One of liberalism’s proudest ideals emerged from hypocrisy and self-interest. This episode covers its 18th-century birth in the polemics of corrupt British journalists, its exclusion of women and colonized peoples, the Founders’ rejection of France’s more balanced model, and its reappropriation by abolitionists and reformers. Free speech’s evolution through the Cold War and the age of Big Tech reveals how a principle meant to liberate became a tool of power and a license for unaccountable media.
