Should free speech be absolute?

Bakhti is joined by Sarah McLaughlin, a senior scholar focused on global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Sarah and Bakhti discuss the difference in free speech traditions between the United States and Europe, threats to speech on both sides of the Atlantic, and why Americans apply free speech selectively along political lines . Sarah also talks through why Americans should defend the right to free expression even, and especially, when it is painful for them. --- Sarah McLaughlin is the Senior Scholar, Global Expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and author of Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech. She writes regularly about the state of free speech around the world and her work has been featured in outlets including Foreign Policy, The Guardian, and The Los Angeles Times. This podcast is hosted by Bakhti Nishanov and produced by Alanna Novetsky and Carly Breland, inconjunction with the Senate Recording Studio.

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Should free speech be absolute? is an episode from Helsinki on the Hill by Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

This episode is 38:42 long.

This episode was published on Apr 7, 2026.

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