Four Constitution Day updates on a terrible week for free speech

A recap of (some) of what’s gone down this week (so far) and items that warrant your attention.

It’s been quite a month this week.

I’m still quite shaken by the Charlie Kirk assassination — especially now that it looks like I’ll soon be speaking at the very place where Kirk was shot.

But even besides that, there has been a lot going on, so I wanted to quickly highlight a few things in case you missed them in the hurricane of news and insanity we’ve been subjected to (so far!).

It’s also Constitution Day today, and what better way to honor that than once again emphasizing the importance of our First Amendment rights?

Can you hear me in the back? Words are not violence!

I published a piece in

The Free Press

about the response to the Charlie Kirk assassination, and once again debunking and demanding that we bury the “words are violence” canard once and for all:

In the minds of these gleeful posters, Kirk deserved to die because of his words—words that allegedly promoted policies resulting in hate, violence, and even death. They think this way because they have forgotten—or have been trained to unlearn—a crucial distinction: Words are not bullets. Words can’t strike a man from 142 yards away, causing a torrent of blood to erupt from his wound, sending him first to the hospital and then to the morgue. Only bullets can do that.

Regular ERI readers will know I’ve come at this subject from a variety of angles (and Angels!) over the years. This includes a chapter in my latest book, which I coauthored with the inimitable

Nadine Strossen

, called The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech — And Why They Fail.

Believe me, it’s annoying and exhausting to make the same points over and over again, but we have to keep doing it until people get it. I highly recommend reading the whole piece in The Free Press.

Greg Lukianoff: Bury the ‘Words Are Violence’ Cliché

Pam Bondi and the Not-So-Curious Case of Constitutional Ignorance

Far be it for the Trump administration to let the left have all the fun. Also this week, Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was a guest on The Katie Miller Podcast, dropped a bombshell of Constitutional ignorance on us all by arguing that there is a hate speech exception to the First Amendment.

This is yet another seemingly immortal canard (and one I also get into with Nadine in The War on Words) that we have to keep putting down. Thankfully, my FIRE colleagues

Angel Eduardo

and

Aaron Terr

did a great job responding to Bondi’s comments in a piece for Expression yesterday so I don’t have to:

Why everything Pam Bondi said about ‘hate speech’ is wrong

Aaron did a great video yesterday on the same subject too, which you should definitely watch:

Also on this, FIRE Executive Vice President and

So to Speak

podcast host

Nico Perrino

hosted a webinar yesterday, featuring

Aaron Terr

,

Sarah McLaughlin

, and Ronnie London. They discussed Bondi’s “hate speech” nonsense, examined the wider implications of the right’s recent censorial behavior in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, and also took questions from the audience.

Definitely check that out if you missed it.

And then of course there’s President Trump himself, who not only echoed Bondi’s comments, but doubled down — telling the C-SPAN journalist who asked him about it:

If that doesn’t make absolutely clear why the idea of a “hate speech” exception to First Amendment protections is not just ludicrous, but dangerous, then we’ve really got our work cut out for us.

The irony, of course, is that this is all ostensibly being done in response to — and in some cases, in honor of — Charlie Kirk’s death…but Kirk himself decried the idea of hate speech laws, and would likely disagree with all of this behavior.

The right promotes ‘Consequence Culture’

I had my 51st birthday this week, and the prize for Rudest Gift Ever goes to Senator Rand Paul, who really disappointed me when he — a self-described libertarian — basically sanctioned Cancel Culture:

Unfortunately, Paul isn’t the only one. Vice President JD Vance this week stepped in to guest host Charlie Kirk’s podcast, and endorsed a mass effort to cancel anybody who “celebrates” Charlie’s murder.

Not only should people “call them out,” he said, we should “call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility, and there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.”

We also have Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy praising airlines that fired employees over their commentary on Charlie Kirk’s death, as we continue through what my colleague

Adam Goldstein

recently wrote is the “Cancel Culture part of the tragedy cycle.”

And then we have people like Trump’s Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, defending the use of RICO statutes to go after protestors who organize and use “vile words and vile anger” against the president.

As Nico Perrino put it on X, “I’m flabbergasted that he’s flabbergasted that Collins is flabbergasted by this argument.”

And just today, we have FCC Chairman Brendan Carr telling Benny Johnson that he’s “threatening immediate action against Jimmy Kimmel, ABC, and Disney for deliberately misleading the public by claiming Charlie Kirk’s assassin was a MAGA Conservative.”

"There are calls for Kimmel to be fired,” Carr says. “I think you could certainly see a path forward for suspension over this."

Flabbergasting, indeed. An unacceptable and raw use of state power to chill speech and punish speakers.

Save the date for FIRE’s 2026 free speech conference to celebrate America’s 250th!

I think if there’s one thing this week has taught us (besides the fact that the whole FIRE team deserves a Nobel prize for all the work they’ve been doing and media requests they’ve been fielding), it’s that the principles of liberty that were the bedrock of our nation’s founding are still revolutionary. And next year, FIRE is going to celebrate that.

Soapbox is FIRE’s bold new conference, taking place Nov. 4-6, 2026 in Philadelphia to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. It’ll feature keynote speeches, timely panels, and unforgettable entertainment with luminaries from the free speech world and beyond!

Learn more at soapbox.fire.org, and sign up there to receive updates as they’re released!

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

In a piece that can be filed under “This was obvious but now we have neuroscience data to back it up,” Dr.

Barbara Oakley

(with whom I collaborated on the free Coursera course, Speak Freely, Think Critically: The Free Speech Balance Act) published a piece in The Wall Street Journal arguing that censorship isn’t just bad for society and democracy, it’s also literally bad for our brains.

Our brains are built to form habits. The basal ganglia — deep learning circuits that automate whatever we repeat — don’t absorb only tennis serves or piano scales. They also wire in patterns of thought. If the only messages we hear are one-sided, the brain’s habit circuits carve them into grooves of thought that resist change.

Definitely give it a read, because it’s fascinating — and once again points to how important free speech is, not just for our civic health, but our actual health.

And don’t miss the Coursera course I worked on with Barbara! It’s free, and it features contributions from the neuroscientist Cristina Koppel, and the constitutional law expert, Ilya Shapiro. I’m really proud of how that turned out, and I urge you to give it a watch!

Speak Freely, Think Critically: The Free Speech Balance Act