Stories of the week

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week in Expression

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

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

• What’s special about poor conservative students? by

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

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

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

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

• The revolution continues by

This week in FIRE’s blog

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

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

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Pernell v. Florida Board of Governors of State University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International free speech stories of the week

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

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

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

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

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

Tribute of the week

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

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Stories of the week

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

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

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

This week in ERI

• Thomas Paine deserves more love by

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

This week in

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

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

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

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

• 250 years later, free speech is still revolutionary by

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

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

• One Voice: Gagging education board members by

• How tolerant are disciples of Cthulhu? by

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

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

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

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

This week on

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

This week in FIRE’s blog

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

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

Sestercentennial Independence Day Lightning Fireworks Round

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

• Utah Political Watch, Inc. v. Musselman

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

• New York Times Co. v. Department of Defense

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

• Accountability Now USA v. Greiss

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

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

• NetChoice v. Hilgers:

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

International free speech stories of the week

• Australia to double potential fines over child social media accounts

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

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

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

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

Book of the Semiquincentennial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Shot for the Road

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

Story of the week

• Tell the government: Hands off our TV stations

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

• Cosmos Grants are back! (Cosmos Institute)

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

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

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

This week in ERI

This week in

• J. Edgar Hoover and the war on dissent by

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

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

• How does the First Amendment apply to AI? by

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

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

This week in FIRE’s blog

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

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

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

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

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

FIRE in the press!

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

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

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Merriott v. City of Bossier City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International free speech stories of the week

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

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

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

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

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

Book of the month

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From: Nico Perrino

Date: Jun 23, 2026, 1:23 PM

Subject: Current challenges for free speech & emerging tech

To: FIRE staff

Hey everyone,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We cannot let that happen.

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

Onward —

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

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

Story of the week

• Statement on shutdown of Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos

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

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

This week in ERI

• The online ‘safety’ trap by me

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

This week in

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

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

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

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

This week on

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

This week in FIRE’s blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FIRE in the press!

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

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

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Borecky v. Nassau County

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International free speech stories of the week

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

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

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

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

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

Video of the week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

I knew Woodrow Wilson was terrible before it was cool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Story of the week

• FIRE backs JAWBONE Act to end backdoor censorship by

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

This week in

• Illinois’ doomed plan to tax social media by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week on

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

This week in FIRE’s blog

• Auburn’s governing overhaul guts accountability by

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

FIRE in the press!

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

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

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

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Boddy v. Grech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International free speech stories of the week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast of the week

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

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Story of the week

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

What does the First Amendment say?

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

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

This week in ERI

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

This week in Expression

• Why do students censor themselves? by

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

• Jeffrey Rosen thinks America is worth arguing about

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

This week in FIRE’s blog

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

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Accountability Now USA v. Griess

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

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

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

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

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

International free speech stories of the week

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tribute of the month

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

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

I know he made so many people feel that way.

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

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

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

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

The blue veins run across my map are rivers,

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

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

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

Father dear, I am spoiled.

Thanks for the pen.

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

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

Rest in peace, Dito.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The broken reality-testing machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early glimpses of a challenge system

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The separation of truth and power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The physical anchor: Replication University

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

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

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

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

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

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

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

Stories of the week

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

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

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

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

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

This week in ERI

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

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

This week in

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

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

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

This week on

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

This week in FIRE’s blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Thakur v. Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

International free speech stories of the week

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Greg on the Run’

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

Event of the week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now we have another level of data.

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

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

Why higher ed being an ideological monoculture is a serious problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FIRE’s faculty ideology report: what the numbers show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How this reality actually warps reality on campus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to pull universities back from the abyss

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

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

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

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

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

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

The implications of this are much bigger than campus politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on that soon.

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

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

Story of the week

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

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

This week in ERI

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

This week in

• Fearing controversy, schools cancel graduation speeches by

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

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

• Thomas Paine: American history’s winter soldier by

• How two Clemson professors fought a wave of censorship by

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

This week in FIRE’s blog

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

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

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

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

FIRE in the press!

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

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

International free speech stories of the week

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

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

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

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

‘Greg on the Run’

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

TV Show of the Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, it doesn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is good advice. Particularly in our distracted age.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. ‘Commencement speakers should reflect our values.’

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

Then you find yourself asking, Whose values?

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

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

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

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

That is not oppression. That is learning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That possibility should be exciting, not offensive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But first, read them.

Then argue with what they actually say.

That would be a pretty good start.

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

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

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

Stories of the week

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

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

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

This week in

• How McCarthy scared America silent by

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

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

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

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

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

This week in FIRE’s blog

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

International free speech stories of the week

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcement of the week

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

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

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Stories of the week

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

• My run-in with CBP at the Vancouver airport

This week in Expression

• How the Comey indictment could backfire on Republicans by

• The quiet push to control AI speech by

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

• Press freedom in Pakistan falls off a cliff by

FIRE in the press!

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

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

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International free speech stories of the week

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

Clip of the week

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

TV Show of the Month: The Expanse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Stories of the week

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

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

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

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

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

This week in ERI

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

This week in Expression

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

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

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

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

• Yale tries to claw back public trust by

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

This week on

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

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

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

FIRE in the press!

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

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

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Davenport

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International free speech stories of the week

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

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

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

• Belarus frees journalist Andrzej Poczobut (CPJ)

Clip of the week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…And then there’s the FCC.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SHOT FOR THE ROAD

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

Stories of the week

• Greg Lukianoff On Free Speech Fights with

The Weekly Dish

Greg Lukianoff On Free Speech Fights

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

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3 months ago · Andrew Sullivan

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

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

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

This week in ERI

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

This week in Expression

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

This week on

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

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

So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast

FIRE Monthly Member Webinar — April 2026

Timestamps…

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3 months ago · 2 likes · Nico Perrino

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

This week in FIRE’s blog

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

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

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

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

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

• California lawmakers threaten free speech regarding immigration groups by

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

FIRE in the press!

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

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

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

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

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

Just two quickies this week:

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

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

International free speech stories of the week

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Greg on the Run’ of the week

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

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

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

What is an IRB, and why do they exist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what went wrong?

Why IRBs have become a problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

People wielding hammers will always find more nails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

FIRE and the AFA’s proposed solutions to IRB overreach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Why does free speech have a “branding problem”?

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

It’s a slow-motion train wreck.

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

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