Yours truly on UnHerd & CSPAN, FIRE Fellow Jacob Mchangama weighs in (twice!) on AI & free speech (buy his new book!), & more!
Bringing you the latest free speech news (12/28/25)
Stories of the week
Earlier this week, I sat down with Freddie Sayers to discuss the current challenge for free speech. As my colleagues at FIRE have documented, 2025 has been the worst year for censorship of students and scholars since we’ve started tracking those categories, topping the prior high of 2020, when Cancel Culture had previously crested in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
Those restrictions on speech are increasingly coming from the off-campus right: politicians, state officials, and federal actors leaning on universities to punish people on the left. But — and this is the part that should ruin any easy narrative — the old censorious impulses on the left haven’t vanished. They’ve slowed in some places, but they haven’t stopped. We’re living through a worst-of-both-worlds moment: a more aggressive right, and a left that still behaves as if it’s “Forever 2021.”
In this discussion I make the point, related to the current administration’s efforts to deport dissenters, that you can’t “win” arguments by disappearing the people making them. Doing so treats adults like children — assuming they can’t be trusted to read, hear, and judge for themselves — while treating government like a kind of ideological parent that should manage what the public is allowed to encounter.
Toward the end of this interview, I introduce my idea of our need for a “fiercer liberalism,” a theme I plan on developing in the new year.
Prof punished over land acknowledgment joke vindicated by court decision: ‘Not going to be silenced’ (NY Post) by Rikki Schlott
“When we place limits on what professors may say or impose punishment for the views they express, we destock the marketplace of ideas and imperil future generations who must be exposed to a range of ideas and readied for the disharmony of a democratic society,” [Judge Daniel A. Bress] wrote.
This week in Expression
The trouble with banning Fizz by @William Harris
FIRE in the press!
China’s AI Governance Ambitions and Their Implications for Free Expression (Lawfare) by Jacob Mchangama (make sure pick up his new book, The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom)
When democracies consider China’s proposals for global AI governance, including its Global AI Governance Action Plan, they should carefully assess China’s efforts to export the anti-democratic values. Rather than accepting China’s proposals, democracies should put forward an alternative for AI governance centered on the protection of fundamental rights and freedom of expression.
Don’t Jawbone AI Companies (Persuasion) by Jacob Mchangama
There are ways that the largest AI companies can disincentivize jawboning and mitigate the effects. Companies may not always be able to refuse government requests to censor outputs when faced with potentially ruinous fines, criminal sanctions for executives, or blanket bans. But through transparency they can make sure that their users know what their governments want to hide or manipulate.
Duke shows what not to do when feds come knocking (The Chronicle) by Dominic Coletti
Restricting their expression not only hurts these community members’ speech rights but also the rights of other concerned citizens to listen to expert opinions about the institutions they know best. And imposing a restraint — even an implicit one — on what employees can say to the media makes Duke a liar, belying its posturing as a university committed to open discourse.
London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup
First Circuit reverses denial of a preliminary injunction seeking access to municipal Citizen Flag Pole for a “Save Women’s Sports” flag, holding that allowing privately sponsored flags could not constitute government speech
Echoing the Supreme Court holding in Shurtleff v. City of Boston that cities opening municipal flagpoles to private use may not discriminate based on viewpoint, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit held the City of Nashua’s truncation of prior approval for local citizens to fly a “Save Women’s Sports” flag was unconstitutional. Nashua had since 2017 allowed such use of one of its four City Hall poles, never rejecting a request until it reversed its approval to plaintiffs after a day of citizen complaints that their flag was discriminatory to the transgender community (the city later denied a request for a “Porcupine” flag associated with the Free State Project and the Libertarian Party). After Shurtleff, Nashua tried to treat privately sponsored flags on the fourth pole as government speech, a position the trial court accepted in denying a preliminary injunction on plaintiffs’ constitutional challenge to the policy. The First Circuit, noting “the City regularly permitted a rotating array of private flags, which conveyed different and sometimes dissonant messages,” held it was “hard to see why the public would view flags on the Citizen Flag Pole as ‘government speech’ when, for example, the government first approves the flying of a flag and later rescinds approval and removes the flag, not as a result of any change in government policy, but in response to criticism received from other members of the public; this sequence resembles a classic heckler’s veto.” Citing the city’s concession that, if allowing privately proposed flags was not government speech, it had engaged in viewpoint discrimination, the court reversed and ordered entry of a declaratory judgment in favor of the plaintiffs (who had indicated acceptance of such, rather than an injunction, during the appeal, as they did not oppose the city closing the fourth pole to private expression).
BONUS CASE: Continuing last week’s “Bonus” theme, in CCIA v. Paxton, yet another state is on the losing side of a challenge to an online age-verification/parental-consent regime, this time involving Texas’ law applicable to app stores and app developers, which the court preliminarily enjoined under the First Amendment as a content-based law unable to satisfy strict scrutiny, analogous to one “that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and, for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to purchase a book.”
International free speech stories of the week
South Korean lawmakers pass bill targeting false information despite warnings on censorship (Arab News)
Scrap non-crime hate incidents, police leaders to recommend (BBC) by Ian Aikman & Iain Watson
The vice-chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, Rachel Swann, said: “It is not for policing to referee online debates on cultural issues. Protecting free speech and ensuring officers focus on real-world threat and risk is an important part of our considerations.
“But equally important is ensuring policing can continue to keep our communities safe, such as by spotting risks to vulnerable people, monitoring community tensions or identifying potential precursors to violence and other criminal behaviour.”
Videos of the week
I always enjoy going on CSPAN (especially when they open up the phone lines!), so I was thrilled when they chose War On Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail (co-authored by Nadine Strossen) as one of the books to highlight during their annual holiday authors’ week this year.
And this panel conversation I participated in at the Global Free Speech Summit in Nashville with Kevin Goldberg, moderated by Ashkhen Kazaryan, was one of my favorites of the year.