- People complain about free speech only when it is taken away from them, and they tend to be really excited about it when it enables them to say something that might otherwise be controversial.

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer and today we are asking what does free speech look like in America in 2025.

How well is that fundamental protection holding up to all kinds of political pressure.

From campus protests to courtroom battles, college curricula to social media algorithms, the landscape for free speech in the United States is shifting and fast.

Both the political left and right say their speech is being silenced by universities, by tech companies, by the government, by each other.

So how free is free speech really?

And what does the future of open discourse look like in a deeply divided country?

To help us answer these big questions, I'm joined by "New York Times" journalist, Jeremy Peters, and constitutional scholar, Ilya Shapiro.

We'll talk about how First Amendment protections are playing out in today's polarized political landscape and why so many Americans feel like their speech is under attack.

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, PROLOGIS.

- [Narrator] Every day all over the world, PROLOGIS helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at PROLOGIS.com.

- [Announcer] And by: COX Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

COX is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, healthcare, and more.

COX, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by: Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York and... (bright music) - In 1977, a group of neo-Nazis announced plans to march through Skokie, Illinois, a quiet suburb outside Chicago, home to more than 40,000 Jewish people, many of them Holocaust survivors.

Residents were horrified.

They had lived through the atrocities of Nazi Germany and now decades later, the symbols of their oppressors were coming directly to their doorstep, so the town sued.

But controversially the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU, decided to represent the neo-Nazis, not in support of their message, but to defend the principle of free speech.

- The Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the group's uniforms, their swastikas, the march itself were all protected forms of expression.

But ultimately the rally was moved to nearby Chicago where about 20 neo-Nazis were overwhelmed by 2,000 counter protesters.

That painful moment helped define free speech for the modern era in the United States.

It's ugly, it's uncomfortable, it's messy, but importantly, there's equal opportunity, a bedrock civil liberty guaranteed to all American citizens.

- So why has the idea of free speech lately been twisted into a partisan talking point?

What does it mean when both parties claim to be the defenders of free speech and its victims?

- In recent years, Republicans have rebranded themselves as the party of free speech.

Donald Trump and JD Vance made the First Amendment a campaign issue vowing to rescue America from the so-called woke mob, its obsession with cancel culture and censorship of conservative voices.

Within hours of returning to the White House, Trump signed an executive order banning federal agencies from interfering with the free speech of Americans.

- I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.

It's back.

(onlookers cheering and applauding) - Problem solved.

In the United States, it's never that simple.

Now, it's the Democrats accusing Republicans of political censorship and ideological overreach.

They say deportations of foreign students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza, threats to revoke billions in funding unless universities comply with audits and punitive measures against law firms that represented Trump's political opponents are chilling examples of violations of the First Amendment.

- The Trump administration argues that its actions are long overdue corrections to a hotbed of liberal indoctrination and academia politically motivated legal battles and threats to student safety by campus activists.

- This is not about free speech.

No one has a right to a student visa.

No one has a right to a green card, by the way.

- And there are also plenty of people on the right, anti-abortion activists, university Republican clubs, groups like Moms for Liberty, who say they can speak freely under this administration in a way that they couldn't before.

Which gets to the core issue: most of us don't judge free speech through some neutral constitutional lens.

Our ideas are informed by our politics.

Each party sees itself as the true defender of free speech, but they each have different ideas about what that means.

- When a Republican administration cracks down on anti-Israel protests, it's protecting Jewish students.

When the Democrat administration pressures social media platforms to remove posts about COVID, it's protecting public health.

But the First Amendment doesn't make those distinctions.

It isn't liberal or conservative, it's foundational; it lets people be wrong loudly and often.

As the people of Skokie learned, that is the price of a free society.

- Here to help us make sense of what the stakes are and what free speech means for Americans in 2025, I'm joined by "New York Times" reporter, Jeremy Peters, and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Ilya Shapiro.

Jeremy Peters, Ilya Shapiro, thanks so much for joining us on "GZERO World."

- Good to be with you.

- Thank you.

- I want to start with an easy one, Ilya, to you, tell us what free speech is and what it is not.

- It's the ability to express yourself, your opinion, your artistry, your views on any number of subjects without being persecuted or prosecuted by official state actors.

That's the very basics.

- And what isn't free speech, for people that think that free speech covers anything.

- It is not physical acts, be they criminal or otherwise that are motivated by ideas.

So if I beat somebody up, if I vandalize a building, if I block a road, physical actions of various kinds, even if I'm motivated by completely expressive, artistic, what have you, ideas that there's no First Amendment or free speech defense to any rules against that.

- So Jeremy, given that, why do you think freedom of speech has become a partisan issue?

Because that definition certainly doesn't sound objectionable to just about anyone that would be watching this show right now.

- Well, I guess it depends on what your political persuasion is and whether or not you feel you're being persecuted for that speech.

The old saying about free speech for me, but not for thee, I think still very much applies today and often this has been the case throughout American history.

People complain about free speech only when it is taken away from them and they tend to be really excited about it as our First Amendment to the Constitution when it enables them to say something that people don't want to hear or might otherwise be controversial.

- Give me if you can, an example or maybe two examples of that happening right now.

One from the left, one from the right.

- So certainly, we see the Trump administration going after elite universities and what they have said is, because you take federal money, we are going to subject you to a list of demands.

You have to discipline your students according to your code and not let them do things that would not be considered free speech, like setting up a tent in a quad.

That is not something generally considered to be an exercise of your First Amendment rights.

As far as on the left, I would say you look to what kind of climate I think is responsible for the very contentious debate we're having right now.

The climate on college campuses where you had progressive student activists and in some cases students egged on by progressive faculty members trying to shout down certain speakers who are conservative or pro-Trump, and that is not something that is a protected First Amendment activity.

You can't prevent somebody else from speaking.

- Ilya, do you think that talking about free speech and claiming oppression from free speech is something that both parties right now have some fundamental truth about, or is it something that only one party, like the party that everyone happens to be affiliated with can be right on?

- It really just depends on the circumstances.

In the university context, one thing is going on, in other contexts, other things are going on.

And even within the university context, if there is an attempt at regulation or restriction of speech within the classroom, that's a very different thing than arguing that the university is not acting to enforce its own rules or it's violating indeed civil rights by, as Florida has done it with its legislature, having DEI offices and things like that.

So there is illiberalism or campaigns against free speech from all sorts of directions and non-ideological directions for that matter.

But we're at a fraught time because it's so polarized and so tribal right now that indeed this dynamic of free speech for me but not for thee is prevalent.

- What would you say is the clearest in your mind, Ilya, example of overstep of fundamental freedom of speech rights in the university context right now?

- I'd say universities not protecting their students' speech rights in various ways.

FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression does a survey every year.

They're by the way very ecumenical, very fair-minded, protect everyone from all over the place.

One of my favorite organizations, and they give a failing grade to most universities in the country.

I think Harvard's at the very bottom with the only school with a negative score.

But they see all sorts of things, not necessarily speech codes, although some of those are still around, but uneven enforcement, certain clubs are allowed to do something that other clubs aren't because they're disfavored by administrators.

Sometimes schools have very good free speech, free expression policies that are observed in the breach and sometimes schools have a hard time, as we've seen since October 7th, in differentiating between speech and things that are non-speech as we just discussed.

- And also in terms of time, place and manner, regulations as lawyers put them.

So for example, core political speech is very important, but I can't go to your residential neighborhood in the middle of the night and with a megaphone tell you exactly what I think about Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

So a lot of issues with schools forgetting their basic responsibilities, their core missions to promote free speech.

Not to mention due process, academic freedom, some of these fellow travelers with free speech, if you will.

- Now, Jeremy, you heard Ilya say that Harvard is at the bottom of this list, at least according to one non-partisan organization.

To what extent is this challenge that the universities have had much more significant in a small number of elite left-leaning universities as opposed to the vast majority of universities across the country?

Are we talking about something that truly is broad-based or not really?

- So that's a great question and I don't think we really know the answer to it.

It's something that I'm interested in as a subject of my own reporting for the Times.

I think it is definitely concentrated at large, elite state schools and Ivy League schools.

They tend to get the most media attention.

So that often leaves us not knowing what is happening at Mississippi State University or at a rural community college in the far reaches of Northern California.

So what the administration has done here is make policy based on those select few schools that have had provocative and outrageous demonstrations.

They're not basing their policy on what's going on at the average college campus.

They're basing their policies on what's going on on Harvard's campus.

- Ilya, let's talk about what the Trump administration is doing at Columbia, at Harvard, at other universities.

Explain Trump's position and what you think he's trying to get done and whether you think he's going about it the right way.

- We've seen the subversion of core university missions in the last 10, 15 years, not just in terms of free speech or cancel culture, but due process.

This goes back to the Obama era.

There have been major settlements alleging violations of due process and sorts of complaints.

Equality under the law.

Again, different ways of applying rules depending on the viewpoint of the speaker.

Civil rights violations after October 7th relating to antisemitism, but not just those, just in terms of equal opportunity to access educational programs.

And what the Trump administration did is focusing on the lowest hanging fruit or the highest profile universities, has set out a list of demands saying, "You violated your obligations under the contracts that you signed to get your federal funds and therefore, here is how we want to remedy this."

I think the administration.

I agree with the administration's overall strategic goals and its large-scale diagnosis of the problem.

I think that strategically or tactically, they might have been better off pursuing some of the investigations that they announced over dozens of institutions laying the groundwork, getting the backup, all of the data and exactly connecting the violations to the statutory authorities under which the education department or the Justice Department Civil Rights Division would be acting and then laying it before the school, saying, "Hey, we found these violations.

You're gonna be in serious trouble unless we see very direct changes."

But that's not what happened.

And we kinda have this high-stakes poker game playing these demands, counter-demands, lawsuits.

I don't know where it's all gonna end, but the schools certainly don't have clean hands here.

- I think that one thing that we haven't talked about is the way that the Trump administration is most likely in violation of the First Amendment, by the way that it's treated some of these students who are non-citizens.

It's exactly true what Ilya said.

The universities do not have clean hands here.

But instead of taking an approach and executing a very reasonable demand that universities allow greater free speech rights on campus and make their campus cultures less ideologically homogenous, rather than execute that cleanly and smoothly, what the administration has done is use this blunt force to deport or try to deport people who really didn't do anything terribly wrong.

These are not the students we were talking about earlier who smashed windows or assaulted security guards.

The students, two of the highest profile- - These are students exercising freedom of speech, right?

I mean, that's what we're saying.

- Right.

And the Supreme... Yeah, and the Supreme Court probably will have to decide whether or not because they're not citizens, what type of free speech rights they're afforded, but it has issued rulings that go back and forth on this.

You talk to legal experts and you just don't know what the Supreme Court ultimately is going to say about the First Amendment rights of these folks.

But the two highest profile cases, we're talking about a guy who at Columbia, who was the spokesperson for an organization that believed and said some pretty outrageous things, but he's not on record having said any of them himself and a woman at Tufts University who just wrote an op-ed about divesting.

It's pretty hard to see where the Trump administration can make a legal case that these people are national security threats.

- So Ilya, it would seem that a lot of American citizens would be outraged if these people were somehow facing penalty as American citizens.

They're not citizens, they're just green card holders.

Does that mean that freedom of speech doesn't apply to them?

Is that your view?

- Well, that's a different issue and even though superficially it seems like an education-related issue because they're students, it's more about immigration policy and national security and a different kind of fight.

And indeed, even the education stuff that we had been talking about, not all of it relates to speech.

There's one thing about trying to control course catalogs or what's taught or said inside classrooms to the extent that that's what the administration is doing.

I don't think they are, but to the extent that it is, they're on shakier ground than if they're trying to police civil rights.

But getting on to this immigration issue, I kind of have a lived experience so-called with some of these rules 'cause I'm a naturalized citizen myself.

And at several steps along the way, having student visas, worker visas, green card, you have to certify that for example, not just that you're not committing a crime, but that you're not a Nazi, you're not a communist, you don't sympathize with an authoritarian party, you don't support terrorism, you don't support the violent overthrow of the US government.

Now, you don't have to commit a crime or even be charged with a crime to be deported.

There are all these other immigration rules under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

I'd prefer that the administration go after violators of the immigration rules like the ones that I described, rather than relying on the broader catchall that says that the Secretary of State can simply designate someone as harmful to American foreign policy because that really opens the door to a lot of problems.

- To abuse.

- Problems.

That's right.

- So I guess the question is, Jeremy, does this have a chilling effect on freedom of speech for a far larger group of people across the United States or who might be interested in visiting the United States because they feel that they could arbitrarily be considered a national security threat and there's no judicial recourse?

- I think you're already seeing the chilling effect at Columbia University, for instance, the dean of the journalism school told students, don't post on Facebook, don't do anything that will draw attention to yourself.

And it's hard to argue with that advice given what students are being deported for or are being put in the queue to be deported for.

It's like we were just saying, these are not students who committed crimes.

And I think the reason the Trump administration hasn't shown us anyone it's deporting who behaved in really egregious ways or was shouting hateful things or is videotaped blocking students from entering the quad or their dorm rooms is because those actions, I would guess, were primarily undertaken by American citizens and the school's responsibility is to discipline them in most cases, not the federal government.

- So hey Ilya, I've seen a lot of commentary about a specific focus in needs to curtail speech that equates to antisemitism.

I'm wondering, do you think that there has been a singling out of antisemitic speech and do you think it's appropriate to do so?

- I don't think there's been targeting of antisemitic speech.

I think there's a proper focus on antisemitism because it's reared its ugly head since October 7th.

Antisemitism is the canary in the coal mine.

It always pops up when there are much larger or more pathologies underneath, and in the educational context that ranges from ideological indoctrination to echo chambers, cancel culture.

I really think that there's this illiberalism that has taken over higher education and that started before even Donald Trump's first term.

- I think that the antisemitic issue is tricky because you have the current president of Harvard, Alan Garber saying that he believes certain forms of anti-Israel commentary can indeed be antisemitic.

And that is something that a lot of people have debated, whether or not these speech codes that try to police antisemitic actions and words go too far in violating the First Amendment.

Colleges now seem to be much more focused on preventing antisemitism than they were just a year ago when it seemed that many of them didn't take it seriously at all.

- Ilya, do you think that it's defined appropriately on campuses that anti-Israel speech by itself is not antisemitic?

Because I mean, certainly as someone who's spent a lot of time on college campuses, I see a hell of a lot of the former that does not equate to the latter.

- Well, I think it's possible to be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic, but it's very rare in my experience, and you see that with opposition, that's nominally to Israel's policies, but it's being directed to Hillel's or it's being directed at synagogues or what have you.

So it's a hard call to make, but you have to be detail-oriented in these things and go case by case, university by university.

- So when I said anti-Israel, I personally was putting in the context of being anti-Russia or anti-China, of which you'd probably describe the vast majority of Congress.

Maybe we're just defining anti-Israel with a broad brush in ways that we shouldn't be.

Is that fair?

- So I mean, when the protesters chant, I don't want no two-state, I want it all or however they do it or from the river to the sea, that is a direct threat to Israel.

That's not just saying we want to replace Netanyahu's coalition government with a different one.

I mean, for that matter, the anti-Netanyahu coalition leader, Naftali Bennett, was shouted down at Princeton very recently.

- [Ian] I remember.

Yeah.

- I don't think we want to get too cute here.

- No, I was gonna say, I don't think we're gonna resolve this issue on this show, which is fair enough.

I see a fair amount of agreement, even if not in the exact terminology that both of you would use, in the way you're generally framing what you think needs to happen and where your concerns of overreach are.

That's certainly a useful place for us to all start.

Jeremy Peters, Ilya Shapiro, really appreciate you joining me today.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

(equipment beeping) - That's our show this week.

Come back next week if you like what you see or even if you don't, but you want to exercise your free speech right to tell us, go on and check us out at GZEROmedia.com.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (piano glissandos) (pensive chiming) - [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, PROLOGIS.

- [Narrator] Every day all over the world, PROLOGIS helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform.

Addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at PROLOGIS.com.

- [Announcer] And by: COX Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

COX is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, healthcare, and more.

COX, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by: Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... (upbeat music) (dramatic music)