Our civic discourse is in danger! ERI footnotes the NYT! Flag burning is protected speech! & more!

Bringing you the latest free speech news (8/31/25)

Story of the week

• We are losing the basis of our civic discourse by FIRE board member

  Samuel J. Abrams

If we stop using the language of freedom, will we still defend the practice of it? The decline of these expressions parallels other troubling trends: shrinking tolerance for opposing viewpoints on campus, partisan sorting in neighborhoods and workplaces, and the growing tendency to treat disagreement as an attack rather than a challenge.

This is how a culture forgets how to live with difference. Not in one dramatic moment, but in the slow attrition of its everyday speech.

This week in ERI

• Footnotes to the recent New York Times piece on FIRE by me

The theme I hit the most in my interview for the article was simply this: There are some people who are perceiving a shift in what FIRE has done, but they seem to have missed that we’ve defended against all threats to freedom of speech — from the right, left, and WTF — since day one. We appreciate that people are starting to notice this principled defense, but as I’ve written before, the secret motto of FIRE since its earliest days has been We’d rather drive this bus into a wall than be unprincipled.

Still, despite it being good overall, there were a few things in the article that warrant a response.

This week in

Expression

• Your burning questions on flag burning

The right to burn the American flag sparks heated debate. Those debates become complicated when protesters engage in behavior that is not protected by the First Amendment, like destroying public property.

In response to the images from Capitol Hill, former President Donald Trump called for one-year jail sentences for anyone who burns the American flag. "Now, people will say, ‘Oh, it’s unconstitutional,’" Trump added. "Those are stupid people that say that." Vice President Kamala Harris jumped into the conversation too, commenting that the flag "should never be desecrated" like that.

But the First Amendment protects flag burning in most cases, and rightly so.

• Chinese officials force censorship of Thai gallery’s art exhibit about authoritarianism (proving the exhibit’s point) by

  Sarah McLaughlin

• How campus conversations shape political tolerance by

  Chapin Lenthall-Cleary
  and Mertcan Güngör.

This week on

So to Speak

• This week,

  So to Speak
  released a conversation with host
  Nico Perrino
  and University of Iowa Law Professor
  Samantha Barbas
  , the author of a new law review article, “How American Civil Rights Groups Defeated Hate Speech Laws.”

This week in FIRE’s blog

• How sure are you? On the virtue of doubt and its role in free speech by a FIRE intern

That’s how safeguarding a touch of uncertainty, even when it comes to your most tightly held beliefs, can help promote a culture of free speech. Because people only become censorial when they are sure of themselves. But if you keep open the possibility that you might be wrong, and that the other person might be right, you are more likely to want to hear what they have to say.

• FIRE statement on President Trump’s executive order to outlaw flag burning

• Fifth Circuit: First Amendment protects drag show from campus censors by

  Jeff Zeman

• FIRE statement on UT-Dallas student newspaper distribution

Student journalists at UT Dallas are taking a stand after the university tried to silence them yet again. Banning newspaper racks is just the latest tactic in a disturbing pattern: censor the coverage, kill the paper, and now, block its distribution. But these students fought back with creativity, resilience, and the truth. FIRE stands with them.

Public universities are bound by the First Amendment. Freedom of the press isn’t a courtesy — it’s a constitutional right. UT Dallas can try to shut down a newspaper, but they can’t stop the news.

FIRE in the press!

• Academia's Crisis of Cowardice: A conversation with Sarah Mclaughlin (To the Contrary with Charlie Sykes)

International free speech stories of the week

• Saudi Arabia launches chatbot with Islamic moral code (The Times of London) by Samer Al-Atrush

The chatbot, which is based on Allam 34B, an Arabic LLM, promises “unmatched fluency in Arabic and deep alignment with Islamic, Middle Eastern and cultural nuance”, according to Humain.

“Allam 34B’s technology is proof that Saudi Arabia is shaping the future of AI on its own terms, with talent, IP and infrastructure rooted at home, and built for the world,” it said.

It is not clear how the chatbot will answer sensitive questions on atheism or homosexuality, which are illegal in the kingdom, but it is unlikely to respond that they are a matter of choice, in the manner of Grok, Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

• A popular VPN is seeing a 1,400% spike in signups as the UK's age verification law takes effect (Mashable) by Haley Henschel

• SC: No free speech immunity for content by influencers (The Times of India)

• Thai Woman Jailed For 43 Years For Lese-majeste Freed (Barron’s) by Agence France Presse

• Quebec plans to table bill banning prayer in public (CBC) by Matthew Lapierre

Podcast of the week

• I had a blast on the Going Big! podcast with Kevin Gentry this week. Kevin set the perfect stage for me to dig into why free speech is the eternally radical idea, — but we didn’t stop there.
  
  We also got into what it really means to “go big,” how dissent drives discovery, how comfort can actually make us fragile, and how even something like AI could either supercharge human creativity or lock us into bad orthodoxy forever.
  
  We talked about the strange fragility of free expression in wealthy societies, the ways safetyism backfires, and why taking risks — intellectual ones especially — is at the heart of progress. It was one of those conversations that jumps from campus absurdities to James Madison to the future of knowledge itself, and still somehow flows and feels fun the whole way through.