Defending our ‘terrible business model’

As we come to the end of a challenging year, supporting FIRE’s nonpartisan defense of free speech is more important than ever.

“You guys have a terrible business model.”

A donor said that to me this year. He meant it admiringly, and I took it as one of the highest compliments my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has ever received.

What he meant was that because we are so unflinchingly and unapologetically committed to defending everyone’s free speech — right, left, and everyone in between — we are guaranteed to annoy basically every major faction in American politics. There is no safe partisan “customer base” for what we do.

And that’s especially true in 2025.

I know — it’s the end of the year, your inbox is full of fundraising emails, and everyone is telling you that this year is uniquely important.

So let me level with you: it really is for us.

Our “terrible business model” means:

• Many people loved us when we took on campus censorship that mostly came from the left — like the California community college that tore down anti-communist and pro-life flyers and ended up having to pay a $330,000 settlement and rewrite its speech codes after we sued.

• Some of those very same people got furious when we sued the Trump administration for trying to deport foreign student journalists over their political views — challenging immigration laws that let the government yank students’ visas for protected speech (especially speech about Israel and U.S. foreign policy).

Conversely…

• Plenty of people on the left cheered when we defended pro-Palestinian students from overreaching administrators and politicians, including Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts Ph.D. student who was arrested and detained by ICE agents for writing an op-ed critical of Israel in a student newspaper. (For more examples, see our Students Under Fire database.)

• But many of those same folks hate it when we defend pro-Israel students, or when we point out that pro-Palestinian students don’t have a great record on tolerating speech they don’t like — accounting for almost all of the shoutdowns of campus speakers in 2023 and 2024.

Being principled and nonpartisan means we’re “morally polluted” in the eyes of the ideologically captured. Liberals remember our defense of conservative professors. Conservatives remember our defense of liberal professors. And so it goes.

Add in the “orphan” issues that don’t fit neatly into anyone’s culture-war narrative, like state “algorithmic discrimination” laws that would effectively force AI to lie, or at least bend reality, to satisfy shifting political notions of “fairness.” FIRE has been warning that these laws threaten free speech, innovation, and honest knowledge creation whether they come wrapped in Biden-era social-justice language or in newly rebranded “anti-woke” packaging. But because they don’t align neatly with one political viewpoint, they don’t earn outrage dollars from angry partisans.

There is nothing easier in the world than running a shop that conspicuously defends only speech popular with one side of the political fence. It is much harder to serve both and all with equal conviction and fervor. Fortunately, we’ve got over 25 years of practice.

Right, left, and the jawboning problem

This year has also been a masterclass in why government “jawboning” — officials leaning on media, platforms, or businesses to punish disfavored speech — is so dangerous, no matter who’s doing it.

We’ve criticized the Biden administration’s pressure on social media companies to suppress speech about COVID, elections, and other hot-button issues. That was at the heart of the Murthy v. Missouri litigation, and we’ve been working to draw a bright line between legitimate government persuasion and unconstitutional coercion.

Now, under Trump, we’re seeing jawboning move into new territory: pressure on TV networks, Hollywood, and even individual comedians. I wrote about the Jimmy Kimmel fiasco — a sitting president using federal leverage to push a critic off the air — but have also made the point that that was likely not even the worst thing that came out of the Trump administration that week (I thought the spectacle of conservatives suddenly becoming pro hate speech codes was probably the worst).

Same problem, different team jersey. And for us, it’s the same principle motivating our opposition to it. If we only complain about jawboning when it hurts our side, we’re not serious about the First Amendment.

Yes, we want higher education reform, too — it just needs to be, you know, constitutional?

Here’s one that really complicates fundraising: I passionately believe in higher-education reform. If you’ve read me for any length of time, you know I’m deeply worried about the illiberal ideological monoculture on campus and the epistemic damage it causes.

But you cannot fix higher ed by effectively nationalizing Harvard — and the government is not allowed to do that anyway. Some of the proposals floating around in Trump-world this year would give the federal government sweeping oversight over elite universities’ hiring, admissions, and even curricula in the name of fighting bias or antisemitism. Harvard itself has been loudly warning about these demands for direct ideological control — and they’re right to be worried, even if they’re wrong about a lot else.

So yes, we’ll fight Harvard when it censors dissent. And yes, we’ll fight the government when it tries to turn Harvard (or any university) into a branch office of whichever administration happens to be in power.

Meanwhile, in the real world, we still had to get the work done

It’s important to emphasize here that all of this big-picture stuff has been happening while our actual day-to-day work has been… nuts.

This includes our College Free Speech Rankings (now with more than 250 schools surveyed each year), our strategic nationwide free speech litigation docket, educational activities (like our Free Speech Forum for high school students), and all the behind-the-scenes counseling we do for terrified students, professors, and ordinary citizens who just got in trouble for saying the “wrong” thing.

You will not always agree with us… and that’s the point.

I completely get that this is not a “normal” fundraising pitch. Most advocacy organizations — certainly the ones that do consistently well with fundraising — tend to pick a side and stick with it. As I’ve illustrated here, though, our “business model” is to frustrate partisans, and only really thrill the most principled defenders of free speech (who are still very much out there, but often hard to find — hence my insane travel schedule). But that’s what being principled means, and that’s what it takes to truly fight for and protect free expression.

Another thing I hear a lot, usually prefaced with “I really respect what you do, but…” or “I love FIRE, but…” is “I just can’t donate because I disagreed with you on [that one case]” — where “that one case” might be from this year, or five years ago, or way back when I was troublingly beardless and just starting out at FIRE.

I get it. Some of our cases are about truly unpopular speech. Some involve people you think are heroes; others involve people you think are villains. And in a hyper-polarized moment, it’s easy to feel like donating means endorsing every single judgment call we make.

But if FIRE only took cases that 100% of our supporters agreed with, there would be precious few cases for us to take. Our supporters don’t just span the political spectrum, they actually extend well beyond the visible spectrum — I’m talking like x-rays and ultraviolet.

The fact is that the only way to build the credibility we want, the kind that makes even our harshest critics grudgingly admit “Fine, they’re honest brokers,” is to stick our necks out consistently, even when it hurts and even when it risks losing donations.

That’s the “terrible business model.” It’s also the only way to do this work right.

Why I’m asking for your support — especially this year

If you are already a FIRE supporter, you’ve sustained our independence and enabled us to defend nonpartisan principles. On behalf of all of us at FIRE, thank you. Because of your trust and generosity, we’ve been able to challenge censorship and help rebuild a culture of free speech in this country. And we couldn’t do it without you.

And for everyone: I know you’re getting a lot of appeals from all kinds of organizations right now. I know free speech isn’t the only worthy cause in the world, too. But I know that every other cause you believe in benefits from people being able to speak freely in its favor.

What I can also tell you, as someone who has been doing this for 26 years and has the gray hair and hate mail (and now the Substack newsletter) to prove it, is this:

• The threats to free speech in 2025 are coming from everywhere — the right, the left, the bureaucracy, the courts, AI regulators, state legislatures…you name it. We also have threats from foreign governments, as FIRE Senior Scholar of Global Expression Sarah McLaughlin details in her book, Authoritarians in the Academy.

• Almost nobody else is willing to be the stubborn and consistent defender of free speech principles across all of those fronts.

• That principled protector of free expression is precisely what FIRE exists to be. But we cannot do it without a robust base of people who are willing to support us even when we take a case or a client they dislike.

I hope you’ll consider becoming one of those people by donating to FIRE. If you can give $25 or more, you can become an official FIRE member. That comes with a membership card, invitations to events and conferences in your area, and a subscription to our FIRE Quarterly magazine. If you’re already a member (thank you!), you can gift a membership to someone in your life who cares about free speech as much as you do.

And if you’re one of the folks who has ever told me, “I don’t always agree with you, but I’m glad you’re out there,” well, this is me, very directly, asking you to turn that sentiment into support.

Our “terrible business model” only works if enough people decide that having at least one honest broker in American public life is a state of affairs worth backing (even if you hated “that one case”).

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Become a card-carrying FIRE member today with just a $25 donation that gets you into FIRE events and conferences in your area and a one-year subscription to the FIRE Quarterly. Oh, and did we mention that “defending free speech never looked so good?”