Jacob Mchangama, founder of The Future of Free Speech, explains how free speech has shaped America, from Frederick Douglass fighting slavery to Supreme Court cases protecting voices that promote hate. He argues that today, tech platforms twist our view by promoting extremists for clicks, making it feel like free speech is the problem. But free speech only works if all voices are allowed. According to Mchangama,  it is silence that truly damages equality and democracy.

JACOB MCHANGAMA: So the nature of power is to protect its own status and expand its existing powers.

And so power rests in an uneasy relationship with free speech because free speech is explicitly in place to allow those who don't have power to confront those in power.

If you want to shine a light on abuses of government, if you want to petition politicians for change, your most important weapon really is free speech. It's the most important freedom.

But people in democracies that have benefited from free speech are losing faith in this freedom. Historically, free speech has not been around for that long, so it is not a right that we can take for granted. And we stand to lose a whole lot if we give up on free speech.

My name is Jacob Mchangama. I am the founder and executive director of The Future of Free Speech, an independent think tank at Vanderbilt University. I'm also the author of the book Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media.

Right now, we're living through what I would call a free speech recession. For more than 10 years, maybe approaching 15 years, free speech has been in decline. You know, there was a time around the 1990s, the early 2000s, when I think people were very bullish and optimistic about the future of free speech and democracy and saw technology as supercharging these values.

But what we see is that authoritarian states have learned to reverse engineer the technology that was supposed to be liberating. They have turned them into tools of high-tech surveillance and censorship. And unfortunately, we even see democracies becoming more and more apprehensive about the benefits of free speech, thinking that free speech has now become a threat to democratic societies because it allows disinformation and hate speech and extremism to go viral.

So we take the benefits of free speech for granted and we focus myopically on the dark sides of free speech. And that leads us to get a skewed perception of how important free speech really is.

Frederick Douglass is a very, very powerful and compelling example. So he's a runaway slave who, without any education, becomes one of the nation's leading, if not the leading, orator. And he uses the power of speech to convince people about the injustice of slavery.

Because you have to remember, if you were enslaved in the South, the First Amendment did not apply to you. You could be beaten. You could be killed with impunity if you spoke back to your owner, or if you in any way challenged the racial hierarchy.

And so if you allow someone like Frederick Douglass to expose the hypocrisy of, on the one hand, having Madison and Jefferson develop these great principles, but writing them while sitting on their porch in sweltering heat in Virginia, being fanned by slaves that they owned—that makes it very, very difficult to sustain the idea of slavery in a free and open debate. And people in the South knew that, and that's why they tried to suppress it.

So unlike some people today who argue that free speech is a tool to oppress and harm minorities, Frederick Douglass sees it as the other way around. He sees free speech as a precondition for human equality, especially for the oppressed.

What I think is a particularly important aspect of free speech is to say that there should be no viewpoint discrimination. The government cannot punish people for expressing specific viewpoints, however abhorrent.

There's an important historic lesson in a case called Brandenburg versus Ohio. Clarence Brandenburg, standing in KKK regalia, was speaking into a camera and he was making thinly veiled threats against Blacks and Jews, saying that if the government didn't do something about these groups, well, they might take action into their own hands. And he was convicted under an Ohio law, but the Supreme Court rejected the argument.

One of the Supreme Court justices in that case was Thurgood Marshall. Thurgood Marshall was the first African-American Supreme Court Justice. He had done more than most to fight for racial equality against segregation. So he was not upholding the rights of Clarence Brandenburg, someone who would, if he had power, take away all the rights that Thurgood Marshall had fought for.

But he saw that defending free speech, even for your enemies, is essential for minorities and for freedom and equality to thrive.

I think you're doing minorities a disservice if by law you protect them, even against hateful speech. Now, there's still a lot you can do with speech to defend minorities. You can express your solidarity. You can condemn the bigots. I think that's a much stronger way to demonstrate that you loathe an idea, rather than having the police come and arrest them, because you often risk making a martyr out of those that you want to silence.

We've come a very long way as a species. We can create incredible beauty. We can collaborate in ways that no other species can, achieving magnificent things. But we're also capable of great cruelty. We're also capable of being extremely delusional. And you need free speech to challenge those sides of ourselves, our narrow-mindedness.

So I think a resilient culture of free speech is one where a critical mass of people in a given society recognizes and values tolerance of ideas they vehemently disagree with as a strength, and that when we do have disagreement about first principles, we try to accommodate them and solve them through speech rather than violence.