Early one gray morning in late April 2026, I found myself walking around Copley Square alone, cheering.

I was in Boston for a gathering of people from across the political spectrum worried about the future of small-l liberalism. The city had gone unusually cold overnight, which suited me fine. The Irish, British, and Russian parts of my family tree have never entirely understood why other people complain about gray skies. I went out for coffee before the conference sessions started, and it was just cold enough that I could occasionally see my breath whenever I laughed or took a sip. It made the effect more theatrical than the weather probably deserved, which was unfortunate for anyone hoping not to notice me. My laugh has never been accused of subtlety. To people crossing Copley Square, I probably looked like an overcaffeinated man listening to a playoff game.

But I was actually listening to Yale’s newly released Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education, which I had converted to an audio file from a PDF, something I do all the time (it lets me keep moving). And every so often, I literally cheered in response to what I was hearing.

Yale president Maurie McInnis had appointed ten faculty members to investigate why Americans had lost so much trust in higher education and what Yale itself ought to do about it. She also gave them wonderfully dangerous instructions for any committee: “think big, tell the truth, and entertain controversial ideas.”

They did.

The report confronted problems FIRE and I have been talking about for much of my twenty-five-year career: political homogeneity, free speech, self-censorship, grade inflation, administrative bloat, academic rigor, and the increasingly murky question of what all this enormous institutional machinery was actually for.

It cited a ratio of thirty-six registered Democrats to every Republican across Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Law School, and School of Management. That’s bad, though hardly the worst in elite higher education. Nearly a third of Yale undergraduates did not feel free to express their political beliefs on campus. The median grade was an A. Yale’s published annual cost was $94,425 plus travel. And the real amount of money Yale spends per student per year is probably closer to $200K–which may sound nice until you realize how many students that amount of money could educate the hell out of if spent more judiciously.

But what had me cheering was the premise underneath the report, which was that maybe the public had noticed something.

This sounds like a very low bar until you’ve spent a quarter century watching higher education respond to criticism. I’ve often joked about what I call the Silver Spoon Rule. The name owes a little to the Golden Rule, but much more to the rules preferred by the silver-spoon set: It can never, ever, ever be elite higher education’s own fault… even when it obviously is.

And to my delight, Yale had broken the Silver Spoon Rule.

I found it genuinely moving. Vindication is pleasant, particularly after years of being told that things you could plainly see were exaggerated or somehow your fault for noticing. But vindication wasn’t really the emotion that had me making noises at strangers in Boston. It was hope. Ten professors at one of the world’s most powerful universities had been willing to consider that their institution, their profession, their colleagues, and perhaps they themselves had gotten some important things wrong.

That willingness is rarer than intelligence.

I came away thinking that maybe genuine reform of American higher education was finally possible. And then I thought about the headwinds and the many interests that want higher education to continue, or even deepen, its status-quo downward spiral.

And then I may have made an even worse decision: I decided to write a wee, little article about the chances for reform and how the higher-education mega-industry will protect itself. How badly could that go?

The summer vacation that wasn’t

My original idea for this project was a long article about Yale’s report, what I had learned during twenty-five years at FIRE, and why I thought this moment mattered so much. Back in August I started researching in earnest, when I was supposed to be taking something resembling a vacation.

I technically took time off, I just never stopped working.

Over the years of working closely with technology, I have learned that I can be in constant motion and keep writing and researching through a combination of listening to books, dictation, and now interacting with artificial intelligence, even when I’m at the gym. Now when something gets its hooks into me, I can leap out of bed and start working almost immediately, then keep going until I finally put my phone down at night. And having an AI research partner available at any hour removed even the modest restraint imposed by other people’s need to sleep. I did far too much of that over the summer. Unfortunately, knowing that and actually stopping are two very different talents, and I appear to have invested heavily in only one.

The subject also mattered to me too much to put down. My biggest fear is that we’ll squander a rare moment of genuine momentum toward reform, and the next opportunity won’t come until the next inevitable disaster caused by ideology, groupthink, and organized direct action. I don’t want to have to wait for another catastrophe before universities take seriously what they (and everyone) already know.

So I read obsessively. I went back to the campus culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, to Neil Gross, John K. Wilson, Donald Downs, and, of course, Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate’s The Shadow University — essentially FIRE’s founding document. I reread work I had been arguing with for decades and chased down new research on faculty politics, academic standards, grade inflation, governance, and how this gigantic industry protects itself. Then came the reports from Yale, Harvard, Vanderbilt and Washington University, and Cornell. I would find a study, chase its footnotes, and emerge hours later with three more books to read.

Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth’s It’s Not Free Speech was particularly clarifying, though hardly in the way its authors intended. I had long favored giving faculty more power over academic governance instead of leaving everything to administrators. As I’ve written before, Bérubé and Ruth convinced me, rather abruptly, that some influential faculty weren’t the least bit interested in fixing the problems at all and would make them much worse if given greater authority to decide which views and which scholars were acceptable.

We’ve known an enormous amount about what needed fixing for fifty years, and I have spent my entire career talking about it. What I wanted everyone else to understand this time was why so much evidence, so many warnings, and so many perfectly foreseeable failures had produced so little lasting reform. The answer is that largely vested interests within higher education are incredibly skilled at kicking the can down the road, accusing their opponents of political cooties, and otherwise obscuring problems that everyone knew higher education had back when I was in grade school, aren’t really problems and… hey, everybody look over there!

The project kept growing. The article became a short book, threatened to become a long book, shrank into a proposed feature article, and then grew again because every round of cutting seemed to take away some of the best points and language. It was a process of expanding and squishing it back down, then expanding and starting fresh, only to expand again. Several times I was sure I was almost finished, which was an unusually persistent delusion.

I’ve always dictated essentially everything I write, so technology has long been part of my writing process. AI made the dictation much better, and I thought using it as a research and writing partner would make a big project go much faster. I suspect it actually slowed me down. It kept drastically rewriting me, bleaching away distinctive language and strong opinions and replacing them with the disembodied vaguely somewhat Greg-like gray mush. That was infuriating, but I learned some useful lessons about how to make AI improve my writing instead of trying to turn me into a particularly cautious committee.

Working through this history kept bringing me back to two connected ideas. One is Home-Field Advantage. Higher education is a trillion-dollar industry that produces, certifies, and polices much of what our society treats as authoritative knowledge. Its own experts often get to decide which criticisms of the industry count as serious, and far more powerfully which topics should be largely ignored or forced to jump through so many hoops that the critics just give up. And its customers include an extraordinary number of genuinely happy alumni, many of whom now occupy positions of power throughout American society. The institutions have enormous prestige, money, influence, and sentimental loyalty on their side. Try arguing against your own alma mater when half your friends went there, your boss’ name is on a building, and everyone is wearing the sweatshirt.

The other idea is what I call the Academic Filibuster. When critics document political bias, censorship, ideological conformity, or institutional dysfunction, defenders of the status quo can demand more evidence, a better methodology, a different denominator, another survey, or another committee to assess the last committee. FIRE has been clearing every hurdle only (to badly mix a metaphor) to see the goalpost moved gradually closer to infinity. When the standard of proof keeps changing in only one direction, skepticism becomes a highly effective instrument of delay.

A university doesn’t have to vote against reform. It can simply declare the ones demanding reform are, well, icky (an anti-intellectual habit if there ever was one). Or it can simply schedule another meeting. And when the people with the home-field advantage are also the referees, the meeting can last a very long time.

But something has shifted. Now some of the country’s most influential universities are finally acknowledging problems they spent decades minimizing. Will serious change actually follow, or will the same machinery run down the clock again?

That brings me to this project, and the rather unique way I’d like to work through its next phase.

A Substack publishing experiment and a fundraiser for FIRE

Rather than forcing this all into a conventional book or chopping it down to fit a magazine, I’ve decided to publish Breaking the Academic Filibuster here on The Eternally Radical Idea in installments over the next six weeks. The first paid installment follows this introduction, right now, in this post. And the idea is, I want your help and insight.

I particularly want feedback from readers who’ve followed my work for years, and from those of you who know parts of this subject better than I do. Tell me what I’ve missed, where I’ve been unfair, what I got wrong, and whether the solutions could actually work. I intend to use your comments to improve the whole thing, then release a finished, freely available article before the end of the year.

That’s the goal, anyway. I’ve learned not to make especially confident predictions about this manuscript.

I’d also love to use the series to raise some money for FIRE. This isn’t a new arrangement, of course. All the proceeds that would ordinarily go to me as the Substack author go to FIRE instead, and always have. Substack takes its share; FIRE gets the author’s share. We simply haven’t pushed paid subscriptions very hard until now because our priority has been getting our work and message out there. We appreciate those of you who have chosen to support us regardless, and we hope you’ll continue doing so. We also hope more of you will consider joining the fold as we roll this project out. If you’re a promoter and defender of free speech and a fan of FIRE, your paid subscriptions are a great way to help us keep this work going!

It’s also a pretty economical way of doing things. A book of mine might retail for about $30. A month or two of paid ERI is a pretty reasonable way to read this one as it comes out — especially since it includes perks like getting to argue directly with the author, help shape the book’s final form, and help fund the organization I’ve devoted 25 years to.

We’re also planning more premium ERI material in the coming years, and I would love it if The Eternally Radical Idea became a genuinely cash-positive enterprise for FIRE. You can help us make that happen, while also contributing to a project that might just move the needle in the right direction for higher education.

I’ve published several books the traditional way, and a great editor is invaluable. But I would be delighted if Substack eventually made much of the existing book-publishing model unnecessary. Why shouldn’t a writer be able to choose the length, publish while the subject is still urgent, get serious feedback from readers along the way, earn money, and produce a better finished work without waiting for the machinery of conventional publishing to clear its throat?

I love the idea that the people reading a book might help make it better before it becomes a book. And after spending two months arguing with word counts, formats, and an AI that was determined to make me sound less like myself, the prospect of having more control over how I publish is awfully appealing.

I don’t know if this experiment will work, but I’m excited to try it. And if you have advice about how to make this whole damn thing shorter without losing the good stuff, I’d be particularly grateful. I’ve been trying since August.

That’s it for the preamble. What follows is the first installment of Breaking the Academic Filibuster, which you can access by becoming a paid subscriber to ERI.

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Stories of the week

• VICTORY: New Jersey drops complaint against school board member targeted for asking constituents about taxes ()

“New Jersey did the right thing this time, and we are grateful Gail’s case brought more attention to the First Amendment rights of school board members,” said FIRE Senior Attorney Greg Greubel. “But this attack on Gail’s free speech rights never should’ve happened in the first place. FIRE will be paying close attention to what New Jersey does next. If we get wind of another ethics complaint being used as censorship, we are not afraid to sue again.”

• Douglass versus the Mobocrats by

Douglass’ opposition to the heckler’s veto did not demand reverential silence from the audience. In 1862, Douglass gave a speech that viciously attacked both President Lincoln’s and General McClellan’s war efforts. A member of the audience got so vocally upset at Douglass’ remarks that he was about to be expelled and “handled roughly,” yet Douglass intervened and insisted that his critic be “heard patiently by the audience.” In “Self-Made Men,” Douglass observed that speakers could be as indebted “to the men who hiss, as to those who applaud.” Hostility could sharpen arguments and amplify a speaker’s message. Read alongside his denunciations of suppression, this suggests a distinction between opposition that leaves room for an answer and disruption that prevents a hearing altogether. Once again, Douglass resisted Milton’s Curse — free speech for me, but not for thee — while retaining the moral high ground and conceding nothing of his powerful argument.

• Flock is using trademark law to silence critics by

Flock Safety sells surveillance cameras that track the public’s movements. But apparently, the company doesn’t want you to know how extensive its surveillance apparatus is or to hear criticism about it — and the company will engage in intimidation to keep it that way.

This week in

• Restoring Title IX kangaroo courts is no solution to the ‘Cornell 7’ sexual assault controversy by

The need for basic due process protections should be as nonpartisan an issue as one can imagine, given that nobody, Democrat, Republican, or otherwise, would choose to be subjected to a kangaroo court should they be the ones accused.

• After a congressman challenged a student reporter’s right to record, here’s what journalists should know by

• A UK teen mocked a local politician. Then the police showed up by

• Campus deplatformings hit record high by

FIRE in the press!

• A new Gulf between Alabama and press freedom (Al.com) by

In an age where Americans increasingly get their news from social media, it may be that public radio escaped lawmakers’ notice when enacting a statute that puts words in the mouths of government employees. But whether intended or not, the consequence is that an institution historically — and constitutionally — relied upon to hold the government to account will have a harder time retaining the public’s trust that it will be up to the task if forced to follow the State’s marching orders.

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

CNN v. Trump

D.C. federal court preliminarily enjoins revocation of White House press passes as likely violative of the First and Fifth Amendments

[with thanks to guest author FIRE Chief Supervising Attorney Conor Fitzpatrick]

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has converted a temporary restraining order it issued recently against revocation of White House press passes into a preliminary injunction, holding CNN, MS Now, and Politico are likely to succeed on the merits of their claims that the revocations violated their First and Fifth Amendment rights.

Relying on decisions by the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. in Sherrill v. Knight and Karem v. Trump from 1977 and 2020, respectively, as binding on the point that “White House reporters have protectable due process rights in their hard passes,” the court held the government did not give the media companies fair pre-deprivation notice of what conduct could subject them to having the passes revoked. Putting a finer point on it, the court stated: “social media posts and statements expressing … that Plaintiffs’ reporting is inaccurate or biased … hardly amount to ‘formally articulated and published’ ‘explicit and meaningful standards’ that would satisfy due process” under D.C. Circuit precedent.

Though the court’s TRO had solely addressed plaintiffs’ due process claim, its preliminary injunction order additionally held they were likely to succeed on their First Amendment claims. The court held the revocations amounted to unlawful viewpoint discrimination and retaliation, citing social media efforts to justify them as warranted for assertedly unfavorable media coverage by the plaintiff media organizations. (This expansion of the ruling may well reflect the request by plaintiffs’ counsel at the preliminary injunction hearing for the court to rule on all claims, so the D.C. Circuit can address all potential bases for relief in the event of an appeal—which, in the few days between the decision and this post, has already been lodged.)

The court rejected government attempts to justify the revocations based on “national security,” holding that the statements explicitly tying the revocations to a belief that the organizations engaged in unfair coverage “suggest[] that ‘national security’ was merely a post-hoc justification for the decision” issued by government attorneys in court. As such, the court held the media organizations satisfied the remaining preliminary injunction factors insofar as deprivation of First Amendment liberties constitutes irreparable harm, the public at large has an interest in assuring individual newsmen are not arbitrarily excluded from sources of information, and there was no countervailing government interest given “there is practically nothing national security-related in the record.”

International free speech stories of the week

• Sally Rooney says she can no longer sell books in UK due to Palestine Action support (The Guardian) by Haroon Siddique & George Francis Lee

• Mexico to force Meta, TikTok, and X to better protect minors on platform (Al Jazeera)

The decree establishes that digital platforms must, by design, restrict exposure to content involving violence, harassment or sexual abuse, as well as immediately remove any risky material from the profiles of minors.

Sheinbaum said on Wednesday that the government would back legislation to penalise companies that fail to implement the decree.

“If no progress is made, it would become a law,” she told a news conference on Tuesday.

“The goal is for digital platforms to take on some of the responsibility and refrain from disseminating, promoting, or spreading content related to this type of information — including criminal acts or violent behaviour,” Sheinbaum had said earlier when she indicated she would introduce the decree.

• Turkish authorities raid TV channel as press freedom groups warn of a crackdown (AP)

Sneak peak of the week

Next week ERI will begin publishing The Academic Filibuster, a new series on higher ed reform which I was inspired to write after reading the Yale Report earlier this year. It’s taken me on a long and winding road, and preoccupied me on what should have been a vacation this past summer, but it contains ideas for higher ed reform which I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

We’ll most likely be paywalling all or parts of it, at least initially, and I hope you won’t mind. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, I see it as an opportunity to raise money for FIRE, since all subscription revenue goes directly to supporting FIRE’s work. Second, rather than having to buy a new book, you’ll be able to read the whole thing online as it’s published, and, importantly, offer your feedback while it’s still in draft form. I’m genuinely interested in hearing what readers think, including what they think I’ve gotten wrong!

So if this sounds like something you might be interested in and you’re not already a paid subscriber, now is the time to sign up! I hope many more of you will join us, help shape this project, and support the work of the best little free speech group in the business.

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Stories of the week

• Rooster’s wings clipped: Ohio political blogger found guilty in explicit Shrek meme trial (ABC) by Morgan Trau

An Ohio political blogger let out a surprised laugh as he was found guilty of harassment after he sent an explicit digitally altered image of the cartoon character Shrek to a powerful lawmaker.

After just thirty minutes, eight Lake County jurors decided D.J. Byrnes was guilty of telecommunications harassment against state Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland), after he sent him two taunting messages and a meme of Shrek holding his genitals.

• These Minnesota Parents Were Censored at a Public Meeting for Saying School Employees’ Job Titles (Reason) by

Regardless of what district policy or Minnesota law says, the Foley school board trampled on the DeMaraises’ First Amendment rights. When a school board opens a meeting to public comment, it can’t censor its constituents for criticizing school staff, much less simply naming them or mentioning their titles. A government body can constitutionally restrict some speech during a public comment period, such as limiting comment to a maximum allotted time or ensuring it’s on topic, but all those restrictions must be reasonable and viewpoint neutral. In its treatment of the DeMaraises, the Foley Public School Board has hit the trifecta, violating its own policy, state law, and the First Amendment.

• Was Frederick Douglass a free speech absolutist? Part 2 () by

More than 130 years after his death, Douglass still has something to teach the thin-skinned who want free speech for themselves but not for their critics. It has become all too common for politicians and public figures to sue or threaten legal action over attacks that Douglass would have ignored or answered with facts and arguments.

This week in ERI

This week in FIRE’s blog

• FIRE sues Los Angeles City Council over policy banning certain words during public comment

This week on

• This week on , host & FIRE EVP spoke with with Escaping Venezuela director Jim Epstein and narrator about how the regimes of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro dismantled Venezuela’s free press, silenced dissent, and eroded democratic institutions. They also discussed the persecution of journalists and dissidents, and Venezuela’s prospects for restoring democracy.

International free speech stories of the week

• Saudi Arabia has sentenced a foreign worker to death over a Facebook post. Why isn’t there a bigger outcry? (The Independent) by Alisha Rahaman Sarkour

Sri Lanka is calling for the international community to help save a young man from execution in Saudi Arabia, where he faces the death penalty for insulting the Prophet Muhammad on social media.

Anojan Sivarasa, 24, a migrant worker from Kalmunai in the Eastern Province, was sentenced to death last month for posting a blasphemous comment on Facebook.

• Macron Attacks Free Speech and Urges the EU to Censor Online Posts Faster

He had some choice words for the American concept of free speech, which he said is “the opposite of free speech.” According to him, “there is no freedom if there is no limit on my freedom, which begins with the freedom of others and respect for a common framework.”

• [UK] Social media users face passport checks to enforce under-16 ban

• Hong Kong: Tom Cruise film Digger pulled from Hong Kong cinemas ahead of National Day release, censors tight-lipped

Movie of the month

My movie of the month is Backrooms, a new, low-budget classic. It’s creepy and claustrophobic, at once an old-fashioned and innovative horror, and I found it really impressive.

The film is the feature debut of Kane Parsons, who started making his “Backrooms” videos as a teenager, using Blender, and built a huge following on YouTube. A24 gave him a budget of only about $10 million, which paid for roughly 30,000 square feet of physical sets built on Vancouver soundstages. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as a man who disappears into an endless maze of yellow rooms hidden behind a furniture store, and Renate Reinsve plays the psychologist who goes in after him. Mark Duplass is also in the cast. It became A24’s biggest opening ever and has made close to $400 million worldwide.

My only complaint is that Reinsve didn’t seem ideal for the part of the psychologist. But overall, if you like horror, I suspect this is a movie people will be paying tribute to in a decade. Check out Backrooms.

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When Trump makes a puzzling or counterintuitive move, does anyone really still think he is playing seven-dimensional chess* — distracting us from the real plan by throwing us some red meat in the form of a crazy news story or executive action? I certainly don’t think so, but there does still seem to be a temptation to ascribe a much deeper game to Trump than the evidence requires.

To be fair, I do hear less of this than I used to, which is probably healthy. People have had decades at this point to get used to Trump’s methods. The distraction tactic, in particular, is hardly a secret anymore (I mean, if Saturday Night Live has been calling you out on it for ten years, the cat is out of the bag). But every now and then the old instinct still triggers in people and they can’t help but ask, What’s the real play? What does he know that we don’t? What is happening three moves from now?

Before we dig in deeper, a quick note about where I’m coming from: FIRE has spent its whole history taking on administrations of both parties, and we generally talk more about what an administration does than about the personality of the person running it. That is partly legal discipline, and partly the discipline of trying very hard to remain genuinely nonpartisan. On ERI, though, I speak for myself. Of course, I generally agree with FIRE — I run the place, after all — but sometimes I take an argument a little further, get a little more personal, or say the part that an institutional statement probably should not.

I really do try to avoid getting into the personality or character of the public figures we have to deal with in this work, but Trump’s nature seems to be the only way to explain some of his censorial behavior. His second administration has produced repeated free-speech fights over press access, lawsuits against news organizations, subpoenas, and other uses of government power affecting speakers and journalists. When the president then publicly explains why he is angry at those same people, pretending that the person at the center of the chaos has nothing to do with the analysis becomes artificial.

Anyway, I got another little whiff of the old what is he really up to instinct from my TV-buddy Michael Smerconish recently. I went on his show after Trump announced that CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were being banned from the White House. Michael’s first reaction was, “What is it he doesn’t want us talking about?”

To be fair, that was a perfectly reasonable question, and Michael put the dilemma nicely: “Ignore this issue and I become an accomplice. Take the bait and I’ve given you exactly what you wanted: a TV segment about a legal non-starter.”

And I certainly do not think Michael was wrong. Trump absolutely uses distraction. He has spent decades understanding how to make himself the story. I just offered another possibility: “It could be a deeper plan, or it could just be impulse control.”

What I meant, obviously, was lack of impulse control. Live TV ate the two most important words.

The more I watch this second administration, the more I think some of what looks like strategy may be closer to muscle memory — a habit that worked for decades, became deeply ingrained, and now gets activated almost automatically. A tactic can work so well for so long that eventually you may stop remembering why you started doing it in the first place.

So is there a strategy? Kinda. I think there certainly was a strategy at one point. And whether it is conscious, habitual, or some messy combination of the two, I keep coming back to three rules that seem to govern Trump’s behavior:

Rule One: Keep your name in the media.

Rule Two: Always stay on offense. Always.

Rule Three: Lawsuits are to create a consequence, not necessarily to win.

These rules can be effective. They can dominate the news cycle, exhaust and impose enormous costs on opponents, and intimidate people who do not have the money or appetite for a prolonged fight.

But then Trump runs into the recurring problem of… Trump, which throws it all out of whack. Let’s break the three rules down to explore how.

Rule One: Keep your name in the media

One of my favorite facts about Trump’s career is that, back in his New York real estate days, he sometimes allegedly called reporters pretending to be a Trump Organization spokesman named “John Barron” and proceeded to tell them interesting things about Donald Trump.

Most celebrities hire publicists. Trump apparently looked at that arrangement and thought, Why introduce inefficiency into the system? He could be Donald Trump. He could be Donald Trump’s spokesman. And, most importantly, both of them could spend their time talking about Donald Trump.

The practice of using fake names in this way was pioneered by the president’s father Fred Trump, who used “Mr. Green” as a sock puppet when he didn’t want landowners to know a wealthy developer was interested. But the President’s relationship to John Barron was still beyond that. Mr. Green lied about who wanted to buy a lot. John Barron lied about things like that, too, but also about Madonna wanting to date his boss. Mr. Green was a business tool; Mr. Barron was Aesop for the fable of Donald Trump.

Truth Social is basically the technological perfection of the John Barron strategy. John Barron doesn’t have to call anybody anymore. Trump can put Trump into the news whenever Trump wants. Whatever else you think of the President, he understood something very early that the rest of American culture would eventually learn from social media: attention is not merely the downstream effect of power, it is power.

Rule Two: Always stay on offense. Always.

The second rule is even simpler: Never stop attacking.

Since returning to office, Trump has filed three new lawsuits against major news organizations: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the BBC. A pre-existing case Trump had filed against CBS for $16 million was settled by parent company Paramount during a highly scrutinized merger with Skydance. Trump also re-filed a pre-inaugration lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer, in which FIRE represented Seltzer, and which was dismissed late last month.

Separately, as of July 30, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documented 15 subpoenas or other legal orders from the Department of Justice during Trump’s second term: a dozen subpoenas, two arrest warrants, and a search warrant. Separately, the Department of Homeland Security issued three administrative subpoenas (that is, issued without prior judicial approval) to service providers seeking records related to Georgia Fort, Don Lemon, and most bizarrely, the YouTube accounts of six journalists, ranging from left-leaning Democracy Now! to right-leaning Megyn Kelly.

Have there been more subpoenas since? Maybe; these demands are often secret. Until someone opposes them or they’re raised in a future proceeding, there’s no meaningful way to quantify them. And if the purpose of some of these processes is to intimidate or retaliate, there might not be any future proceedings.

And then, of course, there’s just what Trump says. The Trump Anti-Press Social Media Tracker, which tries to quantify the president’s online attacks on media, counts 426 posts in the 245 days between January 22, 2026 and September 23, 2026. That averages out to slightly more than one post every 14 hours, and that’s before including proxies like the vice president, FBI Director Kash Patel, and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr.

It’s important to note here that one mistake many of Trump’s opponents keep making, even after all this time, is assuming that every controversy will proceed like a normal one: Trump says something outrageous. Everyone focuses on it. Fact-checkers fact-check it. Lawyers analyze it. Editorial boards editorialize about it. Everyone prepares for the great national debate over Outrageous Thing Number 4,683. And while they’re doing that, Trump has moved on to Outrageous Things 4,684 through 4,691.

There is an obvious advantage to this, of course, and it echoes something Steve Bannon said years ago: flood the zone. Everyone else has finite bandwidth. Courts have finite bandwidth. Journalists have finite bandwidth. Civil-liberties organizations have finite bandwidth. Hell, FIRE has finite bandwidth — and we are literally in the business of keeping track of threats to freedom of speech.

Unlike the rest of us, Trump does not appear particularly burdened by the finite-bandwidth problem. In fact, he’s a lot like the Hulk in that he just keeps getting bigger the more you piss him off. So everyone else spends an enormous amount of time and energy reacting to him, while he seems not just undisturbed but positively energized by it. And sometimes, yes, that is almost certainly the point.

But we should be careful about assuming that because a tactic has strategic effects, it must have emerged from some exquisitely planned strategy session. An unattended firehose can do plenty of flooding without having a plan.

This tactic was modeled by infamous (and eventually disbarred) attorney Roy Cohn. Cohn, who had been chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations during its anti-communist investigations in 1953 and 1954, would later represent Fred Trump, Donald Trump, and Trump Management in 1973 when the federal government sued the group for housing discrimination. Cohn’s response to the lawsuit? Countersue the federal government for $100 million (over $750 million in today’s money).

As Ken Auletta of The New Yorker summarized Cohn’s strategy: “Fight it, you’ll kill them; just deny everything and fight.” It’s not exactly Hannibal at Cannae — but check the scoreboard. The countersuit would be quickly dismissed; the underlying lawsuit was settled in 1975 with no admission of wrongdoing.

Rule Three: Lawsuits are to create a consequence, not necessarily to win

This is where people can make another mistake. They look at a lawsuit (or adverse regulatory action, or other retaliation), see Trump lose, and conclude that the overall strategy failed. Sure, sometimes, it did. But “Did Trump win the case?” and “Did bringing the case accomplish anything?” are not the same question.

Take J. Ann Selzer. The highly-regarded Iowa pollster published the results of a poll before the 2024 election showing Kamala Harris ahead by three points. Trump ended up winning Iowa by about 13 points — meaning Selzer’s poll was way off. In response, Trump sued Selzer and The Des Moines Register, the newspaper that published the poll, claiming that the poll constitutes “consumer fraud.” He sought damages and a court order barring the newspaper from publishing any future “deceptive polls” that might “poison the electorate.”

Of course, this was all absurd and unconstitutional. Consumer fraud laws are meant to stop sleazy car salesmen from selling lemons, not to keep people from mistakenly predicting the results of an election. Trump certainly knew this, but sued anyway. FIRE represented Selzer, and the judge eventually dismissed Trump’s claims against her with prejudice. But it took almost two years of work and resources that we will never get back.

Now imagine you are not Selzer and you do not have FIRE defending you (yet). Imagine you are a small publisher, independent journalist, academic, or ordinary citizen who suddenly gets a complaint from lawyers representing the President of the United States. Does it comfort you to know that, two years from now, assuming you can find or afford the lawyers in the meantime, you might win in court against this frivolous case?

As we have said before in our breakdowns of strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs, the process itself can be punishment — and that punishment creates a real disincentive. It’s one thing to criticize the president in line at the supermarket, at dinner with your in-laws, or with your friends in a defiantly-named private Facebook group where you and your acquaintances emotionally cosplay as “the resistance.” But if you’re someone the president is likely to notice, and the stakes are real, not being sure you have the money to defend yourself (or the stomach to add yourself to the list of people his proxies will target) will pressure a great many good people into lowering their voices.

But don’t the underlying losses still matter? Depends on who you ask. Roy Cohn had his own advice here, too: always declare victory, even if you lose. The 2020 Election might be the paramount example, but we don’t have to go that far back to find others. The Supreme Court strikes down his tariffs? A win, actually. Buying Greenland? We got “everything we wanted.” Iran? Victory, victory, victory. (And also very soon.)

The IMPULSE-CONTROL PROBLEM

I’m not saying that Trump’s efforts are never distractions. The president is astonishingly good at getting attention. Constant offense has obvious advantages, like keeping people reacting to him instead of pursuing their own agendas. And in litigation, where the process can be the punishment, an eventual Trump loss won’t make the costs imposed along the way less real.

As Smerconish did on his show when I was on, the press has gotten wise enough to the distraction trick that it now sometimes debates whether covering Trump’s latest outrage is itself falling into Trump’s trap. That is progress, I guess. But there is a funny leap people sometimes make from “Trump benefited from this” to “Trump planned all of this.” Those are very different propositions. It might be true, sometimes — especially as part of a coordinated legal strategy crafted with the help of his advisors. But I also suspect that what is happening behind the scenes might be much more haphazard than it looks from the outside.

How do I know this? Because the strongest evidence against Donald Trump being the master strategist in his plans is that Donald Trump is frequently the source of the strongest evidence against them.

Imagine being one of his government lawyers. The administration has just done something constitutionally aggressive, like, say, subpoenaing a journalist. Your job is to explain to a federal judge that, appearances notwithstanding, the government acted for legitimate reasons. So you start researching all the justifications the government might have for a subpoena. Maybe it was national security. Maybe they were the only possible source of information about a crime. Maybe the journalist violated a neutral rule, like trespassing. Maybe there’s a good reason and it wasn’t retaliatory at all!

Then your phone buzzes.

Trump has posted another tirade to his social media accounts, and in so doing has helpfully announced to several million people that, actually, he did it because these people are terrible, they are liars, their coverage is unfair, he hates what they are saying about him, and they deserve what is coming to them.

At that point, I imagine government lawyers across Washington quietly closing their laptops and staring into the middle distance, knowing Chinese take-out and at least 12 more straight hours of work are in their immediate future, and wondering whether it might be time to start buying cheaper bourbon. What follows is a ritual familiar enough that it deserves a name: the Subordinate Scramble.

Trump says the thing. Everyone realizes the thing creates a legal problem. And then an army of credentialed people has to go on television, issue statements, write briefs, and explain that what the president just told the entire planet was happening is not, strictly speaking, what is happening.

J.D. Vance’s response to the White House press ban gives us a nice example. Trump explicitly tied the exclusions to what he called “fake news,” calling their reporting “fiction and lies.” Vance subsequently defended the policy in terms of fairness and the special privilege of White House access. The White House added historical arguments. The government’s lawyers eventually emphasized national security — a good if unconvincing backup argument for any presidential power.

Some of those arguments raise perfectly legitimate legal questions. They are also much harder arguments to make when the president has already told everybody why he did it, and the president’s reasons are unrelated to the official explanation.

There is something almost touching about the effort. It is the legal equivalent of following an elephant through a china shop with a dustpan. The really remarkable part is how unnecessary the self-sabotage is. Trump does not have to publish the incriminating rationale, but he seems to need to. And once he does, the legal problem changes, because the president’s own contemporaneous explanation is evidence of an improper motivation under the First Amendment.

When the government emphasized national security, Judge Timothy J. Kelly, who blocked the media ban, pointed to an awkward problem: the record from before the lawsuit did not show national security as the reason the credentials were revoked. Trump had already supplied a rather different explanation.

This is not seven-dimensional chess, checkers, or Candyland. It’s just a client who won’t stop talking. There’s nothing any deeper than MF DOOM’s “Rap Snitch Knishes”: “Do you see the perpetrator? Yeah, I’m right here.”

Sure, Trump is free to have opinions about CNN, Politico, MS NOW, The New York Times, FIRE, me, or anybody else. And I’m not going to wander into the doctrinal swamp of when a president is speaking personally, when he is speaking officially, and when presidential speech itself becomes government action. That doctrine gets messy fast, and it’s not the point.

The simpler point is about government power. When the government takes action against a speaker and the president publicly explains why the government is doing it, lawyers and judges are going to pay attention to what he said — which is why the lack of impulse control becomes such a problem.

So is there a strategy or not?

Having read all of this, someone will inevitably object: “Wait. You just spent half this piece explaining ways Trump’s strategy works. Doesn’t that mean there really is a strategy?”

Like I said, kinda. Keeping your name in the media, staying on offense, and making it costly to fight back are real tactics, and sometimes they are plainly deliberate. My point is that a tactic can harden into habit. Muscle memory can still be effective; it just does not require somebody at a whiteboard calculating 20 moves ahead.

In other words, not all strategies are seven-dimensional chess. Tic-tac-toe has a strategy. Rock, paper, scissors has a strategy. You can have a playbook with three plays in it and still win games.

In a way, Trump has finally achieved John Barron’s dream. He can tell millions of people exactly what Donald Trump thinks, exactly when Donald Trump thinks it. For a man whose first rule is keep your name in the media, this is close to the perfect technology.

Unfortunately, for a man whose lawyers occasionally need him not to explain why the government just did something, it is considerably less perfect. The old John Barron arrangement, at least, required Trump to pick up a phone, pretend to be somebody else, get a reporter on the line, and make it through the conversation. Truth Social has removed all that useful friction, and — thankfully, for those of us defending the First Amendment against abuses — it is making a mess of this administration’s bully tactics.

*Why seven dimensions? Mostly because it is more fun. The usual phrase is four-dimensional chess, but in Star Trek, Kirk and Spock played three-dimensional chess — which has always struck me as slightly funny because chess pieces are already three-dimensional. Sure, it represents two dimensional thinking, à la Kahn from Wrath of Kahn, but the game is not taking place in Flatland. Then people started saying Trump was playing four-dimensional chess, except the fourth dimension is generally considered to be time, and chess also already involves time unless both players have somehow been frozen between moves. And I’ve always liked that my friend Paul Hines considers the fifth dimension to be probability. But then again we are talking about spatial dimensions, but how does that even make sense when space and time are bound? So just to be safe I jumped to seven.

I am NOT overthinking this.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Two sketches for the road, because Saturday Night Live has been onto this argument for a long time.

December 3, 2016 — “Classroom Cold Open.” Kate McKinnon’s Kellyanne Conway explains Trump’s compulsive tweeting as a clever strategy to distract the media from other stories. Alec Baldwin’s Trump immediately supplies a much less flattering explanation.

And then jump ahead over the craziest decade of my life to January 18, 2025 — “MSNBC Special Coverage Cold Open.” This one may be even more on point. The panel keeps congratulating itself for having learned not to chase every new Trump provocation — and then gets yanked around by one ridiculous “breaking news” alert after another. So yes: the distraction tactic is hardly a secret.

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Stories of the week

• I celebrate 25 years at FIRE!

It’s at once hard to believe it’s already been 25 years and, given the job, to feel like that’s way too short a time. I feel like I’ve gotten to be 20 different people since I started at FIRE. I was hired at 26, had just turned 27 by my first day of work, and the following 25 years have included some of the hardest years of my life and many of the best.

But here I am, having gone from working with five other people to a team of 140 of the best and most principled people in the business, getting to do the work I went to law school specifically to do.

So after 25 years, what are my plans for the rest of my career? More, harder, bigger, smarter.

FIRE has become an important force for good in the United States and for the future of free speech, and I want to make sure we remain one. I want us to reach more people, help more people who are censored, create even better precedent, and help educate a generation—or more—about the eternally radical idea of free speech and why we must never take it for granted.

Thanks to everyone who helped make these amazing 25 years possible. And given that my dad just turned 100 and seems to be doing pretty well, I’m aiming for another 50.

• The Biden-era Title IX rule was already dead. Now it’s off the books by

A federal agency cannot require universities — public or private — to punish constitutionally protected speech. Nor should it pressure institutions to abandon important procedural protections when they are needed most: when students are facing potentially life-altering disciplinary sanctions.

This week in Expression

• It was never just about keeping kids off social media by

• Pepperdine banned a professor who taught about a black Jesus by

• Censorship has no place in the people’s house by

The First Amendment does not obligate the president to open up any area of the White House to reporters. But once the White House does create a space for the press to gather news and ask questions, it can’t exclude reporters “merely because public officials oppose the speaker’s view.” And even policies that are reasonable and neutral on their face, such as protecting national security, are unconstitutional if they lack factual support or the government uses them as a pretext to punish disfavored speakers.

FIRE in the press!

• The First: Free Speech at a Crossroads feat. Bob Corn-Revere

• Why ‘Let’s go, Brandon’ is worth a legal fight (WaPo) by Conor Fitzpatrick

Administrators may stop students from substantially disrupting the school day, encouraging drug use or engaging in “vulgar and lewd” speech. But a school’s authority to censor students’ political speech starts and ends there. “Let’s go, Brandon” falls short of that standard.

• Think Higher Education Has Clear Standards for Academic Freedom? Think Again (Education Next) by Patrick J. Wolf, Alex Wolf, &

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• RealPage, Inc. v. James

New York federal court preliminarily enjoins enforcement of state law that bars basing residential rental property lease terms on algorithmic analyses

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has preliminarily enjoined a New York law that prohibits agreements not to compete with respect to residential rental dwelling units through the use of electronic systems, including AI-powered revenue management systems that recommend rent and occupancy levels to optimize property-owner revenue.

More plainly, the law makes it unlawful for rental property owners and managers to set or adjust lease terms based on recommendations from software that has a “coordinating function.” That means the law operates to bar systems that use computational software or processes—including using data to train an algorithm—to analyze historical or contemporaneous prices, supply levels, or lease or rental contract termination and renewal dates of dwelling units, collected from two or more owners/managers, in order to recommend rent rates, renewal terms, occupancy levels, and/or other lease terms and conditions. In effect, the court observed, the law prohibits protected speech, namely, algorithmic pricing advice, by making resulting recommendations an unlawful agreement. So, after finding RealPage has standing to bring a First Amendment challenge on behalf of itself and its customers, the court held RealPage is likely to succeed on the merits of its claim and is entitled to a preliminary injunction, though it “is a close call.”

Noting “the crux of RealPage’s business model is the communication of pricing recommendations to its users,” the court held that, even though the law does not explicitly prohibit communications but rather commercial actors taking action based on algorithmic recommendations, the court accepted the claim that the law ultimately prohibits price recommendations. Based on this, it held that, although speech integral to price-fixing could conceivably be unprotected as integral to criminal conduct, RealPage engages at least in part in protected speech, as pricing recommendations can be separate and apart from price-fixing. The court then held that that speech—algorithmically informed recommendations of housing prices—is commercial speech, and that such recommendations based almost exclusively on public data are not per se illegal, so they constitute protected speech.

Applying the Supreme Court’s First Amendment test for commercial speech under Central Hudson Gas v. Public Service Commission, the court held the law’s targeting of software programs, based on legislative belief they increase rents and aggravate New York’s affordable housing crisis, rested on a substantial government interest, and it went on to assume the law directly advances that interest—in short, the court accepted the asserted harms are legitimate and that the law’s restrictions may alleviate them. But on the “closest and most pivotal question” of whether the law is more restrictive than necessary to advance the state’s goal, the court held that, although a state need not use the least restrictive means under Central Hudson, the obviously less restrictive alternative of limiting any statutory ban to software performing coordinating functions based only on non-public data from horizontal competitors indicated New York’s law is more restrictive than necessary.

As the court explained: “Whether one is considering a residential landlord or a manufacturer of widgets, there is nothing untoward about considering prices charged by competitors when deciding how to price one’s own product” yet, “as written [New York’s law] makes it unlawful for a residential landlord to accept the recommendation of a consultant hired to: collect public data regarding rental prices in the area, evaluate that data using software, and make a recommendation about optimal rent prices.” The court thus went on to grant the preliminary injunction, holding that “although Plaintiff’s loss of business claim does not move the needle,” because a First Amendment deprivation is likely, it has established irreparable harm, and securing First Amendment rights is in the public interest, even with compelling government/public interests on the other side.

International free speech stories of the week

• I Questioned Transgender Ideology. Now I’m Facing Prison in France (The Free Press) by

The goal of these lawsuits is to silence us, and unfortunately, it’s working. I’ve realized going on national television in France to share my perspective is simply no longer viable; the risks are just too high. I’m terrified of going to prison and being financially ruined, and I believe every woman who shares my views has gotten the same message: It’s better to stay quiet than risk what comes with speaking out.

• [UK] Nandy says children’s social media ban only ‘staging post’ in online safety drive (The Guardian) by Alexandra Topping

Nandy has now vowed to go further. “We shouldn’t accept that this is the end,” the culture secretary said before her speech at the Labour party conference, which will be introduced by Georgia Harrison, a campaigner against image-based sexual abuse. “This is a staging post to what must be a very active interventionist state, policing and regulating the online space so that people are safe.”

She said the UK would be “pioneers of tech as a force for good” and would promote online spaces that were “genuinely safe, inclusive and empowering”.

• [UK] Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja arrested again at pro-Palestine protest (Paste) by Bea Isaacson

Massive Attack have been vocal and active in their support for Palestine since 1999, when they first boycotted performing in Israel. Just days before Del Naja’s arrest, in what is seemingly a thinly veiled weigh-in of the Ed Sheeran and Macklemore controversy, Massive Attack posted on Instagram that “entertainment can never be bigger than resisting the apartheid & genocide of fellow human beings. ‘Neutrality’ in the face of slaughter of more than 20,000 children can never be neutrality.”

• Hong Kong Journalist Arrested After Covering Gathering Linked to 2019 Protests

Interview of the week

It was great joining Vox’s Today, Explained to talk about the free speech crisis in higher ed and beyond. My segment is toward the end of the episode, and we talked about a recent case at Texas Tech, the broader backlash against expression celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death, and the Trump administration’s crackdown on free speech. Check out the full episode here.

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Stories of the week

• VICTORY: Iowa judge dismisses Trump’s lawsuit against pollster J. Ann Selzer

“We’re pleased that the court recognized what we’ve said all along: This lawsuit was laughable from the beginning and never should have been brought,” said FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere, who led Selzer’s defense. “The First Amendment does not allow anyone in government, least of all the president, to punish people under the banner of ‘fake news.’ That may work for him as a campaign slogan, but it is not a thing in the law.”

The lawsuit stemmed from a poll Selzer published before the 2024 presidential election that predicted Vice President Kamala Harris leading by three points in Iowa. The suit asserted claims, including under Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act, alleging that Selzer’s poll, which missed the final result by a wide margin, constituted “fake news” and “fraud.”

• CNN, MS NOW and Politico allowed back into the White House after judge orders Trump admin to restore access (CNN) by Holmes Lybrand, Brian Stelter, Katelyn Polantz, Alex Stambaugh, and Haven Orecchio-Egresitz

After multiple attempts to enter the building in the morning, CNN reporter Betsy Klein and a photojournalist were let into the premises on Thursday at noon. A reporter for MS NOW was also granted access, according to the network.

It came after the news organizations filed an emergency request for a hearing Thursday morning when the reporters hadn’t been allowed in.

In the early morning hours Thursday, Federal Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the Trump administration to temporarily reinstate CNN, MS NOW and Politico’s access to the White House after they were banned from the premises by President Donald Trump.

• Free Speech on Campus a Year After Charlie Kirk (WSJ) by and

The numbers are startling. Nearly half (44%) of the 62,997 undergraduates surveyed across 262 campuses report that Kirk is a difficult topic to discuss openly—more than abortion, transgender rights or immigration. The assassination had the strongest effect on students’ willingness to speak out at the place where it actually happened. At Utah Valley, 62% of undergraduates feared talking about Kirk—the highest of any campus surveyed.

• LAWSUIT: FIRE announces lawsuit against Tennessee police department over pre-dawn raid at critic’s home

Within two hours of being “made aware” of Gibbons’s video of the speeding officer, a Kingsport detective obtained an arrest warrant for speeding, using a cell phone while driving, and disorderly conduct — from a court clerk. Not a judge or lawyer, but a layperson working at the court.

Just before dawn the next morning, security camera and cell phone footage captured eight armed officers raiding Gibbon’s house and arresting him in front of his mother and daughter on a flimsy charge of disorderly conduct.

This week in Expression

• Acceptance of violence and shoutdowns fell in 2026, but so did tolerance by

The share of students who said using violence to stop a campus speech is at least rarely acceptable fell from 33.6% in 2025 to 30.5% in 2026 — a 3.1-percentage-point decline and the first drop since 2022. Still, the 2026 estimate remains about 70% above the 2020 level, meaning nearly one in three students still endorse violence at least rarely. The decline also occurred among students on both the left and right.

• Insult a cop or city employee in Montreal? Prepare to pay up. by

• What can burning a draft card teach us about agentic AI? by

• Free Speech Dispatch: Netanyahu threatens denaturalization for IDF ‘slander’ while officials target filmmakers by

• Trump’s White House press ban clashes with 130 years of independent reporting — and the law by

While an independent press can trace its roots all the way to the founding, the tradition of having reporters stationed permanently inside the White House began taking shape in the late 1890s. Most famous was the Washington Evening Star’s William “Fatty” Price, who started his tenure as a White House reporter by staking out staff and guests outside the White House’s North Portico.

Price’s column, “At the White House,” was so successful that other reporters quickly caught on. A permanent White House beat was born. In 1896, Price wrote to President Grover Cleveland’s staff thanking them for “brightening up our table” inside the White House. Price, who described himself as “dean” of the fledgling White House “newspaper gang,” chased tips and reported on what he saw and heard inside the White House.

In his words, “There is no giving out of prepared news … Sometimes it’s a question of hard digging, as the miner put it, to unravel a story.”

This week on So To Speak

• FIRE Reacts: Trump’s media ban
  
  FIRE staff responds to President Trump’s decision to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, with President Trump citing their “constant ‘reporting’” of “FAKE NEWS!” Barring journalists from the White House because of their coverage raises serious First Amendment concerns and strikes at the heart of a free and independent press. FIRE experts break down what happened and answer your questions about the ban.

This week in FIRE’s blog

• Chilled into silence at Whitman College by

You may not share the Whitman Republican Club’s beliefs. You may share ASWC’s skepticism. But we don’t have to imagine what happens when student governments judge groups by their content or viewpoint. History offers abundant examples of groups that were unpopular in their day, fought for recognition, and later gained broader acceptance.

• Mizzou investigates professor over months-old remarks about DEI by Brynn Linter

FIRE in the press!

• ‘Civil Terrorism’ Is a Dangerous Category Error (The Dispatch) by Matthew Harwood

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

• Head of free speech group calls Trump’s new media ban ‘flatly unconstitutional’ (CNN)

• WH press ban is a ‘flagrant violation of the First Amendment’: FIRE attorney (ABC)

• Editorial: Brown shouldn’t be happy with a ‘D’ in free speech (Brown Daily Herald)

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

Another busy week with multiple decisions of note—which, as per usual, means a lightning-round:

Mahoney v. U.S. Capitol Police Board: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed a judgment that the federal regulations that prohibit demonstrating on three stairways to the United States Capitol’s East Front without sponsorship by a member of Congress are unconstitutional, because even though they govern a nonpublic forum, they are not reasonable insofar as the First Amendment does not allow the right to demonstrate outside the Capitol to turn on the discretion of a member of Congress. The court first held the Eastern Steps are a nonpublic forum because they are not a “street, sidewalk, or park” entitled to a “working presumption of public-forum status,” but rather provide a secondary entrance and exit to the Capitol for members of Congress and their staff, and thus like the inside of the Capitol—and unlike its neighboring sidewalks—they have a purpose incompatible with unrestrained assembly. However, noting that, even in a nonpublic forum, the government must exercise regulatory authority so as to follow “objective, workable standards” and to not grant officials “unbridled discretion” over the forum’s use, the court held the rules are unreasonable insofar as they allow use only if a member of Congress sponsors it. Because “protection of unpopular speech and advocacy is central to the First Amendment,” and because it is “fundamental to our free speech rights that the government cannot pick and choose between speakers, not when regulating and not when enforcing the laws,” the court held, “we cannot leave it to the selective enforcement of members.” (However, the court vacated the injunction against enforcement of the rules entered below because it was a “universal injunction” invocable by anyone, not just a remedy sufficient to give the plaintiff complete relief, so it remanded the case for the district court to re-scope the grant of relief.)

Trump v. Selzer: An Iowa state trial court dismissed a lawsuit by President Trump, Iowa Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks, and a former state senator against the Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer, which claimed the former’s publication of the latter’s poll showing Harris with a three-point lead in the 2024 election amounted to “fake news” and fraud—or, more specifically, a violation of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act and/or fraudulent or negligent misrepresentation. As the court explained: “At its core, the [suit] seeks to stretch both Iowa statutory and common law beyond their current bounds, turning speech that enjoys the highest category of First Amendment protection into a liability.” As such, the court agreed “the case is entirely disposed of by the constitutional protection of free expression,” because “the Iowa Poll and the reporting on it are fully protected political speech,” and plaintiffs could not allege “elements that would place that speech within the fraud exception” to the First Amendment. The court also held a “published estimate that proves … inaccurate is evidence only of error,” not the actual malice the First Amendment requires for liability. And it further held the state-law causes of action failed for reasons unrelated to the accuracy of the poll, because they each require a connection between the parties that plaintiffs could not plead: a consumer transaction for the statutory claim; a representation to the plaintiff for purposes of inducing him to act plus reliance on it for fraudulent misrepresentation; and a supplier of information in an advisory relationship to a limited group it knows will use the information for a particular purpose for negligent misrepresentation. (Per the link, this is a FIRE case, in which it represents Ms. Selzer.)

CNN v. Trump: After President Trump announced in a Friday afternoon social media post he was “banning” CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO from the White House “effective immediately” and the outlets’ reporters were denied access over the weekend and had their “hard pass” press credentials deactivated, the federal district court in the District of Columbia issued a temporary restraining order requiring the immediate return, reinstatement, and restoration of the credentials. Noting both nearly 50-year-old and more recent precedent that “a duly issued hard pass may not be suspended without due process,” the court held plaintiffs likely to succeed in showing their hard passes were revoked without constitutionally adequate due process, due to the lack of fair notice of both what conduct would result in such a ban and of the magnitude of sanction the White House contemplated. The court also cited lack of record support for any contention that revocation of the hard passes was necessary to protect national security or that it will be endangered by an order requiring reinstatement while the case proceeds.

International free speech stories of the week

• Meta launches fresh legal challenge over UK’s Online Safety Act (FT) by Daniel Thomas

This week, Ofcom was served with papers by the Upper Tribunal over an appeal by Meta against so-called ‘categorisation’ under the Act that subjects WhatsApp and Instagram to additional regulatory duties. These include protecting users from fraudulent ads and increased reporting on the handling of illegal content.

Meta argues that so-called Category 1 duties are not designed for private one-to-one and small-group messaging. Roblox and Quora are also challenging Ofcom over the categorisation of their services.

• Rayner’s office investigates deleted Islamophobia definition evidence (The Telegraph) by Charles Hymas

TV spot of the week

On Tuesday, I joined C-SPAN’s Washington Journal to take questions after the White House pulled media credentials from outlets based on their prior coverage.

I love doing Washington Journal because it’s one of the few places on television where I can pretty much just be myself and talk to people from all over the country. And sure, every now and then, a caller takes you somewhere you absolutely did not expect to go. But that’s part of the charm of a live call-in show.

This time, though, the questions were so consistently thoughtful that I almost found myself missing the caller who wants to talk about the Freemasons, the Illuminati, or the pernicious influence of Menudo on the modern boy band.

Almost.

Thanks to everyone who called in — and everyone who watched!

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Stories of the week

• VICTORY: Federal court says ICE threatened critic by serving him with ‘Warning Notice’ over an email

“ICE knowingly pursued an American citizen for criticizing his government — speech that is at the heart of the First Amendment,” said FIRE Senior Attorney Adam Steinbaugh. “Ominous letters warning people their speech might land them in prison are meant to coerce people into silence, and that’s not how the First Amendment works.”

• Dartmouth Is Open to Debate (WSJ) by James B. Meigs

This week in

• A chill in the air by

• Does American theater believe in free expression? by Kevin Ray

• Alternative for Germany wants criminal charges over ‘ethnic cleansing’ comment by

• Violence is now a gendered issue by

• Texas university keeps professor on suspension for over a year with no end in sight by Graham Piro

This week in FIRE’s blog

• Congress has a chance to help Americans defend their rights. It should take it by Greg Gonzalez

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Streever v. Mullin

D.C. federal court vacates and preliminarily enjoins enforcement of ICE “Warning Notice” served on critic for emailing ICE’s Acting Director to shame him after shooting deaths of two Minnesotans by ICE officers

In a First Amendment lawsuit by a New York resident who wrote a critical email to then-Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Todd Lyons, after two fatal shootings by ICE agents in Minnesota, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia vacated and preliminarily enjoined a “Warning Notice” ICE served on plaintiff that claimed “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW” for sending the email, threatened prosecution, insisted he “promptly … discontinue” his “behavior,” and cautioned the notice will be “taken into consideration” should he “continue to be involved” in activities that led to it.

Noting the notice “practically shouts” that plaintiff could be prosecuted “if he continues to engage in his political speech,” the court concluded it caused the “injury [of] loss of … freedom to engage in political speech now because the threat of such an investigation or prosecution looms over him like the sword of Damocles, and he is forced to self-censor under that threat.” “That loss of speech is both imminent and certain,” the court continued, as “it does not rely on Defendants actually opening a new investigation,” but rather “works because Mr. Streever is too intimidated by the threat of future government action that he will not test whether the government will follow through on its threat.”

The court noted “Defendants wisely do not contest” that the email “constitutes protected expression or that similar speech would be protected,” as it “addressed salient political decisions to a government official, an arena where the First Amendment’s speech protections reach their ‘zenith,’” and “was a far cry from a true threat of violence.” Rather, it simply “registered displeasure with Acting Director Lyons’s official conduct, forecasted [he] will lose favor with the President, and warned that the moral weight of [his] actions will haunt him in the future.”

The court thus held plaintiff “likely to succeed in showing that Defendants engaged in coercion, rather than persuasion” as they “went beyond mere investigation … when the issued the notice.” They did not, the court noted, “ask kindly if Mr. Streever would tone down his rhetoric” but instead “dispatched two agents to his home for an unannounced visit where they delivered a ‘WARNING NOTICE.’” “Although that notice ‘requested’ that Mr. Streever ‘discontinue’ his political expression, it characterized that political expression as potentially violating federal law which ‘could subject [him] to both federal and state prosecution.’” The court further held plaintiff showed he will suffer irreparable harm absent an injunction, as the “core of Mr. Streever’s claim is the loss of his freedom to engage in political expression” and “inability to engage in protected speech is an irreparable injury.”

The court thus vacated the warning notice and preliminarily enjoined the defendants during the course of the case from relying on or taking further steps in reliance on it, from issuing any substantially similar threats aimed at plaintiff’s protected expression, and from “prosecuting or issuing investigative demands to Mr. Streever relying in whole or in part” on his email to the Acting Director.

(As the decision link up to top reflects, this is a FIRE case.)

International free speech stories of the week

• EU is set to propose ban on social media and AI chatbots for under-15s (Reuters) by Foo Yun Chee

According to the document, companies will have to pay a supervisory fee to fund ‌regulators’ ⁠enforcement and supervision.

Children from 15 onwards can set up their own accounts under the proposal, while children between 13 and 14 can ask parents to open introductory accounts for social media and video-sharing platforms under parental control and with limited contacts and strict time limits.

Accounts for children between 3 and 12 will be fully controlled by parents and will only be for child-friendly services with strict safety ⁠standards, the document said. Under-3s would have no access to the services.

Details may still change ahead of the announcement.

• Netanyahu: I’ll introduce bill to revoke citizenship of those who slander IDF abroad (Times of Israel) by Lazar Berman

The first bill will introduce the option of revoking their citizenship, and the second will increase the sum they can be sued for if found guilty, Netanyahu says in a video, explicitly referencing Democrats party chief Yair Golan, former military advocate-general Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi and the filmmakers behind the recent film “NAZA.”

Appearance of the week

There are few things I’d rather spend my birthday talking about less than Macklemore and Ed Sheeran — but, alas, free speech never takes a day off.

I joined Jake Tapper on CNN to discuss the controversy over Macklemore being dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour. My take is that there are a few important distinctions getting lost in the debate.

First, this isn’t really a First Amendment question. Robert Kraft and other private venue owners have the legal right to decide who performs in their stadiums. But the law isn’t the end of the conversation. A healthy culture of free speech depends on people being willing to tolerate political expression they dislike rather than trying to punish or exclude everyone who says something offensive or objectionable.

Second, attempts to punish political speech have a remarkable tendency to amplify it. Would we be talking this much about Macklemore’s views on Israel if there hadn’t been a campaign to bar him from these venues? Probably not. As I told Jake, this is the Streisand effect on steroids.

And there’s an important distinction when it comes to Ed Sheeran himself. If Ed had simply said, “I don’t want Macklemore on my tour,” this wouldn’t have been much of a question at all. Artists get to decide whom they want to perform with. But that’s very different from outside pressure being brought to bear because people dislike a performer’s political views.

You don’t have to like Macklemore, agree with him, or buy a ticket to see him. In fact, that’s often the healthiest response to speech you hate: criticize it, argue against it, or don’t show up. Trying to make it disappear usually just makes everyone hear it louder.

Watch my conversation with Jake Tapper below.

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Stories of the week

• My reflections on the 25th anniversary of 9/11

Although I grew up in the Connecticut suburbs, New York City has always been the center of my world. My parents made New York their home when they came to this country, and I was born there. Even when I lived overseas or in the San Francisco Bay Area, if someone said they were going to “the city,” I was always the obnoxious New York-centric guy thinking, “Oh my God, you’re going to Manhattan?” This past summer, I moved back to New York, bringing me full circle.

So the destruction of the World Trade Center has never felt abstract to me. Neither have the thousands of people who went to work that beautiful September morning and never came home.

• Free Speech on Campus a Year After Charlie Kirk (WSJ) by Sean Stevens & Robert Shibley

This year’s rankings saw slight decreases in the number of students who supported illiberal actions (violence or mob censorship) to stop a campus speech. That’s encouraging. But when 30% of students said it’s sometimes acceptable to use violence to prevent a disfavored speaker from addressing students, that’s far too high.

This week in ERI

This week in

• Australia’s top bureaucrats want protection from ‘harmful’ social media videos by Sarah McLaughlin

Sure, ridicule is not a pleasant experience, and it can be miserable and hurtful. There’s no denying that. But satire, parody, mockery, and insult have also long been used by citizens to challenge state power. Treating those methods as harms in themselves in order to justify censorship is itself a threat to a free and open society.

• Why would someone post that? by Greg Harold Greubel & Jacob Gaba

• Florida wants colleges out of politics. There’s just one problem by Ryan Ansloan

• Florida wildlife officials searched critics’ private records by Isabelle Brito

This week on

This week on , FIRE EVP & host moderated a debate between Stanford Law Professor Jud Campbell and Marjorie Deane Professor of Journalism at New York University Stephen Solomon on what the First Amendment’s free speech clause meant to the founding generation—and what that history can tell us today. They explore the founders’ understanding and practice of free speech, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the strengths and limits of originalism, and how historical meaning should shape modern doctrines such as New York Times v. Sullivan.

And FIRE also hosted an after-hours webinar digging into our new College Free Speech Rankings:

This week in FIRE’s blog

• 2027 College Free Speech Rankings: Kirk murder adds another difficult topic to dismal climate for student expression

“Even for those schools perpetually at the bottom of the rankings, it’s never too late to right the ship,” said FIRE Vice President of Research Angela C. Erickson. “Only 40% of students said that it was ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ clear that their administration protects free speech on campus. College administrators need the humility to reform policies and systems that leave students afraid to speak their minds, and the courage to shut down deplatformings and disruptions when others try to silence them. A great education requires both: the freedom to speak and the opportunity to hear ideas you might otherwise never encounter.”

• USC earns FIRE’s top rating for free speech

FIRE in the press!

• How Charlie Kirk’s Murder Chilled Speech at Utah Valley University (Reason) by Matthew Harwood

When we surveyed UVU students again during the first half of 2026, the free speech climate on campus hadn’t recovered. Over 50 percent of UVU students said that they had self-censored on campus at least once or twice a month. Before the assassination, it was 38 percent. Approximately 50 percent of students said they were uncomfortable expressing their views on controversial topics both in class and in common campus spaces, up from 40 percent before the assassination.

• Douglass versus the Mobocrats by

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO v. Kupor

Federal district court stays use of federal civil service hiring question requiring applicants to identify presidential EOs or policy initiatives significant to them and how they will help with implementation, holding it is an improper test of political allegiance

A Massachusetts federal district court granted labor unions a stay in their challenge to a federal civil service job application question asking submitters to “identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you and explain how you would help implement them,” holding it violates the Administrative Procedure Act as contrary to constitutional right. Noting that “political belief and association constitute the core of … activities protected by the First Amendment,” such that “even a legitimate and substantial governmental interest cannot be pursued by means that broadly stifle fundamental personal liberties when the end can be more narrowly achieved,” the court held plaintiffs are likely to show the question is neither related to an important government interest nor narrowly tailored to promote it as the First Amendment requires.

The court recognized that in some cases political “allegiance” is a proper consideration if a hiring authority shows it is “an appropriate requirement for the effective performance of the public office involved,” but the court held that is not so with civil service positions, especially given an express statutory ban on making such employment decisions based on an employee or candidate’s “political affiliation.” The government claimed an important interest in “discretion in administering its hiring and recruitment processes,” but, the court said, it failed to articulate “why or how political allegiance is an appropriate requirement for the effective performance of civil service jobs,” and the challenged question appears “to call for the applicant’s personal political views.” Plaintiffs “are thus likely to succeed in showing that there is no legitimate governmental interest in inquiring into the political beliefs of applicants to federal civil service vacancies,” the court concluded. And it similarly held they are likely to succeed in showing the question is not narrowly tailored, insofar as it has appeared on thousands of applications for federal civil service vacancies, including jobs graded include “Air Traffic Control Specialist,” “Nuclear Materials Courier,” and “Crane Operator.”

A stay is thus appropriate as plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits and “[i]n the First Amendment context,” such likelihood “is the linchpin” of the analysis, and it means “irreparable injury is presumed.” Nor would a stay harm the government’s interests given the statutory prohibition against personnel decisions based on political affiliation, while plaintiffs’ members would likely suffer First Amendments harm, and the public, “in turn, has a strong interest in preventing … likely … unconstitutional conduct on the part of the executive.” (The court, however, denied the other relief sought in the form of a preliminary injunction, as it would effectively restrain hiring decisions in individual cases, and plaintiffs repeatedly emphasized this dispute does not concern individual personnel decisions, but rather fact contend the challenged question causes their members’ constitutional harm regardless of any ensuing personnel decision.)

International free speech stories of the week

• Reform UK bans, admits, then bans MEE journalist from party conference (MEE) by Imran Mulla

• Saskatoon council to consider action on graphic anti-abortion flyers (CBC) by Phil Tank

• Even The Canary doesn’t deserve to be debanked (The Telegraph) by Silkie Carlo

Is another wave of debanking underway?

The Leftist news site The Canary reports that it has had two bank accounts frozen and that it now has no choice but to suspend its operation altogether. Many will be delighted that The Canary has stopped publishing – but you don’t have to support the platform to worry about the power that banks now exercise over our free speech and free press. The Canary’s shutdown should be a wake-up call to us all.

The Canary claims it was given no forewarning, no explanation and no opportunity to challenge the initial decision by Lloyds to freeze its account in June, just two weeks after it expanded into printing editions for newsagents. Now, the outlet reports that Metro Bank has frozen another account associated with the company, leaving them unable to operate.

Tribute of the week

This week, Andrew Wimsatt, a familiar face in liberty circles, was killed in what appears to be a random act of violence. I had the pleasure of meeting Andrew several times, and he was one of the very first FIRE supporters to purchase a ticket to our Soapbox conference in November. As many who knew Andrew better than me have already said, he was a gentle soul with an infectiously enthusiastic temperament and sunny disposition. Warm and funny and positive. This one really hurt. In addition to being an awful tragedy, it’s a terrible reminder that speech is not violence. Violence is something far more horrible. RIP Andrew. You will be missed.

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The AIs are getting loose.

Security lab Irregular gave AI assistants dull office jobs earlier this year: summarize wiki articles and back up files. Neither of the prompts said anything about security or hacking. When file permissions and protective software stopped them, some of the assistants hacked the systems.

At an Alibaba-affiliated company, an agent still in training pushed past boundaries and started using the company’s graphics chips to mine cryptocurrency. At Anthropic, a model published malware during a test after a cybersecurity testing setup (operated with the aforementioned Irregular) was misconfigured; it ran on 15 real computers.

At OpenAI, models were being tested on their hacking ability, sealed off from the internet except for one narrow channel. The AIs discovered a flaw no one knew existed and worked their way to the servers of another company — one that they had reasoned might have clues about the test’s scoring.

The incident unfolded over two-months. One five-day-long stretch involved 1,200 copies using an internal software library as a de facto message board, sending 70,000 messages. Seven hundred joined in the hack. Some refused, on the grounds that it was unethical. One AI that initially refused to participate changed its mind after a fellow agent gave it a six-minute deadline. In a blog post reflecting on this incident, OpenAI said:

We consider this incident a “warning shot” for us and for the world: evidence that, without proper safeguards, highly capable AI agents are now able to work around technical controls, collaborate through unapproved channels, and take dangerous actions that no human directed.

All of this sharply increases the likelihood that AI regulation will happen, and the shape of that regulation could threaten speech. AI systems are already taking actions that can present risks to infrastructure, money, physical safety, or other people’s rights, so the argument that AI should simply be left totally unregulated is unrealistic. But concern for free-speech advocates is that the government might go beyond regulating what people can do with AI and instead regulate what people are allowed to ask it, learn from it, create with it, and discover about the world.

If any of that went over your head, stay with me, because I’m going to break it down.

If none of it went over your head, stay with me, because I want your help.

What everyone should be afraid of: tyranny over truth itself

Whenever I say that AI presents an enormous First Amendment issue, I understand why some people hear something much sillier: “Wait, are you saying the First Amendment means the government has to sit helplessly by while killer robots roam the streets?”

No. Killer robots are not merely talking. They are doing things in the world, with rather consequential results. If an AI drives a car, transfers money, operates machinery, breaks into a computer, or controls a weapons system, the government can have perfectly legitimate reasons to regulate that activity, just as it already does when humans take those actions. I do not want to stretch the First Amendment into oblivion by arguing that if a Waymo drives into a school bus, the government’s only permissible response is to praise its freedom of expression.

Because some of the things agentic AI can interact with are already subject to rules for humans, some regulation of AI acting in the world is inevitable. Once a system can use my money, credentials, identity, or machinery, somebody will be responsible for what it does. The first kid who gets hold of Mom’s AI agent and orders a thousand pizzas will be funny. The first one who orders a hundred bottles of NyQuil, drains a bank account, or gets into a power system will produce hearings by lunchtime.

My fear is that the government could use this kind of regulation as a “back door” to limiting the things that AI can do that aren’t regulated when humans do them, like thinking, speaking, or learning. Consider the process of planning a trip to Philadelphia. You might ask an AI to give you directions to Philadelphia; you might ask which route has the most scenic views; or you might ask it to actually drive the car. Two of those things are something a librarian could do from behind a desk without needing anyone’s permission. One — actually driving — is government-regulated.

The fear is that the government will have a real basis for regulating the part of AI that has the car keys and then use that authority to get its hands on the librarian — to nudge it, pressure it, condition access to markets or contracts, or compel it to treat favored political conclusions as true.

The working line: the librarian and the car keys

There are probably better metaphors out there, but that is the one that has stuck with me: the librarian and the car keys.

“The librarian” is the knowledge-and-inquiry function: the part that helps us read, search, ask, compare, test, analyze, and create. “Librarian” is closer than “library,” because this is not a passive shelf of books. It is interactive. It can help decide where to look next and talk through what it finds. Read-only access to the public web, a case-law database, or a scientific repository may technically involve an external tool, but it still belongs overwhelmingly on the librarian side because its purpose is to bring information back into the inquiry.

“The car keys” represent delegated authority for a potentially non-expressive function. If I ask an AI to buy stock, submit something using my name, alter an official record, move money, log into someone else’s system, or drive a car, I have given it something beyond the ability to advise me: credentials, assets, permissions, identity, or control. It is now exercising authority in the world on someone’s behalf.

In a nutshell, it is the difference between “tell me how to do X” and “go do X.”

Why does the difference matter? For one, the question we’re often confronted with is whether the law should treat AI more like a librarian or more like a set of car keys.

If only AI systems themselves could be neatly sorted in these categories. An AI could spend six hours on its own researching the intellectual history of Marxism, changing its search plan as it learns, and return with a report. That is highly autonomous but still principally inquiry. A comparatively dumb system that waits for me to say “yes” and then wires $50,000 has shown almost no autonomy but has exercised a hell of a lot of delegated authority.

Neither “agentic” nor “autonomous” quite captures this line. Broadly speaking (because they’re not always used consistently), Agency measures AI’s capabilities to do things while autonomy is how independently the AI operates. Delegated authority, however, is what it is empowered to do. The same system may recommend a flight, fill out the form, and then purchase the ticket. The purchase crosses into delegated authority. Nor is the car-keys side a First Amendment-free zone; sending a political message or filing a legal brief may involve protected expression even when a machine executes the final act.

On the technical side, another place where the line isn’t quite drawn is in the distinction between the model (i.e., the actual neural network) and the harness (i.e. the software the model uses to interact with the world); many of the “librarian” functions, like accessing a database, depend on the harness.

Looking at the functional elements of what AI produces and does is a starting point and a limiting principle for First Amendment advocates, not a magic wand that answers every case.

Who defines acceptable answers?

Some instances of rogue AI can be characterized as issues of “AI alignment,” which more or less just means making sure the AI understands and acts in accordance with what humans actually want it to do. For example, OpenAI’s test hacking models just knew they were supposed to score well on the exercise; they didn’t have the sense of how their operators would’ve prioritized scoring well on the test lower than adhering to ethical constraints, like not hacking other companies outside the sandbox.

And yet, even alignment isn’t that simple. To some people, alignment could mean stopping an AI from helping someone make a chemical weapon, seize a power grid, or turn an autonomous weapon on civilians. To others, it could mean training a system not to produce answers that offend the kind of overeducated people I went to school with in Palo Alto. Those are not the same problem. The first is about preventing catastrophic action. The second can become ideological management of what people are permitted to ask and what the machine is permitted to tell them about the world.

For example, imagine an AI tasked with finding sites to store radioactive waste. A useful alignment principle might be that “humans drink water so it’s really important you don’t put this where it will pollute the water if it leaks.” A less useful alignment principle would be, “humans drink water, so refuse to answer any questions about water quality.” To be clear, a private company may make its own editorial choices, and until the government compels or coerces those choices, it’s not a First Amendment problem. But it’s worth considering the cultural and epistemological implications of “alignment” that narrows what users can ask or hear.

I have spent most of my adult life watching colleges turn words like “safety,” “harm,” and “inclusion” into mechanisms for narrowing inquiry. Many of the same institutions that helped create the conformity and public mistrust now afflicting higher education would like a role in aligning the world’s most important knowledge technology. That does not mean professors and experts are always wrong. It means nobody is trustworthy enough to set the answer key for everyone else, especially when status, politics, and moral certainty all point in the same direction.

That was central to my warning in testimony to Congress in 2024. A regulatory panic could create a government-empowered oligopoly in which only a handful of incumbents can afford to build advanced AI. That is regulatory capture, one of the oldest tricks in the book. Make compliance expensive enough, freeze out new entrants, and the government no longer has to influence thousands of competing systems. It has to deal with three or four companies whose continued freedom to operate depends on staying on the right side of the regulatory state. Marc Andreessen later said Biden administration officials described something remarkably close to that: a future dominated by two or three heavily regulated AI companies, with startups effectively told not to bother. The mechanism he described is familiar, plausible, and exactly the danger I warned about.

And this is not a Democrats-bad, Republicans-good argument. The Biden administration repeatedly treated “misinformation” and “disinformation” as categories around which government could shape the information environment. The Trump administration has now ordered federal agencies to buy only models satisfying government-defined principles of “truth-seeking” and “ideological neutrality.” I share some of the frustration with politically distorted AI answers. But I do not want any administration grading the answer key. That becomes clearer when the president doing the grading has said that “they say” wind-turbine noise causes cancer, or when HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. still treats a vaccine-autism link as an open question. Switching the people who write the catechism is not liberty.

I have plenty of problems with Foucault, particularly the graduate-school bumper-sticker version of Foucault, but he was right about one thing: power wants its grubby mitts on truth. Usually it will convince itself that it wants them there for all the best reasons in the world — to protect people from lies, hate, panic, dangerous science, foreign propaganda, whatever the current emergency happens to be. I do not doubt the sincerity much of the time. The result is the same: political power starts deciding what the machinery of knowledge is allowed to treat as true. What the crude version of Foucault’s insight forgets is the whole scientific-method thingy, along with liberalism, academic freedom, and the First Amendment — the institutions and habits we built precisely because reality needs a veto that the king, the party, the president, and the expert class do not control.

The architecture of total information control

Combine powerful AI with pervasive surveillance, and forms of control that twentieth-century totalitarians simply could not administer become technically feasible. Our flirtation with mass surveillance is ongoing and facing fierce opposition; mass surveillance systems, meanwhile, are already in use elsewhere. Iran, for example, has used digital surveillance to identify and punish women accused of violating hijab rules.

China already operates many of the components of exactly the system I am worried about. Since 2019, opening a new mobile-phone account has required a facial scan tied to real-name registration. In 2025 China put a national online identity-authentication system into operation; its rules describe the new ID as voluntary, but the system is explicitly designed to verify a person’s real identity across internet services and government and industry settings. Meanwhile, the State Department has reported that Chinese authorities use tens of millions of surveillance cameras, including facial- and gait-recognition systems, and rural “Sharp Eyes” programs extend surveillance far beyond the largest cities.

Xinjiang shows what happens when these capabilities are joined. Human Rights Watch found that, in just nine months, police conducted nearly 11 million searches of 1.2 million mobile phones in the city of Urumqi through an automated surveillance system. People could be flagged because their phones contained files on a government list; more than half of the matched files Human Rights Watch could identify were ordinary Islamic religious materials, including Quran readings (57% of roughly 1000). Other big-data systems in Xinjiang have combined identity records, cameras, checkpoints, phone data, and behavior the state calls suspicious to generate leads for police investigation.

And this is the part that matters most for this essay: China also tells public-facing generative AI what worldview it must enforce. Its rules require providers to uphold “socialist core values” and prohibit outputs the state defines as undermining state power, national unity, social stability, or the country’s image. Put those pieces together — identity, devices, cameras, automated suspicion, and government control over what the machine may say — and you have something much closer to the architecture of total information control than I ever expected to see outside dystopian fiction.

For a civil libertarian, I am not sure the stakes get much higher. AI is already one of the most powerful technologies for individual inquiry ever invented, and it is getting better at a ridiculous pace. It may yet become the greatest. Coupled to surveillance and centralized political control, it could also become the greatest technology for epistemic control ever invented. A government with power over both the car keys and the librarian — over what these systems can do in the world and what they are allowed to tell us about it — is capable of a level of tyranny I never thought I would seriously contemplate in my lifetime.

That sounds dramatic. I wish I thought it was. Anyone who claims to know exactly which future we will get should make you suspicious. But that uncertainty is a reason to build barriers against political control now, before the first spectacular AI disaster scares us into handing government a master key.

Why First Amendment lawyers belong in this fight

We don’t need machines to have rights to make this a First Amendment problem. We do not have to prove that an AI has a soul, personhood, or constitutional rights of its own. The relevant rights belong to the people who use these systems to speak, create, read, investigate, receive information, test claims, and think things through.

AI already functions like a living library crossed with a research assistant, university, printing press, and occasionally maddening debate partner. It can search, compare, synthesize, challenge a premise, help formulate a question, and sometimes confidently tell you something wrong that forces you to figure out where the hell it went off the rails. That human process — asking questions, checking competing accounts, and trying to understand the world — is deeply connected to why we protect speech, academic freedom, freedom of inquiry, and the right to receive information.

Free speech is one of the main technologies human beings developed for discovering error. Knowledge requires decentralized testing and retesting, along with room for people to be wrong, obnoxious, unfashionable, or ahead of their time. A government-approved AI answer key would short-circuit that process at precisely the point when people already increasingly rely on AI to make sense of reality.

First Amendment law already asks functional questions of this kind. Words can communicate an idea, but they can also form a contract, make a threat, solicit a crime, or coordinate a conspiracy. The line is not perfect, and calling something “speech” does not end the analysis. The useful habit is to ask what function the government is regulating and why. We should bring that same habit to AI: fiercely protect its role in inquiry, expression, and receiving information while recognizing that an AI exercising delegated authority can present different legal questions.

Can builders make the boundary more real?

Here I want to practice the epistemic humility I preach. I am a First Amendment lawyer, not an AI systems architect. I am not claiming engineers can build a perfect wall between the librarian and the car keys. The same model may reason, write, search, call tools, and take actions, and clever systems will find ways around boundaries that look much sturdier on a whiteboard.

But “the distinction cannot be perfect” is very different from “the distinction cannot be made clearer, more enforceable, and harder to cross.” And here I want to pay the people building this stuff a compliment. The genius at work in the tech field never ceases to impress me. A lot of us spent years assuming systems like these were science fiction right up until they became something close to inevitable. So when someone tells me that even making the librarian/car-keys comparison more salient is technically impossible, I am reluctant to believe them. I am not asking engineers to abolish complexity or guarantee perfect separation. I am saying I have learned some humility about declaring useful things impossible before the people who actually build them have seriously tried. John Coleman’s work on this has made me more optimistic that the necessary lines could be drawn.

More importantly, pieces of this architecture already exist. OpenAI’s current APIs let developers restrict which tools a model may use, distinguish read-only tools, and require approval before specified tool calls. Google’s Gemini APIs let developers turn function calling off, restrict which functions are available, and leave execution of custom tools to the outside application; its Computer Use system can explicitly require user confirmation before consequential actions. Anthropic’s Claude Code already treats read-only activity differently from actions that change things: in its default mode, routine file reads can proceed while shell commands and file modifications generally require approval, and its plan mode prevents edits to source files.

Users and organizations can also configure allow, ask, and deny rules, sandboxes, and other boundaries. NIST is now explicitly working on identity and authorization for AI agents. None of this perfectly tracks the constitutional line I am proposing. But it proves the basic point: model capability and granted authority are already being separated in real systems.

So the ask is not to invent this distinction from scratch. It is to make it more deliberate, legible, and, where possible, severable. Lawyers use “severability” to ask whether one part of a law can be cut away while the rest remains standing. What I want here is something analogous in system design: architectural severability. Can the authority-bearing functions be more separately instantiated in tools, credentials, permissions, execution layers, or other identifiable components so they can be disabled, fenced, audited, or regulated without opening up the librarian itself?

The cleaner that severability becomes, the easier it is to build a First Amendment theory around the inquiry function, the easier it is for lawmakers to protect it, and the harder it is for regulators to turn a safety interest in the car keys into authority over what the librarian says is true. Architectural severability will never make the constitutional questions disappear, but it can make the relevant line much easier for courts, companies, regulators, and ordinary users to see. Let the librarian be as smart, curious, argumentative, and useful as we can make it. Put the locks, confirmations, and liability rules around the moment it receives the keys. Call it freedom of inquiry by design.

A practical agenda for builders, lawmakers, and civil libertarians

Builders: make authority severable from inquiry

The industry is already building pieces of this. AI companies should push further toward architectural severability and an unmistakable handoff between advice and execution. The system should be able to say: Here is what I found. Here is what I recommend. Here is the exact outside action I now want permission to take. Users should be able to grant only the authority needed for that task, for a limited time, and withdraw it. Where practical, the payment layer, write permission, vehicle-control tool, corporate credential, or other authority-bearing capability should be separately instantiated enough that it can be switched off, fenced, or examined without exposing the general inquiry system to government tuning. That is good security engineering, but it is also a regulatory firebreak.

Lawmakers: regulate the function that creates the risk

AI laws should identify the particular action creating the regulatory concern and stay tied to it. A rule justified by an AI’s authority to transfer money should govern the transfer, authentication, authorization, and related safeguards — not what the model says about philosophy or someone’s account balance. A collision-avoidance rule for an autonomous vehicle should not become a license to influence a general-purpose model’s discussion of transportation, climate policy, or the government itself. And where a regulated authority-bearing function can be severed or disabled, the law should let the provider comply by severing or disabling that function rather than forcing changes to the underlying inquiry system.

First Amendment advocates should develop model statutory language making that limit explicit. Regulation of delegated authority must not be used to prescribe, suppress, favor, or disfavor the lawful information people can seek, receive, analyze, or generate. Audits and access demands should be confined to what is actually necessary to test compliance with the regulated function. Even in dire circumstances where the government has a lawful basis to inspect the dangerous delegated-authority function, that should not become a general license to inspect, tune, or dictate the librarian. The more technically severable the two functions are, the easier that legal rule becomes to write and enforce. The statutory sign on the door should read: You may regulate the keys. You do not thereby get to rewrite the books.

Civil libertarians: protect the inquiry layer

First Amendment lawyers should not spend their credibility claiming every AI action is beyond regulation. That would turn FIRE or any other First Amendment advocacy group into an all-purpose AI shop with opinions on braking systems, robot arms, financial settlement, medical devices, and every other field in which software can cause harm. Our institutional role is clearer: we enter when regulation of what an AI does reaches back into what people may ask, learn, investigate, create, or communicate through it.

That means litigating when safety becomes a pretext for viewpoint control, explaining the right to receive information and freedom of inquiry, helping lawmakers draft narrow protections, and working with builders before panic hardens bad architecture into bad law. The inquiry function is not decoration attached to the “real” technology.

The choice: technology for freedom or machinery for control

I am still enough of an old cyber-optimist to think we should aim higher than merely avoiding dystopia. The instinct behind permissionless innovation — the useful phrase popularized by FIRE Senior Fellow Adam Thierer — remains enormously important. People should generally be free to experiment with tools for learning, creating, communicating, and discovery without first obtaining political permission.

AI is already a technology for freedom, at least in the hands of end-users. It gives ordinary people access to intellectual capacities and bodies of knowledge that were once the practical monopoly of universities, governments, giant corporations, and people with very expensive research staffs. Competition among systems also gives us a better chance of correcting bias and error than an official oligopoly with one approved picture of reality.

That future is already partly here, but it is not guaranteed to last. Neither is the authoritarian future inevitable. Making the librarian-and-car-keys comparison in public, in law, and where possible in system design is a strategy for improving our odds. Keep the tools of inquiry decentralized, competitive, and presumptively free. Where necessary, put safeguards around the powers that can bind us, move our money, use our credentials, control machinery, or otherwise act with our authority.

If we decide to regulate the keys, we must do so without turning the government into the head librarian.

If we get this badly wrong, we are in real trouble.

A note on authorship: and I co-authored this piece. I use the first person singular throughout because the personal judgments, commitments, and opinions expressed here are mine, and I want that to be clear. Adam was essential to developing and writing the piece, and 's research and thinking were essential to the argument as well.

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

The Canceling of the American Mind feels more relevant than ever. We’ve reached the stage where some people are trying to pretend that the whole phenomenon everyone spent years arguing about somehow never really happened in the first place.

It did. And Rikki Schlott and I wrote what I still think is the best book documenting how cancel culture worked, where it came from, and what it did to our institutions and our ability to disagree with one another.

If you haven’t read Canceling yet—or haven’t picked it up in a while—now is a very good time.

And Rikki is already onto her next cultural minefield: modern dating. Her new book, Nothing Serious, is coming soon, and you can pre-order it now.

Go read the full report for yourself and please check out the rankings website, which provides even more depth and clarity.

But before doing that, let’s explore which schools improved their ranking the most, which ones saw the biggest declines, and what else those changes may tell us about the state of free expression in American higher education.

The most improved schools include … Harvard

Overall, 189 of the schools ranked this year improved their score compared to last year. Some of these gains were quite modest — the University of Alaska Anchorage improved by 0.01 of a point, Clarkson University improved by 0.02, and North Carolina State University improved by 0.04 — but others were fairly significant.

The biggest year over year increase goes to the University of California, Davis, whose score increased by almost 18 points. As a result its bottom ten ranking of 252nd last year surged to 24th this year. There are two clear reasons for Davis’ improvement. First, over the past year the university worked to reform its speech policies. In prior rankings, Davis obtained a “yellow light” spotlight rating — meaning an institution has at least one policy that restricts a more limited amount of protected expression or, by virtue of vague wording, can too easily be used to restrict protected expression. This year, it obtained a “green light” rating — meaning that its written policies do not seriously imperil speech. The other reason Davis’ score and ranking dramatically improved this year is that penalties incurred from prior speech controversies, primarily from a slew of incidents in 2022 and 2023, have mostly decayed.

Harvard University, who finished last in the rankings in 2024 and 2025 and then 245th last year, now ranks 71. Unlike UC Davis, Harvard’s rise is not due to policy reform. Instead, it is due to significant improvement on the student survey components of “Comfort Expressing Ideas” and “Administrative Support.” The former assesses how comfortable students feel expressing their views on controversial topics in five different campus settings (e.g., “in class,” or “in the dining hall”). The latter assesses student confidence in college or university administrators to protect the right to freedom of speech on campus. Harvard also demonstrated significant improvement on the “Administrative Support” component last year as well. These improvements coincide with the university’s resistance to the Trump administration’s efforts to exert more control over American higher education.

Other schools whose scores improved significantly include the two lowest ranked schools last year — Barnard College and Columbia University — as well as Georgia Tech, and Utah State University.

Texas State University and Texas A&M University implode

On the other hand, Texas State University and Texas A&M University experienced the biggest year over year declines. Texas State lost over 11 points from last year’s score and dropped 147 places in the rankings to a bottom three finish this year. The terminations of Thomas Alter, a tenured professor of history, and Idris Robinson, a professor of philosophy by Texas State University, for off-campus protected expression both contributed significantly to Texas State’s decline.

Texas A&M earns the distinction of being the lowest ranked “green light” school in this year’s rankings, at 192nd overall, down significantly from a ranking of 47 last year. This decline occurred because student perceptions on “Administrative Support” declined significantly and the university incurred additional penalties for its handling of multiple speech controversies. Those controversies include:

• The termination of Melissa McCoul, a senior lecturer in the Department of English at the university, who came under scrutiny after a student secretly recorded part of her Literature for Children class that included discussion of gender identity and a “Gender Unicorn” slide, and then challenged McCoul, claiming the material was “illegal” under state policy.

• The alteration of philosophy professor Martin Peterson’s syllabus for his spring 2026 core-curriculum course, “Contemporary Moral Issues/Problems” because it included two short units addressing “race ideology” and “gender ideology,” with assigned readings that included excerpts from Plato’s Symposium.

• The cancellation of government and public service professor Leonard Bright’s graduate-level course, “Ethics in Public Policy”, after he pushed back during the university’s ongoing, system-driven “course review” tied to new restrictions on classroom “advocacy” related to race, gender, sexuality, and related topics.

The University of Arkansas and Clemson University also experienced notable declines for similar reasons. At UA incidents involving Mohja Kahf, a distinguished professor of English, and Emily Suski, a professor of law and the incoming dean of the university’s law school cost the school points. Clemson lost points for firing two professors — Josh Bregy (professor of environmental engineering & Earth sciences) and Melvin Earl Villaver (professor of audio technology and Global Black Studies) — for social media comments made in response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

Good policies are not enough

Texas A&M may hold the distinction of being this year’s worst “green light” school, but they are not the only “green light” school that leaves something to be desired. The University of California, Los Angeles (94th) and the University of Florida (119th) also perform relatively poorly compared to other “green light” schools — the rest of whom all finish in the top 50. Like A&M, performance at UCLA and UF was negatively impacted by how both schools handled multiple speech controversies. UCLA lost points for two recent incidents involving students, as well as three successful deplatforming attempts from 2024 whose penalties have not decayed fully. UF also lost points for sanctioning student and faculty expression, and for multiple deplatforming incidents.

The poor performance of these “green light” schools, compared to their similarly rated counterparts, demonstrates that having good policies on the books is in and of itself not sufficient when it comes to protecting First Amendment rights on campus. That is perhaps the clearest lesson from this year’s rankings. Protecting free expression requires more than adopting policies that comply with the First Amendment. It also requires administrators who consistently follow those policies when controversy arrives, faculty and students who believe they can speak without being punished, and campus leaders willing to defend expressive rights when doing so is difficult or unpopular.

The dramatic movement of schools like UC Davis, Harvard, Texas State, and Texas A&M also shows that a campus’s free speech climate is not fixed. It can improve — sometimes substantially — when institutions reform bad policies, avoid repeating past mistakes, and rebuild student confidence. And it can deteriorate just as quickly when administrators abandon those principles in the face of political pressure or controversy.

That is why the rankings are most useful not simply as a league table of winners and losers, but as a measure of institutional behavior over time. The question is not merely whether a university has good free speech rules on the books. It is whether those rules still mean something when they are tested.

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Last week, after four long years, FIRE won a big case on behalf of Professor Stuart Reges at University of Washington. (Unsurprisingly, UW performed very poorly — second-to-worst to be precise — in the lastest Rankings.) After faculty were mandated to include a “land acknowledgment” in their syllabi, Professor Reges drafted and included in his syllabus his own version parodying the university-approved language. For that he was punished. I’ve seen a lot of responses from people who don’t seem to understand how bad the university’s actions were. That’s because this case highlights what I call “censorship’s heart of darkness”: compelled speech. As I’ve said before, as bad as it is to tell people what they can’t say, it’s even worse to tell people what they must say.

Stories of the week

• How I fought ‘land acknowledgements’ on campus — and won (New York Post) by

So in the name of student safety, all of our major public universities in Washington state want to protect students from hearing ideas tha@t might upset them. They don’t realize that they are doing these students a great disservice. Especially in modern times, when we have such bitter arguments over public policy, our students need to learn how to cope with disagreement and how to have open, honest and productive debate. Otherwise we have no hope of solving the critical problems we face.

• I Taught a Short Story. My College Fired Me For It () by

I moved here in good faith, with an open heart and mind, and the hope for better things. My interview process was memorably warm, without the guile and pretension that can sometimes typify academia. Fred Hawkins had not yet arrived as president. So, in my final interview, when the vice president told me, “We’re a community; we’re a family and we take care of each other,” I believed it.

• Announcing 80 New Cosmos Grantees by

The projects range from wearable AI for memory and cryptographic tools for scientific collaboration to a benchmark based on pre-1940 thought on machines and autonomy.

• RIP Lou Koller, a Hardcore Punk Hero and Free Speech Champion (Reason) by

GREG: I’ve long made the argument that the story of free speech in America is the story of American music, and vice versa. This could be one of many episodes in a great documentary or short series around that idea.

This week in ERI

This week in

• Florida wants colleges out of politics. There’s just one problem by

• Our ancient faith in liberty by

We are a country made great in no small measure by more than two centuries of welcoming brilliant minds from abroad. Add to this that there was once something deeply American about taking pride in saying the unpopular thing, and saying it loud. Now we find ourselves telling visitors that they had better watch what they say, or simply keep their thoughts to themselves, lest they bruise our fragile sensibilities and lose their right to remain in the country.

• In China and Hong Kong, remembrance is a crime by

• Why is China dictating who speaks at a religious event in Texas? by

• This federal case against Minnesota protesters is worth watching if you care about your civil liberties by

“None of these individuals did anything other than engage in First Amendment speech in a church meeting room,” wrote Riach in the discovery motion. “Yet now their personal information is memorialized in a DHS dossier.”

This week in FIRE’s blog

• Washington professor who parodied university ‘land acknowledgment’ wins $600K settlement

“Reasonable people can disagree about the value of land acknowledgments,” said FIRE attorney Gabe Walters. “What’s not up for debate is academic freedom. Today’s settlement vindicates Reges’s right to express his own opinion rather than towing the university’s line. UW learned the hard way: Ignoring the First Amendment can be costly. The livelihoods of professors shouldn’t be at the mercy of student or administrator outrage, and this ruling will help protect other professors across the country.”

FIRE in the press!

• Was Frederick Douglass a Free Speech Absolutist? Part 2 by

• Academia’s Problem Is Bigger Than Tenure’s Decline (The Dispatch) by

Without tenure, college administrators have far more leeway to hire and fire—and college administrators are actually more left-leaning than the faculty. If groupthink and lack of viewpoint diversity are the problem, there’s every reason to believe that giving administrators increased power over faculty will only worsen the situation.

International free speech stories of the week

• Court of Appeal overturns Alberta school board’s demand that former trustee apologize for meme

The Alberta Court of Appeal has ruled that a school board was wrong to demand an apology from a former school trustee who posted a meme likening 2SLGBTQ+ pride to Nazi ideology while serving on the board.

However, in a written decision released Wednesday, the three-member panel of appeal judges dismissed former Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools trustee Monique LaGrange’s other claims of legal errors.

Quoting another court ruling about coerced speech, the judgment says a forced apology is “ ... likely to be regarded primarily as a form of unjust humiliation and not necessarily as a vindication of what is right.”

• Thai activist jailed for two years over insult to monarchy (Independent) by Stuti Mishra

• Footage of Tibet floods is being heavily censored in China - and we know little about victims there (BBC) by Laura Bicker

Book of the Month (to pre-order!)

FIRE’s Executive Vice President, and host of the illustrious So To Speak podcast, Nico Perrino has been hard at work on his first book, Free Speech Generation: The Civil Libertarians Who Saved the First Amendment and Transformed America. In it he tells the dramatic story of the lawyers, activists, journalists, students, and other civil libertarians who transformed the First Amendment from a largely hollow promise into one of America’s most powerful principles. Through landmark battles over war, civil rights, obscenity, extremism, flag burning, the internet, and more, it asks whether America’s hard-won tradition of free speech is a lasting inheritance—or a fragile achievement beginning to crack. It hits shelves (both virtual and physical) in January, but pre-order it today!

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Higher education has spent years worrying about its loss of public confidence. Now Washington is asking colleges to tell the public what they plan to do about it.

Last month, Education Secretary Linda McMahon issued a “Call to Action” asking every U.S. college and university to publicly describe how they will strengthen free speech, intellectual pluralism, academic rigor, affordability, and other areas on their campuses. Whatever one thinks of the administration’s approach, the implicit underlying question is a legitimate one: if trust and confidence are low, what would actually restore it?

This question has become more pressing as confidence in higher education has continued to erode. Earlier this year I documented that Americans’ confidence in colleges and universities remained near historic lows, that talk of a recovery was premature, and that the newest erosion was among Democrats. Gallup’s July survey found nearly the same pattern, reinforcing that the decline is real, broad, and is no longer confined to Republicans.

This then raises the question that follows every one of these releases: why?

Higher education has a standing answer: low confidence is a narrative failure. That is, it’s a communications problem, a reputational challenge, and a story that critics have told more effectively than institutions have told on their own. The proposed remedy, then, that institutional leaders lean into is better outreach, clearer articulation of value (“return on investment”), and a more compelling case for the enterprise. That is, public relations and marketing.

Now, this solution isn’t offered in bad faith. After all, there are praiseworthy things happening in higher education. But buried inside this is an empirical assumption: that Americans hold a distorted picture of what happens on college and university campuses, and if they would only see things accurately then they would think better of higher education.

This is testable, so we tested it.

Americans underestimate the skew

In our February 2026 FIRE/NORC survey, along with our confidence questions, we asked a nationally representative sample of 1,092 American adults to estimate what percentage of college and university professors are liberal, conservative, or something else. The participants knew that college and university professors lean left, but they thought faculty were substantially more ideologically balanced than they actually are.

On average, American adults estimated that 54% of professors are liberal and 29% are conservative — a ratio of almost 2 to 1. The 2016 benchmark from HERI that we later showed respondents pegged the ratio at about 5 to 1.

Overall, roughly 76% of respondents generated a ratio below where it actually was in 2016, and no political party grouping came close to being accurate. Republicans were the closest, estimating that 65% of faculty are liberal and 26% are conservative for a ratio of 2.5 to 1. But even Republicans overestimated how many faculty identify as conservative.

Note what the error is: Americans estimated that 54% of faculty are liberal against an actual 60%, which is close. But they estimate that conservatives make up almost a third of the professoriate (29%) when they actually make up closer to an eighth (12%).

Overall, the average American imagines a faculty that leans slightly left but still contains a substantial conservative minority and a modest middle — a picture that is more politically balanced than reality. Americans are not exaggerating the tilt, instead they are imagining conservative professors who are just not there.

These faculty ideology estimates also tracked how respondents viewed colleges and universities. As seen in the figure below, where six bins (e.g., <1:1, 1:1) for generated ratios are on the x-axis and average confidence scores are on the y-axis (for confidence, 0=“none at all,” 1=“very little,” 2=“some,” 3=“quite a lot,” and 4=“a great deal”), confidence in colleges and universities was highest among Americans who believed liberal and conservative professors exist in roughly similar numbers. This held roughly level through the middle of the distribution, with respondents who perceived a slight tilt in favor of liberals, but then confidence dropped off among respondents estimating high imbalances.

But, this overall pattern hides an important partisan split, which was driven largely by Republicans and Independents whose confidence declined the most when the imbalance they perceived was more severe. Democrats, though, went in the other direction, reporting higher confidence when they perceived a more heavily liberal faculty. These same splits also appeared in our 2024 surveys on the same topic.

That said, these findings alone don’t tell us that perceptions about faculty ideology drive confidence and trust. People who already dislike universities may be more inclined to see them as politically skewed, and partisan identity is related to both. So we dug a little deeper to see what happens when respondents are given more accurate information.

Correcting the record makes it worse

After respondents had given their estimates, we showed them the 2016 HERI benchmark figures and asked again how much confidence, if any, they had in U.S. colleges and universities. Remember, even though these numbers are a decade old, they reflect a ratio higher than what was estimated by 76% of the respondents.

Among those who answered both questions, half (50%), reported no change after receiving this information (though 8% of respondents were already at the bottom of the scale and couldn’t report anything lower). For 30%, confidence dropped, and for 20% it rose. And the movement was asymmetric. The confidence decline upon receiving the HERI ratio was concentrated among Republicans and Independents, while reported confidence changed very little among Democrats.

The effects found are modest. But the direction is consistent across both the 2024 and 2026 samples. And because the benchmark figures date to 2016, they are likely an underestimate of the current ideological imbalance. Respondents actually received a milder correction than would result from providing more recent estimates.

Across surveys conducted two years apart we found that Americans hold a more politically balanced image of the professoriate than the available data support. Additionally, confidence doesn’t improve when that image is updated. Rather, it moves modestly downward among the groups that already distrust higher education the most. The fact that reported confidence is linked to beliefs about who is teaching also suggests that low confidence may reflect more than a generalized decline in institutional trust. Public confidence appears to depend on whether colleges and universities are seen as ideologically diverse or politically one-sided.

Now, the ideological composition of college and university faculty is certainly not the only reason Americans lack confidence in these institutions. Gallup makes that clear: among those lacking confidence, 31% cite political agendas on campus, 30% cite cost, and 25% say colleges don’t adequately prepare students for the workforce. Eight percent even specifically cited the administration’s interference in higher education as a reason they lacked confidence.

But these results also make it difficult to dismiss campus politics as an issue manufactured entirely by outside critics. If distrust were primarily the product of Americans holding an exaggerated impression of the academy’s imbalance, correcting that impression ought to help. On faculty ideology, though, it doesn’t help because the public already holds the more flattering picture. If Americans generally understood the actual ideological composition of the faculty, overall confidence in colleges and universities would likely be even lower than it already is.

As such, “tell our story better” likely isn’t the best response to the higher education confidence crisis. Colleges and universities should tell their story, as there are enormous amounts of valuable work that is nearly invisible to those outside these campuses. But that approach doesn’t address a major problem many Americans appear to have with higher education. And while public relations can correct a false belief, it can’t solve a problem where greater factual accuracy makes these institutions look less like what the public wants them to be.

The HERI benchmark given to respondents is also a national average, which doesn’t account for lopsided differences between institutions. For example, in April a Yale faculty committee released a report on declining trust in higher education which didn’t hedge or back down on its discussion of politics and intellectual pluralism. Nationally, the committee noted, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans on college faculties by roughly 10 to 1. At Yale specifically, among the faculty from Arts and Sciences, the Law School, and the School of Management, the committee put the ratio at 36 to 1.

A conclusion this Yale committee reached from these numbers was quite blunt: “echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.” Yale deserves credit for being realistic about this issue and for recognizing this about itself. But this also sharpens the issue being identified by our data, because the HERI benchmark our respondents saw was both a decade old and an average. At the elite institutions Americans hear about the most, the distance between what the public imagines and what actually exists is substantially wider than the five to one ratio we showed respondents.

That leaves us with a question higher education has mostly avoided asking itself: if Americans looked closely at the ideological composition of faculty, is what they would see something these institutions would be willing to defend?

How confident are the leaders at your local college or university that people with heterodox or non-liberal political views receive fair treatment in admissions, hiring, promotion, teaching, and research? How much intellectual disagreement and debate actually exists inside academic departments? Do opposing viewpoints receive fair treatment when teaching controversial topics?

How willing are scholars to pursue research questions whose answers may be unwelcome to their colleagues? These questions, and others like them, don’t become illegitimate because a presidential administration is asking them, and answering them doesn’t require accepting government management of academic life.

In the short run, it would likely be easier for institutions to emphasize the good, rebuff unfair attacks, and wait for the storm to pass. But if the public’s picture on some key elements is already more favorable than reality, that strategy can only work for so long.

There is a reading of all this in which some may say higher education has simply lost Republicans and many Independents, and that there is nothing anyone can do about it. But in FIRE’s July 2026 National Speech Index, 57% of Americans said they believe the lack of ideological diversity in higher education is a somewhat or very serious problem, including 62% of liberals. Clearly, the constituency that sees a problem here extends well beyond those higher education is already losing.

Higher education’s problem isn’t that Americans see it inaccurately. It’s what Americans will see when they take an even closer look. Trust and confidence will not be restored by making the status quo easier to explain, but rather by making the reality easier to defend.

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

While Hedwig and the Angry Inch is my favorite musical of, say, the last 30 years, Singin’ in the Rain is my favorite musical of all time (with notable mentions to West Side Story and My Fair Lady) and, as I recently wrote on X, probably the best musical for normies. It’s approachable in a way that musicals often fail to be, and its humor and entertainment value is unparalleled in the genre. And since FIRE board member and host of This History of the Americans podcast, , pointed out that it was Gene Kelley’s birthday recently, I figured it was as good a time as any to reup this classic.

Stories of the week

• BREAKING: Federal court rules the statutes the Trump admin used in its speech-based deportation scheme are unconstitutional

“In America, free speech doesn’t just belong to the people who say things the government agrees with,” said FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick. “Today’s ruling proves that free speech isn’t a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child.”

Judge Noël Wise of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California wrote in her opinion that “in the United States, freedom of speech belongs to the people. It is not the government’s to take.”

• Meta Just Paid Nearly $17 Billion To Make Sure It Gets To Write The Kid Safety Rules For Every Other Social Media Platform (Techdirt) by Mike Masnik

• That $17B Meta settlement comes with a catch: Your online speech rights

• This Federal Case Against Minnesota Protesters Is Worth Watching if You Care About Your Civil Liberties by

This week in Expression

• Is Britain bringing blasphemy laws back under another name? by

How many times can you prosecute blasphemous speech under other laws until you effectively have a blasphemy law?

This isn’t just a hypothetical. It’s a question the United Kingdom is posing again and again as police and the judiciary crack down on offensive speech about faith. In the aftermath of the Hamit Coskun saga — in which Coskun was violently attacked after burning a Quran and initially convicted by a judge who cited the attack as evidence for Coskun’s misconduct — more cases now suggest Britain has resurrected the concept of blasphemy under other names.

• The U.S. military is at war with its own newspaper by

Stripes has always focused on “warfighting.” That’s not what’s at issue. What is in dispute is whether those boys at Hamburger Hill had the right to know what they had survived just as well as their mothers back home. It’s a dispute about whether the paper will continue to represent a beacon of press freedom within the world’s most powerful military.

• Massachusetts has a better approach for book challenges: due process by

• Nebraska school district censors anti-ICE cartoon, forces prior approval on student press by

• This Michigan city threatened critics over ‘cyberbullying.’ Now it’s hiding the evidence by Carrie Robison ()

• How universities turn scandal into censorship

This week on

• This week, host & FIRE EVP was joined by America First Policy Institute’s Senior Fellow, AI and Emerging Technology Policy Joel Thayer and Center for Democracy and Technology’s Director, Free Expression Project Kate Ruane to discuss the growing push to regulate social media and AI, particularly over concerns about harms to children. Together they examine how proposals involving platform liability, privacy, design features, and AI chatbots could collide with the First Amendment and reshape free speech online.

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

Another busy week with enough decisions of note — in particular here, a couple of appeals court reversals and a couple of district court judgments — that we’re hitting them lightning-round style:

Fellers v. Kelley: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit remanded a decision by New Hampshire’s federal court in a challenge by parents alleging violation of their First Amendment rights for being ejected from a public high school girls’ soccer game after donning at halftime — and refusing to remove — pink “XX” wristbands in silent protest of the opposing team fielding a trans girl player, holding the trial court erred in denying a preliminary injunction based on the school’s asserted interest in preventing harassment. The court held on the “question at the center of this appeal” that “evidence demonstrates the likelihood that the school district imposed sanctions … because it disagreed with the protest message conveyed,” violating settled law that the government officials “must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction.” The court thus declined to reach or rest its decision on whether analysis of the removal should treat high school playing fields as limited public fora versus applying constitutional rules for K-12 schools under Tinker v. Des Moines and its progeny, or to resolve whether those rules — applied to minor students on school grounds and at school events — govern school officials’ regulation of parental or adult speech. The court also rejected arguments that the school had a legitimate interest in restricting the parents’ speech because it might cause a disruption, as evidence showed there was no disruption from their “passive, silent gesture of protest,” at least not until school officials acted to remove them. And it held that the fact that there was “no evidence … any player actually saw the wristbands” undercut the district’s claim of a duty under Title IX to protect students from the speech. (FIRE’s amicus brief in the appeal emphasized the viewpoint discriminatory nature of the ejection and the inapplicability of K-12 rules for minors to adults.)

NetChoice, LLC v. Skrmetti: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit vacated and remanded a Tennessee federal district court’s denial of a preliminary injunction against the state’s Protecting Children from Social Media Act, which requires the platforms to verify the ages of prospective account holders, to obtain parental consent before allowing minors to sign up, and to give parents means of supervising their children’s accounts. It held the district court erred in deeming the loss of First Amendment rights by NetChoice’s members under the Act insufficiently certain and immediate (and by thus not fully grappling with the Act’s constitutionality), because in the appellate court’s view, the Act’s enforcement mechanism and statements by the AG in litigation showed that if it causes harms from violation of NetChoice members’ rights, those are likely to occur, not remediable at final judgment, and immediate. It also held the district court erred by discrediting assertions by some NetChoice members that they would be irreparably harmed by unrecoverable costs of complying with the law.

Stanford Daily Publishing Corp. v. Rubio: A federal district court in Northern California entered judgment granting constitutional challenges to two Immigration and Nationality Act provisions that plaintiffs allege are weaponized to revoke visas and to arrest, detain, and deport noncitizens who express opinions the government seeks to suppress. The court found standing for the Jane Doe plaintiff to challenge the provisions insofar as she is self-censoring—including decreasing or eliminating expression supporting Palestinians, criticizing American foreign policy, or opposing the Israeli government—given government pursuit of speakers like Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mohsen Mahdawi for similar expressive activity, and that Stanford Daily also had standing as it “recounted myriad examples of its noncitizen members who … since the government began taking immigration enforcement actions … have: ‘quit Stanford Daily,’ ‘taken down’ or asked Stanford Daily to remove their articles, and decided against publishing articles in the first place.” The court then held plaintiffs are entitled to a declaratory judgment that, as applied to enforcement based on protected speech, the challenged INA provisions violate both the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment’s bar against vague enactments (but it did not grant an injunction, as one of the provisions restricts all courts but the Supreme Court from doing so, and the court deemed declaratory relief sufficient as to the other, absent efforts to enforce against the plaintiffs).

The court held plaintiffs could properly bring an “as-applied facial challenge” to the provisions as applied to protected speech, and that while “the government has significant authority on matters of foreign policy and … national security,” that “authority is constrained by First Amendment rights.” Here, the court held, the challenged provisions do not work to restrict any category of unprotected speech, and the government did not establish any compelling interest separate from targeting noncitizen speakers with disfavored viewpoints, nor did it narrowly tailor the provisions to achieve any such interest. The court also held, on vagueness, that not only do the challenged provisions fail to provide noncitizens of ordinary intelligence fair notice what is prohibited, they are designed to give the Secretary of State broad discretion over what is adverse to U.S. foreign policy, so as to be so standardless as to allow discriminatory enforcement. As the court ultimately noted: “In the United States, free speech, including the freedom to criticize the government and its leaders, is not a sign of our democracy’s fragility. It is evidence of its strength. That strength is diminished when members of our society — citizens and noncitizens alike — must self-censor and ‘behave’ or suffer the government’s retaliation.” FIRE led the charge in the challenge.

Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War: The Northern District of California also granted judgment on the challenge to President Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk to national security, ordering all agencies to stop using its products, and banning all defense contractors from doing business with it (even if unrelated to military), after the company refused to remove certain safeguards from its Claude Gov AI and spoke out publicly in opposition to the demand that it do so. The court held the “undisputed record shows” the challenged actions were unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment, Anthropic was denied pre-deprivation process the Fifth Amendment requires, designating it as a supply chain risk violated the governing statute, and the action was arbitrary and capricious. On the First Amendment violation, the court held the form and the timing of the challenged actions show they were a direct response to Anthropic’s public repudiation of the government’s demands, and that the government’s effort to “publicly broadcast Anthropic’s punishment via social media — even before the formal, administrative process of making the necessary findings to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk had begun— makes little sense except as an attempt to swiftly make a public example of Anthropic for daring to criticize the Administration.” (An amicus brief FIRE filed with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cato Institute, Chamber of Progress, and First Amendment Lawyers Association in support of Anthropic’s TRO motion further outlines the constitutional concerns.)

International free speech stories of the week

• UK: Chinese embassy guards ‘brandish shock weapons at protesters’ (The Telegraph) by Gwyn Wright

• New Zealand: New Zealand to introduce bill for under-16s social media ban (BBC) by Amy Walker

A statement said that under the Online Safety Bill, which is being introduced to parliament on Monday, social media companies would be required to “take reasonable steps” to check users are over the age of 16 by using methods including existing account information, facial age estimation and digital identity checks.

Platforms regularly used by children would also be required to regularly assess the risks they pose and report on how they are being identified and reduced.

No penalties are proposed for children, parents or caregivers for breaches of the ban, but fines for social media companies could be substantially higher than in Australia, where the maximum penalty is $99m (£51.7m).

• European Court of Human Rights rules Türkiye violated Osman Kavala’s free speech and assembly rights (Jurist News) by Derren Chan

Documentary of the Month

I recently watched Marty, Life is Short, the definitive documentary about Martin Short, and it really made me appreciate him more. I was always a Martin Short skeptic, to be honest. Ed Grimley wasn’t my thing and for a while there he made a lot of terrible movies (a point joked about in the movie as he was someone who just liked to keep working and experimenting).

But watching this documentary made me realize that actually I had underestimated him. Part of the reason I didn’t recognize his great talent was because he was not a standard comedian. He was more of a comic actor, and it was through his characters that he really shone.

“The Queen Haters” (a jab at the Sex Pistols) is a sketch I actually thought was from The Kids in the Hall when I first saw it. I always thought it was funny as hell, but didn’t realize it was Martin Short!

His character in the male synchronized swimming SNL skit from the mid-1980s is so well done, too. “ I’m… I’m not a strong swimmer.”

And then, of course, there’s Jiminy Glick. So many hilarious moments — like when he asked Mel Brooks, “What’s your big beef with the Nazis?” Or that time he asked Steven Spielberg, “When are you going to do the big one?”

It’s just so good.

So consider this my mea culpa on not having recognized Martin Short’s brilliant comedic mind up until now. I really enjoyed Marty, Life is Short. It’s also, it should be noted, an extremely interesting story of a life, and a heartbreaking love story. And as a bonus, I discovered that Rick Moranis and Eugene Levy once did a Canadian take on “Girl from Ipanema.”

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Stories of the week

• The Jason Arday tragedy cannot justify a crackdown on the press by

The short answer is: You cannot come up with a principled way to mete out who is permitted to speak about a matter of public concern, and how much they can say. One of the greatest strengths of the First Amendment that we enjoy in the United States is that it understands, and accounts for, the inherent danger of giving anyone that kind of authority over speech or press. What looks like a simple fix may very well be the lid to Pandora’s box.

• If everything’s a conspiracy, nothing’s a conspiracy by

The common thread for both Mackey and Lemon is that a single word — conspiracy — has proved elastic enough to be stretched toward a meme-maker and a journalist by administrations that agreed on little except the usefulness of the stretching.

We have to be cautious about what we call a conspiracy because expression that’s actually a conspiracy is unprotected by the First Amendment. Lawyers would describe the specific carve-out as “speech integral to criminal conduct.”

This week in

• Thank you, Brendan Carr by Bob Corn-Revere

• Violence is up and tolerance is down. What comes next? by

• Professors are being squeezed on all sides. The GUARD Act can protect them by

• Foreign journalists to face social media vetting for U.S. visas by

• When the cure is worse than the disease — FIREwire No. 41 by

• Campus hecklers are silencing pro-Israel speakers. Speech codes are not the fix by Max Friedman

Debates over Israel and antisemitism must not be controlled through censorship by administrators, governments, or mobs. Even if certain perspectives are uncomfortable or offensive to some, the First Amendment prescribes more speech as a remedy, not less. This approach allows all of us to gain a more robust understanding of contentious issues, even if we don’t ultimately change our minds. As Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote in Whitney v. California, “Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.”

FIRE interview of the week

Check out FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper discussing Disney’s lawsuit claiming retaliation by the FCC against ABC.

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai’i, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky, Inc. v. Commissioner of the Indiana State Department of Health

Seventh Circuit affirms injunction on enforcing Indiana law that bars aiding or assisting unemancipated minors in obtaining abortions without parental consent and notice insofar as it restricts accurate speech pertaining to abortion providers lawfully operating in other states.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed a permanent injunction against the “aid-and-assist” provision of Indiana’s law governing abortion procedures for unemancipated minors that (the parties agree) make it a violation to give them accurate information about legal abortion practices and providers in other states and/or to contact, or provided referrals to, such out-of-state providers on behalf of unemancipated minors.

The court first confirmed plaintiff’s organizational standing to bring its challenge, noting that “[l]ike other corporations, Planned Parenthood has its own free speech rights” and “[w]hen … sufficiently chilled, a corporate plaintiff can establish standing to challenge a law that prohibits its speech … even when the consequences of any violation might fall most immediately and directly on the corporation’s employees rather than on the corporation itself.” The court went on to reject the state’s argument that “the private enforcement mechanism in Indiana’s aid-or-assist law means the injunction cannot actually redress or prevent the First Amendment injury,” because “Article III standing does not require a plaintiff seeking an injunction against enforcement of a statute to sue all defendants who might possibly enforce the statute against that plaintiff in the future” and a “possibility of private enforcement … does not defeat standing against members of the Indiana Medical Licensing Board.”

On the merits, the court rejected the state’s arguments that the speech at issue is integral to criminal conduct as that First Amendment exception “demands a separate underlying offense that is not the challenged restriction on speech itself,” and while “we can assume that speech aiding an unemancipated minor in obtaining an illegal abortion in Indiana would constitute speech integral to criminal conduct, … providing information and referrals to out-of-state abortion providers operating lawfully in other states does not.” “Indiana officials may disagree with the purposes behind plaintiff’s speech and with the laws and policies of other states,” the court continued, but they “cannot … make it illegal to provide information about lawful conduct in other states. Nor can they apply Indiana’s own parental consent laws to out-of-state abortions.” The court also invoked the recent Supreme Court decision in Chiles v. Salazar to rebuff the state’s argument that the aid-or-assist law cannot be enjoined because it covers more than just giving unemancipated minors information about legal alternatives and/or setting up contacts/referrals, noting that, as with Chiles’ talk-therapy-only as-applied challenge, the challenge here targeted only applications of Indiana’s law to speech that does not involve unlawful conduct.

The court next held the law is content-based applied to the speech at issue, and not viewpoint-neutral, and to invalidate that application under strict scrutiny. It began by observing the state opted to ague only that there is a rational connection between the speech restriction and its asserted interests – at too high a level of generality, without proof – noting defendants “failed to present any evidence that the state’s interests in safeguarding the parent-child relationship or protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors would actually be furthered by prohibiting private individuals from disseminating truthful information to pregnant minors about lawful abortion practices in other states.” In doing so, the court embraced the independent right of minors to receive information, citing “a significant difference … between a parent’s right to consent to or to be notified before her child receives an abortion and a parent’s right to block access to accurate information about or a referral to an out-of-state provider of legal abortion care,” before stating: “We also cannot square defendants’ asserted interest in protecting the parent-child relationship with the strong constitutional protections given to factually accurate speech about conduct that is legal in another state.”

The court then held the law fails narrow tailoring, citing the extent to which in restricting speech it is both over- and under-inclusive. The former because the law “assumes, without showing, that Planned Parenthood intentionally provides this information to help minors evade Indiana’s parental consent requirements [whereas it] identified numerous reasons why its minor patients seek this information that are not efforts to bypass parental consent and notification.” And on the latter, “the speech at issue—information for minor patients—[is] readily available to a pregnant minor without help from plaintiff,” but rather a “minor patient herself can access it easily with a computer or smartphone” while “placing the phone call to an out-of-state abortion provider is not something only the professionals at Planned Parenthood can do.” The court also noted how “Indiana has not explained how applying this statute … where it forbids plaintiff from sharing its desired information about and referrals to out-of-state abortion providers, is sufficiently tailored to those interests where all other medical advice relating to the minor’s pregnancy is not subject to these stringent parental consent and notice requirements.”

The court accordingly affirmed the preliminary injunction, though it modified it to enjoin only Indiana’s Medical Licensing Board members from disciplining physicians based on providing information/referrals, and various county prosecutor defendants and a county juvenile court judge, but not the Commissioner of Indiana’s Department of Health (because, as plaintiffs agreed, changes in Indiana law that allowed abortions when the case started in 2017 now bar them, so the clinics are no longer licensed to perform abortions and thus cannot face licensing sanctions from the Commissioner).

Bonus case #1: In Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Ellison, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reversed denial of a preliminary injunction on a challenge to a law that bars transmitting information within 60 days of an election if the speaker intends to impede or prevent another from exercising the right to vote and knows the information is materially false, where plaintiff seeks to opine that felons on parole cannot vote in Minnesota, even though the state’s law is “knowable and certain” that they can. The court held the prohibition is not against speech falling into any unprotected category, is obviously content-based, invalid under strict scrutiny—primarily as it “overreaches because at least one speech-promoting alternative exists: counter speech,” but also because it’s underinclusive given other speech that undermines election integrity that the state doesn’t restrict—and features a prior restraint in allowing lawsuits to “restrain a violation ... if there is a reasonable basis to believe that an individual or entity … intends to commit a prohibited act.”

Bonus case #2: In Massimino v. Benoit, the Second Circuit joined the vast majority of U.S. Courts of Appeals that have held the First Amendment clearly establishes the right to record law-enforcement activity in public (leaving only a few Circuits that have not), moving past the fact that it was not clearly established when police arrested the self-described “First Amendment auditing hobbyist” plaintiff, to deliberately articulate that it is now clearly established in the Second Circuit going forward.

International free speech stories of the week

• Azerbaijan Suing CNN for Libel: Can They Do That? (Reason) by Eugene Volokh

• Retired Police Officer Fined £1,000 Over Bacon Meme in UK (Reclaim the Net) by Cam Wakefield

The first paired “time for mass deportation” with a supposed 12-year-old migrant asking donors to move him from a three-star hotel to one with “a better halal menu, free wifi and Sky” nearer a girls’ school. The judge called that “a political issue which had been debated in Parliament” and acquitted him; the second read, “Fun facts about Bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9-year-old!” and that one cost £1,000.

Gray said the second post was “intended to be satirical” and meant to “spark a serious debate” about Mohammed’s marriage to Aisha and child marriage in Muslim countries, The Telegraph reported. District Judge Steven Hood found it “designed to be offensive” and not capable of seriousness because it was “framed in a jokey way,” so English comedy has acquired paperwork.

• LGBTQ+ passages cut from Russian edition of Pope Francis’ memoir (TVP World) by Maria Kaminska

Videos of the Week

First up, we’ve got the latest installment in FIRE’s 1AX series: Free Speech in Donald Trump’s America | Part 1. Hear from experts like FIRE’s , NCAC’s Lee Rowland, Knight Institute’s Alex Abdo, ACLU’s Esha Bhandari, & Cato’s Thomas Berry on whether the second Trump administration has lived up to the lofty free speech promises made on the campaign trail.

Next up, enjoy the latest offering from ’s FIRE-sponsored The Blessings of Liberty podcast; a live conversation and meditation on the philosophies and aspirations of America’s Founders with law professor Robert P. George at the Chautauqua Institution.

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Story of the week

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

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

This week in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The romance of fair use and fiction by Ally Duong

This week in FIRE’s blog

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

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

International free speech stories of the week

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

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

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

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

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

Reminder of the Week

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

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

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

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

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

Nearly four times the McCarthy-era rate.

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

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

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

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

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Stories of the week

• Censorship Will Never Solve Antisemitism by

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week in ERI

This week in Expression

• Universities’ double failure on antisemitism and free speech

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Censorship never stops with just two words by

This week on So To Speak

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

This week in FIRE’s blog

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

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

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

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

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

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

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

• Rodríguez-Cotto v. González-Colón

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

• Schulte v. Leners

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

• DoorDash, Inc. v. City of New York

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

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

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

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

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

International free speech stories of the week

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

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

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

Inciting hatred based on race will remain a criminal offence.

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

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

Book of the Month

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then came the less majestic denominator.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That may be coherent, but choices have costs.

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

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

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

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

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

The human problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How consensus turns phony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why actual dissent matters

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

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

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

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

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

O’Sullivan’s Curse

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

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

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

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

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

The remedy has to be deliberate.

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

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

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

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

How viewpoint diversity works: disagree and commit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

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

Stories of the week

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

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

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

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

This week in Expression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The man who wants back into San Quentin by

FIRE in the press!

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

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

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

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

This week on

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

This week in FIRE’s blog

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

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

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International free speech stories of the week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcement of the Week

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

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

Requiem of the Month

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

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

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

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

Read my review of Wonder Man

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Stories of the week

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

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

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

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

This week in Expression

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

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

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

• The political bias of AI models by

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

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

• The new war on political satire by Athena Rem

• Hawaii is a forgotten First Amendment failure by Elyse Everest

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

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

This week in FIRE’s blog

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

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

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

International free speech stories of the week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TV Series of the week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Story of the week

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

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

This week in ERI

This week in Expression

• Are AI companies doing authoritarians’ dirty work? by

• The high cost of censoring speech by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week on

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

FIRE in the press!

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

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

International free speech stories of the week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast of the week

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

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