. And I really like this idea as something to grasp or strive for, to ground us particularly now in this insane world as people are being pushed aside as a way for us to ground us and something to try and bring us together.

Laura Flanders: I for many, many years have used a sign off that I think speaks to exactly that. And recently I had it written on my arm because I felt that I needed to be reminded. And it was simply stay kind, stay curious, which is a lot of what I’m hearing there. And I think you’re right, it’s listening, it’s pausing, it’s empathy using that empathy muscle. I think that as we think about our education process, there’s media literacy, there’s comprehension. We need the arts. We need the arts that encourage people’s imagination and to use their imagination to think themselves into other people’s reality so that maybe there’s a moment of pause between the inhale, oh my God, scary thing and an immigrant did. I’m being told on the internet. And exhale, therefore I should go out. What should I do? Wait, maybe I should think about that.
Immigrant, does this make sense? We need those pauses. So I love this idea and I love this series, Michael. You’ve done a wonderful year of work and you and Mark did an amazing thing. And thank you so much for letting me be part of it here at the tail end. It was a pleasure and a privilege.

Michael Fox: Thank you so much, Laura. I really apreciate it. And it’s such an honor and a pleasure speaking with you today. It’s been a gem. So thank you so, so much.

Audio Clip: You’re welcome.

Michael Fox: Hi folks. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Next time.

Marc Steiner: Now the battle for a free speech is more critical than ever. We have to stand up, tell the stories we have to tell, put it out there in every medium we can find and fight for the right to speak our minds, which will be taken away from us if we don’t. That’s what we face right now.

Michael Fox: Next week I’ll spend the entire hour with my co-host, Marc Steiner. He was with me for the first three episodes and in so many ways his life has represented the epitome of what standing up for free speech should mean. Civil rights activist, community organizer, educator, journalist, radio host. For most of his 80 years, he’s been speaking truth to power and I can’t wait to bring you this exclusive finale to this podcast series. That’s next week on the Battle for Free Speech. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and you like this series, please do us a favor, go to your podcasting app, leave a review and tell a friend. It really helps to spread the word about the show and the state of free speech in the United States today. If you’d like to find out more about the Battle for Free Speech and my work on other podcasts, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox.

There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer and sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting in the United States or across Latin America. This really helps me to continue to do this important work. I’m adding links to everyone I spoke with today in the show notes and a huge thanks to Laura Flanders. It was really a pleasure having you on the show. I’ll add a link to her show, Laura Flanders and Friends, also in the show notes.

Finally, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you’ll never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com. The battle for free speech is a production of The Real News. Thanks for listening. See you next time.