This essay was originally published by The News & Observer on April 10, 2026.

“Hey guys, welcome back to my channel,” says the young blonde host as she stands on the campus of UNC Chapel Hill. “Today I’m going to be taking a step outside of Granville and exploring a third-world country — South Campus.”

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What follows is a satire of the genre of performative allyship that some refer to as “white lady liberalism.” Our host continues, “Now I know what you guys are thinking. Stacy, isn’t that, like, super dangerous? The truth is, the people here are just like us. And I’m here to prove it. I just can’t wait to bask in their culture and in their struggle. The truth is, we have nothing to be afraid of.” But just to be safe, she adds, she is taking along two bodyguards, pepper spray, and a taser (as well as her vape).

At this point in the video, the joke could go one of two ways. This could end up being a satire of people who are foolish enough to go slumming, who think we have nothing to be afraid of, or a satire of people with such racist hyper-sensitivities that they feel the need to carry mace to visit the other half of their public Ivy campus. The joke ends up going in the second direction.

When they get to South Campus, the theme song from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly plays in the background as if Stacy has been wandering across a desert wasteland for days. She pauses, and says she’s surprised to see South Campus has roads and buildings. One of her bodyguards notices a nearby building is missing a brick and warns Stacy to watch out for sepsis. The sketch is dripping with mockery for the soft bigotry of exoticizing ordinary places, such as by treating a section of campus as if it’s rural Chad, and the over-the-top pearl-clutching of this well-intentioned white girl whose bodyguards gasp at masonry defects.

In the next scene, a black female student recognizes Stacy and runs up to give her a hug. But Stacy recoils and pretends not to know the girl. She’s a racist Regina George from Mean Girls, warm and performative but image-obsessed and disavowing in public. In the next scene, Stacy continues the tour — “This is where they play their games, such as basketball and futbol” — and introduces herself to a young Latino boy who is in the middle of a pickup game. “Hi, my name’s Stacy. Staaacy. Me, Staaacy.” The boy catches the basketball, looks at her like she’s a moron, and shakes his head. The joke is, unmistakably, at her expense.

On April 1, The Daily Tar Heel ran several satirical headlines — “The Daily Woke Heel,” “Trump orders ALE in Chapel Hill to be replaced with ICE agents,” and “UNC brings back DEI — for whites.” Then on Monday, the student-run late-night variety show Hill After Hours released the South Campus sketch from its March 31 episode on TikTok. One black student filmed a response to the headlines and the sketch, noting that South Campus historically housed black students and calling the sketch racist. The editors of The Daily Tar Heel issued an apology and removed headlines. Things took an even darker turn when UNC Chapel Hill publicly condemned the articles and the video.

“Recent content of both a racist and insensitive nature has had a profound impact on our Carolina students and their families,” wrote Senior Vice Provost James Orr. “Any content that demeans, harms, or contributes to an unwelcoming environment in our campus community is unacceptable.” But these remarks seemingly ignore UNC Chapel Hill’s own free expression policies, state law obligations, and the First Amendment to the Constitution.

To be fair, Orr did recognize that his office has no authority over The Daily Tar Heel, saying the newspaper “operates as a nonprofit organization legally and financially independent of the university.” Still, he called the satirical articles “highly inappropriate and offensive” and said, “we unequivocally condemn them.” That didn’t stop the chill from hitting the newsroom. After the condemnation, The Daily Tar Heel announced it was adding a news adviser, seeking DEI training, and shelving satire for the rest of the semester.

As for Hill After Hours, Orr said, “Student Affairs is investigating this incident to determine more information about how and by whom the video was authorized and produced as well as next steps to address concerns.”

Investigating a student group or condemning speech is not the role of a public university. Students and student journalists do not lose their First Amendment rights just because their speech is offensive, unpopular, or badly received. The Supreme Court has made that clear: In Papish v. Board of Curators of the University of Missouri, the Court held that a political cartoon in a student paper depicting police officers raping the Statue of Liberty and Goddess of Justice was protected speech. “The mere dissemination of ideas” on campus, the Court explained, however “offensive” to others, “may not be shut off in the name alone of ‘conventions of decency.’”

But that’s exactly what UNC Chapel Hill is doing. Satire that others find offensive will continue to be shut off in the name of “decency” if the university doesn’t change course.

Constitutional law isn’t the university’s only concern. North Carolina state law requires the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina to “remain neutral, as an institution, on the political controversies of the day.” This law enshrines a standard of institutional neutrality for UNC institutions. Institutional neutrality, as best described by the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, means that a university “is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” This creates space for individual and collective voices to flourish rather than chilling voices of opposition, much less humor.

This law also limits how UNC system schools can restrict student expression, specifically stating “constituent institutions shall be allowed to restrict student expression only for expressive activity not protected by the First Amendment.” Both The Daily Tar Heel‘s and Hill After Hours’ speech is protected — so UNC Chapel cannot restrict their expression, plain and simple.

Naturally, critics are free to answer The Daily Tar Heel and Hill After Hours with more speech. They can comment on the article or videos online. Or they can make their own content in response, as some students already have. But the school itself, as a public research university, is not free to answer such speech with actions designed to chill student expression.

In June 2024, the philosopher Idris Robinson traveled from Texas to North Carolina to give a talk on Palestinian resistance. Nearly a year later, Texas State University fired him for it. Then when historian Thomas Alter spoke at an online socialist conference, the school fired him too, reinstated him, and fired him again. Now in separate First Amendment lawsuits, the two professors are taking Texas State to court.

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Robinson delivered his 2024 talk, “Strategic Lessons on the Palestinian Resistance,” at the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair (ACAB) in Asheville, North Carolina. During his talk, Robinson described “terrorism murder” as “divine violence” and praised the October 7 attacks on Israel. When the audience noticed three people livestreaming the event, two of them Jewish, the crowd attacked them and kicked them out. Robinson was giving his talk when the fight broke out but whether he told the crowd to stop, said nothing and just watched, or made jokes as the situation unfolded, his speech was protected by the First Amendment.

Local police investigated and three attendees later pleaded guilty to assault. But the police investigation did not name Robinson as a suspect or even a witness.

Nearly a year later, one of the three victims’ livestream appeared on Instagram. Texas State put Robinson on administrative leave shortly afterwards, saying it had received “multiple complaints and allegations regarding an incident that occurred in the summer of 2024.” One month after that, they told him his contract would not be renewed.

Now, represented by First Amendment attorney Samantha Harris of the law firm Allen Harris, Robinson has filed suit against Texas State University, alleging a violation of his constitutional free-speech rights. JT Morris, a supervising senior attorney at FIRE, is serving as local counsel. The lawsuit’s argument is simple: Robinson consistently received positive reviews and was on track for tenure. But after sharing his views off campus and as a private citizen, Texas State pushed him out over a social media pile-on.

Under the law, state universities don’t get to punish faculty simply for saying things that make people uncomfortable, or for attracting negative attention to the school. Universities, especially large public institutions like Texas State University, should encourage the robust discussion of public issues, even if they offend those off campus. To begin with, public schools are funded by taxpayers and therefore function as state actors. If a public school silences a professor, that’s government censorship and a direct violation of the First Amendment. But a university also exists to pursue truth. Indeed, “Truth” is one of the four words in Texas State University’s own motto. Pursuing truth wherever it leads means one must tolerate different perspectives. As John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, even wildly incorrect views and opinions are critical to that process for one unavoidable reason: if you never examine alternative views, you have no way of knowing whether your own views are actually correct.

Robinson’s lawsuit comes on the heels of fellow faculty member Thomas Alter’s lawsuit against Texas State, which was filed last September. As mentioned above, Alter was fired (then reinstated, then fired again) after a video of him speaking at an online socialist conference went viral. In his talk, Alter said workers must organize so they are ready to “take power” when the revolution comes. “Without organization,” he asked, “how can anyone expect to overthrow the most bloodthirsty, profit-driven, mad organization in the history of the world — that of the U.S. government?”

The only possible category of unprotected speech this might fall into is that of incitement — and it falls far, far short of the bar. The First Amendment protects most anti-government speech, even when it is really ugly or aggressive, and the only time “incitement” loses protection is when someone intends to spark immediate illegal action right now through their expression, and that said illegal action is actually likely to happen. Merely encouraging violence in general, in the future, or in some set of potential circumstances does not typically qualify. Famously, in Hess v. Indiana, the Supreme Court said that a protester’s controversial line that got him arrested — “we’ll take the fucking street later” — was protected. The speaker wasn’t calling for immediate action, but at some unspecified time in the future — “later.”

Earlier this week, Texas State community members protested in support of Robinson. In an absurd twist, an administrator confronted Alter, who was also there to support Robinson, and told him he was not allowed to protest on campus because he’s no longer affiliated with the university. Under a university policy adopted last September, individuals who are not affiliated with the university or sponsored by a student group are not allowed to protest on campus, except in very specific free speech zones. The same policy also prohibits expressive activities on campus between the hours of 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. (FIRE has argued that this policy violates the First Amendment, as it is unnecessarily broad and empowers administrators to censor protected speech, and last October we also successfully obtained a preliminary injunction issued preventing the University of Texas System from enforcing this ban on expressive activities between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m.)

Alter argued that the First Amendment trumped university policy. (It does.) The administrator eventually allowed him to stay, but took away his sign and told him not to participate in the protest. So the official position of the state was that he could stay in the free speech zone and be near the protest, but he just couldn’t participate. This makes no sense, but is the sort of absurd outcome that can happen when a university institutes such sweeping restrictions on free speech on campus. Public universities cannot wave a magic wand and severely restrict anyone unaffiliated with the university from demonstrating in public areas on campus. As public institutions bound by the First Amendment, they must respect the rights of members of the public to demonstrate in certain areas on campus, and they cannot arbitrarily cabin those demonstrations to one or two small places on campus.

Sadly, these two lawsuits are shocking but not surprising. Texas universities have been flouting the First Amendment for months. And while people are fighting back, there’s still no end in sight. Now faculty members must go to court to vindicate their First Amendment rights — and the rights of generations of students and faculty to come.

Imagine you are engaging in the time-honored American tradition of criticizing your local government. You air your complaints on a website you’ve set up to report on city news — and then the city threatens you with legal action and potential jail time, all because some of your comments feature the city’s seal and logos. That’s what happened to Kyle L’Hommedieu and the local watchdog group he chairs, Take Out The Trash Committee of Cape Coral.

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A Cape Coral ordinance and logo policy prohibit individuals from using the city’s seal or logo without permission. No exceptions. The policy even bans symbols that so much as resemble the city’s logos, including fictional ones. So the city sent a cease-and-desist letter to the watchdog group, threatening to pursue “appropriate legal action” that could result in a fine or jail time. Several other residents who run websites or online community forums reportedly received similar letters.

But that’s not how the First Amendment works. FIRE has stepped in to tell the city that its threats are out of sync with the Constitution. And we’re calling on the city to immediately bring its policies and actions in line with the First Amendment. City ordinances don’t trump the Constitution, and Americans don’t need the government’s permission to speak. Or to use government symbols in that speech, including — if not especially — when criticizing the government itself. That’s why the Supreme Court has upheld the right to burn the American flag or display it upside down with a peace symbol attached.

Cape Coral’s ban is a classic regulation of the content of speech. The Supreme Court has said that content-based speech restrictions are “presumptively unconstitutional.” And as FIRE has explained, the city has no trademark rights in its seal or logos. Besides, the watchdog’s website makes it amply clear that it’s a private organization, and nothing about its use of the city’s symbols suggests that the city itself endorsed any of this. And yet, under Cape Coral’s overly broad rules, not only is a group like Take Out The Trash barred from using such symbols, even this blog post violates the ordinance because we included images of the logos without the city’s permission!

Cape Coral’s rule forcing private citizens to ask for permission to speak is also a classic example of prior restraint, which the Supreme Court has called the “most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.”

On top of all this, the city’s actions raise concerns that it is selectively targeting who to let speak and who to silence. L’Hommedieu says other groups used the logo “for ages” without issue, but once his group used it, they were told to stop. That would amount to viewpoint discrimination, which the Supreme Court has called an “egregious” form of censorship. The First Amendment means the government doesn’t get to decide who can criticize it — or which images they use to do so.

More than 100 years ago, Stanford University terminated economics and sociology professor Edward Ross and set in motion a wild chain of events that would eventually result in the formal establishment of academic tenure in the United States.

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People today argue about why Ross was pushed out. Some say it was because he violated university rules concerning partisan political advocacy. Others say it was because his political views clashed with the university’s wealthy backers. He publicly supported abandoning the gold standard in favor of a looser system that he believed would help farmers, but hurt bankers. He also spoke out against cheap Chinese and Japanese immigrant labor, which undercut white farmers. In one speech, he infamously said, “It would be better for us to turn our guns upon every vessel bringing Japanese to our shores than permit them to land.”

That didn’t sit well with Jane Stanford, who along with her husband — the Central Pacific Railroad tycoon Leland Stanford — had founded the university. Her railroad fortune depended on the gold standard. Not to mention, 90% of her workforce was Chinese. On top of this, Ross was known to attack the railroad industry in his classes, and had allegedly told students, “A railroad deal is a railroad steal,” though he later denied it. There was also the fact that Ross supported eugenics, and his racial views are often cited today as the reason he was fired, although the Stanfords had a history of anti-Asian racism themselves. But whatever the reason, after that speech, Jane Stanford immediately pushed the university’s inaugural president to fire Ross.

America had just gotten an early taste of cancel culture, and it didn’t go over well. On Nov. 14, 1900, Ross announced he had been let go. The news sent shockwaves through the higher education world and prompted one of Ross’s colleagues, the philosopher Arthur Lovejoy, to resign in protest. The idea that a faculty member could be punished for speaking out in public may seem commonplace in our modern social media ecosystem, but at the time, it represented a new front in the war over free speech, and what one Stanford president later described as the school’s “first academic freedom controversy.”

Inspired by these events, Lovejoy and the philosopher John Dewey founded the American Association of University Professors in 1915, with the mission of protecting and advancing academic freedom in America. In the AAUP’s declaration of principles, released that year, the group argued that universities serve the public trust only when scholars are free to speak honestly, without pressure from the public, the government, or wealthy backers. That statement, in addition to the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, became the gold standard for understanding the principles of academic freedom and helped establish academic tenure in the country, with high bars for terminating tenured faculty members.

To be sure, there are good-faith criticisms to be made of tenure. One critic argued that under financial pressures, tenure effectively creates a two-tiered system where one set of tenured, and therefore more expensive, faculty takes on lighter teaching loads while untenured adjuncts take on heavier class assignments for less pay. Other critics argue that giving faculty job security for life means that they can’t be held accountable for poor teaching or bad behavior.

Tenure isn’t solely a tool that protects controversial, outspoken faculty. It also protects faculty who conduct research that may lead them down risky paths, allowing them to pursue their research to its limits and previously unknown conclusions. It protects faculty whose work runs counter to the interests of the people in power. And it protects faculty who explore new pedagogical methods in the classroom as they attempt to innovate and push higher education in new directions.

Courts have repeatedly defended tenured professors fired for their speech. For example, Linfield University forked over more than $1 million after tenured professor Daniel Pollack-Pelzner sued the school for firing him because he raised concerns about its president and board of trustees. Similarly, former professor James Bowley is suing Millsaps College for firing him after he sent an email to three students in his Abortion and Religions course, on the day after President Trump defeated Kamala Harris, canceling class. “Need time,” he explained, “to mourn and process this racist fascist country.”

In 2024, the private Pennsylvania religious liberal arts school Muhlenberg College fired tenured professor Maura Finkelstein, purportedly for writing on Instagram, “Do not cower to Zionists. Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Do not make them feel comfortable. Why should those genocide-loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat-out racist. Don’t normalize Zionism. Don’t normalize Zionists taking up space.”

These remarks may be offensive. But First Amendment protections are built on the backs of such provocative political speech. For example, in the early 1970’s, during the Vietnam War, Central Connecticut State College’s president denied recognition to a student chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, a prominent left-wing student activist group notorious for disruptive protests on campus. He believed that the group stood for values antithetical to the college’s and was too closely associated with the national chapter of SDS. The Supreme Court intervened and ruled that the president’s denial based on SDS’s views violated the students’ First Amendment rights.

The point wasn’t that the students’ speech was deemed to be good. It was that the government shouldn’t be allowed to ban ideas or groups just because they’re bad. A free people must be able to explore ideas, especially controversial or offensive ones, in order to work out what to think about such things, rather than having politicians tell them what they ought to think. There are few places where that principle matters more than when it comes to the probing and provocative speech of a professor.

Here’s yet another example. University of Wisconsin-La Crosse professor Joe Gow is locked in an ongoing battle with his university after being fired for creating a pornographic vegan cooking show that he uploaded to OnlyFans and PornHub. Not everyone’s dairy-free cup of tea, to be sure. But it’s hard to believe anyone could manage to find his content without already knowing how to change the channel. And Gow’s porn-producing hobby was done outside of working hours and clearly dealt with a matter of public concern, as his videos dealt with issues of healthy sexual practices, veganism, and the adult film industry. This means that Gow’s lawful activities — most forms of pornography are protected by the First Amendment — fell within the boundaries of what tenure protects. After all, if Gow could be fired for producing pornography, it wouldn’t take much for this logic to apply to a professor who engages in other controversial, but lawful, work outside the classroom.

Consider the case of tenured law professor and neurologist Amy Wax, who said America would be better off with “fewer Asians” and later added all nonwhites to the list. In September 2024, her history of inflammatory remarks, as well as other claims about alleged violations of student confidentiality and complaints about in-class conduct, led the University of Pennsylvania to sanction her. Wax subsequently sued, citing a violation of her tenure.

Cases like these are instructive. They raise a stark question. If tenure cannot protect offensive speech, what exactly is it for? However objectionable Wax’s views may be, punishing a tenured professor for expressing them risks turning academic freedom into nothing more than a hollow promise — one that holds only so long as no one’s feelings are hurt. The same principles that protect Wax’s speech protect the speech of all professors, allowing them to speak out on matters of public concern and offer their expertise in service of the public discourse. Tenure, vitally, prevents lawmakers, administrators, or other stakeholders from terminating professors for their protected speech.

FIRE does not take a position on whether tenure itself should exist. We have consistently argued that any attempts to modify tenure must include strong academic freedom protections, as tenure offers valuable security against punishments for protected expression. And post-tenure review is not necessarily harmful in isolation. There’s always the threat that such a review could be wielded in a viewpoint-discriminatory manner. But it could also ensure that faculty remain contributors to their institutions.

After all, the purpose of a university education is not to shield young minds from offensive ideas but to teach them to stress-test those ideas, exposing students to even the most unsettling arguments so that they learn to face the naked horrors of history, think critically about opinions, challenge bad ideas, and dismantle them with reason and logic rather than simply learning to dismiss them and hope for the best.

But this lesson has not been learned. Earlier this year, Oklahoma enacted an executive order eliminating tenure at all public universities in the state, except for research universities. Even at smaller institutions, tenure can be a vital protection for faculty who may bring unwanted attention on their institution or who step out of line when their institutions come under political pressure. For example, Virginia State University terminated six tenured professors without due process, replacing them with more junior researchers. The university told Inside Higher Ed that the changes were made because of “programmatic adjustments.” In 2021, Kansas simplified the process for dismissing tenured faculty. In 2023, Texas, a hotbed for censorship, significantly weakened tenure to let administrators fire faculty for “unprofessional conduct that adversely affects the institution.” As this trend continues, and tenure or other formal academic freedom protections are slowly degraded, more universities will feel emboldened to target faculty who express unpopular views, and classrooms will resemble less the marketplace of ideas with watered down curricula that have the primary aim of avoiding controversy.

Strong academic freedoms are vital for a vibrant and productive faculty body. Those protections can take a variety of forms, and are worth defending in all of those forms. And, by the way, Lovejoy’s free-speech advocacy had its limits. During the McCarthy era, he argued that communist professors should be fired, claiming that their ideology was inimical to a free society. But even if he himself couldn’t apply the principles he helped enshrine in a perfectly principled way, he nevertheless helped lay the groundwork for the modern ideal of academic freedom. And in a moment where major news events can prompt widespread faculty dismissals, professors may turn around to find themselves without the timeless protection that was progressively weakened in broad daylight.

This keynote was originally delivered by Robert Corn-Revere to the Delaware Inns of Court on March 11, 2026.

We live in interesting times.

I can see from some chuckles of recognition that some of you may have heard this expression recently — or maybe even used it yourself — to describe the times we are living in. Perhaps you have used it in an email greeting with a friend you haven’t spoken to recently: “I hope you are doing well in these interesting times.”

I know I have. Interesting times, indeed.

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And the “interesting times” in this reference is not meant in a good way. It is a callback to what we are often told is an ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” Interesting, ironically meaning tumultuous, challenging, or chaotic.

But as it turns out, this is not an old Chinese proverb at all. Its origin traces to the 1930s in Britain, and it began cropping up in publications in the 1940s. By one account, Sir Austen Chamberlain, brother of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, received a letter from a friend in 1936 that concluded with the line, “We are living in an interesting age.” Chamberlain responded that he had learned “from one of our diplomats in China that one of the principal curses heaped upon an enemy is, May you live in an interesting age.” And he concluded his letter by saying, “Surely, no age has been more fraught with insecurity than our own present time.”

As I mentioned, the expression did not originate in China and there is no known equivalent expression in Chinese. The nearest example originates from a short story collection published in 1627 by Feng Menglong entitled Stories to Awaken the World. And the aphorism found there is a bit different: “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos.”

I don’t know. Maybe it lost something in translation. Still a pretty good proverb, though. Some days, I look at our two Australian Shepherds, Lenny and Bruce, and think I wouldn’t mind trading places. They have a pretty good life on our farm.

But if I had to choose an aphorism that sums up the state of the world today, I think I would have to go with Mark Twain. This one may be apocryphal as well, but Twain (supposedly) wrote, “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

You can never go wrong with Twain, even if he didn’t actually write that line. There are plenty more where that came from. Here’s one he did write: “Suppose I were an idiot. Now, suppose I were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

Twain just never gets old.

We laugh at statements like that, but it doesn’t mask the fact that we are living in interesting, that is to say, serious and challenging times. As Napoleon Bonaparte said, “We must laugh at man to avoid crying.” Or as it is often paraphrased, “We laugh so that we do not cry.”

We face no shortage of serious, and some would say, existential challenges, these days. I don’t have to list them — you’re probably ticking some of them off on a mental checklist as I speak. And there would never be enough time in one speech to get through even the top five or 10. I am sure your list may differ.

But I am a First Amendment lawyer, and I have spent my career defending the constitutional protections for freedom of speech and of the press but also promoting a broader appreciation for a culture of free expression. So those are the challenges I will address tonight. How do we maintain our constitutional protections for free expression at a time when it seems like, as a nation, we are at each other’s throats?

We often hear that, as we prepare to celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday, that we face an existential crisis for our system of government and that the degree of polarization in society is tearing at the fabric of civil society. Anyone who has had a Thanksgiving dinner ruined by talk of politics knows this all too well. And confrontations on the streets of our cities and college campuses serve as a continuing reminder of how divided we have become.

These threats are real and we must devote serious thought to how to deal with them. I am not promising to solve them tonight with a speech ... But I’d like to offer some thoughts about some directions we might consider and how we might start.

One of the great minds from which I draw inspiration is the legendary jurist Learned Hand. Judge Hand served on the federal bench for 52 years and issued more than 3,000 opinions. While most were not on constitutional issues, he did issue some key decisions in early cases that helped nurture early First Amendment jurisprudence.

In a 1913 obscenity case, just four years after he came to the bench, Judge Hand wrote an opinion that began the ball rolling to loosen the grip of over American law wielded by professional moralist Anthony Comstock. And a few years later, he was instrumental in persuading Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to change his position on the World War I era prosecutions under the 1918 Sedition Act for criticizing America’s war effort. This was the birth of American free speech law.

But I think his most enduring contribution came not from a judicial opinion, but from a speech he delivered in 1944 that wasn’t even about freedom of expression. The speech was delivered at the height of World War II — one of those “interesting” eras that presented existential threats — and it came at a time when the outcome was far from certain. It was given just a couple of weeks before June 6, 1944 — the date of the allied invasion of Normandy, a critical turning point in the war in Europe.

Judge Hand spoke in New York’s Central Park to a gathering of 150,000 naturalized citizens as part of something called “I am an American Day,” at which the new Americans came together to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. All told, nearly half a million people attended the event. Judge Hand spoke about why the United States was fighting the war and what it means to be an American. His speech was titled The Spirit of Liberty.

Judge Hand admitted he couldn’t define the spirit of liberty — it is a little bit like obscenity that way — but he offered more than just to say you would know it when you see it.

As Judge Hand saw it, “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.” He suggested the foundation of our rights depends on “the spirit of liberty,” which he said flows from “the conscience and courage of Americans who create it.”

And this is the key part: He described it as “the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.”

As I noted, this speech wasn’t really about the First Amendment, but this is as good a summation I have ever seen of what I call the culture of free expression. And it identifies the challenges we face — that it is necessary not just to defend the law, but also to persuade our fellow citizens why it is essential to provide breathing space for all points of view, even for those we detest. Perhaps especially for those we detest.

As Justice Holmes wrote in a 1929 dissent, “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”

That seems pretty straightforward, but keep in mind, Justice Holmes was writing in 1929 — two years before the Supreme Court began seriously developing First Amendment jurisprudence. He understood that protections for free speech had to be grounded on neutral principles.

And this is how the law developed through the 20th century and into the 21st. The First Amendment has protected firebrand priests and Vatican critics alike. It has protected militant civil rights activists and white supremacists equally. It likewise has shielded those who speak for or against a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. And it has protected those who would burn American flags or crosses as a form of protest, just as it has those who display them with pride.

At the same time, Judge Hand’s words remind us that our fate as a free society depends not just on what we do as lawyers and judges. How this ongoing experiment in freedom will turn out depends not just on the law but on our collective thoughts and actions as citizens. His message in The Spirit of Liberty is a cautionary challenge, but it also points a way out of the polarization that is poison to civic discourse.

Nothing about this is easy or automatic. That’s why I have a job.

I work for an organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), that exists to defend the law of free speech and to promote a culture of free expression. We take cases and defend speakers from across the political spectrum. Our motto is, “If the speech is protected, we will defend it.”

But, of course, because we defend speech without regard to the speaker’s point of view, we tend to take flak from all sides. Part of this has to do with FIRE’s origins. We were founded in 1999 by Harvey Silverglate and Alan Charles Kors who had co-authored the book The Shadow University which described a growing degree of illiberalism on college campuses that led to censorship by campus “speech codes” and other administrative policies. It was the time in which the term “politically incorrect” came into vogue.

FIRE was created to address those issues, and at the time we were called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. In 2022, FIRE broadened its mission beyond the campus to address free speech issues in society at large, and our name changed to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Same acronym, broader mission. But most importantly, the same core principles.

Our president, Greg Lukianoff, has been told this is a terrible business model, because it guarantees we are going to annoy every faction in American politics at one point or another. And that much is true. We take it as a point of pride.

This ambivalence was reflected in a lead story in the Philadelphia Inquirer just last month. It features a really nice photo of our Legal Director Will Creeley and our Chief Operating Officer Alisha Glennon in our Philadelphia offices overlooking Independence Hall. And the headline reflects how people sometimes react to our consistency with a “does not compute” error message: “‘Cancel culture’ monitor now a Trump Adversary.”

“How can this be?” some people ask. After all, didn’t our work defending conservative speakers on university campuses show us to be a right-wing outfit? And they are confused by the fact that we currently are taking a number of cases and positions contrary to the current administration.

For example, we are defending Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer against an idiotic suit filed by President Trump alleging “consumer fraud” because her poll in the final days of the 2024 election incorrectly found that Kamala Harris was in the lead.

We are suing Marco Rubio on behalf of the Stanford Daily arguing that the secretary of state should not have the unbridled power to revoke visas and deport student journalists just because they happen to write something the administration dislikes.

And we are suing the attorney general and the secretary of homeland security for strong-arming social media companies into censoring Facebook groups who observe and report on ICE activities.

The point is, we are not a combatant in the culture wars. FIRE does not wear any political team’s jersey. The corollary to our motto “If it is protected, we will defend it” is this: If you are a censor, we will fight you.

That’s why we filed a brief in the Supreme Court opposing the Biden administration’s practice of pressuring social media companies to delete posts about COVID-19 or other matters that were deemed “misinformation.” At the same time, we filed a brief asking the Court to strike down laws in Florida and Texas that would have empowered states to regulate social media moderation policies. And we filed against New York’s attempt to silence the National Rifle Association by jawboning insurance companies against doing business with the gun rights organization.

For each of these examples, I can give you a dozen more that reflect FIRE’s commitment to defending free speech without regard to the speaker’s views. Our goal is to hand down a legacy of strong free speech protections that can stand up to the stress test coming from any federal administration or combination of state and local actors, regardless of the political direction.

The harder problem we try to address is the one Learned Hand identified — to speak to what lies in the hearts of men and women, and to nurture a spirit that seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; to promote an understanding that our side (whomever that may be) may not always be right, and to weigh the competing interests alongside our own without bias. In short, we look for ways to get past this “us versus them” mentality.

How do we do that, exactly? I mean, we are not naïve. There will be no kumbaya moment where everyone comes together to embrace a message of peace and harmony. Political polarization is not going away any time soon.

But to hope for that outcome misses the point of living in a free society. Dispute is a feature of our system, not a bug. That’s what freedom means — the freedom to live and think differently and to disagree. As the Supreme Court reminded us in another “interesting” era, a key function of free speech is to invite dispute, and it “may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”

So, does that mean having a nation filled with angry people is a good thing? Not at all. But having disagreements, including contentious ones, is a fact of life. Part of our job is to explain how we must live in a large, diverse, and yes — at times — polarized society. We try to lead by example by adhering to principle and to spread the message of why we think free speech works. Most importantly, free speech is the best — and perhaps the only way — to resolve these disputes as an alternative to violence or coercion.

One of the things we try to do is to remind people that there is a possibility they might not be right about everything. Or, as Judge Hand put it, the spirit of liberty “the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.”

Former Justice Anthony Kennedy, a champion of the First Amendment, described the flip-side of this concept. “Self-assurance,” he wrote, “has always been the hallmark of a censor.” That’s pretty obvious when you think about it. A mind filled with certainty is a closed mind.

I think for most issues, you are more likely to be persuasive if your objective isn’t to explain to someone why they are dead wrong. Maybe it is enough just to learn a little more about why you disagree. That is why Judge Hand said the spirit of liberty “seeks to understand the minds of other men and women” and “to weigh others’ interests alongside their own.” Maybe you will find you can never agree with your adversary, but cultivating this habit of mind is the beginning of dialogue. And dialogue is the beginning of finding a peaceful resolution of any problem.

Another aspect of this mindset is to try to keep things in perspective.

No one is going to prevail in a winner-take-all culture war. Not for long anyway. As Justice Holmes wrote in 1919, “Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical … if you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart.” But you have got to keep in mind “that time has upset many fighting faiths,” and that the only secure path is to protect what he called “free trade in ideas.”

This means it is vital to keep things in perspective and understand we are playing a long game. Remember those “interesting times” we were talking about? We have seen them before.

For those who think we are facing unprecedented levels of polarization, think back to 1968. (Or, if you are younger, read about that period.) The 60s in general saw political upheaval and the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, and of Martin Luther King. We witnessed the largest military occupation of an American city since the Civil War to quell riots in Washington, D.C. following the King assassination. And it was a time when cities burned.

We saw a “generation gap” that divided the nation. The slogan then was “don’t trust anyone over 30.” Today, it’s “OK boomer.”

The point is, today’s challenges are not entirely unique, and the ones we endured in earlier times made us stronger. I believe the era we are living through now will make us stronger still. Just considering the law of free speech, we went through the Red Scare of 1919, World War II, the McCarthy Era, the civil rights and antiwar demonstrations of the 60s and 70s, and since then an upheaval in the technology of how we communicate. Each was seen at the time as an existential crisis.

Somehow, we managed to get through those challenges. And, in terms of First Amendment jurisprudence, they lead to vast improvements in the law. The cases decided during those periods of turmoil and polarization formed the backbone of the protections we have today. And those decisions are the essential building blocks of the law we are using to confront the current challenges.

Is success guaranteed? No, of course not, and it never was. What is certain is that history is written by those who stand up, not by those who bend the knee to temporary power. (I mentioned Neville Chamberlain earlier — he was responsible for some history that might be an exception to that claim.) But it is no doubt true that the lasting contributions are made by those who understand and use their rights, not by those who file them away in a drawer hoping to avoid the fray.

What does this mean in practical terms?

As members of the Bar, it means living up to our duties as officers of the court, to honor the ethical standards of our profession, and to eschew taking frivolous cases no matter how tempting may be the professional inducements to do so.

As judges, it means holding lawyers accountable when they fail to adhere to those standards.

For those who serve as government lawyers or regulators, it means honoring the oath of office you took to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.

And for those who find themselves confronted with frivolous litigation brought by figures of great influence, it means not settling what you know to be meritless claims. Doing so may at the time seem expedient and even rational. But it cannot be rationalized away as principled, and it represents short-term thinking.

If you doubt this, just ask the law firms targeted with executive orders who settled with the administration, as distinguished from those who stood on their rights.

The Inns of Court is uniquely situated to uphold these values. With its commitment to the rule of law and its creed of fostering excellence in legal practice, it recognizes that law is essential to preserving and protecting the rights and liberties of a free people. It promotes the values of ethics and integrity through collegiality and mentorship. And its commitment to excellence and its creed embody Judge Hand’s spirit of liberty.

Ultimately, how this turns out will be determined by all of us. Not just the lawyers and judges who make arguments and issue decisions, but by everyone who participates in, and is affected by, the clash of ideas. So long as we live in a society governed by the rule of law, I remain optimistic our nation’s 250th year will witness a renewal of the promise of freedom that began with the American Revolution.

This essay was originally published by UnHerd on March 16, 2026.

Over the weekend, the federal government threatened to effectively censor news about the Iran war.

On Saturday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr posted on X that “broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions — otherwise known as fake news — have a chance now to course correct before their license renewals come up.” He added: “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their license if they do not.” The following day, President Donald Trump posted that he was “thrilled” to see Carr issuing these threats to “Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations.”

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Throughout his tenure, Carr has conflated the “public interest” with the president’s interest. But that’s not the law. The law is clear that the First Amendment bars the government from dictating news coverage or punishing outlets for publishing what the president claims is “false.” The American people are entitled to uncensored news about what their government and military are doing. No matter who occupies the White House, war does not justify the government erecting barriers between the people and the press. To the contrary, the life-and-death stakes of war make public scrutiny and accountability more important than ever.

The government has a powerful incentive to apply the “fake news” label to anything that undermines its preferred narrative. This is a lesson that goes back to the earliest days of the republic and the Sedition Act of 1798, which banned “false, scandalous, and malicious” statements about the government. The justification at the time, as it is today, was global conflict. Looming war with France supplied the pretext for a law that functioned as a partisan weapon for President John Adams to aim straight at his political rivals. Thomas Jefferson then rode a wave of anti-Sedition Act sentiment to defeat Adams two years later.

The law is also clear that broadcast licensees which operate under the public interest standard are shielded from Carr’s threats. Historically, the standard recognized broadcasters’ right to exercise independent editorial judgment, and not to operate as a government mouthpiece. While it’s true that the media can be biased, critics should think twice before supporting a solution that gives the government — under either a Democratic or Republican administration — the power to dictate “the truth.”

If Carr tried to enforce his social media decrees about the meaning of “public interest,” his actions would be subject to immediate appeal and near-certain reversal. This is likely why he has not escalated these threats into formal FCC action.

Usually, these threats have backfired. When Carr threatened Disney — which owns the ABC network — over a Jimmy Kimmel monologue last year, Kimmel returned after a week-long suspension to his highest ratings in years. The FCC never opened proceedings against any broadcaster for airing the monologue.

Similarly, when Carr attempted to invoke the so-called “equal time” rule on Stephen Colbert’s James Talarico interview last month, the talk show host posted it on The Late Show’s YouTube channel instead. The clip drew more than three times the viewership of an average Colbert broadcast.

Carr has had more success wielding other regulatory tools. After Trump filed a consumer fraud lawsuit over 60 Minutes’s interview with Kamala Harris, Carr stalled FCC approval of an $8 billion merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media. When Paramount later settled Trump’s lawsuit, the deal moved ahead. Critics claimed that tying merger approval to a newsroom’s editorial decisions amounted to government pressure of the sort the First Amendment is meant to prevent.

If the past is prologue, Carr will continue to reach for any excuse to justify the FCC’s unconstitutional crackdown on the press. But in America, the people decide for themselves what is true — not federal bureaucrats. Principled broadcasters must lead the way by refusing to cave in to Carr’s lawless demands.

Gail Nazarene, an elected school board member in New Jersey, thought she was performing her duties as a public servant and participating in the democratic process when she asked her constituents about tax increases on Facebook. This simple act led to an ethics complaint by another school board member because, unlike most other states, New Jersey interprets its school ethics rules to potentially cover any speech that’s merely about schools, supposedly because community members are likely to attribute any such statement from a board member as being on behalf of the board.

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But the First Amendment forbids the government from punishing school board members for speaking their minds on public issues. That’s why FIRE is suing New Jersey on Nazarene’s behalf.

School boards are a uniquely American institution that originated in colonial Massachusetts, designed to maintain local control over education and prioritize community values over larger state and federal politics. To fulfill this purpose, school board members (who are usually elected) must communicate with their constituents, understand their needs, and keep them informed.

In the social media age, many elected officials post information and engage with constituents online. However, unlike most elected officials, school board members are often saddled with speech-restrictive ethics codes.

These codes are often subjective and ambiguously worded, and — as Nazarene learned — they can carry legal and professional consequences for board members attempting to fulfill their obligations as public servants.

Most states have ethics codes for public officials, which usually include school board members. In many states, including New Jersey, education statutes also require school boards to adopt ethics codes. Even in states without statutory ethics requirements, most school districts are members of their statewide school board association and therefore may be required to adopt a code, usually one recommended by the association, to maintain membership.

Regardless of their source or enforcement mechanism, school board ethics restrictions tend to restrict speech in similar ways. Civility and respect provisions, restrictions on voting statements, restrictions on partisanship and interest group influence, and board integrity provisions are all common features of these codes.

Respect and civility

While civility and respect provisions may appear uncontroversial, these terms are inherently subjective. What qualifies as “respectful” is often in the eye of the beholder.

For example, North Dakota’s School Boards Association ethics code requires school board members to refrain from “attacking others in public.” Yet vehement public disagreement between board members, especially on controversial or emotionally charged issues, could easily be characterized as a public attack.

Similarly, Vermont’s School Board Association code of ethics requires board members to “voice opinions respectfully.” The code does not define what respectful expression entails.

Such ambiguity risks enabling a “heckler’s veto,” in which a single offended individual effectively silences speech others find acceptable. What one board member sees as passionate or loud disagreement might prompt another to seek sanctions or legal action.

Voting statements

Some ethics codes prohibit board members from making statements about how they intend to vote or have voted. Vermont, which received a “red light” rating on FIRE’s School Board Speech Map, restricts board members from furnishing voters “any opinion or comment . . . on any matter to be voted on.”

Among other things, this restriction prevents candidates, including incumbents, from discussing pending matters during an election. This harms both the board member’s speech rights and constituents’ ability to make informed choices at the ballot box.

Partisanship

Provisions restricting partisanship and interest group influence are nearly impossible to enforce objectively. They also threaten board members’ associational rights and discourage consultation with experts.

Ohio’s ethics code requires board members to “render all decisions based on the available facts and . . . independent judgment rather than succumbing to the influence of individuals or special interest groups.” Under this standard, a board member who, for example, consults an association of school counselors about student mental health could be accused of “succumbing to the influence” of a special interest group. Similar provisions exist in other states, such as Indiana, Nevada, South Carolina, and North Carolina.

Because it is impossible to know how a member arrived at a particular decision, these rules invite selective enforcement against unpopular or controversial votes. A vote against expanded sex education, for example, might be labeled partisan even if it rests on logistical or policy concerns.

These provisions may chill association with political parties, religious groups, and advocacy organizations as well. The term “interest group” is poorly defined, leaving board members uncertain whether participation in civic or religious organizations could expose them to discipline.

Ironically, the associations that draft many of these codes are themselves interest groups engaged in advocacy and lobbying.

Board integrity

Other provisions restrict public criticism in the name of protecting the integrity of the board. Nevada’s code of ethics requires board members to “present personal criticism of district operation to the superintendent, not to district staff or to the board in [an] open meeting.” This provision limits board members’ ability to raise concerns publicly and undermines transparent problem-solving. It also prevents constituents from knowing how their elected officials think about district operations.

Oregon has a similar provision. Neither code accounts for the possibility that the superintendent may be the subject of the criticism, nor do they consider that public criticism of district operations is often in the public’s interest or requested by constituents.

Other provisions go even further. Washington requires board members to “support all board adopted policies,” while Indiana requires members to “recognize the integrity of previous board members and the merit of their work.” These rules prohibit board members from criticizing board decisions regardless of how they voted or whether they agree. Such restrictions prevent board members from informing constituents about policy disagreement, depriving voters of information necessary for democratic accountability.

Additionally, board members in many states may not appear to speak on behalf of the board. A board member speaking in an individual capacity risks an ethics violation if someone interprets their statement as representing the board — exactly what happened to Nazarene.

These provisions can deter board members from using social media, voicing dissent, and communicating with constituents. While disclaimers such as “all opinions are my own” may mitigate this risk, they do not always provide protection. In New Jersey, they could be entirely useless, as the state may find that a reasonable person would still be confused about the capacity in which a board member is speaking in spite of any disclaimer.

Chilling effect

Many of these provisions rely on ambiguous and subjective language. Terms like “respect,” “attack,” or “interest group influence” leave board members guessing about what speech might trigger an ethics complaint. Because the boundaries are unclear, enforcement can become unpredictable. One board member’s policy criticism may be treated as ordinary democratic debate, while another’s may be framed as uncivil conduct or improper advocacy.

The consequences are not merely theoretical. Ethics complaints can trigger investigations, legal expenses, reputational damage, and professional consequences. Even when a board member ultimately prevails, the process itself can be costly and time-consuming. And even frivolous ethics complaints against constitutionally protected speech might be used as fodder in school board elections.

Faced with that uncertainty, many board members may conclude the safest course is to avoid speaking publicly about controversial issues at all — especially on social media, where comments are easily taken out of context. That dynamic is exactly what constitutional law calls a chilling effect: rules so vague or punitive that people refrain from exercising their rights in the first place.

If states or associations can punish board members for speaking to constituents, like Gail Nazarene in New Jersey, then school board members have a powerful incentive to say nothing at all. This leaves voters uninformed and governments unaccountable. When elected officials are afraid to speak, democracy suffers from their silence.

“They’re too dumb to know they’re in a bad school,” associate biology professor Allyson Friedman said during a public Zoom meeting at Hunter College. “If you train a black person well enough, they’ll know to use the back. You don’t have to tell them anymore.”

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Her remarks were accidentally picked up on a hot mic while speaking to her daughter, and short clips of her comments quickly went viral, igniting a media firestorm and outrage online, including from Mayor Mamdani. Critics portrayed the remarks as racist and called for her firing, leading the college to suspend her and consider termination.

And yes, in isolation, these comments would make any New Yorker’s blood boil, especially coming from a city college professor. But while many seized on her unintentionally viral commentary to demand the policing of offensive speech, the full context of Friedman’s remarks perfectly demonstrates one of the main reasons why the First Amendment protects offensive speech — and why that’s a good thing.

As Friedman explained, she was trying to educate her child on what she saw as the problem of systemic racism in education by paraphrasing an argument found in the 1933 essay “The Mis-Education of the Negro,” by pioneering black historian Carter G. Woodson. Woodson wrote, “When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions . . . You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told.”

Clearly, Friedman was paraphrasing these lines. Why exactly? Because the school’s superintendent had shared Woodson’s famous remarks earlier in the very same meeting. That’s why Friedman was explaining it to her nearby child when she accidentally unmuted herself. But this context went entirely missing as critics demanded her firing. And they may get what they want too, because despite her long and successful academic track record, she was immediately suspended by Hunter and now faces termination.

The rush to burn Friedman at the stake is precisely why the First Amendment protects our free speech rights, including those of public college faculty members. And even if this wasn’t a misunderstanding and she had actually been saying something racist, Hunter College is still legally bound to uphold her right to discuss local issues outside of work. If free speech means anything, it’s the right to voice concerns about the problems facing our community, even if you’re being rude while you do it.

Imagine yourself in Friedman’s place. Do you want your employer to find the worst thing you said, or that people think you said, and fire you for it? Should someone’s livelihood be up to the whims of lawmakers and social media mobs? A mother is facing unemployment for discussing systemic racism with her child — what kind of message does that send to the working parents of NYC?

But the First Amendment shows us another way. We can stand on principle. Hunter can live up to its First Amendment obligations by upholding faculty free speech rights. New Yorkers do not surrender the fundamental right to discuss political issues when they go to work for the city. On the contrary, public college faculty should share their expertise and criticism, even when it may upset City Hall. That’s why the First Amendment protects state college professors when they speak on matters of public concern outside work. Friedman’s commentary on systemic racism falls squarely within this protection. And if you disagree with her, it’s an act of good citizenship to debate those ideas rather than trying to shoot the messenger.

Academic freedom is under attack across America. You may think it should give way in the name of fighting racism or DEI, but it’s important to remember that tools that limit speech are tools anyone can use. From the many professors punished for criticizing TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk after his assassination to the proliferating bans on teaching “divisive concepts” such as race, gender, and other supposedly “controversial” topics, faculty face ever-evolving threats to their pedagogy and expression. In fact, more scholars have been punished for their speech in the last few years than during the entire Red Scare.

Nearly a century after that dark chapter of American history, Friedman’s suspension demonstrates why faculty are still afraid to speak up. Because taking yourself off mute — even for a few seconds — could be the end of a decades-long career.

Hunter College, defend your faculty. Defend the First Amendment. For whatever ails New York City or this nation as a whole, censorship is not the answer.

I regularly teach a freshman seminar at Sarah Lawrence College. And every semester, without fail, the same scene plays out. A student lingers after class, or appears at my office door, or sends a carefully worded late-night email, sharing a view they would never dream of voicing to their peers. Sometimes it’s a defense of Israel, or abortion rights, or gun control, or simply to confide that they are not extremely liberal. Sometimes it’s skepticism about a campus orthodoxy everyone seems to take for granted. Sometimes it’s something as basic as having a different opinion about an assigned text. They tell me these things because they’re not afraid of me. They’re afraid of the room.

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I thought about those students when I read the new Gallup and Lumina Foundation report, “The College Reality Check: What Students Experience vs. What America Believes.” Its central message is reassuring: the critics of higher education are exaggerating. Between 64% and 74% of Democratic, Republican, and independent students say their professors encourage open dialogue. A mere 2% of all students, including just 3% of Republicans, feel they don’t belong on campus because of their political views. Nothing to see here, the report implies. Move along.

But before accepting that reassurance, it helps to know who’s offering it. The Lumina Foundation is one of the most influential funders in American higher education, with an endowment of roughly $1.4 billion and a mission organized explicitly around equity and increasing college access and graduation rates. Those are laudable goals. But they shape the questions a researcher thinks to ask and, just as importantly, the questions that never make it onto the survey. A foundation whose work depends on students trusting and enrolling in colleges is unlikely to commission a study asking whether the climate inside those colleges suppresses minority viewpoints. The report does ask whether professors create safe environments for students with minority views — and the answers are broadly positive. But those questions measure only faculty behavior. They cannot capture whether students themselves feel free to take the social and intellectual risks that genuine dissent requires.

Scrutinize what actually is there, and the problems multiply. And FIRE’s data makes clear just how deep they go.

The survey is measuring the wrong thing

The Gallup/Lumina findings on free expression rest almost entirely on a three-question battery asking students, “Thinking about the instructors you have had at [institution], how many have:”

• Encouraged students to share their views, even if it might make others in class uncomfortable?

• Created a safe environment for students who might be upset by what someone else says in class?

• Created a safe environment for students who express opinions that are not shared by most other students?

These questions measure only one slice of the phenomenon and then treat it as the whole. The third one is the most telling. About 71% of students say their professors have “created a safe environment for students who express opinions that are not shared by most other students” — that is, that they have cultivated an environment hospitable to minority views. But whether students truly feel able to express unpopular opinions depends on more than what faculty do. Peer dynamics and other factors the survey doesn’t measure also shape the perceived cost of dissent.

Faculty classroom practices may have genuinely improved. I see it in my own colleagues. Syllabi now routinely include language about open inquiry, civil dialogue, and “brave spaces.” Course policies invoke the importance of hearing multiple perspectives. Professors have learned the vocabulary of intellectual openness and built it into the architecture of their courses. Gallup is probably picking up something real: compared to a generation ago, more faculty are formally signaling their commitment to open dialogue.

But the signal is not the thing itself. Institutions and professors have mastered the language and posture of open inquiry without necessarily creating the conditions for it. A syllabus can promise a brave space while the actual classroom — with its particular mix of students, social pressures, and unspoken hierarchies — remains anything but. What Gallup is measuring, at best, is the invitation. What it cannot measure is whether the conditions exist for anyone to accept it.

Campus speech operates through at least two distinct mechanisms of suppression, and the Gallup survey captures only one. Faculty behavior matters, yes. But peer pressure — the ambient, unspoken social cost of holding minority views — is at least as powerful a silencer as anything a professor does or fails to do. A professor can formally invite dissent at the start of every class while students sit in a room where they have quietly, accurately calculated that speaking up will cost them friendships, social standing, or worse. That calculation isn’t hypothetical. I watch students make it at Sarah Lawrence every semester. They don’t stay silent because their professors failed to invite them. They stay silent because they know how to read the room. They know what their peers think. They know the campus climate. They know the stakes.

The Gallup questions ask whether professors have encouraged dialogue and created safe classroom environments, but they do not measure whether students themselves feel able to take the social and intellectual risks that genuine dissent requires. Even beyond the survey’s design, there is reason to question whether a professor’s stated openness to diverse views translates into a classroom climate in which students are comfortable expressing disagreement. Harvard President Alan Garber offered a candid admission about his own institution that cuts to the heart of the problem. In rare and unusually candid remarks on the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Identity/Crisis podcast in January 2026, Garber acknowledged that Harvard “went wrong” by allowing professors to inject their personal views into the classroom, arguing that faculty activism has chilled free speech and debate.

After all, he noted, “How many students would actually be willing to go toe-to-toe against a professor who’s expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?” The point is not that a professor who expresses a strong view thereby prohibits disagreement — of course the invitation to dissent can coexist with a professor’s own convictions. The point is that the invitation and the social reality of accepting it are two different things. Students are not irrational when they notice that a professor has strong views and calculate accordingly. A verbal invitation to disagree does not neutralize the status differential between professor and student, nor the social pressure students feel from peers who share the professor’s position. Garber’s observation is valuable precisely because it comes from inside the institution: even a well-intentioned professor with explicitly open-door rhetoric can, by virtue of authority alone, shape what students believe they can safely say.

The report’s own numbers expose a gap that isn’t adequately explained. The work simultaneously finds that 30% of students are reluctant to share their views and only 2% feel they don’t belong due to politics. But if political alienation is genuinely that rare, what explains the reluctance of the other 28%? The Gallup report waves this away by noting that 57% of American workers also self-censor about politics at work, but that comparison sidesteps the crucial question. The issue isn’t whether self-censorship exists everywhere. It’s whether it falls asymmetrically on students with heterodox views. On that question, the data is simply silent. It never asks.

There’s also a category error built into the report’s architecture because it treats belonging and free expression as proxies for the same thing. They aren’t. Belonging is about friendship, community, and social integration. Free expression is about intellectual risk. A student can feel warmly welcomed on campus, have close friends, love her dorm, and thrive socially all while being entirely unwilling to voice a dissenting view in a seminar. Conflating these two phenomena produces numbers that look reassuring while measuring the wrong thing entirely.

The sample itself compounds the problem. The survey was conducted using Dynata’s non-probability web panel and included students ranging in age from 18 to 59, not the traditional 18-to-22-year-olds living in the social and intellectual environment of a residential campus. Older, returning, and commuter students — who have more social capital, more economic independence, and far less exposure to residential peer pressure — dilute the results in ways that make the climate look more hospitable than it is for the students most affected. Also, the survey can only reach students who stayed. Those who transferred, dropped out, or self-selected away from certain institutions because of the climate they anticipated are simply invisible. Their absence makes the campus look more welcoming than it is.

What FIRE’s data actually shows

The ideological context the Gallup report never provides is this: on most American college campuses, conservative students are a small minority. According to FIRE’s 2024 College Free Speech Rankings, drawn from 55,102 verified students, 48% of college students identify as politically left-of-center while only 19% identify as right-of-center. On predominantly liberal campuses, the average liberal-to-conservative student ratio is 5-to-1. That baseline is not a footnote. It’s the context in which every other number must be read.

When the Gallup report finds that Republican and Democratic students report similar rates of professor openness, this is not evidence that the playing field is level. It could just be that the few conservative students who choose to attend heavily liberal institutions have already self-selected for tolerance before they arrive. They knew the ratio. They enrolled anyway. Their reported comfort is baked in before the first survey question is asked.

FIRE’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings, a substantially larger and more methodologically rigorous sample than the Gallup study (drawn from over 68,000 verified enrolled students at 257 colleges and universities), measures something the Gallup study does not. The 2025 rankings found that 34% of very conservative students self-censor often, compared to just 15% of very liberal students, while the 2024 rankings found that more than one in three conservative students report feeling pressure to avoid discussing controversial topics, compared to just 19% of liberal students.

These are not marginal numbers. They describe a campus culture in which the social cost of speaking falls very unevenly on conservatives. And crucially, FIRE asks about actual student behavior — whether students self-censor, whether students feel pressure — rather than only about whether faculty members behave in ways that are hospitable to dissent. Gallup’s questions capture something real about faculty conduct. What they cannot capture is how students weigh the social costs of speaking up among peers — costs that exist regardless of what any professor does or doesn’t do in the classroom.

One data point from the 2026 rankings is worth dwelling on: for the first time in the survey’s six-year history, most students opposed allowing every hypothetical controversial speaker (three liberal and three conservative) onto campus. Not a single speaker cleared 50% support. Read that alongside the Gallup finding that roughly two-thirds of professors encourage students to share their views and you get a precise picture of the gap this report cannot see. The syllabus says one thing. The culture of the campus says another.

The feedback loop between faculty and student self-censorship makes things worse still. FIRE’s 2024 faculty survey, the largest ever conducted on this topic, found that 42% of faculty say they are likely to self-censor in classroom discussion or lectures, a rate four times higher than during the McCarthy era. When faculty narrow what they teach, students encounter a narrower range of ideas. When students never hear certain arguments taken seriously, they are even less likely to voice them. Faculty self-censorship and student self-censorship feed each other — producing exactly the kind of quiet, apparently civil classroom that the Gallup/Lumina survey may mistake for genuine openness.

The problem is structural, not individual

It would be a mistake to reduce all this to individual bad actors; an activist professor here, an intolerant student there. The pressure is institutional, ambient, and self-reinforcing. Garber’s admission is significant precisely because it comes from inside the system: faculty activism isn’t a rogue phenomenon. It has been permitted, rewarded, and in many cases celebrated as a form of engagement. The invitation to dialogue appears in the syllabus. The actual norms of the classroom tell a different story.

I know how structural this problem is from direct experience. In 2018, I published ideas in The New York Times, based on a nationally representative survey conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, showing that student-facing college administrators are liberal over conservative by a ratio of 12-to-1. The response at Sarah Lawrence was instructive. My office was vandalized, students called for a tenure review, and my college president initially described my empirical findings as an attack on the campus community. But, of course, the data itself was never seriously disputed. The problem, apparently, was that I had published it at all. That reaction, that reflexive impulse to suppress rather than engage, is exactly what a survey about professorial gestures toward openness cannot detect.

When university presidents testified before Congress in late 2023 and retreated to context-dependent free speech principles when asked whether antisemitic speech violated their campus policies, the revealing issue was not whether the speech itself was protected — much of it was. The issue was the selective application of institutional frameworks. These same universities had deployed broad DEI-based harassment standards, mandatory training requirements, and speaker disinvitations against right-of-center expression for years. When the targets shifted to Jewish students, the institutions suddenly discovered the complexity of context. That inconsistency was not a rogue faculty member’s doing. It was a message from the institution itself. This is the kind of structural, atmospheric pressure — operating through DEI offices, orientation programming, speaker selection, and residential life — that shapes what students believe they can safely say.

FIRE’s 2026 rankings found that 166 of 257 schools surveyed received a failing grade for their campus speech climate. Only 11 earned a C or higher. A record one in three students now holds some level of acceptance for using violence to stop a campus speech. No question about whether professors formally invited participation is going to surface any of that.

Getting the diagnosis right

The Gallup/Lumina study could be meaningfully improved. Ask students directly whether they self-censor, as FIRE does, rather than asking only whether students believe their professors are creating environments hospitable to all views. Measure the asymmetry explicitly. Do students of different political identities report different levels of pressure in the same classroom? Survey recent dropouts and transfers alongside current students. Disaggregate by campus type and student age so that commuter and returning adults don’t smooth over the experience of traditional-age residential students, the population the report is ostensibly trying to measure. And stop treating belonging and free expression as interchangeable constructs, because the difference between them is precisely where the problem lives.

Getting this diagnosis right matters well beyond the seminar room. Public confidence in higher education has been in a decade-long decline, and institutions are searching for data that might reassure a skeptical public. But reassurance built on the wrong questions helps no one: not the institutions that need genuine accountability, not the students who deserve an honest account of the climate they actually inhabit, and not the public trying to decide whether higher education deserves their trust and their money.

Garber’s admission — that Harvard went wrong, that faculty activism chills speech, that students won’t go toe-to-toe with a professor who has already taken sides — is the most honest thing a university president has said about this problem in years. The Gallup report, for all its data, cannot see what Garber finally described: that the invitation to speak and the freedom to speak are not the same thing, and that on most campuses, one has been systematically undermining the other for a very long time.

It’s like clockwork. War breaks out. Then come the calls for censorship.

After the war with Iran began over the weekend, the group Columbia University Apartheid Divest tweeted “Marg bar Amrika” — Persian for “death to America.” The group is not a recognized student organization at Columbia University, and it’s unclear who operates its X account. But that didn’t stop demands for punishment.

Investor Bill Ackman assumed the speakers were Columbia students and argued they should not be “permitted to attend a taxpayer-funded university with their tuition funded with government guaranteed student loans.” Rep. Elise Stefanik called for their expulsion and deportation. Sen. Ted Cruz echoed the sentiment, tweeting “Expel all of them.”

The group’s tweet is unquestionably protected speech. The Supreme Court has twice held that even flag burning — often a visceral, symbolic expression of contempt for the nation — is constitutionally protected. As the Court famously declared, “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”

That principle does not crack when bombs start falling. The government may not censor protected speech directly, nor may it pressure private actors to censor — whether they be social media companies or private universities like Columbia.

The most acute challenges to free expression often come during times of war. The Sedition Act of 1798 criminalized criticism of the federal government amid fears of war with France. During World War I, the Espionage Act led to more than 2,000 prosecutions for speech ranging from teaching that Christians should not kill in war to protests over draft exemptions. The Cold War brought McCarthyism, blacklists, and loyalty oaths.

After each of these periods, Americans came to regret the country’s censorship frenzy. The Sedition Act expired in disgrace; those convicted under it were pardoned. Many World War I-era sentences were later commuted, and the Supreme Court justices who upheld them came to regret the hysteria of the period. “McCarthyism” itself has become a slur in American life — a shorthand for reckless repression.

Not every war needs to be followed by censorship and then regret. We can learn from this historical pattern and refuse to censor in the first place.

America gains nothing by undermining the freedoms it claims to defend. Protecting speech during wartime is neither easy nor popular. But it is precisely in such moments that constitutional principles matter most. Civil liberties organizations exist to defend rights not when it’s easy, but when it’s difficult. We at FIRE have done so repeatedly: after September 11, during the Iraq War, and after October 7 — and we are prepared to do so again now.

If you face censorship for expressing your opinions about the war, pull the FIRE Alarm and submit a case on FIRE’s website today.

Imagine black law students at a historically black college or university being told to take the word “black” out of flyers promoting Black History Month. Well, that’s exactly what Florida A&M, the country’s third-largest HBCU, told members of its Black Law Students Association.

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When pressed on why the school resorted to such an absurdity, it initially responded by emphasizing that whatever it was doing was in “full compliance” with Florida Senate Bill 266 and the Florida Board of Governors’ Regulation 9.016, the main pillars of Florida’s efforts to roll back DEI, which Gov. Ron DeSantis has said “is better viewed as standing for discrimination, exclusion, and indoctrination.” But just days later, in the face of public backlash, the university’s law school dean and president reversed course, assuring students (correctly, this time) that neither using the word “black” nor the phrase “Black History Month” violates any law or rules. The restriction, the dean said, “was a staff-level error” and “an overly cautious interpretation” of the law.

Universities have long been rife with this kind of error, often called “overcompliance.” Even if one leaves aside the many hostility-driven attempts to censor expression, when the state engages in speech regulation, it can count on those enforcing its rules to “play it safe” by censoring first and asking questions later (if at all). Give the government an inch of your expressive rights, and it will take a mile.

FIRE has spoken out many times against DEI efforts that go too far, from demanding that students agree with particular views related to hot-button issues to forcing faculty to provide DEI statements that function as thinly veiled political litmus tests if they wish to be hired or promoted. A backlash to such illiberal efforts was inevitable, but that doesn’t justify over-correcting with policies to silence one’s ideological foes. Repeating cycles of vengeance do not serve the public interest.

But that’s what some of these policies are courting. If a university fears a hostile audit, a funding threat, a legislative hearing, or a governor’s public rebuke, the internal incentives are obvious. Staff members decide to red-flag anything that might attract attention. Worse still, the easiest way to prove you’re complying with restrictions on expression is to silence someone in the name of enforcement, because at least then you are “doing something,” adding further perverse incentive to the situation. It becomes a systemic problem, which is why FAMU-style incidents are far from isolated occurrences. Rather, they are the logical outcome of regulating expression based on political pressure rather than making principled decisions based on evenhanded consideration of the situation.

Consider what happened in November at Weber State University in Utah, when Native American writer Darcie Little Badger withdrew as keynote speaker for the university’s annual Native Symposium after the school sent her a list of 10 “prohibited words and concepts” including “bias,” “prohibited discriminatory practices,” and “racial privilege.” She described it as censorship and an “extreme attempt to comply with HB 261,” Utah’s own anti-DEI measure. (For some perspective, earlier this month I spoke for FIRE at a law school event about “hate speech.” I couldn’t have given that speech at Weber State or any Utah public school if the constraints they sent Little Badger were accurate.) It was more overcompliance. As in Florida, the text of Utah’s bill doesn’t technically require such broad bans. But it does prohibit “engaging in or maintaining a policy, procedure, practice, program, office, initiative, or required training” that makes certain arguments, such as the notion that “meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist,” or that is “referred to or named diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

This probably doesn’t mean the university can’t invite a speaker who might make such comments, in most cases. But to administrators trying to keep their jobs and stay off the legislative radar, “probably not, in most cases” sounds a lot like “sticking my neck out on this is likely to get my head cut off.” Simpler just to ban all the things.

Even outside state law, the same dynamics can weaponize anti-DEI pressure into censorship. At the University of Alabama last December, officials suspended two student-run magazines — Nineteen Fifty-Six, focused on African-American student experiences, and Alice, centered on women’s issues — citing federal guidance against DEI programs and concerns about “unlawful proxies.” But as FIRE pointed out to UA at the time, it was using an “illogical and . . . grossly overbroad reading” of a memo containing “nonbinding suggestions” from Attorney General Pam Bondi about compliance with federal law. UA simply ignored our concerns and replied to FIRE that the magazines would be replaced by a new magazine that would somehow give more students a chance to “publish on other topics.”

In all these situations, one cannot overlook another inevitable aspect of politically motivated regulations: malicious compliance. When a regulation limits what people can say in a way that the ground-level regulators themselves are likely to resent, some of them will make the situation worse on purpose, just to score political points. It’s frequently impossible to know for sure when this is happening unless they tell you (which, sometimes, they do).

You might think universities have a moral and legal responsibility to do their best for their students and not limit their expression unless it’s actually necessary. You would be correct. Malicious compliance in regulating the expression and behavior of others often makes unwilling martyrs for your cause out of people who weren’t consulted and don’t deserve it. But it’s only possible to get away with it when those making policy don’t sufficiently consider the downstream implications and realities of what they’re doing. Political interference in university affairs, even if it’s legal (and, in some cases, arguably warranted) is always fraught with danger and should be engaged in as sparingly as possible.

That brings us to the reigning king and ongoing poster child for political interference in purely academic affairs: the Texas A&M University system. In November, TAMU’s Board of Regents voted on a resolution saying that no class could “teach race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance” by that campus’ top brass. At the last minute, the word “teach” was changed to “advocate” in the version that passed, showing some awareness among the regents that they might be careening towards an abyss.

But as anyone could have predicted (and as FIRE did predict), the late change didn’t do much to help. The dean of the College Station campus’s College of Arts and Sciences told faculty this would affect around 200 courses, and in January the policy made well-deserved national headlines when administrators told philosophy professor Martin Peterson he couldn’t teach two selections from Plato in an introductory philosophy course. About a week after that, the university entirely canceled a course on ethics in public policy. By Jan. 30, Texas A&M admitted to altering hundreds of courses and outright canceling six to comply with the new policy, as well as shutting down its programs in women’s and gender studies (though it also blamed “limited student interest” for the shutdowns).

It’s true, generally speaking, that professors are not supposed to be holding classes that merely advocate or propagandize for their preferred beliefs rather than educate. Faculty have a professional responsibility not to do that to their students. But any corrections could and should have been made long ago. No new policy was needed, much less a policy that would impel the presumably intelligent and thoughtful people who run a major university to say “Excerpts from Plato’s Symposium? In a philosophy class? We’d better take that out!” — and then stick to that decision in the face of ridicule. Maybe it’s overcompliance, maybe malicious compliance, maybe honest but misguided compliance. But each one is a predictable outcome of political meddling in the curriculum, and another reason to cast a skeptical eye on efforts to regulate expression.

The fact is, in all these cases, regulating expression is being used as a hammer to force cultural change.

One of the most important lessons we should have learned from decades of efforts to regulate expression on campus is this: We know for sure that those efforts have chilled and silenced the speech of countless real, identifiable students and faculty members over the years. That’s always wrong and often flatly unlawful. So where are the countless real, identifiable people who can point to those restrictions and say they actually produced the results they were supposed to deliver?

If we couldn’t censor our way to the left’s ideal campus culture, why would we be able to censor our way to the right’s? It’s time to consider that maybe, just maybe, telling people that they’re not allowed to say certain things on campus isn’t going to solve higher ed’s problems.

A wave of student walkouts has washed over the country in the last month, with secondary school students leaving campus to protest ICE activity in Oklahoma, Illinois, Virginia, Texas, Washington state, Ohio, Florida, and more. In Texas, the state is investigating whether school employees encouraged the walkouts; in Florida, the state teachers union has rejected similar accusations, saying their members don’t support walkouts.

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As someone who has advocated for, taught, and written about the First Amendment in schools for more than two decades, I’m frequently asked about these protests. Walkouts are a recurring form of student protest; students have used them to oppose gun violence, protest against racial injustice, call attention to climate change, protest wars, and more. Is there a right to walk out? Are states censoring students by pushing back?

The short answer is that the First Amendment protects students’ rights to express views, but not the right to walk out of class to express them. But there’s a lot to unpack.

The 30,000-foot overview

Each of the 50 states has created a right to a public education and state-operated systems to support that right. Those systems can be pretty different at times, or have specific and unusual nuances that could change the outcomes.

A simple example relevant to our conversation here: A handful of states, like Texas, fund their schools based on average daily attendance, not enrollment. So when Texas warns that student walkouts could lead to a loss of funding for the school, it’s true in the sense that walkouts lower daily attendance and in time that could lower the averages. In the vast majority of states (44) and the District of Columbia, though, that’s not how funding works.

So except where I’m talking about federal court decisions, I necessarily have to talk in general principles. Talk to someone licensed in your jurisdiction to find out more about your local laws. That said, the general contours of how walkouts work are pretty similar across the jurisdictions I’ve studied.

A school can usually punish K-12 students for walking out without permission

The First Amendment protects the right to protest, but it doesn’t create a right to leave school to protest. That might feel counterintuitive at first, or even feel like the First Amendment is disingenuous — what good is a right to speech you can’t go outside to use, after all? But it makes sense in the context of how speech law works and the goals of public education.

As a general matter, the intent to engage in free speech doesn’t create exceptions to generally applicable, viewpoint neutral rules regulating conduct. For example, I have a right to paint a mural; I don’t have a right to paint it on a police car. That I want to create art doesn’t create an exception to the general rule that I can’t vandalize government property.

There’s similar tension with walkouts and rules about cutting class or truancy. In every state of which I’m aware, an underage student of the public schools can be punished for cutting class. That’s a viewpoint-neutral rule that exists to ensure the public investment in education returns the intended benefit, and to protect the safety of minors in general. K-12 schools act in loco parentis (literally, “in the place of the parents”) in maintaining supervision and custody of minor students. If a student cuts class, they can be punished; that remains true if they cut class to hang out with friends, smoke in the bathroom, write a letter to a relative, or protest outside.

I’m not aware of any caselaw suggesting that a walkout is insulated from discipline simply because it’s associated with an otherwise-protected message. In most cases, the exercise of First Amendment rights in a K-12 school is governed by the Supreme Court’s 1969 decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District. In Tinker, a group of students planned on wearing black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam war. The school district got wind of this and threatened to punish students who did.

About 50 students attended the meeting to plan the armbands. After the school’s threat, only seven followed through with wearing them. Of those seven, five were suspended. And of those five, three joined a lawsuit against the school: Mary Beth Tinker, her brother John, and her brother’s friend Christopher Eckhardt (who was also the student who had initially organized the meeting).

In a 7-2 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that the school violated the students’ First Amendment rights by punishing them for engaging in passive, silent expression. The Court held that students in public schools have the right to engage in expression that doesn’t “materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school” or infringe on the rights of other students. (This is sometimes called the “substantial disruption test,” for short.)

There are lots of things students can do to express their views without offending the substantial disruption test. Tinker’s armbands would be protected speech, for example, and in most cases, t-shirts and buttons would be treated the same way. Starting an independent student newspaper or contributing editorials to an existing student newspaper would likewise be protected. Circulating petitions or starting clubs would be protected. And engaging in demonstrations at the school or elsewhere outside of school hours would generally be protected, too.

But if K-12 students walk out of classes to join a protest, the First Amendment doesn’t shield them from being disciplined for cutting class.

There are a couple exceptions to that general rule. If a student is 18 years old, their relationship to the school isn’t custodial in the same way a minor’s relationship would be, which is a fancy way of saying adults are in charge of themselves and can often sign themselves out. (This is also why walkouts don’t result in discipline in colleges; the vast majority of college students are adults.)

With minors, parents are usually able to sign them out of school. Remember how I said that a school could punish a student who cuts class, regardless of the reason? Similarly, a school usually cannot punish a student who is signed out of school by a legal guardian, whether the reason for being signed out is a dentist appointment, a family vacation, or to stand on the sidewalk outside with a sign. Whatever authority a school has in retaining custody of a student, absent a court order to the contrary, parental rights come first.

If a school does choose to discipline a student for walking out to join a protest, it has to do it consistently with how it would punish any other student for cutting class. Punishing a student more harshly because they wanted to express their opinion would be viewpoint discrimination, which is never permissible under the First Amendment. (Going back to my hypothetical of making a mural on a police car, the First Amendment won’t protect me from being punished for defacing the car, but it does protect me from being punished harder because they didn’t like the message of the mural.)

In theory, a school doesn’t HAVE to punish students who walk out

A big asterisk: Public schools are organs of the state, and are not really capable of taking dramatically different positions on issues than the ones dictated by state authorities. If a state tells its employees not to cooperate with student walkouts, those employees typically have two choices, and it’s the same two choices most employees have: Follow directives or get fired.

But I’m sometimes asked the question: “Does a school have to punish students who walk out?” As a matter of pure philosophical theory, no. Schools have an obligation to be viewpoint-neutral in the discipline they hand out, so they can’t choose not to punish students who go to protest while still punishing those who go to McDonalds, for example. But they might rationally have different levels of punishment for students who cut class while staying on campus and those who leave campus.

In reality, though, most schools have worked to eliminate nuance and discretion from their disciplinary rules, not enhance it. And to the extent the state directs the operation of public schools and enforces truancy laws, the discretion exists at the state level, not necessarily the district.

States aren’t wrong to push back on truancy, but could be clearer

In states that are pushing back on student walkouts, there’s a missed educational opportunity. Yes, states likely should take steps to encourage students to attend class, but state officials should be as clear as possible about their opposition to the act of walking out, not the message being expressed. (On the other hand, if students walking out were threatened with penalties by the state because state officials don’t like the message of the walkout, that would be a First Amendment problem.)

A major reason states have laws to prohibit truancy is to ensure students are educated. In enforcing truancy law to discourage walkouts, the state should explain the problem and propose alternatives that still allow for free expression. Something along the lines of, “We hear you, we want you to know there are other channels for this, and please understand our rules against truancy are not meant to silence you.”

As heated as this political moment is, it will eventually pass. When it does, the students who lived through it will be left with whatever lessons we gave them. If the lesson we send boils down to “the First Amendment says it protects speech but it doesn’t really,” we will have taken people who are trying to use their speech rights and turned them into cynics who outright deny the truth of individual rights.

It’s important that students go to class, but it’s also important they understand and share American values. We must not sacrifice the latter on the altar of the former — particularly when we can have both if we speak a little more carefully and thoughtfully.

Students and families need to ultimately decide what to do

Some people are going to have the take-away message from this blog that you shouldn’t go participate in walkouts, so I need to be explicit and talk directly to those students: I’m not telling you not to protest. I’m telling you the First Amendment doesn’t protect you from the consequences of walking out imposed by your public school. (At private schools, your relationship to the school is contractual, so it will depend on the terms of that contract — but generally, they aren’t going to have less authority to punish you.)

What you decide to do needs to be your decision. Walkouts can be acts of principled civil disobedience, but civil disobedience has historically drawn its power from participants’ willingness to accept the consequences of violating a rule to draw attention to a perceived injustice.

If you’re a student, talk to your parents about it. (If you’re a parent, talk to your kids about it.) Talk through your goals and options and decide what’s right for you and your family.

What I can tell you is this: The First Amendment won’t stop you from being punished for walking out. There are alternatives to walking out, if you want to express yourself without risking punishment. And in the grand scheme of things, whether you got punished for cutting class one time in high school is going to matter a lot less than whether you understand what the First Amendment means and how to use your rights.

Jacob Roth is a third-year law student at Villanova University and a FIRE legal intern.

Last May, New York Attorney General Letitia James warned school boards across the state that when debating bathroom access or sports participation, board members can be removed if they make or even allow comments that “demean” trans students.

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This is a problem. School board meetings are where the future of our children’s education is shaped. They offer a venue where the public can openly debate matters of public education, parents can stay informed and advocate for their children, and the community can offer needed feedback. Muzzling speech at these board meetings doesn’t just silence opinions; it undermines the community’s role in shaping their children’s future.

In her letter, James tells boards to shut down any such comments because “purely ideological statements opposing students’ rights under New York law are an unproductive diversion from boards’ important work,” adding that boards should “not entertain baseless allegations that transgender students’ identities and experiences are illegitimate, or that their mere presence in school spaces and participation in school activities is harmful to other students.” She also warns boards not to let speakers intentionally misgender students.

Incredibly, James not only threatens to remove board members who make such comments but also those who refuse to censor members of the public for doing likewise.

But when a school board opens the floor for public comment, the First Amendment limits its power to regulate what speakers say. A board can set reasonable ground rules, including time limits on comments and prohibitions on genuinely disruptive conduct, such as speaking out when it’s not your turn. But the government cannot restrict speech simply based on its viewpoint. If a school board member believes there’s no such thing as a “trans child,” they have every right to express that view in a meeting. If a parent thinks letting trans students play on the sports teams of their choice is harmful to other students, they can say that too.

But what isn’t allowed is viewpoint discrimination by the state. The attorney general wants to punish people for making statements she considers transphobic, but she makes no mention of trans-affirming statements. Those are apparently just fine. In other words, whether the state censors your opinion under her direction depends on what that opinion is. The First Amendment simply doesn’t work that way.

Worse still, the attorney general is placing school board members in an untenable position: either carry out her censorship demands and violate the First Amendment, or risk losing their positions.

The references to “harassment” in her letter do not fix the problem. The government cannot evade the First Amendment’s prohibition on viewpoint discrimination by simply affixing the label “harassment” to opinions it dislikes. As a legal matter, harassment generally refers to a pattern of targeted, unwelcome conduct directed at a particular individual, not the public expression of views on matters of public concern.

Even in the educational setting — which does not include a government-run public meeting — the Supreme Court has made clear that “harassment” is actionable only when it is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit.” A school board official or member of the public expressing an opinion relevant to an ongoing public debate, even in sharp or uncomfortable terms, is not harassment under any recognized legal standard. It is protected speech.

This isn’t the first time New York’s attorney general has attempted to stifle speech she doesn’t like. FIRE sued James in 2022 and secured a court order blocking enforcement of a New York law regulating online speech the state deems hateful — an order she later violated. Last month, Glenna Goldis — an attorney in the attorney general’s consumer fraud bureau — was fired after she raised concerns, in her personal capacity, about pediatric gender medicine. Nor is this the first time government officials have tried to control the terms of discussion during public comment periods. In fact, FIRE has frequently warned other government entities against imposing viewpoint-based speech restrictions at their meetings — and, when necessary, sued to vindicate censored speakers’ rights.

FIRE also has been a fierce advocate for local elected officials who face state-directed violations of their First Amendment rights. In Nazarene v. Laux, FIRE represents a New Jersey school board member facing a state ethics investigation for asking residents, via social media, their thoughts on a proposed school tax increase. The state’s School Ethics Commission has interpreted state law as preventing board members from discussing matters of public concern on social media and in op-eds. As in that case, board members in New York now face the threat of the state controlling how they communicate with constituents.

That’s why parents and school board members are fighting back. The Southeastern Legal Foundation recently filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of two parent advocates and two school board members seeking to challenge James’s guidance letter, claiming a violation of their right to free speech.

The First Amendment protects the rights of parents and school board members to speak freely on educational matters at public meetings. There’s no exception for speech a state official finds offensive. The attorney general may disagree with others’ views, but as Justice Louis Brandeis famously put it, “the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

In April 1995, a Gulf War veteran named Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 169 people in the largest domestic terror attack in American history. Inside a white envelope in his car were pages from a 1978 novel called The Turner Diaries, a book that has allegedly inspired 200 murders since its first publication. Written by the neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce, it depicts a race war between an underground white group and a Jewish-dominated government, blacks, and other minority groups.

Before the bombing, the book had been mostly available through hate groups, but afterward, a New York free speech advocate and publisher, Lyle Stuart, decided to republish it. He appended his own foreword that criticized the book, writing that the public had “the right to know what the enemy is thinking.” Stuart himself was Jewish by birth, but recognized the publicity value of reissuing a book said to have inspired a shocking act of domestic terror.

He told reporters he was publishing The Turner Diaries to “alert the average American to what these people advocate.” The Southern Poverty Law Center tried unsuccessfully to get bookstore chains not to sell it, calling it “an invitation to kill blacks and Jews.”

“I’m a First Amendment fanatic,” Stuart said. “I feel the American people should have a right to read anything.”

‘To think as they wish’

Stuart was one of the most important free speech publishers of the 20th century, and his legacy is especially relevant in the wake of the Trump administration’s assaults on the constitutional rights of publishers, broadcasters, and comedians. He believed publishing could, and should, explore controversial ideas, and did not agree with everything he printed. In a 1951 essay, he wrote, “If democracy is to survive, there must always be dissent . . . There must always be the struggle for the complete freedom for all men to think as they wish, to speak as they wish, to write as they wish.”

Born Lionel Simon in Brooklyn to a secretary and a salesman on Aug. 11, 1922, he attended James Madison High School with future Mad magazine publisher William Gaines. He dropped out of school to join the Merchant Marines and served in the Air Force during World War II. While in the military, he changed his name to Lyle Stuart because of the antisemitism he encountered. He was five-nine and had lifelong struggles with his weight.

After the war, Stuart bounced from one writing gig to another. He worked as a journalist for the International News Service in Ohio, covering censorship in film and radio and writing an investigative piece on a bill that benefited the beer lobby. When INS apologized to the beer barons — who had taken out ads supporting the bill — he resigned in protest and moved to New York City. He wrote radio scripts for the State Department and took a job writing for Variety. His self-published novel about newspaper reporting, God Wears a Bow Tie, sold 275,000 copies.

In 1951 Stuart got the idea to launch a publication “where a story could appear without its editor and/or publisher being concerned about whether it might irritate an advertiser, or stir up a boycott by a pressure group, or anger a stockholder.” He named it Exposé. In America in the early 1950s, as he wrote, “there was an undercurrent of tension that was turning into fear and hysteria, that was acting to silence people, to shrink free expression.”

Stuart founded Exposé with his first wife, the former Mary Louise Strawn, and childhood friend Joe Whalen, subletting an apartment in midtown Manhattan from a man he called a “white Russian sympathizer.” The office had a single desk and a couch, cardboard boxes for file cabinets, and one typewriter.

A publication such as yours

To find subscribers, Stuart compiled a list of 100 contacts including Congressmen, newspaper reporters, and executives. Seventy-one subscribed. After Alan Reitman, the ACLU assistant director, read the first issue, he wrote Stuart, “It is vital that we have a publication such as yours on the American scene.”

Though the first issue only sold around 1,000 copies, Stuart hit the jackpot with the second, selling nearly 100,000.

Earlier in his career, he had been a contributor for the notorious gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who had exposed the secret lives of the rich and famous since the 1920s. Winchell had allied with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Sen. Joseph McCarthy in their attacks on Hollywood, and was known for being racist and antisemitic despite being Jewish himself. By the early 1950s, Stuart, a civil rights supporter, had come to loathe Winchell.

So when Stuart read a column in which Winchell smeared the black chanteuse Josephine Baker, the bald racism enraged him and he set out to ruin Winchell. He stayed up all night to write a hit job — “The Truth About Winchell” — that called the columnist vain and “psychopathic” and said his work was “one of the greatest hoaxes ever put over on newspaper readers.”

Testing the limits of the First Amendment

There is no present-day comparison for Exposé (which Stuart renamed The Independent in 1956). It was a mix of investigative reporting — much of it on American foreign policy — and issues of interest to consumers. Think The Nation meets Mother Jones meets Consumer Reports. Similar magazines, like Ralph Ginzburg’s Fact, would follow.

In its nearly two decades of existence, it ran investigative stories about Big Tobacco, Hearst newspapers, the Du Pont family, the American Medical Association, and the Catholic Church, taking down powerful institutions and railing against their hypocrisy, duplicity, and secrecy. Early stories covered life insurance, cost-conscious shopping, Jim Crow laws, sex in prison, and General Electric’s dealings in the metal black market. Stuart never revealed a source or published a retraction. Within two years, circulation was high enough that he stopped selling it at newsstands.

A major but overlooked figure in the sexual revolution, Stuart hired the very first sex columnist in an American newspaper, Albert Ellis, founder of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and one of the most significant psychologists of the 20th century. Stuart’s young managing editor, Paul Krassner, sent Ellis a letter to see if he had articles other magazines had refused to publish. He said yes. (Krassner would later name the Yippies, for “Youth International Party,” and become a major player in the group’s 1960s and 1970s free speech and antiwar protests.)

The column was a hit — though many readers canceled subscriptions — and covered topics like masturbation, clitoral orgasms, and “sex fascism,” or narrow-minded thinking. Stuart became Ellis’s book publisher and titles like Sex and the Single Man (1963) and The Art and Science of Love (1960) were among his bestsellers.

All Lyle Stuart books had broad appeal but also unearthed aspects of life not commonly discussed — like experimental medicine, American policies in Latin America, and marital intimacy. Stuart used direct mail to sell them in an era when many bookstores would not carry difficult material, which also allowed him to maximize profits. A 1961 book defending Castro’s activities in Cuba caused the State Department to deny Stuart a visa to visit Cuba. Naked Came the Stranger (1969) was a sexual satire claiming to have been published by a housewife but actually written by a bunch of journalists to prove how easy it was to sell shlock. The Anarchist Cookbook (1971) taught the author of this article how to get high off banana peels and other readers how to make bombs.

Stuart was extremely successful. The New York Times reported in 1969 that he made around $4 million a year — $35 million in today’s dollars. He loved taking down powerful figures, with books on subjects like J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Anna Nicole Smith. But he never carried libel insurance because he felt it was too expensive.

Stuart’s final years

In 1990, Stuart sold his publishing company and started a new one, Barricade Books. By 1995, when he republished The Turner Diaries, he was in his early 70s. “I’m a nut,” Stuart said to The Washington Post in 1996. “I’ve always tested the limits of the First Amendment. I’m a great believer in letting anybody publish the most outrageous, unpopular things there are.”

But then his luck started running out. In 1995, he published an unauthorized biography of casino mogul Steve Wynn and called him a front man for the Genovese family. Wynn sued and won a $3 million defamation award. The judgment was later reversed, but Barricade Books went into bankruptcy. Stuart died in Englewood, New Jersey, in 2006, at age 83.

Stuart’s own willingness to turn to the courts for revenge was part and parcel of a grudge-keeping personality. “There’s nothing Lyle loves better than giving an enemy a stomach ache,” recalled his former classmate Bill Gaines.

In the inaugural issue of Exposé Stuart laid out what would become the mission of all his ventures: “By publishing information which ordinarily would not be available elsewhere, I believe Exposé can render the American people a much-needed service. Exposé’s growth will depend on a chain reaction: that readers will tell readers; that subscribers will encourage new subscribers.”

By fundamentally believing that many Americans wanted to read truthful and good writing about important and under-reported stories, he created a niche that at that point did not exist on a large scale. This laid the foundation that enabled other countercultural publications (Fact, The Realist, The Village Voice, the alternative press in the 1960s-1970s, Spy) to find readers, too, and brought investigative reporting into the modern era.

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Amy Sohn is the author of 13 books including the novels "Prospect Park West" and "Motherland." Her most recent, "The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age," tells the stories of eight women prosecuted under the Comstock law. It won a First Amendment award in book publishing from the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation and was named a Smithsonian Top Ten History Book.

This essay was originally published in The New York Times on Jan. 12, 2026.

Martin Peterson, a Texas A&M University philosophy professor, was presented last week with a choice straight out of a dystopian novel. To bring his class in line with a prohibition on course materials that “advocate race or gender ideology,” he could either censor the part of his course that included readings from Plato or he could teach a different class.

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The case illustrates the extent to which campus censorship has run amok in Texas: If some of Plato’s texts can’t be taught in a college philosophy course, what, exactly, can be taught?

A bill passed last spring by the Texas Legislature undercut faculty control on public university campuses and clamped down on what can be taught, the First Amendment be damned. Last fall, the Texas A&M University system separately introduced policy changes aimed at purging woke curriculums. Under these measures, administrators have conducted a sweeping review of course materials, aiming to root out officially disapproved ideas about race and gender that professors may impart to their students.

Dr. Peterson submitted the materials for his course on contemporary moral issues to a university administrator as part of one such review — which he accurately described as “mandatory censorship.”

This is a philosophy class that explores how classical ethical concepts apply to contemporary social problems. It includes discussions on the ethics of war, the death penalty and abortion. And to the apparent alarm of university leadership, it includes discussions related to race and gender.

Dr. Peterson was told he could “mitigate” his course content to “remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these.” Those readings included a portion of Plato’s “Symposium,” a classic of Western philosophy. In one of its most famous passages, Plato offers a haunting, beautiful idea: that we are incomplete creatures, wandering the world in search of our other halves, and that love can make us whole — even, in a sense, bring us closer to the divine.

To cut that material from a class because it might set off alarms about “gender ideology” would only further politicize the classroom. It is importing today’s culture war into the ancient agora — turning the modern academy into a parody of its ancient namesake, a place where discussion is replaced by prior restraint.

Texas A&M seems to have concluded that the safest way to handle the ideas contained in a classic text is to bury them. This is no way to run an institution of higher education.

University administrators and state lawmakers are saying, in effect, that academic freedom won’t protect you if you teach ideas they don’t like. Never mind that decades ago, the Supreme Court described classrooms as the very embodiment of the “marketplace of ideas”: “Our nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us, and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.”

Texas A&M leadership seems to want, instead, to ensure that faculty members push the state’s preferred orthodoxy. It’s part of a broader effort in Texas and beyond to limit academic freedom.

In late 2024 The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that administrators at the University of North Texas College of Education had made over 200 changes to graduate and undergraduate courses, including to the syllabuses, course names and descriptions. Last fall, the larger University of North Texas system began a review of faculty syllabuses, and the University of Houston system said it was conducting a similar review.

Within the Texas Tech University system, which has more than 60,000 students, a Dec. 1 memo warned faculty members not to “promote or otherwise inculcate” certain specific viewpoints about race and sex in the classroom. These include concepts like “One race or sex is inherently superior to another”; “An individual, by virtue of race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive”; and “Meritocracy or a strong work ethic are racist, sexist or constructs of oppression.” The point isn’t that these concepts should just be accepted or go unchallenged; it’s that challenging them through a robust give-and-take is what universities are for.

The language in the memo echoes a law in Florida known as the Stop WOKE Act, which my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has been litigating against since 2022. A federal judge described Florida’s law restricting instruction in college classrooms as “positively dystopian,” recognizing that the First Amendment protects classroom instruction. Unfettered, Texas is following Florida’s unconstitutional example.

Texas’s authoritarianism does not end at the classroom door, either. Last September, my organization sued to stop a brazenly unconstitutional Texas law banning all “expressive activities” on campus between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. — a measure clearly aimed at campus protest. The law doesn’t even try to hide its targeting of “speech or expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.”

In 2023, the president of West Texas A&M University, Walter Wendler, canceled a drag show on campus, claiming that the show would be demeaning and offensive to women. He admitted that even though “the law of the land appears to require” that he allow the “artistic expression” to go forward, he was still shutting it down. (My organization is suing to allow the drag show to proceed.)

First Amendment advocates often warn about a slippery slope. Once censorship starts at the margins, core freedoms are next. In Texas, university administrators and state commissars are skipping the slope and going straight for the trap door.

Dr. Faraz Harsini is a biomedical and food system scientist, an animal rights activist, and founder of the nonprofit Allied Scholars for Animal Protection. He and his colleague Daraius Dubash are represented by FIRE in a lawsuit challenging the City of Houston and its private contractor’s refusal to allow Harsini and his colleagues to engage in protected expression, including showing footage of industrial animal practices in a downtown public park.

My mom used to call me every Sunday between 8:30 and 8:45 p.m. In 13 years, she has never missed a call. Like most moms, if I don’t respond, she immediately assumes I’m dead.

Two weeks ago, her calls stopped coming.

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The Islamic Republic of Iran has cut all internal and external communications during the ongoing protests. They even jammed Starlink. It’s been radio silence. Not a word, in or out. And in that silence, they’ve been killing people. At least 16,000 in just a few days.

Mom used to sign off the same way every week. “I love you,” she’d say. “And I’m so glad you’re not here.”

I’m an only child. I’m also the only person my mom has in her life. Many families back home wouldn’t let their kids leave Iran because they didn’t want to be left alone. But my mom sold her jewelry, her prized Persian rug, even her house to make sure I went to a good school, got into a good university, and got out — to America.

What has the Islamic Republic done to this mother (and millions of other families) that she’d rather never see her son again than have him trapped with her?

Imagine what it takes to make synonyms out of I love you and I’m so glad you’re not here.

All the tiny deaths

I once asked my mom to apologize for having me. I looked out my window at the sky. Because of decades of corruption and severe mismanagement, the air in many Iranian cities is often toxic. On a bad day, the sky over Tehran is yellow. I remember thinking, “I deserve better.” No one should have to inhale carcinogens every day. Or live in such a stressful environment. Or under such a repressive regime that does not respect human dignity.

I still don’t know what my parents were thinking when they decided to bring a kid into a world like that. Not that I hold it against them. I know they did what billions of parents do. They tried to build a life in the only reality they understood. They probably didn’t think much about it. But I think about it all the time.

I think about that strange, distant world. I think about my mother. I think about the silence that has replaced her voice. And about the 16,000 people that Tehran killed in recent protests. But not just that. It’s all the tiny deaths too. All the stolen smiles and moments of joy. All the hope and laughter. All the things you cannot see. If you ask me, they are also killing all 97 million Iranians. Probably more, when you count the fact that they export death through terrorist funding. But they do it in far more subtle ways too. Maybe not all at once. Or with a bullet. But with a system that slowly crushes people’s souls. They have killed something inside the soul of every Iranian, but like Sting says in the song, something in our minds will always stay.

Blood will flow when flesh and steel are one
Drying in the colour of the evening sun

Tomorrow’s rain will wash the stains away
But something in our minds will always stay

Perhaps this final act was meant
To clinch a lifetime’s argument

That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could.

But the physical terror is always there too, just beneath the surface. Sooner or later, every Iranian gets a taste. I got my first on a sunny afternoon during a peaceful human-rights protest at the University of Tehran, where I was studying chemical engineering as an undergraduate. I was also the president of the music club at the university. Suddenly, paramilitary forces attacked a man and began beating him over the head with batons. Shocked and furious, students threw books and bags at the police — and the police hit us with tear gas.

We ran, but I inhaled so much gas my eyes and nose were on fire and I was drooling uncontrollably, gasping for air, running blind. I got separated from my friends and saw police vans parked all around the university. They had the gates covered. I had to find another way out or a place to hide. Then a group of men appeared on the path in front of me. Islamic Revolutionary Guards maybe. I couldn’t be sure. One of them raised a machete, cursed at me, and charged. I ran as fast as I could. He chased me with the machete in his hand.

Luckily, there was a university security building nearby. They let me in and saved my life. The next day, I learned a couple of my bandmates had been kidnapped. We didn’t see them for months. When they finally came back, they were changed. Their eyes were different. They had become different people because of whatever things they had experienced in the prisons. You heard terrible things about what went on in the prisons. Unspeakable things.

Now, I have PTSD from motorcycles. Anyone who walks with me quickly learns that if I hear loud engines going by, I clench up. My face shows the pain. Because whenever I hear that sound, I remember all the times the Islamic Revolutionary Guards attacked me and my friends, or surrounded me and other people from both sides of a street, or blocked us in an alley, and beat the life out of anyone in front of them.

It’s hard for me to put these things into words. No matter how proficient I am in English, I can never express my feelings the way I could in my native Farsi. That’s another price I have to pay for being born in the wrong place. And I’m the lucky one. Think of the journalists in prison in Iran. The gays. The women who don’t want to be forced to wear headscarves. Anyone who says anything the regime doesn’t like. Most people never realize what a gift it is to be able to freely express yourself, in your native language — until it’s gone.

Imagine your country, one of the oldest civilizations in the world, whose values once rejected slavery and affirmed freedom and justice, now reduced in every movie to the ugly, bearded bad guy, played for laughs. Imagine feeling a touch of shame every time someone asks where you’re from, knowing that if you say Iran they’re more likely to think of terrorists, nukes, and Sharia rather than one positive thing. Growing up, you never think that one day the familiar streets of your youth will be nothing but memory and other people’s cartoonish impressions.

Radio silence

I’m ashamed to admit that since leaving Iran, I have not video-called my mom. Not once. The last time I saw her was at Tehran International Airport. Naturally, she was wearing her hijab, which many consider a cultural thing. But my mom is not religious. Yet she would lose her head if she loses her hijab. I hate to see her in it. Maybe part of me selfishly just wants that last image of her to remain unchanged in my mind. Maybe I don’t want to see how much older she looks under the stress of so much oppression. Maybe I can’t stand to see her in that hijab again.

I know how it feels to hide oneself in broad daylight. Before I accepted myself as gay, I lived for a decade in an environment where I was made to believe I was sick. That I was deviant. Criminal. Not that I want pity, but it reminds me of all the invisible suffering that cannot be measured or counted in the metrics of journalists who report on Iran. I read headlines that say there have been 16,000 deaths. 16,000? No, my friend. The cost has been so much more than that. So much more.

For all of you born in a country where you can speak freely, I hope you understand how fortunate you are. During World War II, people had to go to the front lines and risk their lives to protect their basic liberties. We have it so much easier. We don’t have to fight tanks or machine guns. We have the honor to be able to fight with our words, and the blessing to have words be the response.

This is what the people of Iran fight for, every day, at the highest cost. Even in the darkness. Even when the global media doesn’t give it the attention it deserves. Radio silence doesn’t.

When I talk about the Islamic regime or lack of free speech, I’m not just talking about prisons and torture. I’m also talking about how it tries to control what people feel, what people sing, and what people are allowed to enjoy. Even music had to be approved. When I was the president of the music club at the University of Tehran, they wouldn’t let me play Persian or pop music. I once submitted a program for a concert in which I was going to play themes from “Hotel California,” but I wrote “Beethoven” down as the composer. It was approved. But the fact that I even had to ask, and fear of what might happen if I was caught. Even joy had to be monitored. That’s how these systems work. They don’t just want to control your body. They want to control your spirit. The Islamic revolution in Iran happened in 1979 and it’s been 1984 every year since.

I remember the first time I saw a lamb at the slaughter. It was so disturbing, it might have been one of the reasons I later became an animal rights activist. At the time, the adults around me said it was okay. Don’t worry, they said, lambs don’t feel pain. I remember the butcher cutting a hole in the sheep’s skin and blowing and blowing into the hole to fill the pocket with air like a giant balloon, helping separate the hide from the carcass so it would be easier to skin the animal. There was so much blood. But everyone acted like it was a perfectly normal thing to do. Not me, though. I kept thinking about a line from a poem by Saadi Shirazi that we all learn in school — every Iranian knows it by heart — it goes, “Never hurt an ant carrying a seed. They are alive, and their dear life is sweet.”

Eventually, after seeing more lambs at slaughter, I grew numb to it just like everyone else. People can get used to pretty much anything, I have learned, given enough exposure. I think about this often, especially when I see so many Iranians who have accepted their fate, like so many lambs. This is why the new protests fill me with pride. If there is a lesson in all of this, perhaps it’s that freedom slips away one inch at a time, so slowly you become accustomed to its loss. New normals settle. Overton windows shift. People forget.

In my home country, under the Islamic Republic, you can get arrested not for something you did, but for something that you believed, or didn’t believe. You don’t get the right to remain silent.

If you live in a country where you still have the right to question, the right to protest, or even the right to remain silent, be grateful. If you have a voice, use it. It’s a tax we should willingly pay for being lucky enough to live in these societies. I use my voice on behalf of animals, who are among the most neglected and least protected victims of injustice, and whose pain and suffering is kept out of public view. I work to inspire the next generation to protect animals, defend liberty for all, and uphold free speech. And I try to remind people that speaking up matters because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

I know I would be executed in Iran for speaking my truth. Instead, I live with dignity in America. My mother gave me life twice, it turns out. Now every Sunday, between 8:30 and 8:45 p.m., I wait by the phone and listen to the silence.

Filming student protesters. Emailing administrators about a newspaper launch. Asking a commentator for additional information to back up their claims. Placing a disclaimer on a letter to the editor. These basic journalistic practices are a far cry from disruption or harassment, yet student journalists nationwide have recently received notices of investigation based on each one of these acts.

These students face a fight behind the closed doors of conduct hearings, and the outcome of these battles determines how colleges and universities decide who is a journalist and what journalism on their campus can look like.

Since October, Ašiihkiokonci Parker has been under one such university investigation. A photographer and videographer for the independent student newspaper El Diario de la Gente, Parker covered a pro-Palestinian protest at a University of Colorado Boulder career fair on Oct. 16. Protesters stood in a circle, arms interlocked, while Parker filmed from outside the circle using a cellphone, capturing the protesters chanting, receiving instructions to disband from university officials, and eventually leaving.

The next day, Parker received an email from CU Boulder’s Student Conduct & Conflict Resolution office. The email explained that Parker was under interim suspension and investigation for potential student conduct violations. The school based its preliminary decision on Parker swiping a student ID card to enter the career fair and film protesters. In other words — reporting on a newsworthy event.

Parker was suspended from campus for 10 days, but the suspension then became an “exclusion” allowing Parker to come on campus for classes only. CU Boulder lifted the interim disciplinary action on Nov. 7.

This means that for three weeks, a student journalist faced disciplinary action for their reporting — before official findings were ever made. That investigation lasted for three months, and eventually resolved in Parker’s favor.

Parker is not alone. Two student journalists for Al-Hikmah, an independent student newspaper “dedicated to informing and representing the Muslim community” at the University of Maryland, are facing student conduct charges including interfering with the expressive rights of others and engaging in disorderly and disruptive actions for recording disruptive protesters outside a Students Supporting Israel event on Oct. 23. The event featured Israel Defense Forces soldiers as guest speakers, sparking protest outside the building. Four protesters entered the building and began chanting right outside the event’s door as the two journalists, Riona Sheikh and Rumaysa Drissi, recorded the event and took pictures.

UMD alleged Sheikh and Drissi had “done more than merely cover, as journalists, other individuals’ protest” of the event. Rather, “it is alleged they were aware of and participated in such protest, albeit by recording and planning on reporting on it, rather than waving signs and shouting.”

What is local journalism if not reporting on events in one’s community? If simply recording events as they unfold can result in conduct charges, then this repackages routine newsgathering as a disruptive violation of school policy.

Instead of classifying student journalists as journalists, CU Boulder and UMD have grouped them in with the individuals they were covering. The result is campus newspapers that operate like leashed-in watchdogs — no longer the investigators, but the subject of investigation.

Parker, Sheikh, and Drissi all reported for independent student newspapers. Student journalists affiliated with independent outlets sometimes do not have the benefit of writing for more well-known outlets within their communities. That was the case for Alex Shieh, who alongside a dozen other students relaunched The Brown Spectator at Brown University last spring. On March 15, Shieh, inspired by the Department of Government Efficiency’s line of questioning about federal workers’ productivity, emailed over 3,800 Brown administrators for a Spectator story and asked them to explain what they had done the prior week.

Brown launched an investigation into Shieh on April 7 for potential conduct violations including invading privacy, misrepresentation, and inflicting emotional or physical harm. The university later traded those out for a trademark infringement charge against Shieh and the Spectator for use of the word “Brown” on May 2. On May 14, Brown found Shieh and the Spectator not responsible for any charges, though Shieh dropped out of college after the incident to launch a stealth startup.

While Shieh’s email and his subsequent reporting may have offended some on campus, editorial decisions that evoke offense shouldn’t lead to student conduct proceedings. Yet often they do, and not just at Brown.

Take the University of Texas at Dallas, which has clashed with student journalists since their critical coverage of the university’s response to pro-Palestinian encampments in May 2024. UT Dallas launched an investigation into former editor-in-chief of The Mercury Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez in August 2024, after a commentator who submitted a letter to the editor took issue with Olivares Gutierrez’s requests for additional sources and the placement of a disclaimer on his piece. Olivares Gutierrez and his editorial team received the editorial, which discussed antisemitism on campus, and though they wanted to publish it, they also noticed that some of the letter’s details didn’t line up with other reputable sources. Olivares Gutierrez and other editors asked the author to provide more sources, as their student handbook authorized them to do. When those concerns went unaddressed, Olivares Gutierrez and his team placed a factual disclaimer on the piece.

Those acts led to a yearlong investigation, in which UT Dallas characterized Olivares Gutierrez’s editing as “discriminatory harassment,” though, as editor, he never had to run the op-ed at all. Olivares Gutierrez is appealing the decision, which, if upheld, would place him under a two-year deferred suspension — meaning if he “messes up” again, Olivares Gutierrez will be automatically suspended.

Such outcomes are alarming, but even the investigations themselves pose major concerns, regardless of outcome. Investigations into student journalists for routine newsgathering and editorial functions are themselves a free speech concern, even if they don’t result in official sanctions. That’s because the threat of investigation is likely to discourage student journalists from engaging in these activities for fear of negative repercussions, casting a chill over the student press.

This trend of abusing student misconduct proceedings to silence student journalism sends a clear message about who gets to do journalism on campus: only those who toe the line administrators have in mind. Classifying student journalists as disruptors for reporting fearlessly on behalf of independent, lesser-known outlets on controversial subjects narrows an institution’s definition of who is a journalist on their campus. Are official student media outlets the only ones that can freely create student media by documenting controversial events on campus?

A similar question arises for what journalism can look like on these campuses: Is recording and planning on covering an event newsgathering or disruption? Is asking questions to administrators fact-finding or a violation of school policy? Is fact-checking and exercising editorial discretion journalism or harassment?

Colleges and universities are getting to decide the answers to those questions behind closed doors. And as they do, they’ll shape who gets to tell stories on their campuses and what stories get told.

I walked into my politics classroom at Sarah Lawrence last week, ready to teach a lesson about civic protest. The prompt was Minneapolis, where ICE’s Operation Metro Surge has sparked mass protests, a general strike, and violent confrontations between demonstrators and federal agents.

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I planned to cover basics: citizens can record police activity, protests must remain nonviolent, participants should comply with lawful orders. My students had other ideas.

“What are we supposed to do?” one asked. “Hold up signs and chant while people are being shot in the street?”

Another jumped in: “You’re asking us to play by rules that only we follow.”

They cited the Black Panthers. They invoked Stonewall. They argued that throughout American history, violence (or the credible threat of it) has driven social change. Several insisted that armed citizens confronting ICE would accomplish what peaceful protest could not.

These weren’t fringe voices. This was classroom consensus.

I study campus culture and have watched these attitudes develop for years in the data. But data is abstract. Percentages don’t argue back. What shook me was hearing my own students, students I know and have taught for months, articulate these views with moral certainty. The numbers had names now.

The numbers

According to FIRE’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings, 34% of students believe using violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable to some degree. That’s up from 20% in 2022, a 70% increase. Gallup’s Democracy for All survey finds that 30% of adults aged 18 to 29 say political violence is “sometimes OK.” Compare that with 4% of those 60 and older. And the Citizen Data 2024 report finds, “Consistently over multiple months of polling, Gen Z showed the highest levels of acceptance for violence against elected officials (56%).”

This is new. When Gallup asked similar questions in 1970 and 1995, young adults showed no elevated tolerance for political violence.

The justifications vary. FIRE’s post-Kirk assassination survey found that 91% of undergraduates agree, to varying degrees, that “words can be violence.” This is a framework that makes physical response to speech seem proportionate. As FIRE’s Sean Stevens puts it, “When people start thinking that words can be violence, violence becomes an acceptable response to words.”

But my students weren’t invoking that logic. They were making a different argument: that the system has failed, that ordinary politics moves too slowly in the face of what they see as a humanitarian emergency, that direct action is the only language power understands. These are distinct rationales — one about the nature of speech, the other about the efficacy of institutions — but they converge on the same conclusion. Today’s cohort increasingly accepts violence as an alternative to speech. My students are not outliers. They are exemplars.

The partisan surprise

We might assume openness to political violence is a pathology of the left. The data says otherwise. According to FIRE’s 2026 survey, Republican students now exceed Democrats in support for violence to stop speakers: 35% versus 30%. Support for shouting down speakers has crossed 50% for the first time among strong Republicans. And strong Republicans, and Republicans who accept violence to stop a speaker, have more than tripled in four years.

As one analyst noted, this “spoil[s] what could have been an otherwise very useful tool for Republicans or Democrats who would like to pretend that the problem of political violence is one-sided.”

This is not a left or right problem. It is a generational problem.

The historical debate

My students were not wrong that confrontation and resistance have accompanied American social change. The Black Panthers exercised their lawful right to bear arms. Stonewall was a riot. The civil rights movement unfolded alongside urban uprisings.

I did not try to tell them those moments didn’t matter. They did. But I asked them to consider what followed. The Panthers’ armed patrols commanded attention; their survival programs — free breakfasts, health clinics, legal aid — built a legacy. Stonewall was a catalyst; the gay rights movement’s lasting victories came through decades of organizing, litigation, and shifting public opinion. The confrontational moments opened doors. What walked through them were movements built on persuasion and institution-building.

And I asked a harder question: What happens when both sides abandon speech for force?

The civil rights movement’s moral power came from asymmetry — nonviolent demonstrators versus the clubs and hoses turned against them. That clarity made the injustice undeniable to persuadable observers. But that strategy depended on a shared assumption: that bearing witness, that appealing to conscience, that speaking, even in the face of brutality, could eventually prevail.

My students no longer share that assumption. And I understand why. They look at Minneapolis and see federal agents firing on crowds. They see a system that, in their view, responds to speech with silence and to silence with violence. Their question is reasonable: Why should only one side play by the rules?

Here is my answer, inadequate as it may be: Because once both sides abandon speech, there are no rules. Politics becomes a contest of force. And in that contest, the state almost always wins.

The logic that justifies armed confrontation with ICE equally justifies armed confrontation with protestors.

We end up not with justice but with power — and the powerful have more of it.

They listened. I don’t know if it landed.

What this means

For years, FIRE has done essential work documenting these trends-tracking the decline in viewpoint tolerance, defending controversial speakers, opposing heckler’s vetoes, insisting that universities remain marketplaces of ideas. That work matters more than ever. Without organizations willing to measure and publicize these shifts, we would not know how serious the problem has become.

But the data now reveals a deeper challenge. FIRE’s surveys show a meaningful portion of students support using force to silence speakers. Combined with Gallup’s and Citizen Data’s findings on broader political violence, a troubling picture emerges: young Americans increasingly accept violence as a substitute for speech and nonviolent political advocacy.

If 91% of undergraduates believe words can be violence, defending “free speech” sounds like defending assault. If a third accepts force as a political tool, debates about particular speaker disinvitations miss the point for many. The disagreement is no longer just about which speakers should be heard, but about whether deliberation itself is a failed concept.

That argument is wrong. But it will not be refuted by citing the First Amendment. It will only be refuted by demonstrating, in the spirit of Justice Brandeis, that speech and the exchange of ideas can accomplish what my students believe it cannot.

What comes next

I did not convince my students last week. That failure stays with me. I have spent my career believing that argument and evidence can change many minds, that the classroom is where democratic habits form and are refined. But I walked out of that room having changed no one’s view — at least not yet. Persuasion takes time. Still, if the arguments for nonviolence cannot gain traction even in a classroom devoted to reasoned debate, what chance does the broader culture have?

The data confirms their views are widespread and growing: across party lines, across campuses, across the country. A generation is losing faith in the premise underlying liberal democracy: that we can govern ourselves through words rather than force.

If that faith dies, what replaces it is not hard to imagine. We are already seeing it in Minneapolis with armed standoffs, tear gas, flash grenades, and bodies in the street. Much of that force has been deployed against people engaged in nonviolent protest or simply recording law enforcement. That is what politics looks like when faith in speech as the historical successor to violence erodes on all sides.

But my students were not advocating violence out of cruelty. They were advocating it out of despair.

I will be back in that classroom next week. I don’t yet know what I’ll say differently. But I know I have to try again, and I will figure this out because if those of us who still believe in persuasion give up, we will have conceded their premise. That persuasion is futile. I won’t let that happen. The numbers suggest we are running out of time.

Last night, federal agents arrested journalist Don Lemon in connection with an anti-ICE protest inside a Minnesota church earlier this month. The Department of Justice charged him with violating federal statutes — primarily 18 U.S.C. § 241 and the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act — that protect people exercising their constitutional rights.

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These are serious charges, and the federal government bears a heavy burden of proof. Let’s break it down.

Section 241 criminalizes conspiring to “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” It’s unclear whether the government has ever invoked § 241 to protect First Amendment religious exercise. Supreme Court precedent suggests that when the government moves to protect First Amendment rights under similar civil rights statutes, the prosecution must prove that state actors were involved. If so, the government faces a steep uphill battle proving the § 241 charge.

The FACE Act makes it a crime to use force, threats, or physical obstruction to intentionally interfere with anyone seeking to exercise their right of religious freedom at a house of worship or to intentionally damage the property.

It appears the grand jury believed the evidence presented by prosecutors established probable cause to return an indictment. But given the fraught political situation and Lemon’s own video, the charges, at least with regard to Lemon, deserve strong skepticism.

The DOJ previously failed to obtain an arrest warrant for Lemon and his producer after a magistrate judge found no probable cause. (Notably, the magistrate did sign arrest warrants for several protestors.) Prosecutors then appealed to U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz, who refused to immediately grant their request, writing:

The government lumps all eight protestors together and says things that are true of some but not all of them. Two of the five protestors were not protestors at all; instead, they were a journalist and his producer. There is no evidence that those two engaged in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so.

That doesn’t instill confidence that the government has a strong case. After being rebuffed by two judges, prosecutors secured the grand jury indictment against Lemon — an alternative procedural route that bypasses the need for a judge to approve a criminal complaint. Some career DOJ prosecutors reportedly refused to be involved in charging Lemon and other journalists who covered the protest because they also believe the evidence is insufficient.

Journalists do not have a special license to break generally applicable laws. When the pastor of Cities Church asked Lemon to leave, he no longer had the right to stay. FIRE recently explained that the First Amendment does not protect the protesters’ act of commandeering private property for their own ends, even if they did so to send a political message. Not only is such conduct unprotected, but it interferes with others’ ability to exercise their own rights to free speech and freedom of religion.

But that doesn’t mean the federal government’s charges against Lemon — civil rights charges that require evidence he was threatening or physically obstructing congregants or coordinating such activity — are warranted. There’s a good reason why, as Politico reports, “[c]riminal charges against journalists over their work activities are extraordinarily rare.”

In a free society, journalists play a vital role in documenting and reporting on events of public concern, including illegal conduct. Manufacturing federal crimes out of the facts we’ve seen so far chills that core function. Considered in light of the administration’s online taunts and demonstrated hostility to the press, that appears to be the point.

FIRE will be watching closely.

For months, the Trump administration has tried to justify its targeting of prominent pro-Palestinian activists like Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Moshen Mahdawi by insinuating that the reasons for their pending deportation went beyond mere speech. But newly unsealed records confirm the Trump administration’s legal basis for targeting these individuals was never unlawful conduct. Instead, the administration targeted them solely for protected speech — and expected a First Amendment fight from the start.

The government cast these cases as responses to unlawful conduct, but they rest on protected speech

On March 8, 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident and vocal pro-Palestine advocate. Rather than charging Khalil with a crime, the Trump administration attempted to deport him based on a pair of seldom-used provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, Section 1227(a)(4)(C) and Section 1182(a)(3)(C). Together, these provisions authorize the Secretary of State to render a noncitizen deportable if he “personally determines” the person’s “lawful” activities are compromising a “compelling foreign policy interest.”

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FIRE is currently challenging this provision in court on First Amendment grounds because it allows the government to turn lawful expression into a deportable offense. The INA already has provisions enabling immigration authorities to take action if a noncitizen actually engages in terrorism or provides material support to terrorist groups. The administration relied on none of them with Khalil, clinging only to the provision covering “lawful” activities. That speaks volumes.

Unsealed documents confirm the administration targeted Khalil for protected speech

When the administration defended its targeting of Khalil in the media, officials hinted there was something more than his pro-Palestine opinions driving their decision. For example, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin claimed that “Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” Rubio, after Khalil’s initial arrest, pledged he was using his INA power to go after “Hamas supporters in America.” These comments insinuated that the administration was relying on something more than Khalil’s protected political advocacy to target his immigration status.

It wasn’t. The unsealed records reveal that administration officials’ private assessment was that Khalil’s actions were lawful speech. He was, according to Senior Officer of the Bureau of Consular Affairs John Armstrong, “involved in numerous pro-Palestinian protests, including serving as the lead negotiator of an encampment at Columbia in April 2024.” Another file claims that Khalil participated in “antisemitic protests.”

Conspicuously absent from the records was any assessment Khalil engaged in conduct falling outside the First Amendment’s protection. Though the documents insinuated a tie between Khalil and the occupation of Barnard’s library, they do not actually allege Khalil was involved in the occupation. Likewise, officials note in one unsealed record that they “are not aware of any prior arrests or citations for Khalil regarding unlawful activity.”

Officials also admit that, aside from the provision allowing Secretary Rubio to render someone deportable for “lawful” activities, they haven’t “identified any alternative grounds for removability that would be applicable,” such as the provision allowing for the “removability for aliens who have provided material support to a foreign terrorist organization or terrorist activity.” In other words, without anything else to justify his deportation, the administration had to hang its actions on Khalil’s speech.

Officials admitted they targeted Ozturk based solely on an op-ed

Nineteen days after Khalil’s arrest, masked federal agents ambushed pro-Palestinian Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen with an F-1 student visa, on the streets of Boston. Agents threw Ozturk into a van and transported her thousands of miles to a remote Louisiana detention facility. Unbeknownst to Ozturk, DHS had revoked her visa days prior without telling her.

To revoke Ozturk’s visa, the administration relied on an INA provision allowing the Secretary of State to “at any time, in his discretion” revoke a visa. The provision contains no language prohibiting a visa revocation from being predicated upon the holder’s protected speech. FIRE’s lawsuit challenges this provision, too, arguing that it violates the First Amendment to the extent it authorizes a visa revocation based on protected speech.

The government’s public-facing comments about Ozturk mirror those about Khalil, implying evidence of unlawful conduct but providing evidence of none. McLaughlin alleged that “investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.” But the unsealed records show officials acknowledged Ozturk’s visa revocation was based solely on her co-authorship of an op-ed in Tufts’ student newspaper. The op-ed criticized the university’s reluctance to divest from Israeli companies or call Israel’s operations in Gaza a “genocide.”

One record, a memo from Armstrong to ICE officials, suggested Ozturk was involved in “associations… that may undermine U.S. foreign policy.” The association in question? Tufts’ Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, which was on suspended status. But the unsealed records reveal the only connective tissue between Ozturk and SJP is the fact that an SJP representative co-signed the op-ed with an organization Ozturk belonged to. The documents reveal no membership, role, coordination, or concrete conduct linking Ozturk to the group. In fact, the records expressly acknowledge that officials had no basis to believe Ozturk was involved in any way with the events leading to SJP’s suspension.

Plus, even if the “association” were deeper than a co-signature, the First Amendment protects association just as it protects speech. So no matter how the administration slices it, they ambushed, transported, and now are attempting to deport Ozturk for protected expression.

The unsealed records confirm the administration has no evidence Mahdawi engaged in unlawful conduct

The Trump administration is also attempting to deport Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student who has been a lawful permanent resident for over a decade. Mahdawi, like Khalil, was involved in protests at Columbia. When Mahdawi arrived at a Vermont USCIS office to complete one of the final steps in his citizenship process, ICE arrested him on the spot.

As with Khalil and Ozturk, the government’s public framing implied actions beyond protected speech. In an official DHS post styled as “THE REAL STORY,” the agency attempted to style Mahdawi as a “terrorist sympathizer and national security threat.”

But one unsealed record reveals that Mahdawi’s alleged “conduct” is that he led “pro-Palestinian protests” and “call[ed] for Israel’s destruction.” As FIRE has explained, this is expressive activity protected by the First Amendment. The records also revealed the government targeted Mahdawi because of a pro-Palestinian poem he wrote.

Protesting, chants, and poems are textbook protected speech. Tellingly, the Trump administration acknowledges in the unsealed records that a “search of interagency databases on March 14 did not reveal any record indicating that the interagency currently assesses that Mahdawi has links to terrorism.” As with Khalil, another record states, “DHS/ICE/HSI has not identified any alternative grounds of removability applicable to Mahdawi, including any indication that Mahdawi has provided material support to a foreign terrorist organization or terrorist activity, as defined in the INA.” Unsurprisingly, then, the administration was again forced to rely on the “foreign policy” provision to target Mahdawi, the one triggered solely by “lawful” activities that FIRE is now challenging.

The administration anticipated First Amendment challenges to its unprecedented assertion of immigration power

The government’s interpretation of these two INA provisions as a blank check to target noncitizens based on protected speech is unprecedented. One of the unsealed records, a March 8, 2025 memo from Armstrong to Rubio, is illustrative. In the memo, Armstrong cautioned that “We are not aware of any prior exercises of the Secretary’s removal authority in INA section 237(a)(4)(C) … [and] courts may scrutinize the basis for these determinations.”

The administration also anticipated First Amendment risk to its theory. In a March 15, 2025 memo from Armstrong to Rubio, Armstrong wrote: “Given the potential that a court may consider [Mahdawi’s] actions inextricably tied to speech protected under the First Amendment, it is likely that courts will closely scrutinize the basis for this determination. We understand that Khalil intends to seek an injunction… and we could anticipate Mahdawi to do the same.”

If the government’s decision to target Khalil, Ozturk, and Mahdawi were actually based on evidence that they were involved in terrorism, the proof would be in the pudding. They’d proceed under the INA’s settled provisions related to material support for terrorism. Instead, they’re relying on broad, discretionless grants of power to revoke a visa for “any” reason and a statute solely confined to “lawful” activities.

But the First Amendment stands tall in the United States and prohibits the government from retaliating against you because of what you have to say. The Supreme Court held in 1945 that that protection remains intact regardless of your immigration status. It is thus unsurprising that the government anticipated First Amendment challenges from the start.

That anticipation was prescient. In late September 2025, a federal district court held that the administration’s targeting of noncitizens for deportation based on protected speech violated the First Amendment. These unsealed records, released with the final judgment of that case, confirm that, despite the administration’s attempted winks and head-fakes to the contrary, targeting Khalil, Ozturk, and Mahdawi has always been predicated solely on their protected speech.

And that, as FIRE has repeatedly explained, violates the First Amendment.