MICHAEL FOX:  It’s good to see you, Mansa.

MANSA MUSA:  It’s good to be seen.

MICHAEL FOX:  I want to start us in Washington at the Lincoln Memorial.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  I’m standing inside the mausoleum of the Lincoln Memorial. President Abraham Lincoln sitting on his chair, staring out, looking down across Washington over the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument in the capital.

MICHAEL FOX:  So, early last fall, I went down to the Lincoln Memorial on the Washington Mall. And I wanted to go because this is, for me, it’s one of the most iconic places I can think of for free speech in the United States.

SPEAKER 1 [CLIP]:  …As the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation [applause].

MICHAEL FOX:  Clearly, like the images of the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and hundreds of thousands of people covering the steps of the Lincoln Memorial running all the way back along the reflecting pool. And I went there to ask people what free speech meant to them.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  Excuse me, sir.

RIC:  Yes.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  My name’s Mike Fox.

RIC:  Yes, sir.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  I’m a freelance reporter, and I’m working on a podcast about free speech.

MICHAEL FOX:  And so I spoke with one guy named Ric. He’s retired. He’s from Arizona. He came there with his wife. They were in town for the day. He actually works as a pit line firefighter for NASCAR. And he told me:

RIC:  The freedom to say what you feel, to express what you have in your heart and to just be open and honest.

MICHAEL FOX:  I asked him what he thought about free speech rights in America today, and he said:

RIC:  Well, with who’s in charge, it seems like it’s kind of controversial that if you say something against him that he will retaliate against you, which I think is totally absurd.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  …Working on a story about free speech and what it means today in the United States.

SPEAKER 3:  I don’t want to make any comments about the free speech in US.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  I understand. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER 3:  Sorry for that.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  No, no, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Yeah.

People are nervous to talk.

SPEAKER 4:  I think I’m good. Thank you, though.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  It’s all good. Thank you so much. Take care.

I wonder if I could interview you real fast?

SPEAKER 5:  Um, not today. Thank you, though.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  It’s OK. I love your camera, though.

SPEAKER 5:  Thank you very much.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  Take care. Thanks.

I’m wondering if I could interview you guys real quick.

SPEAKER 6:  No.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  OK. It’s all good.

SPEAKER 7:  I’m sorry.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER 8 (CHILD):  I don’t even know what freeze beach is.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  What does free speech mean to you?

SPEAKER 9:  That you could be able to say what you want and do what you want as long as it’s not rude or disrespectful to anyone else.

MICHAEL FOX:  I spoke with Ronald Jackson from Birmingham, Alabama, and to Mia Nash from Las Vegas. They were in town for a funeral.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  I feel like anyone can say whatever they want to say.

RONALD JACKSON:  See, what free speech is, we could say what we want to say, but we have consequences behind that. Really, we don’t have free speech because they always want to kill you, take you out and do whatever. So, basically we don’t have no free speech.

MICHAEL FOX:  They too are really concerned about free speech rights today. 

There was an interesting conversation I had with this one gentleman from Ghana. He’s actually a military officer there.

SPEAKER 11:  Whenever we have to talk of states that promote free speech, the first state that comes in your mind is the United States, then other societies or other countries.

MICHAEL FOX:  But that it’s recently become, again, really complicated. Some people are trying to take advantage.

SPEAKER 11:  To bring any kind of chaos, or especially when it has some issues of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.

MICHAEL FOX:  I think one of the things that’s interesting is that almost everyone I spoke with across the political spectrum, because I spoke with people on the left and on the right, and for everyone, everyone was concerned about this moment for free speech in the United States.

SPEAKER 12:  I don’t feel like we’re as free to speak our minds as we were in the ’90s.

MICHAEL FOX [FIELD]:  That was my other question. Where do you think we’re at today with free speech in America?

SPEAKER 12:  Well, I mean, you’ve got people getting shot on college campuses over it, so it’s kind of hard to say that we’re moving in the right direction, but something’s going to have to change.

MICHAEL FOX:  It’s this mixed bag, but in general, people, of course, standing up, people we need to defend it, but very concerned about where we are today and the state of free speech today in the United States.

Mansa, where do you see free speech in America today? Where do you see the state of free speech today in the United States?

MANSA MUSA:  In the United States, we see that freedom of speech is not really free no more. It’s heavily regulated. It’s sectarian. You do a lot of shift shaping. Free speech, you say fake news. So, I undermine your speech by characterizing [it] as fake news, but when I characterize it [as] fake news, I take an action against it. And that’s our reality we’re confronted with. Free speech is not really free no more. It comes with a price. 

And I say that in all earnest. It comes with a price. It was never free for an oppressed people. It was never free for Indigenous people. It was never intended for us to have a voice. It was never free for Chicano or Mexican Americans, migrants that come to this country that later on become a part of the problem. It never was free. It was always designed for a specific class of people and where [I’m] free to do what I want, when I want, and how I want, and say what I want.

MICHAEL FOX:  This is The Battle for Free Speech, a multipart 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 Mansa Musa. He’s a longtime social activist and a former Black Panther. He’s the host of the Real News show Rattling the Bars about the US system of mass incarceration. And this is something he knows a little bit about because, Mansa, you spent 48 years and nine months in prison, right?

MANSA MUSA:  Yep, that’s right.

MICHAEL FOX:  So, Mansa, thank you so much for joining me today. I’m seriously so excited for this conversation.

MANSA MUSA:  And Mike, I’ll definitely enjoy, I would say with you, I enjoy your insight. I enjoy your commitment to people’s freedom and our freedom in general.

MICHAEL FOX:  Thank you. Thank you so much, Mansa.

So, today’s a special episode in particular because it’s dropping on the eve of the United States’ 250th birthday. And yet, things, as we’ve seen in recent episodes, are not good. Press freedom is an all-time low. Hundreds have lost their jobs for speaking out online. Tech barons are deciding whose voices are lifted and whose remain in the shadows, just like Mansa just said. And Trump has launched an all-out assault on our free speech.

Today, I want to take a step back and unravel what that even means. What does free speech even mean? What’s the state of it today? What should it mean? And for the last year, I’ve been speaking with people on the streets in the United States, but also in numerous countries on three different continents about what exactly is this, and how do we need to understand free speech?

And look, we’ve dug into this in recent episodes in many different ways. We’ve looked at all the different facets of free speech. Today, I want to underline so many of these points and try and tie them together. The bottom line is this: free speech is clearly under attack, but it’s also so much more than we can imagine and we usually consider.

I want to start this episode by playing you something to try and center this discussion, Mansa.

MANSA MUSA:  OK.

MICHAEL FOX:  Because everything we’ve been hearing and everything we’re going to hear over the next few days will be about Trump’s grand July Fourth party.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  This will be a time like you’ve never had in your lives. America 250. Thank you. I love you all.

MICHAEL FOX:  And for me, what we see all the time from Trump is him trying to claim everything for himself. It’s as if everything he does is to try and erase history and transform it into something that’s actually his.

And I found this piece of tape when I was researching for this podcast and I thought it was fascinating because it’s an old documentary clip. It shows old news real footage of the 1963 March on Washington. And I was really intrigued by it because of what the narrator says and what it means for this podcast.

DOCUMENTARY CLIP:  Some arrived by rollerskates, some by train and plane. Some drove private automobiles 30, 50 miles. All now walk to the memorial site preserved in honor of Abraham Lincoln.

MICHAEL FOX:  So, as I’m playing this, Mansa, you see people walking with signs arriving for the 1963 March on Washington. You see the steps full of people. You see people walking past the reflecting pool.

DOCUMENTARY CLIP:  They walk to express to the nation in a peaceful fashion their rights to freely assemble and be heard as spelled out in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. The First Amendment requires that the government not only refrain from interference with peaceful assemblies, it must restrain the restrainers as well. 

The Boston Tea Party let off a long chain of effective social protests in America. The suffragette demonstration spread to many cities before their cause was victorious, and the struggles of American labor were traditionally advertised through the right to peacefully assemble and be heard. 

A renowned American jurist recently said, “A function of free speech under our system is to invite dispute. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea.”

MICHAEL FOX:  What does that mean to you? What do those words mean, but also what did that moment, the 1963 March on Washington, mean?

MANSA MUSA:  And in 1963, March on Washington really was a turning point in this country where it gave value to people’s ability to assemble and gave value to people’s ability to tell the talk. 

So, this was the one time where you see the marginalized communities and marginalized people, oppressed people, poor people. They came from all over the country, and some from around different parts of the world, to assemble here, to say we have a right to assemble, but in our assembly we have a right to say what we want to say. They felt as though they were not being recognized, their rights wasn’t being recognized, and had a right to say something about that. That meant a lot because before that you had Jim Crow. 

So, the Jim Crow era, you had a semblance of free speech in the North, assembling, but you had no free speech in the South. You had assemblance, or right to assemble in the North, depending on where you was at, but in the South you had no right to assemble under no circumstance, it was the death penalty. 

So, now you had people saying, we going to Washington to come together and assemble. It took a lot of heart for the people that even wanted to do that because of the state that this country was in at that time.

MICHAEL FOX:  One of the things that I’ve spoken with Marc a lot about and also in this podcast is the importance of free speech, and standing up for free speech comes from the abolitionist movement, it comes from the Civil Rights Movement, and I think we forget these deep roots in organizing and struggle.

I think that’s why I was impressed by this documentary clip where they were talking about free speech on this specific day in this specific place. It’s another reminder of how important the root in the struggle is and the root in the organizing and the root in the fight against racism and what that’s meant historically, but what it still means today.

Mansa, where were you on that day of the March on Washington?

MANSA MUSA:  I’m a native Washingtonian. I was living in Southeast projects in Washington, DC, and everybody in my family was gathered around the TV watching. Later on, my cousins, elderly cousins, they was there. So, they came through the house and they retold what they seen. So, all of us was sitting there like in awe at that.

What it did, it just took a picture of time of what was going on with this country at that time and how much it impacted people. That’s where it turned, when people started becoming more socially conscious, more active, more vocal, more confrontational as opposed to before. You had isolated incidents of resistance, you had isolated incidents of people standing up, but this right here [inaudible], I got a right to say something. I got a right to assemble.

MICHAEL FOX:  That’s awesome. How old were you?

MANSA MUSA:  I think I was like nine, maybe 10.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow. Amazing. You were right there, right down the street. That’s awesome, Mansa.

Mansa, what does free speech mean to you?

MANSA MUSA:  I rest on the principles that it was founded on, the right to speak and assemble without government interference, without being regulated. You can’t yell “fire” in the theater, so it’s some limitations on it. But for me, it’s a person’s God-given right to say whatever they feel, and the right for me to be able to say that and assemble without fear of retaliation, without fear of being subjugated, without fear of me being kidnapped.

NEWS CLIP 1:  On Tuesday, a federal judge in Texas handed down unusually harsh sentences ranging from 30 to 100 years to a group of anti-ICE protestors convicted of terrorism charges in March. Federal prosecutors had accused the nine defendants of being members of…

MICHAEL FOX:  I want to take a step back for a second because I’ve been speaking with a woman named Mary Anne Franks. I’ve brought her in in some of these other episodes with Marc. She’s a legal scholar at American University, also there in Washington, DC, and she’s the author of Fearless Speech: Breaking Free From the First Amendment. And she has a really important perspective not just around what free speech is or what the First Amendment is, but what free speech should be.

MARY ANNE FRANKS:  What I really do think sincerely, having now had many conversations with many different audiences about what do people think free speech means, what does it mean to them? Overwhelmingly, what I realized is that it’s because there’s a kind of narcotic effect of those words. People are kind of lulled into a sense of, don’t ask me about the details. I know what free speech is. And it’s because we think we know it so well that we don’t know anything about it.

MICHAEL FOX:  But she says we have to take it to another level.

MARY ANNE FRANKS:  So, we need to do a kind of estrangement from free speech. Free speech needs to become strange to us.

MICHAEL FOX:  She says she asked her students about this when she teaches [the] First Amendment, and she asked them, when was the last time you had a really good conversation?

MARY ANNE FRANKS:  And they’ll start giving the same sort of characteristics, and it’s either maybe on a bus or at the kitchen table or friends’ conversations. I’ll ask them, well, what made it good? And they’ll say, well, we took turns talking. I learned something. The other person listened to me. We weren’t shouting at each other, and we both came away thinking that there was something valuable that we learned. 

And I thought, is that a version of free speech that is more robust and more significant than whatever we think we mean by this kind of mix of quasilegal, quasipsychological, quasicultural concepts of free speech?

MICHAEL FOX:  Shouldn’t we be taking it to another level where it’s not just my right to speak, but actually what do we want with this? What are we trying to achieve? How do we come together around it?

MARY ANNE FRANKS:  I really do think that term, free speech, has become emptied of meaning and we need to start thinking specifically about what is a good speech outcome for the environment I’m in right now? What does it mean to have a good family conversation? What does it mean to have a good classroom conversation? What do I want a newspaper to teach me? What do I want to learn? What are my goals for this particular interaction I’m having with someone else? And really kind of resist the idea that free speech can be something meaningful in that abstract sense. It usually means something quite concrete in the context that we find ourselves.

MICHAEL FOX:  I think this is so interesting because I had never, when she was speaking this, I’ve never thought about free speech like this at another level of free speech, really. Because today, free speech has been boiled down to, well, I’m allowed to say whatever I want, and you can’t do anything about it, and I can criticize you, and I can attack you. It’s not about coming together as a country or having a community or a conversation, which is really, at the end of the day, I think that’s what most people anywhere want. We want to build community. We want to have friends, and we want to have a conversation. And what we have now has been the exact opposite, particularly with Trump trying to flatten out the discourse to us versus them.

MANSA MUSA:  I like that perspective that she’s offering, and I would venture to say this here, this is the principles that this was founded on. It’s not perfect. The people that put this thing together got a lot of baggage, but they put something that’s got elasticity to it.

But this is what she described is what free speech, the intent behind free speech. The intent behind free speech is not because I can say something, but something got to come out of my speech, something got to come out of my conversation. In other words, it’s not just that, oh, I got a mouth, I talk, you got ears, you listen. It’s a matter of like, oh, we engaging in conversation for the purpose of advancing our community, our neighborhood, our family. 

So, this conversation is the gathering, the coming together, it’s coming together for that purpose, to socialize within our socialization, we’re socializing, we’re developing a social network. It’s an exchange.

And you know where you see that at? And Angela Davis talk about this in her book, [If They Come in the Morning], they come for you at night. You know, you see that what she talked about, you see that, you see it in prison, you see that what she said, the attitude about speech and engaging, you see it in prison because of where we confine ourselves, we develop a social network where the conversation result in something other than what I can get out of you. It might be the conversation might result in ideas about how to make some progress. It might result in me just giving you an ear to listen to and have a conversation where you feel comfortable talking about being vulnerable. It results in you tell me about your family, I’ll tell you about my family. These conversations become any conversations about, man, I got to go get a knife and kill somebody. Oh man, my life is threatened. You see a lot of that, what she talked about. 

But to her point, why can’t it be like that? Why can’t it get [inaudible]? Why can’t it get back to being that?

MICHAEL FOX:  Exactly, exactly. I want to talk about prison a little bit more, but we’ll get to that in a second. 

I want to take you to a place. Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, 1986. It is the commencement speech, graduation ceremony, and on the podium is speculative fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin. So, she passed away years later. She passed away at the age of 88 in 2018. But she says something here which I think is really important and it kind of got obscured and forgotten in the past, and I want to bring it out too because it’s another layer of this, Mansa, that I think is really important for us to analyze and understand when we’re talking about free speech. This isn’t necessarily First Amendment, and it’s more for us to be really grappling with how should we be thinking about free speech? 

So, this is kind of like a second piece to what Mary Anne Franks was talking about. Ursula K. Le Guin, she speaks to the crowd. There’s only a transcript of her speech and I couldn’t find a recording, so I actually asked a voice actor to play her.

URSULA K. LE GUIN [CLIP]:  Thinking about what I should say to you made me think about what we learn in college and what we unlearn in college.

MICHAEL FOX:  But in her speech, she looks at the difference between what she calls father tongue and mother tongue, which are two different ways of speaking. For her, father tongue, she says, is the language of power.

URSULA K. LE GUIN [CLIP]:  Of social power. This is the public discourse and one dialect of it is speechmaking by politicians.

MICHAEL FOX:  She says it doesn’t speak itself, it only lectures. It talks down, it talks at. There’s no dialogue. There’s no communication.

URSULA K. LE GUIN [CLIP]:  The father tongue is spoken from above. It goes one way. No answer is expected or heard. The mother tongue, spoken or written, expects an answer. It is conversation.

MICHAEL FOX:  Mother tongue, she says, is quote, “language not as mere communication but as relation, relationship.”

URSULA K. LE GUIN [CLIP]:  It connects. It goes two ways, many ways. An exchange, a network. Its power is not in dividing but in binding, not in distancing but in uniting. It is written, but not by scribes and secretaries for posterity. It flies from the mouth on the breath that is our life and is gone.

MICHAEL FOX:  And so for me, this was really profound when I learned about it just a few weeks ago, and I think it’s so important because it demands a conversation, like the mother tongue is both speaking but also listening. It’s dialogue. It’s not talking down, which is what Trump does and so much of this stuff online, like everything we see online nowadays over X or TikTok or whatever it is, it’s all people yelling at each other, all telling everybody else, this is the truth, and you’re bad, and I’m true, and I’m good. It’s all us versus them. 

But what she’s saying is, no, we need to be thinking about this and we should be striving for mother tongue. Free speech should be about mother tongue. It should be about a dialogue and a conversation, like how do we build unity and have this dialogue together? We should be pushing to build community.

URSULA K. LE GUIN [CLIP]:  I think we have a responsibility to freedom and especially to freedom of speech. Obedience is silent. It does not answer. It is contained.

MICHAEL FOX:  Right at a time in which everyone’s being pushed aside and Trump is telling, he’s trying to divide everybody else, we should be striving to try and unite each other as much as possible. I just think that what she mentioned and what she brought up in this speech — This obscure speech which got left in the past, it was republished in one of her books — But people don’t really talk about this. But I think it’s really important to be thinking about how do we speak, and what’s the language that we speak, and how much do we sit to listen, and how much do we allow others to have this conversation?

MANSA MUSA:  Yeah, I agree, because when we find ourselves in a space where we’re in a mother tongue state of mind, I’m engaging you not to get something out of you, I’m engaging because it’s a social instructor. I’m building a relationship around ideas, and because I’m building a relationship with you around ideas, I’m listening. 

It’s an African tradition, I think — And stand correct me — They got what they call a talking stick. So, whoever holding the stick is leading the conversation. Once he or she pass the stick, that person can go into whatever they want to go into relative to what either they said or what they want to say. But the whole thing of the talking stick is everybody get a chance to say something and everybody else gets a chance to listen. So, I’m not passing the stick and say I had my… I ain’t trying to hear what you guys say. It’s a network. 

So in regard to her analysis, yeah. And again, I’m going to keep emphasizing this point. This was the original intent of the First Amendment because you look at the historical context, they didn’t have a voice. The British controlled everything. And let it be known, they was in an environment where they had to rely on each other as neighbors. So it’s not a matter of like I got a right to say what I want. No, in this context, I got freedoms to speak with the intent on mobilizing or educating on or socializing with people and learning from people and growing as a result of that. Not just because I got something to say. 

And it got to where we see it now because of the father tongue doctrine or way of thinking. It’s ingrained in social media. The more I get more likes, the more vulgar I am, the more narrow-minded I am, the more ignorant I am, I get likes. So, I’m monetizing stupidity, but at the same time, I’m doing it under the pretense that I got the right, I got free speech. The free speech that I’m offering is not free speech, but regulated speech, controlled speech, conditional speech.

MICHAEL FOX:  Exactly. Controlled and conditional even more by the algorithm and by the owners of these big corporations that control whose voice gets [to be] what other people see and whose voice gets silenced, which we see time and time again.

MANSA MUSA:  The thing I like about what you’re offering in terms of support of an alternative way of looking at free speech is this is the reason why we find ourselves in the state that we in now is because if we are actually living In the original intent of the Constitution, then we don’t have a Donald Trump. We don’t have a MAGA. We don’t have Jim Crow. We don’t have these things because we got a right to agree to disagree. The fact that I’m in a state of mind where I want to be in harmony with people, then that’s going to keep me grounded on, maintain that kind of level of sympathy and empathy or compassion towards my neighbors and people that I’m engaging with. So, my speech is there to grow not only the person, but for me to grow as well.

MICHAEL FOX:  Yeah, it’s absolutely true. And here’s the thing, and this is the direction I want to go into, is that not only is social media and Trump and all of the political discourse, this father tongue speech, so top down. It’s not inclusive, clearly. But what we’re also seeing now, and I’ve spoken about this in some of the previous episodes, but I want to get back into it now, is this push by Trump to try and redefine what we even understand as free speech today.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America [applause].

MICHAEL FOX:  And just to back up a little, I think that many people for a long time would say, oh, free speech is our right to stand up and speak our minds. But it’s also, I think, what’s been won in the past decades is free speech as our right to stand up and protest. That’s what comes from the free speech movement and the anti-war movement, that it’s this thing that if I don’t like something that’s happened, I can get into the streets and I can stand up and demand my rights, and we all have an equal voice.

And I think part of what Marc and I have talked a lot about in this podcast is how we’re now seeing rollbacks in free speech or censorship of free speech in the name of free speech and this push to redefine free speech in order to mean something that is akin to, it’s my right to post whatever I want online. And it’s the big media tech companies’ right to not have regulation over social media and to not have regulation over AI and to not have regulation online. That is what they’re trying to transform this all into at this moment so that Trump can push his agenda because the more he closes that space for dialogue and the more he closes the space about what people are allowed to say, the more he controls communication and controls the agenda, which is exactly what he wants.

MANSA MUSA:  Right.

KATHERINE JACOBSON:  Yeah. I think by co-opting the definition of what free speech and freedom of the press is and what “good news media,” what good reporting constitutes, I think that is not only distorting democratic values, but really I think making it much more difficult to even follow the conversation.

MICHAEL FOX:  Katherine Jacobson, she’s from the committee to protect journalists. I spoke with her in the last episode.

KATHERINE JACOBSON:  We’re not using common language to even talk about what’s going on with a common shared definition of what freedom of the press is, then it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to have any meaningful conversation about how to protect media freedom, about how to protect journalists, about how to ensure that people feel that they can have true online discourse in a healthy fashion — Or in-person discourse, for that matter.

MICHAEL FOX:  Gone are the days, she says, where you have a debate on the Senate floor and then you go have lunch together. That type of thing is over and it’s been lost in large part because of the shrinking space for free speech and Trump’s attempt to redefine what free speech is in the United States today. Do you see this, Mansa?

MANSA MUSA:  Yeah, most definitely. Most definitely. And I always laugh at reporters. Some got awards out the yin-yang, I mean like endless awards, and how in a conversation with him they find themselves dumbing down because the conversation is not going to have no substance. I find myself being like, no, you lie. No, you lie. No, you lie. No, you lie. No, you lie. No, I find myself being dumbed down because of what they have taken and done with free speech.

So, like she said, go on all them days, we can’t rely on nothing that is mass media information wise, we got to be real discerning, social media with AI generated information, we got to be real discerning. So, we find ourselves now in a space where we got to do a lot of, what they talk fact check, we got to do a lot of vetting information that we get because there’s no such thing as free speech in this country now. It’s regulated speech and it’s controlled speech.

MICHAEL FOX:  Mansa, I just want to underscore why this is happening, in particular with Trump, but many other people, Trump allies, and it’s because Trump can’t win with communication and dialogue. He doesn’t. When we come together and we have I talk, you listen, just like what Mary Anne Franks and what Ursula Le Guin were speaking about, Trump doesn’t win. He has to listen, and that doesn’t work. And that’s why he lies. He makes up his own fake news, his own truths. He can’t win with equal communication so he yells and attacks people. And of course not just him but other members of his administration and many others. And also that actually supports him because it makes him look powerful, which many of his supporters, that’s what they want to see. So, he’s able to control the message, he’s able to control the conversation.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  And as we enter the golden age of America, that’s what we have. This is the golden age. We’ve never had anything like it…

MICHAEL FOX:  And it’s not just happening in Washington. This happens on the local level with politicians on the local level. It happens in our own families. We see it over the Thanksgiving table. But I think it’s important for us to understand this reality so that we can see it when it’s happening and analyze it, to understand what it is and not fall victim to it. 

Because I feel like this is part of what happens is that we don’t understand what’s actually happening. We just get pushed around like we’re like boats that are tossing at sea rather than understand what’s at play and the tools and the tactics that Trump and many others are using, and it all has to do with our speech, and it all comes back to our free speech and our way of communicating. I just wanted to kind of place that there because I think all of that is really important to understand this moment, but also understand the background when we take a step back from talking about free speech or First Amendment, whatever else, to really try and analyze what communication is and how we should be talking or what kind of speech we want to have.

Mansa, I want to bring us back to the 250th birthday of the United States. And to do that, I want to take us to another place in history, 1852 Rochester, New York, July. Frederick Douglass has been invited by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society to deliver an Independence Day speech.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS [CLIP]:  What to the American slave is your Fourth of July?

MICHAEL FOX:  Now, of course, Douglass was a leading abolitionist. He had escaped slavery in Maryland in 1838, 14 years before, and his speech on July 5, 1852 is still remembered.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS [CLIP]:  To him, your celebration is a sham, your boasted liberty and unholy license…

MICHAEL FOX:  In it, he reminds the country of the hypocrisy of celebrating freedom and the Fourth of July while millions were still enslaved. He says, “I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. The Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

Mansa, what do you feel when you hear this? What does this speech mean today?

MANSA MUSA:  So, you telling me, like Malcolm say, don’t call me a diner. I’m sitting at the table with an empty plate. When we look at Frederick Douglass’s speech, it’s appropriate today. In the District of Columbia, you got over 50% of the citizens live in low income areas. They can’t get food stamps. They can’t get subsidized rent because all these things have been cut. So really, Frederick Douglass is talking and speaking to this country when he’s saying, why should we be celebrating this 250 years of oppression that we’ve been unsubjugated to since we’ve been in this country, 250 years under the only class of people that they systematically target and always got something they throwing at us to try to get us extinct? As opposed to say, y’all celebrate, we mourn. I say, y’all celebrate, and we organize, agitate, and resist.

MICHAEL FOX:  That’s awesome, Mansa. 

I want to talk about the prison-industrial complex for a minute, because I think it’s really important. The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. It’s gone up with tens of thousands of people in ICE detention, clearly. More people are in jail in the United States than any other country in the world. Nearly two million people, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. You have done a ton of work around incarceration and the prison system, and you don’t just talk about it on your show Rattling the Bars, but you lived it yourself for decades. What does the Fourth of July mean for those in prison? What did it mean for you when you were there? And what do we need to be understanding about the prison system today in the United States that still two million people are behind bars, which is just a shocking figure that I think that people just don’t even realize.

MANSA MUSA:  Prison-industrial complex, it’s a multibillion dollar industry, but more importantly, it’s so fragmented that it’s hard to dismantle it. Not one corporation controlling the whole entire infrastructure. You got some controlling the guards. You got some controlling the food. You got some controlling the telephone. So, it’s so dissected in that regard it’s hard to dismantle it in turn saying like, we’re going to abolish this, because it’s so much money invested in it. When you go down in Alabama, they so entrenched on maintaining that system. People got the right to be paroled. Because they want to maintain your labor, they won’t give you parole. They just keep denying you parole. Not because you working in the street. You done worked in the street for the last five year here, but they deny your parole, and they just come up with some obscure reason because you’re labor, cheap labor.

NEWS CLIP 2:  We are getting the new data on immigration and customs enforcement. It shows that the number of immigrant detainees without criminal records has grown exponentially since the start of the second Trump administration.

MICHAEL FOX:  Mansa, I’ve been hearing reports that a lot of people, in particular in these ICE crackdowns over the last year, are being held for months and months in prisons before being deported. They might be scheduled to be deported, but they’re still held for months. Do you think part of that behind that is the profit motive by these large corporations?

MANSA MUSA:  So yes, it’s all about profit. Everything. This right here, when he campaigned on getting rid of so-called illegal immigrants, he was basically campaigning on lining somebody’s pockets because the very people you initially said that you was coming to get, you initially said criminals, but you got all day laborers, you got people that’s a central part of the infrastructure in this country, you’ve rounded them up and took them and put them in detention centers for no other reason than to say we could do that, but more importantly for profit purposes.

MICHAEL FOX:  Right, because the federal government is also paying these companies for each bed. Each time somebody’s in there, one of these people, they picked them up, and that company is then making more money off of it. What are these top companies, the prison companies that run these prisons? What are they called? What are the names again?

MANSA MUSA:  Yeah, it was GEO and CoreCivic.

MICHAEL FOX:  Big money off of the immigration crackdown and off of the incarceration system. 

Before we move on to dive back into free speech, just, Mansa, what was, for you, what was… I mean, I can’t even imagine nearly 49 years in prison. If you were able to sum that up for people out there, what did that mean, and why were you held for so long?

MANSA MUSA:  Well, first, the reason why I was held so long, because Maryland has a draconian legal system that later resulted in me getting out and jury instructions, but I don’t try to sit back and unpack how I survived. I survived. 

What I try to do, what I try to focus on is what I got out of that. I got out of that Eddie Conway, members of the Black Panther Party, becoming raising my consciousness to put me in a space where I’m not a prisoner. I’m a political prisoner, and I’m a political prisoner because of the way this country treat poor and oppressed people. It was inevitable that I would find myself in a situation where I would be struggling to do something, petty or otherwise. 

So, it educate me. It gave me… And what it did, more importantly, it created in me a sense of purpose that now I understand my responsibility. They say dare to struggle, dare to win. That’s my motto. I’m the epitome of all the cliches. Since I’ve been out, I’ve been in this space advocating. It’s not an easy thing to look back on. I learned over the years that when you get five or six people that’s been incarcerated in the room together, that’s five or six people, they serve collectively 300 years or close to 200 years. That’s how much time they get out of people.

MICHAEL FOX:  I thought it was fascinating what you said just a couple minutes ago, Mansa, about how the mother tongue, Ursula Le Guin’s description, how the mother tongue was so strong amongst inmates in the prison where you were. And yet at the same time, what you saw, the father tongue, this is what you would see from the guards.

MANSA MUSA:  And I told you, Angela Davis said that she found in prison where you had the most human social network that she seen because we care for each other. Our commonality is immediately identified. We spoke [inaudible], we serving time, we’re being subjugated to the same thing. So, why would we become a continuous source of oppression and dehumanization? We find a space where if you met my neighbor and we get packages, food packages, and you don’t have no family member, I say, let me get a package in your name. I get a package in there. I’ll give you some of it. Or, I give you the clothes. I ask you what you want. That’s how people thought. If they had more than the next person, they would willingly share. 

And the communication, like I said before, the communication wouldn’t be, free speech wouldn’t be, I got the right to say what I want to say to you. I’m engaging in a speech system that is cultivating me to become more human and cultivating you to become more human in regard to how we look at each other, how we look at this environment amongst ourselves.

MICHAEL FOX:  I want to dive back into this question of misinformation and disinformation that’s being pushed out there and Trump’s just constant lies. And the reason why this is important is because if we look back at actually the history of the United States and how free speech was seen historically going back into the early part of the 20th century, there was actually a different vision about what should be allowed and what shouldn’t be allowed.

SPEAKER 13 [CLIP]:  Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them…

MICHAEL FOX:  Of course, what we’ve seen in recent times is almost all fact checking being rolled back, and it’s now pretty much a free for all online, but I spoke with this one professor Fara Dabhoiwala. He’s a Princeton professor. He wrote the book What Is Free Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea. And this is so fascinating because he talks about how in the 1930s and the 1940s, as the totalitarian systems is rising in Germany…

FARA DABHOIWALA:  And they can see how powerful propaganda is and that vehicles of mass communication are not neutral. They are instruments of power.

MICHAEL FOX:  There was this push within the United States to push back on propaganda.

FARA DABHOIWALA:  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.

MICHAEL FOX:  And so this is crazy because, in fact, this is then weaved into the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

FARA DABHOIWALA:  This is after all an American document drawn up under Elenor Roosevelt.

ELANOR ROOSEVELT [CLIP]:  We stand today at the threshold of a great event, both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind. This Universal Declaration of Human Rights may well become the international magna carta of all men everywhere.

FARA DABHOIWALA:  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.

MICHAEL FOX:  And this is really interesting because in the United States we think of it as just it’s just a free for all. It’s just my right to say what I want. It doesn’t matter if I harm you or not. But at that time in particular, there was this other understanding that there should be professionalism and journalism, that there shouldn’t just be fake news and disinformation being spread, but that actually we have this right within our understanding of free speech to truthful information, even if that’s not in the First Amendment.

FARA DABHOIWALA:  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 taking 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.

MICHAEL FOX:  And I think this is so fascinating because it’s almost been forgotten. And part of what Fara talks about is how with the internet revolution and the communications revolutions in social media, that’s just been thrown out the window.

ABC NEWS REPORTER [CLIP]:  ABC News, sir.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  You’re with who?

ABC NEWS REPORTER [CLIP]:  ABC News, sir.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  Fake news. ABC, fake news. One of the worst in the business, but I’ll answer your question…

FARA DABHOIWALA:  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 to always, including in the United States, 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. All that is now under assault by right-wing authoritarians whose project is made easier by the fact that our public discourse has now been overwhelmed by greedy social media companies that take no account at all of the public good insofar as it contravenes their profits.

MICHAEL FOX:  And really what we’re now seeing is this push for just full deregulation, where it doesn’t matter if it’s fake or not. And that’s creating, I think, part of the problem and the divisions and, of course, only supporting Trump that we’re seeing right now.

MANSA MUSA:  We have regulated speech, we don’t have free speech. And the speech is being… When I say regulated, if you’re a MAGA, you gladly fall under regulation because you can say whatever you want to say and with impunity. If you’re antiestablishment, he going to spend an inordinate amount of time either investigating them, tying them up, or locking them up.

MICHAEL FOX:  Mansa, I want to take our discussion of free speech to another place. Obviously, I’ve been talking to a lot of people in the streets over the last year, and I’ve been noticing something in my reporting that I really need to underscore because I think this is really important for us to understand what free speech means in the United States for us today, but also what it means abroad elsewhere. 

And I’m generalizing slightly, but pretty much every time I’ve interviewed someone in the United States about what their definition of free speech is, they usually say something like, it’s my right to say what I want when I want, full stop. But when I interview people outside of the United States, they usually include a caveat. So they’ll say, it’s my right to say what I want, when I want, but then they include just as long as it doesn’t harm or injure others. So, there’s these two visions. 

And it’s crazy, Mansa, because I’ve done this in a lot of countries on three different continents, and I’ve tested it in a bunch of different places, and I just want to bring us to Quito, Ecuador, for just one second because I think this example is important.

So, I was at a park last year in Quito and I was interviewing people — And remember, this is a country that has one of the highest murder rates in Latin America. The president has called the fight between drug traffickers and the armed forces an internal armed conflict. But even there, almost everyone I spoke with included this caveat that you can’t harm or threaten others. 

So, I spoke with this one woman, Sobele Camacho. She’s a Venezuelan immigrant to Ecuador. And she said, freedom of speech is the way that a human being has to communicate freely, as the word says, freedom. But she said, your rights end where mine begin. And the way I am free to express myself, to act, to live, well, it always has to be framed in respect for others.

Alejandro Topanta is an Ecuadorian police officer who I also interviewed at that park. And he told me the freedom of speech is to be able to freely say what one feels without fear of reprisals from an authority, but he said there also have to be limitations. So, when I spoke to him, there had just been this right-wing protests a few days before where people in the march were using the Nazi symbol, and I asked him about that. I said, do you feel they should be allowed to do that? And he says, I don’t agree with the Nazi slogan and it’s not good for certain people. It has nothing to do with the freedom of speech. It’s a message that is repressive and authoritarian and I don’t agree with what they did.

But here’s the thing, Mansa, in the United States, that would be permitted and then defended by the ASLU because in the United States the idea is that all speech, regardless of how harmful it is, should be protected under the Constitution. And this is really different from what you see elsewhere. 

So, I spoke with professor Fara Dabhoiwala about this, and he describes these two definitions as absolutist and balancing definitions of free speech. 

So, absolutists believe that free speech is absolute. You have the right to say whatever you want, full stop. It doesn’t matter what it is, KKK rally, neo-Nazi propaganda, Trump denouncing the elections, it’s all good. The balancing method says, I can say what I want, but the right to free speech isn’t absolute. It’s a balance between this right and the other rights that I and other people have. So depending on the country, there might be laws against racism, against hate speech, and you just can’t say certain things. In Germany, for instance, you can’t deny the Holocaust and disseminate Nazi propaganda. You just can’t do it. Some of that could actually get you months or years in jail. Not in the United States. 

But here’s the thing that most people in the US don’t understand. The US and most people inside of it, I would say, embrace this absolutist definition. Like for the United States, it’s pretty much absolutist. That’s the way the laws work, First Amendment, but pretty much the rest of the world, every other country sides with the balancing approach. Say what you want, but there are limits. You can’t encroach on other people’s rights. And Mansa, I think this is so important because people just think that we have the best country in the world, we have the most freedom in the world, but they don’t understand how the US vision fits within a US concept, but every other country has these other ideas.

And it’s also important to understand that even this idea has been in flux because when I spoke with Fara Dabhoiwala, this professor, he said the United States didn’t always have this absolutist understanding of this.

FARA DABHOIWALA:  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 hardline libertarian outlook, the results of which we’re living through today.

MICHAEL FOX:  I think that’s just so fascinating how even the very definition of free speech is constantly in flux from even what we understand within the United States, but also all these other countries. And this is really important to understand where this comes from, but also to understand why it can also be important to be kind of critical of this definition and the First Amendment itself. Fara talks about, Mansa, how he sees the Constitution and also the First Amendment in the United States like having a very old car.

FARA DABHOIWALA:  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 has given it this — 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.

MICHAEL FOX:  So, it’s been used and weaponized by corporations and the powerful to claim that money equals speech and corporate power shouldn’t be limited, and if they constantly use it in order to kind of protect corporate rights.

FARA DABHOIWALA:  That’s why it’s especially been weaponized by antiregulation 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 to free speech, which is a great thing, against other important rights, and indeed the common good.

MICHAEL FOX:  It’s this very complicated place where it’s been used at this point to kind of push an agenda. Oh, well, it’s my right to say whatever I want and anyone can say whatever they want, rather than understanding that it should be a place for all of us to find a place and stand up, but also to speak truth, to speak truth to power, to organize what free speech and what the First Amendment has meant for so many organizations and so many movements going back to the abolitionists to Civil Rights Movement, and now it’s being used to really gut our own voice. Censorship again, censorship in the name of free speech.

MANSA MUSA:  Yeah, because in this country, what corporations do, they litigious. So, once they get into the Supreme Court, they become law. So, my shift is not so much as a shift away from me having this absolute mentality, my shift or being more liberal, my shift is I got to get this codified. I got to get this to become law. So, I filed a lawsuit, I created conditions to file a lawsuit, and then the law say, oh, corporations can be free like this. So, now I’m pat. I’m in good shape.

MICHAEL FOX:  Yeah. So, clearly the First Amendment isn’t perfect, but it’s what we have, and we have to defend it. And we’ve seen so many attacks on it and in our rights in recent months, people and journalists assaulted, intimidated, arrested. And this is something that I think is really important, Mansa. And I know this is controversial, but a lot of people I’ve been talking to that are working around these issues are saying that maybe we need to be looking elsewhere about how other countries are reacting to these authoritarian threats.

MARY ANNE FRANKS:  And I firmly believe this, and if I’m on the other side of people when I say this, so be it. But 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:  Mary Anne Franks, I mentioned her earlier.

MARY ANNE FRANKS:  I go back and I think about that moment in 1943 where our Supreme Court is looking at totalitarianism taking over other countries and Justice Jackson saying, Here’s why we will not be like those countries. And it’s because we recognize that the real evil here is the government imposition of orthodoxy, that they’re being told that for their own good or for whatever reason or being convinced that they are choosing this kind of domination. 

And I think about how tragic it seems to me that if we’re ever going to get out of our own destroyed society, it’s because we’re going to have to look to other countries. It’s going to have to flip. It’s actually going to be Europe probably teaching us a lesson. If the First Amendment couldn’t stop Trump from doing everything he’s doing, then what is it worth? This might be what actually shakes us out of our complacence to say, why do we keep saying against all evidence to the contrary that the First Amendment protects us uniquely when we’re not allowed to say that we didn’t like some of the views of someone who was killed, and [in] other countries that would not be something you could go to jail for?

So, we become that country that we’re looking at as the kind of object lesson of what you don’t do in a democracy, and that is a really difficult thing to have to come to terms with.

MICHAEL FOX:  And what she’s saying is that maybe we need to be looking elsewhere because it clearly didn’t stop Trump from becoming president. It’s not stopping Trump from taking over the country and pushing whatever he wants. And so I think we need to be looking out of the box.

MANSA MUSA:  Yeah, I agree. Ella Baker say those who believe in freedom must not wait. So, those that believe in freedom must take a stance on how we deal with this nonsense that we see in there, and we create alternative information sources to challenge them and be prepared for the kickback. It’s up to us. It’s up to those that’s resistance. It’s up to those that understand this phenomenon. It’s up to us to say do something. It’s The Real News. It’s Mike Fox. It’s Rattling the Bars. It’s any news source that’s coming out saying, this ain’t right. You have a right to this way. Don’t believe the hype.

MICHAEL FOX:  Mansa, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate it. It’s been fantastic talking with you.

MANSA MUSA:  Thanks, man.

MICHAEL FOX:  Next we go to Brazil to understand how the next largest country in the Western Hemisphere is also standing for free speech and fighting fake news and authoritarian assaults, and how tech barons and far-right activists and even Trump himself are trying to undermine its democracy. 

That’s all for now. Thanks for listening. 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. We are now also on Bluesky. Just search for The Battle for Free Speech. 

Folks, if you’d like to follow my work on The Battle for Free Speech and my other podcasts, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox. You can also follow the link in the show notes. There, you can 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. This really helps me to continue to do this important work. 

You can find links to all of the people I spoke with today in the show notes, and a huge thanks and shout out to Mansa Musa for joining me in this episode today. Thank you so much. 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.