>When he reentered the White House in January, President Donald Trump insisted that protecting free speech was one of his key missions. On his first day back in office, he signed an executive order called “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” which condemned the Biden administration for “trampl[ing] free speech rights” and instructed federal agencies to uphold the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. But in truth, Trump has likely done more to undermine free speech than any U.S. president since the McCarthy era. In his second term, he has launched spurious personal lawsuits against media outlets, sought to pull funding from universities whose curricula do not meet his preferences, and tried to deport foreign students and academics for political speech.
>This campaign took an even sharper turn in mid-September, after the assassination of the commentator Charlie Kirk. The Trump administration used the killing to target a wide variety of actors—military personnel, private individuals and companies, nongovernmental organizations, magazines—for their responses. Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, blamed Kirk’s death on left-wing speech and pledged “to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.” Brendan Carr boasted on Fox News that the FCC would keep ramping up its efforts to punish outlets the administration disfavors. The Trump administration has moved with startling speed from trumpeting free speech to seeking to criminalize it. At first glance, that might seem to vindicate the arguments in the historian Fara Dabhoiwala’s new book, What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea. Dabhoiwala believes that the modern obsession with free speech—particularly the American belief that almost any restriction on it threatens democracy—has blinded its defenders to how often that right is invoked cynically in pursuit of antidemocratic ends. In his view, the right to free speech has most often been wielded as “a weaponized mantra” by people motivated by “greed, technological change and political expediency” rather than as a principle invoked sincerely to restrain tyranny.
>Although Dabhoiwala acknowledges that pre-Enlightenment peoples such as the Athenians valued forms of freedom of expression, his main story begins in the eighteenth century. In that era, he writes, the idea that freedom of speech was necessary for human flourishing went viral across Europe and the United States, despite the fact that the theorists who made the argument often did so “for personal gain, to silence others, to sow dissension or to subvert the truth.” A robust and civil-libertarian interpretation of it became entrenched in twentieth-century American culture and legal doctrine, but Dabhoiwala contends that modern First Amendment jurisprudence undermined the very democratic values it was supposed to safeguard. Rather than fulfilling its promise as an “antidote to misinformation and falsehood,” he writes, the American approach to free speech “often amplifies it.”
>Dabhoiwala suggests that contemporary European attitudes toward speech are superior to the defective American conception. In his characterization, Europeans consider citizens’ right to free expression to be dependent on context and more carefully balance it with other social goods. Every EU member state criminalizes hate speech. Many also punish the “glorification” of terrorism and the dissemination of “disinformation” or “false news,” and several retain blasphemy laws. Throughout much of U.S. history, however, the United States’ First Amendment did little to shield unpopular minorities from persecution. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did it become a formidable barrier against majoritarian intolerance. Today, the Trump administration is trying to breach that barrier—a strategy that would be far easier to pursue under a European-style approach to speech. Europe’s measures have neither eliminated intolerance nor produced a public square free of falsehoods. Instead, they have expanded the state’s discretionary power over dissent. Peaceful protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, insults aimed at politicians, critiques of immigration policy, and irreverent attacks on religion have all led to investigations, arrests, and convictions—and minorities have been among those targeted by laws ostensibly adopted to protect them.
>Ultimately, Dabhoiwala’s account—both grievance-driven in its reading of the First Amendment and uncritical in its praise of European restrictions—is profoundly distorted. Its selective telling of history obscures a basic truth: across centuries, free speech has been a genuine engine of emancipation, not merely a contingent privilege. Especially now, as supposed champions of free speech seek to suppress it in the United States, it is crucial to reinforce the principle’s real meaning rather than let those who wield it cynically strip the public’s faith in its potential. Free speech has repeatedly offered the powerless a peaceful way to challenge the powerful—a legacy illuminated by key episodes in U.S. history that Dabhoiwala mostly ignores.
>Dabhoiwala directly targets the canonical thinkers who were essential in articulating modern free-speech doctrines. These include the early-eighteenth-century British writers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, whose pseudonymously authored Cato’s Letters claimed that freedom of speech is the “great Bulwark of Liberty,” and John Stuart Mill, who extolled “the liberty of thought and discussion” as essential to progress and warned against the tyranny of majority opinion. For Dabhoiwala, however, Cato’s Letters were less a noble defense of liberty than a text full of “deliberate fabrications” and “glaring contradictions.” Mill’s On Liberty was “profoundly imperialist and intellectually flawed.” In his view, these thinkers promoted a kind of false consciousness, persuading people that they were defending a universal ideal while advancing arguments that ignored the harms speech could inflict on the common good. In his telling, American free-speech exceptionalism was not a principled triumph but the most extreme outgrowth of this poisoned doctrinal tree.
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>When he reentered the White House in January, President Donald Trump insisted that protecting free speech was one of his key missions. On his first day back in office, he signed an executive order called “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” which condemned the Biden administration for “trampl[ing] free speech rights” and instructed federal agencies to uphold the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. But in truth, Trump has likely done more to undermine free speech than any U.S. president since the McCarthy era. In his second term, he has launched spurious personal lawsuits against media outlets, sought to pull funding from universities whose curricula do not meet his preferences, and tried to deport foreign students and academics for political speech.
>This campaign took an even sharper turn in mid-September, after the assassination of the commentator Charlie Kirk. The Trump administration used the killing to target a wide variety of actors—military personnel, private individuals and companies, nongovernmental organizations, magazines—for their responses. Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, blamed Kirk’s death on left-wing speech and pledged “to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.” Brendan Carr boasted on Fox News that the FCC would keep ramping up its efforts to punish outlets the administration disfavors. The Trump administration has moved with startling speed from trumpeting free speech to seeking to criminalize it. At first glance, that might seem to vindicate the arguments in the historian Fara Dabhoiwala’s new book, What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea. Dabhoiwala believes that the modern obsession with free speech—particularly the American belief that almost any restriction on it threatens democracy—has blinded its defenders to how often that right is invoked cynically in pursuit of antidemocratic ends. In his view, the right to free speech has most often been wielded as “a weaponized mantra” by people motivated by “greed, technological change and political expediency” rather than as a principle invoked sincerely to restrain tyranny.
>Although Dabhoiwala acknowledges that pre-Enlightenment peoples such as the Athenians valued forms of freedom of expression, his main story begins in the eighteenth century. In that era, he writes, the idea that freedom of speech was necessary for human flourishing went viral across Europe and the United States, despite the fact that the theorists who made the argument often did so “for personal gain, to silence others, to sow dissension or to subvert the truth.” A robust and civil-libertarian interpretation of it became entrenched in twentieth-century American culture and legal doctrine, but Dabhoiwala contends that modern First Amendment jurisprudence undermined the very democratic values it was supposed to safeguard. Rather than fulfilling its promise as an “antidote to misinformation and falsehood,” he writes, the American approach to free speech “often amplifies it.”
>Dabhoiwala suggests that contemporary European attitudes toward speech are superior to the defective American conception. In his characterization, Europeans consider citizens’ right to free expression to be dependent on context and more carefully balance it with other social goods. Every EU member state criminalizes hate speech. Many also punish the “glorification” of terrorism and the dissemination of “disinformation” or “false news,” and several retain blasphemy laws. Throughout much of U.S. history, however, the United States’ First Amendment did little to shield unpopular minorities from persecution. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did it become a formidable barrier against majoritarian intolerance. Today, the Trump administration is trying to breach that barrier—a strategy that would be far easier to pursue under a European-style approach to speech. Europe’s measures have neither eliminated intolerance nor produced a public square free of falsehoods. Instead, they have expanded the state’s discretionary power over dissent. Peaceful protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, insults aimed at politicians, critiques of immigration policy, and irreverent attacks on religion have all led to investigations, arrests, and convictions—and minorities have been among those targeted by laws ostensibly adopted to protect them.
>Ultimately, Dabhoiwala’s account—both grievance-driven in its reading of the First Amendment and uncritical in its praise of European restrictions—is profoundly distorted. Its selective telling of history obscures a basic truth: across centuries, free speech has been a genuine engine of emancipation, not merely a contingent privilege. Especially now, as supposed champions of free speech seek to suppress it in the United States, it is crucial to reinforce the principle’s real meaning rather than let those who wield it cynically strip the public’s faith in its potential. Free speech has repeatedly offered the powerless a peaceful way to challenge the powerful—a legacy illuminated by key episodes in U.S. history that Dabhoiwala mostly ignores.
>Dabhoiwala directly targets the canonical thinkers who were essential in articulating modern free-speech doctrines. These include the early-eighteenth-century British writers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, whose pseudonymously authored Cato’s Letters claimed that freedom of speech is the “great Bulwark of Liberty,” and John Stuart Mill, who extolled “the liberty of thought and discussion” as essential to progress and warned against the tyranny of majority opinion. For Dabhoiwala, however, Cato’s Letters were less a noble defense of liberty than a text full of “deliberate fabrications” and “glaring contradictions.” Mill’s On Liberty was “profoundly imperialist and intellectually flawed.” In his view, these thinkers promoted a kind of false consciousness, persuading people that they were defending a universal ideal while advancing arguments that ignored the harms speech could inflict on the common good. In his telling, American free-speech exceptionalism was not a principled triumph but the most extreme outgrowth of this poisoned doctrinal tree.