The Historian Fara Dabhoiwala Says Absolute Free Speech Never Really Existed

Before he became the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr often talked about the importance of freedom of speech. “Free speech is the counterweight—it is the check on government control,” he wrote on X in 2023. Or, in 2024: “We must dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.” Since taking up his post in January, however, he has found a value in regulating how certain people express themselves. His FCC has launched investigations into 60 Minutes, Saturday Night Live, PBS, and NPR—all before last week, when ABC temporarily suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s nightly talk show, in the wake of vague threats from Carr. (“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said on a podcast.)

To Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton and the author of a timely new book, What Is Free Speech? A History of a Dangerous Idea, all of this is standard practice for a concept that has always been used to advance particular agendas. Speech, he writes, is always abused and always subject to regulation: “Formal and informal rules about expression are ubiquitous. We label such restraints ‘censorship’ when we disapprove of them, but in truth they are inescapable.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.