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The Genuinely Interested Podcast

Ep 74 Sarah McLaughlin - Free Speech For All

Jan 28, 2021
01:11:41

Sarah has worked with FIRE as a Program Assistant through Drexel's cooperative education program since 2012. 

She has defended students and faculty facing censorship in FIRE’s Individual Rights Defense Program, where she worked for five years. She is now Director of FIRE’s Targeted Advocacy program, where she focuses on U.S. universities’ relationship with international threats to free speech and art censorship. She has written for publications such as - Foreign Policy, Artsy, The Huffington Post, and New York Daily News.

Sarah and I discussed: 

  • Free Speech on U.S. Campuses
  • What are Confucius institutes?
  • How FIRE helps 
  • Censorship by social media corporations 
  • Blasphemy laws and suppression of free expression
  • What satellite campuses are
  • Foreign government financing of US educational systems 

And much, much more...

Sarah McLaughlin Twitter

My Take: Everyone agrees with free speech when it's something they agree with, the problem is defending free speech when you have someone with an opposing opinion or set of ideological differences that are contrary to yours. If you want free speech to be upheld, we must agree on an uncomfortable truth which is - free speech should be accessible to all regardless of social standing, politics, religion, or anything else.  If we allow open conversation we can hopefully weed out the bad ideas, and allow the good ones to surface. 

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