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…

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17 days 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…

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20 days 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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2 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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Last month, we marked a bittersweet milestone in the history of my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Our co-founder and my mentor, Harvey Silverglate, decided to step down from FIRE’s Board of Directors after 27 years of service to the organization. He’s moving to the advisory council, so this is not goodbye, exactly. Harvey remains very much Harvey, which is to say deeply engaged, relentlessly principled, funny, warm, and still more capable than almost anyone I know of cutting through nonsense with a single question: What, exactly, is the principle supposed to be here? Still, it is the closing of a pretty important chapter in our organization’s history.

For those who don’t know FIRE well, the short version is that we were founded in 1999 to defend free speech, due process, and freedom of conscience on college campuses. This happened during a period when too many universities were congratulating themselves on their commitment to liberty while simultaneously enforcing speech codes, running sham disciplinary processes, and generally treating basic rights as inconveniences that could be brushed aside whenever administrators found them awkward. We have grown a great deal since then, and the mission has broadened, but the core idea remains quite simple: rights matter most when they are hardest to defend, and they are not rights at all if they belong only to the people your tribe already likes.

That understanding was in FIRE from the beginning, because it was in Harvey.

Long before FIRE, Harvey had already built an extraordinary career as a civil liberties and criminal defense lawyer. His public and principled defense of free expression dates back to the late 1960s, when he represented student anti-war protesters on trial. Since then, he taught at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Harvard Law School. He has also served on the board of the ACLU of Massachusetts for over three decades. In 1999, Harvey co-authored The Shadow University with his FIRE co-founder Alan Charles Kors. It was a book that did as much as anything to explain the campus speech and due process crisis to a broad audience, and helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the organization we now know and love.

But the résumé version of Harvey, while impressive, is not really the point. The more important thing about him is that he belongs to that increasingly rare breed of civil libertarian for whom principle is not a costume and freedom is not a mere slogan. Harvey has spent his life defending liberty consistently — even when it is inconvenient, even when the rights-bearer is unpopular, and even when defending the principle means disappointing people who would greatly prefer that you just pick a side and stay there.

My first experience with Harvey was talking to him on the phone in 2001, looking out my window at a spectacular view of San Francisco from near Bernal Hill Park. Shortly before that, Harvey had asked his former employee Kathleen Sullivan — then dean of Stanford Law School and my law school mentor — whom she would recommend to be the first legal director of this new organization he was launching. She named me. It remains one of the greatest compliments that I have ever gotten in my life. Certainly the most influential one.

I loved talking to Harvey from the start. We discussed all kinds of things, including much of what I liked and didn’t like about The Shadow University. He was trying to sell me on a vision for a new organization — one that would require me to leave this amazing life I had built for myself in San Francisco. That was tough. I loved the city, I loved my friends, and I loved the exhilarating feeling that life there could become almost anything. But I had also always wanted to be a First Amendment lawyer. That was why I went to law school in the first place, after all, and it was what I specialized in once I got there. This was my chance. And while it was a difficult decision, Harvey’s frankness, passion, principle, humor, and warmth were a huge part of why I decided to make the move.

I started at FIRE on October 2, 2001. I became president five years later.

I have made no secret of the fact that I find this to be a challenging job. I have written about that in The Coddling of the American Mind, and I talked about it very explicitly in my appearance on The New York Times’ “The Daily,” podcast — particularly when discussing the way the culture war itself can become simply exhausting.

I don’t mean that in a melodramatic way. I mean that being stuck in the middle of the culture war, especially if you are trying to apply principles consistently rather than tribally, can be alienating in a way that is hard to explain to people who haven’t lived it. I became clinically depressed and suicidal as a result of this work.

When you defend liberals and progressives, your liberal and progressive friends may love you for it. When you defend anyone else, some of those same people can suddenly become furious, as if your principles were only valid so long as they stayed safely inside the tribe. For example, an ex of mine didn’t like that a lot of my work was defending conservatives and Republicans. I told her, “Listen, I’m an old-school ACLU guy. I think even Nazis deserve freedom of speech.” Her response? “I think Republicans might be worse.”

Meanwhile, conservatives often assume that if you are defending lefties, or defending neutral principles when they would prefer a partisan fight, you must be either stupid or morally compromised. I actually almost got into two bar fights in Philadelphia during my early days at FIRE, for the crime of defending lefty professors’ rights.

If you do this work right, you can end up in the unhappy position of doing exactly what you think integrity requires while still disappointing almost everyone who wishes you would become a little more predictable and a lot more tribal.

That takes a toll.

I had my breakdown way back in 2007, and odd as it may sound, I count myself lucky for that. Not because there was anything enjoyable about it, obviously, but because it means that when people come to me now totally burned out, or deeply anxious, or just hollowed out by what the culture war does to the human nervous system, I can say that I’ve already been there. I know that kind of exhaustion from the inside. And while things did get better after 2008, that certainly did not mean everything was rosy after that. The 2010s were still brutal in their own special way — especially as social media amplified every fight, sped up every moral judgment, and made it feel as if all conflict had to be immediate, total, and somehow permanent.

At one point during those years, I asked one of my old bosses how he dealt with being publicly unpopular. To be frank, he gave me some uniquely unhelpful advice: If I cared what people thought, there must be something wrong with me, probably something traceable to childhood damage.

Well, fine. Of course I have that. I think most people do.

But I care what some people think because I’m not a sociopath. Human beings are social animals. That is not a flaw in the design; it is part of the design. Hume understood that. Adam Smith understood that. (This is currently top-of-mind because I just finished the fantastic book The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought by Dennis C. Rasmussen). Our moral sentiments are bound up with our social instincts, and our desire to be respected by people we ourselves respect. So I never found “just stop caring what people think” to be especially useful advice. If you really did not care what anyone thought of you, it would not make you enlightened, it would make you alarming.

Thankfully, Harvey gave me much better advice.

At first I wasn’t sure he even had any. He just seemed so unflappable, so genuinely hard to hurt — which also seemed surprising, given that he was so warm and clearly loved people so much. But his advice was very simple and very impactful. In fact, it was the best advice I have ever received in my life.

He told me to pick my ten.

You can have friends whose opinions you don’t take seriously, and you can have opponents whose point of view you very much do. So, pick your ten. Figure out who the small number of people are whose judgment you genuinely trust, the people who know you well enough and love you enough to tell you the truth when you’re wrong, when you’re being unfair, when you’re getting carried away, or when — to use the technical term — you are full of shit. Then, when the crowd is screaming, when the internet is losing its mind, when strangers are confidently informing you who you are and why you did what you did, bring it back to those ten. Ask yourself what they would think. Ask yourself whether they would be disappointed in you. Ask yourself whether they would tell you that you had acted unfairly, or out of vanity, tribalism, or cowardice. Or even better, go and ask them yourself.

This was life-changing. In an instant, Harvey had given me a mechanism for blunting the impact of endless anonymous adversaries, trolls, critics, and sycophants. It helped me enormously, and I still think about it all the time.

Now, I should be clear that, as it is with all good advice, I have not always followed it perfectly. I still sometimes find it hard not to care what people outside my ten think. But remembering to bring it back to them, and checking myself against what they think, has made me far happier and far saner, even as the culture war and the threats to free speech have gotten worse. Harvey’s advice has given me a way to distinguish between criticism that matters and noise that only feels like it matters because it arrives at such an overwhelming volume (in both senses of that word).

As I said earlier, I’ve lost people due to the work I do. Dear ones. Ones that it still hurts to think about. People whom I love but could never understand why I had to defend what they saw as “the bad guys” alongside those they approved of and agreed with. But I am also very lucky in the composition of my ten. I’m still best friends with my best friend since I was three, and with my best friend from high school. They will always tell me if I’m full of shit. They are not impressed by public drama, and they are not intimidated by it either. They know me too well. That is part of why their judgment is so useful.

For a long time, I did not hand out Harvey’s “pick your ten” advice very often. I didn’t know that many people who were in a situation as difficult and alienating as my job can sometimes be. For a long time, I thought this was advice for people living under a peculiar kind of pressure: people in public life, people stuck in the middle of ideological warfare, people who spend their days being denounced by one side for not hating the other side enough, and denounced by the other for not joining the bar fight.

I no longer think that.

At this point, most of us are living with some version of that pressure. The culture war has become a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week force in American life, and has been for a while. It invades friendships, families, workplaces, schools, and the portal to the universe that sits in all our pockets. This new paradigm has trained us to confuse visibility with significance, outrage with insight, and the judgment of strangers with moral reality. A lot of people who have never thought of themselves as public figures now live in a constant low-grade state of exposure, agitation, and social vigilance.

One consequence of this is that Harvey’s recommendation is no longer niche advice for a handful of people with especially public jobs. It is useful for almost anyone trying to keep their sanity and decency in a society that makes it very easy to lose both.

So, pick your ten. Make sure they are people who really know you. Make sure at least some of them are capable of telling you hard truths without cruelty or relish. Make sure they are not merely people who agree with you, but people whose judgment you trust more than you trust your own mood on a bad day. And then, when the world starts trying to get into your head, bring it back to them.

It’s the best advice I ever got, and I got it from Harvey Silverglate — a man whose contributions to my life and the organization I now lead cannot be overstated.

I love you, Harvey. You transformed my life. You gave me, and gave so many of us, an organization we are deeply proud to work for. Thank you for finding me in San Francisco. Thank you for the example you set, for the steadiness you brought.

And most importantly, thank you for the wisdom you gave me at exactly the right time.

It was long past time I paid it forward.

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Rather than continue talking about him, I should just let the man talk for himself! Here is a great profile FIRE just did in — you’re kidding me?! — 2013?! It was that long ago? Oh dear God, I’m old.

Well, it still looks great and really gives you the flavor of this great figure in the history of American free speech (and one of my favorite people on the planet)!

Stories of the week

• 1AX: Free speech and political violence

• The four kinds of Trump voters by

This week in ERI

• The Pentagon’s Anthropic ultimatum and the case for the ‘separation of power and truth’ by me

This week in

• Who controls private AI systems in a free nation? by

AI systems are powerful expressive systems. They generate language, shape ideas, consume and interpret knowledge, and embody the values embedded in their design. The developer has the right, protected by the First Amendment, to make decisions about what capabilities to include or exclude. Anthropic isn’t willing to remove safeguards from its models for use in autonomous weapons targeting or domestic surveillance. Those limits reflect a deliberate expressive choice about what tools the company is willing to build, including what it is willing to provide to the government, and what its existing AI system is capable of achieving.

• After a professor’s hot-mic racial remarks, Hunter College faces a free speech test by

• Hamit Coskun wins Quran-burning case, but threats to free expression linger in UK by

• Professors are inviting dialogue. That’s not the same as free speech by

• Calls for censorship are a familiar wartime mistake by

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• CAIR-Foundation, Inc. v. DeSantis

Florida federal court holds state’s governor cannot unilaterally designate Muslim civil rights group a “terrorist organization” and withhold government benefits from anyone assertedly providing it material support or resources

A federal court in the Northern District of Florida granted a First Amendment challenge in preliminarily enjoining an executive order issued by the state’s Governor designating the Council on American-Islamic Relations as a terrorist organization and denying it or “any person known to have provided [it] material support or resources” any “contract, employment, funds, or other benefit or privilege” from any state agency, county, or municipality. CAIR challenged the EO as unconstitutional retaliation for its speech, viewpoint discriminatory, and violative of its rights to petition and of association, but the court held the EO’s unconstitutional coercion of third parties to disassociate from CAIR was enough for a preliminary injunction.

The court first held CAIR has standing to challenge the EO even if based on how coercion of third parties to cut ties creates a prior restraint on CAIR’s future speech, rather than on direct censorship of CAIR. It held injury-in-fact lied given a Florida-based production company withdrew from producing a podcast with CAIR due to the EO, and the South Florida Muslim Federation publicly disassociated from CAIR-FL (a state-level affiliate) while explicitly citing the EO, after the state’s Attorney General, ahead of the Federation’s conference in Coral Springs, said on social media the city “should remember that state and local resources cannot be used by any organization affiliated with CAIR” so the city commission “is on notice.” “In short,” the court held, CAIR “has been publicly designated a terrorist organization from Florida’s bully pulpit and continues to suffer for it.”

Then, citing Supreme Court law that both dates back to 1963’s Bantam Books v. Sullivan and was reaffirmed as recently as 2024 in NRA v. Vullo, the court explains that: “Where a government uses the threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion to achieve the suppression of disfavored speech, it functionally creates a system of prior administrative restraints that bears a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity”—and this case, the court notes, “bears all the hallmarks of unconstitutional coercion that the Supreme Court identified in Bantam Books and Vullo.” On the Vullo factor of the state actor’s authority, the court held it is “at its zenith here” where the Governor “is Florida’s head of government and controls Florida’s executive branch and cabinet agencies.” Next, on whether alleged coercive communication is understood as a threat or inducement, the court cites the EO as “sweeping and clear” that “[a]ny relationship with [CAIR] will be punished by cutting off access to all benefits even peripherally within Defendant’s control.” And regarding reactions from coerced parties, between the production company and the Federation, recipients “interpreted the EO as a threat to disassociate … and responded accordingly.”

The court then held it “need not determine whether intermediate scrutiny or strict scrutiny applies … because, under either standard” the Governor “fails to point to any evidence justifying his indirect censorship of Plaintiff’s speech.” And it rejected his argument that “to the extent any speech is involved, ... the EO nevertheless passes muster” under the Supreme Court’s Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project decision, noting “authority to designate a foreign terrorist organization under federal law is subject to procedural safeguards that are absent from” the EO. So, the court ultimately concludes: “The First Amendment bars the Governor from continuing the troubling trend of using an executive office to make a political statement at the expense of others’ constitutional rights. The Governor’s decree coerces third parties, under threat of losing government benefits, to disassociate from [CAIR], thereby closing avenues of expression and suppressing CAIR’s protected speech.”

It thus enters a preliminary injunction, and refuses to stay it pending appeal – though it enjoins enforcement of the EO only as to CAIR and not its state-counterpart CAIR-FL “or any other organization named in the EO” – followed by a wrap-up that among other things notes the ease of targeting minority-group speech and George Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport extolling religious tolerance, concluding: “The Constitution protects Plaintiff’s speech just as it protects any other organization’s lawful speech from suppression by governmental coercion of third parties.”

Bonus Case: In the FIRE-litigated Kershnar v. Kolison case of SUNY Fredonia removing a philosophy professor from teaching and barring him from campus since early 2022 for philosophizing on the underpinnings of adult-minor sex taboos on two podcasts he appeared on outside his instructor’s role on his own time away from campus, the court denied a motion to dismiss the First Amendment challenge to the punishment, holding debate about moral and philosophical justifications for criminalizing adult-child sex is a matter of public concern, that any graphic parts of his comments were not gratuitous but part of a broader discussion of age-of-consent laws, that the university repeatedly failed to identify credible threats against Kershnar or other security concerns to outweigh his free speech rights, and that banishment from campus effecting a no-contact order with colleagues and students is a prior restraint.

International free speech stories of the week

• Ministers urged to investigate students’ posts mourning Ayatollah (THE)

• Dubai Police Threaten Arrest for Social-Media Posts Contradicting Officials (WSJ)

• How Germany’s unusual approach to fighting antisemitism is ensnaring Jews who are critical of Israel (JTA)

• UK Counter Terrorism Police release insane video on Instagram

As I posted on X, “It’s positively dystopian to scare the hell out of kids and their parents about their responsibility to censor themselves on behalf of the state.”

Video of the week

When I was invited to speak at UVU in the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder on their campus, I felt a moral obligation to show up. At a moment marked by shock, grief, and anger, it was important to stand for the principles of free expression and peaceful engagement. In light of FIRE’s release of the latest episode in our 1AX series—focused on political violence and specifically the muder of Charlie Kirk — here are my full remarks from my visit.

BONUS: Citation of the week!

• ERI Managing Editor cited by Congress!

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Control over the tools of knowledge is control over knowledge itself. That’s the principle behind every press licensed, every book banned, every broadcaster fined. Power wants control over truth. Power has always wanted that. It will never stop wanting that. And once it gets even a finger on that lever — whether it’s through regulation, contracting cascades, “supply chain” designations, or emergency authorities — it will no longer need to announce that it’s shaping reality. It will just…shape reality. We will see when the powerful want us to see, and we will be blind when they want us to be blind.

Right now, AI is the most powerful tool of knowledge creation we have. Many of us are cynical about its promise and its products — so cynical that we’d be willing to let the government reach out and take control of it. And last week, we saw the government do just that.

On Friday, the Trump administration picked a fight with one of the biggest AI companies in the world. On Saturday, the U.S. launched major combat operations against Iran, Iran hit back, and the whole country’s attention turned to a larger fire. By the end of the weekend, Friday’s story was effectively buried.

That’s the tempo now. Friday’s “This has real ramifications” becomes Monday’s “Wait, that was Friday!?”

So let me put a flag in the ground at the start, because this piece is headed somewhere bigger than the daily headlines.

Friday’s story is a reminder of something we’re going to have to say out loud, over and over, whether it’s fashionable or not: The separation of truth and power — the separation of government from the tools we use to ask and answer questions — just became more important than ever.

If we’re talking about AI as a truth-seeking tool, as the interface between human curiosity and attempted answers, then the worst outcome of the current wave of AI cynicism is that we build — out of fear and fashionable pessimism — a government backdoor into it.

What happened between The Pentagon and Anthropic, before it gets buried again

Late last week, the Pentagon delivered Anthropic a “best and final” ultimatum: Give the military full “lawful” access to its AI chatbot Claude without corporate carve-outs, or lose the relationship.

The deadline was Friday.

Anthropic declined. Publicly, their line has been consistent. They have said they will support national security work, including in classified environments, but they also draw two bright boundaries: no mass domestic surveillance of Americans, and no fully autonomous weapons. And while they did choose to work with a department that oversees the military (and employs people to make weapons of war), companies don’t sign their beliefs away when contracting with the government.

It’s easy to hear those two boundaries and think this is mostly a debate about scary sci-fi endpoints: killer robots and a surveillance state. And yes, those are real, concrete moral red lines. But they’re also the kind of red lines that hide the deeper categorical mistake people keep making about AI. Claude isn’t just a weapons component, and it’s not like Microsoft telling the Department of Defense that its word processor can only be used for messages of peace. It’s a system that talks, explains, summarizes, argues, and refuses — a system that sits in the middle of human inquiry. So when the government pressures a company to erase its carve-outs and treat the model as fully “lawful-accessible,” it isn’t only pushing for capability. It’s pushing for control over the rules of speech inside a truth tool.

And that’s why I’m talking about “truth” here: because the fight underneath the fight is about who gets to set the boundaries for what questions can be asked, what answers can be given, what gets declined, and what becomes professionally unsafe to say out loud.

In other words, mass surveillance and autonomous weapons are the obvious dangers. The less obvious danger is what happens when the state learns it can use its contracting power — and the threat of emergency authority — to reach into the epistemic layer itself; the layer at which truth is discovered and decided. Once you accept the premise that government gets to dictate the internal policies of a general-purpose system that mediates inquiry, you’ve already accepted the principle that power can steer truth-seeking. The rest is just paperwork and precedent.

Once Anthropic refused to play ball, President Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using their products (with a phase out). Soon after, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth branded Anthropic a national-security “supply chain risk.”

In the defense world, this is the kind of designation meant for situations like foreign state control of a platform, compromised update channels, coerced access, and hidden dependencies — problems that can turn a vendor into a villain.

And it doesn’t just hit the company wearing the label, either. The moment the Pentagon uses that phrase, every prime contractor and subcontractor hears the same message: touch this, and you may be torching your own contracts. People don’t need a formal prohibition to start backing away. Risk departments and lawyers do that work automatically. This designation is treated as something closer to blacklisting than ordinary contract drama.

Hovering over the exchange was the detail that should have dominated the weekend, which was reporting that Pentagon officials discussed using the Defense Production Act as leverage in the dispute. The DPA was passed in 1950, in response to the start of the Korean War, and grants the president power over American industries in the name of national security. The idea was to ensure the prioritization and production of necessary materials during times of emergency, when those materials may be scarce. It was certainly not intended to allow the president to bully private companies into doing whatever he wants. But that is, in effect, what he’s using it for.

Adam Thierer has been warning for years about the DPA getting repurposed into a general tech-policy lever, turning an emergency production statute into an expansive tool for steering algorithmic development.

The government’s invocation of the DPA last week should have been an outrage, but then the Iran strikes swallowed the news cycle. The thing is, though, the Anthropic story didn’t get less consequential after war began. It just got easier to miss.

As I said on X on Thursday, the government had the very simple and fair option of buying from someone else if Anthropic didn’t meet their requirements. Instead, they’re trying to make Anthropic radioactive. And to accomplish what? The government quickly contracted with OpenAI, who maintains similar red lines. The switch doesn’t make sense unless the purpose was to punish Anthropic.

That’s where the free-speech issue shows up in plain English. Not because the government declined to sign a contract, but because the government aimed its power at the rulebook for what a private system will and won’t say.

I’ve discussed this before on ERI, but it bears repeating: With AI, “speech” isn’t a metaphor. It’s the outputs. It’s the refusals. It’s the internal rules that decide what the model will help with, what it will facilitate, and what it will decline to do.

The combination of “radioactive” labeling and emergency-authority threats teaches the entire industry that independence is conditional. If the government is simply making ordinary procurement decisions based on performance, cost, or mission alignment, there is little constitutional issue. But if it is using contracting power as leverage to punish protected expression, that should be taken very seriously.

Even companies nowhere near the Department of Defense will start asking themselves a quiet, dangerously chilling question: Could they do this to us next?

We want Reno v. ACLU, not a Federal AI Commission

We’ve already faced this choice once with a transformative communications technology.

In the 1990s, the internet triggered panic. Congress responded with the Communications Decency Act. The impulse was familiar: a new communications tool creates some real harms and a lot of moral hysteria, so Washington reaches for the master switch.

The Supreme Court refused. In Reno v. ACLU, it struck down the CDA’s core censorship provisions and treated the internet as what it actually was: a vast forum for speech, not a broadcast medium requiring paternal supervision. That decision didn’t deny that the internet would create problems. It recognized something more important: giving government general authority over the infrastructure of expression is a cure that turns into a permanent disease.

That’s the model we need for AI.

The model we do not need is the FCC model. The FCC began with an ostensibly bounded problem of allocating scarce broadcast space. Over time, it became a durable bureaucracy with elastic authority and the predictable tendency to treat every new communications controversy as justification for more discretion, more oversight, more leverage, more power.

Now imagine that “public interest” logic aimed not at the airwaves, but at the interface people use to ask questions. The tool people use to think with. The operating system for truth.

That’s how you end up with the Federal AI Commission. Do we want that? FAIC no!

We can’t give the government control of AI without giving up control of truth, too

AI is quickly becoming our society’s epistemic infrastructure: the tool people use to ask questions, find information, summarize, argue, test, translate, and ultimately decide what they think. In other words, it is increasingly woven into how people make sense of information and, ultimately, how they understand the world around them. That’s why the separation that matters most now is the separation between truth-seeking and power.

When government gains leverage over the systems that mediate inquiry, it gains leverage over inquiry itself. You don’t need overt censorship. You don’t need show trials. You don’t even need a “Ministry of Truth.” You just need a backdoor that grants you the ability to nudge the operating system for truth toward whatever the people in charge find convenient with actual truth-seekers none the wiser.

That’s why the current wave of AI cynicism worries me. And I don’t mean skepticism here. Skepticism can be healthy. I really do mean cynicism. In particular, I mean the kind of cynicism that serves as a pretext for building permanent government authority over AI. This is authority that will not be used sparingly, and will not stay limited to the administration that created it.

This, however, is not the popular take right now. The fashionable mood is “tech caused all our problems, therefore tech should be supervised by the state.” And while that mood is understandable, it’s also how you sleepwalk into the worst possible outcome.

AI creates specific, different, and difficult problems. It can, for example, be used to mislead and deceive people in much more efficient and effective ways, with deepfakes and the like. We can talk about them. We should talk about them. Companies should fight about them loudly, both in public and inside the industry. Competition should remain fierce. Consumer pressure should matter. Liability should be the consequence of real wrongdoing. And we shouldn’t lose sight of the tools we already have available to counteract those problems. FIRE Senior Fellow wrote a fantastic article for recently about how powerful the truth still is, even amid our new technology.

The line I don’t want us to blur is the line between government and the epistemic layer itself. The irony is that the headline fears — killer robots and mass surveillance — are already bad enough to keep you up at night. But even those nightmares don’t justify building a permanent government grip on the epistemic layer. Once that grip exists, it won’t stay confined to weapons systems or intelligence programs; it will seep outward into whatever becomes politically urgent next — health, elections, “misinformation,” dissent, you name it.

Once the state gets its grubby mitts on the operating system for truth — once it has a reliable way to steer what models can say, what they can refuse to say, and what questions become professionally unsafe — the downstream damage is not limited to AI. It becomes a problem with knowledge creation itself.

And that brings me to the principle underneath this whole thing; the one that made me care about this in the first place: Free speech is not only how knowledge gets made. It’s also knowledge itself.

This ties into what I call the Pure Information Theory of free speech. Sincere speech tells you what someone believes. And yes, that belief may be mistaken. It may be confused. It may even be destructive. But the belief still exists in the world, and a truth-seeking society needs to see it to understand and respond to it. Even lies are evidence about how the world is. They point to incentives, fear, pressure, corruption, status games, and more — all of which is valuable information about the minds that are both operating and operating in the world around us.

Freedom of speech isn’t just a moral principle. It’s an epistemic principle. It’s how error gets exposed and corrected. It’s how truth gets separated from falsehood. It’s how a society avoids becoming blind to itself.

The philosopher Karl Popper described knowledge as progress through error elimination — conjectures and refutations. John Stuart Mill warned that silencing dissenting opinion rests on the assumption of infallibility, and that even true ideas decay into “dead dogma” without challenge. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson emphasized that our freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much.

Taboo is the enemy of knowledge. Think about that in the context of AI — perhaps the most powerful potential tool for truth seeking and knowledge creation we will ever invent — and you start to see why this moment is so important. Hopefully, you’ll also start to see why the separation of this tool from the influence of power is the only way to safeguard the future.

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

FIRE Executive Vice President and host of the podcast hopped across the pond recently to participate in a debate at the Cambridge Union, one of the world’s most prestigious debating societies. The resolution was “This House Believes In The Right To Offend,” and Nico did an incredible job emphasizing how fundamental free speech is to all the things we hold dear, even if that sometimes means hearing things we hate.

Stories of the week

• The decline of confidence in higher ed by Nate Honeycutt

• My take on alleged coercion of Anthropic by the federal government

This week in

• Six signs of student press censorship by

• Netflix and…chilled? New UK rules target ‘harmful or offensive’ streaming content by

This week, communications regulator Ofcom announced “enhanced” regulation for video-on-demand services with more than 500,000 UK-based users. Some of the requirements will address accessibility features such as subtitles, but there will also be a significant focus on the aired material itself: specifically “harmful or offensive material.” Platforms with user bases of this size will be subject to a forthcoming video-on-demand code modeled on rules already in place against stations like the BBC.

• What FIRE’s critics get wrong about our ICE app lawsuit by

• Australian police raid Canberra bar’s artwork under new counter-extremism legislation by

• Do K-12 students have the right to walk out in protest? by Adam Goldstein

• NY attorney general threatens to remove school board members over trans comments by Jacob Roth

• Bad cop: Brendan Carr’s manipulation of the FCC’s equal-time rule shows why it’s a bad idea to give federal regulators power over broadcast speech by Bob Corn-Revere

Carr frequently cites the “public interest” requirements imposed on broadcast licensees, but that general obligation to serve the public (that is, to provide broadcasting service) has never been understood to give the FCC power to restrict particular programs, and it would be unconstitutional if it did. He neglects to note that both the FCC and the courts historically have interpreted the public interest standard to require broadcasters to exercise independent editorial judgment, and not to follow the whims of some government functionary.

This week on So to Speak

This week on So to Speak, host & FIRE EVP sat down with Jeff Kosseff, a nonresident senior legal fellow at The Future of Free Speech and author of The United States of Anonymous, to discuss the legacy of anonymity in the United States.

This week in FIRE’s blog

• Taking ‘black’ out of Black History Month by

• Victory! High school clears publication of stalled student articles after FIRE’s intervention by

• Six signs of student press censorship by

• Renew your domain or lose your voice by

• FIRE statement on the University of Texas System Board of Regents adopting guidelines for ‘controversial’ topics in class

FIRE in the press!

• The FTC’s Threats Against Apple News Are Baseless by &

Apple’s First Amendment rights aren’t limited by the fact it’s a technology company, despite the FTC’s attempt to frame it as an issue of the platform’s terms of service. This kind of inquest is about as transparent and lazy as censorial pressure can get. But the consequences of letting it slide can be fatal to free speech and a liberal democracy. If the government can supplant a website or app’s interpretation of their subjective terms of service with its own, the FTC could easily censor any ideas it doesn’t like by threatening to punish an alleged “failure to live up to” them.

• Senate’s new AI regulation bill nightmare for free speech and your wallet (Richmond Times-Dispatch) by & (free version)

AI is an expressive tool, much like a camera or the printing press. And just as it was with those technologies, the introduction of AI into our culture and discourse will profoundly disrupt the way we’re used to receiving, creating, and interpreting information. It already has. But the First Amendment does not contain an exception for artificial intelligence or misinformation, and these attempts to legislate our way out of the challenges they pose threaten the fundamental rights that keep us free. As always, the appropriate remedy for false and misleading speech is more speech, not government suppression.

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• In re Search of Real Property and Premises of Hannah Natanson

Federal judge rescinds authorization for government to open, access, and review Washington Post reporter’s seized laptops, mobile devices, and portable drive, to allow court to conduct its own review instead of “unsupervised, wholesale search” by the feds’ “filter team”

The U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia issued an order seeking to balance First Amendment and newsgathering rights of the Washington Post and its reporter Hannah Natanson against law enforcement interests in investigating and prosecuting the alleged unlawful transmission and retention of classified national defense information by a government-contractor employee.

Natanson used Reddit and Signal, accessed via phone and laptop, to develop nearly 1,200 confidential federal employee sources at more than 120 agencies—averaging up to 100+ tips a day, allowing her to write or co-write 200+ articles—whose identities she worked to protect given their need for anonymity due to fears of government retribution. As part of its investigation of classified defense materials, government lawyers sought an expedited search warrant for information thought to be in the reporter’s possession, citing a first-person article she authored. Though the court denied the warrant multiple times over concern about its proposed scope and apparent intent to identify confidential press sources, it ultimately issued one “limited to records and information … received from or relating to” the contractor employee. The FBI controversially executed the warrant at the reporter’s home, seizing two laptops, and a mobile phone, portable drive, recording device, and smart watch (while also issuing the Post a grand jury subpoena for basically the same information). After asking the government to not review the seized material until a court could weigh in, and being refused, the Post and Natanson intervened in the search warrant case to move for return of the devices on grounds they contain material protected by the First Amendment and/or attorney-client privilege.

The order on that motion chides the government for not bringing the court’s attention to the federal Privacy Protection Act, which bars government officials from searching or seizing “work product” or “documentary materials” held by those “reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, … broadcast, or other similar … public communication.” After a bit of mea culpa (“the Court acknowledges … it did not independently identify the PPA when reviewing the warrant” but “had never received such an application”), and noting the government’s failure to flag the PPA “seriously undermined … confidence in the [its] disclosures in this proceeding,” the court held that “seizing the totality of a reporter’s electronic work product, including tools essential to ongoing newsgathering, constitutes a restraint on the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

That left the court to address both the “complicating factor … that classified national security information may be among the seized material,” and “the need to identify and protect classified information before any materials are returned,” by deciding between the government proposal for its own filter team “with an appropriate protocol, … to search all of [the] data” and the Post’s and Natanson’s view that they or the court must conduct the review to protect First Amendment and attorney-client privileges. The court resolved that tension by holding that “[b]alancing [the] First Amendment … and newsgathering rights against the government’s compelling interest in its prosecution,” makes it “reasonable for the government to retain only the limited information responsive to the search warrant—and nothing more.” It noted: “Given the documented reporting on government leak investigations and the government’s well-chronicled efforts to stop them, allowing the government’s filter team to search a reporter’s work product—most of which consists of unrelated information from confidential sources—is the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of the Washington Post’s henhouse.”

So, the court granted in part and denied in part the motion for return of property, rejecting “the government’s request to conduct an unsupervised, wholesale search of all [the] seized data using a government filter team” in favor of the court doing that review itself. It thus rescinded the portion of the original search warrant authorizing the government to open, access, review, or examine any of the seized data, and ordered return of all but the limited information authorized by the search warrant—i.e., all non-responsive information on the devices. But that necessitated denying the Post’s and Natanson’s motion as to the limited information authorized by the search warrant, and denying without prejudice the request for return of the seized devices, until after developing a process for independent judicial review of the seized materials (in consultation with the parties) and then conducting said review.

International free speech stories of the week

• German prosecutors say calling Merz Pinocchio covered by free speech (DPA)

• Thailand: Free Speech Activists Get 32-Month Sentences (HRW)

• $750,000: B.C. Human Rights Tribunal orders payout in ruling against former school trustee (Canadian HR Reporter)

Reel of the week

In the interest of engaging folks in this brave, new, “post-literate society” I’ve been told we’re now living in, this week I tried something new; posting short-form video content about anything and everything that happens to pop into my brain at any given moment. The first clip explained a bit of my reasoning, and the second clip (included above) responded to breaking news regarding claims that the federal government may be attempting to coerce the AI company, Anthropic, into altering its code. But no cause for alarm, yee faithful Substack subscribers, I’m not going anywhere. You’ll still have thousands-of-words-long pieces to look forward to here on ERI every couple weeks! But in the meantime, enjoy seeing more off-the-cuff, short video content. Let me know what you think and some topics you want me to talk about in future ones!

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Story of the week

• German chancellor echoes the frequent — and illiberal — call to end online anonymity by

It’s one thing to praise the value and benefits of speaking out under your true identity, but German citizens have reason to be troubled by Merz’s comments. For one, given the extent to which Germany and European nations regulate internet speech, Merz and other officials may indeed push for further rules that require social media users to post under their real names. Second, and most importantly, what you post online can already have consequences in Germany. There are very real risks of telling the world who you are when you tell them what you think.

This week in ERI

• Plato, ‘Gender Ideology,’ and the Efficient Rhetorical Fortress by me

This week in

• Why do students at hyper-liberal colleges seem more tolerant? by

• America’s most controversial publisher by

• Ruling on Palestine Action ban casts even more doubt on UK’s troubling mass arrests of peaceful protesters by

• Deep dive into New York’s proposals to ban demonstrations near houses of worship

• This is no way to run a university by me (originally published Jan. 12 in the New York Times)

• Fandom’s lighthouse in a sea of censorship by

This week on

• This week, FIRE opened our monthly member webinar to the public. COO , Legal Director , Director of Public Advocacy , and Campus Advocacy Chief of Staff answered viewers’ questions on topics ranging from Stephen Colbert’s fight with the FCC to social media censorship, anti- and pro-ICE cases on campus to the Don Lemon arrest, and more.

So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast

FIRE Monthly Member Webinar — February 2026

Timestamps…

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3 months ago · 1 like

This week in FIRE’s blog

• He refused to censor his syllabus — so Texas Tech cancelled his class by

• FIRE statement on Stephen Colbert’s James Talarico interview and continued FCC pressure

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Johnson v. Fliger

California federal court preliminarily enjoins application of state community college DEIA requirements to history professor’s teaching and scholarship, work with a DEIA-opposed campus group, and speech as a public academic or private citizen

The federal court for the Eastern District of California issued a preliminary injunction on a professor’s pre-enforcement, as-applied challenge to prohibit Bakersfield College and Kern Community College District from enforcing against him two California Code of Regulations provisions that require “teaching, learning, and professional” practices that reflect diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility and anti-racist principles, and demonstrating “proficiency in DEIA-related performance to teach, work, or lead within California community colleges.” The court held the professor showed his intended speech in opposition to DEIA regulations and state DEIA policies involves matters of public concern, and that to the extent the rules chill that speech in his teaching or scholarship, his work with the Renegade Institute for Liberty (a campus “dissident faculty” group opposed to DEIA), or as a public academic or private citizen engaged in extracurricular speech, they implicate his First Amendment rights. In fact, the court held, “it is hard to envision how any reasonable interpretation” of “‘teaching [and] learning ... practices’ would exclude his course lectures and classroom discussions” or that, “if defendants determine [his] speech does not sufficiently ‘reflect DEIA ... principles,’” how he avoids “being found to be failing in ‘DEIA-related performance’” such that “his job would be on the line.”

The court then held defendants failed to identify any legitimate administrative interests that outweigh the professor’s speech rights (while noting they agree he is “free to express his views in his scholarship and teaching” as well as “outside of his employment with his ‘off-duty’ speech”). Rather, the court held, they asserted “merely a generalized interest” in “efficiently carrying out [the State’s] educational mission, ensuring teaching excellence, and in securing equal education opportunity for students,’” and “in being able to ‘review the content of faculty scholarship and teaching,’ ‘favor particular scholarship interests and approaches,’ and establish ‘academic standards for the quality and method of delivering instruction to students.’” A public college does have, the court noted, “a legitimate interest in exercising certain control over its curriculum and in ensuring faculty members’ compliance with academic and teaching standards,” such that “the First Amendment would not protect a faculty member who fails to satisfy a minimum level of academic competence, or … who insists on lecturing a captive student audience at length on his personal political views rather than teaching his assigned math course.” But the administrators here neither cited any speech by the professor that would fail to meet such academic competence or course requirements, nor alleged that regulating his speech is “required to prevent discrimination or harassment” or that he “intends to engage in derogatory speech entitled to lesser First Amendment protection.”

At the same time, the court held the professor failed to establish likely success on his challenge to the requirement that he complete mandatory DEIA training in order to participate on faculty screening committees, citing the government’s authority to express views through such training and the absence of record evidence showing it requires the prof to personally endorse government views or perspectives as his own. The court also held the professor’s role in his official capacity on the College’s Equal Opportunity & Diversity Advisory Committee involves government speech rather than his own First Amendment-protected activity, as he did not show the role is sufficiently connected to scholarship or teaching. And the court also held the professor not likely to succeed on his facial challenge to the DEIA rules—given they “apply to a range of non-speech conduct” “such as grading anonymously, using lower-cost course materials to reduce student costs, or creating additional opportunities to discuss feedback with students [that] constitute ‘DEIA-proficient teaching, learning, and professional practices’” under the regulations—as he thus failed to show the rules prohibit a substantial amount of protected speech relative to their plainly legitimate sweep.

So, the court entered a preliminary injunction barring application of the DEIA requirements to the professor’s teaching and scholarship, his work with extracurricular groups, and his public speaking as an academic or private citizen, carrying out its charge on remand from the Ninth Circuit, which had revived the case last summer (an outcome for which FIRE advocated) for consideration of preliminary injunctive relief in the first instance, after the district court had originally dismissed it for lack of standing.

International free speech stories of the week

• Musk launches landmark legal battle against ‘biased’ Brussels over €120m fine (The Telegraph) by James Titcomb

• VPN crackdown in Spain, as LaLiga raises against pirates (Cybernews) by Paulina Okunytė

Clip of the week

FIRE Executive Vice President and host of the podcast was on CNN this week to discuss the FCC, Stephen Colbert, and what the actual rules are when it comes to broadcasting.

To quote Commissioner Gordon:

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