UCLA targets FedSoc chapter! I answer CSPAN callers! I must ask myself “will I be trapped in Canada forever”? I endorse The Expanse! & more!

Bringing you the latest free speech news (5/10/26)

Stories of the week

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

• My run-in with CBP at the Vancouver airport

This week in Expression

• How the Comey indictment could backfire on Republicans by Jacob Gaba

• The quiet push to control AI speech by John Coleman

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 Zoe Armbruster

FIRE in the press!

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

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

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 (The Bedrock Principle) by Natalie Alkiviadou

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.