Radiolab - More Perfect: The Hate Debate

Back in 2017 our colleagues at More Perfect gathered a room full of people together to debate a straight forward question: Can free speech go too far? Today, eight years have passed and plenty has changed, but this question feels alive as ever. And so we’re re-airing More Perfect’s The Hate Debate. Taped live at WNYC's Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, Elie Mystal, Ken White and Corynne McSherry duke it out over whether the first amendment needs an update in our digital world. Special thanks to Elaine Chen, Jennifer Keeney Sendrow, and the entire Greene Space team. Additional engineering for this episode by Chase Culpon, Louis Mitchell, and Alex Overington. EPISODE CITATIONS: Videos - If watching is more your speed, you can see the event, in its entirety, here: https://www.youtube.com/live/azcIcVDyVTM?si=ZqpQHQfvTKr2jS0z There’s other Radiolabs for that - Further recommended listening What Up Holmes and Post No Evil. Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Duration: 40m
Broadcast on: 18 Jul 2025
Audio Format: other

And so we’re re-airing More Perfect’s The Hate Debate. Taped live at WNYC's Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, Elie Mystal, Ken White and Corynne McSherry duke it out over whether the first amendment needs an update in our digital world.

Special thanks to Elaine Chen, Jennifer Keeney Sendrow, and the entire Greene Space team. Additional engineering for this episode by Chase Culpon, Louis Mitchell, and Alex Overington.

EPISODE CITATIONS:

Videos -
If watching is more your speed, you can see the event, in its entirety, here:
https://www.youtube.com/live/azcIcVDyVTM?si=ZqpQHQfvTKr2jS0z

There’s other Radiolabs for that -
Further recommended listening What Up Holmes and Post No Evil.

Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!

Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.

Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected].

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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Hey, this is Latif, you might have seen last month, we did a whole week of shark stories to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the movie Jaws. If you haven't checked it out, please do, we're really proud of it. It's called Swimming with Shadows, a Radiolab Week of Sharks. It also kind of ate up our whole team for weeks. So this month, we are running a couple extra rewinds so that we have time to finish a bunch of new episodes that are going to start coming out in August. Just about topics like menopause, artificial intelligence, bioluminescence, evolution of the human voice. There's so many things we are really excited about, all that will be coming at you starting in August. In the meantime, today we have for you a debate over how free free speech should really be. It comes from our sister's show, More Perfect, who recorded it live back in 2017, they called the episode The Hate Debate. And we wanted to rerun it because these issues of what should and should not be sayable continue to be as alive and electric as ever. Whether we're talking about college student protesters, or non-citizens, or social media platforms, or government employees, or now there's even the question of whether AI chatbots have free speech rights. This question of free speech and how much of it is too much, it's not going away. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to my predecessor as host, Jad Abemrod, and the debaters. We recorded this at WNYC's green space in New York in front of a live audience. The evening begins with Jad polling the audience whether or not they think the government should do more to limit free speech. Here you go. Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. Everybody who thinks that you're right to free speech, especially online, okay, people say some bad things fine, but your right to free speech should remain pretty much unlimited. Those of you who feel that way, make some noise. Alright, you guys are thunderous over here. Let's do one more time so I can just get a sort of more accurate. Those of you who don't think it should be limited, go. Okay, now those of you on the flip side, those of you who think there should be some clear, hard limits. Easy, easy. Those of you who think there should be some clear limits on what you can say online, make some noise. Alright, okay, that gives us a good sense of where we're starting. Alright, so let me introduce our debaters for round one. The question is should the government limit online free speech taking one side of that question is, Mr. Ellie Mistal, our legal editor at More Perfect. Also an editor above law, a site for legal news, he is on one side of the stage and of the question. On the other, Mr. Ken White, a First Amendment litigator criminal defense attorney at Brown White and Osborne in Los Angeles. He has joined us here from the left coast. He's a former federal prosecutor, he runs the free speech and criminal justice blog, popat.com. Give it up for Ken.

Alright, let us begin. We'll start with you Ellie. Is there something wrong with the First Amendment, would you say? Yeah, no, I don't have a problem with the First Amendment. It was a beautiful thing written for white people who wanted to overthrow the government, it's fine. I have a problem with absolutists who want to elevate threats, harassment, and calls for genocide to the level of a sacred right. I do not think that the First Amendment prohibits us from preventing a Nazi from getting a permit to rally any more than I would think that the Second Amendment prevents us from having a sociopath not get a gun permit, okay? Absolutism is absolutely wrong on this issue. Okay, Ellie Mistal, strong beginning. Ken, what do you think? Well, I don't know what absolutists Ellie is talking about. The last one I know is Hugo Black, and he died in 1971. We have well-established narrow exceptions to the First Amendment, and they are narrow for a reason. We got them narrowed on the backs of the powerless being suppressed by the powerful. All of the types of restrictions that Ellie would like are ones that have historically been used against communists, against labor protesters, against war protesters, against minorities, and everyone else.

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