Free Speech Has Fair Weather Friends

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Sally Kohn: Free speech is never popular among majorities, because they're th who get to decide. When conservatives were in charge and able to read the riot act to any one who as deemed to be a communist or progressive, they did that cause they had the power. She says free speech salways the friend of the person who is socially marginalized and weak at any given moment. And means on a college campus where you've got overpowering numbers of progressives and only a few conservatives, for example, the conservatives are going to say, we need free speech,. she writes.

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In episode 190, Michael Shermer speaks with Jonathan Rauch as he reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge” — our social system for turning disagreement into truth. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.