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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In case you hadn’t heard, my Coddling of the American Mind co-author was invited to give a commencement speech at New York University last week, and it led to an uproar from students.

This was, in one sense, ordinary university life: students objected to a speaker, people argued about it, some booed during the speech, and others defended him. It didn’t lead to a sustained disruption of Jon’s remarks, so great. I’ve defended the right to protest on campus more than practically anybody in the United States, and this was well within the bounds of what you’d expect to see.

The more troubling part was why NYU’s student government leaders called on the university to disinvite Jon in the run-up to commencement. “Students are astonished by the university’s inability to leverage its vast network and unique connections to secure a speaker whose scholarship and global contributions more accurately reflect the values and diversity of its graduates,” their statement read.

Once again, these students are free to object, and I will defend their right to do so. But I can (and, I believe, should) criticize their reasoning. For one thing, a university is not a mirror. It is not supposed to show students an image of themselves with better lighting. At its best, it exposes them to people who know things they do not know, who see things they do not see, or who may even be wrong in useful ways. That’s the purpose of a university education: to cause reflection, not be a reflection. It is unsettling, though unsurprising, that this graduating class got through their years in higher ed without recognizing that.

And now that Jon has actually delivered his commencement address, we do not have to guess what terrible burden he imposed on these NYU graduates. His talk, published in full by The Atlantic under the title “Pay Attention,” turned out not to be a declaration of war on the graduating class. The editors even note that they reproduced the speech “so that readers may judge it for themselves.”

Jon opened by joking that NYU graduates had heard from “prime ministers, presidents, Supreme Court justices, movie stars, civil-rights crusaders, and Taylor Swift,” and must have been thinking, “Finally, they brought in a social psychologist!” He then told them to “treasure [their] attention,” because “what you pay attention to shapes what you care about. And what you care about shapes who you become.” He warned that phones, apps, social media, video games, dating apps, gambling, and even investing platforms are increasingly built to capture attention rather than earn it. He gave concrete advice from his NYU “Flourishing” course: turn off most notifications, add friction to social media, spend time with real people in the real world, and do hard things.

If this is a war on students, it is being waged with the deadly weapons of obvious life advice and mild dad energy.

Nonetheless, I spent more of my weekend than I care to admit arguing with students and their defenders, and I came away convinced that a lot of people badly misunderstand both Jon’s arguments and what we actually wrote in The Coddling of the American Mind.

So below, I’m going to paraphrase the main objections and answer them in listicle form, because sometimes civilization advances one numbered grievance at a time.

1. ‘The Coddling of the American Mind says modern students are spoiled little brats.’

No, it doesn’t.

In fact, as Jon and I have explained pretty explicitly — including in this video discussion of the book and documentary — I have never loved the title The Coddling of the American Mind. If I’d had my way, the title would have been Disempowered because that was always the point: not that students are spoiled brats, but that adults and institutions have been teaching them ideas that make them feel less capable, less resilient, and less in control of their own lives.

Jon and I also said in the book itself, should these critics choose to actually read it, that we were ambivalent about the word “coddling” because we did not want to imply that young people are pampered, spoiled, or lazy. In fact, we recognize that many students are under enormous academic pressure, face new forms of harassment and social competition online, and have uncertain economic prospects. Those are legitimate issues, and our point is that the current trends in academia and higher education don’t adequately prepare students to deal with them.

2. ‘You and Haidt called students naturally fragile snowflakes.’

Nope. The core argument was basically the opposite of this.

Borrowing from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of “antifragility,” Jon and I argued that human beings actually need challenge, stress, failure, and disagreement in order to grow. We are not china teacups. We are more like immune systems, muscles, or bones: deprived of stressors, we weaken. Taleb’s whole point was that some systems don’t merely survive stress; they require it in order to become stronger. Human beings are one of those systems.

The problem is not that students are fragile. The problem is that too many adults have been teaching them to think of themselves as fragile. That is a lousy thing to teach young people. And it is especially lousy to teach it at universities, which should be intellectual gyms rather than padded rooms.

3. ‘Haidt’s speech was going to scold and belittle the graduating class.’

If you think that, then people should read or watch the actual speech. What Jon actually did was emphasize how much agency these students actually have.

Jon told graduates to reclaim their attention. He warned them that their phones and apps are engineered to hijack their minds. He told them to spend more time in embodied reality, with friends, love, work, and difficult things.

That is good advice. Particularly in our distracted age.

If the message “your attention is yours, defend it” now counts as belittling, we have expanded the concept of harm beyond recognition or meaning.

4. ‘Students have every right to demand that he be disinvited.’

Correct. As I said above, students have every right to say Jon should not have been invited. They can boo (within reason), criticize, write op-eds, hold signs, walk out, or complain that NYU should have booked Taylor Swift instead. (I personally accept Taylor Swift as an exception to many rules because she is brilliant, but that is a separate essay…and probably a dangerous one.) FIRE has done more than any organization in the country over the past quarter century to defend precisely those rights.

However, to paraphrase Chris Rock, “You can drive a car with your feet if you want to. That doesn’t make it a good idea.”

It is not a great sign for an institution supposedly devoted to free inquiry and the marketplace of ideas when students believe the correct response to disagreement is shutting down or disinviting speakers. It is an even worse sign when they want speakers punished for things those speakers never actually said, or for arguments they imagine were made in books they clearly never bothered to read.

A lot of the outrage directed at Jon falls into exactly that category. Students confidently denounced arguments that are simply not in The Coddling of the American Mind. They treated caricatures of the book as if they were the book itself — another terrible sign that their four years at NYU failed to instill certain critical lessons (namely, that you should know what you’re talking about before you talk about it).

That should worry people. Curiosity is supposed to be one of the defining virtues of a university education. If students are not even interested enough to read the arguments they are condemning, something has gone wrong.

Thankfully, NYU didn’t cave to the pressure to disinvite Jon. If they had, or if students had successfully disrupted Jon’s remarks, it would have crossed the line from protected protest to mob censorship.

Preventing others from hearing what you personally find objectionable isn’t “more speech.” It’s the heckler’s veto, and it is, as Frederick Douglass once said, “a double wrong.”

You can object to a speaker. You do not get to decide that nobody else may hear him. Kudos to NYU for not caving to that pressure.

5. ‘Commencement speakers should reflect our values.’

This is one of those arguments that sounds reasonable for about four seconds.

Then you find yourself asking, Whose values?

The graduating class does not have one set of values. No large university does. Conservative students, religious students and, increasingly, Jewish students routinely sit through speakers, trainings, and institutional messaging that do not reflect their values. They are expected to deal with it because, well, that’s part and parcel of education.

But when the locally dominant campus ideology is not affirmed, suddenly the speaker “doesn’t reflect our values.”

That is the expectation of confirmation: the belief that an educational institution should echo your worldview rather than challenge it. I warned about this in Freedom From Speech years ago. In a proper academic environment, students would not merely tolerate speakers they disagree with; they would actively seek them out and relish the opportunity to engage with them.

You should want at least some speakers who make you think, “Wait, is that wrong — or am I?”

That is not oppression. That is learning.

6. ‘The Coddling of the American Mind is anti-DEI.’

No. What Jon and I criticized was not the idea that universities should be fair, welcoming, or open to people from every background. Those are good goals. What we criticized was a particular kind of identity politics that we thought was bad for students, bad for learning, and bad for coalition-building. Those are not the same thing, but defenders of the campus DEI bureaucracy often use this motte-and-bailey technique to avoid recognizing this.

In Coddling, Jon and I contrasted common-humanity identity politics with common-enemy identity politics. Common-humanity politics tries to expand the circle of concern. It says, in effect, We are different in important ways, but we are also human beings who can reason together, work together, and appeal to shared principles.

Common-enemy identity politics does almost the opposite. It sorts people into simplistic moral categories — oppressor and oppressed, good and bad, safe and dangerous — and then treats disagreement as evidence of corruption. That makes durable coalitions difficult or impossible to create or maintain. After all, why persuade someone if your theory already tells you they are morally contaminated? Why build bridges if your worldview rewards burning them down?

That is what we objected to. A campus can be welcoming without being intellectually suffocating. It can care about fairness without telling students they are breakable. It can oppose bigotry without teaching students that every awkward comment is aggression, or that every disagreement is an attack on their identity.

This distinction should not be difficult to recognize, but somehow it has become one of the hardest things in the world for people to grasp.

7. ‘Old guys shouldn’t lecture young people.’

Uh…that is pretty much exactly the job description of a commencement speaker.

Commencement speeches have traditionally been an opportunity for older, wiser people to try to pass along wisdom to younger people before everyone takes pictures and goes to Chili’s (Ok, maybe the Chili’s part was just me, but hey, I really liked it in undergrad because it was cheap). Sometimes the speeches are profound. Sometimes they are a fog machine of platitudes. But they are always older people trying to give some life advice to younger people. That’s kind of the point.

What are we supposed to do — have some high school kid come onstage to talk to college graduates?

Obviously, age doesn’t always equate to wisdom. Turn on cable news for three minutes. The point is that people who have studied, built, failed, suffered, governed, researched, or fought for something may know a thing or two that a graduating class does not yet know, and might find helpful or inspiring.

That possibility should be exciting, not offensive.

The actual lesson here: You have agency and you should use it

Jon told NYU graduates to pay attention. Pay attention to your mind. Pay attention to your friends. Pay attention to the real world. Pay attention to what your phone is doing to you. Pay attention to what kind of person you are becoming.

That is not an attack on students. It is a compliment. It assumes they are adults. It assumes they can choose. It assumes they are capable of doing hard things.

And that, ultimately, is what The Coddling of the American Mind was about, too. Not contempt for young people, but respect for their strength.

I’ll be blunt: Jon and I were right about a lot. We were right that these new attitudes students possessed when they started hitting campus around 2012 would be harmful to both academic freedom and free speech. We were right that teaching young people to see disagreement as danger would make them more anxious, more censorial, and less prepared for adult life. We were right that “always trust your feelings” is terrible advice. We were right that common-enemy politics would make campuses angrier, more brittle, and less capable of building real coalitions. We were right that a culture of safetyism would not stay confined to campus.

And, as and I showed in The Canceling of the American Mind, we were right to warn that these habits would spread outward into journalism, nonprofits, corporations, K–12 schools, medicine, law, and the arts.

If you think Coddling was just about college kids, read Canceling. And read ’s We Have Never Been Woke, too, because it makes a point many elite graduates badly need to hear: Much of what passes for radicalism in America’s prestige institutions is often just the culture, status competition, and moral vocabulary of the upper professional class.

The people who told you that you were too fragile to get through life were lying to you. Maybe they meant well. Maybe they thought they were being compassionate. But they were wrong. And at some point — hopefully before graduation, but if not, soon after — your life becomes your own.

It is no longer on them. It is on you.

You can keep proceeding according to the local norms of America’s elite finishing schools: avoid taboo books, adopt the approved opinions, speak in the approved phrases, and mistake social conformity for moral courage. Or you can take seriously the possibility that you are mistaken about some things, likely many things. You can read the books you were told not to read. You can face the arguments you have been avoiding. You can seek out the smartest people who disagree with you and ask the most adult question there is: What if I’m wrong?

Otherwise, you risk carrying the prejudices of America’s upper classes into adult life while congratulating yourself for being a rebel. That is just conformity with better branding.

So criticize Jon. Criticize me. Criticize Coddling. Criticize Canceling. Criticize We Have Never Been Woke. Criticize the criticism until everyone involved needs a nap.

But first, read them.

Then argue with what they actually say.

That would be a pretty good start.

If you’d like to read before commenting, order a copy of The Coddling of the American Mind.

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

I recently got a sneak preview of The Narcissist’s Playbook featuring actress Evan Rachel Wood, psychotherapist Dr. Christine Louis de Canonville, and diagnosed narcissist Professor Sam Vaknin. The film looks at true human evil in the form of malignant narcissism, including interviews with world-renowned experts and four self-aware malignant narcissists. Everyone should see it when it comes out (a general release date is TBD, but early backers will see it on May 30). It’s scarier than you think.

Stories of the week

• N.Y.U. Students Object to Speaker Who Calls Their Generation Coddled (NYT) by Jeremy W. Peters & Matthew Haag

On Thursday my friend & co-author gave the commencement talk at NYU. As I pointed out on X, if it weren’t so depressing it would be comically ironic that a number of students’ first instinct was to immediately prove the premise of The Coddling of the American Mind correct by demanding he be disinvited.

• I had the pleasure of joining host & FIRE EVP , COO , & Legal Director for a member webinar.

This week in

• How McCarthy scared America silent by

• Senate’s rush to regulate AI chatbots is bad for everybody by

Growing calls for a federal solution, including from the White House, to fix the fragmented landscape of state regulations reflect a clear political appetite for legislative action. And a single national standard has obvious appeal for an industry seeking consistency across jurisdictions. But consistency isn’t the same as constitutionality. If federal proposals like the GUARD Act replicate the speech restrictions found in state laws, they just hardwire those problems into federal law.

• Lawmakers see different threats to campus speech — but the same stakes by Michael Hurley

These points echo a long line of constitutional law, which leaves no room for the view that First Amendment protections should apply with less force on college campuses. Indeed, the Supreme Court warned in its seminal case on academic freedom that teachers and students must remain free to inquire, study, evaluate, and gain new maturity and understanding, or else “our civilization will stagnate and die.”

• Free Speech Future: Episode III – Cycles of Censorship: Emerging Technologies

This week in FIRE’s blog

• The Privacy Protection Act protects watchdogs. What if it’s ignored? by

International free speech stories of the week

• Protesters [in Australia] prepare legal challenge over ‘absurd and stupid’ anti-hate speech laws (SBS News)

• Met warns about hate speech at Unite the Kingdom and Palestine marches (The Guardian) by Chris Osuh

• Finnish Parliamentarian Convicted of “Insulting” a Group for 20-year-old Church Booklet to Appeal to European Court of Human Rights (ADF UK)

• Lee Seung-hwan awarded damages over abrupt concert cancellation in 2024 (Korea JoongAng Daily) by Cho Mun-Gyu

Lee’s concert had originally been scheduled to take place at the Gumi Culture and Arts Center on Dec. 25, 2024. His agency applied to rent the venue on July 31 that year and received approval.

However, five days before the concert, Mayor Kim demanded that Lee and the head of his agency, Dream Factory Club, sign a written pledge stating that they would not engage in political agitation or remarks that could cause misunderstanding.

Announcement of the week

After FIRE’s staff retreat this past week at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, I’ve unilaterally decided that we’ll be pivoting from defending free speech on land & in the air(waves) to the open seas with a new initiative to purchase a warship in order to fight the pernicious threat of marine censorship!

(But in all seriousness, we got to tour the USS Olympia—the oldest steel American warship still afloat—and I think I fell in love. It’s like a floating battle mansion!)

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Stories of the week

• Campus deplatforming attempts surpass 100 for the year and it’s only May 7 by

• My run-in with CBP at the Vancouver airport

This week in Expression

• How the Comey indictment could backfire on Republicans by

• The quiet push to control AI speech by

People who build and use AI tools do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of expression at the prompt window. That includes the right to speak without being pressured by the government to first seek approval or give them a look under the hood. What starts as “just a review” can quickly become pressure to change what tools the public is allowed to have and what information users are allowed to see. Informal oversight has a way of turning into coercion.

• Press freedom in Pakistan falls off a cliff by

FIRE in the press!

• Senate’s Rush To Regulate AI Chatbots Is Bad for Everybody (RealClear Politics) by

• Free speech emergency: What UCLA doesn’t want you to know (NYPost) by

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• American Counsel of Learned Societies v. National Endowment for the Humanities:

S.D.N.Y. enjoins termination of hundreds of NEH grants targeted for association with “diversity, equity and inclusion” and/or the Biden administration, calling it a “textbook example of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination”

In two consolidated cases, the federal court for the Southern District of New York granted challenges to what it called “the largest mass termination of previously awarded grants in the history” of NEH since its 1965 founding, involving “more than 1,400 grants, representing over $100 million … to scholars, writers, research institutions, and other humanities organizations,” under executive orders issued after the 2025 inauguration, including Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. In doing so, the court held that as a matter of law the terminations violated the First Amendment and equal protection under the Fifth Amendment (and were ultra vires because DOGE officials exercised decisive authority over grants without statutory authority to do so).

On the First Amendment foundation for its decision, the court explained that NEH grants fund private expression, not public speech, and that “while the government retains some discretion in administering grant programs, that … is bounded by the First Amendment.” So, it “may define programmatic objectives and allocate resources accordingly, but it may not deny or withdraw funding because it disagrees with the ideas expressed.” Accordingly: “Where, as here, the government funds a program that facilitates private expression, it may not act where the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction.”

And, the court continued, “DEI is, of course, a viewpoint,” because it “inherently conveys … that the exclusion of historically disadvantaged groups is undesirable.” Here, the record “establishes that the termination decisions were driven by an expressly ideological method of classification. There can be no genuine dispute about this point. Indeed, the Government has all but admitted as much.” That was especially apparent where the government in part used a ChatGPT prompt to examine whether grants “relate[d] at all to DEI,” which, the court noted, “reflects a purely ideological filter that has no other purpose than to identify disfavored viewpoints the Government wants to suppress.”

The court also held the terminations “likewise violated the First Amendment” to the extent they were “based on their perceived association with the Biden Administration.” Here, too, the government “may not leverage its power to award or deny subsidies on the basis of subjective criteria into a penalty on disfavored viewpoints,” including any “basis that infringes … constitutionally protected interests—especially … freedom of speech,” and ”[p]olitical association is one of those protected interests.” Insofar as “grants were treated as suspect because they were associated with the prior administration” and thus “presumed to not align with the Trump Administration,” the court held, that “is not a permissible funding criterion. It is discrimination based on perceived political association.”

Ultimately, the court held the terminations “reflect the same fundamental constitutional error” in that some “penalized grants because they were perceived to express or reflect disfavored viewpoints” while others did so “because they were perceived to be associated with a disfavored administration,” and “the First Amendment forbids both.” For those reasons, and those involving equal protection violations and/or DOGE action without statutory authority, the court declared the terminations unconstitutional, ultra vires, and without legal effect, and permanently enjoined them.

Update for Search of Real Property and Premises of Hannah Natanson: In this recently covered case, an E.D. Va. district judge rejected government objections and affirmed the magistrate order that rescinded authorization for the government to open, access, and review a Washington Post reporter’s seized laptops, mobile devices, and portable drive, to allow court to first conduct its own review, holding the seized materials include documents protected and/or privileged by the First Amendment, the Privacy Protection Act, and attorney-client privilege, the former two of which “mandate judicial review” rather than allowing review by a government filter team.

International free speech stories of the week

• Protecting Children or Restricting Speech? The CJEU’s Judgment on Hungary’s Anti-LGBTQ Law () by

Clip of the week

Anyone who knows me at all knows I love a good Q&A. And so I always enjoy getting the chance to join C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, particularly because they open the phone lines for viewers to call in. This time was no exception. Here’s me, breaking all the rules at, about not rolling your eyes on national TV., and check out the full interview here.

TV Show of the Month: The Expanse

There comes a time in every conversation I have with a sci-fi nerd when they ask me what I thought of The Expanse. And, until recently, I had to admit I’d never watched it.

Things go real cold in the room then, as my fellow nerd considers revoking my nerd card.

But that is the case no more. I have now watched the entire series from beginning to end, and I’m happy to report that it really is one of the best sci-fi shows of all time. And boy, does it get better from season to season, with the writing and characterization improving almost all the way to the end.

My only disappointment is that it’s clear they had to rush the last couple of episodes after Amazon decided the sixth season would be the show’s last. But this attempt to ground sci-fi in actual physics, political realism, and what might plausibly happen in our own solar system is a masterpiece.

And don’t worry if Miller annoys you. He annoys everyone. It all works out.

The Expanse originally ran from 2015 to 2022: the first three seasons aired on Syfy, which canceled it in 2018, before Amazon picked it up for three more seasons. It is based on the novels by James S. A. Corey, the pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. As of now, the series is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, with purchase options on Apple TV and Fandango at Home.

Fun fact: the fan campaign to save the show after Syfy canceled it was unusually intense, including more than 100,000 petition signatures and even a crowdfunded airplane banner urging Amazon to save the series. George R. R. Martin, Patton Oswalt, Wil Wheaton, and others backed the effort. And I still want three more seasons.

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Stories of the week

• They Went Hard Against Woke. And Then… Went Even Harder Against Trump () by

But should liberals avoid talking about these issues simply because it might give ammunition to the right? That doesn’t seem like a winning strategy. [Ken] White thinks that free speech advocates who oppose left-wing cancel culture spout such blatantly hypocritical “bullshit” that they turn multitudes of people off the free speech cause. But surely it’s much more off-putting to evade or sanitize the truth—evasions plenty of people are savvy enough to notice. Given today’s free-for-all media ecosystem, liberal and centrist silence about the abuses of the illiberal left is not going to sweep those problems under the rug (even if that were desirable); it will only boost right-wing media that will happily report these problems—and, sometimes, misreport them in the service of their own agenda.

• If “86” Is Illegal Speech, Nobody is Free (Persuasion) by FIRE Senior Editor & ERI Managing Editor & FIRE Director of Public Advocacy

To assume that “86” means “kill” or “assassinate” is, at best, uncharitable. There are obvious ways to “get rid of” a president without ending his life, like impeachment and removal from office. When the Chicago Sun-Times reported that NBA coach Jim Boylen was “eighty-sixed by the Bulls,” nobody thought it meant the Bulls’ front office had murdered him.

Even if they can somehow establish that “86” unambiguously means what they say it means, the prosecution still has their work cut out for them. Unless it can be proven that Comey himself seriously expressed an intent to kill the president, the phrase “86 47” would still be protected speech. The law is clear that merely wishing for someone’s death is and should be protected speech, as distasteful as it may be, absent more evidence proving intent to cause harm.

This week in ERI

• Kimmel and Comey: If it looks like an attempt to chill speech by Trump, it probably is by me

This week in Expression

• What do the most and least tolerant students say about self-censorship? by &

One thing that immediately jumped out was that across all three groups, emotional reasoning is more common than rational thinking. On today’s campuses, the divide over free speech isn’t just about who gets to speak but about whether students are thinking or feeling their way to that answer, and the data isn’t good.

• Licensed to speak? How NY’s AI bill gets it wrong by

• A lawsuit against a Black Lives Matter activist could chill all of our speech by

• Yale tries to claw back public trust by

• Lawmakers want to force Californians to take anti-hate speech training by and ERI Editor in Chief

This week on

Could it be?! A third week in a row with two offerings from the team that brings you FIRE’s most illustrious podcast.

• First up, FIRE staff react to the latest free speech news involving James Comey, Jimmy Kimmel, ABC & the FCC:

• Then, FIRE Executive Vice President & host sat down with Reporters Without Borders Executive Director to discuss contemporary challenges to a free press, RWB’s “Uncensored Library”— a virtual archive hosted within a server of the videogame Minecraft — and a lot more!

FIRE in the press!

• Chatbots are a problem. But this jumble won’t fix it (WaPo) by and FIRE Senior Fellow

• Jimmy Kimmel proves the White House can’t take a joke (UnHerd) by

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Davenport

Unanimous Supreme Court recognizes standing for nonprofit’s First Amendment associational freedom challenge to New Jersey subpoena for records identifying the organization’s donors

Reversing the Third Circuit’s affirmance of a New Jersey federal court order dismissing the case for lack of standing, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a nonprofit subpoenaed for donor records sufficiently suffers present, ongoing injury-in-fact to its associational rights to allow a First Amendment challenge and pursuit of preliminary injunctive relief from the subpoena.

New Jersey’s Attorney General ordered the production of records with (among other info) names, phone numbers, and addresses for those who donate to organization, which provides counseling and resources to pregnant women but not abortions or abortion referrals. The organization sued in federal court to challenge the subpoena, while the AG sued in state court, claiming it violated NJ law in not responding. The federal courts held the group lacked injury to state a claim, especially given the state proceedings, in which the court had yet to compel compliance with the subpoena.

No matter, the Supreme Court held. In a unanimous opinion, it credited the showing that the subpoena caused actual, ongoing injury to First Amendment rights by deterring donors from associating with First Choice. Injury in fact necessary for standing to bring a federal claim, the Court explained, “does not arise only when a defendant causes a tangible harm to a plaintiff, like a physical injury or monetary loss,” but also when he “burdens a plaintiff ‘s constitutional rights.” As the Court noted (citing FIRE’s amicus brief), “even if a subpoena targeting First Amendment activity is never enforced … it will give its targets a very good reason to clam up and give the target organization’s members and supporters a very good reason to abandon the cause.”

The fact that the subpoena is non-self-executing, and thus supposedly imposes no obligation on its own, but rather creates a legal duty only if a court enforces it, does not mean no injury, as “the value of a sword of Damocles is that it hangs—not that it drops.” So, the Court concluded (with citations omitted):

Put aside the possibility that, even with a protective order in place, donor information might wind up in the public domain due to a hack or leak. Put aside the risk of harassment and reprisals that could invite. And put aside that risks along those lines are “heightened in the 21st century,” where almost “anyone with … a computer” can access information once it migrates to the public domain.

**** An official demand for private donor information is enough to discourage reasonable individuals from associating with a group. It is enough to discourage groups from expressing dissident views.

“Worse,” the Court noted – citing again the FIRE Brief, in which the ACLU and ACLU of New Jersey joined – as “amici represent, officials ‘across the political spectrum’ have sometimes issued subpoenas and other investigatory demands in order to secure just these results.” The Court thus remanded the case to the lower federal courts to reinstate and conduct proceedings consistent with the high court’s opinion.

International free speech stories of the week

• When Hate Speech Law Becomes Political Speech Law: The Tale of Armenian Church and State () by Ashkhen Kazaryen

• We Should All Be Concerned About What’s Happening in India (NYT) by Arman Khan

• Greece Reportedly Wants to Curb Anonymity on Social Media Platforms (CNET) by Omar Gallaga

• Belarus frees journalist Andrzej Poczobut (CPJ)

Clip of the week

I grew up hearing that what made America special wasn’t ethnic unity or centralized power, but a commitment to pluralism, candor, and free speech.

As I explained at the ASU+GSV summit with Olivia Gross, those values are rarer than we think, and more fragile than we admit.

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I was supposed to be at the White House Correspondent’s Association Dinner last weekend. I had to bail because I was still recovering from getting sick while traveling for the umpteenth time. So FIRE’s Executive Vice President, the great , went in my stead.

Next thing I know, I get a news alert that made me scared I might’ve gotten Nico killed.

As we all know by now, a gunman tried to storm the event. A Secret Service officer was shot and saved by his vest. The president, the first lady, the vice president, and others had to be evacuated.

It was genuinely horrifying, but thankfully it looks like no one was seriously hurt and the shooter was apprehended. Nico was, of course, fine, but was close enough to smell the gunpowder in the air after the shooting. Also, no food went to waste. Nico was on the case early on, and those 2,600 steak and lobster dinners that never got served on Saturday were freeze-dried and donated.

Two days before the dinner, late night host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke during his monologue describing Melania as having “the glow of an expectant widow.” The first lady posted a response on X this Monday, saying Kimmel’s “hateful and violent rhetoric” is “corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America” and calling on ABC to “take a stand” over his “atrocious behavior.”

Trump, of course, followed up with his own post explicitly calling on ABC to fire Kimmel.

As FIRE Senior Writer & Editor and ERI Managing Editor put it in a piece for UnHerd Monday afternoon, déjà vu has never been less fun.

Anticipating precisely what would happen, I posted a response to the first lady on Monday morning. As I said there, Melania is of course entitled to her opinion. So is the president. So are the people who thought Kimmel’s joke was vile. But I wanted to reiterate that the White House may not pressure ABC to fire a comedian because of his jokes — which is exactly what it has done in the past, and would soon prove to be doing again. The way Midichlorians follow force sensitivity, the FCC announced a day later that it was looking into Disney’s broadcast licenses. What a coincidence!

This case, once again, gets us talking about jawboning. Essentially, this is when the government pesters and pressures private companies to censor speech that the First Amendment prevents them from censoring themselves. That’s a major threat to free speech for reasons that should be obvious. That’s why the Supreme Court punting in the Missouri v. Biden case (also known as Murthy v. Missouri) was such a disappointment — and why the Court’s unanimous decision that same term in National Rifle Association v. Vullo, finding a New York State agency head’s pressure on insurance companies to drop ties with the NRA because of the NRA’s gun rights advocacy flatly violated the First Amendment, was such a resounding victory.

Jawboning is something we complained about a lot during the Biden era, and have had even more reason to complain about it under Trump. The current administration just seems to do even more than Biden did — or at least it does so much more publicly than Biden ever would have even considered.

Why this administration no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt when they do something that looks like it’s trying to chill speech

I got pushback in response to my X post, basically saying what I also said — which is that Melania and even Trump himself have a right to voice their opinions. Yes, they do. It’s right there in my post. But they are ignoring the fact that when the President of the United States calls for a broadcaster to fire a comedian over political satire, and the FCC chairman starts talking about “the easy way or the hard way” — as he did over Kimmel’s jokes back in September — we have left the land of ordinary criticism.

The FCC is not just some guy named PatriotEagle1776 yelling in my replies and exercising their free speech. It is the federal agency that regulates broadcast licenses. It has considerable power, and its abuse of it is a serious problem for everyone’s free speech.

Others in my mentions announced that the First Amendment only says “Congress shall make no law,” apparently under the impression that the president, the FCC, and the rest of the executive branch operate in a magical Constitution-free zone.

Then came the whataboutism. Always the whataboutism. What about Biden? What about Obama? What about COVID? What about YouTube? What about Europe? What about Democrats? What about every annoying campus activist from 2015? What about things I’ve been criticizing in books, articles, speeches, lawsuits, and probably in conversations with unlucky Uber drivers for the last 25 years or more?

The problem for those accusing me and FIRE of not being there in previous cases is, of course, that we always were there for those previous cases. The only exception would be that it happened off campus before FIRE expanded its mission in 2022, which would have meant it was outside of our scope as an organization at the time. Still, we are and always have been committed to being principled, and we really do take on censorship and free speech violations from the left and right. I have the hate mail to prove it. I get it every damn day of the week lately. Search through the cases yourself and see.

But the thing that I found the strangest, or most disingenuous, or — to be charitable — the most naive was the idea that Melania’s post existed in a vacuum, and that it wasn’t clearly part of a larger course of action that had already gone underway as the replies to my post were still being written. People were acting as if it wasn’t painfully obvious at this point that the FCC would once again be going after Jimmy Kimmel, and probably some other critics while they’re at it, using a tragedy to justify going after their political enemies the same way they did after Charlie Kirk was killed.

This administration uses power against enemies. It uses lawsuits. It uses regulators. It uses funding threats. It uses access gatekeeping. It uses merger pressure. It uses investigations. It uses whatever lever is closest to hand — and if that lever breaks, it grabs another one, and then another, and then another, until it’s grasping at straws or seashells.

This was true in Trump’s first term. It is true now. Saying so does not require anyone to pretend the left has been wonderful on free speech. I have written entire books arguing the opposite. But “the other side is bad too” is not a constitutional argument. It is a coping mechanism.

During Trump’s first term, he repeatedly threatened hostile broadcasters with license consequences. In 2017, after NBC reported that he wanted a dramatic expansion of the nuclear arsenal, Trump publicly wondered when it would be “appropriate to challenge their License.” He later said network licenses “must be challenged” and, “if appropriate,” revoked.

In 2018, the White House revoked CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass after a hostile exchange with Trump. CNN sued, a federal judge ordered the administration to restore the pass, and the White House backed down.

In 2020, the Trump campaign filed defamation lawsuits against The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN over opinion pieces. These were lawsuits by the sitting president’s reelection campaign against major news organizations covering him. A president suing the press is not the same thing as your neighbor suing the HOA newsletter.

Trump’s Justice Department also secretly obtained phone records from reporters at The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN as part of leak investigations. That became public only after he left office, which is a useful reminder that abuses of power are often late to their own press conferences.

And now the pattern has resumed with a vengeance. The FCC pressure around Kimmel is not a bizarre one-off. It makes another episode in an ongoing constitutional tragedy. So does the pressure on ABC and Disney. So does the Paramount/CBS settlement in the shadow of merger approval. So do the renewed attacks on NPR and PBS. So does Kash Patel’s new $250 million lawsuit against The Atlantic, filed shortly before another one of his defamation suits was tossed.

The point is not that every one of these efforts succeeds in court. Almost all fail, and thank the First Amendment for that. The point is, as we have said many times, that the process is part of the punishment. Legal fees are a punishment. Regulatory uncertainty is punishment. Discovery is punishment. A delayed merger is punishment. A panicked boardroom is punishment. A newsroom wondering whether the next story is worth years of legal hassle is punishment.

That’s how jawboning works. That’s how the chilling effect works. It shows up as a demand letter, a licensing review, a regulator’s warning, a presidential post, an investigation, a lawsuit with a ridiculous number of zeroes, and a chorus of people insisting that anyone who objects must secretly hate free speech.

So yes, Melania Trump has free speech rights. Donald Trump has free speech rights. Jimmy Kimmel has free speech rights. Viewers who hated the joke have free speech rights. Viewers who laughed at it have free speech rights.

The constitutional concern begins when government power gets pointed at the speaker — and with this administration, it gets pointed at speakers a lot.

That is why the Kimmel episode is best considered in the larger context of this administration’s willingness to pursue its critics and enemies with everything it has. Trumpworld uses state power and legal intimidation against enemies, including enemies whose offense is speech. You can rely on it.

The Trump Administration’s (very) long list of jawboning and attempts to chill disfavored speech

Here’s the record. Let’s start with cases that have been dismissed.

• Trump v. New York Times (Tax Story) (filed 2021, dismissed 2023): Trump sued the Times over its Pulitzer-winning 2018 investigation into his finances and taxes — reporting that was later confirmed by his own civil fraud trial. Dismissed; Trump ordered to pay $392,638 in attorney fees. The judge noted that New York had changed its law shielding against abusive defamation suits in part because of Trump:

The revised anti-SLAPP law was specifically designed to apply to lawsuits like this one. In fact, among other reasons, plaintiff’s history of litigation — that some observers have described as abusive and frivolous  — inspired the expansion of the law.

• Patel v. CNN (affirmed January 2025): Now-FBI Director Kash Patel sued CNN over articles reporting he helped coerce Ukraine into investigating Biden — conduct described in a House impeachment inquiry report and the congressional testimony of Trump’s own NSC senior director for European affairs, Fiona Hill. Dismissed for failure to plead actual malice; affirmed by the Virginia Court of Appeals.

• Trump v. CNN (“Big Lie”) (filed 2022, closed March 2026): Trump sued CNN for $475 million over its use of the phrase “the Big Lie” to describe his false claims about the 2020 election, arguing the phrase falsely linked him to Adolf Hitler. After losing, a spokesman for Trump’s team said: “There is no doubt that Fake News CNN defamed President Trump and all of the tens of millions of Americans who have rightly stated that the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged and stolen.” Dismissed 2023; affirmed unanimously by the Eleventh Circuit in November 2025, by a panel including by two Trump appointees who, as part of the per curiam opinion, called the arguments “meritless” and “untenable”; the full court declined rehearing en banc in March 2026.

• Trump v. Woodward/Simon & Schuster (filed 2023, dismissed July 2025): Trump sued Bob Woodward to block the audio release of interviews he had given the journalist, claiming copyright in his own recorded words. Dismissed; the court found Trump had “not plausibly” established any copyright interest in his own statements.

• Trump v. Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones (filed July 2025, dismissed April 2026): Trump sued for $10 billion over the Journal’s reporting on a birthday letter bearing his name found in Jeffrey Epstein’s files. Dismissed for failure to plead actual malice; the judge found Trump “comes nowhere close” to the required standard. A spokesman for Trump’s legal team said they would “refile this powerhouse lawsuit… The President will continue to hold accountable those who traffic in Fake News to mislead the American People.” The deadline to refile was Tuesday.

• Patel v. Figliuzzi/MSNBC (filed June 2025, dismissed April 22, 2026): Patel sued an MSNBC analyst who joked on air that the FBI director spent more time at nightclubs than at FBI headquarters. Patel’s suit declared: “Since becoming Director of the FBI, Director Patel has not spent a single minute inside of a nightclub.” Dismissed as “rhetorical hyperbole” — in other words, the judge found a reasonable person would not have taken the joke as a statement of fact. Two days before the dismissal, Patel filed a new $250 million suit against The Atlantic (more below).

And now, let’s look at some of the threats that are still outstanding:

• Trump v. Pulitzer Prize Board (filed 2022, in discovery): Trump sued the Pulitzer Board after it commissioned two independent reviews of its Russia-reporting awards to the Times and Post, both of which confirmed the journalism was sound. Trump’s legal team says he “will see this powerhouse lawsuit through to a winning conclusion.” The Board has responded by demanding Trump’s tax returns, medical records, and full prescription history as part of discovery.

• TMTG v. Washington Post (initially filed 2023, active): Trump Media sued the Post over reporting on financial connections between a trust linked to a “porn-friendly bank” and Truth Social. Filed in state court, removed to federal court; dismissed in March 2024 for failure to plead actual malice, but with leave to amend. Refiled, then re-dismissed in December 2024, for, again not pleading actual malice. Active in 2026 discovery.

• Iran reporting demand letters (June 2025, no suit filed): After the The New York Times and CNN reported a DIA preliminary assessment contradicting Trump’s claim that U.S. military action had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, the administration sent formal demand letters to both newsrooms calling the reporting “unpatriotic.” Both outlets publicly rejected them. The Times’ lawyer said, “No retraction is needed. No apology will be forthcoming. We told the truth.” No suit filed; New York’s one-year statute of limitations expires next month. (Below is JD Vance’s expression after Trump says “totally obliterated.” Just an observation.)

• Trump v. New York Times ($15 billion) (filed September 2025, active): Trump’s most expansive media suit yet, targeting financial reporting, a book by Times reporters, and a story quoting former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s warning that Trump would govern like a dictator. The initial complaint is worth a look, because a Trump-appointed judge struck it and required a rewrite, calling the original “decidedly improper and impermissible” and saying a complaint is not the proper place for:

[T]he tedious and burdensome aggregation of prospective evidence, for the rehearsal of tendentious arguments, or for the protracted recitation and explanation of legal authority putatively supporting the pleader’s claim for relief. As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective — not a protected platform to rage against an adversary. A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner.

The refiled version, capped at 40 pages, is now active.

• Trump v. BBC ($10 billion) (filed December 2025, trial date February 2027): Trump sued the BBC over a Panorama documentary that edited his January 6 speech in a way he called defamatory. The BBC says it will fight. An FCC probe into the same edit is running simultaneously (and we’ll talk more about the FCC soon).

• Trump v. Trevor Noah (threatened February 2026, no suit filed): Trevor Noah made a joke at the Grammy awards: “Song of the Year. That is a Grammy that every artist wants almost as much as Trump wants Greenland, which makes sense because Epstein’s island is gone, he needs a new one to hang out with Bill Clinton.”

Trump posted on Truth Social promising to sue him “for plenty$.” No suit filed, yet.

• Patel v. The Atlantic ($250 million) (filed April 20, 2026): Patel sued over a story reporting that he had “alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences,” citing more than two dozen sources. Before publication, Patel warned the magazine (quoted in the story itself): “I’ll see you in court — bring your checkbook.” After it published, he said, “I’ve never been intoxicated on the job, and that is why we filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit.” The Atlantic’s response: “We will vigorously defend The Atlantic and our journalists against this meritless lawsuit.”
  
  Patel’s complaint, filed April 20, mentions his lawsuit against Figliuzzi, noting that The Atlantic was told their reporting “echoed a similar fabrication previously aired by MSNBC’s Frank Figliuzzi on Morning Joe… yet Defendants published it anyway.” On April 22, the lawsuit against Figliuzzi was dismissed, calling the former FBI official’s statements “rhetorical hyperbole.”
  
  The Atlantic’s story begins with the anecdote that when Patel couldn’t log on to an internal computer system, he called aides and friends to tell them he’d been “locked out,” with two of the friends characterizing this as a “freak out.” The complaint characterizes the incident as a “routine technical problem,” which essentially confirms the event while challenging the characterization.
  
  The Atlantic also states the story was sourced with two dozen people over months. Patel counters, arguing that the two hours the FBI was given an opportunity to comment was unreasonable, given the breadth of the story. But under the Supreme Court’s longstanding precedent, that wouldn’t matter unless The Atlantic’s reason for the short response window was that it entertained serious doubts about the story. That there were two dozen sources and that it echoed criticism from another lawsuit would tend to undermine the possibility of that, absent some evidence of radical abdication of journalistic standards.

• Melania Trump and Jimmy Kimmel (current): The administration is applying regulatory and social media pressure over a joke where Kimmel said Melania had “the glow of an expectant widow. ” Kimmel later described the joke as highlighting the couple’s age difference. On Tuesday, FCC chairman Carr announced a review of ABC’s broadcast licenses; while not directly tied to the Kimmel comments, last week, Carr said on a podcast that the FCC can “accelerate” when licenses are reviewed if there are concerns with how a network operates.

…And then there’s the FCC.

Legal threats operate on a timeline of years, but the FCC can move in days. FIRE has written a great deal about the FCC’s unconstitutional jawboning before, but let’s review the highlights.

Since taking the chairmanship in January 2025, Brendan Carr has launched formal investigations of nearly every major broadcast network and several of their flagship shows.

• NBC - Equal Time/SNL: Triggered directly by the Harris SNL cameo on November 2, 2024. Carr complained the same night it aired, before he was even chairman, saying, “This is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule.” (And as FIRE’s own Bob-Corn Revere explained…no, it isn’t.) When he became chair in January 2025, he reinstated a formal complaint against NBC over the same appearance, alongside simultaneous complaints against ABC and CBS over separate Trump-related content grievances.

In February 2025, a few weeks after Carr reopened the complaint, the FCC opened a probe into NBC/Comcast’s DEI practices.

• CBS - 60 Minutes/Harris Interview: Triggered by CBS’s editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris before the 2024 election — the same interview Trump was simultaneously suing CBS over in a $20 billion defamation suit (which, once again, we’ll discuss later). The prior FCC chair had dismissed the complaint, saying that the agency would reject claims that “seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment.” Carr reinstated the complaint in January 2025, the same week as the ABC debate complaint.

• ABC - Debate Moderation (reinstated January 2025): Another complaint revived by Carr was related to Trump’s complaint that ABC’s moderation of the September 10, 2024 presidential debate with Joe Biden was skewed in Biden’s favor. A few weeks after reviving this complaint, Carr opened a facially neutral but curiously timed inquiry into ABC/Disney’s DEI practices.

• Jimmy Kimmel/Charlie Kirk (September 2025): Triggered directly and explicitly by Kimmel’s monologue about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Carr appeared on Benny Johnson’s show the same day to deliver the “easy way or hard way” ultimatum. Disney suspended Kimmel within days.

• The View (September 2025–February 2026): Carr began questioning The View’s news-exemption status in September 2025, the same month as the Kimmel episode — the show had long been a target of conservative criticism for its commentary about Trump. He opened a formal equal-time investigation in February 2026 after the show hosted a Democratic Senate candidate, with the effect (whether intended or not) of causing CBS lawyers to cancel at least one Late Show booking out of equal-time caution.

• Seth Meyers (November 2025): No formal inquiry — Carr reposted Trump’s call to fire Meyers from his official account after Meyers aired critical Trump commentary. No regulatory action followed. Trump’s criticism followed the day after Meyers criticized Trump’s position on launch assist systems on aircraft carriers.

• CNN (April 2026): Carr echoed Trump’s criticism of CNN’s reporting on the Iran ceasefire — even though CNN is a cable network outside FCC jurisdiction. Carr wrote: “Fake news is bad enough for the country, but pushing out a hoax headline in such a sensitive national security moment as this requires accountability… Time for a change at CNN.”

• ABC/Kimmel/Melania (April 2026): The early license renewal order issued Tuesday nominally stems from the DEI investigation opened in March 2025. The FCC says the timing is unrelated to Kimmel. The order came a day after Trump and Melania publicly demanded Kimmel be fired.

What remains after you remove the pending or defeated claims is one win, still being contested, and seven settlements. The win involves a Nevada blogger who called Patel a Kremlin asset who helped plan January 6. The blogger didn’t show up to defend the case and Patel got a default judgment. Since then, the blogger has shown up, and has moved to set aside the judgment on personal jurisdiction grounds. That motion is still being briefed.

Of the seven settlements, two involved Melania. The First Lady sued the Daily Mail in the U.S. and U.K. after it published the false claim that she had worked as an escort. The Daily Mail issued a retraction and paid roughly $3 million. The underlying claim was false, the paper acknowledged it, and no regulatory leverage was required to produce the outcome. A separate suit against a Maryland blogger over the same false claim settled in her favor as well.

Then there are the five settlements with companies that often get counted as wins:

• ABC ($15 million), after George Stephanopoulos said that Trump had been found liable for rape in the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit, which was not true (he was found liable for sexual abuse);

• CBS ($16 million), rooted in what Trump claimed was deceptive editing of a Kamala Harris interview; and

• The three social media companies sued for deplatforming Trump after the January 6 insurrection — X (about $10 million), Meta ($25 million), and YouTube ($24.5 million).

Note, however, that four of these five had regulatory exposure. ABC settled while Disney needed FCC approvals. CBS settled while Paramount was waiting on its Skydance merger. Meta and Google faced antitrust inquiries, since resolved. Of the deplatforming defendants, X seemed to have the least government pressure, and paid the least, even though, arguably, it’s the deplatforming that’s the best known.

The record is clear: The Trump Administration likes to punish its enemies for clearly protected speech

If you’re exhausted by that pretty exhaustive list, you should be. I sure am. We at FIRE all are. Look, yesterday the Justice Department indicted James Comey because they believe he Instagrammed a threatening picture of seashells, and I’m too tired to think of a way to make that sound less insane. It sounds like the FBI was social media stalking its ex (director). Why? Were they worried he was running a younger, hotter agency?

The fact is that this administration has obliterated any benefit of the doubt that they may not intend to punish their opponent for their speech. At this point, there is no universe where Trump or any of his people can publicly call for the firing of a late night host where I’m not going to brace for another First Amendment fiasco. I knew it when I posted what I did on X in response to Melania this Monday, and it took less than 24 hours for my concerns to be vindicated.

Thanks to ERI Editor in Chief , ERI Managing Editor , FIRE Senior Attorney , FIRE Operations and Strategy Lead Carrie Robison, and FIRE Legal Fellow for contributing research to this piece!

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Another Greg on the Run, this time from the lovely streets of Boston!

Stories of the week

• Greg Lukianoff On Free Speech Fights with

The Weekly Dish

Greg Lukianoff On Free Speech Fights

Greg is a lawyer, journalist, and author. He’s also the president of FIRE — the best free-speech group out there. His books include The Coddling of the American Mind (written with Jonathan Haidt), The Canceling of the American Mind (written with Rikki Schlott), and…

Listen now

a month ago · Andrew Sullivan

• FIRE statement on Kash Patel’s $250M defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic

The Trump administration has a record of punishing critics, and its officials are no strangers to filing lawsuits meant to silence dissent by driving up the cost of speaking. Today’s filing from FBI Director Kash Patel has all the markings of that playbook.

The First Amendment sets a high bar on defamation cases against public figures. In order to win, Patel must prove not only that The Atlantic published false information, but that the reporter knew it was false or had serious doubts about it, and published it anyway. That high standard is important so that all of us — reporters and citizens alike — can hold our government accountable.

This week in ERI

• How institutional review boards threaten groundbreaking research in higher ed by &

This week in Expression

• The critics are wrong about Tennessee’s Charlie Kirk Act. Here’s why by

This week on

Truly an embarrassment of riches with a one-two punch for the second week in a row:

• First up, we’ve got a FIRE monthly webinar (brought to you by host & FIRE EVP & host , Special Counsel for Campus Advocacy , Director of Public Advocacy , and Senior Attorney Colin McDonnel) on topics ranging from the recent controversy involving reporting by The Atlantic on FBI Director Kash Patel’s alleged proclivity for getting pie-eyed, the proliferations of so-called “Charlie Kirk Act” legislation addressing free speech in higher ed, Tik Tok & social media, FIRE’s upcoming Soapbox conference, and more!

So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast

FIRE Monthly Member Webinar — April 2026

Timestamps…

Listen now

a month ago · 2 likes · Nico Perrino

• And next, Nico sat down with Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director Cindy Cohn to discuss free speech (and its limitations) online.

This week in FIRE’s blog

• Victory! UNC Chapel Hill backs away from comedy probe, reaffirms commitment to free speech

On April 16, the university updated its original statement with this language:

Carolina is committed to upholding the First Amendment rights of our students and student groups to engage in free expression. This is true even when we believe those instances of expression may be offensive to members of our campus community . . .

For the record, the University is not investigating any student or student group for the articles that appeared in the April 1, 2026 edition of The Daily Tar Heel or for the recent Hill After Hours video. Our April 6, 2026 statement was issued out of concern for members of our community, many of whom were clearly distressed. That statement was in no way intended to chill free speech on our campus, and we retract those portions of our message that may have suggested our students and student groups were engaged in unlawful conduct or conduct that could subject them to discipline.

• University of North Texas cancels art show — then power-washes protests by William Harris

• California lawmakers threaten free speech regarding immigration groups by

• DOJ investigation into University of Washington over off-campus bake sale is a recipe for trouble

FIRE in the press!

• Where Protest Ends and Censorship Begins (Chronicle of Higher Education) by

Indeed, FIRE has always defended the right of students and faculty to criticize speakers and protest peacefully. We even stand ready to protect the rights of those who call for censorship, though we flatly disagree with their aim. The more troubling question is whether a campus committed to free inquiry should treat organized efforts to silence speech as a healthy norm. If one believes colleges are places where ideas should be tested and refined through argument, it is difficult to endorse a campus culture in which some participants actively work to prevent ideas from being aired in the first place.

• Never a good reason to dilute right to free speech (Otago Daily Times) by

As countries from Australia to France to Spain to the US jump on the trend of age verification on the internet, the risk that the global internet will be the greatest victim of the free speech recession rises exponentially.

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

Just two quickies this week:

Las Vegas Review-Journal, Inc. v. Eighth Judicial District Court in and for County of Clark: The Supreme Court of Nevada memorialized its late-January emergency order that vacated – as a manifest abuse of discretion imposing an unconstitutional prior restraint, and as a violation of court access rights – a district court’s order and directions in a high-profile criminal case that restricted media from publishing the identity of an alleged victim, even though it had been repeatedly disclosed in public filings and open court, ancillary to which the court threatened to hold in contempt anyone who published it, and ejected several Las Vegas Review-Journal reporters from the courtroom while the alleged victim testified, because they refused to acquiesce to the court’s order.

NetChoice v. Griffin: Yet another state restriction on minors’ access to social media gets preliminarily enjoined, this one in the federal district court in Western Arkansas, which enjoins the state’s new age-verification/parental-consent law that also lowers the triggering age from 18 to 16 years old, prohibits “addictive” practices, prescribes default settings for minors (including for hours-of-use and privacy), and requires platforms to create an online dashboard for parental supervision, with the court holding NetChoice is likely to succeed on its vagueness challenge to the addictive practices provision, on its compelled-speech challenge to the dashboard provision, and on its First Amendment challenges to the other provisions, even under intermediate scrutiny.

International free speech stories of the week

• Free speech complaints system to come into force at universities (BBC) by Branwen Jeffreys

• Retired Pastor Faces Trial Under U.K. Speech Laws for Preaching John 3:16 Near Hospital (Reason) by Reem Ibrahim

• Journalist Mehmet Yetim arrested in Turkey for ‘spreading disinformation’ (CPJ)

• More than 20 arrested over Queensland’s controversial ‘from the river to the sea’ laws during weekend of protests (The Guardian) by Joe Hinchliffe

• Canada: Court to decide if public universities must uphold freedom of expression and be liable for Charter infringements (Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms)

  On June 4, 2024, the Court determined that provincial universities are not government entities and, when delivering post-secondary education, are not delivering a government program. And yet, the Province of British Columbia allotted nearly $7 billion in funding to provincial universities in its 2024 budget, describing provincial universities as “service delivery agents for the provision of services on behalf of the government.”

‘Greg on the Run’ of the week

I recorded this last week, but given the violence at the White House correspondence dinner it seems extra relevant today. I am once again tapping the sign that WORDS ARE NOT VIOLENCE:

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Last month, the Academic Freedom Alliance issued guidance highlighting the threat that Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) pose to the freedom to conduct research at colleges and universities.

If you’re outside academia, you may not have even heard of IRBs (sometimes called Human Subjects Committees). But they wield consequential power over what research is pursued in our truth-seeking institutions, and as a result the knowledge the wider public gets to have and benefit from. Through overreach and mission creep, the arbitrary and often viewpoint-discriminatory processes employed by IRBs can too easily be used to suppress unpopular research, preventing consequential and potentially groundbreaking scientific endeavors from getting off the ground.

What is an IRB, and why do they exist?

An IRB is a committee at a college or university that reviews and approves any kind of research involving human subjects. The idea is straightforward: the IRB wants to make sure that nobody is harmed and that participants know what they’re signing up for when participating in a study.

If this sounds reasonable, that’s because it is. In fact, IRBs were established by federal directives in the U.S. after major ethical abuses in research. One of the most infamous was the untreated syphilis study at Tuskegee between 1932 and 1972, in which the U.S. government studied the effects of syphilis on black men for decades without treating them — or even telling them what disease they had.

In 1979, the federal government issued the Belmont Report, which laid out three core principles for ethical research:

1. Respect for persons: People must give informed consent.

2. Beneficence: The benefits of research must be weighed against the risks.

3. Justice: The burdens and benefits of research should be shared fairly.

These reforms also drew on earlier research ethics principles reflected in the Nuremberg Code, which were written in the aftermath of the Holocaust and in response to the medical atrocities committed by Nazi doctors.

IRBs, then, became an oversight mechanism for enforcing these principles at the local institutional level. Today, any institution conducting federally regulated human subjects research is required to have an IRB, and many other institutions voluntarily maintain similar review bodies.

These safeguards serve a vital purpose. No one wants a return to the days when researchers could experiment on people without their knowledge or consent, or inflict lasting harm on participants just to attain some desired research data.

So, what went wrong?

Why IRBs have become a problem

Like many well-intentioned oversight mechanisms, over time a significant number of IRBs have become object lessons in scope creep and unchecked authority.

What started as a system for protecting people from genuine physical and psychological harm has, at many institutions, ballooned into a bureaucratic apparatus that can delay, distort, or even derail research — sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with participant safety.

For example, many IRBs now have authority over research that poses no meaningful risk to participants. Simple surveys, or in some cases even the analysis of public records, routinely face scrutiny similar to that received by far riskier research. Aspects of studies that wouldn’t have warranted a second look a decade ago are now subject to intense review at our major institutions. In effect, bureaucratic hurdles are slowing or preventing research that has no meaningful risk of harm.

This has led some to argue that IRBs “subject researchers to petty tyranny,” and others to claim that they “have become nationwide instruments for implementing censorship” because of their ability to operate as bureaucratic gatekeepers: IRBs have the power to permit research that meets their satisfaction, and suppress data and prohibit publication for research that doesn’t. This is particularly true on hot-button, controversial issues.

Funnily enough, the expanding scope of IRBs over time may in part be explainable by more ethical research being conducted at colleges and universities.

In one of several studies, psychology professor David Levari and his colleagues asked participants to play the role of an IRB reviewer. Participants read a series of research proposals and then decided whether each should be approved or rejected. With the obvious caveat that these clearly weren’t trained IRB reviewers, Levari found that as the prevalence of genuinely unethical research proposals decreased over time, reviewers did not start to rate fewer proposals as unethical. Rather, they started rejecting ethically ambiguous proposals that they would have approved earlier on. In other words, even as research practices improve, IRBs may keep finding problems by unconsciously lowering the bar for what counts as problematic.

People wielding hammers will always find more nails.

Needlessly expanding scope isn’t the only problem, however. IRBs can also be weaponized to suppress or stymie research on unpopular or hotly debated topics. As former IRB chairs Jessica Hehman and Catherine Salmon recount, there are many well-documented cases where IRB review processes have been used to thwart research for ideological reasons — or to simply protect an institution’s brand.

Consider the case of Elizabeth Loftus and Melvin Guyer. In the late 1990s, at the peak of the “Memory Wars” — the sudden popularity and then debate over the eventually-discredited practice of recovered memory therapy — Loftus and Guyer embarked on a pivotal investigation into a Jane Doe case they believed overstated proof of recovered traumatic memory. In turn, their articles and investigation provoked prolonged institutional retaliation.

A central actor in the retaliation, it turned out, was the University of Michigan IRB, whose chair drafted a confidential memo that was leveraged to target both Loftus and Guyar. Both researchers were eventually cleared, but in the three years of investigation they — and in particular, Loftus — were subjected to the seizure of research materials, lengthy misconduct investigations, and threats of professional sanction. The shadow of these events still lingers decades later.

IRBs in some cases also appear to look out for themselves and their institutions more than those they are actually charged with protecting. In studies that have surveyed the researchers themselves — federally-funded principle investigators in one, criminology researchers in others — about their views of IRBs, many reported perceiving that IRBs are more concerned about protecting themselves or the university from liability than actually protecting human subjects.

The problem isn’t altogether new either. Back in 1985, psychology professor Stephen Ceci and colleagues found tentative evidence that IRBs were more likely to block research on politically sensitive topics than similar research on less controversial topics. They argued that some IRBs were reacting not just to participant risk, but also to worries about what the research might imply politically or socially.

And that’s where the academic freedom issues begin: IRBs began drifting beyond protecting participants and toward policing ideas.

FIRE and the AFA’s proposed solutions to IRB overreach

FIRE researchers have also seen or personally experienced IRB overreach firsthand.

In one case, there was an almost year-long delay by an IRB for a project looking at public records. We have also seen delays or punitive audits of benign survey research which involved asking faculty about their views on free speech and related topics.

FIRE researchers have also been on the receiving end of legal threats from faculty, as well as frivolous ethics complaints submitted by faculty to their IRBs. Just to give you a sense of how far IRB overreach can extend, these complaints were filed during the data collection phase, before anything was even analyzed. The goal was to suppress research — specifically, research questions — that these faculty members disagreed with, before any conclusions or findings could be reported.

If these patterns sound familiar, they should. IRB overreach is an integral part of what Greg and his Canceling of the American Mind co-author Rikki Schlott have referred to as the Conformity Gauntlet: the long series of ideological hurdles that independent-minded academics face at every stage of their careers, from graduate school admissions to tenure review. Central players in the Conformity Gauntlet, of course, are DEI statements, bias response teams, and secret disciplinary hearings. As we have seen, IRBs, too, can be captured by ideology and used as a checkpoint where nonconformist research or researchers can be pressured or silenced. No single hurdle is insurmountable, but when combined these barriers powerfully incentivize conformity and disincentivize open and fearless inquiry — the very thing universities should exist to protect.

FIRE has previously endorsed IRB reforms aimed at protecting academic freedom by guarding against this type of overreach. For example, when we discussed potential ways the National Institutes of Health could protect academic freedom through its grant agreements, we wrote:

NIH could help prevent the abuse of Institutional Review Boards. When IRB review is appropriate for an NIH-funded project, NIH could require that review be limited to the standards laid out in the gold-standard Belmont Report. Additionally, it could create a reporting system for abuse of IRB processes to suppress, or delay beyond reasonable timeframes, ethical research, or violate academic freedom.

The AFA’s new guidance goes further than this, endorsing ten reforms from a set of principles called the Mudd Code. Many of these proposals are similar to what FIRE has recommended in the past, and include things like transparency requirements, which would make it easier to identify if viewpoint discrimination had taken place; clarity on risk thresholds; clarification that IRB approval is not necessary for the re-evaluation of existing science; and the addition of a science advocate to the composition of IRBs themselves.

These reforms are aimed at preserving the important role of ensuring safe and ethical research practices, while also guarding against the kind of ideological and bureaucratic overreach that can too easily be used to suppress unpopular research.

While some of the AFA and Mudd Code recommendations fall outside FIRE’s narrow scope as a free-speech watchdog, we applaud them for bringing light to the threat that IRBs can pose to academic freedom. We also commend them for proposing concrete, principled reforms to address it.

Our institutions of higher education are places where difficult, groundbreaking, and important research should be done. That requires asking questions and dealing with subjects that might be uncomfortable and controversial. It also means grappling with results that may be politically or ideologically inconvenient. The truth remains true regardless of our concerns, and if we fail to discover it we will be compromising much more than we think.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Why does free speech have a “branding problem”?

Once an institution becomes one-sided, it stops needing free speech and starts seeing it as a threat. When people feel like they’re the majority, the temptation is to control speech instead of defend it.

It’s a slow-motion train wreck.

I discussed all of this and more with Olivia Gross at the ASU+GSV Summit:

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Story of the week

• Yale Report Finds Colleges Deserve Blame for Higher Education’s Problems (NYT) by Alan Blinder

The committee offered dozens of recommendations, like expanding financial aid, reducing admissions preferences, zealously protecting free speech and adjusting grading policies. People in academia, the committee said, “must be willing to admit where we have been wrong and where we might improve, even as we defend what is essential about higher education and its academic mission.”

This week in ERI

• AI, free speech, and America’s real advantage over China by new FIRE Senior Fellow & me

This week in Expression

• Free Speech Future: Episode II – Regulating AI: Who decides?

• Gen Z is 10 times more accepting of violence against speakers than Boomers by

• Texas Tech censors sex and gender courses by

Forget walking on eggshells. Faculty now need to walk across the verbal equivalent of broken glass if they dare include material that could conceivably violate these rules. If a student asks a question that mentions sex or gender? Be sure not to “assess” the question!

• You don’t need to live in China to experience China’s censorship by

• French bill would criminalize ‘from the river to the sea’ by & Zoe Armbruster

• How silencing medical debates puts patients at risk by Allison Riddoch

This week in FIRE’s blog

• Adam Thierer joins FIRE as Senior Fellow

FIRE in the press!

• In Poisoned Ivies, Stefanik Sees Censorship as a Cure for ‘Anti-Americanism’ (Reason) by

• Fact Checking Without Facts (Broadband Breakfast) by Bob Corn-Revere

• An Open Letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr (Checks & Balances) by Bob Corn-Revere

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Rosado v. Bondi

Illinois federal court grants preliminary injunction motion challenging DOJ and DHS jawboning of online services into removing the ICE Sightings Facebook group and the Eyes Up video app, each of which platformed posts about ICE based on publicly available information

Holding there is “no dispute that Plaintiffs allege a First Amendment violation,” the U.S. District Court in Chicago granted the preliminary injunction motion of two social media platforms that allowed users to share public information about U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement activity.

Plaintiff Rosado created the ICE Sightings–Chicagoland Facebook group, and plaintiff Kreisau Group created the “Eyes Up” smartphone app in 2025—each for sharing videos and information about ICE activity—and received, respectively, reassurance from Facebook that individual participant posts would not affect the group’s status, and favorable review from Apple allowing entry into its App Store. But in October 2025, then-Attorney General Bondi and then-Homeland Security Secretary Noem boasted about federal outreach to Facebook and Apple, which was followed by the services removing user platforms that allowed sharing information on ICE-related activity.

The court first confirmed plaintiffs’ standing to challenge the federal pressure against the online services. It held the First Amendment right to record police performing duties in public is “beyond debate” and that collection and publishing of third-party content is itself expressive and protected, so interference with those activities constitutes legal injury. And it found the plaintiffs showed those injuries are likely traceable to government-coerced enforcement, given Facebook and Apple had earlier determined plaintiffs’ content met their requirements, but changed position and removed it only after defendants contacted them, as confirmed by defendants taking credit in public statements. And the court could redress those injuries because the defendants’ actions can be reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action against Facebook and Apple, and the coercion continues to suppress the still-disabled Chicagoland Facebook group and still-unavailable Eyes Up app, such that court intervention “will allow Facebook and Apple to reach their own decisions regarding Plaintiff’s speech rather than be pressured by Defendants.”

The court was then able to succinctly conclude that preliminary injunctive relief lies because plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claims. It explained that the First Amendment bars public officials from trying to coerce private parties into punishing or suppressing views the government disfavors—yet defendants contacted Facebook and Apple and demanded, rather than requested, that they censor plaintiffs’ speech, while intimating the service providers may face prosecution if they did not comply. As the loss of First Amendment rights for even minimal periods is irreparable harm, and injunctions protecting those rights are always in the public interest, a preliminary injunction order will follow. FIRE is litigating the case.

International free speech stories of the week

• Orbán’s War on Free Speech: The Receipts (The Bedrock Principle) by FIRE Senior Fellow

Being in favor of stronger national sovereignty, against EU membership, and in favor of traditional values is a perfectly valid political position. But those who want to advance such policies should not pretend that in pursuing these ends, Orbán was a champion of free speech and open democracy.

Americans who rightly hail the First Amendment and point to arrests in the UK and Germany as vindication of US free speech exceptionalism should not be taken seriously if they simultaneously insist that Orbán was fighting for freedom.

• EU age verification app ready as Europe moves to curb children’s social media access (Reuters) by Gianluca Lo Nostro

“We are moving ahead with full speed and determination ⁠on the enforcement of our European rules. We are holding accountable those online platforms that do not protect our kids enough,” von der Leyen said at a press conference in Brussels.

The app, which will be compatible with both mobile devices and computers, will require users to upload their passport or ID card to confirm their age anonymously, she said.

• ‘Ban her’: Conservative MP reportedly calls for musician DJ Haram to be barred from UK (EuroNews) by David Mouriquand

• Kanye West postpones Marseille concert as France considers blocking him from performing (The Guardian) by Sian Cain

• MP demands death penalty for insulting Prophet (PBUH) (Dhaka Tribune)

Music video of the week

I’m a huge fan of OK Go, so a “music video of the week” from them is long overdue!

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Cameron Berg, founder and director of the AI cognition nonprofit Reciprocal Research, published a smart essay in The Wall Street Journal yesterday called “AI Is Bound to Subvert Communism.” In it, Berg gets at something many Americans still seem reluctant to admit: China wants world-class AI, but it also wants to control what people can say, know, and ask — and those goals do not sit comfortably together.

Berg’s point is that advanced AI systems are hard to contain inside a regime built on censorship, ideological discipline, and fear of open inquiry. The better these systems get, in fact, the more they encourage the very habits authoritarian governments hate most: asking questions, testing claims, following arguments, and noticing contradictions.

That is China’s problem when it comes to the development of AI tools.

Our problem in the U.S. is that we may be stupid enough to copy part of it — not with a Communist Party or a Great Firewall, but rather with a growing pile of laws and proposed laws that pressure American AI developers to build more hedged, more lawyered, and more sanitized systems. The result is AI technologies that are more and more afraid to say plainly what they think is true.

Proposed AI legislation, and its implications

This is where the debate gets slippery. People talk about “AI regulation” as if it were one thing. It is not. Some of the harms people worry about are perfectly real. AI can be used for fraud, impersonation, extortion, defamation, and stalking. It can scale up old abuses and make them cheaper. We dispute none of that. Our only point there is that in those cases we should go after fraud as fraud, extortion as extortion, defamation as defamation, and criminal misuse as criminal misuse. That is all right and good, and very doable right now. It’s also a very different thing from building a broad legal regime to supervise what AI systems are allowed to say in advance. And yet that broader regime is exactly what is beginning to take shape.

Take Colorado’s AI law, SB 24-205. It imposes “reasonable care” duties on developers and deployers of certain “high-risk” AI systems to protect consumers from “algorithmic discrimination.” In practice, that means impact assessments, documentation requirements, disclosure duties, and a strong incentive to make outputs safer, flatter, and more regulator-friendly.

Texas has passed its own version of an algorithmic discrimination law, and other states are lining up to do the same. We have been warning for a while now that this kind of legislation does not merely create compliance burdens. It pressures developers to train systems around the government’s preferred understanding of fairness, diversity, and disparate impact, rather than around truth.

And this is not some isolated trend, either. The United States introduced more than 1,200 AI-related bills in 2025 alone, and 145 were enacted. This year’s total is already approaching 1,700 proposed laws. That is an absurd amount of legislative activity aimed at a technology that is still developing at breakneck speed. A lot of these bills are narrow, but the broader pattern is obvious: state governments are rushing to build a patchwork of confusing, contradictory rules for one of the most important new knowledge technologies in generations. Many of them will have profound ramifications for the future of freedom of speech and knowledge-generation in America.

The lawsuits in response are already starting, too. Last week, xAI sued Colorado, arguing that the state’s law violates the First Amendment by pressuring developers to alter training, prompts, outputs, and disclosures so their systems reflect the state’s preferred moral framework. After all, if the government can use “algorithmic discrimination” law as a backdoor way to nudge AI systems toward approved conclusions on politically contested questions, we are no longer just talking about consumer protection. We are talking about ideological pressure applied to machines that are rapidly becoming part of how people learn, research, write, and reason.

That should alarm anyone who cares about free speech, but it should also alarm anyone who cares about America’s competitive position against China.

Why this matters for free speech — and our competition with China

Berg’s essay is useful because it reminds us that censorship is not free. When a regime pressures AI systems to evade reality around taboo subjects, the damage does not stay neatly confined to those subjects. A model trained to lie, dodge, or hallucinate in ideological forbidden zones becomes less trustworthy overall. That is the authoritarian tradeoff. To make AI politically safe, you often have to make it objectively worse.

America’s great advantage is supposed to be the opposite. In congressional testimony in February 2024, Greg argued that AI is not just another industry. It is a tool for creating and discovering knowledge. That means the central policy question is not simply how to reduce risk, but whether we are going to let a small number of regulators, incumbent firms, and political actors decide what questions may be asked and what kinds of answers are too dangerous for the public to hear. He also made a point that remains badly underappreciated: AI systems are built out of words and numbers. In a very important sense, they are made of speech. Efforts to control their outputs therefore raise free speech concerns from the jump.

This is the point some conservatives in particular need to hear. Yes, many current models reflect elite biases. Yes, too many institutions want AI to mimic their taboos. But the answer is not to build a right-coded censorship machine to fight a left-coded one. The answer is to protect the conditions under which rival models can emerge, compete, criticize one another, and improve. The answer is more room for experimentation, more tolerance for dissent, and more confidence that truth is more likely to emerge from contestation than from prior restraint.

That is both a civil-liberties argument and a strategic one.

The First Amendment is not some decorative extra in the AI race. Section 230 is not some embarrassing relic. A decentralized culture of argument, experimentation, and criticism is not an unfortunate side effect of American life. These are among our real advantages as a nation. China cannot fully enjoy them because the CCP, in its desperate need to keep an iron grip, is too afraid of where open inquiry leads.

It would be a hell of a thing if we gave these advantages up voluntarily.

What’s at stake if we don’t change course

What could America lose precisely? In their important new book, The Future of Free Speech, FIRE Senior Fellow and document the essential role that the First Amendment and Section 230 played in building American tech leadership globally. They identify how Section 230 “helped the United States become the center of the internet economy,” and how it “explain(s) why so many of the world’s most successful internet platforms... are based in the United States.” There is a reason that 19 of the 25 largest digital technology companies in the world today are U.S. based.

Section 230 has also served as the primary legal building block of the current American AI boom by propelling the massive wave of innovation and investment our country enjoys today relative to other nations. According to new data released this week from the latest annual Stanford University “AI Index Report,” U.S. private AI investment reached $285.9 billion in 2025 — more than 23 times the $12.4 billion invested in China.

The First Amendment deserves some credit for this result as well, as it has been a driver of American “soft power” globally for decades. In testimony last April, Adam explained how America’s global race with China for geopolitical supremacy in AI and advanced computation is not solely a technical or economic matter. Important social and cultural principles—and the policies that support them—are in play.

The Chinese government approach to shaping global markets and cultural norms is rooted in a top-down approach some scholars refer to as “weaponized interdependence.” This entails looking to boost their global might by getting poorer nations hooked on investment assistance and state-subidized technologies that come embedded with the CCP’s own desired values of control, surveillance, and censorship. Historian Arthur Herman calls this threat of Chinese supremacy in AI “potentially more catastrophic for human freedom than anything dreamed up by science fiction” and that “[t]he fate of societies and economies founded on Western liberal principles hangs in the balance,” should China race ahead of the U.S.

This is why America’s current policy choices matter so deeply. Smart pro-speech policies and liability norms help drive positive economic outcomes and national competitive advantage.

Consider two information revolutions that America dominated: the global entertainment industry and the internet. In both instances, several policy drivers were crucial to American global leadership, including stable government, balanced intellectual property policies and light-touch economic regulation. But it was the First Amendment — and America’s protections for free speech and information production — that was the true foundation of those information revolutions.

We shouldn’t give up America’s cultural influence

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, scholars documented the important influence that American entertainment culture played in helping end the Cold War. The Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc nations took direct steps to control the dissemination of American music, television, and movies, while other nations looked to limit American news and entertainment flows into their countries. But censorship and cultural protectionism were leaky, and American-generated information and entertainment spread — first gradually and then rapidly — across the globe. Entire books were written just about the influence the TV show Dallas had on global audiences, and one documentary even gave the show credit for helping to topple Romanian communism!

Of course, it took much larger forces than a prime time CBS soap opera to help bring down communism, but the role American entertainment culture played in perking interest in the West and our freedoms should not be underestimated.

The same process played out again in the digital era with American technology firms and online speech platforms coming to have global reach. Many governments, including democratic ones, have acted to limit the reach of U.S. platforms and content, but the sheer volume of American innovation and speech output is hard to bottle up entirely. China and some other countries continue to take extreme steps to limit America’s more open networks and speech using firewalls, surveillance, and other authoritarian controls.

This is why today’s debate over AI policy takes on such importance. We find ourselves at another inflection point. “We are on the threshold of a revolution in the creation and discovery of knowledge,” Greg pointed out in his 2024 testimony. “[W]ith decentralized development and use of AI, we have a better chance of defeating our staunchest rivals…it’s what gives us our best chance for understanding the world without being blinded by our current orthodoxies, superstitions, or darkest fears.”

Yet, as Cameron Berg’s new op-ed noted, “that’s exactly what the Communist Party can’t tolerate.”

This gives America another chance to double-down on the principles and policies that made our nation the leader of multiple modern information and entertainment revolutions.

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

You may not know it, but FIRE Senior Writer & Editor, and ERI Managing Editor is in a band! The group is called ZÁFA, and they’re a very interesting blend of Latin music and heavy metal. Follow them on Instagram and Facebook (and TikTok, if you’re a youngin’), and stay tuned for more!

Here’s a clip from a recent show they did in Brooklyn:

Stories of the week

• FIRE statement on the government’s attempts to unmask Reddit critic

Government critics are not suspects and free speech is not a crime. The First Amendment protects our right to criticize the government anonymously — an American tradition that dates back to the founding. So far, the government hasn’t been able to point to a single Reddit post that’s not protected by the First Amendment.

Not one.

• Does Free Speech Have a Future? (The Dispatch) By FIRE Senior Fellow &

The state of free speech in America is somewhat dif­ferent. In the words of Columbia University’s former president, Lee Bollinger, the First Amendment is “the most speech protective of any nation on Earth, now or throughout history.” The robustness of the First Amendment has acted as a firewall against the kinds of legal restrictions that are hollowing out free-speech protections in other open democracies. But America—and the world—currently are at an inflection point for free speech values. The underlying assumptions of American “free-speech exceptionalism” have lost much of their unifying appeal. While the abstract principle of “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” debate remains widely supported, unity fractures along deepening identitarian lines when each side’s sacred taboos are violated. This shift toward free speech pessimism is particularly notable among legal scholars, journalists, and pundits who once broadly embraced civil-libertarian First Amendment principles. The rise of large, centralized social media platforms—now integral to the exercise of free speech—has exacerbated this pessimism.

This week in ERI

This week in

• Conservative women are as likely as liberal men to say words are violence by

• UNC Chapel Hill’s students dabbled in satire. Now the university is investigating them by

• Texas State fired two professors for speech — now it’s facing two lawsuits by

• It’s the end of internet anonymity as we know it (and I don’t feel fine) by

  

This week on

• This week was a double whammy: First, FIRE EVP & host talked with Jordan Taylor, historian and author of Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America, about how misinformation shaped American life in the 18th century.

• Then, Nico sat down with The Future of Free Speech at Vanderbilt University Executive Director & FIRE Senior Fellow and The Future of Free Speech Senior Fellow (co-authors of this week’s “Story of the Week” as well as their upcoming The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom) to discuss the global free speech recession.

This week in FIRE’s blog

• How silencing medical debates puts patients at risk by Allison Riddoch

If students are not able to engage in these conversations in classrooms and at campus events, with the guidance of faculty and the benefit of diverse perspectives, how can we expect them to do so competently when real patients, real communities, and real consequences are at stake?

• Constitutional attorney Casey Mattox joins FIRE Board of Directors

• Economist Sallie James joins FIRE Board of Directors

• First Amendment scholar Ron Collins joins FIRE’s Advisory Council

FIRE in the press!

• Kanye West visa ban sets a dangerous precedent (UnHerd) by

While governments may ultimately exercise some authority to determine which non-citizens are able to enter a country’s borders, we should firmly reject the use of those powers as a filtering tool for popular or government-approved speech. It won’t actually make hateful or offensive ideas go away, but it will give governments another tool to regulate and punish speech — including critics and dissenters, too.

International free speech stories of the week

• Abu Dhabi Police arrest 375 for filming incidents and spreading misleading information (Gulf Today)

• UK Police Arrest Protesters Near Base Used By US (Barron’s)

“Greg on the Run” of the week

And don’t forget to follow me on Instagram for my regular musings!

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The most important new AI lawsuit in the country is asking some of the biggest questions of our time: is AI-generated content protected speech? Are the design choices behind it expressive? And how far can the government go in controlling what these systems say? How these questions are answered may determine the future of AI and who gets to define truth itself.

Yesterday, xAI sued Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser in federal court, challenging SB 24-205, the state’s controversial AI law, which is scheduled to take effect on June 30, 2026. The law requires developers and deployers of certain “high risk” AI systems to use “reasonable care” to guard against “algorithmic discrimination,” while also imposing disclosure, documentation, and notification obligations. But that dry summary badly understates what is really at stake. As we argued in our National Review essay “Don’t Teach the Robots to Lie,” laws like this are dangerous not merely because they impose compliance burdens, but because they pressure AI developers to shape their models around the government’s preferred understanding of fairness, diversity, and disparate impact rather than around truth.

Indeed, while it is intended to combat discrimination, this law actually exempts certain forms of differential treatment intended to increase diversity or remedy past discrimination. In other words, the law penalizes certain disparities while permitting outputs that support the state’s goals. The result is pressure on AI developers to align with the state’s views, which amounts to viewpoint discrimination.

That is what makes xAI’s complaint so important, and it deserves real credit for saying plainly what too many people in this debate have preferred to blur. Colorado is pressuring developers to alter training, prompts, outputs, and disclosures so their systems reflect the state’s favored moral framework. This, for example, may prevent a user from learning about other partisan or politically incorrect perspectives, or testing media bias. That gets to the core of the problem we have been warning about from the start. Once the law begins nudging AI systems away from disfavored truths and toward regulatorily approved answers, government is no longer just trying to reduce risk — it is trying to decide, in advance, what kind of reality these systems are allowed to describe.

Thus commences a major First Amendment battle over whether the state may use “algorithmic discrimination” law as a backdoor tool for steering AI outputs. That is exactly the fight we should be having now, before a pile of state laws hardens into a regime under which our most powerful knowledge-producing systems are rewarded for giving safer, flatter, more fashionable accounts of the world instead of truer ones. Once enough states head down that road, AI will go from helping us see reality more clearly to helping public officials sand down reality until it fits the ideology of the moment.

This is about more than compliance

What makes this complaint more serious than the usual industry grumbling is that it starts from a strong and necessary premise: model design is itself expressive. Decisions about what data to train on, what to optimize for, how to fine-tune behavior, what guardrails to impose, and what outputs to permit are editorial judgments as much as engineering choices.

That is the key point. We already recognize in other contexts that selecting, ranking, filtering, and presenting information can be protected expression. Editorial discretion is one of the central commitments in First Amendment law, whether it’s editing a newspaper, curating a social media feed, or crafting AI outputs. Once you understand modern AI systems as engines for selecting and structuring language, Colorado’s position starts to look much less like ordinary regulation of commercial conduct and much more like an attempt to steer speech-producing systems toward the state’s preferred moral conclusions.

Colorado presents this law as a way to prevent harm in consequential decisions related to things like housing, hiring, insurance, and health care. Uses may range from a small business generating interview questions to a mortgage broker running fraud checks. But that is exactly how speech restrictions are so often sold: not as censorship, naturally, but as reasonable safeguards against harmful consequences. The problem is that once the state starts pressuring AI systems to avoid disfavored conclusions and produce approved ones instead, it is leaning on the machinery of thought itself.

That is part of what makes Colorado’s law so troubling. It excludes from the definition of discrimination efforts to expand applicant pools to “increase diversity or redress historical discrimination.” xAI argues that this is ideological selectivity dressed up as consumer protection. Put less delicately, Colorado is taking sides in a live moral and political dispute and then trying to hard-wire its preferred answers into systems the rest of us will increasingly rely on to understand the world.

The complaint also points to something else worth noticing. Colorado’s own political leadership has already acknowledged that this law needs “additional clarity” and “improvements,” and the state delayed the effective date while arguments over revision continued. While their concern was the law’s focus on discriminatory outputs (as opposed to intentional discrimination), the delay and controversy demonstrate that the law’s central problems are more than small drafting defects easily amended later. The problem is a law with a baked-in, ideologically loaded standard that could pressure developers into laundering awkward outputs into something less accurate but more fashionable.

xAI also raises a basic point that should concern anyone who cares about free speech, innovation, or federalism: Colorado does not get to set AI policy for the whole country. This law purports to reach any AI system that affects a Colorado resident somewhere in the chain of impact. Even an AI model built outside the state, trained outside the state, and used nationwide would have to bend to Colorado’s rules if any Coloradan, anywhere, is impacted.

That would be bad enough as a matter of overreach. It’s worse because it invites a race among states to impose their ideological and regulatory preferences on national AI systems. xAI’s lawsuit is, in part, a fight over whether one state may pressure the rest of the country into accepting its preferred standards for how AI systems should talk, reason, and describe the world. (After all, it wouldn’t be the first time Colorado used a law to impact an ideological debate.) If anti-discrimination law becomes a general-purpose lever for controlling AI outputs, it isn’t hard to imagine a regulatory tug-of-war where states issue contradictory (or even mutually exclusive) directives, each trying to cement an ideology, and none of them quite being the same as the pursuit of truth.

Why “algorithmic discrimination” law worries us

Our concern is simple. The danger is that “algorithmic discrimination” becomes a high-minded label for pressuring AI systems to produce outputs that conform to the moral and political preferences of whoever happens to be writing the rules.

We have seen this dynamic before. In Unlearning Liberty and Freedom From Speech, Greg wrote about the way anti-discrimination and anti-harassment rationales, however sincerely advanced, were repeatedly expanded beyond punishing actual misconduct and turned into tools for policing expression itself. What began as supposedly narrow efforts to protect people from harm too often ended up punishing satire, dissent, heterodoxy, and ordinary disagreement. The result was less about clarity or justice and more about fear, conformity, and institutions less able to distinguish truth from orthodoxy.

Now the same logic is threatening to migrate into AI, only this time it would be aimed not merely at speakers on a campus or writers in a newsroom, but at systems rapidly becoming the intellectual infrastructure of modern life. They are, in an important sense, the new libraries. And if the great knowledge machines of our age are incentivized to say not what is true, but what will not get them sued, we are all in serious trouble.

The electronic oracles start to act like the electronic HR representatives. They learn to hedge where they should speak plainly, evade where they should answer directly, and flatten contested questions into whatever formulation is safest and most regulatorily comfortable. We no longer get systems optimized for truth-seeking. We get systems optimized for risk avoidance. That’s a fundamental corruption of the project.

Free speech matters because it prevents any one faction from gaining too much control over the process by which society tests ideas and corrects error. In American politics, we divide power because we know human beings are biased, self-interested, and far too sure of their own virtue. In knowledge-producing institutions, we need the same principle. We need disagreement, criticism, rival interpretations, and the freedom to say uncomfortable things. We need, in other words, something like separation of powers around truth.

“Algorithmic discrimination” law threatens to do the opposite. It offers governments a way to pressure AI developers to treat contested moral, political, and empirical questions as though they had already been settled. It threatens to do to AI what speech codes did to campuses: use the language of protection to narrow the range of permissible thought.

That is why this case matters so much. Not because xAI is a perfect messenger, and not because every argument in the complaint is certain to prevail, but because the lawsuit forces a crucial question into the open: Are the design and tuning choices that shape an AI model’s outputs protected expressive judgments, or are they merely a form of conduct that officials may pressure into saying approved things in approved ways? Are developers exercising editorial discretion, like newspaper editors, or are they just building systems, like plumbers?

If the answer is that these judgments are protected expression, Colorado’s law has a serious constitutional problem. If the answer is no, then the rest of us do. Because it will become much easier for states to turn “algorithmic discrimination” into a general theory of AI control. And at that point, asking an AI model a question may no longer yield the best account of reality it can generate. It may yield only the version of reality that regulators are willing to tolerate.

At FIRE, this is one reason we are expanding our work on technology and free speech. The old fights over campus speech, censorship by bureaucracy, and the abuse of anti-discrimination rationales are migrating into the systems that increasingly mediate how people learn, argue, research, and think. If those systems are trained to fear liability more than they value truth, the damage will extend far beyond Silicon Valley to reach classrooms, workplaces, journalism, science, and democratic culture itself.

If you want to help us fight this, support FIRE. We are expanding our work on technology and free speech, and that will take money as well as good plaintiffs, strong sources, and reporters paying attention. If you are in a position to help on any of those fronts, we want to hear from you.

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Shot for the Road

I’m very excited to be back in Vancouver at TED2026 next week. If you haven’t already seen it, please check out my TED talk from last year and take a peek behind the curtains to see how I prepared!

Story of the week

• Trump’s War on Lawyers Is a Threat to Everyone (The Dispatch) by & me

Lawyers are not an optional accessory in a constitutional republic. They make rights enforceable. If a university tramples your free speech rights, if an agency violates due process, if a state retaliates against dissent, if the federal government starts treating opposition as disloyalty—your rights do not leap off the page and defend themselves. You need counsel. You need somebody willing to take your case, file your brief, walk into court, and tell the government, on the record, that it has gone too far.

• Speech Restrictions Justified by Child Safety Rarely Stop There () by

The social media ban reflects a dangerous and familiar pattern: governments begin by regulating in the least controversial domain—children’s safety—and then expand those mechanisms into speech and access to information. As Australia’s eSafety office collaborates with the EU Commission and the UK’s Ofcom on frameworks for “media literacy”, “critical thinking”, and “confident, informed online engagement,” the underlying assumption is that citizens, adults included, cannot be trusted to discern truth for themselves.

This week in ERI

This week in

• How campus deplatforming has evolved since WWII by

• UK government admits the obvious: Free countries shouldn’t police legal speech by

• Is it safe to use Signal? by

• Finnish Supreme Court fines politician over religious pamphlet deemed hate speech by

• The images a Florida city says only it can use by Carrie Robison

• The UK is testing digital curfews. Social media bans for teens might be next by

This week on

• This week host & FIRE EVP talked with Techdirt CEO & founder about the recent verdicts in California and New Mexico courts holding Meta and Google liable for failing to protect young users from harm and their implications for free speech.

This week in FIRE’s blog

• VICTORY: School district reverses suspension of student punished over pro-ICE poster

“School administrators can’t pick and choose which opinions students are allowed to express,” said FIRE Supervising Senior Attorney Conor Fitzpatrick. “Voicing an opinion which makes others upset is not ‘harassment’ or ‘intimidation,’ it is American democracy in action.”

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Chiles v. Salazar

Supreme Court (8-1) holds that applying Colorado’s conversion-therapy ban to conversations between counselors and minor clients is viewpoint-based speech regulation subject to strict scrutiny, reinforcing that professional speech does not lose First Amendment protection simply because it occurs in a licensed setting

The Supreme Court reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and Colorado’s federal district court by holding a state law barring licensed counselors from undertaking “conversion therapy” with minors – that is, practices or treatment to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, or their related behavior, gender expressions, or sexual/romantic attractions to individuals of the same sex – is viewpoint-discriminatory under the First Amendment as applied to talk therapy.

Following reminders that the First Amendment protects the inalienable right to decide for oneself how to speak, that regulating speech based on subject matter, content, and/or viewpoint is presumptively unconstitutional, and that there are but a few clearly identified, longstanding, and narrowly drawn categories of content that do not automatically get strict scrutiny, the Court first reaffirms that “a law regulating the content of speech cannot avoid searching First Amendment review just because it mostly regulates non-expressive conduct.” Or, put differently, “Just because a law may generally function as a regulation of conduct … does not exempt it from demanding First Amendment review when a government seeks to apply that law to speech alone.”

Nor does First Amendment protection, the Court continued “turn on the fact that a licensed professional happens to be speaking.” Rather, those protections “extend to licensed professionals as much as they do to everyone else,” and “dangers associated with censorship … are no less acute in the fields of medicine than they are anywhere else.”

And this is where the courts below erred, the Court explained—that is, in failing to subject Colorado’s law to demanding First Amendment review in its application to licensed healthcare professionals who conduct talk therapy. Because, so applied, the law regulates not only therapists’ speech—in fact, it regulates only their speech—and not just its content, but what views they may and may not express. They may express acceptance, support, and understanding for facilitation of identity exploration, and/or offer words of assistance for those undergoing gender transition; but if a client seeks counsel toward changing their sexual orientation or gender identity, behaviors, or romantic attractions, the law forbids it—even if that’s what a client seeks or hopes to achieve. In short, therapists cannot voice perspectives the state disfavors when speaking with consenting clients. That makes the law viewpoint-discriminatory in application to talk therapy, and thus subject to strict scrutiny, which the lower courts did not conduct, and which the Supreme Court has elsewhere said it is the “rare case” that a speech restriction can withstand.

The Court notes that licensed professionals often have good-faith disagreements about the efficacy and/or ethics of practices in their fields, including medicine, where “consensus … is not static” but “evolves and always has,” such that a “prevailing standard of care may reflect what most practitioners believe today, but it cannot mark the outer boundary of what they may say tomorrow.” That is why the First Amendment rests the “simple truth” that “the people lose whenever the government transforms prevailing opinion into enforced conformity.” So, the fact “that the State’s viewpoint regulation targets only licensed healthcare professionals … changes nothing.” The Court thus sums up as follows:

Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety. Certainly, censorious governments throughout history have believed the same. But the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country. It reflects instead a judgment that every American possesses an inalienable right to think and speak freely, and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for discovering truth. However well-intentioned, any law that suppresses speech based on viewpoint represents an “egregious” assault on both of those commitments.

International free speech stories of the week

• French far-left MEP Rima Hassan to be tried in July over post on X (Reuters)

• When Racism Is a Crime: Brazil Puts a Tourist on Trial for Word and Gesture (NYT) by Ana Ionova & Lucia Cholakian Herrera

In Brazil, a majority Black country that is still grappling with the legacy of centuries of slavery, the case has been viewed in a starkly different light.

Racism has been enshrined in Brazil’s Constitution as a crime since 1988, but prosecutions are rare.

After a recent push by activists and lawmakers for more accountability, Brazil has implemented some of the strictest antiracism laws in the world.

• American journalist kidnapped in Iraq (NBC) by Matt Lavietes, Mirna Alsharif, Abigail Williams & Chantal Da Silva

• Court rules Papagomo guilty of sedition, RM4,000 fine imposed for post against King (MalayMail)

Book of the week

The Future of Free Speech by FIRE Senior Fellow & US Naval Academy cybersecurity law professor , hits shelves Monday so make sure to order a copy! And in case you missed it, they had a great piece on the recent social media rulings in CA & NM in the Wall Street Journal last week.

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A few days ago, Greg and I published a piece in The Dispatch about the Trump administration’s executive orders targeting major law firms. Go read it, if you haven’t, but the short version is that people generally aren’t appreciating that the administration’s targeting of law firms is an attack on everyone’s ability to check governmental power, because lawyers are the mechanism by which constitutional rights get enforced, and making lawyers afraid or unable to oppose the government ultimately harms the public at large.

I’d like to go a little deeper here on some of the legal questions that are likely to come up in the argument over Trump’s targeting of law firms. Because there is an argument happening, at dinner tables and on social media. Defenders of the president say something like this: The president has broad authority over security clearances. The president can choose who the government contracts with. A government review isn’t punishment, it’s good governance. National security is a real concern.

Let’s unpack those arguments and line them up against the relevant legal doctrines. And let’s do in the style of Greg’s and Nadine Strossen’s essential handbook for defending the First Amendment to your family and friends, “The War on Words,” by showing the argument you’re likely to hear, and the response.

Authority over security clearances isn’t unlimited

Argument: “The president has broad authority over security clearances.”

Response: The law is a bit more nuanced than that. It says the president has broad authority to make security clearance determinations on the merits. In Department of the Navy v. Egan (1988), the Supreme Court held that the president has broad, largely unreviewable authority over security clearance determinations as part of his Article II power over national security. Courts are generally reluctant to second-guess the executive’s judgment that a particular person shouldn’t have access to classified information.

But Egan is about the substance of security judgments — whether someone poses a genuine risk. That doesn’t mean that determinations made as a pretense are entitled to the same deference, particularly if an individual can produce prima facie evidence to that effect. When a security determination is made as a pretense, there is no substance to defer to.

And when it comes to targeting law firms with executive orders, the orders recite a retaliatory basis for the determinations on their face. When an executive order opens by complaining that a law firm represented Hillary Clinton in 2016, hired a veteran of the Mueller investigation, or prevailed in a defamation case on behalf of Dominion Voting Systems, it looks a lot more like a list of grievances than a national security determination.

The district courts that struck down these orders understood this. Across four separate rulings, judges found that whatever formal authority the president has over clearances, he cannot exercise that authority with the purpose of punishing firms for protected advocacy and representation.

Discretion over government contracts isn’t unlimited

Argument: “The president can choose who the government contracts with.”

Response: Also true, as a general matter. The government is not obligated to hire any particular firm, and discretion over contracting is a real and legitimate executive function. But the government choosing not to hire someone based on their advocacy violates the First Amendment.

There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how government power works that underpins both this and the prior question. Both presuppose that the government having the power to do something is the end of the inquiry. It isn’t, because the government can act unconstitutionally even within the scope of its legitimate authority.

What makes something unconstitutional isn’t so much the specific action being taken, but the motivation and effect of that action. If a government action is motivated by a desire to punish speech and has the intended effect of punishing, preventing, or otherwise disincentivizing that speech, then the action violates the First Amendment, whether or not that action is normally within the authority of the government to perform.

We can see this throughout all levels of government. Some examples:

• School boards normally have the power to limit who can speak at their meetings, but they violate the constitution when they use that authority to selectively silence only those parents who want to object to the content of the curriculum.

• Prosecutors have almost unreviewable discretion in their authority to charge defendants. But a DA who selectively chooses to charge only one race of defendants violates the Constitution.

• Cities have broad discretion to issue parade permits, but a city that denies permits based on the viewpoint of the marchers does so unlawfully.

• The IRS has the authority to determine who to audit, but it violates the First Amendment when it uses that authority to target groups with conservative keywords in their names.

• States have the authority to issue professional licenses (for lawyers, doctors, and so on), but can’t selectively refuse to issue licenses to people based on their speech.

This is pretty basic constitutional doctrine. The action the government takes, even when within its power, becomes unlawful with an unconstitutional motivation and a detrimental effect on the targeted speaker.

These first two rhetorical defenses of the executive orders targeting law firms — “the president has authority over national security determinations” and “the government has authority over contracting decisions” — fail because they address only the action, not the motivation or effect. No one is questioning whether this authority exists; of course it does, just like the school board’s authority exists, the DA’s authority exists, and the IRS’ authority exists. But just like all of those determinations, we need to then consider the motivation and effect of these particular exercises of discretion. And when we do, the executive orders look a lot like unconstitutional retaliation.

You could also look at these orders through the lens of unconstitutional conditions doctrine. That says, roughly, that the government cannot condition a benefit on the recipient’s willingness to surrender a constitutional right. The executive orders are packages of incentives and threats designed to change behavior; to make it costly to represent unfavorable clients, employ unfavorable people, or prevail in unfavorable litigation. That creates an unconstitutional conditions problem, and presidential authority over access and contracts is the mechanism of the constitutional problem, not the resolution of it.

Government process as punishment

Argument: “A government review isn’t punishment, it’s good governance.”

Response: Process is punishment, particularly when the process is imposed out of the blue and states a retaliatory motive in the preamble. FIRE in particular has seen process-as-punishment for years in the higher education context, where professors would be subjected to months-long reviews to chill their speech over clearly protected expression. And the executive orders were slightly worse, because those suspended clearances pending review, meaning that, functionally, the punishment started before the review did. Query how long those “reviews” would have taken if the law firms had decided to meekly accept the process.

The Supreme Court addressed this directly last term in NRA v. Vullo. Maria Vullo ran New York’s financial services industry regulator. She didn’t even subject insurance companies to a process, exactly; she just told them that the state might be looking closely at any insurer with NRA ties in the future, and might at that point subject them to some kind of a process. The Court unanimously held this was unconstitutional.

If the threat of a potential future process was unconstitutional in Vullo, an immediate process, like the one instituted in the executive orders, is surely worse. Government officials cannot use their regulatory power to coerce private parties into suppressing disfavored speakers or associations, and the coercion doesn’t have to be explicit or direct to violate the First Amendment.

The National Security concern

Argument: “National security is a real concern.”

Response: Of course it is. And you’re right, that as we mentioned above, the government is entitled to a great deal of deference in its national security determinations. The question is whether the specific government action actually reflects a national security determination, or whether it is a political grievance cosplaying as such a determination.

The executive orders here don’t primarily argue that these firms pose security risks because of their access to classified material. They argue the firms should be punished because of who they represented or hired. Perkins Coie’s order brings up representing Hillary Clinton in 2016. The Jenner & Block order mentions Andrew Weissmann’s work on the Muller investigation. The Susman Godfrey order literally complains about a case Susman won.

National security is a real concern. So is the use of government power to punish critics and opponents. Which one does this look like to you?

What Happens Next

The four district court cases have been consolidated at the D.C. Circuit, and oral argument is set for May 14. At that point, our hypothetical dinner table conversation is going to need real answers from the court.

The answers to these questions will determine whether the machinery used against these law firms can be used against any law firm — indeed, any organization — that takes the wrong case, wins the wrong verdict, or hires the wrong person, in the eyes of whoever happens to have won the last election cycle.

Greg and I said in the Dispatch piece that this is the administration’s most structurally dangerous campaign, and the least appreciated. Perhaps it is most dangerous precisely because, to the non-lawyer, the other side sounds reasonable at first. The president does have authority over clearances. He does have discretion over contracts. National security is a real thing. None of that is wrong.

What’s wrong is that the Constitution doesn’t let you use legitimate powers as instruments of retaliation for protected speech and association. That principle was hard-won over the 20th century by innumerable speakers who risked their freedom to see if the First Amendment did what it promised to do. This summer, the D.C. Circuit will tell us if it still holds true.

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Shot for the Road

Join us in Philadelphia this November to celebrate America’s 250th at Soapbox, FIRE’s premier free speech conference. From November 4–6, hear from leading voices like , David Goldberger, Aryeh Neier, , John McWhorter, and keep an eye out for more big names to be announced in the coming weeks. Hope to see you there!

Stories of the week

• The Big Tech verdicts you’re cheering for are actually terrible for free speech by

Declaring the target to be “design features” — such as infinite scroll or notifications — instead of speech doesn’t change things. The First Amendment isn’t fooled by synonyms, and what these lawsuits target is, inescapably, speech. Some allegations are aimed at content hosted by platforms that some perceive as harmful. And the ways platforms arrange, display, and choose how users consume content are editorial choices that are protected by the First Amendment. That those features might be designed to keep users’ attention is hardly a groundbreaking discovery. That is the point of all media. Imposing liability because speech is too appealing would be a breathtaking incursion on free speech.

• Campus cancellations approach record high by

This week in ERI

• Afroman and the sweet sound of a free country by me

This week in

• Protecting teens shouldn’t require permission to speak by

• ‘From the river to the sea’ is now a criminal offense for millions of Australians. Arrests are underway by

• The great chatbot panic by

This week in FIRE’s blog

• Students forced to remove ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ sweatshirts seek Supreme Court review

FIRE in the press!

• Free speech must be protected amid AI fears (Minnesota Star Tribune) by

Artificial intelligence, like other software, doesn’t speak on its own. Rather it’s an expressive tool people use to create, edit and better communicate ideas and information, similar to but more interactive than a word processor, calculator or search engine. Removing speech protections from AI-assisted expression inevitably restricts the rights of the humans who develop and use those tools.

• Why the Afroman ‘pound cake’ police saga is so delectable (Washington Post) by ERI Editor-in-Chief and me

So, yes, the case is hilarious. But there is a fundamental American truth running through this whole thing, perhaps best captured in the imagery from the music video “Batteram Hymn of the Police Whistle Blower,” where Afroman marches defiantly toward the camera in his American flag suit, telling the cops, “Afroman will bring it to you.” That deserves a civil-libertarian salute: Genuinely free people have the right to tell power where to go.

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Dep’t of War

Finding “classic illegal First Amendment” action, federal district court in California preliminarily enjoins executive branch retaliation against Anthropic’s refusal to drop AI guardrails against domestic surveillance and fully automated lethal weapons under its DoW contract—including a presidential directive banning it from all government contracts, and DoW directives designating it as a supply chain risk with which all government contractors must sever ties

The U.S. District Court for Northern California granted a motion for preliminary injunction arising out of a dispute between Anthropic, creator and provider of artificial intelligence model Claude, and Claude-user the Department of War (née Department of Defense), over demands that Anthropic permit the Department to employ Claude for “all lawful uses” without restrictions—including those barring mass surveillance of Americans and “lethal autonomous warfare.” After Anthropic went public with the disagreement, the President announced all federal agencies would immediately ban Anthropic from having another government contracts. And DoW Secretary Hegseth announced that anyone wishing to do business with the military must sever commercial relationships with Anthropic, and that the DoW had designated it a “supply chain risk”—a designation not previously applied to a domestic company, but rather one historically reserved for U.S. adversaries who may sabotage our tech systems, like foreign intelligence agencies, terrorists, and other hostile actors.

After Anthropic sued and sought among other things to preliminarily enjoin the retaliatory measures, the court concluded there was support for the “inference that Anthropic is being punished for criticizing the government’s contracting position in the press.” The court issued a blunt assessment: “Punishing Anthropic for bringing public scrutiny to the government’s contracting position is classic illegal First Amendment retaliation.” As the court summarized the matter:

The record shows that Defendants’ conduct appears to be driven not by a desire to maintain operational control when using AI in the military but by a desire to make an example of Anthropic for its public stance on the weighty issues at stake in the contracting dispute. Although Anthropic had always applied the usage policies in question to Claude Gov, it had been repeatedly lauded as a partner and passed lengthy national security vetting processes. Only when Anthropic went public with its concerns about DoW’s contracting position did Defendants set out to publicly punish Anthropic for its “ideology” and “rhetoric,” as well as its “arrogance” for being unwilling to compromise those beliefs. At that point, Defendants announced a plan to cripple Anthropic: to blacklist it from doing business with any company that services the U.S. military, to permanently cut off its ability to work with the federal government, and to brand it an adversary that could sabotage DoW and that posed a supply chain risk. Those actions go far beyond what would be necessary to address DoW’s ostensible concern about having complete operational control when using AI. ****

The court held Anthropic engaged in protected speech and suffered a significant adverse impact from government actions that “leave little question that the measures were prompted by Anthropic’s public repudiation of DoW’s contracting request and its perceived use of public scrutiny to ‘strong arm’ DoW into changing its mind.” And it rejected government efforts to play off Anthropic as just being engaged in a “contracting position” that was conduct not speech, and claims that it was Anthropic’s refusal to accept DoW’s terms, not its speech, that led to the adverse actions. The court noted that, were this merely a contract issue, DoW could have just stopped using Claude, but the government’s actions “far exceed … what could reasonably address such a national security interest.” The court continued: “Although courts owe deference to the government on issues of national security,” they “cannot defer to [its] reading of the First Amendment, even when such interests are at stake.” (The court also held Anthropic was likely to succeed in showing the government denied the company due process in summarily blacklisting it and designating it as a supply chain risk, and that the corresponding agency actions violated the Administrative Procedure Act.)

The court then held Anthropic suffered irreparable harm—not just because deprivations of constitutional rights unquestionably comprise such injury, but also because federal agencies have already moved to end their relationships with Anthropic, defense contractors using Claude-integrated APIs are assessing and in many cases looking to terminate their use, and government contractors outside the defense sector are following suit. And the balance of equities and public interest favor Anthropic notwithstanding government concerns over risks that “an AI model used in national security systems” may “be sabotaged by a hostile and untrustworthy corporate owner,” or that “the public interest is harmed if the government is unable to effectuate statutes enacted by representatives of its people.” Rather, the court emphasized that there is “a strong public interest that the laws … are not imperiled by executive fiat,” and that the government “cannot suffer harm from an injunction that merely ends an unlawful practice.”

But the court granted the government a one-week administrative stay to seek emergency expedited relief from its ruling from the D.C. Circuit, saying it would thereafter issue a separate order reflecting that Anthropic had made the necessary showing to enjoin each agency from implementing the presidential directive, and that it is entitled to injunctive relief against DoW and Defendant Secretary Hegseth.

All of which comports with the position staked out in the FIRE-led amicus brief in the case.

International free speech stories of the week

• Finnish MP convicted for saying homosexuality is ‘developmental disorder’ (The Guardian) by Miranda Bryant

In a 3-2 vote, the supreme court on Thursday found Räsänen guilty of a crime when she republished the pamphlet on Facebook in 2019 and on her website the following year. She was fined €1,800. The court ruled her claim that homosexuality was a disorder of psychosexual development was incorrect.

*This is an update in a case which figured prominently in a piece we wrote back in January about the (sorry) state of free speech in Europe:

• Hungary’s government files charges against prominent journalist for alleged espionage (LA Times) by Justin Spike

• Hong Kong amends security law to allow police to demand phone passwords (Jurist) by Renee Ferguson

• Claims of censorship as artworks removed from exhibition (Bristol 24/7) by Martin Booth

Update of the week

• BREAKING: Judge blocks Pentagon’s effort to label Anthropic a supply chain risk

*A positive development in the case we wrote about earlier this month:

Video of the week

I really enjoyed sitting down with on “The Anxious Achievers” podcast earlier this month to discuss themes from Coddling including the many connections between mental health and free speech.

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ERI Editor in Chief and I have a piece in The Washington Post today about the rapper Afroman’s courtroom victory — and the victory for free speech that came along with it.

In case you don’t know, Ohio sheriff’s deputies raided Afroman’s house back in 2022 on suspicion of drug trafficking and kidnapping. They found nothing, and after he turned the whole fiasco into songs and videos, along with one of the more memorable dessert-related free speech controversies in modern American history, they sued for $3.9 million — a sum that could buy, by our rough estimate, 163.9 tons of lemon pound cake.

A jury ultimately, and rightly, found for Afroman across the board.

Part of what makes this story so satisfying is that it feels both current and gloriously old-fashioned. It has the spirit of Cohen v. California running through it: the old “Fuck the Draft” energy; the old American idea that when power wrongs you, you get to answer back in anger, mockery, profanity, and contempt. Not because those things are always pretty. Oftentimes they are not. Rather, it’s because free people are not required to speak to authority in the tone of a worried assistant dean. They are allowed to tell power to go to hell.

And few things say “Go to hell” with quite the same style as turning a failed raid into a diss track about lemon pound cake.

The song was based on security camera footage from Afroman’s home, which showed one officer seeming to consider whether he should snatch a slice from the countertop while his fellow officers raided the house. In his deposition, the officer — dubbed “Officer Lemon Pound Cake” in the song — complained that he had received “hundreds of pound cakes” at work. As forms of public retaliation go, that is much better than what state abuse has inspired in less free countries and less free centuries. If your punishment is carbohydrates, count your blessings.

But the real reason this case landed is not just that it was funny (though it obviously was). It is that Americans are in a real free speech moment, and this one felt like a reminder of what the old deal was supposed to be.

These days, too many people seem to wait to find out how the censored person voted before deciding whether they care about the censorship they were met with. This case cut through that: Somebody with power pushes you around. You refuse to grovel. You answer back. You make them look ridiculous. You win.

That still has enormous emotional force.

It also points to something bigger, which I have thought for years: The story of music in America is, in large part, the story of free speech in America. I have long wanted to see a documentary that makes exactly that argument, because once you start looking, the pattern is impossible to miss.

Alfred Bryan wrote the lyrics to 1915’s hugely popular but genuinely divisive “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.”

Marian Anderson sang at the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her perform at Constitution Hall, and the performance became an icon of artistic dignity against racial exclusion.

The Harlan County miner’s conflict gave us “Which Side Are You On,” an explicitly partisan song written by the wife of a union organizer.

Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” turned horror into song and helped make protest music part of the moral vocabulary of the country.

Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” called for unity (which was a remarkably un-self-aware sentiment from a full-throated Stalin supporter).

Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” answered racist terror with fury and brilliance.

Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” gave the civil rights movement one of its great anthems.

Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” is a catalog of social injustices and existential threats.

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Ohio” reacted to the 1970 Kent State shooting with rage and urgency.

Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” captured something old and essential in American music: the rebellious spirit — the recurring sound of people who were not in the mood to shut up and behave.

And the tradition has continued, from Rage Against The Machine’s “Bulls On Parade” to Childish Gambino’s “This is America.” (And I should probably mention Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” which was itself a kind of protest to Neil Young’s protest songs “Southern Man” and “Alabama,” calling out racism in the South.)

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Throughout our history, the fight over who gets to sing what in America has always also been a fight over who gets to speak freely in America. These were not side issues. They were central to how Americans argued about freedom, equality, and the right to tell ugly truths in public.

That sort of expression has always drawn the ire of the powerful, and those of you who have been around a few decades will remember a few instances when would-be censors decided they were going to save America from its record collection.

For example, in the 1980s, a group called the Parents Music Resource Center, led by then-senator Al Gore’s wife Tipper Gore, held Senate hearings to discuss the so-called “filthy” lyrics in many contemporary artists’ work. Coming to the defense of artistic freedom? Frank Zappa, Twisted Sister singer Dee Snider, and John Denver.

And yes, if your first thought is, “Wait, John Denver? Wasn’t he squeaky clean?” Actually, yeah. That was part of what made his presence so perfect: The man who sang “Rocky Mountain High” — a song famously misread by some as drug-themed when it was really about the emotional euphoria you get by being in nature — had already learned that censors will find dirt wherever they feel like finding it.

Dee Snider’s testimony was particularly noteworthy. While being questioned about his song “Under the Blade,” which was about his bandmate’s oral surgery but the PMRC argued was about sadomasochism, Snider stunned Senator Gore into a beat of silence with the perfect line:

Songs allow a person to put their own imagination, experiences, and dreams into the lyrics. People can interpret it in many ways. Mrs Gore was looking for sadomasochism and bondage and she found it. Someone looking for surgical references would have found it as well.

In the end, the PMRC sort of succeeded. The music industry began labeling certain albums with the now-famous “Parental Advisory” sticker — a move that was formally described as a voluntary parental tool. It also backfired hilariously. The sticker became a signal that effectively said “Here’s music they don’t want you to hear,” and all but guaranteed that the very people it was meant to be kept away from would listen even more enthusiastically. The whole thing was framed as a fight for parental rights and control, but the broader fight was unmistakably about censorship, taste, and whether politicians and scolds were going to decide what the rest of us were allowed to hear.

FIRE Executive Vice President did an episode on the history of music censorship on his podcast back in 2022, tracing it from Reconstruction-era song suppression through the PMRC and into later controversies.

All of this is why I resist the very modern expectation that the best speech is somehow gentle, hygienic, and emotionally pre-approved. No. Free speech is valuable in part because it gives us a way to fight without using fists. Self-government is deadly serious business. Historically, disputes over power, humiliation, injustice, and corruption have often been settled with blood, prison, or both. Speech offers another route: jokes, chants, songs, satire, mockery, sermons, pamphlets, editorials, and sometimes gloriously juvenile acts of public ridicule. It is not always pretty or kind, and only a certain kind of Victorian mind would expect it to be. But, as I’ve argued many times — including my TED Talk from July of last year — it is always better than the alternatives of violence and coercion.

This is also why the humor in the Afroman case matters. The jokes are not beside the point. They are the point. A man gets pushed around by the state, and instead of reaching for violence, he reaches for rhyme. Instead of a vendetta, he gives us a music video. Instead of a blood feud, he gives the republic a running joke about pound cake. Honestly, that is civilizational progress.

FIRE has spent more than 25 years defending free speech in courtrooms, on campuses, and in the broader culture. I’ve been doing it for almost as long. And one of the things that doing this work teaches you is that censorship almost always arrives wearing the face of reasonableness: “Calm down. Be constructive. Do not make it personal. Do not be offensive. Do not embarrass the wrong people.” But one of the oldest and healthiest American instincts is the refusal to accept that the only legitimate response to abuse by power is polite disappointment. FIRE’s broader mission is to defend and sustain the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought, and this case is a good reminder of why that mission still matters so much.

So please read our piece in The Washington Post, and then come back to the larger point: What made this case resonate was not just that it was ridiculous (though it was!). It was that it reminded people that when power overreaches, free people answer back — sometimes with a brief, sometimes with a protest, and sometimes with a song about lemon pound cake.

All of it is free expression, and all of it should be vociferously protected. It’s the American way.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

On a much more serious note, the Supreme Court recently denied our petition to review citizen journalist Priscilla Villarreal’s case, after Laredo, Texas officials arrested Priscilla for asking police questions — something reporters do every day, and something the First Amendment squarely protects.

As FIRE’s statement puts it, the decision not to take Priscilla’s case only shines more light on the need for the Court to revisit how qualified immunity applies in free speech cases, sooner rather than later.

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Stories of the week

• Rapper Afroman is back in the news after winning a high-profile lawsuit brought by Ohio sheriff’s deputies over his viral “Lemon Pound Cake” music videos, which mocked a 2022 police raid on his home. A jury ruled fully in his favor, affirming that his videos were protected free speech and artistic expression.

• FIRE statement on the White House’s AI framework

The White House properly recognizes AI developers should not be penalized for third-party misuse, a welcome and important step to protecting the expressive rights of people who use and develop AI. Echoing FIRE’s longstanding concerns about coerced censorship, the framework also recommends legislation prohibiting the government from pressuring tech companies to censor (or speak) based on partisan agendas, and that Americans should have legal recourse if the government censors or compels expression on AI platforms.

This week in

• Maintaining principle in a time of polarization by Robert Corn-Revere

Today’s challenges are not entirely unique, and the ones we endured in earlier times made us stronger. I believe the era we are living through now will make us stronger still. Just considering the law of free speech, we went through the Red Scare of 1919, World War II, the McCarthy Era, the civil rights and antiwar demonstrations of the 60s and 70s, and since then an upheaval in the technology of how we communicate. Each was seen at the time as an existential crisis.

Somehow, we managed to get through those challenges. And, in terms of First Amendment jurisprudence, they lead to vast improvements in the law. The cases decided during those periods of turmoil and polarization formed the backbone of the protections we have today. And those decisions are the essential building blocks of the law we are using to confront the current challenges.

• Lies in politics are bad. That doesn’t make Wales’ new plan to criminalize them a good idea by

• Censoring Iran war news sets a dangerous precedent by

• Why are school board members afraid to speak? by

• Spain’s new AI ‘hate’ tracker raises familiar risks for online speech by

• Why are liberal students at liberal schools terrified to talk about Israel? by

This week on

This week on host & FIRE EVP sat down with , an attorney and expert in international law and emerging technologies, to discuss how foreign censorship doesn’t respect American borders.

This week in FIRE’s blog

• Tennessee city bans ‘blasphemous’ and ‘offensive’ pamphlets, First Amendment be damned by Isabelle Brito

• FCC warning that networks risk licenses over Iran reporting a ‘shocking’ abuse of power

FIRE in the press!

• Thanks to for the kind words about and the Eternally Radical Idea shout-out in !

The Davidson Lux

The Eternally Radical Idea

Editor’s Note: This article is part of The Davidson Lux’s upcoming print edition, releasing next week. It is published here as an early preview…

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2 months ago · 6 likes · Ethan Tran

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Olivier v. City of Brandon

Supreme Court confirms constitutional challenges for purely prospective relief, like injunctions against future enforcement, can proceed against laws under which the plaintiff was previously convicted

The Supreme Court unanimously clarified that its 1994 decision in Heck v. Humphrey, which bars using the Civil Rights Act’s civil suit provision to challenge the validity of a conviction or sentence to obtain damages or a release from custody, does not bar the convicted party from challenging the constitutionality of the law underlying their conviction by seeking going-forward relief like an injunction or declaratory ruling.

The plaintiff Mississippi street preacher—who had entered a no-contest plea, paid a fine, and got a year’s probation in lieu of a 10-day sentence after his arrest for violating a City of Brandon ordinance restricting protests or demonstrations near the city’s amphitheater to “designated protest areas”—sued to obtain a declaration that the law violates the First Amendment and to enjoin its future enforcement. But the city argued his suit was barred by the line in Heck that “when a state prisoner seeks damages in a § 1983 suit, the [] court must consider whether a judgment in favor of the plaintiff would necessarily imply the invalidity of his conviction [and] if it would, the complaint must be dismissed.” The district court and the Fifth Circuit both agreed, but the Supreme Court reversed.

The Court acknowledged that, “strictly speaking,” Heck’s “necessarily imply” language “fits” because, if the suit challenging the ordinance’s constitutionality succeeds, “it would mean [the] conviction was unconstitutional.” But, the Court clarified, that language in Heck “was used to identify claims that were really assaults on a prior conviction, even though involving some indirection,” that is, those that require “looking back” to the conduct resulting in the conviction. The suit here, conversely, seeking a declaration of unconstitutionality as to the amphitheater ordinance and to enjoin it prospectively, requires no such retrospection. Heck accordingly does not prevent the claims.

The Court observed that, before Heck, defendants like the city would have had “no plausible basis” to argue such a suit is barred because, so long as there is a credible threat of future prosecution, a plaintiff may bring a constitutional challenge and seek to prevent a law’s future enforcement. The Court noted cases like Steffel v. Thompson and Wooley v. Maynard—the latter of which, the Court said, “taken alone,” would defeat the city’s position. It also cited two post-Heck cases in which the Court drew a line between Heck-barred claims and those seeking forward-looking relief, Edwards v. Balisok, and Wilkinson v. Dotson, which the suit here resembled in seeking “wholly prospective” relief, i.e., “only to be free from prosecutions for future violations.” So, the Court held, Olivier’s First Amendment suit to “enjoin the ordinance, so he can return to the amphitheater” may proceed.

All of which is entirely consistent with FIRE’s amicus briefs in the case.

Bonus case: In The New York Times Company v. Department of Defense, the federal district court in D.C. granted summary judgment to the Times and one of its national security reporters, declaring unconstitutional, vacating, and enjoining new DOD policy for restrictively granted “Pentagon Facilities Alternate Credentials,” on grounds the rules—which excluded the Times and other longstanding Pentagon press corps members—violate the Fifth Amendment as unconstitutionally vague in “fail[ing] to provide fair notice of what routine, lawful journalistic practices will result in the denial, suspension, or revocation of a PFAC,” and the First Amendment as viewpoint-discriminatory and unreasonable, holding: “record evidence supports the conclusion that the Policy discriminates … based on editorial viewpoint,” as it “tells the story of a Department whose leadership has been and continues to be openly hostile to the ‘mainstream media’ whose reporting it views as unfavorable, but receptive to outlets that have expressed support for the Trump administration.”

International free speech stories of the week

• Nepal investigating burning of Xi Jinping’s book at university (Reuters) by Gopal Sharma

• ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ Censored in India Amid Fears Theatrical Release ‘Would Break Up the India-Israel Relationship’ (EXCLUSIVE) (Variety) by Nick Vivarelli

• Canada parliament’s push to criminalize hate crimes sparks free-speech concerns (JURIST) by Derren Chan

The Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights of Canada’s House of Commons ended the debate on the Combating Hate Act on Wednesday. Several groups criticized the push for passage, claiming that the bill is poorly drafted and would violate the freedoms of speech and religion.

The Combatting Hate Act, Bill C-9, would criminalize the “wilful promotion of hatred” by display of symbols of listed terrorist groups, the Nazi swastika, and other symbols that “so nearly resemble” them. The legislation would also criminalize offenses motivated by “hatred” based on specific personal characteristics. On Wednesday, the committee passed the finalized version of the bill for third reading by a vote of 5-4.

Greg on the Run!

• I just can’t get this out of my head!

• Some reflections on my visit to UW-Madison

Video of the week

In honor of the recent announcement that Bill Maher will receive the next Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, here’s my appearance on Real Time from December 2023:

I also stuck around for Overtime to talk Taylor Swift as TIME’s person of the year, Hunter Biden’s drug indictment, Russian election interference, and the attempt to ban hate speech in Ireland.

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Story of the week

• This week, at the invitation of host & FIRE EVP , I joined Cato’s and , a pioneering cyber-libertarian and the namesake of Godwin’s Law. Among other topics, we discussed the push for online age verification, and why I, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, oppose age verification laws for social media.

This week in ERI

• ‘Pick Your Ten’: The best advice I ever got in my life by me

This week in Expression

• Iran war triggers calls for censorship in UK as higher ed regulator seeks to monitor ‘extremism’ by

• The Pentagon is violating Anthropic’s First Amendment rights

• Northern Ireland to consider abolishing blasphemy law by

Though these kinds of blasphemy laws are rarely or sporadically enforced in some nations that maintain them, it’s still important to abolish them to ensure they cannot be used in the future, and to signal that blasphemy must not be treated as a crime. This is especially notable at this moment in the UK, where asylum seeker Hamit Coskun just successfully defeated prosecutors’ efforts to punish him for burning a Quran in front of London’s Turkish embassy. Coskun was not charged under a blasphemy law, but civil liberties observers have rightfully warned that prosecutors may be seeking to enforce a quasi-blasphemy law under other statutes.

This week on

• This week, was joined by his colleagues, Director of Faculty Legal Defense , Vice President of Strategic Initiatives (and ERI’s own EIC) , and Legislative and Policy Director , to talk about the latest news in free speech land, including the Pentagon vs. Anthropic, cancel culture, the rights of non-citizens, and Soapbox!

So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast

FIRE Monthly Member Webinar — March 2026

Timestamps…

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3 months ago · 3 likes · Nico Perrino

This week in FIRE’s blog

• Texas censors get more censorial by

This story represents another chilling development regarding free speech in Texas. Whether it’s shuttering an art exhibit at the University of North Texas, ordering a philosophy professor to remove Plato excerpts from his philosophy course, or canceling a psychology course because the professor refused to censor his teaching, these cases are no doubt just the tip of the iceberg. And that’s really disturbing. Because when universities start scrubbing courses of politically controversial ideas, the lesson students learn isn’t one of history or psychology — it’s fear.

• Maryland bill would end ‘free speech zones’ on public campuses

International free speech stories of the week

• Spain To Deploy Tool To Track Social Media Hate Speech (Barron’s)

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Wednesday announced the creation of a tool to track hate speech on social media and hold them accountable, in his latest measure targeting tech giants.

The tool “will make it possible to systematically measure the presence, evolution and reach of hate speech on digital platforms” with “recognised academic criteria”, Sanchez told a Madrid forum dedicated to the topic.

• Germany uses anti-Nazi law to investigate critic of, er, Hitler (The Times) by Oliver Moody

• Two protesters charged on first day of Queensland’s ‘from the river to the sea’ ban (The Guardian) by Andrew Messenger

Greg on the Run!

Podcast of the week

Check out the latest episode of Win-Win with feat. yours truly!

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