Story of the week

• Why I Quit the Tenure Track (The Atlantic) by Tyler Austin Harper

I began to develop a case of political vertigo. There I was, joining my colleagues in sifting through our curriculum like anti-racist truffle pigs; assigning an Afro Caribbean graphic novel, Marshallese ecopoetry, and the like to diversify my syllabi; and organizing a “Decolonization and Liberation”–themed MLK Day celebration meant to honor a civil-rights leader who had been assassinated while supporting sanitation workers agitating for basic labor rights. Meanwhile, the college was paying ungodly sums to corporate mercenaries to ensure that it could continue exploiting its most vulnerable employees. But if administrators felt the least bit sheepish about their hypocrisy, they didn’t show it.

This week in

• Americans left and right agree: Higher ed has an ideological-diversity problem by

• Tuskegee tells students to suit up and leave the durag at home by

• How the unraveling of Jason Arday’s career and the UK’s censorship collided by

• Pete Hegseth wants the Pentagon press corps on a leash by

• NYU’s crackdown on affinity graduations solves a problem that isn’t there by Elizabeth Maguire

• Countries are hiding censorship in ‘cybercrime’ bills. A UN treaty could make things worse by

The treaty purports to improve international cooperation in addressing crimes taking place using computer systems — but cooperation is not limited to specific online criminal acts like fraud or phishing. Instead, the treaty pushes nations to share personal data that other nations request about individuals accused of committing “serious” crimes.

But there’s an important question here. What constitutes a “serious” crime? The treaty does little to define it other than clarifying that it’s a crime carrying at least a four-year prison sentence as a punishment. For billions of people around the world, speech is a crime that warrants a long prison term.

• The romance of fair use and fiction by Ally Duong

This week in FIRE’s blog

• Student punished for ‘blasted’ comment wins court battle by

• Free speech study finds surprising similarities between ‘very liberal’ and ‘very conservative’ Americans

International free speech stories of the week

• [Canada] Justice Centre urges MPs to reject Bill C-34, warns social media law threatens privacy and free speech

Another concern raised by the organization is the creation of a new Digital Safety Commission, which would be responsible for interpreting and enforcing provisions dealing with harmful online content.

The report argues that platforms could face fines of up to $10 million or 3% of global revenue if they fail to adequately address content deemed to promote hatred, while leaving key definitions to regulators after the legislation is passed.

• France shuts mosque over Quran verses and Islamic texts used in Muslim worship

• Brazilian Influencer Convicted Of “Social Racism” After Criminally Misgendering Transgender Politician

Reminder of the Week

In light of Tyler Austin Harper’s fantastic article in The Atlantic this week (see “Story of the Week” above) and all the many problems with higher education it raised, it’s worth a reminder that and I wrote a whole damn book about the scourge of Cancel Culture inside and outside American academia.

One thing worth remembering about The Canceling of the American Mind is why I felt compelled to write it in the first place. At the time, it seemed like virtually nobody with the resources to do it was willing to undertake a serious, data-intensive examination of just how bad Cancel Culture had become, particularly in higher education, and how historically unusual the situation was.

And this was exactly the kind of work academia should have been doing itself. Universities should have been able to examine their own institutions and ask “Is there actually a problem here? How serious is it? What does the evidence show?” Instead, large parts of academia seemed barely able to keep themselves from sneering at the very idea that there was a problem—even though an enormous number of people inside higher education knew perfectly well that there was one.

The data were extraordinary. In FIRE’s 2022 faculty survey, 16% of professors reported that they had either been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their teaching, research, academic talks, or non-academic expression. 29% said they had been pressured by administrators to avoid researching controversial topics.

And the evidence has only gotten stronger. FIRE’s much larger 2024 faculty survey found that 35% of professors had recently toned down something they were writing because they worried it would cause too much controversy. The comparable number among social scientists surveyed during the McCarthy era was nine percent.

Nearly four times the McCarthy-era rate.

That is a disaster. And remember: Nobody seriously pretends McCarthyism didn’t happen.

There is an additional problem when the institutions suffering from this kind of dysfunction are the institutions responsible for producing and policing knowledge. Higher education and journalism exercise enormous influence over what gets researched, what gets covered, what gets dismissed, what gets fact-checked, and ultimately what the rest of the country is encouraged to regard as true or false. That makes failures within those institutions unusually difficult to confront, because the institutions you are criticizing have disproportionate power to decide which criticisms get taken seriously in the first place.

That was one of the reasons we wrote The Canceling of the American Mind. To my knowledge, it remains the only book on Cancel Culture that attempts anything like this combination of data, historical comparison, case analysis, and explanation of how the phenomenon actually worked.

So if Tyler Austin Harper’s piece has you wondering how American higher education got here, or if you simply want to remember what actually happened during the period when much of the press was insisting that cancel culture was imaginary, exaggerated, or merely “accountability,” check out The Canceling of the American Mind.

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Stories of the week

• Censorship Will Never Solve Antisemitism by

Jewish Americans have historically been among the most principled defenders of free speech. When a group of neo-Nazis planned to march through the town of Skokie, Illinois, home to many Holocaust survivors, it was a Jewish attorney who stood up for their right of assembly. David Goldberger, then the legal director of the ACLU of Illinois, was no self-hating Jew, and he certainly harbored no sympathy for the National Socialist Party of America. But he realized that “the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and press would be meaningless if the government could pick and choose the persons to whom they apply.”

*David Goldberger will be speaking at the gala to conclude FIRE’s Soapbox conference in Philadelphia, Nov. 4-6! Get your tickets now!

• Investigated for saying ‘word salad’!? (FIRE) by

How far can a university stretch the definition of harassment? Far enough to investigate a professor over the phrase “word salad,” apparently. Just ask Richard Himelfarb, a political science professor at Hofstra University.

• Police investigated journalist who tried to expose Cambridge professor (Telegraph) by Gordon Rayner

“I was just doing my job. Journalists should be free to ask questions of anyone, even star professors. It’s very rare that academics refuse to speak to the press – that caused me to look into this matter further and I was astonished by what I found.”

This week in ERI

This week in Expression

• Universities’ double failure on antisemitism and free speech

• How does the First Amendment govern liability for AI? by

A publisher does not become the guarantor of every idea it distributes, and a reader who acts badly on what he reads does not thereby transfer responsibility to the publisher.

*’s last day at FIRE was this past week as he starts law school in the fall, and we’re sorry to see him go but wish him the best!

• Can students learn to disagree without becoming enemies? by &

• Australia targets Telegram as Russia charges its founder with terrorism by

• College students aren’t becoming less polarized. They’re becoming less tolerant by

• Censorship never stops with just two words by

This week on So To Speak

• This week on So To Speak, FIRE EVP & host had on Michael Tigar to discuss the landmark John Peter Zenger trial and its legacy for American free speech, as well as reflections from Tigar’s six-decade legal career — from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Chicago Eight to jury nullification and lawyers’ First Amendment rights.

This week in FIRE’s blog

• The real threat at Michigan’s commencement wasn’t the speech by Michelle Liao

• FIRE statement: White House’s framework puts AI evaluation in a black box

AI models are expressive tools. Their creation and use fall within the First Amendment’s protection — so the government’s efforts to regulate them rightly face serious hurdles. The public is right to be skeptical of a secret process that can be abused to reward views those in power find favorable, and punish views those in power dislike.

• University of Alabama earns FIRE’s top rating for free speech after reforming policies

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

The beginning of the end of the summer of ‘26 …

Another busy week, especially in U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals, so we’re doing quick hits again:

• Rodríguez-Cotto v. González-Colón

Holding that the law is a content-based restriction that fails strict scrutiny, the First Circuit affirmed an injunction in the challenge by journalists to a Puerto Rico statute that criminalizes purposeful, knowing, or reckless warnings or false alarms related to an imminent catastrophe, or disseminating (including via social networks or the media) a notice or false alarm that puts at imminent risk the life, health, bodily integrity, or safety of others, or public or private property, during a governor-declared state emergency or disaster. The court rejected the government’s claim that the law is constitutional in criminalizing only knowing or reckless falsity, and thus falls in the category of historically unprotected false speech, as it is not simply a defamation law, then held that in targeting falsity and nothing more, the law is inherently content-based. And while Puerto Rico has a compelling interest in limiting falsehoods that risk public safety in an emergency, the law is not narrowly tailored as it applies not just if harm occurs but when it could, nor is it limited to speech that might be reasonably believed, and the government failed to show why the less restrictive alternative of counter-speech does not suffice. In upholding the injunction, the court ensures the concerns raised in the amicus brief FIRE joined with Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Press, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Pen America Center remain at bay.

• Schulte v. Leners

The Seventh Circuit affirmed denial of qualified immunity to the chair of a town board of supervisors on a First Amendment challenge to his viewpoint-based deletion of comments from the town’s website. The court held that, even prior to the Supreme Court decision in Lindke v. Freed (which the chairman’s actions predated), under clearly established law: allowing comments on a town webpage creates a public forum; websites are not unique fora to which different constitutional rules might apply; the First Amendment bars viewpoint discrimination in any forum where the government hosts speech; and the comment section could not be deemed “government speech” the town could freely censor.

• DoorDash, Inc. v. City of New York

The Second Circuit affirmed an injunction against a New York City code section that requires food delivery platforms to share with restaurants from which they retrieve and deliver food the full name, phone number, and email and delivery addresses of the customer, and the order contents, holding it violates the First Amendment’s protections against compelled speech. The court held the required disclosure did not fall within the allowance for compelled commercial disclosures under the Supreme Court’s Zauderer decision, as it was neither about the platforms’ own services but rather third parties (the customers who order the food), nor designed to counter potentially misleading commercial speech. The court then held the law is arguably content-based and subject to strict scrutiny, but even as a regulation of commercial speech it failed intermediate scrutiny. Even assuming (without deciding) economic protection of restaurants is a substantial interest that the disclosure would directly advance, the City offered no evidence the reg serves its interests better than obvious, substantially less burdensome alternatives would—especially given the reg presumes every customer consents to having their personal information shared, and requires those who want to opt out to do so on an order-by-order basis, resulting in “a marketing list that no customer asked to join and that none can be confident they have permanently left.”

• VIP Products, LLC v. Jack Daniel’s Properties, Inc.

Not a First Amendment case per se, but one in which FIRE’s Supreme Court amicus brief sought to ensure constitutionally protected parody still receives the breathing space it needs, and where the Ninth Circuit has now vacated an injunction under the federal Trademark Act’s dilution-by-tarnishment provision against VIP’s “Bad Spaniels” dog toy, which mimics Jack Daniel’s black label and bottle-shape. The court held the only Jack Daniel’s marks that are famous, as anti-dilution requires, are its name and bottle shape—and not other label elements made part of the Bad Spaniels parody, like changing “Old No. 7” to “Old No. 2”—and that the trial court erred by overlooking that parodic nature in finding a negative association between the whiskey and dog poop likely to tarnish Jack Daniel’s marks. (The opinion also admirably starts with the line “A man walks into a bar.”)

• Amazon.com Services, LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc.

Also not a First Amendment case, but here, the Ninth Circuit vacated a preliminary injunction granted to Amazon under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act against use of Perplexity AI products to shop for goods at Amazon.com. The court held, in part by using the Rule of Lenity, that Perplexity’s Assistant AI did not unauthorizedly “access” Amazon’s site as the CFAA requires, but rather only Amazon customers authorized by the company did so, with the AI serving as a tool for them to carry out specific acts at the website.

International free speech stories of the week

• Minns government rejects expansion of hate speech laws after review recommendations made public (ABC Australia) by Nick Dole

The Minns government has rejected key advice from a review it commissioned, which recommends hate speech laws be extended to protect more members of the community.

As a result, inciting hatred against people based on sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, religion and other characteristics will not be made illegal under the Crimes Act.

Inciting hatred based on race will remain a criminal offence.

• German high court rules comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is protected speech (Jerusalem Post)

• X says Turkish court ordered block of Istanbul Mayor Imamoglu’s candidacy account (Reuters)

Book of the Month

This month’s winner of the Prestigious Ashurbanipal book award goes to A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness by Michael Pollan. The book opens with my brilliant friend Christof Koch, who has spent his career chasing the neural basis of consciousness and is one of the leading champions of Integrated Information Theory. The book leaps right into the real question: what even counts as consciousness in the first place? Coherent thoughts? We’re certainly not all walking around narrating in words — not everybody has a clear inner monologue. So what’s the minimal unit? A feeling? An instinct? Something even less coherent than that, which I think we all experience anyway? And perhaps most interestingly, do plants enjoy a kind of consciousness?

I can’t do the book justice here. You have to sit with it yourself, and I think you’ll enjoy the time spent with the topic, and with Pollan.

NOTE: Christof, incidentally, co-hosts a terrific podcast with Heather Berlin called Science of Perception Box, which just opened its second season with my friend as the first guest.

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On July 30, the American Association of University Professors did something it has never done in its 111-year history: It endorsed a candidate for political office.

And this was not a general-election endorsement against some uniquely terrible enemy of academic freedom. No, the national AAUP waded into a contested Democratic primary for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat and backed Abdul El-Sayed, the unmistakable candidate of the party’s left. He had the backing of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ran on Medicare for All, rejected corporate PAC money, and called for ending U.S. military aid to Israel.

He was also the more controversial choice, especially because of his position that Israel’s war in Gaza constitutes genocide and his appearances with Hasan Piker. Academic freedom, by contrast, was not a defining issue of his campaign, although El-Sayed had been an AAUP member and was strongly backed by organized labor. The AAUP proudly advertised the decision as its “First-Ever National Political Endorsement.” Todd Wolfson, the AAUP’s president, said roughly 80 percent of the Michigan members who voted supported making an endorsement and 97 percent favored El-Sayed.

Then came the less majestic denominator.

Inside Higher Ed reported that about 40 Michigan AAUP members attended the consultation call where the informal poll occurred, out of roughly 4,000 members statewide. Fewer still were on the call when the vote happened. One Michigan member said his “jaw dropped” when he saw Wolfson cite the percentages without the raw numbers.

That is not exactly a sweeping mandate, and yet here we are.

The more revealing part came when people pointed out that a century-old organization claiming to defend academic freedom for all professors might lose something by becoming an electoral participant in one party’s primary.

Wolfson’s response on X was: “Apparently our first endorsement has upset some people. Good.” He added, “AAUP isn’t going to respond by pretending politics isn’t happening. We’re going to organize.”

In another, now-deleted post, he called the critics “clowns” while straw-manning their arguments against the move.

The amazing thing is that this was offered as a rebuttal. But nobody had claimed that politics was imaginary or demanded silence about attacks on universities. FIRE has hardly been silent about the Trump administration’s abuses in that realm and others. It’s absurd to claim the issue here is some martyr-like desire to roll over, dressed as neutrality.

The deeper objection to this move, though, is actually practical. Suppose you are a professor who opposed El-Sayed, or simply does not share the AAUP’s politics, and your academic freedom is violated. Are you really going to bring your case to the organization that has declared itself a left-wing political union and endorsed the candidate you opposed? More likely, you will go to FIRE or the Academic Freedom Alliance, or look to Heterodox Academy for support.

And the damage compounds. Once the AAUP behaves like a left-wing political organization, it attracts more people who want exactly that while driving away moderates, conservatives, libertarians, and anyone else who does not want an academic-freedom organization doubling as a political faction. The membership becomes still more homogeneous in the process. Internal objections get weaker. The next partisan step seems even more obvious.

That is how an organization becomes trapped inside its own box and then mistakes the view from inside for reality.

Wolfson has been unusually explicit about what changed. At a debate in June, he said that for its first 50 years the AAUP was “a professional association representing the profession,” when neutrality made sense. Over the last 50 years, he said, it “has pivoted to being mostly a union.” Then came the key sentence: “Unions are political organizations,” and the AAUP has “shifted the organization to reflect that.”

So there it is. The AAUP’s president is saying openly that his organization has been remade into a political union. Not only that, but it has formed a political action committee and signaled that more endorsements are coming.

That may be coherent, but choices have costs.

I’ve written about the AAUP’s increasing partisanship and rejection of its founding principles before, and I didn’t do it to score points or make new enemies. I did it because this is a real loss. For most of its history, the AAUP occupied a uniquely important place in American higher education. Its 1940 Statement became part of the operating system of the modern university, and FIRE treated its best reports as models of principled analysis.

That authority depended on the belief that its standards applied across political lines. A professor did not have to vote correctly to deserve academic freedom. Once the AAUP becomes an electoral organization allied with one coalition, professors outside it have reason to wonder whether the association sees them as people to protect or opponents to defeat. And why wouldn’t they?

This past spring, I gave a presentation to FIRE’s staff about the importance of cultivating and maintaining viewpoint diversity across our ranks. Unfortunately, the AAUP has become an almost perfect case study in what happens to an organization that does not share — or worse, is outwardly hostile to — that value. What strikes me most is not simply that its leaders made a bad strategic choice. It is that they seem unable to understand why anyone could see the choice as a problem.

An organization with meaningful viewpoint diversity would have had at least one person in the room saying, “Before the national authority on academic freedom endorses a candidate in a Democratic primary, perhaps we should think about what this does to our credibility with professors who vote the other way.” And an organization with meaningful viewpoint diversity would have recognized what a seriously compromised position that endorsement puts it in.

While preparing my talk I realized there were parts of the argument I had never fully written down, and I really should, because viewpoint diversity is incredibly important. Failure to preserve it puts us where the AAUP is right now, and because of who we are and how we’re wired, we are unlikely to see it until it’s far too late.

The human problem

Human beings are self-deceiving creatures. Evolution did not design us to understand the world exactly as it is. It designed us to survive and reproduce in it. A belief that helps us do those things does not have to be true. We are perfectly capable of feeling absolute certainty about things that are, to use the technical term, bullshit.

And I do not mean “those people” are like this. I mean you. I mean me. Believing that bias is mainly a problem our opponents struggle with is, conveniently enough, one of our favorite biases.

In 1990, Ziva Kunda’s foundational paper, “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,” explained how readily the rational parts of our minds become attorneys for the conclusion we already want. Give us a reason to believe something, and we can usually construct a justification that feels principled enough to preserve both the conclusion and our self-image.

Eight years later, Raymond Nickerson’s review, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises,” showed how prior beliefs shape what evidence we search for, notice, remember, and take seriously. Evidence that supports our side gets waved through customs. Contrary evidence is detained, strip-searched, and asked to produce three forms of identification. Then, in 2001, my friend and Coddling of the American Mind co-author gave the same basic process its most memorable image in “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail.” Moral intuition arrives first. Reasoning trots along behind it, explaining why our immediate reaction was also, by astonishing coincidence, the principled and intellectually serious one.

In 2017, Dan Kahan, Ellen Peters, Erica Cantrell Dawson, and Paul Slovic gave this an especially nasty twist. Participants were asked to interpret a difficult numerical table. For some, it described whether a skin-rash cream worked. For others, the same numbers described whether a ban on carrying concealed handguns reduced crime. On the politically neutral skin-cream problem, greater numeracy worked exactly as we would hope: The more mathematically capable subjects were much more likely to get the answer right. But once the identical problem was framed as gun control, political identity took over. The most numerate subjects became the most polarized. They were especially good at reading the numbers correctly when the answer supported their side, and remarkably capable of getting them wrong when the answer threatened it.

That is what makes the finding so disturbing. We like to imagine that bad reasoning is a result of low intelligence. Kahan’s study suggests that greater intelligence can instead drive us faster and more efficiently toward the conclusion we already wanted. Rather than defeat bias, intelligence actually accelerates it. In an ideologically uniform institution, the cleverest people in the room may be the most dangerous because they can build the strongest arguments for the group’s blind spots.

Then, in 2023, Aileen Oeberst and Roland Imhoff gave me the term I had been looking for: belief-consistent information processing, or BCIP. I was genuinely excited when I found it because BCIP sums up a bewildering number of cognitive biases with one simple idea — what I think of as a kind of super-bias. We begin with a belief, identity, or desired conclusion and then search for, interpret, remember, and evaluate information in ways that protect it. Confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, selective exposure, asymmetric skepticism, and a long list of other named errors are all variations on that basic move. Instead of having to memorize a zoo of biases, BCIP lets you see the animal underneath.

BCIP is the human default, which is why institutions need belief-inconsistent people.

It is not enough to have brilliant people who all think alike. A room full of smart people can become extraordinarily effective at confirming what the room already believes. That is what has happened at the AAUP. Its leaders can explain at length why neutrality is surrender, why electoral endorsements are simply another form of defending academic freedom, and why concern about political homogeneity is really just a concern that fascism is not better represented in peer review. The conclusion always seems to be that the AAUP’s current political instincts are both morally necessary and intellectually unimpeachable. What luck!

I have watched the same mechanism operate in my own work. Early in FIRE’s history, I persuaded myself that academic freedom required us to defend Elizabeth Ito, a technical-writing professor who spent ten minutes of a 50-minute class attacking the Iraq War. At the time, we had many cases involving right-leaning professors, and I wanted a visible case involving someone on the left. I also worried that turning it down would make us look hypocritical.

But the First Amendment does not give professors license to stop teaching the assigned course: In Piggee v. Carl Sandburg College, the Seventh Circuit held that a college may require classroom speech to remain germane to its educational mission, while Hardy v. Jefferson Community College and Bonnell v. Lorenzo mark the corresponding line between controversial material that genuinely serves a pedagogical purpose and speech that does not.

I was wrong, and the important thing is that my bias did not announce itself as bias. It arrived dressed as principle.

That is what viewpoint diversity pushes back against. It is not a dogmatic demand that every possible opinion receive equal weight. Many opinions are wrong. Some are embarrassing. Viewpoint diversity is institutionalized disconfirmation — a structure that helps self-deceiving people discover when they are wrong.

How consensus turns phony

The trouble gets worse in groups, and particularly in groups that think they agree.

There is nothing wrong with genuine consensus. People can disagree, test assumptions, examine alternatives, and eventually reach the same conclusion. But consensus should be an aspiration rather than an expectation. When an organization begins with the goal of consensus, it often gets groupthink instead. There is actually a fascinating timeline of research on this topic that is instructive here.

In the 1950s, Solomon Asch’s famous line-judgment experiments showed the raw power of unanimity. When everyone else in the room gave an obviously wrong answer about which line matched another, many subjects went along with it despite seeing for themselves that it was incorrect. That’s how powerful the pressure is to conform. But Asch also found that unanimity is fragile. Just the presence of one dissenter sharply reduced the pressure to conform. One person saying, “No, that is not what I see,” immediately changed the dynamic in the room.

In 1969, Serge Moscovici and Marisa Zavalloni helped establish what became known as group polarization. Like-minded people do not necessarily average one another into moderation. Instead, they often move toward a more extreme version of the position they already favored. Group members hear more arguments for their side and learn which position carries status inside the group. Cass Sunstein later pulled together decades of this work in his 2002 essay “The Law of Group Polarization.”

In 1972, Irving Janis coined the term “groupthink” in Victims of Groupthink. He argued that tightly knit groups can become so focused on maintaining agreement that careful evaluation of evidence falls by the wayside. Members censor themselves, warnings are dismissed or rationalized away, “mindguards” keep inconvenient information out of view, and silence comes to be treated as evidence that everyone is on the same page.

In 1974, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann introduced the idea of the spiral of silence: People who think their views are unpopular often choose not to express them, reinforcing the impression that a consensus exists. Two decades later, Timur Kuran’s 1995 book Private Truths, Public Lies described a closely related phenomenon he called preference falsification, in which people publicly profess beliefs they privately reject because candor comes with consequences. The result is an institution where many individuals quietly doubt an idea while assuming almost everyone else accepts it.

And in 2004, Cass Sunstein, David Schkade, and Lisa Ellman found a comparable effect in federal appellate panels. Judges sitting with ideologically similar colleagues produced more ideologically pronounced decisions. The presence of a judge from the other political camp could change deliberation and moderate outcomes.

Numerical parity was not required. All it took was the presence of one genuinely different person.

That describes the AAUP’s evolution unusually well. First, the organization became more politically homogeneous. Then dissent became rarer. Then the absence of dissent began to look like proof that no serious dissenting position existed. Eventually, the organization moved from lacking viewpoint diversity to publishing arguments against it and publicly dismissing political disagreement as fascism failing peer review.

That is how institutions become strange without realizing they are strange.

Why actual dissent matters

Organizations often respond to the problem of bias by assigning someone to play devil’s advocate. That is a useful exercise, but it is not a substitute for having someone who actually disagrees in the room.

In 2001, Charlan Nemeth, Keith Brown, and John Rogers tested this directly in “Devil’s Advocate versus Authentic Dissent: Stimulating Quantity and Quality.” Genuine dissent produced more and better ideas than assigned dissent. In fact, in some conditions, the staged devil’s advocate actually reinforced the majority’s starting position.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Everyone knows the designated dissenter is doing a bit. More importantly, a role-player does not bring the same information, intuitions, priorities, or persistence as someone who sincerely believes what they’re saying. People also tend to be pretty terrible at simulating arguments they despise. Their version of steel-manning becomes, “Let us imagine that I am an ignorant bigot with contemptible motives.” Shockingly, this does not produce an especially accurate account of what the other side believes.

Dissenters have to be in the room to keep the room honest. You cannot ask a monoculture to promise that it will do better next time. The AAUP’s problem is not merely that it made a partisan decision. Its internal culture appears to have reached the point where the best response to criticism is: Yes, we are political; politics is necessary; our opponents are fascists or clowns; why would any decent person object?

That is what total lack of viewpoint diversity looks like near the end of the process.

O’Sullivan’s Curse

This brings us to John O’Sullivan’s 1989 observation that “all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing” — what I call O’Sullivan’s Curse.

It is not a scientific law. Institutions can plainly drift rightward. But in my experience, rightward transformation usually has an identifiable source of pressure from the top: a wealthy owner, political appointees, a government, a church hierarchy, or a board deliberately imposing a new direction.

Some of this leftward drift is organic, and some of it plainly is not. In The Canceling of the American Mind, and I spent a great deal of time on the number of different mechanisms that can produce conformity: political self-selection, professional sorting, prestige pipelines, ideological litmus tests, social-media mobs, administrative cowardice, group polarization, and the cumulative pressure to keep your head down. We called the whole obstacle course the Conformity Gauntlet.

Similarly, Neil Gross’ 2012 work emphasized occupational reputation and self-selection: Institutions known as liberal attract more liberals and repel conservatives, making the reputation increasingly accurate. His forthcoming book, What Happened to College?, is considerably less reassuring about what happens after that sorting begins. Gross describes politics seeping into every corner of campus life, bringing ideological litmus tests, self-censorship, and social exclusion. And, yes, people may simply decide they do not want a career in a place where they will spend every lunch figuratively — and perhaps literally — eating alone.

You don’t have to take Gross’ word for it either. FIRE has documented that machinery for 25 years. Over the last half-century, academics have been denied opportunities (like Mike Adams, denied promotion for his conservative writing at UNC-Wilmington), targeted by colleagues (like Dorian Abbot, the University of Chicago professor deplatformed at MIT), investigated (like Ilya Shapiro, investigated over a tweet after appointed at Georgetown), punished (like John McAdams, who Marquette attempted to fire for criticizing a colleague), or taught that professional survival requires silence (like the 55% of conservative faculty who say they at least occasionally hide their political views from colleagues). Whether coercion is the main cause or just one cause among many is almost beside the point; pretending it has no causal role is ridiculous.

The remedy has to be deliberate.

An institution does not wander back into viewpoint diversity by accident, especially after decades of sorting. It has to actually want it, value it, recruit for it, and protect the people who provide it. That means actively seeking excellent people from perspectives the organization lacks, rather than posting a job into the same professional networks and acting surprised when the applicant pool looks exactly like the existing staff. It also means bringing dissenting perspectives into conversations early enough to matter. Asking the lone conservative, libertarian, religious, or merely heterodox person to bless the finished product on Friday afternoon does not count.

Disagreement also needs rules. People should be free to attack ideas without treating every dispute as proof that a colleague is stupid, evil, or unfit for the job. Dissenters need room to speak, majorities need enough humility to listen, and everyone needs to care more about the mission than winning the argument.

The AAUP is a clean example of what happens when that fails. Its leaders do not see the drift as a problem, they see it as progress. The institution does not think it was captured, it thinks it’s seen the light. That is precisely why the remedy has to begin with a conscious decision that viewpoint diversity is not an obstacle to the mission. It is part of the mission.

The clash also has to be structured so that it produces better thinking rather than miniature cancel campaigns. People must be able to criticize political ideas sharply without treating every disagreement as proof that the other person is stupid, evil, or professionally unfit. Dissenters need enough security to speak; majorities need enough humility to listen; and everyone needs a shared mission strong enough to keep the fight focused on the question rather than the dissenter’s moral worth. That is the difference between productive conflict and Cancel Culture.

How viewpoint diversity works: disagree and commit

The thing about viewpoint diversity is that it is only effective when it’s real, and when people involved really want it. It’s a pain to have people around who are willing to tell you, to your face, that you’re wrong. It makes work harder to get done. It makes meetings more tense. But the alternative, some frictionless utopia where everyone agrees, only sounds nice. It’s actually a delusion, and delusions have consequences.

What’s required is a genuine commitment to the idea that you might be wrong, and a practice that mirrors that commitment. Before things get set in stone, ask yourself: What evidence could be presented that would change your mind? Who among you is most likely to see your blind spots? Are there dynamics at play that might skew everyone’s perception, such as the boss speaking first and then everyone else parroting her opinion?

Hiring is where this kind of commitment becomes visible. You need to bring people into the room who are able and willing to disagree.

And here I’ll quickly dispense of a ludicrous straw man of what I’m advocating for: Viewpoint diversity is not a reason to hire someone who doesn’t believe in your mission. FIRE needs people who believe in free speech as a principle. It can’t sustain itself if it hires someone who regards freedom of speech as an obstacle to the causes they care about. But mission alignment is very different from political homogeneity. We should be wary of people who cannot work well with colleagues they disagree with, who treat every institutional choice as a moralistic binary between total evil and their exact position, or who see coworkers primarily as people to convert.

That said, sometimes you have to import friction. You look for the person who makes you think, “I disagree with this person about nearly everything, but they are damned good on freedom of speech,” and then you try to get that person into the building.

FIRE’s history shows the value of those structural counterweights. I was hired as legal director in part to provide a left-leaning counterbalance to a conservative executive director. When that executive director left, I supported the conservative lawyer David French as a possible successor because I wanted to preserve ideological tension at the top. That was not just an internal voyage of personal growth — though it was. It was also organizational design.

And when an institution does not yet have authentic dissent, it should manufacture some friction while it goes looking for the real thing. Red teams, outside reviewers, adversarial presentations, devil’s advocates, and formal pre-mortems are all weaker than having an actual dissenter in the room, but they are also considerably better than nothing. Epistemic humility is a habit, and habits are borne from intentional and systematic repetition.

Another potential risk here comes from the other direction. Too much doubt and back and forth can be crippling, and organizations also have to act to further their missions. Endless deliberation stops being evidence of intellectual seriousness somewhere around hour four. That is why we, at FIRE, so often cite Amazon’s principle of “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit.” Before the decision, argue honestly. Do not soften a real objection merely to manufacture consensus. Once the decision is made, carry it out. No pocket vetoes. No quiet sabotage. No hoping the project fails so you can perform a triumphant little dance over the wreckage. Then, let reality grade the decision.

After the fact, preserve enough institutional memory to know what the dissenters predicted. Revisit the issue if the facts change or their warnings prove correct. “Commit” cannot mean that leaders acquire infallibility the moment the meeting ends.

As I sometimes put it at FIRE: If you agree with us 50 percent of the time, you should probably be a donor. If you agree with us 80 percent of the time, you should probably work here.

The AAUP shows what happens when those habits and structures fail. The institution’s internal politics become invisible to the people inside it, because fish don’t know they’re wet. Partisanship is redescribed as principle. Old commitments are rewritten to accommodate current political objectives. Critics become fascists, clowns, or enemies of academic freedom. And an organization that once spoke with unusual moral authority becomes another predictable voice in the partisan chorus.

It can continue. It can raise money. It can organize. It can even win.

It just cannot plausibly expect anyone who isn’t in perfect ideological lock-step to trust it.

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

The video below is one of those rare Shots for the Road that actually belongs on the road we are traveling. It is the staff-retreat talk from which this essay grew, and it goes further into the research and the practical work of keeping disagreement healthy.

Stories of the week

• She was fired for teaching English literature in an English class. Now she’s suing

“For 20 years, I’ve taught students how to engage with stories that excite them, challenge them, and broaden their experience of what it means to be human,” said Prabhakar. “I don’t plan on stopping now. If what happened to me becomes the norm, colleges across America will become less curious, less vibrant, and less free.”

• This European country launched a task force to target ‘hate speech.’ Now a journalist who insulted politicians is going to prison (Expression) by

There are many lessons to learn from Georgia’s continuing descent into censorship, but an especially important one is that this is simply an inherent risk of giving government officials a wider mandate to crack down on “hateful” expression: Authorities may very well take it as an opportunity to punish speech they deem hateful toward . . . authority.

This week in Expression

• How does the First Amendment apply to ‘deepfakes’? by

The current research presents little evidence that the fears about AI-generated content are materializing, or that the medium is proving more formidable at persuasion than the long line of content manipulation tools which preceded it. In fact, the lesson from those tools has been that society is fairly resilient to novel fabrications. And for the rare fabrication that is truly dangerous or damaging, the law already has existing remedies.

• The applause that disrupted nothing — yet still led to an arrest by

• The on-campus left and the off-campus right by

• The front line of combating self-censorship is the classroom by Caroline Cunningham

Peer culture is an important reason students self-censor, and classroom environments have the potential to influence this too. Conversations are carried over from the classroom to the broader campus. If students are meeting each other’s ideas in classrooms where they feel unafraid to raise their hand and express a controversial opinion, this will likely spill over into their interactions with their peers outside of the structured classroom setting. This could produce greater tolerance among students of opposing viewpoints, and could lead to a higher number of productive discussions as well as a decrease in self-censorship, as students will have learned from the example set in their classes.

• UK police review politician’s repost of guillotine art on a T-shirt by

• Why student journalists are asking to remove their names from articles by Michelle Liao

• Pennsylvania shields public universities from transparency. This student wants to change that by

• The man who wants back into San Quentin by

FIRE in the press!

• Censorship never stops with just two words (LA Times) by

Last July, the council adopted a motion to prohibit two terms — a racial epithet and a slur against women — during the legally required public comment periods of their meetings. As the rules document states, anyone who says “any variation of either of these words” during public comment will be warned. If they say a banned word again at that meeting or any subsequent one, they’ll be removed. Ejected speakers automatically are prohibited from attending future meetings for up to six business days.

This policy, championed by Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, is meant to push back against words he argues are “designed to attack someone’s personhood and their protected status.”

Now, you may loathe the words in question and never use them yourself. You may share the council’s desire to make public comment more civil and appropriate. You may believe Harris-Dawson and the other council members’ hearts are in the right place. But make no mistake: The council is effectively claiming the authority to ban any words it decides are inappropriate or offensive in the future. That’s a very dangerous power to grant any government official.

This week on

This week on So To Speak, host & FIRE EVP was joined by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Senior Fellow , Yale professor of radiology and biomedical imaging, , and FIRE Director of Research to discuss the Office of Management and Budget’s proposed overhaul of federal research grant rules, exploring how the changes could reshape scientific funding, academic freedom, and medical innovation.

This week in FIRE’s blog

• What student journalists need to know about social media by Dominic Coletti

• New FIRE study finds record low number of restrictive campus speech codes

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• African People’s Education and Defense Fund v. Pinellas County

Eleventh Circuit revives First Amendment unconstitutional conditions retaliation claim based on denial of COVID-relief funds

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed the dismissal of First Amendment retaliation claims by a civil rights nonprofit serving the African community, which challenged a Florida county’s denial of the group’s access to federal COVID-relief funds for radio-station equipment to broadcast local health, educational, and emergency alerts, based on its association with the socialist Uhuru movement that promotes black community empowerment.

Viewing the essence of the First Amendment claim as being “the County manipulated the … grant program to suppress ideas that it viewed as dangerous—namely, those associated with the Uhuru Movement,” the unanimous appeals court reversed the dismissal below, holding APEDF plausibly alleged unconstitutional retaliation. While the court acknowledged “APEDF wasn’t (and isn’t) legally entitled to a COVID-relief grant,” and that “the government doesn’t engage in viewpoint discrimination simply because it selectively funds a program to encourage … activities it believes to be in the public interest, without at the same time funding an alternative program,” it is still the case, “even in the provision of subsidies,” that the government “may not aim at the suppression of dangerous ideas.”

And within that framework, the court held APEDF plausibly alleged it engaged in protected expressive association with the Uhuru movement, and that the County’s actions would likely deter a nonprofit of ordinary firmness from engaging in it. In so holding, the court disagreed that denial of what the County called “the benefit of grant funding” cannot cause objective chill simply because APEDF can “engage in protected expressive association (including with the Uhuru Movement) without the benefit of grant funding” and in fact does so. As the court put it: “The short answer is that Supreme Court precedent is to the contrary. In particular, the Court’s unconstitutional-conditions decisions … make clear that the denial of a government benefit for speech-discriminatory reasons can have a chilling effect because that type of denial can operate to penalize a speaker’s viewpoint.”

The court then held APEDF also plausibly alleged both that “the County effectively punished it for associating with the Uhuru movement—forcing it to choose between that association and an important infusion of cash that, by objective markers, it seemed to have warranted,” as well as the necessary link between the protected activity and adverse government action. The court cited text exchanges between a county board member and his aide, and transcripts of a board work session, as permitting reasonable inferences that the board member objected to funding APEDF because of its association with the Uhuru Movement, and that the board heeded that objection and revoked APEDF’s first grant and denied its application for a second because of that association.

The court thus reversed the dismissal of the First Amendment retaliation claim and remanded the case for the district court to resume proceedings. (It also reversed dismissal of equal protection claims based on the same denial of grant funding, but affirmed dismissal of a due process challenge.)

Bonus case: In Whateley v. Lackey, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, on “a question that has divided district courts and state supreme courts in recent years: whether the character combinations on personalized license plates (or ‘vanity plates’) are government speech or private speech,” held that “Virginia’s personalized license plate messages are private speech subject to First Amendment protection,” and that the trial court erred by dismissing plaintiff’s challenge to the state’s recall of his “FTP&ATF” (“Fuck the Police & Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms”) vanity plates, though the court did not decide if the recall/restriction of the personalized message is unconstitutional, but rather left that to the lower court in the first instance. That outcome on First Amendment protection for vanity plate messages mirrors that which FIRE advocated in supporting U.S. Supreme Court resolution of the division in the lower courts on this issue.

International free speech stories of the week

• Australian watchdog files legal action against Telegram, saying it failed to remove violent content (AP) by Rob McGuirk & Charlotte Graham-McLay

The United Arab Emirates-based app, which reports having 1 billion users worldwide, faces a fine of up to 54.6 million Australian dollars ($38 million) if convicted in the Australian Federal Court for “alleged failure to detect and remove pro-terror material,” eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said Thursday.

The civil action is a test of Australia’s 2021 law requiring tech platforms to work to keep illegal and pro-terrorism material off their networks.

• Police arrest dozens at London rally supporting Palestine Action (Al Jazeera) by Daniel Khalili-Tari

• [Finland] Päivi Räsänen appeals conviction to European court (Helsinki Times)

• [UK] University lecturer’s dismissal appeal leaves academic freedom questions unanswered (CAF) by Frederick Attenborough

• Azerbaijan Jails Prominent TV Journalists, Media Workers (HRW) by Giorgi Gogia

An Azerbaijani court on July 27 sentenced nine journalists, media workers, and civil society activists to between 12 and 15 years in prison. It is the harshest verdict since the government began its ongoing crackdown on independent journalism.

Announcement of the Week

A quick heads-up: We’ll have more information in the coming days and weeks, but ERI plans to begin offering occasional premium pieces that will initially be available only to paid subscribers.

The overwhelming majority of ERI will remain free. But please consider becoming a paid subscriber for as little as $8 a month — especially because every dollar goes directly to FIRE!

Requiem of the Month

On this weekend of triumph, in which Spider-Man: Brand New Day became the most successful movie of the past five billion years — excuse me, 13.8 billion years — there is also a terrible crime to report: Season 2 of Wonder Man has been canceled.

As devoted ERI readers will know, I was a huge fan of Wonder Man. I thought it was wonderfully done: funny, creative, and genuinely moving in its own strange way. It reminded me of the best quirky comics I grew up with, which could come at a serious problem from such an odd or funny angle that they somehow reached something more honest.

Adding insult to injury, Wonder Man was co-created by Destin Daniel Cretton, who directed its first two episodes—and who also directed the apparently civilization-redeeming Spider-Man: Brand New Day. So, on the very weekend we celebrate his triumph, we must also mourn the destruction of one of the best things he helped create.

This is not quite a Firefly-canceled-after-half-a-season level of betrayal. At least we got a full season of Wonder Man. Still, to quote Liz Phair, it is a mark I will carry with me for a long, long time.

Read my review of Wonder Man

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Stories of the week

• Government withdraws subpoenas of 3 reporters for The New York Times after admitting legal errors (AP) by Michael R. Sisak, Eric Tucker, & Larry Neumeister

“Subpoenas are the last step, not the first step, but the last step,” the judge said, citing rules set to protect against violations of the First Amendment. He said the government’s actions had turned the law and the regulations “on its head.”

• Don’t let California turn universities into AI gatekeepers by &

Assembly Bill 2392 would require the California State University and the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges to convene a working group and establish procurement standards for generative AI — or GenAI — in line with certain state requirements. These requirements include ensuring that GenAI tools are evaluated for “potential harms, misuses, abuses, and bias,” and ensuring they will not produce “harmful” or “illegal” content. Although the bill provides a few examples of covered content, such as “disordered eating,” they don’t cure the underlying issue: these terms have no settled meaning and often depend on contested political and social judgments, making this mandate as broad as it is subjective.

This week in Expression

• Censoring with a vengeance: Indecent speech in the Yiddish theater by Max Friedman

Asch’s response draws on a cornerstone free speech principle: what we consider “true” or “dangerous” can change, sometimes very rapidly. John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty that we must embrace speakers’ right to express controversial, unpopular ideas, because those ideas may in fact be true. And even if they are not, the proper remedy is truthful speech, not censorship. Got fun nekome is a case in point. Today, the play’s rejection of racialized essentialism and embrace of same-sex relationships are points of pride for many Yiddish theater aficionados; and its radicalism in its own era inspired Paula Vogel’s award-winning play Indecent. Suppressing Got fun nekome — even assuming it might have prevented some gentiles from believing negative stereotypes about Jews — would have erased what many view as a transformative work of Jewish art.

• Shiloh Hendrix’s conviction can’t be squared with the First Amendment by

• The political bias of AI models by

• Who is trying to punish scholars for their speech? by

• Is training AI on copyrighted materials protected by the First Amendment? By

• The new war on political satire by Athena Rem

• Hawaii is a forgotten First Amendment failure by Elyse Everest

• Does MLB’s Pride Night policy violate the First Amendment?

• Flag on the play: The free speech stakes of NIL

This week in FIRE’s blog

• FIRE demands LA City Council end policy banning certain words during public comment

“A government that gets away with censorship won’t stop at just two words. It will target other speech, too — particularly criticism,” said FIRE attorney Zach Silver. “The council president himself has said he wants to ban more words in the future, and you should believe him.”

• Pennsylvania shields public universities from transparency. This student wants to change that by

International free speech stories of the week

• France becomes first EU country to ban social media access for under-15s (The Guardian)

French senators had opted for a two-tier system distinguishing between blacklisted platforms flagged as harmful to a child’s development, and those that could still be accessed with parental consent.

But the lower house’s blanket ban prevailed, despite criticism from some on the left over the age verification process, the speed of its implementation and risks of circumvention as well as privacy concerns.

• Vietnam: 5 Arrested for Ho Chi Minh Book (Human Rights Watch)

• Georgian journalist sentenced to 14 days over Facebook post (OC Media) by Mikheil Gvadzabia

• Russian activist arrested a day after predicting Putin will end up in handcuffs (South China Morning Post)

Ilya Remeslo, 42, faces charges of “spreading fakes on the Russian army”, under censorship laws Moscow introduced when it sent troops to Ukraine, according to the TASS news agency.

The charge carries a maximum penalty of up to 10 years in prison. Sergei Badamshin, named by independent media as his lawyer, said on social media that Remeslo was being transported to Moscow to face court.

[Can we add in monster tweet thread of the week? And then link to the monster tweet thread and response to Jeffrey Sack?]

TV Series of the week

I guess I technically knew that my beloved canceled show Community had a sixth season. It originally ran on NBC from 2009 to 2014, surviving cancellation scares, a famously rocky fourth season, and just about every other indignity a cult classic can endure. Then NBC finally canceled it for good… except not quite.

In one of the stranger episodes of the streaming wars, Yahoo! decided that Community would be the flagship original series for Yahoo Screen, its attempt to break into streaming. They ordered a 13-episode sixth season in 2015. The experiment didn’t exactly work out—Yahoo Screen was gone soon afterward—but somehow Community got one last chance.

I knew all of this once. Somehow I’d filed it away under “alternate timeline” and convinced myself that Season 6 either didn’t really exist or couldn’t possibly be very good.

Then Hulu added the entire series, including Season 6, and I finally gave it a shot.

The premiere didn’t do much for me. But then again, Community has always been a brilliant, gloriously uneven show. Even its pilot isn’t particularly good. Once it finds its rhythm, though, it’s unlike anything else on television.

If you’ve never watched it, it’s one of the funniest and weirdest sitcoms ever made. Dan Harmon and an absurdly talented cast somehow turned a show about a community college into a playground for formal experimentation: stop-motion animation, an 8-bit video game episode, fake documentaries, alternate timelines, action movies, westerns, and what remains the greatest paintball war in television history.

What really surprised me was that Season 6 is every bit as inventive as the best years. Rather than pretending Donald Glover’s Troy Barnes, Yvette Nicole Brown’s Shirley Bennett, or even Chevy Chase’s Pierce Hawthorne could simply be replaced, the show evolved. Keith David’s Elroy Patashnik is an absolute revelation—one of the rare late additions to a sitcom who actually makes the ensemble stronger. Paget Brewster’s Frankie Dart has become a genuine fan favorite. I liked her well enough, but she absolutely has her moments.

My favorite is the clip below, where Frankie has to deal with Dean Pelton (the incomparable Jim Rash), who has somehow become a delirious evangelist for Honda—exactly the sort of sentence that makes no sense unless you’ve watched Community.

And yes, after all these years, the prophecy is still alive. What began as an absurd throwaway line—“six seasons and a movie”—is finally becoming reality. Dan Harmon and most of the original cast are still working toward Community: The Movie. Somehow Greendale refuses to die.

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Story of the week

• When AI mirrors foreign censorship: FIRE statement on Oversight Board AI speech report

Authoritarian regimes are just that: authoritarian. They will lean hard on AI companies to shape and censor political speech — or perhaps even trust that those companies will voluntarily self-censor to retain market access, even without an explicit order to do so. But AI companies who profess to care about free speech have a moral duty to protect free expression and ensure their systems don’t unintentionally extend the speech restrictions of despots to users around the world.

This week in ERI

This week in Expression

• Are AI companies doing authoritarians’ dirty work? by

• The high cost of censoring speech by

• Can the government require ID before you use artificial intelligence? by

• The global crusade to ban teens from social media is now advancing across Europe by

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing on teen social media bans. The bans are everywhere, and more are coming. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced this week that the EU will seek some form of a youth social media ban across Europe.

• The shape of campus censorship on the left and on the right by

• After punishing people for Charlie Kirk comments, colleges are paying steep settlements by

Kirk’s assassination was a monumental moment for many Americans who considered Kirk to be an embodiment of the value of exchanging ideas with the other side. But the First Amendment does not allow public institutions to punish their employees simply because employees speak out in ways that offend others. Rather, it provides robust protections for public employees to speak as private citizens on matters of public concern, including Kirk’s death.

• America Is Failing Its Own Free Speech Standards (cross-posted from @The Next Move) by

• Michigan State’s ethics policy gags dissent — and the public will feel the effects by

• German bill would criminalize denying Israel’s right to exist by

This week on

• This week on , sat down with University of Chicago historian Ada Palmer to dig into what the history of censorship reveals about today’s free speech debates. Together they explore how censorship has evolved from the Renaissance to the age of AI, discuss the shifting relationship between state and private censorship, the role of fear and self-censorship, and why efforts to control ideas have persisted across centuries—and what that history can teach us about the challenges we face today.

FIRE in the press!

• Hochul’s data center moratorium is a disaster for New York (Poughkeepsie Journal) by

Like Europe, New York lawmakers apparently believe they can regulate energy and AI innovations in their territory without regard to the costs and consequences, and then hope they can somehow still develop their domestic technology base to meet all their future market needs. As they say, you cannot have your cake and eat it too. In reality, such moves just undermine domestic industry and options, making governments far more dependent upon surrounding jurisdictions for their energy and technology needs, while also making their citizens poorer. This is already what happened in New York following the state’s fracking ban a decade ago. Data center bans could end up being a replay of that mistake, and could also look like America’s hampering of its domestic nuclear industry over the past half century, as federal and state over-regulation made it impossible to develop critical energy infrastructure and options.

International free speech stories of the week

• Hong Kong official says booksellers should ensure titles won’t harm national security after arrests (WaPo) by Kanis Leung

But Secretary for Security Chris Tang told reporters at the legislative building that the law is clear.

“If you are a bookseller, you have the responsibility to make sure the books you sell won’t endanger national security,” he said. “It’s equal to, for example, when you are selling food, you need to ensure the food won’t cause a stomach ache and is not either poison or illegal.”

Asked if authorities would make a list of banned books, Tang said that would not be conducive to effective law enforcement targeting titles that “intend to harm the country.”

“We will not let criminals off the hook like this,” he said.

• European Commission Moves Us One Step Closer to the End of the Open Internet (Reason) by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

From posting political commentary on X to asking potentially embarrassing health questions on Reddit, reviewing books on Goodreads, posting to a forum for LGBTQ young people, consuming TikTok content, subscribing to Substack newsletters, joining a community for people dealing with psychological issues, and so much more, your real identity will be tied to your online activity. Tech companies, regulators, and law enforcement may be able to connect you to activity across the internet. There would be no more online anonymity, at least not in any real sense.

• [Germany] A Communiqué from an Author of Harmful and

Podcast of the week

On The Blessings of Liberty podcast, Senior FIRE Fellow was joined by Senior Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice & New York Times columnist to explore the life and legacy of James Wilson, one of America’s most influential yet overlooked Founding Fathers. Drawing from his new book, The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution, Wegman discusses Wilson’s pivotal role in shaping the Constitution, his vision of popular sovereignty and democratic self-government, and how personal scandal contributed to his historical obscurity despite his lasting impact on the American constitutional tradition.

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If you’re in America and smell something burning up north, it’s unfortunately not just the Canadian wildfires. In recent months, our hockey-mad friends have also been torching a number of its free speech protections — beginning with a legal shield that has been part of its law since 1970.

Until now, a Canadian charged with a hate-propaganda offence could raise the “good faith religious opinion” defense, a narrow protection for sincerely expressing an opinion on a religious subject or advancing an argument based on a religious text. The defense predates Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which was adopted in 1982, by twelve years. The Combatting Hate Act, which received Royal Assent on June 18 and takes effect July 18, repeals it.

The government’s reassurance is that this changes nothing for the faithful: preaching, teaching, and reading scripture “in good faith” still won’t clear the bar for willful promotion of hatred.

Maybe. But two things happened at once here, and both are bad.

First, the categorical safe harbor is gone — so whether a sermon or a quoted verse is protected now depends on context, audience, and how a prosecutor reads the room. Second, in the horse-trading that got the bill through Parliament, the government also dropped the longstanding requirement that the Attorney General personally sign off before a hate-speech charge can proceed. In the absence of these two barriers, clergy and ordinary believers now get to wonder, in advance, whether saying the quiet part of their faith out loud will be read as hatred by someone with the power to charge them.

American law has a name for what happens when people must guess what they are allowed to say and, because of the uncertainty, end up not saying anything at all: a chilling effect. We have little doubt Canadians will feel that chill, even in wildfire season.

There’s more. Close behind the Combatting Hate Bill, a new Ottawa bylaw taking effect August 1 will mandate a 50-meter “bubble zone” (that’s about 164 freedom feet) around schools, hospitals, places of worship, daycares, and care homes. Inside the bubble, protest is simply banned. Not “protest that blocks the door,” or “protest that disrupts planned events,” but any protest at all. A councillor actually proposed narrowing the mandate to only prohibit conduct that actually obstructs access, and the motion lost. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Canada’s analogue to the ACLU, warned that two people standing on a sidewalk reading a pamphlet about peace would now be in violation of this bill. This is an intentionally broad blanket ban on expression that was once protected in Canada.

There’s more. In early July, Canadians learned of a 35-page internal memo from Industry Minister Mélanie Joly’s department — titled “Misinformation and Disinformation Strategy” — floating “legal action” against users on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn who post what the government deems “false and misleading information.” What action, exactly? Beats us. That part’s redacted. The visible portion assures everyone that whatever it is will be “documented, proportionate, and subject to senior level approval.” And don’t worry, the department itself would decide what counts as “factually incorrect, misleading or out of context.”

You read that right. This memo proposes giving the Canadian government the power to deem criticism false and punish (somehow?) the author for publishing that false information or the platform for hosting it — who exactly would be the target of “legal action” is also unclear. If that sounds familiar, it should. The Soviet Union had something very much like it. And if it strikes you as bizarre that Canada is doing this, we’re with you. Giving the government power to determine what is misinformation functionally gives it control of truth itself. Every government makes mistakes, and every government has incentives to conceal those mistakes, defend its policies, and discredit its critics. This policy and others show Canadian officials seemingly ignoring these very real risks.

One risk Canadian officials are not ignoring, though, is that of… deepfake bestiality. Yep. The recently-enacted Protecting Victims Act creates “a new hybrid offence which prohibits distributing bestiality depictions, including deepfakes, with a maximum penalty of 5 years on indictment.” We can’t help but wonder what gross (or possibly hysterical) incident led to this particular law. Canadians may want to avoid making any satirical images inspired by this Vice Presidential tweet.

As Americans, we can say with love that we are not a people known for excessive curiosity about the inner workings of our polite neighbor to the north. But after a month of speech news drifting down from our toque-wearing cousins, one of us (Adam) stood up, walked to the window, looked out over the streets of Washington, and in a moment of Seinfeldian clarity asked the open air: what is the deal with Canada?

So we tried to figure it out. We may have missed some distinctly Canadian subtlety — our legal expertise ends roughly at the border — but whatever nuance we’re missing, the overall picture is not good. Here, for similarly confused Americans, is the deal, as best we can tell.

How Canada balances expressive rights away

TL/DR: In Canada, freedom of expression is real, but conditional.

The Charter guarantees expression, religion, assembly, and association — a bundle that, on paper, maps reasonably well onto our First Amendment here in the States. The catch is the sentence right before that, which says those rights are subject to “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

Since a 1986 decision called R. v. Oakes, that clause has been operationalized as a balancing test: the government can limit a right if it has a “pressing and substantial” objective and pursues it through means that are proportionate and impair the right as little as reasonably possible.

Compared with the American system — which sorts speech by content, viewpoint, forum, and category before it ever reaches a test — Oakes looks elegant: one rule to govern them all. But that elegance comes at a sinister cost. A balancing test is also a creativity test for motivated reasoning. Give a sufficiently motivated official two values to place on a scale, and the scale will tend to tip exactly where the official already wanted it to — followed by a long, sincere-sounding explanation of why the government’s interest was simply too pressing to ignore. In other words, rather than constrain the outcome, the test can launder it.

It gets easier to censor, not harder, when the decision-maker is not a court at all. Under a pair of Canadian Supreme Court decisions known as Doré and Loyola, courts give substantial deference to professional regulators, licensing bodies, and administrative tribunals that restrict expression. Instead of reviewing the right from scratch, a court asks whether the official reasonably balanced the speaker’s Charter rights against the agency’s statutory mission. The right shows up not as a trump card but as one interest among many — and it is weighed first by the very institution that wants to limit it.

What can go wrong?

Now add the institutional setting. Many Canadian speech disputes begin not in courtrooms but in human rights tribunals — bodies designed, staffed, and funded to find and remedy discrimination. FIRE has watched this exact dynamic on American campuses with Bias Response Teams: an institution built to find harm will find harm, because that is the only tool in the drawer. It’s the hammer-and-nail problem, and it has a testable form. When an ambiguous social conflict lands in front of a body whose entire purpose is to identify discrimination, the question it asks is not “is this protected speech?” but rather “can this speech be described as discrimination?” And with the aforementioned balancing test on hand, the answer can almost always be yes.

The American equivalent, for what it’s worth, is that we have no legal doctrine at all for weighing speech against someone’s dignity — because dignity isn’t a right here, and speech is. Our resolution for the hurt-feelings case is the less formal doctrine of “Have a Coke and a smile and…”

We do not believe freedom of speech can safely be made subordinate to other rights — or to an amorphous concept like dignity — because speech is the mechanism by which a society debates, challenges, revises, narrows, and expands its understanding of every other right. And wherever governments have tried to turn “dignity” into an enforceable legal standard, its vagueness has become a very concrete threat to freedom of expression.

A cavalcade of concrete examples

So far we’ve been keeping things hypothetical for the sake of outlining principles and risks here, but we’ve got receipts too. In fact, the cases have been stacking up for years.

In 2022, Jordan Peterson’s professional regulator, the College of Psychologists of Ontario, ordered him into a mandatory “coaching” program over off-duty political posts — including calling a former Trudeau aide a name, insulting a city councillor, and mocking a magazine cover. Because Peterson is such a cultural flashpoint, many people on the left treated the punishment as a verdict on him rather than a warning about the power being claimed. But disliking the speaker is not an excuse to ignore the principle. Under Doré, an Ontario court upheld the order: a professional regulator may police your lawful political speech.

In December 2025, Professor Frances Widdowson was arrested for trespassing at the University of Victoria after attempting to speak about disputed claims of residential-school mass graves. Now, Canada’s residential-school system was unquestionably brutal, and thousands of Indigenous children died in its custody. But the famous “215 children” at Kamloops were not bodies excavated from a mass grave; they were underground anomalies identified as possible burials by ground-penetrating radar, and the claim remains unconfirmed by excavation. At another residential-school site, the excavation of 14 similar anomalies found no human remains. None of that excuses the horrors of the residential-school system, but it does show why claims should be investigated rather than treated as sacred, and why Widdowson shouldn’t be in handcuffs for discussing it.

One more: This February, the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal ordered former Chilliwack school trustee Barry Neufeld to pay $750,000 — the largest award the tribunal has ever made against an individual — for a five-year campaign of Facebook posts, emails, interviews, and public remarks against gender-identity policies in schools. Neufeld called the province’s SOGI program a “weapon of propaganda” built on an “absurd theory.” He described affirming transgender children as “child abuse,” accused educators of trying to “recruit … troubled kids into this new fad,” and warned that teaching children about sexual orientation and gender identity primed them for sexual abuse. In one particularly ugly post, he claimed there were “far more teachers who abuse kids than Catholic Priests,” and elsewhere suggested that modern schools produced more abuse victims than residential schools. So no, this was not polite policy criticism, and nobody needs to pretend otherwise. But three-quarters of a million dollars for a campaign consisting of speech, imposed by a tribunal, is a number designed to be seen from orbit. Even critics who despised what Neufeld said noticed. Pierre Poilievre called it “Orwellian.” John Cleese said he would stop booking shows in British Columbia. Neufeld is seeking judicial review.

Virtually none of these actions could survive serious First Amendment scrutiny in the United States. Our Constitution permits the government to punish threats, incitement, harassment, obstruction, fraud, and defamation — not speech merely because officials consider it hateful, offensive, undignified, or false.

That is the crucial difference: Canada asks whether the government balanced speech against its preferred interests reasonably. The First Amendment asks whether the government had any legitimate power to punish the speech in the first place. In our running effort to track speech threats worldwide, Canada keeps turning up like a bad loonie. (They stopped minting pennies more than a decade before we did.)

The convoy and the cost of emergency power

For the clearest look at what Canada will do when it decides political expression has become intolerably disruptive, consider the Freedom Convoy. And stay with us even if you thought the convoy was obnoxious, because civil liberties that apply only to protesters you like are not civil liberties. They are favors — ones that will be withdrawn if you stop agreeing with the powerful.

In early 2022, thousands of protesters and hundreds of trucks converged on Ottawa to oppose COVID mandates, especially vaccination requirements affecting cross-border truckers. The protesters believed they were resisting government coercion, defending their bodily autonomy and livelihoods, and forcing political leaders to listen to people they had dismissed. Their opponents saw an unlawful occupation that subjected residents to relentless honking, disrupted businesses and trade, and allowed a determined minority to impose enormous costs on everyone else. The protest was deeply disruptive, and related blockades closed critical border crossings, including the vital trade route at Windsor. But it was also overwhelmingly peaceful — and that distinction matters.

When organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber were later tried, the judge acquitted them of intimidation, emphasizing that they had repeatedly urged protesters to remain peaceful. They were convicted of mischief. The Crown nevertheless sought prison sentences of seven and eight years. The judge instead imposed 18-month conditional sentences, explaining that she wanted to deter unlawful conduct “without chilling political protest.” The prosecution’s appetite and the court’s restraint, side by side, tell you quite a lot.

But the larger civil-liberties story is what the government did in the moment. On February 14, 2022, it invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time since that law replaced the War Measures Act in 1988. Among the powers it switched on was the ability to freeze the bank accounts of people connected to the protest — without a criminal charge, a conviction, or a court order.

It’s hard to understand how extreme this measure is without putting it into the context of daily life. Imagine someone drives to Ottawa, or sends forty dollars to a crowdfunding campaign. Days later, they’re standing at a grocery checkout confused as to why their credit card charge keeps getting declined. The state has moved beyond stopping unlawful conduct and into frustrating the machinery of the ordinary life of its critics: their rent, their groceries, their savings, their ability to function. And what the state can do to one, it can do to you.

That’s not just our American independence talking. In January 2024, the Federal Court found the invocation unlawful and unconstitutional, violating the Charter’s protections for freedom of expression and against unreasonable search and seizure. In January 2026, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld that ruling. Warning against the government’s theory, the court noted that treating blockades of critical infrastructure as national-security emergencies “could stifle all kinds of protests,” including actions involving pipelines, nuclear plants, and railway lines.

This is something we keep trying to get through people’s heads as free speech advocates: The power a progressive might tolerate when it is aimed at right-wing truckers is the same power that can later be aimed at climate protesters, labor organizers, or Indigenous land defenders. Governments do not build coercive tools with a single-use setting. The tool stays in the drawer, waiting for the next official who finds your cause intolerable.

The government is now seeking leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association — hardly a right-wing outfit — called the invocation “unnecessary, unjustifiable and unconstitutional” and helped defeat it in court.

You’ll notice that the CCLA thread runs through this entire story. The same civil-liberties left that challenged the government over the convoy also opposed the Combatting Hate Act and Ottawa’s bubble-zone bylaw. Critics want to dismiss concern over these issues as a conservative grievance. It clearly isn’t. It is a classical-liberal warning about what happens when governments acquire broad powers to suppress expression — and the people sounding it span the political spectrum.

When consensus becomes enforced conformity

Canada is a left-leaning country, and some of its political calm comes from a degree of ideological agreement that Americans can barely imagine. Sure, there is real dissent — Quebec sovereigntism, Alberta alienation, a growing populist right — but the country’s leading political, cultural, academic, and professional institutions cluster around a consensus-minded center-left.

“Consensus” sounds healthy, and sometimes it is. A society that broadly agrees on basic rules can be stable, cooperative, and pleasant to live in. But genuine consensus has to survive disagreement. Once institutions preserve agreement by punishing dissenters, the word becomes a flattering label for conformity.

Social psychologists distinguish between “loose” cultures, which tolerate deviance and weak social norms, and “tight” cultures, which enforce norms strongly. Tight cultures often function smoothly. They are also prone to treating an unwelcome idea as antisocial, discriminatory, disloyal, or professionally disqualifying. The dissenter is no longer someone who may be wrong, but a problem the institution must manage.

That is the danger of a narrow Overton window. The people inside it may experience broad agreement and social peace. The people outside it experience investigations, compelled coaching, cancelled talks, tribunal awards, frozen accounts, and laws written broadly enough to make them guess what they may safely say. (As a Hong Kong security official explained this week, if you tell people exactly what they can’t say, that will just “let criminals off the hook.”) Canada’s consensus remains calm in part because the cost of disturbing it keeps rising.

At the height of McCarthyism, Edward R. Murrow warned, “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.” Canada increasingly confuses dissent with harm.

Fairness requires acknowledging that the harms prompting these laws are real. Ottawa’s bubble-zone bylaw followed genuinely ugly conduct, including a protest outside the Soloway Jewish Community Centre, which also houses a long-term-care facility. Drums and bullhorns reportedly agitated patients with dementia and retraumatized Holocaust survivors. Police-reported hate crimes in Canada more than doubled between 2018 and 2024. Lawmakers did not invent these incidents. They did, however, choose remedies that sweep far beyond them. Harassment, threats, intimidation, obstruction, and mischief were already illegal. The new powers reach the peaceful protester inside a blanket bubble zone, the preacher guessing how a prosecutor will hear a verse, and the citizen wondering whether contradicting the government’s account of events could invite legal action.

When a government responds to unlawful conduct by regulating an entire category of expression, it is targeting the debate itself. Ottawa’s bylaw even exempts labor picketing. The state, as ever, has a remarkably good ear for the difference between protest and protest it likes.

Canada is preview of the global free speech problem

Despite everything we’ve said here, though, Americans have no grounds for smugness. Many of the ideas now entering Canadian law were beta-tested on American campuses: speech as one interest to be balanced against dignity, inclusion, safety, and emotional harm; dissent recast as discrimination; censorship presented as care.

Governments across the democratic world increasingly treat expression as a social risk requiring supervision. Regulators police professional speech. Tribunals balance speech against dignity. Ministries classify misinformation. Politicians promise to protect the public from dangerous ideas. Every new authority comes wrapped in reassuring words: safety, fairness, truth, inclusion, proportionality.

Our own government has pressured platforms, pursued whistleblowers, flirted with debanking, and looked for ways to suppress speech officials considered dangerous or false. The appetite is bipartisan because power finds censorship useful regardless of who wins the election.

Canada has simply moved farther toward making that appetite routine. Its officials can invoke balance, reasonableness, professional standards, social harmony, and senior-level review. Each phrase sounds moderate in a vacuum, but together they create a system in which the government may decide what counts as hatred, misinformation, discrimination, or unacceptable disruption — and then punish people on the losing side of that definition.

The American free-speech tradition begins with distrust of anyone claiming that authority. Free speech allows us to challenge, revise, narrow, and expand every other right. It is how a pluralistic society handles deep disagreement without demanding ideological surrender. Once speech becomes subordinate to dignity, safety, inclusion, or official truth, the officials defining those values acquire power over the boundaries of public thought.

That is why Canada matters beyond Canada. It offers a preview of a democratic world with fewer outright bans and more administrative controls; fewer declarations of censorship and more balancing tests; fewer forbidden opinions and more opinions that carry professional, financial, or legal consequences.

The courts have occasionally applied the brakes, and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association keeps sounding the alarm, but Canada’s political leadership shows little appetite for changing direction. A disturbing event produces public pressure, public pressure produces broader authority over speech, and broader authority becomes the starting point for the next controversy.

Canadians have long earned a reputation for kindness, sanity, and unshowy courage. Courage is exactly what their speech culture now requires. At this rate, the anthem may need an edit: “the True North, strong and free … ish.”

A right that yields whenever officials invoke a sufficiently pressing interest is a right in name only. Canada is showing the world how censorship advances in a modern democracy: politely, procedurally, and one “reasonable limit” at a time.

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

I was thrilled to sit down with @Jason Willick on ’s new “Make It Make Sense” podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about free speech in higher education. We talked about the Trump administration’s confrontation with Harvard, the use of Title IX and civil rights law on campus, and how elite universities helped create the backlash they now face. We also explored the cultural forces driving censorship, the erosion of free expression, and the high stakes of artificial intelligence, as well as how control over AI systems may become one of the defining free speech issues of the future.

Stories of the week

• VICTORY: Federal appeals court decisively rejects Florida’s ‘Stop WOKE Act’

“Today’s important decision means that college remains a place where professors and students are allowed to debate controversial topics — even if politicians disagree with them,” said FIRE senior attorney Greg H. Greubel. “Today’s ruling makes clear something we’ve known for a long time: Governments cannot censor their way to freedom.”

• The Trump administration is cracking down on dissent. That’s chilling (WaPo) by me

Streever isn’t the only American targeted by the Trump administration for criticizing its policies. The administration has aggressively pursued everyday Americans for expressing their grievances with the government. These flagrant violations of the First Amendment should frighten Americans of every political stripe, because they threaten the very heart of the American experiment: the freedom to criticize our representatives vociferously and petition our government for change.

• A Song of FIRE and ICE (The Dispatch) by Kevin D. Williamson

We’re not talking here about the lunatic ravings of some genuinely scary and dangerous figure, like maybe the author of Best Bike Rides New Jersey. This is the author of Best Bike Rides Connecticut.

This week in Expression

• Canada wants to fight misinformation, a new memo reveals. But exactly how is a mystery by

• DHS tracked a man down over an email. Now FIRE is suing by

• What’s special about poor conservative students? by

• How does the First Amendment apply to AI regulation in hiring and health care? by

“The question isn’t whether the government may police discriminatory or negligent decisions. It may. The question is what happens when the government moves beyond regulating decisions and starts regulating what’s behind them — the process and tools that feed into decision-making.”

• Democracy has a participation problem. AI may help solve it by

• Hazelwood is the training-wheels version of free speech. It’s past time the Court revisited it by

• The revolution continues by

This week in FIRE’s blog

• FIRE files lawsuit after federal agents confront New Yorker over ICE criticism

If someone is really threatening a government official, you don’t wait five months to act on it,” said FIRE Senior Attorney . “The fact that authorities didn’t respond immediately shows that David presented no threat. This pursuit is designed to intimidate lawful speech, pure and simple.”

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Pernell v. Florida Board of Governors of State University

Eleventh Circuit affirms preliminary injunction against Florida law barring public university and college professors from promoting or endorsing state-disfavored views on race, color, national origin, and sex

I think I can both admit my bias yet unbiasedly flag as the notable decision in our space this week FIRE’s win in the Eleventh Circuit, in which the court leans heavily into the First Amendment’s protection for academic freedom to affirm the preliminary injunction in the constitutional challenge to application of Florida’s STOP WOKE Act to the state’s public colleges and universities. The law effectively precludes instruction on specific “concepts” related to race, color, national origin, or sex, such as whether people are unconsciously biased based on race or sex, whether certain virtues like “merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness” are racist, and whether specific races or sexes inherently enjoy privileges or disadvantages. The federal district court in Northern Florida preliminarily enjoined the law, calling it “positively dystopian.” And the Court of Appeals has now affirmed.

The court confirms Florida’s law violates the First Amendment because “[v]iewpoint-based restrictions designed to compel or ban a set of beliefs are dangerous in any setting, and they are especially pernicious in the classroom context,” and that “goes double for broadly worded yet imprecise regulations like these, which are sure to leave both professors and their students guessing about what kind of speech might violate the rules.” Here, the Act “bars Florida’s educators from promoting or endorsing” disfavored ideas about race, color, sex, and national origin while allowing criticism of those ideas. As the majority opinion for the 2-1 panel noted: “Forcing an official government line—in a college classroom of all places—is exactly the ‘pall of orthodoxy’ that the First Amendment will not tolerate.”

In so holding, the court rejected the state’s argument that public university and college instruction is “government speech” subject to no First Amendment limits. As the court explained:

the State cast about for an existing case or doctrine that could support its speech ban in the university setting. Finding none, it tried to marry public-employee speech cases with government speech doctrine, resulting in a new rule: if the government pays a professor’s salary, it has total control over her classroom speech.

That is not a blessed union. Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry—classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth. This new rule also runs headlong into the Supreme Court’s repeated, if imprecise, endorsements of academic freedom. If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.

Put otherwise: “Florida’s restrictions are, as the State admits, an attempt to force uniformity of thought on students by curtailing the free exchange of ideas in universities—the very environments traditionally regarded as laboratories for expression and truth seeking.” The court made clear “the government has plenty of ways to promote its own viewpoint,” but “puppeteering every university professor in the state is not one of them.” As the court emphasized, higher education presents concepts that may challenge beliefs and sensibilities, but “the First Amendment trusts students to figure it out for themselves.”

With its ruling the Eleventh Circuit becomes the seventh federal court of appeals to expressly recognize the First Amendment rules generally applicable to public employees differ when it comes to public university faculty’s academic freedom that protects their teaching and scholarship (with no appellate court having concluded otherwise). FIRE Legal Network member Gary Edinger serving as its local counsel, and its challenge was heard alongside a related challenge filed by the ACLU, ACLU of Florida, and NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

International free speech stories of the week

• [UK] Andy Burnham’s team confirms his stance on social media ban for under 16s (Birmingham Live) by James Rodger

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall previously told the BBC that an update on VPN restrictions would be coming in July. A spokeswoman for Mr Burnham told The Mirror: “Andy is committed to keeping kids safe online, and has been vocal in his support of age restrictions for kids using social media.

“He knows this ban is a critical first step to keeping kids safe online and preventing further tragedies for families. The task now is to build on the consensus across political parties to make sure it’s enforced in full, and delivered with the urgency this issue demands.”

• [Canada] Federal memo considers legal action against social media posting false info (Toronto Sun)

• SpongeBob censored in Russia amid ‘LGBT propaganda’ fears (TVP World) by Ewan Jones

Tribute of the week

RIP to Bonnie Tyler, the singer of one of my all-time favorite songs, and certainly my favorite karaoke song. I recently had the pleasure of introducing my 10 year old to the joy of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” 75 is far too young, but “forever’s gonna start tonight”!

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Stories of the week

• Frederick Douglass represents the best of us. And free speech () by

To Douglass, free speech wasn’t a side issue. It was a weapon essential to the cause. “To utter one groan, or scream, for freedom in the presence of the Southern advocate,” Douglass said in a 1854 speech, “is to bring down the frightful lash upon their quivering flesh … The right of speech is a very precious one, especially to the oppressed.” Douglass knew that free speech is essential not for those in power, but for those who are not. If the enslaved could not speak for themselves, he would speak for them. And he did so for decades as the sectional tensions continued to rise.

• VICTORY! Court dismisses Trump appointee’s speech-chilling lawsuit against Idaho conservation officer

This week in ERI

• Thomas Paine deserves more love by

By the time of his death, there was little gratitude for Paine’s contributions to the United States outside of workingmen’s associations because of his blistering attacks on revealed religion, particularly Christianity. But as America barrels toward its semiquincentennial, Thomas Paine emerges as the Founding Father Americans can celebrate without regret. Unlike his contemporaries, Paine’s radical liberalism feels strikingly modern—pro-democracy, pro-market, anti-poverty, and antislavery—and worth defending as the forces of reaction mount here at home and abroad. Without the pen of Paine, in fact, there might not be a United States to celebrate today.

This week in

• America, we’ll give our best to you by

Human beings will always be living through times that try our souls. The New World is constantly on the verge of sliding back into the dogmas of the Old. The Declaration’s signers felt the temptation to abandon principle for the sake of preservation, and we feel that same temptation today. But we cannot give in. Ever. These twin ideas — America and free speech — are so much bigger than us. Particulars of time and place, no matter how uncomfortable or disagreeable, cannot and should not destroy our faith in them. No matter how ugly it gets.

• Will Germany amend one of its most censorial laws? by

• What has FIRE been doing in the AI space? by

• 250 years later, free speech is still revolutionary by

Of course, people have been fighting for freedom since time immemorial. But what makes America unique is that this struggle was enshrined in its founding. The bedrock of our country wasn’t blood and soil, but the ideas and ideals — chief among them being the freedom to speak, to hear, and to engage in the open exchange of ideas — that make democracy possible.

This is why Philadelphia is neither a surprising nor a coincidental birthplace for these American principles. William Penn strove for religious toleration and liberty of conscience as fundamental tenets of his newfound colony of Pennsylvania. In the years leading up to the Declaration, Philadelphia became a center of colonial pamphleteering, newspapers, and political debate, renowned as the “Cradle of Liberty.”

• One Voice: Gagging education board members by

• How tolerant are disciples of Cthulhu? by

• America turns 250. Join us where it all began.

America’s 250th deserves more than fireworks. It deserves a celebration of the right to free speech that has helped make this nation great. That’s why FIRE is launching a new event right in the birthplace of American democracy itself.

In Philadelphia from November 4–6, 2026, Soapbox is bringing together headline speakers, unflinching debates, and unforgettable entertainment to explore the ideas and freedoms that will shape America for the next 250 years.

• The KIDS Act would put Washington in charge of how we can communicate online by &

This week on

• This week, FIRE EVP & Host sat down with —author of Just Plain Filthy: The Story Behind Book Banning’s Trial of the Century—to discuss the history and lasting impact of Island Trees School District v. Pico, the Supreme Court’s landmark school library book-banning case, and what it reveals about today’s debates over censorship, parental rights, and access to books.

This week in FIRE’s blog

• Early bird pricing ends July 4: Get your tickets to FIRE’s Soapbox conference in Philadelphia

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

Sestercentennial Independence Day Lightning Fireworks Round

A few quick hits and updates from a busy pre-holiday week

• Utah Political Watch, Inc. v. Musselman

The U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed in significant part dismissal of a challenge to the Utah Legislature’s Capitol Media Access and Credentialing Policy—which requires reporters to be from “an established reputable news organization” and “adhere to a professional code of ethics,” while categorically excluding those from “blogs, independent … or other freelance” media—by a previously credentialed, award-winning reporter who covered the statehouse for a 25 years for institutional media, but was denied credentials on starting and becoming editor and sole reporter for his own independent newsletter. The court held the reporter plausibly alleged the policy is facially viewpoint discriminatory insofar as it allows denial of access the Legislature to reporters/media organizations for choosing to not affiliate with a larger outfit and/or to not have an editor. It also held that insofar as the credentialing policy is at least a nonpublic or limited public forum to which plaintiff had a constitutional right of access, and he averred the Legislature denied him credentials due to prior critical reporting on it, he plausibly alleged unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. However, the court upheld dismissal of a prior restraint claim on grounds that a denial of credentials does not restrain speech but only access, and a First Amendment retaliation claim on grounds that plaintiff alleged only conclusorily that such denials objectively chill speakers of ordinary firmness. FIRE filed an amicus brief in the case, joined by Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

• New York Times Co. v. Department of Defense

In an update to this case, where the D.C. federal court previously held unconstitutional and enjoined a then-new DOD policy for restrictively granted “Pentagon Facilities Alternate Credentials,” the court has now preliminarily enjoined a new policy—adopted the next business day after its earlier order—that closed effective immediately the Pentagon’s designated “Correspondents’ Corridor” from which journalists had long worked, and required going forward that all credentialed journalists are barred from entering the Pentagon altogether unless specifically invited to a press conference or prearranged interview, and even then, only if escorted by a DOD official. The court held the escort requirement violates the First Amendment because DOD issued it in retaliation for the plaintiff journalists exercising their constitutional rights, easily deeming it an adverse government action that would chill speakers of ordinary firmness, and that it was causally linked to plaintiffs’ speech given the “myriad statements by Department officials expressing disdain for reporting by The Times and other ‘legacy’ media outlets.”

• Accountability Now USA v. Greiss

An update here, too, in the case where the D.C. federal court issued a temporary restraining order against the National Parks Service/Department of Interior revoking a protest group’s permit for displaying an “8647” flag at their downtown demonstration or from otherwise seizing or ordering the flag’s removal. The court has now entered summary judgment for plaintiff and converted the TRO into a permanent injunction, holding: “Although the Court’s opinion is lengthy, that does not mean that this is a hard case. It is not. Plaintiff’s signs and flag fall well within the heartland of protected First Amendment speech, and Defendants offer no plausible basis for suppressing Plaintiff’s core, political speech.” The court’s reasoning is, indeed, straightforward:

Plaintiff’s signs accusing President Trump of raping a minor might outrage or offend some, but they do not, by any measure, cross the line from protected political speech to unprotected obscenity. That is true, moreover, even under the less demanding obscene-as-to-minors standard. Similarly, Plaintiff’s “8647” flag and similar materials, which were displayed along with other materials calling for President Trump’s removal from office, do not constitute a “true threat” or criminal “incitement” to violence. Rather, both sets of materials represent core protected speech, and, as a result, the NPS may not compel their removal or condition Plaintiff’s continuing entitlement to a demonstration permit on Plaintiff’s refraining from that speech.

• NetChoice v. Hilgers:

Another federal district court enjoins another state social media age-verification/parental-consent law, this time the U.S. District Court in Nebraska, which preliminarily enjoins the requirements that social media platforms use reasonable age verification to verify those seeking to become an account holder a on a social media platform, and to obtain “express parental consent” for minors wishing to sign up, for many of the familiar reasons, i.e., failure to satisfy strict or even intermediate scrutiny for lack of sufficient tailoring, trips the same constitutional wires as the video game restrictions for minors in EMA v. Brown, etc.

International free speech stories of the week

• Australia to double potential fines over child social media accounts

“We can all agree we would like the scheme to work better than it is currently, but that is on Big Tech taking the Mickey,” Wells told the Australian Broadcasting Corp., using an Australian slang term for deceiving, teasing or mocking.

The government announced Sunday it would introduce draft legislation into Parliament this week that would double the maximum fine to 99 million Australian dollars ($68 million) for platforms that fail to take reasons steps to prevent Australian children from holding accounts.

• Grandmother arrested under Queensland’s hate speech laws amid pro-Palestine rally outside Brisbane court

• Uganda army chief shuts down media group amid widespread curb on free speech

Book of the Semiquincentennial

’s A Glorious Liberty won my Prestigious Ashurbanipal Award back in 2021, but, frankly, it’s so good that I’m also making it my “book of the semiquincentennial.” As I’ve said before, it remains the only exception to my rule that if you’re interested in Frederick Douglass, you should read Frederick Douglass.

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Note from Greg: The following was originally published yesterday in Reason, but I thought it was such an eloquent tribute to one of the less celebrated, more polarizing, but incredibly influential Founders, that I wanted to make sure my readers here on ERI saw it before celebrating America’s 250th Independence Day tomorrow. Check out Reason’s July issue on “The First Free Americans,” and, if the holiday elicits a spirit of generosity or gratitude, please consider a gift to the hardest working, most reliable defender of free speech for all Americans.

On June 8, 1809, 72-year-old Thomas Paine took his last breath inside a small house in Greenwich Village. The next day the best-selling author and revolutionary’s body was loaded onto a cart and taken to his farm in New Rochelle, about 22 miles north of New York City, for burial. There was no procession, no national moment of silence, no celebration of a life fully lived.

A small group attended his funeral, including his caretaker, Marguerite Bonneville, a friend from his many years in Revolutionary France, and her son, Benjamin. As the dirt hit the mahogany coffin, Bonneville exclaimed, “Oh! Mr. Paine! My son stands here as testimony of the gratitude of America, and I, for France!”

By the time of his death, there was little gratitude for Paine’s contributions to the United States outside of workingmen’s associations because of his blistering attacks on revealed religion, particularly Christianity. But as America barrels toward its semiquincentennial, Thomas Paine emerges as the Founding Father Americans can celebrate without regret. Unlike his contemporaries, Paine’s radical liberalism feels strikingly modern—pro-democracy, pro-market, anti-poverty, and antislavery—and worth defending as the forces of reaction mount here at home and abroad. Without the pen of Paine, in fact, there might not be a United States to celebrate today.

In January 1776, Paine’s Common Sense hit the streets of Philadelphia like a cannonball. The 47-page pamphlet was an immediate sensation. Not only did Paine reject reconciliation with Great Britain and call for independence, he attacked hereditary monarchy and aristocracy as millstones around humanity’s neck. What made the text dangerous was that Paine didn’t write it for polite society. With wit and verve, he wrote it for the masses in language any farmer or artisan could understand. But Paine went further. He had the temerity to tell common people that they weren’t mules to be driven into the mud by their so-called betters. Instead, they had the right and ability to rule themselves with dignity, the divine right of kings be damned.

Paine’s democratic beliefs terrified the more elitist and conservative Founding Fathers, most notably his decades-long nemesis, John Adams. While Adams conceded that without Paine “the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain,” he feared Paine’s egalitarian ethos would unleash anarchy into the nascent republic. Paine’s forceful argument for universal male suffrage without a property qualification petrified Adams. (Though he had a friendship with the founding feminist Mary Wollstonecraft during his time in England and revolutionary France, Paine doesn’t seem to have commented on women’s voting rights.)

A few short months after the Declaration of Independence in September 1776, Pennsylvania made good on Paine’s democratic promise. The state’s constitutional convention—presided over by Benjamin Franklin, Paine’s friend and benefactor—codified popular democracy into the state constitution while protecting civil liberties such as free speech and the right to bear arms for self-defense. In response, the embattled nation’s working people celebrated him while the colonial elite cursed him for unleashing the unforgivable conceit: equality by birth.

Paine, however, couldn’t be typecast as a typical progressive today. As the Democratic Party flirts with socialism and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement champions tariffs, Paine’s bourgeois radicalism stands firm: Markets and private property are the best ways to combat poverty. He anticipated that great wealth could be “capable of good” and rebelled against the simplistic notion that entrepreneurs and business owners were evil. “I care not how affluent some may be,” he wrote in Agrarian Justice, “provided that none be miserable in consequence of it.” In The American Crisis, Paine insisted that trade “flourishes best when it is free, and it is weak policy to attempt to fetter it,” understanding that prosperity flowed from the free trade in goods and services between individuals and nations.

Paine, however, wasn’t an apologist for the rich or inequality. Instead, he earned the admiration of working people. Not only because he was one of them, but because he fought for them wholeheartedly. Enraged by the privilege and feudalism of the Old World and any scheme to plant such poison in American soil, Paine laid out an early proposal for social insurance to provide public education for poor children, maternity benefits for new mothers, and pensions for the infirm and elderly. But Paine didn’t see his proposal as welfare. He saw it as every individual’s natural inheritance from common land being cultivated and taken out of common use. “It is not a charity but a right,” he wrote, “that I am pleading for.” Paine thought his plan would undercut the rampant inequality and dependency that corrupted the Old World.

Unlike many in the Founding generation, Paine detested slavery. When he arrived in Philadelphia in 1774, his quarters sat next to a slave market. What he called “the infernal trafic (sic)” horrified him. Later in life he would write a sentence that connected his hatred of subjugation to his celebration of democracy and individual rights: “Man has no property in man, neither has one generation a property in the generations that are to follow.”

About seven months before his death, Paine even hurled his abolitionist views in the face of former president Thomas Jefferson, according to textual analysis by the historians behind Thomas Paine: Collected Writings, published this week by Princeton University Press. In what was considered a letter of unknown authorship to Jefferson from November 1808, Paine chastised the former president and slaveholder, reminding Jefferson of the Declaration’s language he penned. “We hold these truths self-evident; that all men, (not all white men) are created equal,” he wrote. Then he came in for the kill, telling Jefferson that if slavery was so entrenched in America then that meant it was “high time for America to give up all pretentions [sic] to liberty & freedom.” Paine’s antislavery credentials shouldn’t need defending today, but they take on new salience when the U.S. government rewrites American history to sand down slavery’s wickedness.

This year, more than ever, there is an impulse to engage in hagiography when discussing the Founding generation. Paine was far from perfect, but when it comes to the questions that matter most today, he’s the Founding Father to cast our lot with. He reminds us of America’s true covenant: the right of every person to live without a master.

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Shot for the Road

It wouldn’t be a proper Fourth of July—let alone America’s 250th Independence Day—without revisiting the greatest patriotic anthem since Francis Scott Key. So before the fireworks (or after), treat yourself to Hulk Hogan’s immortal classic, “I Am a Real American.” You’re welcome.

Story of the week

• Tell the government: Hands off our TV stations

The American people don’t need Brendan Carr to appoint himself as the nation’s speech police. Whether the FCC is targeting The View, conservative talk radio, or your local TV station, the danger is the same: When the government exerts power over editorial decisions, broadcasters are pressured to follow only the government-approved narratives. Viewers have less choice, see fewer perspectives, and hear fewer voices.

• Cosmos Grants are back! (Cosmos Institute)

Truth is found in the open, by many people testing each other’s claims. AI can replace that contest with a single confident answer, and the disagreement that catches error begins to thin out.

• Gwar you kidding me? Secret Service reportedly investigates metal band for mock Trump execution by

Despite the anger it inspired among some Trump supporters, and despite drawing the attention of the Secret Service, Gwar’s onstage antics are First Amendment-protected speech. While true threats aren’t protected, a true threat is a serious expression of intent to commit unlawful violence against an individual. It doesn’t include hyperbole, satire, or artistic expression that simply references or depicts violence, however provocative it may be.

This week in ERI

This week in

• J. Edgar Hoover and the war on dissent by

• The ‘papers, please’ era of the internet will decimate your privacy by

• Cassius Marcellus Clay brought cannons to a free press fight by

• How does the First Amendment apply to AI? by

Far from a simple probabilistic machine, AI models are the direct result of human judgments about what information it should absorb, what values it should prioritize, what tone it should adopt, and what kinds of answers it should avoid.

• Law professors say they support free speech. Many are afraid to practice it by

This week in FIRE’s blog

• STATEMENT: ICE tracked down a New York woman who posted information she saw in a newspaper. Why her fight is everyone’s fight.

A free America doesn’t dispatch federal law enforcement agents to intimidate someone for an Instagram post of publicly available information. Free speech is the bedrock of a free society, and the First Amendment squarely prohibits ICE agents from intimidating Americans for nothing more than repeating information from a newspaper report. As we approach the 250th anniversary of our independence from England, where police now hassle residents over social media posts, let’s not follow their lead.

• VICTORY: FIRE, press freedom advocates win settlement over California law prohibiting anyone from sharing lawfully obtained information about sealed arrest records

“The First Amendment right to publish lawfully obtained information on matters of public concern is a cornerstone of an informed public, and California’s lawyers looked at the law and recognized it was indefensible under the First Amendment,” Steinbaugh said. “California’s legislature should follow their lead by rescinding this provision.”

• UW-Madison barks up the wrong tree by investigating student group for beagle rescue flier

FIRE in the press!

• Oakland County’s Adopt-a-Road controversy is a First Amendment lesson (The Detroit News) by

But if the government prohibited speech every time it made someone uncomfortable, free speech would mean little. Public colleges could shut down both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian speakers. High schools could censor students for supporting or opposing ICE. Police could throw people in jail for posting a meme about the president. The First Amendment protects all of us from all of that. Protecting our free speech rights means sometimes standing up for speech we don’t like — not demanding it be taken down.

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Merriott v. City of Bossier City

Fifth Circuit revives First Amendment challenge to city council public-meeting open-comment speech restrictions all-too-frequently maintained by local bodies, such as against “personal,” “impertinent” or “slanderous” remarks

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed the dismissal of First Amendment claims brought by a Bossier Parish (La.) online journalist and City Council meeting participant against a public-comment policy that purports to ban “personal,” “impertinent,” “slanderous,” or “boisterous” remarks, holding he sufficiently alleged the restrictions are unconstitutionally overbroad, vague, and viewpoint-based.

The court deemed the facial overbreadth challenge to the personal remarks ban to be plausibly alleged, holding it “captured nothing more than bold criticism of City Council members,” in contravention of the “bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment ... that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” Based on “the ordinary meaning of ‘personal remarks,’” the court held, the policy “prohibits speakers from uttering an infinite number of protected, relevant statements or questions,” including: “(1) using a councilmember’s name for the record; (2) mentioning that a councilmember may have a personal stake in the outcome of a vote; (3) stating that a councilmember engaged in a corrupt act; (4) highlighting that a councilmember had recently been convicted of a crime; (5) claiming that a councilmember lied to the public; (6) suggesting that a councilmember had a conflict of interest; and (7) bringing to public attention that a councilmember had been sued—just to name a few.” In short, the court held the policy’s “possible applications are unquantifiable, especially when not harnessed by any limiting principle” and insofar as it “forbids a citizen from noting that a councilmember has—even questionably—done anything that may be relevant to the public.”

The court similarly held that in barring “impertinent” remarks – i.e., those “given to or characterized by insolent rudeness” or “not restrained within due or proper bounds especially of propriety or good taste” – the policy “runs afoul of the Constitution,” because it “is so unbounded and covers a substantial amount of core First Amendment activity in relation to its legitimate sweep.” “With no limiting principle, this provision effectively allows the City Council to decide which comments are permissible at its whim,” because: “If a councilmember is offended by comments that the Council does ‘not have the citizenry’s best interest in mind,’ or it is ‘breaking the law,’ or ‘not listening to the demands of its constituents,’ the Council could simply silence the speaker.” In the same vein, in banning “slanderous” comments, “used in the same way against the same backdrop” of New York Times v. Sullivan and its progeny, the policy “creates the same chill” on speech the Supreme Court identified, so, “standing alone, this proscription is overbroad.”

The court also holds “a standalone prohibition on ‘becom[ing] boisterous’ is too broad to be constitutionally permissible.” Under its “expansive definition” that “refers to both traditional speech and conduct, … banging one’s hand on the podium, emphatic hand gestures, pointing, crying, clapping, or simply shifting one’s tone could trigger application … as could any remark deemed ‘rowdy’ or inflammatory.” As with the personal remarks ban, the court held, “potential applications are limitless.”

The court next held the constitutional vagueness challenges to be plausibly pled, as “the terms ‘personal’ and ‘impertinent’—which are undefined—fail to provide speakers with a reasonable opportunity to know what conduct is prohibited,” with “boisterous” being vague for the same reason—violations “turn only on the listener’s discretion.” Further, the court held, “absent any explicit standards for those who apply the Policy to safeguard against its arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement by the City Council, the Policy’s other terms are likewise unconstitutionally vague.”

Finally, the court holds plaintiff also plausibly alleges the bans on personal, impertinent, and slanderous remarks are viewpoint-based, and thus unconstitutional in any public forum, including the limited public forum that city council meetings represent. Similar to the vagueness analysis, the court holds any such prohibition “turns on the perception of the individual councilmembers” and in doing so “constitutes unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.” And because those prohibitions are viewpoint-based, “they are also content based to an impermissible degree and unreasonable” for a limited public forum. The court did, however, affirm dismissal of the viewpoint-discrimination challenge to the policy against boisterousness to the extent it can apply to speech without reference to viewpoint or content (as well as the dismissal of plaintiff’s state open meetings law claim).

The case thus returns to U.S. District Court for Western Louisiana to proceed on the plaintiff’s facial challenges.

International free speech stories of the week

• Paris Police Ban Far-Left Concert Over Anti-Police Violence Fears (NewsFire) by Dimitris Papafotis

• Japan’s Flag Desecration Bill Threatens Rights (HRW) by Teppei Kasai

• South Korea’s ‘fake news’ law tests press autonomy (DW) by Julian Ryall

Among the key changes to the law are the obligatory removal from online sites of comments deemed to be false or defamatory by the Korea Media and Communications Commission, which is also able to impose fines of up to 1 billion won (around €584,000, $690,000).

One of the most controversial additions to the law — which South Korea’s ruling Democratic Party refers to as the “anti-fake news act” — is the right to demand corrections or rebuttals to editorials or opinion pieces.

Book of the month

The winner of this month’s Prestigious Ashurbanipal Award — yes, the most prestigious of all fake literary prizes — is Nita Farahany’s The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotech (2023). It is a terrific, urgent, and skillfully written book about one of the next great frontiers of liberty: cognitive liberty. Farahany argues that freedom of thought, mental privacy, and self-determination are not abstract philosophical luxuries. They are going to become very practical legal and cultural questions as brain-sensing technology, AI, neurotech, and behavioral prediction all get better, cheaper, and more intimate.

And while “mind reading” still sounds like science fiction, the distance between crude inference and meaningful access to our inner lives may be shorter than most people think. That’s why this book matters now. Farahany provides brilliant insight on how to translate liberty into the age of supertech — how to preserve the private space where thought, dissent, conscience, and individuality actually begin. Read The Battle for Your Brain, and pre-order her next book, Cognitive Extinction: Saving Human Thought While We Still Can. Let’s make sure we are not traipsing into dystopia while congratulating ourselves for being innovative.

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Regular ERI readers will know that some of my biggest hobbyhorses lately have been social media, age verification, and AI — particularly how it intersects with free expression and, perhaps most importantly, truth-seeking and knowledge creation.

Just in the last few months I’ve discussed the UK’s age-verification push, the U.S.’s own overbroad proposed AI regulations, the fight between the Pentagon and Anthropic, and much more.

In all of these posts and others, I’ve been struggling to convey how serious this is and why those of us who care about free expression are so concerned. We are in a moment where people seem ready to give as much power to the government as the government will take (which is as much as you’ll give it) to fix problems that are not nearly as bad as the proposed cure.

And to be clear, the concerns are real. People worry about what these technologies will do to work, to children, to politics, to privacy, and to society itself. Those fears are understandable. Every transformative communications technology has inspired fears, sometimes justified ones.

What worries me is that fear has a way of making old mistakes look like new solutions.

Throughout modern history, whenever a new way of communicating emerges, a familiar argument follows close behind: this technology is too dangerous, too disruptive, too influential to be left free. And the proposed answer is almost always the same — give the government more power.

But governments do not possess some magical ability to eliminate risk, panic, misinformation, extremism, or social conflict. What they can do is acquire new authority over the systems through which people communicate, learn, organize, search, publish, and exchange ideas. And once governments acquire those powers, they rarely surrender them voluntarily. And they always abuse them.

That is why the stakes are so high. We are debating the future of the infrastructure through which billions of people will speak, argue, search, publish, organize, learn, and understand the world. Resisting the ancient impulse to put authorities in charge of what people may say and know helped give us the best things in the modern world: science, liberal democracy, individual rights, pluralism, innovation, and the astonishing expansion of human knowledge. If we forget that lesson now, just as the channels of knowledge are being rebuilt all around us, the consequences could last for generations.

Today, FIRE’s executive vice president (and host of the podcast!) sent an email to staff that conveyed this sentiment better than I ever could. So I am sharing it in full here, only making minor changes and adding links and parentheticals to make it easier for people outside FIRE to understand.

From: Nico Perrino

Date: Jun 23, 2026, 1:23 PM

Subject: Current challenges for free speech & emerging tech

To: FIRE staff

Hey everyone,

At yesterday’s Rapid Response meeting1, and again today, we discussed the headwinds we face in ensuring that First Amendment standards apply to new communications technologies, particularly social media and artificial intelligence.

In Congress and the states, there is renewed momentum behind legislation that would regulate constitutionally protected speech and burden access to it through age-verification and other requirements.

In the courts, recent rulings from the Fifth and Sixth Circuits involving laws passed in Texas and Ohio call into question decades of established First Amendment precedent.

And in the court of public opinion, social media and AI remain deeply unpopular. Many people do not think of free speech when they think of these technologies, and they may not instinctively understand how our arguments apply.

We are already doing a lot to meet these challenges: directly litigating or filing amicus briefs in nearly every major case, engaging with lawmakers, hosting a free speech and emerging technologies event series, coordinating through an internal working group, communicating with our partners, and staffing up to accommodate the expanding workload.

That said, the headwinds are growing stronger. At yesterday’s Executive Team meeting, we agreed that an important first step is to acknowledge the scope and scale of the opposition. From there, we need to ask what more we can do, and how we might adjust our tactics and strategies to be more effective.

Over the coming months, you can expect more conversations across departments toward that end. We want each department to think critically and creatively about what it can do to help ensure that First Amendment protections extend to new communications technologies. We also want to improve our messaging by stress-testing our talking points internally and externally, and sharing which arguments are landing and which are not.

I recognize that these questions are hard. Many concerns about social media, AI, and other emerging technologies are real and deserve thoughtful engagement. Civil liberties work often requires us to acknowledge that the case for censorship can be emotionally and politically powerful.

Sometimes the harms cited are grave: war, national security threats, civil unrest, child safety, or life-and-death emergencies. But the old solution is still the wrong one: giving the government more power over speech, thought, and knowledge itself.

Our role as a First Amendment organization is to insist that, even when a technology is unpopular or disruptive, the government must still meet the demanding standards the First Amendment requires before it regulates speech.

Ultimately, we want to look back at this moment 25 years from now and say, “We did everything in our power to meet the moment.”

Civil liberties victories can take a long time, and the opposition can be intense. It took 140 years for the Supreme Court to first strike down a speech restriction on First Amendment grounds. Comstockism, McCarthyism, and censorship during World War I were all astoundingly popular.

The same pattern has often held for new communications technologies. We dealt with centuries of licensing requirements for printed matter. The Supreme Court initially held that movies did not receive First Amendment protection. Broadcast communications have been burdened by censorial laws for nearly a century.

The internet was the major exception. When it began to be widely adopted in the 1990s, the government quickly tried to regulate its content by likening it to broadcast communications. Public opinion was largely on the censors’ side, and the Communications Decency Act passed with overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress.

Fortunately, civil libertarians recognized what was happening and acted quickly. The Electronic Frontier Foundation had formed. The Cypherpunks got organized. And the ACLU developed a litigation strategy that culminated in Reno v. ACLU, which applied full First Amendment protection to the internet. EFF attorney Mike Godwin thought he might be long retired before the Supreme Court vindicated First Amendment rights online. But when the Court delivered its ruling in 1997, he then asked himself “whether I ought to retire from civil liberties work, my job being mostly done.”

Of course, his job would never be done. That’s not how civil liberties work. As ACLU founder Roger Baldwin often reminded people, defending the Bill of Rights requires “eternal vigilance.” That’s why Greg calls free speech “the eternally radical idea.” There will always be censors, and there will always be people — sometimes most people — who believe they have a point. Oftentimes they do. But after the passions and factions of any given moment subside, we almost always look back at censorship as a misguided solution, no matter how commonsensical it seemed at the time.

When I interviewed former ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser for my forthcoming book, I asked him why the ACLU fought for free speech rights in the early internet era. He told me, “If the First Amendment wasn’t going to apply to this new means of speaking in roughly the same way that it applied to the old means of speaking, then free speech was going to really be wounded, because in a short period of time that was going to be the major way in which speech was spoken. And that turned out to be an understatement.”

I think we stand at a similar moment today. Whether we like it or not, much of where we speak and access speech will occur through new internet-enabled technologies, including social media and AI. For many people, these technologies are already a primary way of gathering news and information. If the First Amendment does not apply to them in the same way it applies to older technologies, then the First Amendment — and FIRE’s mission to defend free speech — will be seriously compromised.

We cannot let that happen.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. For now, please begin thinking about creative tactics and strategies your department could deploy on these issues, and stay tuned for more scheduled discussion in forthcoming meetings.

Onward —

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

In light of Nico’s points — particularly regarding the fact that the technologies are new but the proposed solutions are the same — I’d like to reshare my remarks at FIRE’s 2023 gala in New York City, which I’ve titled “Fight the Guardians.” Power will always tell us it needs still more power for our own good, and it’s up to those of us who believe in the truly radical idea of human freedom to push back.

Story of the week

• Statement on shutdown of Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos

By demanding Anthropic eliminate access solely for foreign users — a functional impossibility, per the company — the government is exercising the kind of “kill switch” on artificial intelligence we have seen repressive regimes abroad use on the internet.

By leaving the public in the dark as to the specific threat identified and the statutory authority invoked to address it, the government’s dramatic action functions as an arbitrary abuse of power. The export controls serve as a prior restraint or a licensing system, requiring Anthropic to receive government approval as a condition of operating expressive systems.

This week in ERI

• The online ‘safety’ trap by me

Come for the AI-free speech analysis, stay for the Woodrow Wilson takedown!

This week in

• Why do so many law professors believe one thing, but teach another? by

• Ida B. Wells: Journalist, activist, civil rights icon, and free speech hero by

• What does AI have to do with the First Amendment? by

Applying First Amendment principles to AI-generated expression is both a natural extension of those principles and a necessary step to prevent those principles’ weakening in other applications, including in areas like newspapers and video games.

This week on

• This week, Nico spoke with activist and self-described Satanologist about using satire, litigation, and “malicious compliance” to test the limits of religious liberty, free speech, and government viewpoint neutrality under the First Amendment.

This week in FIRE’s blog

• Outside a New Jersey immigration detention center, reporting on protests may cost you a hospital visit by Athena Rem

• Victory: Wisconsin school board backs away from ban on criticism during public comment by Isabelle Brito

On May 21, FIRE wrote to the board, explaining that the restrictions were unconstitutional and urging the board to rescind them or confirm they no longer reflected board policy.

The board responded, confirming the statement “does not reflect the Board’s current formal or informal policies and practices” and that it has “no plans to . . . enforce such restrictions in the future.”

That’s a win for every resident who wants to hold local officials accountable. At government meetings, the First Amendment protects more than praise and flattery.

• UK teen social media ban is anonymity-killer for adults by

• New York wants warning labels on AI in the news by

FIRE in the press!

• Brits May Soon Say Goodbye to an Anonymous Internet (Persuasion) by

But there’s a problem: these “under-16” policies will blunt all UK citizens’ ability to speak freely and anonymously online. All users, whether they’re 15 years old or 55, will need to prove their age in order to post on social media. This raises significant privacy concerns, not just for users’ ages, but for their identities. The process of age verification will cut away vital firewalls around users’ anonymity. As the rush to ban children from social media hits a global fever pitch, it’s well past time we abandon the faulty claim that only children will feel its effects.

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Borecky v. Nassau County

NY federal court preliminarily enjoins ban on expressive or symbolic conduct within 35 feet of house-of-worship entrances or driveways, or within 10 feet of anyone in a 100-foot bubble around the entrances without their consent, for one hour before through one hour after any service, meeting, or ceremony

Calling it “unprecedented,” the U.S. District Court for Eastern New York preliminarily enjoined Nassau County’s Religious Safety Act banning picketing, advocacy, literature distribution, and all other expressive or symbolic conduct within 35 feet of entrances or driveways of houses of worship, along with its related ban, applicable in a 100-foot bubble around the entrances, against getting closer than 10 feet to anyone for such expressive purposes without their consent. Under the RSA, houses of worship are “any church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or other … location regularly used primarily for religious worship, religious education, or religious services,” an “entrance area” is “any doorway, threshold, entryway, gate, ramp, or other point of ingress or egress,” and a “driveway” is any “entry from a public street to any parking lot” where the house of worship has “an ownership, easement, leasehold interest, or other property right.” The court agreed with the plaintiffs challenging the combined bans, which apply an hour before though one hour after any religious service, community meeting, ceremony, or congregational, educational or organizational meeting or event, that: “the law’s benign purpose—to allow individuals to freely attend religious services and other events at these places, without harassment or fear, and to ensure public safety—is inconsistent with the broad sweep of the law and constitutes a substantial infringement on core First Amendment activity.”

That was so given the RSA’s practical effect. The court cited evidence that there are nearly 1000 places of worship in the county. So, with the 35-foot buffer and 100-foot bubble resulting in restrictions that reach public streets and sidewalks, the combined effects of density of places of worship and RSA limits make entire public streets off limits for any of the prohibited conduct—which the court notes “cover the waterfront” of the First Amendment activity. And given the plethora of religious services, community meetings, and other events at houses of worship, and that the RSA covers non-religious activities—i.e., any community meeting or event—its bans can make prohibited zones off-limits, based just on weekly scheduled events, for upwards or 12 hours a day, and more than 16 hours a day in some places.

Noting the parties agree the RSA is content-neutral and thus subject to intermediate scrutiny, and that insofar as its operation reaches traditional public forums it must, in addition to advancing an important government interest and not burdening substantially more speech than necessary, leave open ample alternative channels for communication, the court held the 35-foot buffer likely cannot withstand First Amendment scrutiny. It held (and plaintiffs did not contest) that protecting public safety and the right to religious freedom are important government interests. But the buffer likely flunks narrow tailoring given it “imposes restrictions on such speech essentially without limitation as to time, and in some places over sidewalks and public streets.” So the “combination of these effects imposes nothing less than severe burdens on Plaintiffs’ activities,” while “Nassau County’s interests in protecting religious freedom and public safety are insufficiently linked to the imposition of such broad suppression.”

“If the goal is to avoid harassment, intimidation, violence, or threatening speech,” the court continued, “the County could have drafted a law that criminalized such conduct. It need not have also banned peaceful conversation, polite exchange, and information distribution on public streets—what amounts to the extreme step of closing a substantial portion of a traditional public forum to all speakers.” And the county’s “proposed alternatives—that Plaintiffs demonstrate 35 feet away, leaflet during the hours there are no services, or stand stationary within the 100-foot bubble zone—are inadequate.”

Similarly, the bubble governing the 10 feet surrounding each person within 100 feet of house-of-worship entrances was not narrowly tailored, especially given that, combined with the 35-foot buffer, it is quite different from Hill v. Colorado’s 8-foot buffer around individuals within 100 feet of healthcare facilities. And the county “failed to articulate any rationale for having both a buffer and bubble … to advance their interests in protecting religious liberty and public safety.”

The court also found “an independent basis that makes the RSA susceptible to invalidation,” in “the unbridled discretion of an officer to police violations of the law.” Speakers face criminal liability under the RSA after they “receive a verbal, written, or other communicative or expressive instruction, warning, or order” from an officer—but “given the breadth of the expressive conduct and speech implicated by the law, an officer is left with the discretion to determine whether the individual standing in silence wearing a t-shirt with a political message is violating the statute or not engaging in expressive conduct at all.” Relatedly, the law is standardless as to what “instruction, warning, or order” will suffice, because the law “could encapsulate anything from a loud and clear instruction to disperse or risk criminal liability to a simple raising of the arm and pointing down the street.” In short: “There are no rules, standards, or guidelines to determine what constitutes conduct that violates the law.”

Having held plaintiffs likely to succeed on the merits of establishing the RSA is unconstitutional, the court held they also established irreparable harm, and that the public interest favors enjoining the RSA, noting that, even if the county “has a powerful, ongoing interest in protecting its residents from harm when attending religious service,” “an important government interest that is insufficient to demonstrate constitutional validity, cannot tip the equities or public interest in the County’s favor.” The court thus preliminarily enjoined the bans in their entirety and their enforcement against anyone.

International free speech stories of the week

• Telegram challenges India ban over exam paper leak fears (BBC) by Nikita Yadav

• Canada tables bill restricting social media, AI chatbots for under-16

“The evidence is clear: online harms are putting our children especially at risk,” said Anna Gainey, Secretary of State (Children and Youth). “The Safe Social Media Act will hold platforms accountable and help make the internet safer.”

Specifically, the framework will operate through three core duties: the duty to protect children, which will apply to all regulated services under the act; the duty to act responsibly, which will require social media services to mitigate risks associated with exposure to harmful content, apply labels to synthetically generated content, and provide clear and accessible ways for users to flag harmful content and block other users; and the duty to make certain content inaccessible, which will require the rapid removal of content that sexually victimizes a child, or intimate content communicated without consent, including deepfake sexual images.

• (India) ‘Stand-up should be banned’ says city mayor (Chortle)

Video of the week

The great Bob Odenkirk reprised his iconic role as the hilarious, if perhaps a bit unscrupulous, attorney, Saul Goodman, from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul to wish America a happy 250th birthday. It made its rounds on social media, but in case you missed it!

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On June 12, the federal government ordered the AI company Anthropic to cut off foreign-national access to its newest and most powerful AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Anthropic said the directive, issued under national security authorities, forced it to disable those models for everyone. According to The Washington Post, officials initially gave Anthropic 90 minutes to take one of the models offline.

Maybe the government had good reasons. The public does not yet know enough to say, because the directive is still not public. And that is itself a serious problem. Without identifying the specific threat being addressed or the statutory authority being invoked, these controls look less like a narrowly tailored national-security measure and more like an arbitrary infringement on the expressive rights of Anthropic and its users. AI models are expressive tools: They reflect choices about training, weighting, design, and guardrails. In users’ hands, they enable people to gather, create, and share information. The danger is not only that a particular model gets shut down. It is that the government claims a kill switch over AI systems — the power to suppress models that contradict its preferred views, embarrass its officials, or come from developers who defy or oppose the administration.

But while the Anthropic fight has been taking up all the oxygen and attention, two other online-safety stories have been unfolding that deserve at least as much attention.

In Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that the government plans to ban children under 16 from major social media platforms by spring 2027. The proposal would require big tech companies to introduce age-verification technology, building on the UK’s Online Safety Act and following the model of Australia’s under-16 social-media ban. The UK government says the goal is to protect children from online harm. But critics immediately pointed out the obvious problem: To keep 15-year-olds out, platforms must find a way to check who is 15. And to do that at scale, the internet starts moving toward ID checks, face scans, and third-party verification systems, or some functional equivalent.

Meanwhile, at the White House, offices connected to the chief of staff, the first lady, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the National Economic Council reportedly met with children’s online-safety groups. The grand bargain forming in Washington is that Congress may block states from adopting or enforcing some of their own AI laws — what’s known as “preemption” — but only as part of a broader package of federal internet regulations. Those rules could pressure platforms to remove more speech, require age checks that double as identity checks, create new takedown rights over AI-generated images or voices, and assert government control over how AI systems are designed and what they may say.

And like the Anthropic order, it’s all in the name of safety.

It’s important to point out here that I am not a social media utopian. As regular ERI readers and FIRE supporters will know, I co-authored The Coddling of the American Mind with social psychologist . In that book, we argued that overprotection was making young people more anxious, fragile, and less prepared for adult life. I also happen to think that the phone-based childhood has been a bad bargain for many kids, and that phones should be out of schools entirely.

But that does not mean governments should build a national identity-checking system for the internet, give government a foot in the door for controlling artificial intelligence, or create broad new liabilities that pressure platforms to suppress lawful expression in the name of protecting minors. I have disagreed with Jon on this point, as I’ve outlined in my review of his most recent book The Anxious Generation. And I certainly disagree with his support for the UK’s under-16 social-media ban. Britain is one of the last countries on earth that needs another lever for controlling speech — or another excuse to make anonymity online functionally impossible.

The Anthropic order, the Washington bargain, and the UK age-verification push are powered by the same dangerous assumption: if a problem can be described as a matter of safety, the government should be trusted with new leverage over speech.

The slope is more than slippery. It’s a mudslide

Unfortunately, something I and other free speech defenders have to repeat until we’re blue in the face is that regulation rarely ends where it begins. Lawmakers start with a sympathetic target, a modest-sounding standard, and a category of speech almost nobody wants to defend. Then the category expands, the logic of control migrates, and before long, a tool sold as a scalpel becomes a warhammer.

One big problem with the discourse surrounding all of this is that age verification is something of a misnomer. This is because the systems necessary to make that kind of screening possible also inevitably make anonymity for adults impossible to preserve. That means building a “show me your papers, please” internet at the very moment when anonymity is most essential.

What people arguing in favor of these policies don’t seem to get is that anonymity is not a loophole in free speech. In fact, it’s one of its oldest protections. Anonymous and pseudonymous speakers have included dissidents, whistleblowers, abuse survivors, religious minorities, political minorities, and citizens with something unpopular to say. The Federalist Papers were published under a pseudonym. So were anti-slavery pamphlets, samizdat writings under Soviet rule, and the anonymous tips and leaks that exposed corruption, abuse, and illegality in institutions that wanted those facts kept hidden.

Now is a reckless time to weaken that tradition. Freedom of speech is in global freefall. Germany has used hate speech, insult, and anti-propaganda laws to punish satire, political memes, and discussion of crime statistics. Britain reportedly arrests thousands of people a year — 13,000 in 2024, according to The Telegraph — under online-communications laws, including for social-media posts and private messages deemed grossly offensive or menacing. The European Union pressures platforms through sprawling digital regulation. In much of the democratic world, “safety” has become the respectable language of speech control.

The United States has long been the great exception, but that exception looks shakier by the day. On campus, administrators have too often tolerated or facilitated shoutdowns, heckler’s vetoes, bias-response systems, and investigations into protected speech. In Trump’s Washington, threats against universities, law firms, media companies, political opponents, and even private associations have become routine tools of governance. Groups on the left helped normalize informal censorship as moral imperative; many on the MAGA right are learning to enjoy formal censorship as retribution.

Another issue is the overextension of certain terms to meet ideological ends. The most dangerous word in this entire debate may be “harm.” On campus, we at FIRE have spent years watching this term expand from actual threats and harassment into reading controversial books, inviting visiting speakers, making jokes, offering classroom hypotheticals, hearing different political opinions, and even entertaining the presence of disfavored arguments. That was one of the central warnings of Coddling: When institutions teach people to treat emotional discomfort as danger, censorship starts to look like compassion.

Last year, then-attorney General Pam Bondi echoed this logic from the right, treating critical comments about Charlie Kirk after his murder as grounds for official retaliation. Practically anything important enough to argue about can be repackaged as harmful to someone, and “harmful to children” is the most powerful and manipulative version of the claim. That is a perpetual source of frustration for those of us who actually do want to protect kids: child protection can become the skeleton key that opens the door to censoring adults.

Some threats sound scary and new, but they’re old — and already protected against

The NO FAKES Act, designed to allow people to control the use of AI-generated versions of their voice or likeness, is the easiest part of this package to sympathize with. Nobody wants their voice or face cloned for a scam, fake endorsement, or humiliating sexual image. But existing law already protects us against fraud, defamation, privacy law, right of publicity, extortion, or harassment. AI will create hard cases, for sure, but courts can develop narrower rules around actual abuse in light of this new technology. A broad new federal right over “digital replicas,” especially if enforced through notice-and-takedown measures, will inevitably sweep in things like parody, satire, political commentary, documentary work, memes, reenactments, and criticism. Another issue is the vague and overbroad wording of the proposed law. The exceptions offered in the bill are so narrow that speakers cannot reliably determine in advance whether they apply. When in doubt, it’s smart to keep quiet, which is exactly how chilling effects work.

I will say here that federal preemption of state AI laws is, by itself, a very good idea. States are already producing a thicket of inconsistent, vague, and sometimes flatly asinine AI rules that aren’t compatible with the breadth of expressive rights Americans enjoy.

But the answer to state-level overreach is not federal overreach. As we speak, AI is becoming a tutor, editor, research assistant, librarian, debate partner, and search engine — something close to the future operating system of the planet. Rules that govern what AI systems may say, how they must be designed, what risks they must avoid, and what answers they must suppress are automatically and unavoidably rules about the future of knowledge creation itself. This is why FIRE and the have teamed up to create and promote truth-seeking AI.

Our goal must be to keep control of AI out of the hands of the powerful

The great liberal achievement of human history was separating truth from power: Denying kings, priests, commissars, bureaucrats, and mobs the authority to decide what everyone else is allowed to know. Power always wants that authority back. It wants to decide which claims are false, which harms matter, which depictions are unauthorized, which jokes are too risky, which AI answers are unsafe, and which anonymous speakers must be unmasked.

We should do everything we can to keep power’s hands off the systems through which humanity will increasingly think, learn, argue, and discover.

Granted, there are real concerns about kids and the effects of technology on their development. But a hard social problem does not justify building permanent speech-control infrastructure. A phone-based childhood can be improved through cultural adaptation, parental supervision, better parental tools, and getting phones out of schools. A federal system that weakens anonymity, pressures platforms to remove lawful speech, and gives government leverage over artificial intelligence is unlikely to solve the problems it ostensibly wants to solve, and introduces a different order of danger in the process.

The FCC is an example of a solution that has turned into a problem. It was created in large part to solve a practical issue of its time: allocating the electromagnetic spectrum. However, again and again, it has threatened First Amendment values — and under current Chairman Brendan Carr it has shown how quickly a communications regulator can become a tool for jawboning (using government pressure on private actors to do what the government cannot directly command) media companies, threatening licenses, and punishing perceived enemies of the president.

That is why civil libertarians sound so unreasonable and callous at the outset of these kinds of arguments. It’s not that we don’t see the concerns animating people. It’s not that we don’t care about addressing those concerns — in fact, most of us care a lot. What we’re doing is looking beyond the stated purpose of the law and identifying the agency that will inevitably be built, the precedents that will undoubtedly be set, and the politicians who will enthusiastically inherit and wield the tool to serve their own ends.

As Justice Robert Jackson wrote in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the First Amendment was designed “to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.”

That’s what I’m urging all of you — especially those of you with children, who are concerned for their safety and their future: Think like an American, in the best tradition of our 250-year argument over liberty. Imagine every new power in the hands of your worst political enemy, because eventually, it will be. Try to consider how those enemies might use and abuse the power you’re so eager to grant your allies. And when you come to the conclusion that this is a terrifying state of affairs, come back to this moment and recognize that you can stop it from ever becoming reality.

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

I knew Woodrow Wilson was terrible before it was cool.

I remember studying Wilson in high school and thinking, even then: Wow, this guy had a ton of terrible ideas.

It wasn’t just that he kept the United States out of World War I too long — a decision that may have made the war longer, bloodier, and more destabilizing than it needed to be. It was also that so much of his worldview seemed to mistake abstractions for reality. Did he really think the cause of World War I was some seminar-room equation about diplomacy and ideals? Germany wanted its war with France before Russia became too powerful. Austria-Hungary wanted Serbia punished and subordinated. Nationalism, empire, militarism, alliance politics, and old-fashioned power-seeking were doing what they usually do. And Wilson’s grand solution — national self-determination — sounded noble until you noticed that, if followed consistently, it could leave humanity trapped in an endless war over borders, peoples, language, ethnicity, religion, history, and grievance.

And, of course, didn’t people know he was a total racist?

On that last point, at least, public opinion has started to catch up. Most people now know — and justly criticize — Wilson’s segregationist policies, including the resegregation of parts of the federal government and his infamous White House screening of The Birth of a Nation.

Less known, though, is how much of an absolute disaster he was for free speech. During World War I, Wilson signed the Espionage Act of 1917 and backed the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a crime to criticize the government, the military, the Constitution, or the war effort in ways officials deemed disloyal. His administration oversaw thousands of prosecutions and arrests, targeting anti-war activists, political dissidents, journalists, and ordinary citizens whose offense was often little more than speaking their minds. Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for an anti-war speech. Newspapers and magazines were denied mailing privileges for publishing views the administration disliked. Wilson was hard-pressed to meet a dissenter he didn’t want to throw in jail, and in far too many cases he actually succeeded in doing just that.

That’s why FIRE has officially dubbed Woodrow Wilson the worst president for free speech, ever.

Check out this fantastic video from FIRE, which is part of its Figures of Speech series celebrating America’s 250th birthday.

Story of the week

• FIRE backs JAWBONE Act to end backdoor censorship by

If the JAWBONE Act becomes law, Americans will be able to sue federal officials for violating the First Amendment when they coerce social media companies, AI platforms, or broadcasters to change or take down protected speech. If the federal official did the jawboning “willfully and wantonly,” they’ll have to personally pay the damages. (Otherwise, the government will pay on their behalf.) That means federal employees will be personally incentivized to make sure they’re staying on the right side of the First Amendment when they reach out about speech on social media, AI platforms, TV, or radio.

This week in

• Illinois’ doomed plan to tax social media by

We’re not surprised to see a proposal like this filled with ambiguities and holes. As states have attempted to turn around the losing streak social media regulation has faced in court, we’ve seen a number of half-baked schemes to find some kind of creative workaround. States have tried to avoid scrutiny by casting their speech restriction as regulating “design choices,” by targeting platforms through the app store, and by labeling their target “conduct” rather than “speech.”

• Woodrow Wilson: America’s worst president for free speech by

• For now, censorship stays at the University of Alabama by

• American Diabetes Association ejects researchers from conference for sharing editorial from its own journal by

• The law faculty who self-censor the least are not the ones you think by

• A study isn’t ‘worthless’ because it’s incomplete by

• Ohio man jailed for texting Shrek’s penis to a state senator. Your questions about Shrexting, answered

This week on

• This week, host & FIRE EVP sat down with , author of Transaction Denied: Big Finance’s Power to Punish Speech, to talk about “what happens when people are denied access to financial services because of their lawful speech and conduct.”

This week in FIRE’s blog

• Auburn’s governing overhaul guts accountability by

• FIRE endorses Senate bill that would prevent government coercion of protected speech

FIRE in the press!

• Law Professors Say They Support Free Speech. Many Are Afraid To Practice It (Daily Wire) by

• N.J. school ethics law has become a gag order. It’s time to change it (NJ.com) by

• The European Court of Human Rights Is Betraying Its Purported Values (Persuasion) by

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Boddy v. Grech

Sixth Circuit rebuffs speech-restrictive open-meeting shibboleths while reinforcing the unconstitutionality of the heckler’s veto—and why it can’t be grounds for silencing speakers at local board and council public comment periods

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed denial of a preliminary injunction, and ordered one entered, in a case by a local citizen whose remarks the president of the Xenia, Ohio, school board cut off during a public open comment period after she found them offensive, forcefully stated as much to the assembled open-meeting attendees, then used the heckles and boos fomented as grounds to recess the meeting before the speaker could finish. Doing so based on the speaker’s respectful criticism of the board and other local officials, the court held, likely violated her First Amendment rights, resulting in irreparable harm, and thus warranted the preliminary relief the lower court had denied.

In reaching its decision, the court rejected open meeting prohibitions on directing public comments to specific members of the body, ad hominem attacks, and remarks lacking “reasonable decorum” (beyond prohibiting those causing disruption, true threats, incitement, etc.), all of which, alas, are common in the rules of local boards and councils. Insofar as such a body uses those restrictions, imposed formally or simply in how it conducts meetings, because it deems such remarks offensive, the court held, the result is unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. And that violates the First Amendment, the court explained, because a comment simply being directed to or about a specific official, or amounting to an ad hominem attack, does not make it unprotected.

But the court saved its greatest ire for the extent to which in cutting off the plaintiff the board president effected an unconstitutional heckler’s veto, i.e., a curtailment of peaceable First Amendment-protected speech to appease an audience that reacts disruptively and/or to stave off potentially violent action by them. The court first made clear that constitutional bar applies equally to limited public forums (like meetings restricted to board-related business) as it does traditional public forums (like public sidewalks and parks), because a heckler’s veto necessarily involves viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment in any type of forum (or in the absence of one). In this respect, the court said, “several important throughlines surface regardless of the forum at issue” when it comes to the heckler’s veto:

When a peaceful speaker engages in protected speech and is confronted by a hostile crowd, the state may not silence the speaker as an expedient alternative to containing or snuffing out the lawless behavior of the rioting individuals. Nor can the government sit idly by as the crowd imposes a tyrannical majoritarian rule. It should take any appropriate action to maintain law and order that does not destroy the right to free speech by indefinitely silencing the speaker.

As cutting off plaintiff’s remarks based on reactions of the public meeting attendees—resulting primarily from instigation by the board president, no less—was unconstitutionally viewpoint-discriminatory, she was likely to succeed on the merits of her First Amendment claim and able to show irreparable harm, so a preliminary injunction against future violations lies.

(It’s also worth noting the decision includes a powerful concurrence featuring a thorough history lesson illustrating the heckler’s veto problem through the lens of pre-Civil War abolitionist speech, and several rousing paeans to the right of citizens to exercise their free speech rights, not to mention that its lead footnote explicitly cites FIRE missives to illustrate that: “In the modern day, we have seen our fair share of crowds stifling free speech and debate.”)

International free speech stories of the week

• Signal, DuckDuckGo, and NordVPN threaten to exit Canada if metadata surveillance law passes (Techspot) by Daniel Sims

The latest version of Canada’s Bill C-22 would require digital services such as internet service providers, messaging platforms, email providers, and potentially hardware companies to retain up to one year of user metadata. In addition, tech companies would have to implement mechanisms that allow authorities to obtain “lawful access” to that information for criminal investigations.

• Starmer gives tech firms ultimatum to block explicit images on children’s phones (The Guardian) by Rajeev Syal

The prime minister said tech companies must activate nudity-detection algorithms or other technical solutions on smartphones and tablets to prevent users taking photos or sharing images of genitalia unless they are verified as adults.

If businesses do not comply within three months, legislation will be brought forward requiring the protection to be added to all phones and tablets sold in the UK. Tech firms that fail to do so could face fines, and their senior managers could be made criminally liable.

• Politician-insult law faces scrutiny amid some disagreement (GermanPolicy.com)

• Landmark German ruling declares Google’s AI Overviews are Google’s own words and makes it liable for false answers (the-decoder.com) by Matthias Bastian

Podcast of the week

I always enjoy sitting down with , and my recent interview on After Party was no exception. We talked about free speech in Europe and what America can do to avoid going down that very dark road, DEI in American higher ed, and a whole a lot more!

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Story of the week

• Ohio man jailed for texting Shrek’s penis to a state senator. Your questions about Shrexting, answered by Daniel Burnett &

What does the First Amendment say?

About Shrek’s schlong specifically? Nothing, surprisingly. But it does have a lot to say about speech criticizing government officials — that is, that it lies at the heart of our constitutional protection for free speech. Aside from very narrow exceptions to the First Amendment, such as true threats or obscenity, the government generally cannot punish people for saying things to or about public officials, even if some find the speech offensive, insulting or vulgar.

Political speech doesn’t have to be serious or reverent to have First Amendment protection.

This week in ERI

• The Reality Test Project: turning AI into an Enlightenment technology by me

This week in Expression

• Why do students censor themselves? by

• Frank Kameny was fired for being gay. What he did next changed America by

• Jeffrey Rosen thinks America is worth arguing about

• Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker banned as the UK’s free speech backslide continues by

This week in FIRE’s blog

• Jeffrey Rosen joins FIRE as senior fellow, launches new podcast featuring debut guest Justice Neil Gorsuch

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Accountability Now USA v. Griess

D.C. federal court issues temporary restraining order against feds interfering with 24/7 impeachment protest near federal courthouse based on display of “8647” messaging, holding “no reasonable observer could have viewed … the flag as a threat to the President’s life or physical safety”

The U.S. District Court in D.C. issued a TRO barring the National Parks Service and Department of Interior, and all their agents, from revoking the demonstration permit of protest group Accountability Now for displaying an “8647” flag at their downtown round-the-clock demonstration near a federal courthouse, or from otherwise seizing or ordering the flag’s removal. The “8647” slogan has become a popular call to remove the 47th President, i.e., President Trump, though federal officials—including the Secret Service’s Deputy Director in this case—have increasingly tried to paint it as a death threat, perhaps most notably in the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey for a social media post with the phrase spelled with seashells in the sand on a beach.

The court held Accountability Now is likely to succeed on its First Amendment challenge to attempts to remove or punish the flag, even as the case “implicates two fundamental principles essential to a free country,” that “content-based restrictions on political speech in a public forum—particularly restrictions that are premised on the ad-hoc impressions or views of government officials—are inherently suspect,” but “true threats to the life or safety of government officials are intolerable.” That is because “true threats” are only those “where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals,” with “true” serving to “distinguish … jests, hyperbole, or other statements that when taken in context do not convey a real possibility that violence will follow.”

And here, the court held, where officers’ actions “can be sustained only if the speech at issue satisfies both the objective and subjective criteria for a true threat,” the analysis concludes at that first step, as “NPS … offers no plausible basis to conclude that a reasonable person … would regard the flag to represent ‘a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to” the President. The court notes “86” is “a slang term with no single meaning” but found in dictionaries as “meaning ‘to throw out,’ ‘to get rid of,’ or ‘to refuse service to,’“ and that it “is used far more often to mean ‘throw out’ than ‘kill.’” And while “whether ‘8647’ constitutes a true threat cannot be resolved in the abstract, without consideration of context,” the context here “makes clear that no reasonable observer could have viewed … the flag as a threat to the President’s life or physical safety”—that is, “the flag itself contains no symbols of violence” such as “knives, skulls, nooses, or other threatening symbols,” and it “was displayed … as part of an ongoing demonstration seeking President Trump’s impeachment and removal” with other “IMPEACH. CONVICT. REMOVE.” and like messaging.

All told, “[a]lthough the Court recognizes the importance and difficulty of the mission of the Secret Service, the First Amendment does not permit the government to censor political speech, which no reasonable observer would view, in context, as actually conveying a threat of violence, merely because the speaker uses a phrase that, in addition to other more common meanings, has been used to refer to an act of violence.” The court thus concludes that: “In short, the record contains compelling evidence supporting Plaintiff’s contention that it displayed the flag merely to urge President Trump’s removal from office but contains no evidence supporting Defendants’ contention that the flag represented a true threat on the life or physical well-being of the President of the United States.” And for similar reasons—i.e., Accountability Now “displayed the 8647 flag to urge that Congress impeach and remove” the President—the court also finds “no evidence that a reasonable observer would have viewed the flag as an incitement to imminent violence or … intended to incite political violence.” Consequently, it granted a TRO, with preliminary injunction proceedings to follow.

International free speech stories of the week

• 5 more charged after antisemitic signs displayed at March rally: Toronto police (CBC)

• [Canadian] Senate committee amends C-9 to criminalize residential school denialism (iPolitics.ca) by Marco Vigliotti

Specifically, it would create a new provision in the Criminal Code making it illegal for

anyone who in public, “wilfully promotes hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada or by misrepresenting facts relating to it.” The maximum penalty, if treated as an indictable offence, would be a prison term of less than two years.

• Press Release: Laws giving police, courts greater power to combat extremism pass Parliament (New South Wales, Australia)

• Romania: Draft Law Requiring NGOs, Including Media, to Publish Donor Identities (Council of Europe, Safety of Journalists Platform)

Tribute of the month

I am heartbroken to hear of the passing of a friend and an extraordinary talent, Dito Van Reigersberg, Artistic Director Emeritus of Pig Iron Theatre Company, after a long battle with cancer.

Dito was one of the people who made the artistic scene in Philadelphia such a thrilling community to witness during my two two-year stints living in that city. The second time I moved back to Philadelphia, to become FIRE president, I was extraordinarily lonely. But Dito always had a way of making me feel accepted, welcome, and at home.

I know he made so many people feel that way.

I was lucky enough to see him when he was just starting his career as Martha Graham Cracker at L’Etage in Philadelphia. I had watched another actor who preceded him improve his cabaret chops over time, but Dito seemed to arrive nearly fully formed: astounding from the beginning, and soon dominating the scene.

But as everyone who knew him knows, he was also incredibly kind, surprisingly humble for a genuine genius, and, of course, funny as hell.

I was so inspired by some of the art I got to be adjacent to during my time in Philadelphia. In fact, I still have a recording of the song “Napoleon” from Pig Iron Theatre Company’s “James Joyce is Dead and So is Paris: The Lucia Joyce Cabaret.” It was a musical about Lucia Joyce, the daughter of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, who spent much of her life institutionalized. The song was about Lucia wondering what will become of her while meditating on a pen, a meager gift from her beloved father.

I still have a lot of the lyrics committed to memory:

The blue veins run across my map are rivers,

I cut my nails and I feed them to the moon slivers…

Father dear, I swear to you on the head of Jesus

That I will never love another man till the day hell freezes.

Father dear, I am spoiled.

Thanks for the pen.

That song always crushed me, and all the more so now that Dito is gone. I hope Pig Iron Theatre Company releases it, or, even better, that somewhere there exists a video of Dito singing it, because it was so intimate and moving.

But I am very happy to see people celebrating his too-short but wonderful life.

Rest in peace, Dito.

Here he is, as Martha Graham Cracker, singing one of my all-time favorite songs, David Bowie’s “Life on Mars.”

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I’ve been writing and talking a lot lately about how humanity creates knowledge, and I suspect some of my readers are wondering why a civil-liberties lawyer seems to have pivoted to the philosophy of science. The answer is simple: they are the exact same topic.

People often talk about free speech as if its primary purpose is self-expression, personal autonomy, or participation in democracy. Those are all enormously important. But the deeper reason I’ve spent decades defending free speech is that it remains humanity’s most effective tool for figuring out what’s true — or, perhaps more accurately, for discovering what’s false.

Long before I became a First Amendment lawyer, I was fascinated by the history of scientific censorship. The stories of Galileo, Darwin, and countless others drove home a lesson that has only become more important to me over time: whenever societies try to protect people from ideas, they also protect bad ideas from scrutiny. Truth doesn’t emerge because authorities decree it. It emerges because claims are challenged, tested, criticized, and forced to survive contact with reality.

That’s why I’ve always viewed free speech as far more than a political right. It is an epistemic technology — a social invention that allows us to compare competing explanations of the world. Democracy, individual freedom, and scientific progress all benefit from and depend on that process. But the process itself comes first.

Free speech is not a secondary luxury that sits alongside science, journalism, and academic inquiry. It is the larger Boolean sphere inside of which those truth-seeking technologies exist. It is, quite literally, the systematic application of doubt and, most importantly for the parallels to freedom of speech, of dissent.

The broken reality-testing machine

At FIRE, our historic focus on higher education taught me that academic freedom is just a specialized version of this exact same principle — the systematic application of dissent and skepticism. The point was never that professors possess some special inheritance of wisdom and should be left alone. Professors are often wrong, and sometimes gloriously wrong. The point is that knowledge advances through challenge, criticism, dissent, and the constant possibility that what “everyone knows” might turn out to be false.

Universities matter not because they protect scholars from scrutiny, but because they create spaces where assumptions can be tested, orthodoxies challenged, and sacred cows occasionally introduced to the concept of a slaughterhouse.

The claim that academic freedom and free speech are unrelated — made by Stanley Fish in The First, among others — is utterly bizarre. As best I can tell, it’s also simply a tactical move to argue about why free speech can be limited, but academic freedom shouldn’t be (a self-serving argument for an academic, if there ever was one). Even authoritarian regimes understand the connection. The Chinese Communist Party does not tolerate political dissent, but it is forced to tolerate a meaningful degree of open disagreement within scientific and technical fields because otherwise their bridges fall down and their technology stagnation sets in.

The trouble is that outside many hard STEM fields, the tolerance for challenge often narrows. Knowledge creation requires discipline, first principles thinking, and genuine viewpoint diversity. But when politics, ideology, and institutional prestige become too intertwined, people stop asking whether a claim is true and start asking whether it is safe, loyal, or useful. That’s when disciplines risk becoming more interested in justifying their existence than questioning their assumptions.

The result is that our societal disconfirmation apparatus is badly damaged. Between ideological monocultures, intense conformity pressures, the ongoing replication crisis, and university administrators who think their job is to manage speech rather than protect inquiry, too many fields are insulated from serious challenges.

This looks incredibly obvious to anyone outside the elite academic bubble. When the public watches a scholar, journalist, or scientist get professionally destroyed for stating something that a large majority of ordinary citizens believe is true, they do not conclude that the institution is carefully maintaining high intellectual standards. In those cases it’s just obvious that social pressure has made objective inquiry impossible.

They aren’t imagining things, either. In The Canceling of the American Mind, and I documented hundreds of these exact cases. More broadly, data shows that roughly one in six professors report having been punished or threatened with punishment for their speech. To my knowledge, that level of expressive inhibition is historically unprecedented.

Early glimpses of a challenge system

Despite this, I have become more optimistic recently because we are finally seeing the first signs of something genuinely new. As regular ERI readers will know, FIRE and the have partnered to fund spot grants for AI development focused on truth-seeking and epistemic humility. Through those collaborations, I’ve watched projects like Replication Radar and Priori experiment with using AI not as an all-knowing oracle, but as a systematic challenge system.

These tools are designed to identify weaknesses in research, surface neglected findings, expose hidden assumptions, and help users map the biases of the systems they rely on. They demonstrate a massive, underappreciated concept: AI is useful for much more than generating answers. It can be used to challenge answers.

This is the foundation of a concept that neuroscientist and clinical psychologist Dr. Heather Berlin and I are working through for our next book project. We are calling it The Reality Test Project.

The premise is audacious, scary, and massive: What if we built systems specifically designed to challenge human knowledge at scale? Not just within a single journal or a single field, but across the entire accumulated body of human scholarship?

Here is how a multi-generational project like that actually scales:

We shouldn’t stop with current English-language scholarship, either. A system like this could scour historical archives, translate foreign-language literatures, and unearth valuable, overlooked work that was ignored simply because it was unfashionable, politically inconvenient, or unlucky when it was published.

The funny thing is that people often hear words like “disconfirmation” or “falsification” and assume they’re talking about tearing knowledge down. In reality, they’re talking about how knowledge gets built. The only way we figure out what’s true is by discovering what’s false. That’s harder than it sounds because our brains are constantly trying to convince us that we’re right, even when we’re not.

The printing press didn’t usher in the Scientific Revolution by confirming what everyone already believed. It helped expose how much of what “everyone knew” was wrong. A lot of medieval certainties ended up in the intellectual scrap heap. Good. That’s how we got modern science and, eventually, jet planes, antibiotics, Nespresso machines, and Game Boys.

The separation of truth and power

One of the most important discoveries of the modern world is that truth and power need some distance from each other. Power can fund inquiry, protect it, and create the conditions under which it flourishes. But the moment power gets to supervise truth, truth has a funny way of becoming whatever power needs it to be.

That’s why freedom of speech, a free press, academic freedom, and the separation of powers matter. They’re anti-corruption mechanisms for knowledge itself.

The same principle applies to AI. If artificial intelligence is going to help us discover what’s true, it can’t become a tool for enforcing what powerful people want to be true. Governments, corporations, activist groups, and ideological movements will all be tempted to use AI to shape what people see, what questions they ask, and what conclusions they reach. That’s how censorship will increasingly be sold: not as censorship, political control, or orthodoxy, but as safety, risk management, and optimization.

If AI becomes a tool for enforcing elite consensus, it won’t need to ban books. It can simply make certain questions harder to ask, certain arguments harder to formulate, and certain conclusions harder to imagine.

But the same technology could do the opposite. It could help us challenge assumptions, test claims, expose errors, and hold every institution — including AI itself — to higher standards of scrutiny. The goal should not be artificial intelligence that tells us what to think. It should be artificial intelligence that helps us figure out when we’re wrong.

To ensure it becomes the latter, we must absolutely reject the creation of a “silicon pope.” If a single, monolithic AI engine is crowned as the supreme arbiter of human knowledge, it will be captured by political and corporate interests within forty-eight hours.

Instead, we need to follow the wisdom of Montesquieu and the American Founders: we must implement a strict separation of powers.

This project requires a decentralized, adversarial ecosystem of several different kinds of independent engine crawlers, allowing every serious player in data verification and scholarly integrity to contribute. Crucially, these systems must live in private institutions completely outside of traditional academia so they cannot be swallowed by the same bureaucratic capture and social conformity that ruined the universities. Their single-minded mission should be to flag research that must either be done over or completely abandoned.

To be clear, I don’t mean that we should uncritically trust our AIs in this process. Instead, we should use their ability to independently highlight potentially bogus knowledge. This way, we can triage where human experts should review the record and intervene with more or less research.

The physical anchor: Replication University

Software alone cannot fix a cultural collapse of trust. The digital ecosystem needs to be anchored by physical reality.

That is why this effort must include the creation of Replication University — a brick-and-mortar institution, or preferably a network of them, whose sole institutional purpose is to check society’s homework. Replication University would exist entirely to disconfirm. It would be a physical sanctuary completely insulated from the social pressures of academic conformity, explicitly structured with genuine viewpoint diversity, and laser-focused on high-integrity replication studies. You’ll hear more about this soon.

We are approaching a moment when humanity has the ability to systematically challenge not just individual claims, but the entire map of human knowledge itself. Finding out what we don’t know at that scale would be one of the most important discoveries we could possibly make.

Computer scientists, statisticians, open-science advocates, lawyers, and publishers are likely already working on individual pieces of this puzzle. If that is you, I want to hear from you in the comments. Once we have a clearer map of reality, improving the world becomes a much easier project. That’s the goal, and that is the most noble and important use for AI that I can imagine.

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

FIRE IS HIRING! If you’re fired up about the future of AI and you’re a lawyer who is ready to do something about it, or you know someone who is, let me direct your attention to FIRE’s open position for Lead Counsel, Tech and Free Expression Policy!

The Lead Counsel, Tech Policy and Free Expression reports directly to FIRE’s Legislative and Policy Director and plays a central role in advancing the organization’s mission to protect freedom of speech involving AI, social media, and other emerging technologies.

Stories of the week

• Americans don’t trust the government to regulate social media. They’re right in (Expression) by

In FIRE’s latest edition of the National Speech Index, 75% of Americans said they were at least somewhat concerned about government pressure on tech companies to suppress viewpoints. And 77% said the same about government access to user data for surveillance.

Those concerns cut across ideology, but they shift with power. In the fall of 2023, Republicans were especially likely to distrust government involvement in speech decisions. By April 2026, liberals were especially likely to express concern about government pressure on tech companies.

• Germany Considers Law to Force Social Media Algorithm Boost for State-Approved News (Reclaim the Net) by Cindy Harper

A leaked document, obtained by Apollo News, lays out the plan and if it goes ahead, a state authority will decide which media organizations count as “reliable,” and platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok will be legally required to make those outlets’ content more visible in users’ feeds.

This week in ERI

• New study confirms the right — and the center — have nearly disappeared from faculty politics by me

And then there’s the FIRE finding I’ve found clarifying for years: self-identified Marxists and socialists outnumber conservatives nationally among faculty. That does not mean every college campus is just a Trotsky reading group that appointed a Title IX coordinator. But it does tell you something important about higher education’s ideological center of gravity.

This week in

• The Harvard alumni who refuse to abandon their alma mater by Bobby Ramkissoon

• How Anthony Comstock became America’s most powerful censor by

• High school administrators censored the student newspaper. They don’t think they did anything wrong by

This week on

• This week, FIRE Executive Vice President and podcast host presided over a debate between Harvard Law Professor Larry Lessig and Institute for Justice Senior Attorney Paul Sherman on Super PACs and campaign finance.

This week in FIRE’s blog

• VICTORY: Pensacola State College backtracks, prints student-created magazine by Dominic Coletti

Student journalists at Pensacola State College will once again be able to read their work in print. After weeks of insisting that Florida’s unconstitutional Stop WOKE Act prohibited the college from printing the student-run magazine Just Opposed, PSC President Ed Meadows confirmed that the college has begun printing the magazine for students. This is a huge win, not just for the students but for free speech on all Florida college campuses.

• New FIRE study finds narrowing range of political views among faculty donors

By relying on contribution data rather than voter registration data, Primo was able to measure professors’ ideology instead of just their party affiliation. A Republican professor who gives exclusively to Maine Sen. Susan Collins (CFscore: 0.70) would score differently than a Republican professor giving exclusively to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (CFscore: 1.52), for example.

The average ideology score of faculty donors in the 55-school sample was -1.02. That’s only slightly less left-leaning than some of the most left-wing members of the U.S. Senate, such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who are tied with CFscores of -1.14. Notably, there was no equivalent critical mass of donations on the Republican side.

• Judge orders Texas State to rehire professor fired over viral Gaza panel by

In a win for academic freedom and the First Amendment, a district court in Texas has ordered that Idris Robinson, a professor terminated for speaking at a contentious event about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, must get his job back as his court case proceeds.

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Thakur v. Trump

Ninth Circuit partially upholds preliminary injunction against ideologically grounded terminations of federal grants to University of California researchers as viewpoint-discriminatory and thus likely unconstitutional

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed in part a preliminary injunction obtained by UC researchers on a First Amendment challenge to cancellation of their Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities research grants, under executive orders that the President issued on taking office to bar federally funded research on “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and other targeted topics. When federal agencies began implementing the EOs’ mandate to terminate previously issued grants in those areas, by cancelling them en masse through form termination letters that simply stated the grants no longer met “agency priorities,” over $324 million in grants to UC were lost, with EPA, NSF, and NEH admitting they used mere keyword searches and/or titles to flag grants terminable as involving the prohibited topics.

On challenge to the terminations, the federal district court in Northern California provisionally certified two classes of UC researchers – a “Form Termination Class” that lost grants through form letters without specific explanations, and a “DEI Termination Class” whose terminations expressly cited the EOs – then preliminarily enjoined the terminations, holding the Form Termination Class likely to succeed in showing the terminations were arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act, and the DEI Termination Class likely to succeed in showing (among other things) the terminations violated the First Amendment as viewpoint discriminatory.

On appeal, the Ninth Circuit reversed the Form Termination Class’s preliminary injunction, on grounds the district court lacked jurisdiction over their APA challenge, because it at bottom rests on the researchers’ grant contracts with the government, any challenge to which must go exclusively to the Court of Federal Claims under the Tucker Act – but the court upheld the DEI Termination Class’s preliminary injunction grounded in the First Amendment.

Noting the First Amendment bars government from using its powers to punish or suppress disfavored speech and viewpoints, and that even in providing subsidies cannot discriminate among viewpoints to suppress what it deems “dangerous ideas,” the court held that in terminating the UC grants under the EOs, the government did not merely exercise authority to choose what programs to fund. Rather, it terminated individual grants in existing programs based on researchers’ perceived viewpoints, given that DEI (and diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility) and environmental justice “are inherently directional” in that they “reflect perspectives rather than neutral topics,” e.g., the former conveys that exclusion of historically disadvantaged groups is undesirable.

The court thus credited the finding below that the purpose of the terminations, as supported by statements the agencies themselves made, was to suppress particular points of view grant recipients promoted. In doing so, it rejected government arguments that it may cease funding programs it no longer believes are in the public interest, as “there is a critical distinction between creating or ceasing a particular program (or subsidy, or forum) … and discriminating against disfavored speaker viewpoints within a program (or subsidy, or forum).” The court thus affirmed the preliminary injunction issued to the DEI Termination Class, vacated that granted the Form Termination Class, and remanded the case to the trial court for further proceedings.

International free speech stories of the week

• TikTok and YouTube ‘not safe enough’ for kids, says Ofcom (BBC) by Laura Cress

Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme on Thursday, Ofcom chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes defended its actions but said she knew the job was “not done” yet.

“We’re talking about a twenty-year culture at Silicon Valley of not taking safety seriously; you can’t change that overnight,” she said.

Asked what the regulator would do if platforms did not comply with its rules, Dame Melanie said Ofcom was “ready to take the toughest enforcement action”.

• Police drop case against artist who depicted high-profile Australians in uniforms with Nazi symbols (The Guardian) by Jordyn Beazley

• Military reprimanded soldiers who raised concerns about monitoring Canadians online during COVID-19 (CBC) by Ashley Burke

‘Greg on the Run’

My son and I didn’t just binge Disney movies. At his request, we conducted a longitudinal study that began with Oliver and Company. I now know as much about The Little Mermaid as I probably do about free speech ... and hot dogs.

Event of the week

This week, R Street Institute hosted a panel discussion on free speech, censorship, and comedy with comedian, author, and political satirist Andrew Heaton, along with FIRE Executive Vice President and podcast host , and FIRE Senior Fellow .

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I spend a lot of time on college campuses and to this day, one of the stranger experiences I keep having is running into skepticism that there is even a free speech problem in higher education.

You can cite survey data. You can cite FIRE’s cases. You can cite shout-downs and disinvitations, ideological litmus tests, faculty self-censorship, DEI loyalty oaths, investigations of professors and students for protected speech, and the many students and professors who will tell you privately what they are afraid to say publicly.

Still, someone will usually say, in effect, “This is a nothingburger.”

But the skepticism that frustrates me most is about the most obvious point of all: that higher education, especially elite higher education, leans decidedly to the political left. This is one of those things everybody knows and yet many people still somehow resist saying plainly. My best guess is that even many of the people denying it know it’s true, they just don’t think admitting it is tactically wise.

And because there are many different kinds of evidence, there are many different ways to dismiss each one. Faculty surveys? People lie on surveys, or the sample is biased. Voter-registration data? Party registration is crude. Campaign donations? Well, that only tells you professors give to Democrats. Maybe they’re donating to centrist Democrats, not the progressive wing of the party.

Fair enough. Every method has limits. But when many different methods keep pointing in the same direction, you should start updating your view of reality.

And now we have another level of data.

FIRE’s new report on faculty ideology helps answer the “maybe they’re just centrist Democrats” objection. The report, written by University of Rochester political scientist David Primo, does not merely ask whether faculty donors give to Democrats or Republicans. Rather, it uses campaign-contribution data to place faculty donors and politicians on the same ideological scale. That lets us ask a more precise question: what kind of Democrats are we talking about?

Very “progressive” ones, it turns out. Not NPR-totebag-and-recycling progressive. More like, Bernie Sanders-but-peer-reviewed-by-a-room-full-of-people-snapping progressive.

Why higher ed being an ideological monoculture is a serious problem

Before getting into the numbers, it’s worth reiterating why any of this matters at all.

The most important mission of higher education — the one that best justifies its special legal protections, public subsidies, tax advantages, prestige, and autonomy — is knowledge creation. Universities are supposed to help society see the world as it actually is.

That happens through a continuous and rigorous process of disconfirmation. Test claims. Try to prove things wrong. Eliminate what fails. Over time, if the process is healthy, you establish a cloud of probability around what might be true.

That process requires an unusual amount of freedom. It requires dissenters — people willing to say, “I think the premise everyone here accepts is dead wrong.” And it requires a culture in which being wrong is not fatal, and being on the wrong side of a hot-button political issue is not career suicide.

Higher education does not work well when professors and students face what and I, in our book The Canceling of the American Mind, called the Conformity Gauntlet: This is a series of intellectual and professional hurdles that keep out dissenters and defectors from the orthodoxy. It consists of layer after layer of hard and soft pressure to say the right thing, avoid the wrong topic, signal the correct commitments, and stay away from questions that might make you socially and professionally radioactive.

That’s the crux of the problem here: if there are almost no people in the room who actually reject the dominant assumptions, or if they are there but have learned to keep quiet, higher education’s primary function ceases to work at all.

That is why faculty ideology matters. It’s not because conservatives are always right — good lord, no. It’s not because progressives are always wrong — also no. It matters because any knowledge-producing institution that becomes too ideologically uniform loses one of its simplest and most critical error-correction mechanisms.

FIRE’s faculty ideology report: what the numbers show

Primo’s report looks at faculty at 55 elite and flagship universities, the same schools FIRE studied in its 2024 faculty survey, which includes 112,516 faculty members. He matched those faculty members to campaign-contribution records using Stanford’s Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections, also known as DIME, which includes more than 850 million itemized contributions going back to 1979.

Of the faculty members studied, 30,289 — about 27% — had enough giving history to receive a reliable ideology score. If the analysis is restricted to faculty who gave $200 or more to a candidate or political committee in at least one election cycle, the number is 16,253, or about 14%.

This matters because party labels only tell you so much. “Democrat” can mean Joe Manchin or Bernie Sanders. “Republican” can mean Susan Collins or Ted Cruz. Primo uses CFscores, a campaign-finance-based measure developed by political scientist Adam Bonica, to place donors and candidates on the same ideological scale.

The result is striking, though totally unsurprising to people like me, who have been dealing with college campuses for more than a quarter century.

Among faculty donors in the 55-school sample, the median ideology score is -1.02. Among $200-plus donors, the median is -.95. For comparison, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s CFscore is -1.16, and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren both score -1.14.

Primo’s conclusion is memorable: AOC, Sanders, and Warren, among the furthest-left members of their respective chambers, would appear only slightly left of center in a legislature made up of faculty contributors. That is the part of the report that should end the “maybe they’re mostly moderate Democrats” argument. Nobody who is worried about the Squad being swing voters is in the middle of anything except season eight of The Handmaid’s Tale.

I want to be clear, here: Professors have every right to be progressive. They can believe what they want, donate to whom they want, and argue for whatever politics they think best. I do not want government ideological quotas for faculty hiring. I do not want trustees marching into departments and demanding one conservative, one libertarian, one socialist, one Catholic integralist, and one guy who keeps bringing up Boethius. That way lies madness. (Or worse, another vice provost.)

The concern is that primary function I mentioned above. Universities are supposed to be places where ideas are tested, and testing requires disagreement. Disagreement requires having people in the room who do not share your priors and are willing to say so.

Primo’s report is only the latest confirmation. UCLA’s long-running HERI Faculty Survey has asked faculty about ideology since 1989. Analyzing those data, researchers Phillip Magness and David Waugh found that by 2016 faculty identifying as “far-left” were equal in size to all right-leaning faculty combined. Overall, left-leaning faculty outnumbered right-leaning faculty about 6 to 1 — especially in the humanities and social sciences.

FIRE research fellow and manager of polling and analytics ’s 2021 and 2022 surveys found the same basic pattern. Faculty identifying as “far-left” or “very liberal” exceeded all right-leaning faculty, with a left-right ratio of 6.9 to 1. FIRE’s 2024 faculty survey of more than 6,000 faculty members at 55 universities found that far-left faculty outnumber far-right faculty 16 to 1, and strong Democrats outnumber all Republicans by 2.5 to 1. At some point, the faculty stopped leaning and started doing ideological hot yoga.

Voter-registration studies tell the same story from another angle. Mitchell Langbert and FIRE’s own chief researcher Sean Stevens studied more than 12,000 professors in the 30 states that include party affiliation in voter-registration data. They found that Democrats outnumber Republicans 8.5 to 1.

And then there’s the FIRE finding I’ve found clarifying for years: self-identified Marxists and socialists outnumber conservatives nationally among faculty. That does not mean every college campus is just a Trotsky reading group that appointed a Title IX coordinator. But it does tell you something important about higher education’s ideological center of gravity. In most American institutions, conservatives dramatically outnumber self-identified Marxists. In academia, the reverse is often true.

That is remarkable. If higher education were as curious about itself as it claims to be about everything else, it would treat that fact as a major research question rather than a public-relations problem.

If you’re wondering whether the political leaning of faculty has any effect on their actions, Primo’s research also finds that faculty are unusually politically engaged. That matters because politically active faculty are more likely to shape departmental norms, influence hiring climates, mentor graduate students, and signal what younger scholars are allowed to say if they want careers in academia.

In 2024, faculty in the sample were about four to five times more likely to make campaign contributions than the average American. About 13.2% of faculty in the dataset made campaign contributions of any disclosed amount, and 7.6% gave at least $200. By comparison, 3.5% of American adults made disclosed campaign contributions in 2024, and 1.5% gave at least $200.

The range across institutions is also fascinating. At Brigham Young University, 15.7% of faculty had any contribution record, and 3.9% had given $200 or more. At Stanford, 43.4% had any contribution record, and 30.5% had given $200 or more.

Primo also compares faculty donors in 2024 with all individual donors in 2024. He writes that there is “essentially no mass to the right of center” among faculty donors, while such a right-of-center mass exists in the donor population overall.

That phrase “essentially no mass to the right of center” is dry academic prose. Let me put it another way, paraphrasing my friend John Cleese, and his friend, Graham Chapman: The fantasy of a group of right-of-center faculty donors is no more, it has ceased to be, it has rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.

How this reality actually warps reality on campus

Despite all of this being concerning enough, the report’s most important finding may be about concentration. Here’s why:

Primo finds a leftward shift over time among both faculty donors and donors overall, but he also found that the faculty distribution is much narrower. The interquartile range — the spread of the middle 50% of the data — has “essentially shrunk to nothing over time” for faculty donors.

The problem is not only that the median faculty donor is far left, it’s that the politically active faculty have become tightly bunched. The middle is where most people meet and mingle, with the extremists occupying a relatively tiny space on either end of the bell curve. But now, the middle is no longer spread across liberals, moderates, libertarians, conservatives, left-liberals, civil libertarians, communitarians, old-school labor Democrats, Burkeans, religious liberals, and interesting cranky people who are wrong about half of everything but right about the half everyone else missed.

That is how institutions become strange without realizing they are strange.

If everyone around you shares the same assumptions, those assumptions stop feeling like assumptions. They start feeling like reality. And when this happens, the dissenter does not seem like a colleague with a different interpretation. He seems ignorant, cruel, unserious, dangerous, “anti-science,” “harmful,” or in need of a long meeting with an assistant dean whose title contains at least three abstract nouns, an ampersand, and the word “belonging.”

The school-level data reinforces this. While there is variation among institutions — Texas A&M is about four times as ideologically spread out as Berkeley, and Duke is about twice as spread out as Columbia — Primo notes that median ideology is extremely similar across nearly all schools, hovering near -1. However, this doesn’t mean the “more diverse” schools are suddenly centrist. They just have enough right-of-center or less-left representation to stretch the distribution a bit more.

The field-level findings are also revealing. Unsurprisingly, humanities is the most left-leaning field. Business is the least left-leaning. No one needs a grant to guess that. What is surprising is that, according to Primo, the medians are essentially the same across fields. Even business faculty who make campaign contributions lean strongly left.

Another important but likely unsurprising finding is that the least ideologically diverse and most left-leaning fields are also the most politically active. Humanities faculty give at the highest rate — over 35%. Business is a little over 25%. Agriculture is around 18%. Engineering is a bit above 20%.

So the fields most responsible for shaping students’ understanding of history, literature, politics, identity, culture, morality, oppression, power, and America itself are among the most left-leaning, least ideologically diverse, and most politically active. That should worry anyone who cares about knowledge creation.

One reason this debate gets stupid so quickly is that people use terms like “liberal,” “left,” “progressive,” and “Democrat” as if they are interchangeable. They are not.

A center-right libertarian liberal and a center-left civil libertarian liberal may disagree on taxes, regulation, unions, guns, abortion, immigration, or the size of government. But they often share a deeper commitment to the liberal rules of the game: free speech, due process, viewpoint neutrality, individual rights, pluralism, skepticism of concentrated power, and a willingness to let people be wrong in public.

That old civil-libertarian liberalism can exist on the center-left or the center-right. It is the tradition that says bad people can have good arguments, good causes can use bad methods, and no institution should be trusted with the power to decide which opinions are too dangerous for adults to hear.

Campus progressivism is often different. It is more comfortable treating speech as harm, equality as requiring bureaucratic management of outcomes, dissent as evidence of moral defect, and institutional neutrality as complicity. It tends to be more identitarian, more suspicious of procedural neutrality, more willing to trade open inquiry for a promised moral result.

I am not saying every progressive thinks this way. Many thoughtful progressives care deeply about civil liberties. But the center of gravity has shifted in the last couple of decades, and many universities that still call themselves “liberal” are no longer liberal in the older civil-libertarian sense. Rather, they are progressive institutions with liberal branding.

This distinction matters. A university dominated by center-left civil libertarians would still have problems. It would still need more conservatives, libertarians, religious traditionalists, and other dissenters. But it would be much more likely to defend free speech, tolerate disagreement, and teach students to argue about ideas — which would keep them more on track to fulfilling the university’s primary mission of knowledge creation. A university dominated by progressivism is decidedly less likely to do these things, which fundamentally undermines the pursuit of knowledge.

How to pull universities back from the abyss

Okay, so things are pretty bad. What can we do?

Well, as I’ve been saying for years now, there are several fairly easy things that can be done. First, universities should adopt institutional neutrality and actually mean it. They should stop issuing statements on every war, election, Supreme Court decision, protest, viral video, or moral panic. When an institution takes an official position on contested public questions, it teaches students and faculty that there is a campus-approved view of reality. Dissent inevitably becomes riskier in that scenario, and the chilling effect of that is real. Not every grim headline requires a campus-wide push notification from the president’s office confirming that it, too, has feelings.

Second, universities should recommit to real due process. Notice. Evidence. A chance to respond. Neutral decision-makers. No more shadowy proceedings that punish first and discover facts later. This is where a corollary to the Golden Rule ought to come in: adjudicate the rights of others the way your own rights should be adjudicated.

Schools should also stop using ideological litmus tests in hiring and promotion. DEI statements, and “fit” tests too often function as conformity filters. They do not reliably identify good teachers or serious scholars, they just identify people fluent in the modern esperanto of faculty collective guilt acknowledgement.

Another important intervention is making serious disagreement part of the university curriculum. Students should not graduate from elite universities having encountered only cartoon versions of arguments held by half the country. Thinking you understand conservatism because your professor gave you the verbal equivalent of a sock puppet with a villain mustache is like thinking you can perform spinal adjustments because you once played Mortal Kombat as Sub-Zero. Courses on contested topics should include scholars who genuinely disagree. Sometimes that means co-teaching. Sometimes it means better reading lists. Sometimes it means bringing in visiting speakers. Sometimes it means creating programs specifically designed to expose students to serious arguments that their departments have filtered out.

Importantly, university presidents and trustees also need to stop pretending they are powerless. If a department has spent decades narrowing the range of acceptable opinion, it makes no sense to ask that department to be the sole judge of viewpoint diversity. That is like asking a cartel to write antitrust law. This does not mean donors or politicians should dictate conclusions. They should not. But boards and presidents are responsible for the health of the institution. If universities become politically homogeneous environments where dissent is chilled and students are protected from serious disagreement, leadership has failed.

The implications of this are much bigger than campus politics

This cannot be treated as just another culture-war skirmish, or a problem that solely concerns those involved with higher education. FIRE’s report matters because it gives us a sharper picture of how ideologically narrow the politically active academy has become, and this has serious implications for the discovery and creation of knowledge. That affects all of us, on campus and off.

Universities are supposed to be reality-testing institutions. They should produce better maps of the world. They should train students to ask whether the consensus is true, not merely to repeat it in the approved vocabulary. When higher education loses viewpoint diversity, it loses one of the simplest checks on motivated reasoning. When universities lose institutional neutrality, they become political actors. When they lose due process, they become less trustworthy. When they lose free speech, they lose their error-correction mechanism. When they punish dissent, they teach everyone else to shut up and get in line.

Yes, some attacks on higher education are unfair. Some are opportunistic. Some are cynical. But we also have to acknowledge that universities did not lose public trust by accident. They squandered it through ideological litmus tests, administrative double standards, shout-downs, disinvitations, and a habit of treating dissent as contamination. When legislatures attempt to intervene on campus in ways that dictate outcomes and bypass real inquiry, it’s hard to tell how many administrators are upset at the intrusion into academic freedom — and how many just think that’s their job.

That’s what a loss of institutional trust looks like. And you do not rebuild trust by demanding applause. You do it by making your claims easier to test.

The academy needs viewpoint diversity, yes. But viewpoint diversity is only one piece of the larger repair job. We need stronger systems for protecting knowledge creation itself: replication, citation audits, adversarial collaboration, red teams, prediction ledgers, and AI tools designed to challenge consensus rather than flatter it.

Neuroscientist and clinical psychologist Heather Berlin and I have been calling this broader effort The Reality Test Project. The ambition is large: use new tools, including specially designed AI, to help test what humanity thinks it knows.

The alternative is to keep doing what human beings naturally do: mistake consensus for truth, status for expertise, moral confidence for evidence, and institutional prestige for reality. And then, because we just love taking flamethrowers to grease fires, training AI on all of that so our reality warps exponentially.

More on that soon.

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

The American Revolution was not inevitable. John Adams had to plead the case and faced fierce opposition from colleagues including John Dickinson. But the process by which the Founders debated and eventually decided to draft the Declaration of Independence is a perfect example of how productive discourse — even tense and sometimes scathing — sharpens arguments and refines ideas. 250 years later, we should be grateful those conversations were able to be had unfettered and uncensored.

Story of the week

• VICTORY! Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins $835,000 settlement after First Amendment lawsuit

And, in case you missed it, check out my NYT piece on the case from back in November: A Retired Police Officer Posted a Meme. It Earned Him 37 Days in Jail.

This week in ERI

• What Jonathan Haidt actually said at NYU — and what The Coddling of the American Mind actually argued by me

This week in

• Fearing controversy, schools cancel graduation speeches by

This is not a new problem. FIRE’s deplatforming database documents instances of campus censorship going back to 1998. Amazingly, 48% of all deplatforming efforts succeed, with 959 out of 2,000 recorded attempts resulting in a cancellation, disruption, or a similar outcome. Since 2014, the problem has exploded. In the 12 years since, our data shows that 67% of all recorded deplatforming attempts have taken place in this span of time. Commencement speakers make up about 19% of all campus disinvitation campaigns, targeting 382 speakers out of 2,000 total disinvitation efforts. Why does it keep happening?

• Which religions are the least tolerant of campus speakers? by

• Thomas Paine: American history’s winter soldier by

• How two Clemson professors fought a wave of censorship by

• Sticker shock: lawsuit claims Nevada student expelled for pro-ICE emblems by

This week in FIRE’s blog

• FIRE sues DHS for information about alleged database of ICE protester

“Americans deserve to know more about this database, starting with whether it exists,” said FIRE attorney . “The First Amendment prohibits the government from retaliating against peaceful protesters, including by putting their names and faces in a shadowy database.”

• A Marine takes the stage for free speech by Will Harris

• Rich Thau, veteran public opinion strategist, joins FIRE’s Advisory Council

FIRE in the press!

• A post after Charlie Kirk’s death never should have landed our client in jail (MSNOW) by Cary Davis

• MSU needs more transparency, not less dissent (The Detroit News) by

International free speech stories of the week

• Reform’s immigration TikTok reinstated after being deleted ‘in error’ (LBC) by Asher McShane

• Canada House of Commons Tracks Online Posts About MPs (Reclaim The Net) by Cindy Harper

• London police were out in force to deal with rival rallies and a soccer final (AP) by Pan Pylas

Live facial recognition will be used for the first time in a protest policing operation, with cameras set up in the north London neighborhood of Camden that is not on the route of the “Unite the Kingdom” march, but which is expected to be used by a lot of people attending the event.

‘Greg on the Run’

I really can’t overstate how excited I am about Replication Radar. If successful, it could provide proof of concept for my ambitious “Knowledge Crawler” idea to comb through the corpus of human knowledge in order to identify shoddy research and obscure gems.

TV Show of the Week

Daredevil, a.k.a. Matt Murdock, is Marvel’s blind-lawyer-turned-vigilante, originally created by Stan Lee and Bill Everett, with some early design input from Jack Kirby. He first appeared in Daredevil #1 in April 1964. As a boy, Matt was blinded by a radioactive substance while saving a man from an oncoming truck, but the accident also heightened his remaining senses to superhuman levels and gave him a kind of “radar sense.” By day, he is a defense attorney in Hell’s Kitchen. By night he becomes Daredevil, the Man Without Fear.

But it wasn’t a particularly popular comic book. Daredevil was nearly canceled more than once. In the 1970s it even rebranded itself Daredevil and the Black Widow in an effort to give the book a boost. (Yes it’s true, Hercules and Matt Murdock are the dominant man-whores of the Marvel universe).

But when Frank Miller took over the comic around 1980, Daredevil went from a marginal property to one of Marvel’s most important literary comics. Miller brought noir, Catholic guilt, urban decay, ninjas, Elektra, Bullseye, Stick, the Hand, and a genuinely tragic moral atmosphere to a character who had often been treated as a second-string Spider-Man.

And the amazing thing is that Daredevil kept attracting writers and artists who understood that Matt Murdock works best when he is being morally, spiritually, physically, and psychologically put through hell. Ann Nocenti and John Romita Jr.’s classic run pushed the book into stranger, more political, more psychologically intense territory, giving us stories about corruption, feminism, environmental damage, poverty, violence, and temptation without ever forgetting that it was still a superhero comic. Later, Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev brought the noir realism roaring back, putting Matt’s secret identity, legal career, friendships, enemies, and sanity into one big pressure cooker. Ed Brubaker, Mark Waid, Charles Soule, and Chip Zdarsky all found different ways to keep the depth and power of the character alive.

Amazingly, the Netflix version of Daredevil really caught that. The series ran for three seasons from 2015 to 2018, with Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock, Deborah Ann Woll as Karen Page, Elden Henson as Foggy Nelson, Rosario Dawson as Claire Temple, Vincent D’Onofrio as Wilson Fisk, Élodie Yung as Elektra, and Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle. I’d argue that those three seasons were masterpieces, particularly in how they expanded the legend of Elektra, made Karen and Foggy feel like real human beings rather than sidekick furniture, and captured Kingpin as a genuinely Shakespearean villain. But the biggest surprise for me was the Punisher. I had always genuinely disliked the character and found him deeply one-dimensional: a walking revenge fantasy with a skull on his chest. The Netflix series transformed him into one of my favorite Marvel characters, thanks in no small part to the pitch-perfect casting of Jon Bernthal, who gave Frank Castle grief, rage, tenderness, moral horror, and terrible charisma all at once.

So when Disney brought the character back for Disney+, I was, like a lot of fans, worried. There were hints early on that we might be getting “Daredevil Lite.” But even in the first season of Daredevil: Born Again, they mostly kept it grim, grounded, and morally serious from the opening episode.

The big question was what would happen in season two. Having just finished it, I was not the least bit disappointed. It keeps what was excellent about the comic and the original series, but with what looks like a much larger budget: more action, more color, more detail, and a bigger sense of New York as a living, corrupt, dangerous place.

I highly recommend Daredevil: Born Again season two. And if, God forbid, you haven’t seen the Netflix series from the very beginning, go back and study it. Hell, while you’re at it, buy yourself some trade paperbacks, start with Frank Miller’s first Daredevil work, and keep going.

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