Free Speech at the Flashpoint: Promise, Recession, and the Transatlantic Rupture

In the organizer's words:

When Vice President Vance accused European leaders at the 2025 Munich Security Conference of betraying shared values by restricting free speech, he transformed free expression from a cornerstone of common values into a transatlantic fault line. The provocation landed because the underlying crisis is real. We are living through a global free speech recession - one that implicates democracies as much as autocracies, and in which well-intentioned laws against hate speech, disinformation and digital harms increasingly erode hard-won freedoms to dissent and speak truth to power.

Drawing on his new book The Future of Free Speech, Jacob Mchangama's keynote asks whether Western democracies can rediscover a shared commitment to the values both claim to champion.

This keynote address is part of the Bavarian American Academy annual conference. The 24th BAA Conference will take place from Thursday, July 09, 2026, through Saturday, July 11, 2026, at the Amerikahaus under the theme "Free Speech: Promises, Meanings, Controversies."

About the Speaker:

Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). In 2018, he was a visiting scholar at Columbia's Global Freedom of Expression Center. He has commented extensively on free speech and human rights in outlets including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy. Jacob Mchangama has published in academic and peer-reviewed journals, including Human Rights Quarterly, Policy Review, and Amnesty International's Strategic Studies. He is the producer and narrator of the podcast Clear and Present Danger: A History of Free Speech. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed book Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media (Basic Books, 2022) and co-author with Jeff Kosseff of The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy's Most Essential Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026). He is the recipient of numerous awards for his work on free speech and human rights.

Please register via following link: https://eveeno.com/271341851.

The event will be livestreamed on YouTube. Please note that no registration is necessary for watching the livestream.

Organizer: Bavarian American Academy

Partners: Melior Foundation, Friedrich Naumann Foundation, Thomas Dehler Foundation

Price information:

Admission is free.