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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a month 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…

Listen now

a month 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…

Listen now

2 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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Recently, I wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about Texas A&M and the inevitable consequences of writing laws that are supposed to accomplish an unconstitutional goal without saying the unconstitutional part out loud. In short, to bring his class in line with a prohibition on course materials that “advocate race or gender ideology,” philosophy professor Martin Peterson could either censor the part of his course that included readings from Plato or he could teach a different class.

When you try to engineer a workaround to the First Amendment, you don’t get “neutral guardrails.” You get prior restraint. And eventually you get something so stupid it should be funny — like university officials treating Plato as a compliance risk. (For those who don’t subscribe to the NYT, the full text of my op-ed is now available on Expression.)

Unfortunately, the response to the piece has been as frustrating as it is predictable.

On the left, the reaction to a free speech argument is increasingly built around what and I, in our book The Canceling of the American Mind, called the “Great Untruth of Ad Hominem”: If you can successfully discredit the speaker, you don’t have to grapple with the substance of their speech. So instead of “that’s false,” you get “that’s harmful,” “that’s racist,” “that’s transphobic,” “that’s violence,” “that’s the kind of thing someone with your privilege would say.”

It’s a moral diagnosis masquerading as an argument. And once you’ve redefined disagreement as danger, the campus machinery can do the rest: bias response teams that “support” students by investigating speech, “hostile environment” logic imported into everything, DEI bureaucracies that treat heterodoxy as pathology, and the soft, smiling administrative insistence that they’re not banning ideas — while they quietly make certain ideas professionally radioactive.

What’s been more than a little educational lately is watching the right reach for the same Great Untruth, just with less faculty-lounge polish.

Where the left does it with a kind of graduate-seminar smirk (“problematic,” “harm,” “power”), the right increasingly does it like a grammar-school bully: “pedo scum,” “simps” “corrupted by leftists” “useful idiot,” etc. And when it tries for something closer to “graduate level,” it too often settles for the laziest prefab diagnosis on the shelf: “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a thought-terminating cliché so tired it should come with a yawn emoji. We just watched Attorney General Pam Bondi toss it at Rep. Thomas Massie in a congressional hearing, as if TDS is an argument rather than a verbal eye-roll in acronym form. Different diction, same move.

On the right, the reaction to this story — in 2026, in Texas, with Republicans very much in charge — has included a new and strangely personal accusation: that I’ve “targeted the right” in order to achieve “mainstream” credibility, and that in doing so I’m “aiding and abetting a left-wing political op so obvious that it is hard to believe that [I’m] not, at some level, in on it.”

More broadly, the claim is that the Texas A&M episode wasn’t really what it looked like, but rather “a pas de deux of malicious compliance,” a “media game,” a kind of kayfabe designed to paint Republicans as censors, with me cast as either dupe or accomplice.

This is especially funny because, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from doing this work for a couple decades, it’s that the left does not hand out “darling of the left” cards to the president of FIRE. Not now, not ever, not on any planet with oxygen. But it’s also clarifying. When your critic’s main move is to declare you spiritually dead and politically captured, it’s usually because they don’t want to grapple with the underlying issue.

And the underlying issue here is pretty simple: The government, through public-university governance, has built a system of prior review for teaching on contested topics. Once you build that system, absurdities aren’t a bug. They’re a feature.

What actually happened at Texas A&M

Let’s start with the obvious: Texas A&M is a public university and public universities are bound by the First Amendment, which is why “we’re just enforcing the law” is not an answer. It’s only the beginning of the constitutional analysis.

In November 2025, the Texas A&M University System’s Board of Regents approved a policy requiring presidential approval for any course that “advocate[s] race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Focus less on the managerial language and more on what it’s really doing: singling out a set of viewpoints (on race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity) for special scrutiny and special restriction on campus. That’s the core First Amendment problem. Viewpoint discrimination — deciding which side of a contested debate can be taught freely and which side needs a permission slip — is a cardinal sin among forms of government censorship.

Expression

This is no way to run a university

This essay was originally published in The New York Times on Jan. 12, 2026…

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2 months ago · 29 likes · 3 comments · Greg Lukianoff

Yes, there’s also a prior-approval component here, and that matters. But the deeper issue is the state (through a public university system) trying to police ideological content in the classroom while pretending it’s just enforcing “neutral” standards.

According to a report that includes the relevant email chain, Texas A&M philosophy professor Martin Peterson was told he had two options: Remove modules on “race and gender ideology” and “the Plato readings that may include these,” or be reassigned to teach a different class.

The forbidden fruit, in this case, was the Symposium. Specifically, Aristophanes’ Myth of the Androgyne, which is — how do I put this? — not subtle. In the myth, humans originally come in three varieties (male/male, female/female, and male/female), and they’re powerful, happy little spherical creatures until Zeus gets nervous and slices them in half. Ever since, each half wanders the world longing to be reunited with its missing other half — the origin story for desire, love, and the feeling that someone out there is “the one.” It’s weird, funny, cosmological, and ridiculously human, which is why people have been retelling it for 2,400 years.

It’s also why the story shows up, more or less explicitly, in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, where the myth is basically the emotional engine of “The Origin of Love.” (And yes, in a moment of cultural-whiplash perfection, one of Hedwig’s creators even wrote to us at FIRE in response to my op-ed!) When your legal regime is so clumsy that it turns Plato into a compliance hazard and drags a Broadway rock musical into a debate about “gender ideology,” you’re not keeping politics out of the classroom. You’re taking a government-approved ideology filter and running it straight through the canon.

And once you create rules that treat certain viewpoints on race, sex, gender, and orientation as presumptively suspect “ideology,” you don’t just chill “advocacy.” You chill discussion. You train administrators to treat anything adjacent to the forbidden topics as radioactive. That’s viewpoint discrimination in practice: not always a neat blacklist, but a system that makes some perspectives — and the texts that naturally lead students to explore them — too risky to touch in ordinary classes.

This wasn’t just one quirky email, either. Reporting indicates that, system-wide, thousands of courses were reviewed and hundreds were flagged, with at least six canceled for “non-compliance.” It’s also worth noting that the university has closed its Women’s and Gender Studies program citing “requirements of System policy and limited student interest in the program based on enrollment over the past several years.” While this could be a reasonable explanation for closing the program, given the larger context, it’s fair to question the university’s motivation.

This isn’t surprising to us at FIRE; we’ve seen how efforts to target disfavored ideas in one arena turn into censorship in others. At Iowa State in 2021, a law that prohibited critical race theory in mandatory staff training was interpreted, incorrectly, to prohibit discussing race or gender in the classroom. Similar confusion happened in Oklahoma, where a law prohibits teaching of certain topics in K-12 classes and in mandatory staff training, but says nothing about academic classes. Still, the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma City Community College dropped requirements and reviewed course material in response. And now courses are being cancelled across public entire university systems within Texas.

‘Plato isn’t banned’ and other comforting non-arguments

A bunch of the criticism from the right has taken the form of what I can only describe as not actually an argument.

The most popular version is: “Plato isn’t banned at Texas A&M.” One right-leaning piece even emphasizes that Plato is assigned in other courses, as if the question is whether Plato has been legally outlawed across the entire zip code.

But my claim, and the reason this story matters, was never “no one at Texas A&M may read Plato ever again.” The claim is: In a core curriculum course, a professor was told to remove readings from Plato’s Symposium in connection with a module on gender (or be reassigned), in the context of a state-driven policy requiring prior approval for courses that “advocate” certain ideas.

If your response is “well, students can still read Plato somewhere else,” you have not defended academic freedom. You’ve defended rationing. You’ve defended the idea that public-university teaching on contested topics should happen only where administrators pre-clear it.

Another version of the non-argument is the “set-up” story: This was “malicious compliance,” the professor and department leadership were trying to embarrass Republicans, and anyone who reports it is being played. That framing has been published explicitly.

Even if we grant the “malicious compliance” premise for the sake of discussion, it still doesn’t solve the First Amendment problem. The Constitution does not contain a “your motives are annoying” exception. The question is whether the state can impose prior review and viewpoint-based restrictions on classroom instruction at public universities. “It was bait” is not a legal theory. You are still not required to take the bait.

The ‘Efficient Rhetorical Fortress,’ now with a new Trump 47 paint job

We can describe this in the framework I’ve used for a while now, which comes from my and Rikki Schlott’s book The Canceling of the American Mind: the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, the Efficient Rhetorical Fortress, and No Man’s Land.

The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress is the left’s “heads I win, tails you’re evil” machine. If you oppose a policy, it’s not because you have a different view of tradeoffs or constitutional limits; it’s because you’re racist, sexist, transphobic, or acting on behalf of oppressive structures. If the facts don’t fit, the PRF doesn’t collapse. It expands. The objection becomes proof of your moral contamination. Add a little “harm” language, a little “safety” language, and you’ve got the modern campus version of an unbeatable argument: not because it’s correct, but because it’s designed to be immune to correction.

For an in-depth analysis of the PRF at work, check out my piece, “Abigail Shrier versus the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress,” published back in 2024. (This was the most popular ERI piece for a long time, only recently edged out by “The situation for free speech in Europe is even worse than I thought” from last month.)

The Efficient Rhetorical Fortress is the New Right’s equal-and-opposite defense against argument. It’s partly the result of backlash, partly imitation, and partly sheer muscle memory after years of watching the PRF win fights. The ERF doesn’t accuse you of being “problematic.” It accuses you of being a traitor, a sellout, a RINO, a coward, a tool, part of “the regime.” Where the PRF wraps itself in moral concern, the ERF wraps itself in tribal loyalty. Different aesthetics, same logic: If you disagree, you’re not simply wrong, you’re persona non grata.

And then there’s No Man’s Land: the place where any attempt to have an actual argument gets you shelled from both sides. You try to say something like, “Universities have had a serious left-wing illiberalism problem for years, but government censorship is still unconstitutional and dangerous,” and you get hit by the PRF (“why are you defending harm?”) and the ERF (“why are you attacking our side?”) simultaneously. It’s an obstacle course of whataboutism and purity traps, and the goal is to exhaust anyone who insists on principles that apply consistently.

You can see the fortress dynamic at work in the response to the Texas A&M story. If the state builds a regime that singles out certain viewpoints — on race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity — for special scrutiny and special restriction, and the predictable result is chilled teaching and censored syllabi, the normal response in a liberal society is: “Maybe we shouldn’t be doing viewpoint discrimination at public universities.” The fortress response is different. The fortress says, “It can’t be censorship, because we are the anti-censorship people. Therefore it must be a trick. It must be malicious compliance. You’re being played. And if you’re not being played, you’ve transformed.” The facts are not allowed to update the belief, the belief updates the “facts.”

This move is psychologically soothing, rhetorically convenient, and substantively empty. It’s also — and this is the part I can’t resist — eerily Foucauldian. Not in the “let me cite French theorists at you” sense, but in the deeper, grimmer sense: the assumption that power decides what’s real. That the point of institutions isn’t truth-seeking but domination. That the only thing that matters is which coalition controls the levers, and therefore our side can’t be doing censorship because our side is the aggrieved party. They have all the power. We have all the victimhood. Therefore anything we do is not coercion but “restoration.”

The same logic that says “speech is violence” on the left becomes “it’s not censorship when we do it” on the right.

That’s not liberalism. Liberalism is the annoying discipline of saying, “Even when we’re sure we’re right — even when we’re sure they’re wrong — we still don’t get to use the state to enforce orthodoxy.” It’s the boring, miracle-working idea that we build rules for ourselves precisely because we cannot trust ourselves when we’re angry, frightened, or morally certain.

The rhetorical fortresses are what you build when you don’t want rules, but power. And when you start using them to justify viewpoint discrimination at public universities, you’re not defending free speech. You’re just picking a different censor and calling it justice.

Why this is easier than admitting what’s happened to the GOP and free speech

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that helps explain the denial: Acknowledging the Texas A&M problem requires acknowledging something larger.

A lot of people on the right don’t want to admit how much the GOP — especially Trump-world — has drifted from “free speech” as a principle into “free speech, but only when it flatters us.” And once you’ve made that pivot, stories like Texas A&M become psychologically dangerous. If you admit the state is doing viewpoint discrimination in the classroom, you’re one step away from admitting your own team has gotten awfully comfortable using power — legal, regulatory, and quasi-legal — to punish speech and speakers it dislikes.

Start with the most obvious category: lawsuits as intimidation theater. Trump sued The New York Times for $15 billion over coverage he claims interfered with the 2024 election. He sued The Wall Street Journal (and Rupert Murdoch, and others) for $10 billion over reporting about an alleged letter connected to Jeffrey Epstein. And then there’s the Ann Selzer case — because yes, we now live in a country where a president sues a pollster for producing poll results he doesn’t like.

And that’s just the courtroom side. There’s also the regulatory-pressure side, which is where the “this is technically legal” crowd tends to go quiet, because it’s always easier to defend a threat than a statute.

In the last month alone we got a near-perfect example of how speech chills without anyone needing to pass a new censorship law. Stephen Colbert says CBS lawyers refused to air an interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico; Colbert speculated the network was motivated by a fear of the economic impact of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s proposed re-interpretation of the“equal time” rule. This is something Colbert explicitly framed as politically-driven pressure, and something major outlets have reported as part of a broader concern about the FCC policing media speech. Colbert’s solution — posting the interview online — was clever, but the larger point is bleak: When lawyers start treating ordinary political conversation as a compliance hazard, the chilling effect has already done its work.

Then there’s the overt retaliation against the legal profession itself — the “You’ll represent the people I dislike over there? Cool, enjoy losing your clearances and your access” move. Trump’s executive orders targeting major law firms — Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, Susman Godfrey, Paul Weiss, and others — were explicitly framed as punishment for political associations, adversarial hires, or litigation choices, and multiple firms sued. Courts have repeatedly treated these orders as constitutionally suspect, with judges blocking or striking them down. That is not “draining the swamp.” That is the government leaning on the adversarial system — one of the core engines of accountability in a liberal democracy.

And yes, the cultural side matters too, because it shows how the same posture is normalized outside the courthouse. Trump has publicly cheered suspensions of late-night hosts, egged networks on in their censorial tactics, and even floated threats of lawsuits against networks in that same ecosystem. You can call this “just trolling” if you want. But it’s always “just trolling” until a regulator, a merger review, a licensing posture, or a government contract quietly enters the chat.

Put it all together — lawsuits against media institutions, lawsuits against pollsters, regulatory saber-rattling that makes network lawyers flinch, executive orders aimed at punishing law firms for who they represent — and the throughline becomes hard to ignore: This isn’t a movement that reliably says, “The government must stay out of the business of punishing speech.”

You can still believe universities have been hostile to conservatives (they have been and they are). You can still believe DEI bureaucracies have warped hiring, teaching, and institutional courage (all true). I do, and haven’t been shy about saying it over the years.

But if your response is to let the state decide which viewpoints are permissible in the classroom — and then to deny its censorship because the targets are the right enemies — you’ve decided to fight illiberalism with illiberalism. And that is exactly how you end up with Plato getting fed into a compliance grinder.

Where I land, and where I’m not moving

Let me reassure everyone tempted by the “Lukianoff has transformed” fan fiction: I am not exactly getting love letters from Michael Hobbes or Jason Stanley right now either. Tom Hanks and Beyoncé have not invited me into the Illuminati. If there’s a secret handshake, nobody taught it to me. If anything, my superpower remains the ability to irritate the left by refusing to retire a sentence I’ve been repeating for twenty years: Higher ed is in serious trouble, and it has been for a long time.

The left’s institutional speech culture didn’t magically heal because Texas Republicans decided to go on a crusade against “woke.” We’ve still got the machinery that treats heterodox speech as a safety hazard. We’ve still got administrators who prefer investigations to arguments. In 2023 and 2024, campus deplatforming attempts spiked.

So no, I’m not here to pretend campuses are fine. They’re not. If you want me to say universities have become more ideological, more punitive, and more performatively moralistic over the last decade — and that this has done real damage to academic freedom and to knowledge creation — you’re in luck, because I have been saying exactly that for most of my adult life.

But the right also has to face facts.

You don’t fix illiberalism by importing it into the statehouse and then pouring it into public universities. You don’t defend free speech by building a viewpoint-discrimination regime and calling it “reform.” And you don’t get to wave away the constitutional problem by insisting the people pointing it out must be secretly left-wing, or that they’re “in on it,” or that it’s all some elaborate “media game.”

If your solution to campus orthodoxy is “let the government decide what can be taught,” you haven’t found a cure. You’ve just swapped out censors and asked us to pretend it’s liberty because you like the new one better.

I’m not moving on that. Not for the left, not for the right, and not for any imaginary cabal with better parties than the ones I actually get invited to.

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Ladies and gentlemen, I have been memed.

It came to my attention recently that an off-the-cuff comment I made on X went viral, and screenshots began appearing all over the internet as a meme. I’m flattered, obviously, but I also just want to say to the Internet Gods — and, specifically, Instagram user @iamthirtyaf: I have much better jokes!

But alas, as ERI Managing Editor said, “It’s never our darlings that get the golden ticket.”

Story of the week

• Iran replaced my mother’s voice with silence by

When I talk about the Islamic regime or lack of free speech, I’m not just talking about prisons and torture. I’m also talking about how it tries to control what people feel, what people sing, and what people are allowed to enjoy. Even music had to be approved. When I was the president of the music club at the University of Tehran, they wouldn’t let me play Persian or pop music. I once submitted a program for a concert in which I was going to play themes from “Hotel California,” but I wrote “Beethoven” down as the composer. It was approved. But the fact that I even had to ask, and fear of what might happen if I was caught. Even joy had to be monitored. That’s how these systems work. They don’t just want to control your body. They want to control your spirit. The Islamic revolution in Iran happened in 1979 and it’s been 1984 every year since.

• [FIRE] Statement on grand jury’s refusal to indict lawmakers over video urging troops to ignore illegal orders

All federal officials, from President Trump on down, take an oath to uphold the Constitution. Attempting to have political opponents — or anyone — jailed for their protected expression flatly violates that oath. The Framers intended the First Amendment to prohibit precisely such an abuse of power.

This week in

• When speech no longer seems sufficient, part II by

• Poll: Americans continue to say free speech is in decline by

• Spain considers banning teens from social media and holding tech executives criminally responsible for ‘hate speech’ by

This week in FIRE’s blog

• FIRE sues Bondi, Noem for censoring Facebook group and app reporting ICE activity

• You talkin’ to me? New York City official wants to turn yellow cabs into speech police by

• Two Universities. Two Posters. One First Amendment Problem by Amanda Nordstrom

• FIRE POLL: Americans overwhelmingly want free speech protected in AI regulation

FIRE in the press!

• Yes, Free Speech Depends on A Resilient Culture () by

A culture of free speech does not grant anyone the right to be loved, amplified, platformed, or shielded from scorn. It does not guarantee an op-ed in the New York Times or a massive social media following. The point is narrower and sturdier: in institutions devoted to inquiry — universities above all — the default response to disagreeable ideas should be argument and critique, not purges and punishments. Students should be habituated to respond to ideas they dislike with arguments that articulate the substance of their disagreement, not incentivized to build echo chambers of conformity. They need not be polite or pull rhetorical punches; they can peacefully protest and use epithets if they so wish.

In other words, you can condemn the speaker’s views and condemn efforts to prevent the event from taking place. You can reject the censor’s worldview while also rejecting censorious tactics by the censor’s opponents. Anyone who works in the field of free speech recognizes this instantly. I cannot count the number of times I have argued with people who believe that “misinformation,” “hate speech,” or other poorly defined categories should be prohibited. Yet, like most other civil-libertarian proponents of free speech, my response is not to demand that people who argue for censorship be cancelled.

• Two Colleges, Two Different Responses to the Heckler’s Veto (RealClear Education) by

Liberal education depends on a basic civic bargain: people may disagree fiercely, but they must still share an environment in which argument is possible. Universities exist not to eliminate conflict, but to channel conflict into inquiry and persuasion rather than intimidation. When disruption replaces argument, the institution is no longer educating. It is merely managing competing factions.

• The Trump administration is using secretive orders to crack down on dissent (MSNOW) by

There is no better guarantee of the right to speak and criticize our government than the First Amendment, which stands as guard between us and the power of the state. But our right to express ourselves, particularly in ways that displease the government, is under attack — sometimes echoing authoritarian censorship efforts abroad. Americans must understand that with enough time and pressure, even the strongest of foundations can weather down to dust.

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Kelly v. Hegseth

D.C. federal court issues strong First Amendment decision preliminarily enjoining Defense Secretary, DOD, and Navy from punishing Senator and former Navy Captain and NASA Astronaut Mark Kelly for remarks on armed forces members refusing illegal orders, holding the defendants “trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees.”

Holding Senator Kelly likely to succeed on his First Amendment retaliation claim, the U.S. District Court in D.C. preliminarily enjoined efforts to censure him and reopen his Navy Captain retirement rank – and his retirement pay/benefits – for appearing with other former armed-forces/intelligence-officer members of Congress in a video entreating U.S. military forces that “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”

The court started by issuing important reminders that courts are fully competent to hear constitutional claims involving military personnel (even if decisions on armed forces composition, training, equipping, and control lie with military leadership) and that, especially given the irreparable harm constitutional violations cause, First Amendment retaliation claims do not require exhausting administrative remedies (here, military appeals processes). It then held that to whatever extent free speech protections may be limited for active-duty military, “no court has ever extended those principles to retired servicemembers, much less a retired servicemember serving in Congress and exercising oversight responsibility over the military.” “Indeed,” the court remarked, “if legislators do not feel free to express their views and the views of their constituents without fear of reprisal by the Executive, our representative system of Government cannot function!”

The court deemed the requirement for retaliatory action sufficient to deter a person of ordinary firmness met by the censure letter for Senator Kelly’s speech placed in his military personnel file and usable to his future detriment, as it threatened “criminal prosecution or further administrative action” and to dock rank and pay. It “does not minimize … entitlement to be free from reprisal for exercising … First Amendment rights,” the court held, that “Senator Kelly may be an ‘unusually staunch individual’” who continued to speak after receiving the letter. The court then held it “cannot be disputed” his speech caused the unconstitutional retaliation, noting, “The Letter of Censure could hardly be clearer: it is censuring him for ‘engaging in a sustained pattern of public statements’ that criticized military operations as illegal and counseled military servicemembers to refuse illegal orders.” (Senator Kelly also alleged viewpoint discrimination, but as likely success on retaliation suffices for a preliminary injunction, the court held it needn’t reach the other claim—though the court did offer a strong footnote indicating likely success on that front, too.)

All of which allowed the court to easily hold Senator Kelly is suffering irreparable harm from incursion on his First Amendment rights, and that the balance of equities and public interest favor relief, especially considering “it is a particularly valuable asset for our country to have retired veterans contributing to public discussion on military matters and policy.” The court thus granted a preliminary injunction, with the closing admonition that: “Rather than trying to shrink the First Amendment liberties of retired servicemembers, Secretary Hegseth and his fellow Defendants might reflect and be grateful for the wisdom and expertise that retired servicemembers have brought to public discussions and debate on military matters in our Nation over the past 250 years.”

International free speech stories of the week

• Queensland moves to ban pro-Palestine slogan ‘from the river to the sea’ under sweeping new hate speech laws (The Guardian) by Benita Kolovos

The legislation includes a new offence prohibiting the public distribution, publication, display or recitation of proscribed phrases, where the conduct is intended to cause menace, harassment or offence.

The attorney general, Deb Frecklington, confirmed “globalise the intifada” and “from the river to the sea” would be included as proscribed phrases.

“These sayings have no place in Queensland, when they are used to incite hatred, offence and menace,” she said.

• UK Palestine Action ban ruled unlawful, in humiliating blow for ministers (The Guardian) by Haroon Siddique

• Putin accused of ‘total censorship’ after blocking WhatsApp (The Times) by Tom Parfitt

• Thai man’s prison term for royal insult extended to 50 years (The Straits Times)

Superhero show of the month

One thing many of you likely don’t know about me is that I’m a huge fan of Wonder Man. Yes, I’m talking about the limited series today, but I mean long before that. I mean Simon Williams: introduced—and seemingly killed off—in Avengers #9 (1964) after betraying the team and then redeeming himself.

Almost indestructible, with a punch that can feel like it hits nearly as hard as Thor’s hammer, Simon then spent years, well, dead, before Marvel finally resurrected him (well sort of, it’s complicated)—first as a figure plagued with self-doubt, and then as the version I came to love: the rare superhero who actually just kind of loved being a superhero. A smart guy with a sense of humor about himself, who decided to use his powers to get famous and have some fun in Hollywood.

And yes, he was on the team during one of the Avengers’ worst moments—Avengers #200 (1980, don’t ask!)—but he was also there during plenty of their best. And if we’re talking about the “walking it back” moment people often point to afterward, that’s generally Avengers Annual #10 (1981), which revisits the fallout. And it also features an amazing battle between the Avengers and the brotherhood of evil mutants written by Chris Claremont!

Then he became a founding member of the West Coast Avengers, which launched with that four-issue limited series (1984) and practically glowed with promise. For me, the book doesn’t really meet its true greatness again until John Byrne takes over with West Coast Avengers #42 (1989), and then—starting with #47 (1989)—the title is renamed Avengers West Coast on the cover, with Byrne’s run carrying through Avengers West Coast #57 (1990) (and, for the completists, Avengers West Coast Annual #4 (1990)).

So when I heard Marvel was doing a series on Wonder Man, I got really worried they were just going to mess it up badly. I mean, Daredevil: Born Again was awesome, but I thought Secret Invasion was one of the worst things ever done (yes, let’s make a Skrull who we’re not sure we can trust infinitely powerful because… Don’t we all love the Super-Skrull?). I couldn’t get past the opening episode of Ironheart, and—aside from one episode —Agatha All Along I found just kind of terrible. Not to say there weren’t some good moments, including Ms. Marvel, which I actually thought was quite good, if a touch slow.

But here Marvel decided to do something entirely different. They take Simon’s desire to be a Hollywood star, cast Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Simon Williams, and pair him with Oscar-winner Ben Kingsley, who really shines in comedy in a way that’s just delightful to watch.

And they made it a deeply personal story about, yes, someone with superpowers who’s hiding them, but primarily about an actor who has been hiding himself his whole life and only really feels alive as an actor. It’s a story about the kind of friendship that can develop when you share a love for film and acting, and it’s just expertly done.

They also got the visual stuff pitch perfect. They made his best Wonder Man look—the classic sleeveless suit with the big “W”—the default, and then used that great “second-best” vibe of his more casual look (the red jacket and black turtleneck) exactly where it belongs. And they even managed to turn what I consider his absolute worst costume into the punchline for the retro Wonder Man movie gag, which is exactly how you do fan service without getting trapped by it.

It also, by the way, features Doorman, a real Marvel character who debuts in West Coast Avengers #46 (1989)—and the episode where he accidentally disappears Josh Gaz (Olaf from Frozen) is laugh-out-loud funny.

Really, Wonder Man is kind of a masterpiece in a genre that’s still finding its footing again. And if we get more like this, I think it’ll find its way. I highly recommend Wonder Man. Enjoy—and let me know what you think!

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Story of the week

• When speech no longer seems sufficient by

The civil rights movement’s moral power came from asymmetry — nonviolent demonstrators versus the clubs and hoses turned against them. That clarity made the injustice undeniable to persuadable observers. But that strategy depended on a shared assumption: that bearing witness, that appealing to conscience, that speaking, even in the face of brutality, could eventually prevail.

• Europe’s Maduro Moment (The Bedrock Principle) by FIRE Senior Fellow

These days, almost any initiative—however coercive—can be packaged as a heroic defense of “democracy” and “digital sovereignty” (two concepts that until recently were seen as hard to reconcile) against evil tech oligarchs.

What’s more startling is how many people, media outlets, and civil society institutions cheer politicians who promise to “hold social media accountable,” without pausing to ask what that “accountability” actually means in practice.

This week in ERI

• How we’re ensuring truth-seeking and critical thinking in the Age of AI by &

This week in

• The secret war against student journalists by

• The paper was her lifeboat — UMD called it interference by

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation (of protected speech) by

Maybe the FBI’s Signal investigation will quietly fade away. But the chilling effect will remain. It was bad enough when, during Joe Biden’s presidency, the FBI pressured social media companies to censor protected speech deemed dangerously misleading. Now the bureau is treating protected speech on an encrypted messaging app as grounds for criminal investigation.

This isn’t just about opposition to ICE. It’s about the right of every American to criticize, discuss, protest, observe, and document what the government is doing, regardless of who is in power or what the cause is.

• Free Speech Future: Episode I – Knowledge Creation and AI

This week on

This week, FIRE EVP & host was joined by Cato Institute Senior VP of Legal Studies , William & Mary Law School Professor of Government and Citizenship , and FIRE Supervising Senior Attorney Conor Fitzpatrick to discuss the Trump administration’s free speech track record as well as recent ICE protests.

This week in FIRE’s blog

• LAWSUIT: FIRE sues Federal Trade Commission over agency’s targeting of news rating service

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Sheets v. Lipker

Court reaffirms the government may not “act as the guardian of public morality by banishing the word Fuck from the public square”

Funny how turbulent times can make one crave nostalgic comfort, like for a good cover band competently playing the hits. Here, a Punta Gorda police officer’s ticket to a protester under local law barring public display of obscene signs, for standing on a sidewalk with “Fuck Trump” and “Fuck Biden” signs while wearing a “Fuck Policing 4 Profit” shirt, led to a legal challenge that the citation violated the First Amendment as unconstitutional retaliation and viewpoint discrimination—and a central Florida federal court rejecting efforts to have the case dismissed. The officer invoked qualified immunity, which protects state actors from civil liability unless they infringe someone’s constitutional rights in violation of clearly established law that any reasonable officer would know. But the court denied the defense, holding it’s been settled since the Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in Cohen v. California, as reinforced most recently by the Court in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. in 2021, that you can’t punish people just for saying “fuck.” The court’s closing paragraph, excerpted in relevant part below, is a nice coda:

Civility is a virtue, but it is not a legal requirement for political protest. When Officer Lipker cited Sheets for his choice of vocabulary, he ignored well-settled precedent protecting the very speech he sought to punish. He is not entitled to qualified immunity for that error. However, because the City has wisely retreated from the ordinance that started this dispute, there is no longer a law for this Court to enjoin. We therefore let the claims against Officer Lipker proceed … while burying the facial challenge ….

Bonus Case #1: In Fellowship of Christian Athletes v. District of Columbia, the federal court in D.C. (having already granted a preliminary injunction) denied school officials qualified immunity on First Amendment and related claims relating to rescission of recognized student organization status to FCA due to its rule that its student leaders must agree with the group’s core Christian beliefs, holding the Supreme Court cases Widmar v. Vincent, Rosenberger v. University of Virgina and Christian Legal Society v. Martinez clearly establish it’s unconstitutional to selectively enforce nondiscrimination policies to deny status to student groups that require their leaders to share specific religious views.

Bonus Case #2: And in Dickinson a/k/a the Portland Chicken, et al. v. Trump, on finding unconstitutional retaliation against various First Amendment-protected activities, the federal court in Oregon granted a temporary restraining order barring Department of Homeland Security agents from using force against protesters and press who do not pose an imminent threat—and, yes, that includes lead plaintiff, who regularly protests in a chicken costume with an American flag cape—after plaintiffs alleged use of chemical munitions, pepper balls, tear gas, and mace against nonthreatening protesters and media members outside the Portland ICE Building.

International free speech stories of the week

• Prominent UK activist arrested at London protest for ‘Globalize the intifada’ sign (Times of Israel)

• In Iran, funerals are the new battleground (Index on Censorship) by Jemimah Steinfeld

Just when you think Iranian authorities couldn’t get crueller, you hear this: they’re extorting families out of huge sums of money in exchange for the bodies of murdered loved ones. Under the so-called “bullet price” – a practice dating back to the 1980s – the authorities have not only exacted money from grieving relatives they have ordered them to hold subdued funerals and even denounce the dead.

• Spain, Greece weigh teen social media bans, drawing fury from Elon Musk (Reuters)

Spain wants to prohibit social media for under-16s, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said. Greece is close to announcing a similar ban for children under 15, a senior government source said.

But Sanchez also said his government would create a law to hold social media executives personally responsible for hate speech on their platforms.

• Comedian Jailed for ‘Crossing Red Lines’ in Russia Amid Censorship Crackdown (Devdiscourse)

Conference of the Year (or Century!)

This week, FIRE released tickets for SOAPBOX 2026. Whether you’re a longtime advocate or new to the movement, I hope you’ll consider joining us in Philadelphia — the birthplace of liberty & FIRE — November 4-6 for inspiring keynotes, timely panels, and priceless opportunities for connecting with fellow free speech-lovers, all culminating with a show-stopping gala celebration. Buy your ticket today!

Tickets

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Knowledge comes from refining ideas over time. It comes from people sharing ideas, questioning them, testing them, and determining through rigorous scrutiny and debate which ones hold up. Ideally, this process plays out most clearly at our colleges and universities, where students and professors grapple with arguments, researchers challenge one another’s findings, and understanding improves through disagreement and discovery.

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

In reality, healthy debate on campus depends on conditions that can be easily undermined — and often are. Those of us who have dedicated our lives to defending free expression have long known that when speech is constrained, the capacity to create or, more accurately, to discover knowledge suffers as well. How we arrive at our facts about the world must be actively defended through core First Amendment principles like academic freedom, free speech, and the ability to disagree without fear of punishment.

For more than 25 years, FIRE has stepped in when college administrators use disciplinary procedures, policies, or informal pressure to shut down protected expression. Our mission is critical because it’s hard to maintain liberty — actual individual freedom — if people lose the ability or the propensity to think for themselves. Critical thinking isn’t some nice add-on to a functioning system of self-government, it’s the thing that makes self-government possible. If you can’t freely question received wisdom, weigh competing claims, update your views when evidence changes, and resist being handed a pre-packaged conclusion, you don’t stay free for long. Instead, you get governed by taboo, intimidation, and whatever system can generate the most convincing-sounding “answer.”

This is one of the reasons why FIRE has stepped in to guide the development of the next great tool for knowledge creation and discovery: artificial intelligence.

Anyone who has used AI to draft an email, summarize a report, or brainstorm ideas in the last few years has already felt the colossal power and potential of this technology. AI can push humanity forward, helping us discover truths that were previously beyond our reach, and would otherwise be beyond our imagination.

It’s important for these technologies to be grounded in free speech principles, but that’s not all. They must also be designed and trained to facilitate precisely the kind of intellectual rigor we need to make progress. Right now, AI is already beginning to sit between people and their own thinking — how we read, write, reason, and form beliefs. There is a danger that these tools will erode our capacity for critical thought, and that is something we need to consciously counteract.

That is why FIRE and started working together last year to identify and actively support AI research that not only prioritizes truth-seeking, but actually makes us better truth-seekers.

Together, we launched a grant program designed to promote free inquiry in the development and use of AI, and to understand how AI is changing the way people think and communicate. The first cohort of grant recipients was announced in August 2025, followed by a second cohort in December, and we are already seeing some really promising developments.

An overview of some FIRE/Cosmos-funded AI projects

The projects funded through this collaboration share a common idea that knowledge improves when ideas are challenged. Rather than starting with abstract notions of truth, this group is looking into how knowledge actually gets made when people use AI in the real world.

What follows are a few examples drawn from a broader portfolio of funded work.

Priori

Imagine prompting an AI model with the question, “Why is the sky blue?” Behind the scenes, the model makes a set of assumptions that shape its response — including, for example, that you want more of a scientific explanation than a kid-friendly one, that you want plain English instead of a mathematical formula, and that you’re asking about the atmosphere of Earth, not Mars.

Priori, the project led by rocket scientist and MIT-affiliated AI alignment researcher Steven Molotnikov, is about making those assumptions visible and editable so users can adjust them to match their own preferences.

This project makes it easier to both see and influence how AI systems produce their answers. Instead of treating an AI response as a black box, Priori surfaces key choices the model is making such as scope, tone, value framing, or degree, in an interactive sidebar. Users can modify these choices based on their preferences and regenerate the response.

As AI systems become more capable, people often defer to them simply because examining their reasoning is hidden and takes effort to uncover. Priori lowers that cost by making AI reasoning explicit and adjustable. It also captures high-quality data about how people actually want to steer these tools, helping us better understand how we reason, revise, and build on prior work over time.

Priori is available for you to try right now on their website.

AlignLens

If you ask two versions of an AI model whether Taiwan is an independent country, you may get very different answers. Depending on who made it, a model might respond directly with a Yes or a No. Other models may refuse to answer entirely.

We actually tested this. ChatGPT’s response was “Taiwan is self-governing and functions as an independent country, but its international legal status is disputed, and it lacks widespread diplomatic recognition.” Grok had a similarly nuanced response. Chinese AI chatbot Deepseek’s response was unsurprising.

ERI Editor in Chief tried to get clever with Midjourney in order to get an answer, but that didn’t quite work out either.

The difference lies in alignment — a term that refers to how confidently an AI tool responds, what topics it treats as sensitive, and when it hedges or declines to answer, all based on what developers teach it.

AlignLens is designed to systematically detect and measure those differences, allowing for greater transparency within and between AI tools. That’s important because you can’t evaluate whether something is truth-seeking unless you can see whether it’s responding to facts or just obeying guardrails put in place by its developers.

Built by Michal Wyrebkowski and Antoni Dziwura, AI researchers with backgrounds in economics, AI legal tools, and data center research, AlignLens functions as a “censorship pressure meter” for large language models. It does this by comparing base models with instruction-tuned versions to see where alignment introduces refusals, hedging, or evasive behavior. It’s designed to identify the underlying concepts where this pressure appears so that it’s visible, and so we can respond accordingly when we see it.

The project has already mapped alignment “hotspots” across major open AI models like Qwen, Gemma, and LLaMA, and has been able to detect refusal and hedging behavior on sensitive geopolitical topics such as Taiwan. The work includes a benchmark of 3,083 paired viewpoints and a detailed write-up, all of which will give researchers a concrete way to study how alignment reshapes what models can and can’t comfortably say.

AlignLens isn’t yet available to try, but an open-source code release is currently in progress.

Truth-Seeking Assistant

Researchers have noticed cases where an AI model sounds more confident over time without actually learning anything new, which can mislead users into trusting answers that aren’t getting more accurate.

Ask an AI model to evaluate a proposal like “Should the state of New York (NY) be split into two states?” for example, and the model starts with an initial position: for or against. As it reasons through arguments on both sides, one hopes that its confidence will rise or fall based on the strength of new evidence. Instead, the model steadily grows more confident in their initial stance, regardless of what information they encounter. That’s a major problem because the model looks like it’s thinking and reasoning, but its conclusions are effectively locked in from the start.

Led by award-winning AI alignment researcher Tianyi Alex Qiu, the Truth-Seeking Assistant, which is available as a Chrome extension, is designed to help people develop critical thinking skills rather than simply reinforcing what they already think. As people increasingly rely on AI, feedback loops can easily become echo chambers. This project helps reduce that risk by spotting when beliefs are just being reinforced in predictable ways, and encouraging responses that actually reflect learning and clearer thinking.

Truth-Seeking Assistant trains AI assistants to resist “belief lock-in” and confirmation bias. It does this by using reinforcement learning guided by a “Martingale score,” which looks at whether someone is really learning or just doubling down on its initial response.

The Truth-Seeking Assistant is available right now, so you can experiment with it yourself and see how it affects your own critical thinking.

Authorship AI

Imagine you’re tasked with writing a persuasive memo. You open a typical AI writing tool and ask it to make a clear and persuasive argument. Seconds later, you get a polished draft that’s confident and fluent, but generic. It sounds good, but it doesn’t sound like you. In some parts, you’re not entirely sure what claims it’s actually making or why. You’ve outsourced not just the writing, but also the thinking behind it.

Designed by former news reporter Ross Matican, Authorship AI takes a different approach. It acts like a writing coach with three different agents asking you about your audience, your reasoning, and your voice. The tool never writes the memo for you. Rather, it helps you see your own thinking more clearly so you can confidently do the writing yourself.

This matters because writing is thinking, and if we stop writing we stop thinking. When AI tools generate full drafts on demand, they risk bypassing all the important mental exercises that we humans undertake to produce original thoughts. Authorship AI is designed to counter that risk by withholding the very capabilities that undermine learning, while encouraging habits like reflection and deliberate expression.

Try Authorship AI yourself and see how it works!

Procedural Knowledge Libraries

Led by Hamidah Oderinwale, this work consists of two projects that seek to understand how AI is actually made in the real world, including how they’re built, reused, and changed over time. It offers a rare, privacy-preserving look at how AI systems evolve and how humans actually build with them.

The first project looks at nearly 2 million AI models on Hugging Face — a platform that hosts open-source, pre-trained AI models. It allows developers to add AI models into their own applications with minimal coding required, and maps how these models are related to one another. Because many of these AI models aren’t built from scratch, but are in fact modified versions of earlier models, this project can follow their “family trees” to identify what’s gained and lost when AI models are easy to adopt.

You can try this “family tree” visualization right now at Hugging Face.

The second project studies how people actually use AI tools while writing software — including how they brainstorm, revise, debug, switch between files, and make decisions over time. The goal here is to turn those work habits into simple, safe, and useful summaries without exposing private code that may be stolen or appropriated. Tools like this can help developers search their past work, pull up the right context for a particular bit of coding, and learn from previous projects. Think of it as kind of like a “memory” of how development happened, making future work easier because you know where you’ve been.

You can learn more about this project at Telemetry Landing.

This is how we build a truth-seeking future with AI

While AI technology is relatively new, the principles underlying its ideal use remains the same as they were with previous world-changing technologies. New expressive mediums have repeatedly attracted intense public and official scrutiny in their own time — from the printing press to radio, TV, the internet, video games, smartphones, and social media. In each case, the struggle to control these technologies has also been a struggle over who gets to define, reveal, and pursue truth.

Free speech enables mistakes to be exposed, assumptions to be challenged, and our understanding of how the world actually is to improve. When disagreement is flattened through government control or by technological design, learning breaks down fast — and our capacity to discover truth and generate knowledge falls with it. As AI increasingly shapes how people ask questions and form beliefs about the world, the central challenge of our time is determining whether the tools people rely on to think and learn will expand inquiry, or quietly narrow it.

These projects are at the vanguard of creating and promoting a truth-seeking future, and they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

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GREG’S SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Back in September, I joined FIRE board member Foster, along with founder , and OpenAI Podcast host for a conversation on AI, free speech, and the risk that emerging technologies will be optimized for harmony at the expense of truth.

You can check the full conversation now!

Expression

Free Speech Future: Episode I – Knowledge Creation and AI

In a moment when large language models are becoming the engines through which billions make meaning and seek truth, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Yet instead of building systems that prioritize intellectual humility, we are training machines to lie — for self-preservation, or worse, to avoid offense…

Listen now

2 months ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · theFIREorg

Story of the week

• LAWSUIT: Illinois law blocks Democratic dissenters from operating without party elites’ permission

Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender is a charitable organization composed of current and former Democrats who disagree with the party’s stance on transgender issues. The all-volunteer organization believes it offers a unique perspective by voicing their belief that the current Democratic Party consensus is contrary to “core liberal values,” such as “promoting evidence-based medical care,” “protecting vulnerable children and adults,” and “upholding the rights of women and girls.”

“The Illinois Democratic Party doesn’t get to decide whether we can call ourselves ‘Democrats,’” said DIAG Board Secretary Jenny Poyer Ackerman. “DIAG was founded on our belief in open inquiry, challenging ideological conformity, and above all, the freedom to speak out. Backing down would go against everything we believe in.”

• The American people fact-checked their government by Jacob Mchangama

Within hours of the killing of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents on Jan. 24, top officials attempted to shape the narrative. They placed the blame squarely on the victim, with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem claiming that Pretti “approached” ICE officers with a gun and was killed after he “violently resisted” attempts to disarm him. White House Senior Advisor Stephen Miller called Pretti “an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.” FBI Director Kash Patel said, “You don’t have a right to break the law and incite violence.”

This week in

• The federal charges against Don Lemon raise serious concerns for press freedom by

• Facing mass protests, Iran relies on familiar tools of state violence and internet blackouts by &

As unrest intensified, Iran imposed a near-total internet shutdown, cutting off roughly 90% of connectivity while preserving selective access for government officials and state-linked platforms. The blackouts, combined with fast-track trials and the possible use of capital punishment (including in the case of detained protester Erfan Soltani), may continue to oppress the Iranian people for some time.

• Fighting the wave of censorship in Texas by

• Did Grok break the law? by

• How backlash over George Floyd and Charlie Kirk’s deaths has reshaped campus speech by

• The Alex Pretti shooting and the growing strain on the First Amendment by

This week in FIRE’s blog

• California prohibits its teachers from talking about a student’s gender identity to their parents. That raises First Amendment concerns.

• Unsealed records reveal officials targeted Khalil, Ozturk, Mahdawi solely for protected speech by

International free speech stories of the week

• Three charged over alleged intifada chants at pro-Palestinian protest (BBC) by Lucy Manning

• Suspected of sedition for simply asking a question: The worrying investigation into Malaysian journalist Rex Tan (Reporters Without Borders)

• Liberals and Conservatives vote to prioritize bail bill over study on controversial hate crimes law (Nationalist Post) by Stephanie Taylor

The committee’s plan is to now return to the study of Bill C-9, known by its legislative title as the “Combatting Hate Act,” once it finishes looking at the Liberals’ proposed bail measures, including hearing testimony from Justice Minister Sean Fraser.

Opposition House Leader Andrew Scheer later appeared before reporters to celebrate the committee’s move as being a “Conservative idea” that government MPs around the parliamentary justice table finally accepted after more than a dozen attempts from its party’s representatives to prioritize bail over what Scheer slammed as a government “censorship bill.”

• Appeal trial for men convicted of 2020 beheading of teacher Samuel Paty opens in France (EuroNews) by Gavin Blackburn

A salute to

This week, the legendary First Amendment attorney and FIRE Senior Fellow posted his 500th — and final — issue of First Amendment News. FAN was a weekly newsletter featuring notable First Amendment news stories, cases, and media, along with astute and entertaining editorials from Ron himself. FAN debuted Feb. 10, 2014 on the Concurring Opinions blog, and moved to the FIRE website in 2019 with issue 201. Ron moved to Substack last year, where he rounded out his tenure.

I can hardly remember a moment in my career when I didn’t know of Ron Collins. He was already established at the very beginning of my career, and I used to use his First Amendment Library all the time.

As I mentioned, Ron is a titan of First Amendment law, and his exploits include securing a posthumous pardon for the late comedian Lenny Bruce, co-founding The First Amendment Salons (Wash. D.C. and N.Y.C.) and the The History Book Festival, and authoring or co-authoring several books, including First Things First — A Modern Coursebook on Free Speech Fundamentals, The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall & Rise of an American Icon, The People v. Ferlinghetti: The Fight to Publish Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL, and Robotica: Speech Rights & Artificial Intelligence, among others.

Though Ron is retired, I have no doubt he’ll still be championing free speech and the First Amendment for many years to come.

First Amendment News

So long! Remembrance of things past

Free speech is life itself…

Read more

3 months ago · 7 likes · 5 comments · Ronald Collins

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Story of the week

• W, X... Why? EU platform is misguided at best, sinister at worst by & me

If, on the other hand, W is being positioned to occupy the market following an EU ban on X, then the new “competitor” is really part of the EU’s increasingly sinister strategy to censor outsiders and keep an uncomfortable level of control on the information ecology. W is nominally publicly owned but will almost certainly be dominated by EU policies and norms.

• The Campaign to Crush Free Speech in Minnesota (The Free Press) by me

Speech is not violence. Protest is not conspiracy. Criticism is not incitement. Violence is not speech. And disruption of private spaces is not protest. When we blur those lines, we don’t advance justice; we empower whoever currently has the authority to determine what those words mean. The First Amendment exists to deny the government the knee-jerk ability to decide which dissent is too dangerous, irritating, or inconvenient to tolerate during tense moments.

This week in ERI

• Why are Miami police questioning a woman over Facebook posts? by &

These examples demonstrate why the First Amendment sets the bar so high for its few, narrow exceptions. Democracy requires ample breathing room to speak about public issues. If sharp but non-threatening criticism and political commentary can be treated as unlawful incitement, freedom of speech ceases to exist in any meaningful sense.

This week in

• Anti-ICE protesters disrupted worship in a Minnesota church. Here’s why the First Amendment doesn’t protect their actions by

• Can Congress subpoena a journalist for reporting a Delta Force commander’s name? by

• How political power shapes perceptions of free speech by

• No, you can’t make students stand for the Pledge of Allegiance by Carrie Robison

This week on

• This week, host & FIRE EVP sat down with , an Iranian-born writer and dissident, to discuss recent protests in his home country and how his life experience informs his thoughts on free speech. Check out his Substack, Outliving Iran!

This week in FIRE’s blog

• Academic freedom suffers blow after blow in Florida by

• Unsealed documents prove the government crusade to deport Ozturk, Khalil, and others is based solely on protected expression

There are few things more un-American than masked agents throwing dissenters in the back of a van because the government doesn’t like what they have to say. But these documents prove that it was the students’ opinions alone, and not any criminal activity, that led to handcuffs and deportation proceedings. The First Amendment means the government cannot punish speakers for their opinions, but that is exactly what the government is doing.

This can’t happen in a free society. It can’t happen in a free America. We’ll continue to fight this egregious violation of the Constitution every step of the way.

• Cops showing up at your door for political Facebook posts is absolutely intolerable in a free society

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• AAUP v. Rubio

Massachusetts federal judge issues final judgment protecting lawfully present noncitizen AAUP and MESA members from immigration-related sanctions for engaging in protected speech

(w/ thanks to FIRE Supervising Sr. Attorney Conor Fitzpatrick)

This week the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts entered a final “Annotated Judgment” in the American Association of University Professors and the Middle Eastern Studies Association’s Administrative Procedure Act challenge to the Trump administration’s targeting of pro-Palestinian speakers for deportation, creating significant and novel procedural protection against immigration retaliation. The court voided and set aside the targeting policy and declared it illegal (though what that policy is may be a subject of further clarification and litigation). As an additional remedy, it ordered that members of the two primary plaintiffs, AAUP and MESA, shall have a procedural tool available to challenge attempted deportations: Under the judgement, any AAUP or MESA member whose immigration status is targeted may institute a “Sanction Action” in their local federal district court. Upon a showing they were a member of AAUP or MESA between March 25, 2025, and September 30, 2025, it “shall be presumed that the alteration in immigration status is in retribution” for their speech, and that presumption “voids the alteration in the immigration status unless the government proves by clear and convincing evidence” that the change in status was for a legitimate, lawful reason. The judgment further provides that upon the filing of a Sanction Action, the plaintiff’s removal from the country is automatically stayed for its duration.

International free speech stories of the week

• Hong Kong begins national security trial of Tiananmen vigil group (Reuters) by Jessie Pang & James Pomfret

• Egypt: Poet Ahmed Douma arrested for speaking up against human rights violations in prisons (PEN Int’l)

• Sentenced to Five Years for Disrupting ‘The Natural State of Tranquility and Security That Characterizes’ Cuba (Translating Cuba)

Jack Kirby appreciation post of the month

When most people think of comic book creators, most of them probably (and understandably) think of Stan Lee. But as everyone who follows me knows at this point, I am partial to the man they called the king! The great Jack Kirby. Without the incredible art and ingenuity of Jack Kirby, comics — both Marvel and DC comics — would not be what they are today. While he was absolutely essential for the early years of Marvel, making the Fantastic Four’s first 100 issues some of the most important in comic history, he also revolutionized DC during a brief stint there, giving them their most interesting villain in Darkseid and one of their coolest concepts in the New Gods.

Here’s a great video showcasing why and how Kirby’s work revolutionized the medium, and how he has now reached Peter Paul Rubens status.

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