For nearly four decades, students in America’s public schools have experienced a straightjacketed version of the First Amendment.

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That’s due to the Supreme Court’s Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier decision. School administrators — who are government officials — have used Hazelwood to censor student expression, often prioritizing the school’s reputation over student voices.

These administrators mark certain stories and topics as off-limits, including critiques of school boards or commentary on federal immigration policy. It should come as no surprise then that the nation’s largest journalism teaching organization has condemned Hazelwood. Still, schools argue that they should be able to dissociate from student speech to maintain its reputation. With that in the foreground, Justice Samuel Alito’s recent dissent calling the Court to reconsider Hazelwood should be echoed, not dismissed.

In Hazelwood, the Supreme Court set a low bar for school administrators to censor school-sponsored publications and activities that the public might reasonably perceive to bear the imprimatur of the school. To quash such expression, a school must only show the censorship is reasonably related to legitimate educational concerns — which touches essentially every aspect of student life at school. Schools have pointed to the sole justification of “avoiding controversy” to meet that bar.

To characterize Hazelwood as a protector of diversity at schools, as New Jersey Public Education Coalition founder Michael Gottesman recently did, is to allow the school’s reputation to supplant student expression. Schools are not made more diverse when officials demand student speech be non-controversial. Instead, they become chilling enclaves where students shed their rights as citizens in favor of government officials’ subjective concerns for the school’s image.

License to censor

“Maintaining neutrality” is the sheep skin the censorial wolf wears, and it affects expression on all sides of the political spectrum. Take for instance the case that sparked Alito’s dissent, in which the student leader of a pro-life club sought to hang flyers advertising the club’s meetings that the school rejected because they included images of members holding “Defund Planned Parenthood” signs. The justification the school offered — appearing neutral on a politically ripe issue — was the same rationale Nebraska officials used after pulling a student journalist’s editorial cartoon critical of ICE’s actions in Minneapolis. Reconsidering Hazelwood could end this cycle of censorship.

The chill is spreading

That cycle reaches beyond K-12 institutions. Postsecondary students have had to surrender their expressive rights to administrators’ discretion under decisions that expanded Hazelwood to reach college student media. Look no further than the University of Alabama, where administrators shut down two student-run magazines that focused on women and black students. In May, a federal district court held these magazines fit within the Hazelwood standard, and then went on to characterize them as government speech that the university could cast aside at its whim.

Alito specifically called on the Court to revisit Hazelwood in light of the “government speech” doctrine, which had not yet been recognized when Hazelwood was handed down. As Alito’s dissent notes, the distinction between private speech and government speech is paramount, as First Amendment protections extend to the former and not the latter. The time to clear this muck did not come soon enough for the University of Alabama student journalists who lost their magazines. But the Court could offer clarification before it spreads.

Take off the training wheels

Hazelwood forces students into a training-wheels version of free speech. It has been so discredited that 18 states have enacted “anti-Hazelwood” statutes specifically to nullify its effect. The idea that the government’s “right” to a controversy-free reputation overrides the right to engage in core political speech the Constitution most fiercely protects runs counter to that founding document itself. Under the guise of maintaining neutrality, schools interpret Hazelwood to grant them nearly boundless authority to turn their hallways into the placid Seahaven of The Truman Show that ignores the outside world.

The reality is that students also live in the outside world. Yet their cartoons, club posters, and editorials must ignore controversy should a school administrator decide to elevate the government’s reputation over student voices. We are in the middle of a self-fulfilling cycle in which the government demands institutional approval for speech, then censors speech to avoid any risk of attribution the school itself invited.

The stakes are high — not just for student journalists, but for all students. Students learn democracy best by exercising it. But unless Hazelwood is revisited, students may learn a different lesson: the government’s reputation matters more than their expression.

They could have died. We forget that now. After appeals to history and self-evident truths and the long train of abuses and usurpations, the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to a cause that was not certain. To an idea as radical as their revolution. To a notion of a nation yet to be built.

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The United States could have died. The might of the British Empire was pressing in on the mid-Atlantic. Boston had already been occupied and blockaded. New York City would soon fall to the Redcoats, and New Jersey would follow shortly after. As Thomas Paine famously wrote later that fateful year, it was a time that tried men’s souls.

The Declaration could have died. The 56 signers could have abandoned it at the sight of the British fleet or during that terrible winter at Valley Forge. They could have saved themselves and forgotten all about the idea that people matter more than the state. That we are all created equal. That we can govern ourselves better than any prince or potentate.

To make matters more complicated, these men had little in common. The oldest was 70 years old. The youngest was 26. They represented all thirteen colonies with different economies, climates, politics, and religious affiliations. Eight of the signers were immigrants, expats from the British Isles. There were Catholics, Anglicans, Protestants, deists, and alleged atheists. Lawyers, merchants, farmers, doctors, and writers. Plantation owners and abolitionists. Forty-one owned slaves. They were principled and hypocrites, aspirational and cautionary.

In a tribal world, it was perhaps the most diverse deliberative body to that point. It’s no wonder many thought the United States would die before it began! And who could blame them? If history proved anything it was that a deliberative body of such wildly different characters and personal agendas could never put aside their differences for long enough to create a new nation, let alone defeat the greatest empire the world had ever seen.

But they weren’t interested in following the lead of history. They stepped out of it. 250 summers later, the United States of America — the offspring of that revolutionary communion — remains. Those 56 signers asserted that accident and force no longer rule the minds of man. That the human mind is created free. That we may think, write, speak, and pursue truth. It is on that rock, the Declaration itself, that they built our new home.

The terrible times they endured did not shake their resolve or dampen their belief in the struggle for which they were engaged. Nor did their personal disagreements or bickering impede it. If anything, their differences strengthened its power. Those men disagreed on much but were willing to die for each other because of the one thing that mattered most: that human beings are capable of self-government. They defended that idea when failure meant ruin and death. And they won.

That became the story of America. A grueling, methodical, often frustrating process of dissent, debate, and compromise in pursuit of a common cause. A perfect cause imperfectly lived. Generation after generation have grappled with the promises of those Founding charters and our failure to fully meet them. Like Jacob wrestling the angel in Genesis, it is in the struggle to live up to the Declaration that we find our civic purpose. In dissent and debate, we make the United States more perfect.

America has needed the exchange of ideas since the beginning. Without it, the republic would have crumbled long ago. This makes free speech not just one right among equals. It is the discipline by which the country keeps faith in the Declaration itself. It has been the indispensable mechanism of that neverending struggle, from the Founding Fathers to the abolitionists and suffragettes; from civil rights to gay rights and the campus free speech movement and beyond. Douglass once called free speech the “great moral renovator of society.” The practical expression of the American idea.

Human beings will always be living through times that try our souls. The New World is constantly on the verge of sliding back into the dogmas of the Old. The Declaration’s signers felt the temptation to abandon principle for the sake of preservation, and we feel that same temptation today. But we cannot give in. Ever. These twin ideas — America and free speech — are so much bigger than us. Particulars of time and place, no matter how uncomfortable or disagreeable, cannot and should not destroy our faith in them. No matter how ugly it gets.

Nor should our own worldviews warp them for selfish ends. Because they are greater than any one person or party or politician or political movement. They are more powerful than cultural pressures. Eternally radical. In spite of all the negative baggage we bring to both, we must love free speech like we must love the idea of America. Only with both can we remain the last best hope of earth.

Even after 250 summers, the United States is still not guaranteed. A nation forever at dawn. Ever ancient, ever new. Look how far we’ve come because of the American idea and the freedoms that sustain it. Imagine how much more is possible.

A young prairie lawyer once prophetically warned that “if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

Our semiquincentennial is not just about celebration or remembrance. It is a recommitment to be a nation of freemen in the Spirit of the 56: To mutually pledge our lives, fortunes, and sacred honors. To defend the Declaration’s promise through free speech, fierce disagreement, and goodwill during the fiery trials ahead. To give our best to her as she has given her best to us.

No matter what. For the next 250. For all time.

A quarter of a millennium ago, the American project began in FIRE’s birthplace of Philadelphia.

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In a boarding house at Market and South 7th Streets, Thomas Jefferson drafted a document that would usher in a new nation and a new era. In the short term, the Declaration of Independence added fury to an already brewing revolution. But it also ignited an endeavor that continues to this day, and which remains just as revolutionary now as it was then: the pursuit and preservation of liberty.

Of course, people have been fighting for freedom since time immemorial. But what makes America unique is that this struggle was enshrined in its founding. The bedrock of our country wasn’t blood and soil, but the ideas and ideals — chief among them being the freedom to speak, to hear, and to engage in the open exchange of ideas — that make democracy possible.

This is why Philadelphia is neither a surprising nor a coincidental birthplace for these American principles. William Penn strove for religious toleration and liberty of conscience as fundamental tenets of his newfound colony of Pennsylvania. In the years leading up to the Declaration, Philadelphia became a center of colonial pamphleteering, newspapers, and political debate, renowned as the “Cradle of Liberty.”

It was home to Benjamin Franklin, who wrote that “freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government.” It was home to the defense attorney Andrew Hamilton, who would be instrumental in the establishment of truth as a defense against claims of libel. And it was where Thomas Paine published his legendary pamphlet Common Sense, which called for the American colonies to not only separate from Britain but to construct a government based on the natural rights that all people possess, no matter the station of their birth.

These influences and many others were in the air when Jefferson put pen to parchment in 1776.

The First Amendment was ratified in 1791, guaranteeing that Congress shall make no law abridging our freedom to speak, publish, assemble, worship, and petition the government. But as anyone with a passing knowledge of our history knows, the fight was far from over then.

In fact, it was only just beginning — and Philadelphia was ground zero for much of it.

It is where the hellishly censorial Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in 1798. It was where Pennsylvania Hall, built by abolitionists and suffragists as a “temple of free discussion,” was burned to the ground in an act of violent suppression. It was where labor organizer and activist Emma Goldman had her lectures and demonstrations shut down by police under orders from the city’s director of public safety.

These incidents and many others highlight how tumultuous our struggle to defend and live up to our founding ideals has been, and continues to be. It also underscores the importance of having individuals and organizations that are willing to protect and promote those ideals.

A quarter century ago, FIRE’s project began in America’s birthplace of Philadelphia. Its mission is to ensure that our courts, campuses, and broader culture live up to America’s promise. To guarantee that everyone on American soil enjoys the inalienable right to free expression enshrined in our founding documents. To fight for and defend these ideals when it is most difficult and altogether thankless — because that’s what the principle demands, and what freedom entails.

We’re proud to join the revolutionary struggle that is core to our country’s founding and all humanity’s dignity. It remains revolutionary two and a half centuries later, and will undoubtedly stay revolutionary forever.

Many, many boards for school districts, community colleges, and public universities, and at least one state, have formal policies that limit board members from publicly criticizing actions taken by the boards, speaking to the press, or communicating on social media. These policies, often called “One Voice,” have resulted in punishments of board members and lawsuits challenging those actions. The policies are propagated by dozens of consultants and education attorneys, state and national board associations, at least one accreditor, and the New Jersey Department of Education.

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The policies are surely unconstitutional for elected boards (school districts and community colleges), though that may not be as clear-cut for boards appointed by state government (most public universities). Regardless, they are horrid governance policies for educational institutions, set bad examples for the students they’re educating, and contribute to the deterioration of civic culture.

In a small number of hours, I’ve found 50 institutions with One Voice policies (see the spreadsheet). Based on the endorsements of many state and national board associations and a large accreditor, I’m guessing there’s an order of magnitude more.

Currently there are three court cases challenging One Voice (New Jersey Department of Education, Pennsylvania State, and a Michigan school board) and a FIRE Public Advocacy case (Michigan State University).

Examples

Here are typical examples of restrictive One Voice policies from public universities, community colleges, and school districts. These policies are not merely aspirational — they can be (and sometimes are) enforced by censure, removal from board committees, and removal from the board.

University of Hawaii: “As individuals, regents make no commitments on behalf of the board to constituents, nor should they criticize or work against board decisions. Regents should speak with one voice, supporting the decisions of the board once made.”

Pennsylvania State University: “While Trustees think independently and make informed individual decisions about what they feel is in the best interests of the University, they shall support majority decisions of the Board and work cooperatively with fellow Board members and the Administration to advance the University’s goals. Negative or critical public statements about the Board, the University or its students, alumni, community, faculty, staff, and other stakeholders do not serve the University’s interests and are inconsistent with a Trustee’s fiduciary obligation to act always in the best interests of the University.”

Garden City Community College: “As individuals, trustees make no commitments on behalf of the board to constituents, nor do they criticize or work against board decisions . . . Speak with one voice, and support the decision of the board once it is made.”

Northwest Iowa Community College: “As individuals, trustees make no commitments on behalf of the board to constituents, nor do they criticize or work against board decisions . . . Speak with one voice, and support the decision of the board once it is made.”

Duluth Public Schools: “Support the decision of the school board, even if my position concerning the issue was different . . . Make no disparaging remarks, in or out of school board meetings, about other members of the school board or their opinions.”

Reardon-Edwall School District: “Individual members will support the decision of the board.”

Restrictions on sharing information

Some policies specifically restrict information sharing:

Lisle District 202: “I will . . . avoid sharing Board information that has not been verified and made public.”

Katy Independent School District: “Post only content that the District has already released to the public.”

Rochester Community School District: “I . . . will not share any document or information that has not already been shared by the District.”

There’s an ongoing lawsuit by a mom school-board member of the Rochester Community School District who published an op-ed containing publicly available information that hadn’t been explicitly shared by the district. She was censured and removed from all committees.

Restrictions on speaking to media or the public

Some boards and states want to limit or control how board members speak to the media or communicate on social media:

New Jersey Department of Education: The School Ethics Commission interprets the School Ethics Act as barring many elected officials from discussing school issues on social media. FIRE filed a lawsuit 11/2025 on behalf of a school board member. New Jersey has 590 public school districts.

Spokane Public Schools: “Media correspondence from members of the media shall be directed to the board president and superintendent.” Local media laments being unable to speak with individual board members.

University of Texas: “Except in unusual circumstances, Regents are expected to coordinate media contacts with and to provide advance notice to the U.T. System Office of External Relations, Communications and Advancement Services regarding any media contacts and press statements.”

Minnetonka Public Schools: “All employees and/or Board members shall notify the District’s Communications Director immediately if they are contacted by the media.”

Genesee County school districts: In 2018, a local newspaper reported that five county districts restricted their board members from speaking publicly or to the media, requiring all press contacts to go through the superintendents.

Katy Independent School District: In November 2016, a board member complained about a 10-year-old policy that only allowed the board president to speak to the media. He threatened to get a private attorney, and the board changed the policy in December 2016.

Timberlane Regional School District: In 2014, the board voted 7-2 to adopt a strict One Voice policy and prohibit board members from speaking to the press, directing all media contacts to the superintendent. The New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union said it was considering legal action, and the NHCLU worked out new language with the board.

University of Virginia: In 2014, the board floated a draft policy that would have gagged members from talking to the media. It was harshly criticized by state legislators and reported in the Washington Post before they dropped it.

Accreditor

At least one accreditor requires a One Voice policy. The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges is the sole accreditor for over 181 community colleges in California, Hawaii, Arizona, New York, and five Pacific territories and countries. It requires the boards of those colleges to have a One Voice policy, and their guide helpfully provides a sample:

Once a collective decision has been reached, board members, individually, demonstrate their support for board policies and decisions.

The Commission’s Senior Vice President Dr. Droker led a 2019 study session of the San Mateo County Community College District, and the outrageous minutes from that session deserve quoting at length:

The board acts as a collective entity. Once the board reaches a decision, all board members act in support of the decision. (IV.C.2) Dr. Droker said this does not mean that board members will not have disagreements. However, once a vote is taken, there is no minority report and all board members must support the decision. Dr. Droker said there have been situations where board members who did not agree with the majority opinion have gone to the media. She said this is very destructive to the institution and to the board’s leadership.

...

President Goodman asked if a Board member who is asked a question by the media can express an opinion and clarify that he or she is speaking as an individual and not for the Board. Dr. Droker said that once elected, board members move into a public position and lose rights as individual citizens; they are board members at all times and always represent the institution. Therefore, she said they lose the ability to say they are speaking as individuals.

...

She said that expressing an opinion before a vote might be a violation of the Brown Act [California public meeting law] because it could be interpreted as the board member making a decision on an issue before the public and others have seen the item on a meeting agenda and have had an opportunity to comment on the item.

In other words, in her view, a board member elected by citizens can’t speak individually to the press before a board vote or after a board vote. One of the board members in the study session objected to her interpretation of the Brown Act, and she deferred to the District’s counsel; you’d think a senior executive of the California accreditor would be more confident of their interpretation of the Brown Act before pontificating to a board.

State and national associations

Many state and national associations provide model policies and guides that include One Voice, and their consultants help boards revise their policies. This accounts for the similarities of wording across dozens of boards.

For example, the Association of Community College Trustees provides this model policy:

The power of governance is expressed through one voice. As individuals, trustees make no commitments on behalf of the board to constituents, nor do they criticize or work against board decisions.

Little wonder that wording appears in many community colleges’ policies. I found meeting minutes from multiple colleges mentioning the same ACCT consultant.

The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges has an article by AGB Senior Fellow and Senior Consultant R. Barbara Gitenstein saying, “Once a decision is made by the board, individual trustees have one of two routes before them. Either support the decision or sever ties with the board.” There are two recommended books on its web site that simply assume One Voice is an obviously good policy for university boards.

Other associations that recommend model One Voice policies:

• Connecticut Association of Boards of Education

• Kentucky School Boards Association

• Michigan Association of School Boards

• Minnesota School Boards Association

• Oregon Community College Association

The history of One Voice

The One Voice policies may have originated from the work of John and Miriam Carver starting in the 1970s, defining what they called Policy Governance in several popular books. They advocated for corporate governance in which boards set policy and the administrative staff executes the policy. Boards are “holistic” entities that speak in “one voice” to the executive leader (CEO, president, superintendent, executive director), and no individual board member has authority to act on behalf of the board.

Hundreds of consultants have been trained in Carver Policy Governance, and the principles have been widely adopted by other consultants. Much of what they preach sounds reasonable and helpful. But some of their web sites are dogmatic and cult-like, pronouncing what is and what isn’t policy governance, what constitutes a “source document,” and the originalist meaning of their Ten Principles.

Many consultants interpret One Voice to mean not only should the board give directions to the CEO as a holistic entity, but they should also speak to the public and their stakeholders and constituents with “one voice.” In their view, there should be constructive debate in the boardroom, but once there’s a majority vote, all debate ceases and the minority must support the decision and may not criticize it publicly (and sometimes not even in the boardroom).

One Voice is a reinvention of a key principle of Lenin’s theory of democratic centralism. Lenin thought there should be free and open debate within the party, but once a decision is reached, everyone must support the party line and implement it uniformly. Democratic centralism was adopted by communist parties worldwide, and we know how that ended.

But not all consultants agree with this interpretation of the holistic-board principle.

Brown Dog Consulting says it’s a frequent misinterpretation, and that the principle is directed solely to communication between the board and the CEO.

Some academics advocate One Voice. Notably, Professor Emeritus Richard Chait at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, a reputed authority on higher education governance, has defended gag orders on trustees, saying it is not their place to speak out on policy matters that have been set by the board or to undermine the administration.

Why One Voice is bad governance

Advocates of One Voice repeatedly chant “good governance,” saying that One Voice reduces confusion by the public, staff, faculty, and students and results in better decision-making. They think One Voice encourages timid board members to be more forthcoming behind the closed boardroom doors. They worry that public dissent will be bad PR, leading stakeholders to think less of the institution. The advocates often speak of the members’ fiduciary duties to the institution, as if the greater good of the institution excludes the interests of the stakeholders funding and being served by it.

But One Voice hides critical information from the stakeholders. Majority votes hardly guarantee correct decisions, and many majority votes are wrong the minute they are taken. The board’s constituencies need to know the reasons behind the minority vote, and the dissenting board members want to communicate with those constituencies to start building support to change or ameliorate important bad decisions. One Voice prevents the people who know the most about the issue from communicating with stakeholders.

One Voice acts as a ratchet, making it more difficult to change bad decisions — one policy, one vote, one time. We all know that suppressing dissent over critical decisions doesn’t make the dissenters go away — it makes them madder and more determined. And One Voice leads stakeholders to think that the important decisions are being made in secret behind closed doors, contributing to deteriorating public trust in these institutions.

One Voice and the First Amendment

For boards with elected members — school districts, community colleges, and some public universities — One Voice is clearly unconstitutional, imposing content- and viewpoint-based restrictions on elected officials. FIRE’s recent letter to Michigan State University Board of Trustees repeatedly hits them over the head with this hammer.

In Forced Unanimity and the First Amendment, Frank Lamonte of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University puts it succinctly:

If you purposefully set out to concoct a government policy guaranteed to be unconstitutional, here is how you would do it. You would impose a restraint that forbids people from expressing viewpoints on contested political issues that dissent from the government’s official position. And you would justify the restraint by arguing that, if the citizenry is given the whole truth, they might think less of the government.

Unlike Michigan State, most boards of state universities are appointed by the states’ governors or legislatures. Are these trustees employees reporting to the governor, and thus their speech can be restricted under Garcetti v. Ceballos? Or are they more akin to elected officials? Or would the Supreme Court put them in the same yet-to-be-clarified bucket as university professors?

Lamonte makes the case that the First Amendment should apply to appointed trustees as well, but I’m not qualified to judge the strength of his arguments.

Current and past cases

Currently active cases over One Voice and similar policies:

New Jersey Department of Education and School Ethics Commission: FIRE “is suing the commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Education and members of the state’s School Ethics Commission to stop them from abusing a law to chill the speech of an elected school board member who used social media to seek her constituents’ input.”

Pennsylvania State University: “Three news organizations are suing the Board of Trustees, accusing them of violating the First Amendment by controlling what individual trustees can say to the public and the press.” (5/29/26) They’re represented by Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic.

Rochester Community School District: A mom school-board member of the Rochester Community School District published an op-ed about a possible tax hike containing publicly available information that hadn’t been explicitly shared by the district. She was censured and removed from all committees. She’s suing the school district, represented by the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation.

Michigan State University: In May, the elected Board of Trustees approved a One Voice policy, and two trustees have very publicly refused to sign it. FIRE wrote to the board, calling on it to revise the policy to ensure First Amendment compliance, and asking for a reply by 6/12/26.

A couple of past cases I’ve found:

Duluth Public Schools: In 2015, the board tried to remove a member, alleging (among other things) that he made disparaging remarks. He sued and the Federal District judge indicated that his disparaging remarks were likely protected by the First Amendment. The board member and the district quickly settled, with the member accepting a censure.

Timberlane Regional School District: In 2014, the board adopted a strict One Voice policy, and the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union immediately threatened a legal challenge. The NHCLU and the board worked out better language for the policy.

A detailed survey

By googling for common One Voice phrases, names of consultants, and news stories, I found 50 institutions with “red” and “yellow” One Voice policies (mostly red):

• 17 school districts

• 12 community colleges and districts

• 10 universities (9 public)

• 9 associations

• 1 accreditor

• 1 state (New Jersey)

I found five instances of board members punished for violating the policies and five legal cases.

I didn’t record the institutions I found lacking One Voice (but I should have). But because my search methodology targeted likely suspects, they numbered far less than 50. I did record five institutions with very good policies, including my daughter’s own Sequoia Union High School District.

This survey gives a qualitative feel for the extent of the problem. Since an accreditor and many state and national associations are pushing One Voice, I’m guessing there are hundreds of institutions that incorporate it. Many of those policies won’t be indexed by Google (e.g. because they’re on platforms like Boarddocs that Google doesn’t seem to crawl thoroughly) and many will have wording that I didn’t search for.

A good next step would be to randomly sample 50 each of school districts, community colleges, and public universities. This would give a better quantitative estimate of the scope of the problem. At five institutions per hour, this would take about 30 hours of tedious effort (you often must dig around in schools’ and colleges’ poorly organized web sites).

If you’d like a copy of the spreadsheet containing my results, please send me a private message via Substack.

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America’s 250th deserves more than fireworks. It deserves a celebration of the right to free speech that has helped make this nation great. That’s why FIRE is launching a new event right in the birthplace of American democracy itself.

In Philadelphia from November 4–6, 2026, Soapbox is bringing together headline speakers, unflinching debates, and unforgettable entertainment to explore the ideas and freedoms that will shape America for the next 250 years.

• Keynotes, panels, and debates

• Networking opportunities

• Immersive entertainment

• An unforgettable gala on the last night

Free speech is under pressure. From cancel culture and government censorship to a growing erosion of public understanding and support for this essential right, the conversation about its future has never mattered more.

Soapbox is our answer to this moment. This conference will be a place to exchange ideas, challenge assumptions, and yes — we’re also planning one hell of a party.

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More to be announced soon!

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*Employees of 501(c)(3) nonprofits and currently enrolled students can receive $50 off Conference or Combo tickets — just email soapbox@fire.org using your nonprofit or student email address and we’ll send you the discount code.

Questions? See our FAQ page or email us at soapbox@fire.org.

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In June 1845, Cassius Marcellus Clay launched an anti-slavery newspaper in Lexington, Kentucky, one block from one of the largest slave markets in the United States. He called it The True American. Published by William L. Neale and edited by Clay, the paper openly challenged Kentucky’s slaveholding establishment. Its editor was a son of a Kentucky aristocrat; a cousin of the Great Compromiser, Henry Clay; and a man who understood that publishing against slavery in a slave state was not merely controversial. It was dangerous.

Clay’s father, Green Clay, was one of Kentucky’s wealthiest landowners and largest slaveholders. Cassius Clay graduated from Yale in 1832, where he heard abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison speak. Over time, Clay came to see slavery not only as a moral wrong, but as a political and economic poison that corrupted republican government, degraded free labor, and threatened liberty itself.

By the early 1840s, Clay had become one of the most hated men in the commonwealth of Kentucky because he would not stop talking about emancipation. His speeches brought threats and violence. In August 1843, at a political rally near Lexington, a hired gunman named Samuel Brown attacked Clay after Clay interrupted a pro-slavery speech. Brown hit and then shot Clay, who then lunged at Brown, cut his nose in half, cut off one of his ears, and gouged out one of his eyes. In 1849, after a debate between Clay and pro-slavery candidates for Kentucky’s constitutional convention, Cyrus Turner attacked Clay. A small crowd descended on Clay, hitting him, stabbing him in the side, and firing a revolver at his head four times. Each shot failed, discharging only the percussion cap. Clay fought off the men, wrenched his knife from another attacker by its blade, and slashed Turner’s abdomen with his Bowie knife, disemboweling him.

Kentucky did not tolerate a diversity of viewpoints when it came to slavery, and dissent on the matter was often met with violence. Kentucky had formal protections for free speech, but it would take a number of Supreme Court decisions before the people of Kentucky would actually begin to feel the shade of those protections. In the meantime, Clay made clear his silence would not come easily.

When local papers refused to print his anti-slavery writings, Clay helped create one that would. The True American advocated gradual emancipation in Kentucky and attacked slavery as a threat to liberty, labor, and republican government. The title was a claim about the country itself: that fidelity to America meant defending liberty when liberty was unpopular. In Kentucky in 1845, even gradual emancipation was enough to make him a marked man. Threats against the paper began immediately, including death threats.

Clay prepared accordingly.

The office of The True American was not just a newspaper office. According to historian Herndon J. Evans, it was “armed with two brass cannons, iron barred windows, and an arsenal of Mexican lances and pikes. A trapdoor in the roof provided an escape route in case the editor and his helper found they could not hold the fort in an attack. In the basement, Clay had rigged up an ‘infernal machine’ with a powder keg that he could set off from the outside to blow up the building and whoever was in it should the attackers succeed in taking over the plant.” Clay later said he had filled the four-pounder cannons with shot and nails.

Clay’s cannons were not toys. They were his defense for a press operating where the formal promise of liberty could not be trusted to protect the act of publication. The issue was not simply whether Clay had a right to criticize slavery. It was whether he could actually print those criticisms in Lexington without having the press seized or destroyed.

The community of Lexington treated the paper as a public menace, organizing meetings and committees and demanding that Clay shut down his press. The flashpoint was an 1845 editorial, printed in Clay’s paper while he was bedridden with typhoid fever. Apparently written by a South Carolina planter, it warned that America’s betrayal of its founding ideals of liberty would bring retribution. The outraged people of Lexington ran Clay and his paper out of town, calling him “a fanatic and incendiary.” Claiming his press would “excite to sedition,” they quoted from the editorial:

But remember you who dwell in marble palaces — that there are strong arms and fiery hearts and iron pikes in the streets, and panes of glass only between them and the silver plate on the board, and the smooth skin woman on the ottoman.

The 60 or so men who made up one of the committees to shut down Clay’s press claimed to be defending “our wives, our children, our homes, our property, our country, our honor.” Their concern did not extend to black women and children, except insofar as enslaved people were counted among the “property” they meant to protect. And their chosen remedy was censoring a newspaper. “Do tell your secret conclave of cowardly assassins,” Clay answered defiantly, “that C.M. Clay knows his rights and how to defend them.”

As they gathered evidence against him, the men argued that printed words were more dangerous than action itself:

The plunder of our property, the kidnapping, stealing and abduction of our slaves, is a light evil in comparison with planting a seminary of their infernal doctrines in the very heart of our densest slave population.

After a Lexington judge issued an injunction against the True American office and its equipment, Clay, bedridden with typhoid, yielded the keys to the city marshal. Later that day, the committee acted on a broader decree: “no Abolition Press ought to be tolerated in Kentucky, and none shall be in this City or its vicinity.” Even the mayor warned they were acting “in opposition to law,” but the committee seized the paper’s press and type and shipped them to Cincinnati. The mob, and slavery, had won. But the war wasn’t over.

Clay continued publishing The True American from Cincinnati, and in a small act of defiance, he kept the paper’s Lexington dateline — and kept sending copies back into Kentucky.

More than 165 years later, the Society of Professional Journalists recognized that legacy on April 12, 2011, when it designated White Hall, Clay’s home in Madison County, Kentucky, as a National Historic Site in Journalism because of Clay’s career as an anti-slavery publisher. The plaque honors Clay as a publisher whose press was attacked because of what he dared to print. The inspiring story of Cassius Clay reminds us that the basic principles of a free press are never tested when speech is popular or polite, but when a local community decides an argument is too controversial to tolerate.

More than a century later, another fighter would inherit Clay’s name. In 1942, a black child in Louisville was named Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. after his father, a sign painter whose family had adopted the name of one of American slavery’s greatest enemies. But ironically, the young boy would grow up to reject “Cassius Clay” as a “slave name” and accept a new name bestowed by Elijah Muhammad: Muhammad Ali, after two central figures of Islam, the prophet Muhammad and his cousin Ali, both slave owners. He became one of the greatest fighters in the history of the sport. But before he cast off the name Clay, it belonged to another legendary fighter, a white Kentucky aristocrat who attacked slavery with the power of the pulpit, the press, and, when necessary, brass cannons.

An American heavy metal band says it was contacted by the Secret Service for holding a mock execution of President Trump onstage.

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The group is Gwar, a theatrical science-fiction musical project formed in 1984. They describe themselves as former members of an elite extraterrestrial fighting force called the Scumdogs of the Universe, who were banished to Earth for bad behavior, accidentally created humans through fornication with apes, and now tour the globe playing concerts. Their current lineup consists of THE BERSERKER BLÓTHAR on lead vocals, BÄLSÄC THE JAWS ‘O DEATH and GRODIUS MAXIMUS on guitar, BEEFCAKE THE MIGHTY on bass, and JIZMAK DA GUSHA on drums.

…so you know they’re serious.

The band has been doing this at concerts throughout their recent tours — the latest occurrence happening during the group’s performance at Warped Tour in Washington, D.C. this month. A now-viral video depicts someone in a Donald Trump costume walking onstage and being disemboweled by the band, his fake blood spraying on the first few rows of concert attendees.

For this, Gwar is allegedly being reviewed by federal agents. Their manager, Sleazy P. Martini, could not be reached for comment.

Anyone familiar with Gwar knows that the band is famous for its often grotesque, shocking, and bizarre stage shows. A staple of those performances for decades has been the gratuitous mock killing of public figures. Their victims have included former President Barack Obama, former President Joe Biden, Queen Elizabeth, Elon Musk, Hillary Clinton, and Kanye West, among others.

Puzzlingly, however, this is the first time the band has drawn the attention of government agents for it.

“For years, GWAR would do whatever the fuck we wanted,” BLÓTHAR said in a recent interview. “We would kill politicians from both sides of the aisle. We would kill famous people. We never had any backlash.” But when Trump was re-elected, he said, “people started getting extremely upset about politics and music and politics in art.”

For anyone concerned about free expression the last few years, the actions of the federal government will come as no surprise. President Trump and his administration are notorious for wielding government power and the legal system to bully perceived enemies — including universities, law firms, media companies, political opponents, and even private associations.

Apparently, not even heavy metal groups are small enough potatoes.

Despite the anger it inspired among some Trump supporters, and despite drawing the attention of the Secret Service, Gwar’s onstage antics are First Amendment-protected speech. While true threats aren’t protected, a true threat is a serious expression of intent to commit unlawful violence against an individual. It doesn’t include hyperbole, satire, or artistic expression that simply references or depicts violence, however provocative it may be.

The obviously over-the-top theatrical context of Gwar’s mock execution, and the fact that the band has done the same thing to other politicians and public figures, make clear that they weren’t actually threatening the president’s life. There’s also no credible argument that the performance amounted to unprotected incitement, which applies only to speech intended and likely to result in imminent unlawful action.

Mock executions may be crude, offensive, or disturbing, but they are hardly new. Americans have used symbolic depictions of violence against political figures for centuries to express dissent. In 1919, angry suffragists burned President Woodrow Wilson in effigy outside the White House. In 1842, protesters did the same with then-president John Tyler. Former Vice President Aaron Burr was hanged in effigy in Baltimore following his trial for treason in 1807. Lincoln was subjected to public effigy burnings throughout the South during the Civil War. And of course more recent presidents, including Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Trump, haven’t been spared this tradition.

All of it was protected speech, and Gwar’s blood-spewing onstage execution is no different. We doubt this investigation will go anywhere, but even the Scumdogs of the Universe have First Amendment rights — and if they’re threatened, FIRE will be ready.

Whether leaning on social media platforms or threatening broadcasters, federal officials of both parties have made jawboning — using government power, or the threat of it, to indirectly censor protected speech — a growing stain on American life.

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To fight back, Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Wyden have introduced a landmark bill to rein in jawboning against websites and social media platforms, AI systems, and broadcast airwaves. Supported by FIRE, the Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression (JAWBONE) Act would mark major progress toward addressing indirect and unconstitutional government censorship of Americans’ speech.

What is jawboning?

Jawboning is when the government uses threats to force private actors into censoring speech the government cannot ban directly. It’s government censorship by coercion, and FIRE has long warned that jawboning is a serious threat to free expression, especially online. (Check out our full explainer on jawboning.)

Consider the recent Supreme Court ruling in NRA V. Vullo, a case involving a New York state insurance regulator opposed to the National Rifle Association who allegedly threatened its insurance company with fines unless they dropped the NRA as a customer. In other words, the NRA claimed the regulator was going after the NRA’s speech indirectly because they couldn’t target it directly. The Court unanimously said if that was the case, it was unconstitutional coercion.

Or consider FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s threats of regulatory consequences for broadcasters to pressure them to drop Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Kimmel was condemned by President Trump. That’s jawboning, too.

Why do we need legislation?

The Supreme Court has held that coercing private parties to become government censors is a violation of the First Amendment since 1963’s Bantam Books v. Sullivan, so why do we need a new law when this is already unconstitutional? The reason is that a right is only effective if you have some way to enforce it, and people censored through jawboning often lack that ability, usually for one of three reasons.

1. You don’t always know you were jawboned.

Say you’re on Facebook, criticizing the IRS. A federal official sees your post and privately reaches out to Facebook, saying, “Delete this user or we’re going to start launching tax audits of Facebook executives.” Facebook deletes your account and never tells you why. Your First Amendment rights were violated, and you have no idea it even happened.

Even if someone at Facebook tips you off, you may not have enough evidence to file a lawsuit. This is exactly why FIRE drafted model legislation last year to require transparency when government officials talk to social media companies about moderating content. That way, everyone can see if there’s any pressure, threats, or backchannel dealing.

2. It’s hard to sue when the censorship is indirect.

The government doesn’t always directly threaten the speaker they’re trying to censor. Often, they’ll coerce a third party to do that work for them, such as in the targeting of an insurance company to punish the NRA. (And to be sure, these episodes also implicate the expressive rights of the third parties.)

Often, the third party is a social media company. Consider how the Biden administration turned the screws on social media companies to pressure them to take down certain content related to COVID, vaccines, and elections. Now we’re similarly seeing the Trump administration pressuring companies to delete lawful content about immigration.

But when the Biden administration’s jawboning faced a challenge in court, the Supreme Court said in Murthy v. Missouri (2024) that it wasn’t enough for victims to prove social media companies removed their speech after the government pressured the platforms to do so. The users also had to prove that the social media companies took down the content because of the government pressure.

Of course, this is hard to prove without the company’s help. When the Supreme Court was deciding Murthy, Google and Facebook had not spoken up about the Biden administration’s jawboning. Only after the political winds shifted did the companies put out statements acknowledging they’d been “pressed” or “pressured” to remove content. Even now, neither company has been willing to say the jawboning was the reason they took any content down.

This all boils down to two important points: First, the government can get away with attempted jawboning when the third party does not act. Even though the threat alone is a violation of the First Amendment, it’s very hard to challenge it unless the third party agrees to censor you. Second, when you do get censored, you’ll have a hard time making your case unless the third party — which has already caved to the government — is now willing to help you challenge the government’s actions by confirming that the government pressure was the only reason for the censorship.

3. You can’t sue for money when the feds violate your constitutional rights.

At the state level, you can sue and seek damages if a government official violates your constitutional rights. This is intended to incentivize government employees to respect Americans’ rights and to provide accountability when they fail to do so.

But you can almost never sue a federal employee for damages when they violate your constitutional rights, and certainly not for violating your First Amendment rights. You can sue to make them stop violating your rights, but you can’t sue to make them pay. And after they’re done violating your rights, making them stop ceases to be a viable remedy, so you get no day in court at all.

The upshot: When the feds violate your rights via jawboning, you often won’t know. If you do know, you’ll face an uphill battle in court. And even if you win, you can’t actually get any compensation, and rarely any accountability.

The JAWBONE Act

The JAWBONE Act is designed to chip away at each of these problems by doing two important things:

1. The bill lets people sue for money if the federal government jawbones their speech.

This is huge. If the JAWBONE Act becomes law, Americans will be able to sue federal officials for violating the First Amendment when they coerce social media companies, AI platforms, or broadcasters to change or take down protected speech. If the federal official did the jawboning “willfully and wantonly,” they’ll have to personally pay the damages. (Otherwise, the government will pay on their behalf.) That means federal employees will be personally incentivized to make sure they’re staying on the right side of the First Amendment when they reach out about speech on social media, AI platforms, TV, or radio.

The bill also provides for liability for when the government makes the illegal threat. This means they won’t escape accountability just because the company won’t help the plaintiff prove the threat was the reason the company suppressed the speech.

2. The bill requires the government to publicly report its communications with social media companies, AI companies, and broadcasters.

While it doesn’t go as far as FIRE’s model legislation, the JAWBONE Act raises the specter of public accountability for jawboning, which should deter officials from doing it. When jawboning does happen, the increased transparency will put more victims on notice that their rights were violated.

The bill also makes it easier for plaintiffs to obtain discovery, requiring the government to share more information about their jawboning. This will help victims prove their case in court.

Putting it all together

Let’s go back to our hypothetical: You’re posting criticisms of the IRS, and a federal official privately reaches out to Facebook and says, “Delete this user.” Facebook then deletes your account and never tells you why. Under the status quo, you never find out you were a victim of jawboning. You never file a lawsuit. The official faces zero consequences for violating your rights.

Under the JAWBONE Act, the government would have to report that communication publicly. Now the official is much more likely to be deterred from jawboning in the first place, because they will get found out. If they proceed anyway, the communication will have to be reported, so you’re going to know it happened. Now you can sue. If the public disclosure didn’t include enough information to prove your case in court, you can get discovery to dig up more evidence.

Since you can show your speech was jawboned, you can win even if Facebook won’t help you prove it. And you can get compensation. The government faces real consequences for violating your rights, and any federal employee who learns about the case thinks twice before doing the same to someone else.

This change would be a huge step forward in reining in First Amendment violations by federal officials, especially as the share of America’s discourse happening on digital platforms continues to grow. Jawboning has proven to be an enduring, bipartisan problem, and we know we cannot rely on platforms alone to protect our rights. The JAWBONE Act empowers Americans to take their rights into their own hands. FIRE applauds Sens. Cruz and Wyden for introducing this legislation, and we urge Congress to pass it.

We need to talk about Bama.

The University of Alabama delivered a real blow to the student magazine editors, writers, and photographers who staffed Alice and Nineteen Fifty-Six last December. UA shut down these publications, which focused on women and black students, citing a nonbinding memo from then-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi that warned against the use of “unlawful proxies” for discrimination.

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What followed was a scene from a student media horror story: Student journalists lost access to their old facilities, and administrators refused to reopen the publications, even after condemnation from student press advocates — including FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative — came flooding in.

Then the next chapter began. Eight student journalists sued UA to get those magazines reinstated and have their free speech rights vindicated.

But we turned the page to find a federal district court’s decision upholding UA’s closure of Alice and Nineteen Fifty-Six — a ruling that threatens student press freedoms nationwide. On May 22, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama ruled the university likely did not violate the First Amendment and denied the students’ request for a preliminary injunction.

FIRE condemns UA’s censorship of these magazines, and we’re deeply concerned by this ruling.

The court disregarded decades of student press law designating student-run publications as student speech, not government speech. In reaching its decision, the court marked the magazines as akin to curriculum, concluding that “decisions about what educational opportunities to offer belong to the University,” and thus are “University speech, not the speech of students petitioning for a particular class or publication.”

That characterization isn’t just a problem for student journalists at Bama. It risks silencing student media across the country if copied by other courts. Student media is more than just an educational opportunity. Student publications are living examples of democratic values in action — forums for student voices to be shared without administrators interfering with editorial decisions. Student media doesn’t exist to be a mouthpiece for the university. In fact, student media can be the most valuable critics and watchdogs of a college.

Citing Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier — thus taking a standard designed for high school into the college setting — the court found a workaround for censoring those voices: just silence those publications entirely. The court reasoned that the university could freely open and close a student publication — and the decision, in the court’s words, “will not be reversed based on the government’s intent,” opening the door for potential viewpoint discrimination that, in effect, “drive[s] certain ideas or viewpoints from the marketplace.”

And on the topic of viewpoint discrimination, the court also ruled the magazines were defined by their women or black-focused content instead of a particular viewpoint, dodging the concerns of viewpoint discrimination FIRE and other student press advocates raised.

Viewpoint-based restrictions on speech don’t merely prohibit speech on a particular topic — they shut down a specific side of a debate, a specific point of view on that topic. In Rosenberger v. Rectors and Visitors of University of Virginia, the University of Virginia subsidized publishing costs for nonreligious groups but denied those funds to a Christian student newspaper. The Supreme Court held that the university engaged in unlawful viewpoint discrimination, even though UVA said its restriction applied to all religious groups equally.

While the district court in the Alice and Nineteen Fifty-Six case decided Rosenberger was inapplicable because of a slightly different publication setup, it’s hard to see why this would make a difference constitutionally, since there’s little doubt that it was the “specific perspective[s] of the speaker[s]” (aimed at female and black readers) that motivated the university to shut down these magazines.

Nonetheless, the students, who are represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ACLU, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, are continuing their fight.

Our work at FIRE is far from over — whether it’s supporting student journalists with our advocacy or working to enshrine free speech protections on campus through policy reform. When performing an annual update to FIRE’s Spotlight Database of speech codes recently, FIRE gave UA our highest, “green light” policy rating, a designation for when a college or university’s policies do not seriously imperil speech. That rating does not itself guarantee a school actively supports free expression or a free student press. It simply means the college’s written policies do not threaten students’ free speech rights.

A climate of free expression demands more than the right written policies. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are fundamental to our nation, and there’s no place where these rights should be more valued and protected than on our college campuses. Shutting down publications degrades the “marketplace of ideas” a public university is expected to preserve. We’ll continue advocating for ‘Bama students — including student journalists — to defend their First Amendment rights.

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The ADA is a private organization, so this isn’t a First Amendment issue. But it does raise questions about why an organization that claims to “welcome scientific inquiry, respectful dialogue, and diverse perspectives” responded so harshly to conference attendees peacefully distributing an article from one of its own publications.

The incident occurred outside a conference hall where Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, was scheduled to deliver a keynote address. The Washington Post reports that a small group of researchers quietly handed out printouts of a recent editorial in Diabetes Care criticizing Trump administration policies affecting biomedical research. One of the researchers is the journal’s editor and co-authored the piece. Security staff and police escorted them out of the conference at the request of event organizers. Video captured the confrontation.

Some of the ousted researchers said they believed they were removed partly because the ADA feared repercussions from the Trump administration. Let’s hope that’s not true. But all the organization has offered are weak and shifting justifications that seem to be inconsistent with its stated commitments to open dialogue and viewpoint diversity.

For example, in a statement to the Post, the ADA said the researchers were ejected for “violating the conference code of conduct,” under which participants are expected to “conduct themselves in a professional and respectful manner.” Those terms are highly subjective, but it’s worth noting that, on the reported facts, there is no claim or evidence the ejected researchers chanted, blocked access, disrupted an event, or otherwise interfered with the conference. They simply handed out pieces of paper.

Then, in another statement defending its actions, the ADA cited the “safeguards” it has in place to ensure compliance with its obligations as a tax-exempt organization, including “maintaining a strictly nonpartisan environment at all organizational events and functions.” But the ADA was in no real danger of losing its tax-exempt status by allowing conference participants to distribute the editorial.

IRS rules do restrict Section 501(c)(3) nonprofits from participating or intervening in political campaigns on behalf of, or in opposition to, candidates for public office. But the editorial merely criticizes administration policies and calls on “concerned citizens” to contact their congressional representatives. That is issue advocacy — and under certain circumstances may be grassroots lobbying — but it is not urging people to vote for or against a candidate. As the IRS has made clear, “Section 501(c)(3) organizations may take positions on public policy issues, including issues that divide candidates in an election for public office.”

Not only that, but the ADA was not even the speaker here. Conference participants were acting independently, and the editorial itself includes a prominent disclaimer — at the top and bottom — stating that the opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the ADA.

The organization’s rationale echoes a mistake FIRE has seen universities make for years: erroneously claiming that their tax-exempt status requires suppressing the independent political advocacy of students or student organizations. At Washington and Lee University in 2021, for example, the administration prohibited the College Republicans from displaying campaign materials in support of then-Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin. As FIRE explained to W&L, the university had ignored “the distinction between institutional expression and the expression of its students.” IRS guidance recognizes that the “actions of students generally are not attributed to an educational institution unless they are undertaken at the direction of and with authorization from a school official.”

The ADA similarly appears to be misinterpreting IRS rules. Allowing conference attendees to hand out copies of an editorial is not the same as the organization itself promoting the editorial or adopting it as an official position.

If the ADA really believes distribution of the editorial endangered its tax-exempt status, it raises an obvious question: Why didn’t the same concern stop it from publishing the editorial in the first place?

All that said, the organization was still within its rights to remove the researchers. But if it truly seeks to “welcome scientific inquiry, respectful dialogue, and diverse perspectives,” it should avoid this kind of heavy-handed response to the peaceful exchange of views at its conferences.

This essay was originally published by the American Enterprise Institute on June 2, 2026.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) recently released a study by David Primo measuring faculty viewpoint diversity through campaign-contribution data. The average faculty donor scored only slightly to the right of progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

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The findings and criticism traveled quickly. John K. Wilson, writing in Inside Higher Ed, pronounced the study “worthless” because most faculty never make campaign contributions, so a sample of donors cannot describe the average professor. On the narrow point he is right: a sample of donors is not a sample of all faculty. “Worthless” is a serious conclusion — a verdict that, applied consistently, would discard nearly every measure we have.

Surveys, voter-registration data, and donation data all have weaknesses; none is complete. The question is not whether Primo’s measure is perfect — it isn’t — but whether it tells us something useful. It does.

Campaign-contribution data record a particular behavior: writing a political check. They tell us about the faculty engaged enough in politics to spend money on it — a minority of the professoriate. Primo matched roughly a quarter of 112,000 faculty to the Stanford contribution database and scored them using the CFscore system, a standard measure that places donors and politicians on the same ideological scale.

Political scientist John Holbein has correctly emphasized how much of the professoriate lies outside that sample: 73% of faculty never appear in the matched data, and restricting the analysis to 2024 leaves 87% out. Those are important cautions.

Yet the study’s limitation points toward its most interesting finding.

Among faculty active enough to donate to political candidates, conservatives are nearly absent.

That is worth noticing because the selection effect should run in the opposite direction. If campaign giving captures the most politically engaged faculty, committed conservatives — who donate too — should be easier to find, not harder. Think of the Federalist Society law professor, the supply-side economist, the Hoover fellow.

Instead, the conservative tail remains remarkably thin — and even granting every caveat, the imbalance is difficult to ignore.

What the study does not show deserves equal attention. It does not prove discrimination, that conservatives are silenced, or that campuses with overwhelmingly liberal faculties necessarily have poor climates for free expression.

Ideological imbalance is not the same as a hostile climate. A department can lean heavily left and still argue well — air disagreement, tolerate dissent, change its mind. Donation data capture composition, not conduct: they show who is in the room, not how the people in it treat one another. The most homogeneous campus need not be the most repressive, and treating skew as proof of repression claims more than the evidence supports.

Still, composition matters.

Universities are not legislatures, and no one should expect departments to mirror the partisan distribution of the electorate. The issue is not partisan representation but whether important assumptions are still being contested. Universities work best when smart people disagree, and a discipline that loses its dissenters loses some of its capacity for self-correction. A department can stay civil, professional, and committed to free expression while growing less willing to question its own assumptions. The danger is not that disagreement becomes forbidden, but that certain questions stop being asked.

Some of the imbalance may reflect self-selection rather than discrimination; conservatives may be less likely to pursue academic careers in particular disciplines. But whether they are filtered out or opt out, the consequence is largely the same.

Other evidence points in the same direction. FIRE’s 2024 faculty survey found that only 20% of faculty believed a conservative scholar would fit well in their department, compared with 71% who said the same about a liberal scholar. Nearly half of conservative faculty reported self-censoring. Survey data and contribution data have different weaknesses, yet they point toward a similar conclusion.

History offers a reminder of why this matters. Ideas once dismissed as unfashionable — from school choice to deterrence in criminal justice — advanced because dissenting scholars remained part of the conversation. Academic fields stay healthy when important assumptions remain open to challenge and there are heterodox voices and ideas in room; when disagreement narrows, so does the range of questions scholars will pursue.

The donation study justifies neither panic nor ideological quotas. A faculty assembled through political audits would be no healthier than one assembled through ideological conformity. FIRE is right to reject that cure.

But the study does justify attention. It does not prove universities are hostile to conservatives; it does suggest that many disciplines have become substantially less ideologically diverse than they once were. Whether that narrowing reflects hiring, graduate-school pipelines, professional incentives, self-selection, or some combination remains an open question. But first we have to acknowledge what the evidence increasingly suggests: the narrowing is real. Explaining it is the next task.

Disclosure: I serve on the board of directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. FIRE commissioned the study discussed here; the analysis was conducted independently by David Primo, a Stanford-trained political scientist and chaired professor at the University of Rochester.

Harvard has, in recent years, seemingly abandoned its foundational commitments to free expression and academic freedom, the conditions that make the pursuit of Veritas possible at all. It has repeatedly ranked at or near the bottom of FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings, earning an “abysmal” rating for its campus climate. In 2024, it received the lowest score the index had ever recorded.

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Alumni have predictably responded by withdrawing their financial support. By the end of the 2024 fiscal year, cash gifts to Harvard had fallen 15%, the steepest single-year drop in nearly a decade. Others went even further, openly cheering as the federal government moved in to dismantle their alma mater from the outside.

The temptation is understandable. Few institutions look less amenable to reform than a centuries-old, self-governing ivory tower sat atop an endowment larger than most nations’ GDPs. The conclusion that one’s emails and gifts and votes cannot possibly matter is, for many alumni, the conclusion of long experience.

Yet there is a group of alumni who choose to see things differently. They call themselves Harvard Alumni for Free Speech (HAFFS). Founded in 2022, the group has taken the view that Harvard’s present condition is precisely why alumni should not abandon the university, but step in to help restore it.

“Alumni are important stakeholders and must play their part to maintain excellence at Harvard,” said John Evangelakos, HAFFS’s president and founding member. “Alumni should regard themselves as stewards who have been entrusted with passing on to future generations a Harvard that is as vibrant and impactful as it was when they were there.”

For HAFFS, that stewardship has taken concrete form. The group published voting guides and candidate endorsements for elections to Harvard’s Board of Overseers and the Harvard Alumni Association, two bodies most graduates have spent their lives ignoring, but help shape what the university does and does not do.

HAFFS has also convened the kinds of public conversation that has become difficult to stage in Cambridge. Last year, the group brought together Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and Heterodox Academy’s John Tomasi to discuss what it would take for elite universities to recommit to intellectual pluralism. This March, HAFFS hosted a discussion of Harvard’s new Intellectual Vitality Initiative with Harvard philosopher Edward J. Hall, Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen, Harvard student leader Ari Kohn, and Monica Harris, the executive director of FAIR.

Other gatherings have brought in the two most recent chairs of the Harvard Crimson editorial board to talk about the state of student debate, as well as FIRE’s Sean Stevens and Connor Murnane to discuss what the 2026 rankings reveal about Harvard in particular.

HAFFS has responded to more acute crises as well. When Harvard found itself confronting the Trump administration’s demand for sweeping changes to its admissions, hiring, and permitted areas of study, HAFFS helped make the legal terrain legible to alumni by hosting briefings with FIRE’s Robert Shibley, walking alumni through the amicus briefs filed in Harvard’s support, and explaining the federal court ruling that ultimately found the funding cuts to be unconstitutional.

This is the kind of approach that is needed: sustained engagement, public events, legal literacy, electoral participation, and working in partnership with groups like FIRE, Heterodox Academy, and FAIR. Each strand on its own would be modest. Together, they give the group’s critique of Harvard’s culture an institutional weight by signaling continued engagement in the debate, rather than withdrawal from it in despair.

The work has yielded results, however partial. Harvard has convened an Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group whose recommendations are now reshaping discrimination policies, and adopted a policy of institutional neutrality that bars the university from issuing statements on most current events.

“HAFFS has been able to galvanize alumni and work effectively with concerned faculty to contribute to meaningful reform at Harvard over the past several years,” Evangelakos said. “But our biggest challenge is to ensure that the reforms are durable. We need to ensure that there is accountability and that alumni remain to ensure there is no backsliding.”

Walking away has its satisfactions, and so does cheerleading punitive measures from the sidelines. But both have enormous limitations. They empty the arena of the people most likely to demand reform and leave the institution to the risk-averse administrators and malevolent political actors.

Engagement works differently. It produces voting guides that change the composition of a board, events that change which arguments faculty will make in public, relationships with administrators who, when a hard moment comes, know there is a constituency on the other side of the table.

Whether Harvard becomes a place where free speech genuinely thrives will depend, in the end, on whether those who still believe in it are willing to stay and do the work.

HAFFS has chosen to stay.

Dozens of young people stood in a San Francisco park lined with palm trees and town homes, holding a long white banner that read in bold black font: “STUDENTS FIGHT BACK!” Below, highlighted against a red background: “AGAINST ZIONISM — AGAINST TRUMP’S BILLIONAIRE AGENDA — AGAINST MASS DEPORTATIONS.”

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In February, that image appeared on the front page of The Redwood Bark, the student newspaper for Redwood High School in Marin County, California. Front-page photos are meant to grab attention and raise questions, but this one prompted an investigation into the paper itself. This was after administrators ordered the removal of The Bark’s Instagram post this same semester for noting that Marin County was mentioned in the Epstein files.

These acts of censorship are bad, but administrators’ continued characterization of them as benign or, worse, necessary forces us to weigh in. But even after FIRE’s advocacy interventions, these administrators still haven’t budged an inch. So we’ll spell it out.

Eye-catching cover sparks eyebrow-raising probe

The paper’s troubles started with coverage of the local student protest at Dolores Park in San Francisco, including a photo of the banner described above. That image captured a tense moment in local news, and sparked debate and backlash among community members, which is generally a reliable mark of good journalism.

But, feeling the pressure, the student editors-in-chief decided to publish a letter “acknowledging that this image caused pain and concern for some readers, particularly some members of our Jewish community.” They added, however, that the paper’s “responsibility is to present reality as it occurred.”

Days later, an individual wrote to school leaders, “I am worried that Redwood’s student paper decided to publish an image of a protest slogan about Zionism that has increasingly been used as an antisemitic slur.”

Ultimately, the complaints culminated in the district’s senior director of student services sending an email to the newspaper adviser with the subject line, “Notice of Investigation.” The email said an independent investigator had been assigned “to conduct a thorough and neutral review of the complaints filed” about the image. Courtney Goode, the superintendent for the Tamalpais Union High School District, characterized the investigation as concerning “harassment and discrimination.”

Epstein reporting taken down

As noted above, The Bark had also recently posted on Instagram a rundown of all the Marin County towns that were mentioned in the Epstein files.

Like other news outlets, they sought to make a national story local. But this reporting would land them at the center of another controversy. The Bark mentioned French national Gisele Attias Bonnouvrier as “providing models to Epstein.” Not long after, the principal of Redwood High received an email from someone claiming to be Bonnouvrier herself. The person sending the email demanded the removal of her name from the post, threatening a lawsuit if the school did not comply.

“I have a directive from the cabinet and superintendent,” the principal wrote to The Bark staff, “to redact the one name immediately from the post.”

And just like that, based on a single email from an unverified source, school administrators censored their own student journalists.

High school admins aren’t the arbiters of the law

The administrators’ actions caught the attention of local news in late April. FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative wrote the school district on May 6, urging them to end the investigation into The Bark’s front page image and to promise not to interfere with its content again — such as by demanding the takedown of social media posts — both of which violate constitutional obligations and California state law.

As FIRE explained, The Bark is a “limited public forum” — a phrase found on its own website — which, under the Supreme Court’s Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier decision, receives greater student press protections than those afforded to curricular or school-sponsored publications. In cases like this, school officials are held to the more deferential standard articulated in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. Under the Tinker test, administrators can only regulate student speech if it is unlawful or likely to create a substantial disruption to the school day. In addition, California’s Student Free Expression Law specifically protects the editorial decisions of student journalists.

The photo and The Bark’s decision to run it were protected expression. The school’s characterization of the photo as potential “harassment and discrimination” was deeply misguided and shouldn’t have led to this investigation. FIRE’s letter spelled out how the paper’s front page couldn’t be investigated for discriminatory harassment, which the Supreme Court has narrowly defined as conduct that is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” that it “detracts from the victims’ education experience.” A single photo on the front of a newspaper falls well short of that standard.

And that’s where the core of the free speech concerns lie for The Bark. The question isn’t just whether a school ultimately punishes a speaker after an investigation. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held, the question is whether the institution’s actions would “chill or silence a person of ordinary firmness from future First Amendment activities.” That decision is binding on the school district, and an investigation into protected student journalism would do just that.

Then there’s the demand to take down the Instagram post about the Epstein files. While Tinker and California state law recognize exceptions for defamatory student speech, The Bark’s post still warrants protection. That’s because, even assuming the underlying allegation about Bonnouvrier amounts to libel, the post falls within the “fair report” privilege, which protects fair and accurate reporting on official government proceedings, including federal investigations. In other words, The Bark had the right to name the French national in the context of reporting on the content of the Epstein files. Even more concerning is reporting that Goode admitted “no legal analysis was done before issuing the directive to remove the woman’s name.”

Goode responded to FIRE’s initial letter, saying the district “has a long-standing commitment to student journalism” and “remains fully committed to upholding student free expression rights consistent with California law.” The district characterized both matters as “resolved.”

As for the investigation? As Goode put it herself, “There is no investigation.” But, she added, “when concerns are raised through the formal complaint process, the district is required to review them.” But none of this, she promised, will “limit student editorial decision-making or student press rights.”

Thankfully, no single administrator’s belief, however well-intended, is the legal standard. FIRE responded, pointing out that the school had emailed The Bark adviser with a “notification of investigation,” suggesting that the school was, you know, notifying the paper of an investigation. We made clear that nothing in our position required the district to ignore complaints or decline to provide resources to those offended by the image. But when the school receives a complaint about speech, the correct approach is to conduct a preliminary, internal review rather than sending an ominous email announcing an investigation. That would allow the district to handle complaints and offer support without chilling speech.

The district disagreed, saying it “remains fully committed to student free expression rights consistent with California law” and that “student editors make the decisions about what they publish.” The student journalists at The Bark deserve better. Its advisor has taken an unpaid leave of absence through June 2027, reportedly in protest. Regardless of whether the district wants to admit it, its actions aren’t aligned with its obligations to the student press.

What we have now are promises that the district better keep. FIRE will be watching.

After studying engineering at Rutgers, Rami Elghandour began chasing a problem that has haunted medicine for decades — how to teach the body to kill cancer cells without destroying itself in the process. This spring, his biotechnology company, Arcellx, unveiled a treatment that moves the science closer to that goal than ever before. In conference halls and investor calls, the reaction bordered on astonishment. Last month, Gilead Sciences bought Arcellx in a deal valued at $7.8 billion.

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Elghandour credits much of his success to his mother. In 1989, she left a comfortable life in Egypt, and the fashion boutique that was her lifelong dream, for the uncertain promise of opportunity in America. Watching her rebuild her career shaped his own approach to leadership. Each year, for example, he hosts about 60 students from Rutgers’ Road to Silicon V/Alley program. The meetings often go long, but Elghandour is happy to take the extra time, he says, “because it is refreshing to talk openly about the things that matter to students.”

So it was no surprise when Rutgers invited Elghandour to give the engineering school’s graduation speech this year. But the speech was promptly canceled after students (about five of them, Elghandour estimates) complained about remarks he’d made on social media. The school specifically cited one post in which he opined that Israel was committing genocide and “running dungeons where they train dogs to sexually assault prisoners.” In other words, a former student returning as a billionaire innovator at the forefront of cancer research was prevented from addressing 800 students because a handful of them disliked his politics. Regardless of one’s feelings about Elghandour’s opinions, there’s no denying that this is a standard that could be used to torpedo virtually any speaker, with opinions on this or any other topic. Elghandour later said this sends a dangerous message to students. Namely, “Don’t you dare speak up and say anything that you believe.”

A pattern emerges

As though to prove that point in the most obvious way possible, earlier this month, Dr. Morton Schapiro withdrew as the commencement speaker for Georgetown University Law Center after students protested his selection due to his support for Israel. Maybe it’s just the Israeli/Palestinian issue? No such luck. Around the same time, Congressman Rich McCormick said he still plans to speak at Morehouse School of Medicine – his alma mater – despite student backlash over the fact that he supports restricting immigration and has introduced legislation to prohibit using federal funds to perform transgender surgery on minors. Meanwhile, Drexel University’s College of Computing and Informatics’ original commencement speaker, David Kaganovsky, “mutually agreed” to step back from speaking after his “problematic social media posts came to students’ attention.”

Unfortunately, year after year, school after school has decided that it’s easier to cancel graduation speeches (or pressure speakers to drop out) than brave a threatened controversy. The only way to avoid that would be to find a speaker who has never made a controversial remark in their life (or, at least, not online). But who wants to hear a speech from someone like that? As Will Creeley, FIRE’s legal director, has said, “If we treat ideas we don’t agree with as barred from campus, then really what’s left are only the most inoffensive, and by extension most uninteresting, folks.”

In a recent piece, “Cracking down on graduation speeches won’t solve the problem on campus,” the editorial board of The Washington Post notes that American universities are under incredible pressure to prove they are addressing rising antisemitism. (In the past, other issues have been at the forefront, of course, with similar results.) This pressure can result in positive change, but it also inevitably produces “performative measures that border on censorship.” As an example, the board cites New York University’s decision this past March to end live speeches entirely at some of its graduation ceremonies:

This is a lazy way to prevent more embarrassment because it avoids addressing the fundamental problem, which is that universities still need to do a better job of preparing students to engage in civil and respectful discourse once they enter the real world . . . too many elite college campuses became crucibles of conformity in recent years. People with unpopular ideas too often got shouted down or even canceled. Criticizing Israel became a shibboleth.

The solution is not to shut down live speeches. It’s to teach kids that using a graduation ceremony to scream and yell about their personal political views is a stupid and ineffective way to make the world a better place. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression says that it’s ultimately up to the university how it wants to format its ceremonies, which is correct, and that it’s good to allow community members to “express themselves liberally on campus.”

Instead of live speeches, the school has decided to play pre-recorded remarks by student speakers on a jumbotron while the speakers themselves sit silently on stage. As Steven Thrasher writes for Literary Hub, “Seeing ‘speakers’ sit on stage, mute, while a video of themselves is played for their parents will make them seem, I imagine, as if they are presenting a ‘proof of life’ video from their kidnappers before being allowed to get their diplomas or leave the stage.”

This is not a new problem. FIRE’s deplatforming database documents instances of campus censorship going back to 1998. Amazingly, 48% of all deplatforming efforts succeed, with 959 out of 2,000 recorded attempts resulting in a cancellation, disruption, or a similar outcome. Since 2014, the problem has exploded. In the 12 years since, our data shows that 67% of all recorded deplatforming attempts have taken place in this span of time. Commencement speakers make up about 19% of all campus disinvitation campaigns, targeting 382 speakers out of 2,000 total disinvitation efforts. Why does it keep happening?

After a few colleges cave to disinvitation attempts, they provide cover for others to do the same. Today’s would-be disruptors now have a surfeit of disinvitations to draw inspiration from. Two schools in particular, which we will look at below, illustrate this dynamic in stark relief. They also share a troubling pattern: universities are hiding behind vague “safety concerns” rather than standing up to political pressure campaigns.

Utah Valley bends the knee

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination on its campus last September, Utah Valley University vowed to strengthen protections for free speech and planned a civic education program to that effect. But only a few months later, Sharon McMahon, the bestselling author and civics educator dubbed “America’s government teacher,” was uninvited from giving a graduation speech at the school for being “anti-Charlie Kirk.”

The problem began when Jack Posobiec, a host and contributor at Turning Point USA, the conservative nonprofit co-founded by Kirk, commented on the decision to invite McMahon. He wrote on X, “What is going on here, @uvu_president?” State Rep. Trevor Lee replied that taxpayer funds should be withheld from the school. Senator Mike Lee also voiced opposition, and UVU College Republicans followed suit.

Their objection? After Kirk was killed, McMahon made a post — since deleted — listing quotes from Kirk along with the caption, “These aren’t sound bites taken out of context. Millions of people feel they were harmed, and the murder that was horrific and should never have happened does not magically erase what was said or done.”

The pressure campaign worked. UVU withdrew its invitation, citing “increased safety concerns,” and proceeded without a speaker for the first time, leaving 13,400 graduates — about one-third of whom are the first in their families to graduate from college — without a keynote address. But these safety concerns did not arise in a vacuum. As McMahon said, “The security issues really did not even come about until there was a coordinated effort on the part of Utah’s state and federal lawmakers and Turning Point USA to try and pressure the school into canceling.”

If true, the irony is painful. This is the very campus where Kirk was murdered for speaking his mind. The lesson its administration appears to have drawn from that tragedy is not that free expression must be defended at all costs, but that controversial speakers should simply be kept away from the podium. At Utah Valley, the fear of blowback has now become an institutionalized reason to silence speech. This is a textbook example of how threats of violence are used to launder political censorship under a palatable “safety” rationale, and how jawboning by government officials can coerce a public university into silencing a speaker it had freely chosen.

In a biting essay for The Free Press, “Why The Campus Where Charlie Kirk Was Killed Canceled My Speech,” McMahon wrote, “The First Amendment and Utah law protected Charlie Kirk’s right to speak on a public campus. It protects students’ right to protest against him. It protects my right to condemn his murder while speaking honestly about his public rhetoric. It protects a Utah citizen’s right to criticize me. But it does not protect public officials who use the power of their office to make a public institution punish a citizen for protected speech. That is the difference between criticism and coercion.”

South Carolina State picks a fight

The situation at South Carolina State University — the state’s only publicly funded historically black university — raises equally troubling questions about who actually controls the commencement stage. The school invited current Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, who is also running for governor in the Republican primary, to speak at its commencement in May. But before any public announcement was made, students organized protests, a petition quickly gathered more than 20,000 signatures, and Alexander Conyers, the university’s president, caved to the pressure.

“This felt like a slap in the face to me and my fellow graduates,” said Summer Gray, a senior at the school who started the petitions to get Evette’s speech canceled. “What made me start this petition is the fact that they invited a speaker who is against everything we believe in as HBCU students. She openly stated that she is against DEI, and coming to speak to people of color with that belief is disrespectful.”

Of course, students have every right to organize, petition, and protest a speaker selection. But rather than standing by its invitation or articulating a principled reason for the change, the school defaulted to the same “safety” rationale, without saying whether any concrete threat had been made.

This case also highlights how such cancellations, regardless of the speaker’s political affiliation, invite escalating retaliation. After the school canceled her speech, Evette reposted a letter from a small group of Republican lawmakers asking the House Ways and Means Committee chair to cut more than $35 million in state funding proposed for the university next year. Evette added, “The far left has silenced freedom of speech and pushed its radical, anti-American agenda for far too long . . . not one dime of taxpayer money should ever go to a school that discriminates against conservative views. It certainly won’t happen when I’m governor.”

NYU holds its ground, kind of

Students at NYU similarly organized to object to Dr. Jonathan Haidt as a graduation speaker. In a letter to the university, student government leaders called Dr. Haidt’s selection “deeply unsettling,” arguing that another speaker would “more accurately reflect the values and diversity of its graduates.” This disinvitation attempt is especially ironic given that Dr. Haidt is an outspoken critic of cancel culture and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, which argues that schools have cultivated a mentality of fragility and emphasized personal safety and comfort over problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Thankfully, unlike South Carolina State and Utah Valley, NYU decided to stand by Dr. Haidt’s invitation.

This is not to say that NYU is a bastion of speech protection, as the university has severely cracked down on student speech at graduations. In 2025, NYU faced backlash for withholding a student’s diploma after he spoke during his graduation speech about the “genocide currently occuring.” And, as noted above, NYU is now using pre-recorded speeches, despite, as students have pointed out, recently pushing forward an initiative to get students off screens and interacting in person.

Cracking down on student speakers

NYU is not the only university cracking down on student speakers. In 2024, the University of Southern California canceled valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s speech, citing “security risks.” As is often the case, the university never specified what, if any, threats had been made. It did, however, indicate to Tabassum that the decision was based on her pro-Palestinian activism. After backlash to the cancellation of her speech, multiple invited alumni speakers were also canceled. Tabassum later wrote:

As your class Valedictorian, I implore my USC classmates to think outside the box . . . I challenge us to respond to ideological discomfort with dialogue and learning, not bigotry and censorship.

The following year, George Washington University investigated a student who called for divestment from Israel during her speech. MIT’s class president was barred from her own graduation ceremony after giving a pro-Palestinian speech during commencement the day before, in which she said “free Palestine,” adding, “the MIT community that I know would never tolerate a genocide.”

Now, during the 2026 commencement season, some schools are taking a more proactive approach to avoid controversy. Like NYU, CUNY School of Law has also reportedly nixed live speeches. Stanford tried to ban student speeches, but reversed course in response to student and faculty pushback. NYU and other schools are also announcing limitations on what speakers can wear — no decorated caps, sashes, stoles, cords, pins, or scarves.

Conclusion

From a purely legal perspective, schools having speakers make only pre-recorded speeches is fine. It’s their event, and universities and colleges can decide what they want to focus on and what kind of comments are out of bounds. If the school doesn’t want people to promote their parents’ businesses, discuss their sexual preferences, or share their political beliefs, that’s their call. But it is sad to see academic institutions so seemingly afraid of their own students, including students who won’t even be on campus any longer.

And, in making these cowardly decisions to revoke invitations or limit student speech, universities often only succeed in creating new or additional controversy while eroding already crumbling student and faculty trust in university administrations to protect speech.

Greyson Hartsell spent four years as a mechanic stationed at Camp Pendleton in California, where he spent his days as a United States Marine doing engine, transmission, and drivetrain work on Humvees, LVSRs, and 7-ton trucks. He was talented, a hard worker, and rose through the ranks to corporal.

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Once tasked with keeping equipment ready for the battlefield, he now unexpectedly finds himself on the front lines of a very different kind of battle, fighting for artistic freedom as part of a theater troupe at Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Last month, Greyson and his fellow theater students were performing the ancient Greek play The Bacchae by Euripides. Riffing on how the women in the play became radicalized in their own time, the students included a variety of contemporary protest slogans, including “No Kings,” in the set design.

But mere hours before opening night, Greyson and the troupe found out that the school had suddenly decided that one slogan in particular — “No Kings” — had to go. Officials cited a supposed obligation of “political neutrality” (which wouldn’t apply to a student play even if the school had an institutional neutrality policy, which it doesn’t) and claimed “overt references to current political messaging” would distract from the “enduring themes of the work.”

Greyson was in disbelief. The original purpose of the play itself was to use ancient stories as a way to make allegorical references to current political events, namely the Peloponnesian War. Administrators ignored that one of the “enduring themes of the work” was a warning against tyranny — exactly the kind of warning embodied by the slogan “No Kings,” which, as far as Greyson was concerned, wasn’t a partisan phrase.

“As an American,” he told a local radio station, “I feel like the ‘No Kings’ message is more of a . . . rite of passage, since that’s how America was founded, getting away from kings, from the king of England.”

Greyson wrote to his college’s president, Jim Morton, telling him that as a Marine who took an oath to defend the Constitution, he stands by the First Amendment and the right to free expression. “Even,” he added, “when that expression may be uncomfortable.”

Throughout his life, Greyson says theater has been a constant source of community — and he wasn’t about to let that community get bullied out of its voice. As a kid, Greyson moved from Charlotte, the bustling city on the border of North and South Carolina, to much-smaller Wilmington, on the shores of the Atlantic. It was three and a half hours away, but it might as well have been another country. He didn’t know anyone. He played football. He tried baseball. But nothing felt like it really clicked. “I wrestled for one year,” he says, laughing. “That didn’t last long.”

When some friends convinced him to try out for a theater production during his first year of high school, however, he quickly found his community. “I did sports but, I don’t know, acting was just… I was just better at it, I guess.”

Greyson found another community in the Corps. But after the Marine Corps, back in school at Cape Fear Community College, Greyson picked theater back up as well. He was initially reluctant to join the production of The Bacchae. “I am not a fan of Shakespeare and old Greek plays,” he says. “I think they’re kind of hard to follow if not done right.”

He says he was so turned off by the ancient story, in fact, that he decided not to act in the play at all, and to take on a tech role in the crew instead — a first for him. Yet he was stunned when he saw the production performed for the first time. “I saw the first dress rehearsal and I was blown away by how it all came together. I was not expecting that at all. I kind of regret not acting in it now.”

Greyson attributes The Bacchae’s success to the interpretation his peers integrated into the set design, where topical political slogans implied overlap with the themes of the play. “At first, I didn’t understand the art themes for the set that the girls had decided on, but after watching it and seeing it and understanding it, I was able to kind of see it all come together. They did a really good job connecting real-world issues with an old play like this.”

Greyson says The Bacchae intersects naturally with our time in history and the social movements the set design references. His peers agree, telling WHQR the messaging was an attempt to relate the play’s thematic elements to struggles over power, as seen in protest movements past and present. In the original, King Pentheus tries to suppress the ecstatic worship of Dionysus because he sees the god and his followers as threats to his authority. Dionysus responds by driving the women of the city mad. In the end, they rip Pentheus apart — his own mother tears off his head. The whole play is a warning against the blind arrogance of a tyrant. That’s why Greyson doesn’t think “No Kings” is a distraction from its enduring themes.

Besides, the students’ set design falls into a tradition of avant-garde restagings of old, historic plays. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, for example, has been famously reimagined to critical acclaim. One such adaptation transposed the play into the high-pressure environment of a Michelin-starred restaurant, where the “three witches” were memorably recast as three trash collectors.

That creative risk, Greyson says, was what made the production work. The decision to remove the “No Kings” slogan undercut the source of the production’s success, and the spirit of the original play. Plus, Greyson says, there is a principle at stake — this is a fundamental matter of free expression. “I may not necessarily believe and have the same ideology as most of my classmates,” he remarks, “but I’m still going to try to stop someone from walking in and telling them what they can and can’t say or do.”

Administrators’ demands initially did not stop at one phrase, Greyson says. School officials also expressed concern about slogans like “We the People” and “Silence = Violence.” But when students took to defending their design, a bargain emerged from administrators: If “No Kings” disappeared, the rest might be allowed to stay. With opening night at hand, they had little choice, and painted over the slogan.

Greyson was unimpressed by the college’s explanation that this was all in the service of neutrality. To him, official “neutrality” stopped looking neutral the moment administrators ordered students to alter their expression.

“If it was really about the institution being neutral,” he said, “then they shouldn’t have said anything to stop us. They could obviously ask us and maybe suggest it slightly, but to tell us — that’s a different story. That’s them taking a side.”

“If I had been in the room,” he added, “I would have just told them to go kick rocks.”

Instead, he wrote the college president an email. Though the president never responded, another administrator did, brushing off Greyson’s concerns with vague references to political neutrality and maximizing interpretive space. Greyson says the exchange reminded him, in a small way, of the hierarchy he had known in the Marine Corps. He never pretends to have been a major or a colonel. He was a corporal, E-4, the first rank of a noncommissioned officer. “You get ignored a lot by higher-ups,” he says. “So this is kind of a drop in the bucket.”

Still, the principle mattered. Greyson did not see the students’ work as some reckless political stunt. He saw it as young artists trying to make an old text speak in the present. And he has little patience for the idea that protest only becomes respectable once history has distanced its impact. “If this was 1773,” he says, “they would say the Tea Party would have been a radical thing to do.”

After the first article about the controversy circulated, Greyson’s former classmates and even his high school theater teacher reached out to say they were proud of him for standing up against art censorship. He also remembers hearing about one especially tough local theater critic — the kind of person whose praise does not come easily — calling The Bacchae one of the best productions Cape Fear Community College had put on in years.

In her Facebook post, Mirla Criste Thompson, the local critic who herself is a theater professor, wrote that she remained “as impressed as ever by the quality of Jack Landry’s student actors,” praising their “discipline, boldness of choice, vocal clarity, utter commitment and utter fearlessness.” She singled out the Greek chorus as “particularly engaging,” writing that its members moved and chanted “as a single whirlwind of body and voice.”

It’s now late May, and the production has long since finished its run. Greyson doesn’t expect school administrators to reverse course ex post facto or suddenly discover their spines. But he does hope his peers will take something from the episode. Not cynicism, but a clearer sense of their own agency. “I don’t expect them to really do anything differently,” he says of the administration. “I think they’re just going to remain the cowards they are. But I hope that the students take a slight lesson from this and start challenging people’s authority more often.”

The curtain may be drawn, but Euripides’ words still echo: “Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force.”

A Nevada student was expelled for putting pro-ICE stickers around his high school, according to a federal lawsuit filed by his father last week. If true, the school engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

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I say “if true” because, so far, all we really have to work from is the complaint itself and a vague statement from the school that, because of student privacy law, is necessarily non-specific. I have no specific reason to doubt the complaint, but it is, by its nature, one side of the story. With that caveat, let’s look at the story it tells.

On Jan. 21, 2026, hundreds of students walked out of Clark County School District schools to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They gathered on school grounds, chanted, and carried signs. At least a couple of the signs, as highlighted in the lawsuit, compared ICE agents to Nazis and included swastikas. The district’s response to the walkout, in part: “CCSD encourages students to be active participants in democracy by taking the time to research important issues and express their opinions civilly and peacefully.”

N.C. was a student at East Career & Technical Academy, a school in the district. The day after the protest, N.C. arrived to school early and placed (in the words of the complaint) “approximately six” stickers about the size of a Post-it note along the walls of a hallway. The complaint doesn’t show the stickers, but describes them as AI-generated images of the school’s logo (its mascot) and the words “‘ICE Immigration Enforcement’, ‘Border Security Academy Deportation Force,’ and ‘Titans ICE’.”

The stickers were removed by the time the first bell rang, the complaint says, and the next day, N.C. got pulled into a closed-door meeting with Assistant Principal Thomas Smith. According to the complaint, Smith said that the acceptability of the student’s actions depended on “what lens you look at it through” and asked the student how he would feel if someone put up stickers that said “let’s go get whitey.”

Smith then suspended N.C. for a “racially motivated incident.”

Three days later, the student and his father appealed the suspension to Smith. According to the complaint, Smith told the pair that N.C.’s actions were “considered racism because the majority of the school is Hispanic,” and compared the anti-ICE stickers to a burning cross because it could be perceived as intimidating.

No, seriously. Seriously, that’s what the complaint says happened. The vice principal compared a Post-it sized sticker affixed to a hallway wall to a man-sized yard display engulfed in flames.

So you can see why I’m so annoyed that I don’t see a picture of this sticker. I was a kid in the 1980s. We know a thing or two about stickers. I’ve seen it all — holograms, lasers, puffy, Lisa Frank, vinyl — heck, I’ve ordered custom scratch-and-sniff FIRE stickers that smell like a campfire. You know what I’ve never seen? A sticker that preceded a lynching. It’s just not part of the whole deal. It’d be quite a dramatic shift in the Klan’s whole motif, with stickers, and Trapper Keepers, and maybe the pointy hood turned into a side ponytail with a scrunchie.

The family appealed again, this time to Principal Natasha Lerutte. On Jan. 30, they expelled N.C. for his supposedly “racist” incident of putting stickers on the wall. When the student tried to compare his actions to the walk-out, the response was that the school didn’t want to talk about other situations. (Like, say, the one where they “encouraged students to be active participants in democracy.”)

Assuming the allegations in the complaint are true, the law is pretty straightforward. Tinker v. Des Moines — decided in 1969, the year students wore black armbands to protest the Vietnam War — established that students don’t “shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate.” Schools can restrict student speech only when it would cause “material and substantial disruption” to school operations or collide with the rights of others. These stickers were removed before school started without disturbing a single class period. The disruption threshold wasn’t approached, let alone crossed.

In theory, the school could punish a student for putting up unauthorized posters (or putting them up outside of authorized areas, assuming the stickers went up in places that weren’t, like, bulletin boards). But that wasn’t the reason for the expulsion. If the complaint’s allegations hold true, the school engaged in viewpoint discrimination, letting other students engage in conduct that would merit discipline in ordinary cases (i.e., walking out) while bringing the hammer of Thor down on N.C. specifically because of his views. That’s unconstitutional.

Another reason to think the student’s story holds water is that this is not CCSD’s first encounter with viewpoint discrimination. The complaint notes a 2015 case in which the district settled a lawsuit over its refusal to approve a pro-life club at a sister school. More pointedly, a nearly identical case at ECTA itself was settled in 2024, after the Students for Life club sued over the school’s refusal to let them distribute flyers — CCSD agreed to pay $36,000 in legal fees and revise its handbook. The settlement came with a memo reminding district administrators that “students are not exempt from the First Amendment.” Apparently the reminder didn’t reach everyone.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada. We’ll keep you posted as the case develops. And before someone accuses FIRE of being pro-ICE, I’ll gently remind you that we sued them yesterday.

The shock hit Clemson before the facts had fully settled. Charlie Kirk was dead. Within minutes, the ghastly footage of his murder circulated online. For many, the initial response was horror. Others found the killing justified. Some even joked about it.

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At Clemson University, students gathered hours after the attack to mourn Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA. But the sadness was soon accompanied by an ominous chilling effect on speech as administrators began targeting any faculty or staff perceived to have justified or celebrated the shooting.

“As free speech advocates,” FIRE’s Adam Goldstein wrote at the time, “it places us in a painful position. Charlie Kirk’s assassination was an attack on free speech and open discourse. In a free society, we must not be afraid to express our views, no matter how strongly some might oppose them. That’s the point of free speech. But it is precisely for that reason why we must not respond to mockery of Kirk’s assassination by canceling everyone who offends us: because that too creates a society where people are afraid to express themselves.”

These words too often fell on deaf ears. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Clemson fired two professors for social media posts about Kirk’s death. One was Joshua Bregy, who shared a post saying, “Karma is swift and sometimes ironic,” as well as one of Kirk himself saying, “Play certain games, win certain prizes.” The other was Melvin Earl Villaver Jr., who called Kirk a racist and a white supremacist and shared multiple posts celebrating and mocking his murder. Clemson initially stood by the professors, but after public backlash, both were gone within days. Clemson also fired a third staff member.

But this particular story isn’t about them — it’s about two of their colleagues. When Clemson faculty members Mike Gregory and Charlie Kurth saw what was happening, they refused to stay silent about it. Socrates constantly pulled philosophical lessons from political events of the day, engaging with the fallout over Athens’ loss of the Peloponnesian War and Athenian anxieties about dissent. In that longstanding tradition, Gregory and Kurth likewise incorporated Kirk’s killing and its aftermath into their courses, using it to bring dry arguments about civic values to life to encourage students to join the conversation.

“The only way for people to stop being scared of difficult issues is to put them in front of them and let them handle it,” said Gregory. “People realize that it’s not scary, that we don’t need to be fragile with each other around these issues. There are good ways to talk to each other.”

When they saw Clemson fire their colleagues, Kurth and Gregory sprang into action. Gregory wrote an op-ed criticizing the school for “a pattern of capitulation” in punishing faculty, while Kurth put a sign on his office door reading, “My employer is morally bankrupt.” The sign generated some attention online, including from one former South Carolina House representative who posted his disapproval on X.

But Gregory and Kurth weren’t done. “We no longer know what speech will be tolerated or punished,” they co-wrote in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Who Will Clemson Censor Next?” The result, they added, was simple: “self-censoring and silence.”

Looking beyond Clemson at the larger wave of cancel culture in the wake of Kirk’s murder, they added, “Across these cases, universities appear less guided by consistent standards than by external outrage. Terms like ‘disruption,’ ‘misalignment,’ or ‘institutional values’ function as catch-alls, invoked only after political actors or social-media campaigns generate pressure. The result is a chilling effect in which speech protections hinge not on content but on who objects and how loudly.”

On May 6, FIRE visited Clemson’s campus to honor Kurth and Gregory with our second-ever Berkson Courageous Colleague Award for boldly defending the expressive rights of their colleagues. FIRE created the Berkson Courageous Colleague Award in 2023 to honor faculty who go above and beyond to defend free speech and academic freedom, oftentimes at personal or professional cost. The award is named for Mark Berkson, a professor at Hamline University who spoke out in support of a colleague who was fired for showing images of Muhammad in her art history class. Berkson embodied the award’s values, namely courage in the principled defense of academic freedom and free speech, often at professional or personal cost.

At Clemson, FIRE hosted a 45-minute panel discussion with Gregory and Kurth in which they talked about defending free speech on campus in the midst of a firestorm of controversy around Kirk’s death. “I think that it can break through a bit of a chilling effect when you go public with some of these things,” said Gregory. “Of course, there’s risk. But the public nature of these things can have the effect of cutting through some chilling effects.”

Kurth said he wanted to remind the university that while it was probably getting a lot of pressure from politicians and donors, it had a duty — first and foremost — to its faculty and students. “The ability to speak publicly as Mike and I did,” he said, “and as others have done, is an important way to show that there are other constituents — the students, the faculty — who presumably the universities are here for, who need to be paid attention to as well.”

He added, “It’s not about checks. It’s not just about political influence. There has to be more.”

Republicans and Democrats often struggle to find common ground. But a recent congressional hearing revealed a shared conviction: free speech in higher education is essential to our nation’s future.

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To be sure, committee members diverged in important ways. Republicans focused on threats to campus free speech from university administrators, while Democrats challenged that framing, highlighting threats from state governments and the Trump administration. But from the outset of this hearing — “Speech or Silence? The Future of the First Amendment in Higher Education,” held by the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development — one throughline emerged: the importance of the First Amendment on campus.

“College students have clear rights on campuses,” Chairman Burgess Owens said. “Public universities should uphold the First Amendment, and private universities should abide by their own stated free speech policies.” He added, “Protecting free expression is essential not only to the educational mission of our schools, but also to the continued strength of our nation.”

Subcommittee Ranking Member Alma Adams made similar points, arguing that “every student is entitled to the full protection” of both the First Amendment and Title VI. She later added, “A campus where people are afraid to speak is not a place of learning. It’s a place of silence.”

These points echo a long line of constitutional law, which leaves no room for the view that First Amendment protections should apply with less force on college campuses. Indeed, the Supreme Court warned in its seminal case on academic freedom that teachers and students must remain free to inquire, study, evaluate, and gain new maturity and understanding, or else “our civilization will stagnate and die.”

Other members reinforced these points. Rep. Kevin Kiley warned that without the First Amendment, we lose the ability to have the “discourse and debate on which a healthy democracy depends.” Rep. Mark DeSaulnier cited the historical importance of free speech, noting that Thomas Jefferson kept a bust of Alexander Hamilton in his home specifically because they disagreed so vigorously.

As often happens, differences emerged in the details, particularly around the nature and scale of threats to free speech, as well as how to address them. Yet even some of these differences reflected common principles. For example, members of both parties highlighted free speech concerns related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. Democratic Reps. Adams and Suzanne Bonamici argued that federal anti-DEI efforts are chilling protected speech on campus, including by pressuring institutions over what faculty may say or teach. Republican Rep. Bob Onder argued that DEI policies in medical education can act as an ideological gatekeeping mechanism.

FIRE has previously written about both concerns. And while the representatives sharply disagreed about what is threatening campus speech, their concerns share an important foundation: without the free exchange of ideas, effective education is impossible. Bonamici, even while arguing that the threat comes from the administration rather than campuses themselves, acknowledged that college campuses “of all places, are where we should have the free exchange of ideas.” Onder argued that “doctors, nurses, and medical students have to be able to ask questions and challenge assumptions” because “free speech is the foundation of evidence-based medicine.”

With shared principles like these in mind, we can find solutions that protect free speech for everyone on campus, regardless of their views or who is attempting to censor them. Fortunately, there are tried-and-tested, constitutionally grounded ways to do this. Many, including those highlighted below, were included in the Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act, which passed the House in 2024 with bipartisan support.

At public universities, for example, Congress can:

• End the use of “free speech zones” that unconstitutionally quarantine student expression to tiny areas of campus

• Require adherence to the Supreme Court’s time, place, and manner framework for expressive conduct regulations

• Prohibit the use of political litmus tests in admissions, hiring, or promotions

• Protect students from unconstitutional, viewpoint-discriminatory “security fees”

These commonsense, widely adopted policy frameworks protect students’ rights while giving schools the flexibility to tailor their policies to institutional needs. They are not novel, unexpected, or onerous. At least 24 states have enacted some or all of them, often with unanimous or bipartisan support.

Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have made clear that campus free speech is indispensable. Amid disagreements during this hearing, members repeatedly returned to the same core principle: higher education cannot fulfill its mission unless students and faculty are free to debate the issues of the day. We hope this shared commitment can translate into practical reforms that ensure our nation’s leaders are trained through “that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth ‘out of a multitude of tongues, rather than through any kind of authoritative selection.’”

Reintroducing and passing the Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act would be a great first step.

This essay was originally published in the California Post/New York Post on May 7, 2026.

The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law is in the midst of a free-speech emergency.

When a major American law school teaches its students that the right way to respond to political opponents is to silence them, something has gone wrong.

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And when it then attempts to protect those disruptive students from public criticism by threatening other students’ speech, it’s a crisis.

That’s just what happened at UCLA this past month.

Last month, the local chapter of the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers’ group, hosted a lecture by James Percival, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security.

It was quickly derailed by student protesters.

Even by the disappointing standards of a campus shout-down, this one was particularly egregious: Protesters filled the room and began disrupting the event before the introductions were even finished.

They shouted. They booed. They sounded their cell phone ringtones on cue. About 50 protesters — mostly students — later staged a distracting walk-out.

Students had every right to protest Percival. They could have rallied outside, criticized him online, or written op-eds in the Daily Bruin. Better yet, they could have asked tough questions, and made clear they despise the administration’s immigration policies. That is protected speech.

At a public university like UCLA, the First Amendment protects both the invited speaker’s right to speak and the students’ right to protest. But it does not allow one group of students to stop another group from hearing an invited speaker.

That is not protected protest. It’s mob censorship.

Then UCLA made it worse.

After video of the disruptions spread online and in the media, Assistant Dean of Student Affairs Bayrex Martí warned the Federalist Society not to identify publicly those students visible in the clips.

“If that information is shared despite the tenor of some online commentary, and an implicated student reports [prohibited] behavior,” the dean wrote, “the student organization and/or individual students could be connected to it . . . and subjected to campus processes.”

Translated from administrator-speak: If you merely identify the people who disrupted your event, and someone else later misbehaves, you may be investigated, too.

That is an astonishing message from a law school.

The First Amendment protects the right of both Federalist Society members and student hecklers to publish the names of private individuals depicted in publicly available videos. Event attendees were told beforehand that the event would be filmed and had no reasonable expectation of privacy about their presence or conduct in the room.

Worse, UCLA’s concern for adult law students facing online criticism was seemingly selective. Student protesters had already named and mocked Federalist Society members online. UCLA apparently saw no need to warn them.

The viewpoint-discriminatory message was hard to miss: If protesters identify Federalist Society members, that is campus politics. If FedSoc identifies protesters, that could become a disciplinary matter.

UCLA has yet to show any recognition of the profound miseducation it is providing its students about free speech, civic debate, and the role of the legal profession.

This mess is not just a campus speech problem. It is a legal education problem.

Simply put: Do today’s students understand what lawyers do?

Civil disagreement and the willingness to engage seriously with opposing arguments — even when objectionable — are central to the practice of law. The adversarial process relies on attorneys vigorously defending their claims and pointing out the weaknesses in the opposing arguments.

Effective advocates do not win by drowning out the other side. They win by understanding and out-arguing their opponents.

The students most opposed to the administration’s immigration policies had the most to gain from hearing Percival. Lawyers who hope to fight DHS policy must understand DHS’s reasoning and legal arguments. They chose not to.

UCLA should have treated that choice as the problem. Instead, it warned the students who hosted the event that their own protected speech could drag them into a disciplinary process.

These misplaced priorities are bad enough from law students. They are much worse from a public law school that seems happy to teach students that disruption works, criticism is harmful, and administrators may pick favorites when the politics get hot.

If this is how America is training its future lawyers, we’re all in trouble.

This essay was originally published by The Dispatch on May 6, 2026.

The Department of Justice’s recent indictment of former FBI Director James Comey has been rightly criticized as flimsy and an affront to the First Amendment. This is nothing more than a naked use of federal authority to intimidate a notable critic of President Donald Trump. It’s also something that should make conservatives uneasy.

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The Republican Party won’t always control the government, but by treating hostile political symbolism as a threat, the Department of Justice has opened a door that future administrations may be all too willing to walk through.

DOJ first sought to indict Comey in September 2025, alleging that he lied to Congress during testimony he gave in 2020. A federal judge dismissed that indictment in December on the grounds that the prosecutor, acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, had been unlawfully appointed. In late April, Comey was indicted again, this time over a nearly year-old social media post in which Comey had spelled out “86 47” in seashells. The government called that “a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States.”

How are numbers threatening? The indictment has no answer, but “86” commonly means to “get rid of” or “throw out” (with “47” meaning Trump, the 47^th president). To argue that “86” means “assassinate” or “kill” requires taking an uncharitable interpretation of Comey’s post, to say the least. Even Amazon sells “8647” and “8646” (referring to former President Joe Biden) decals explicitly branded as “anti-Trump” and “funny Joe Biden bumper stickers.”

It stretches credulity to suggest that any American who buys and sells those stickers threatens death on the president. But if the DOJ’s theory were to hold, there’s no reason a future Democratic administration couldn’t say that anti-Biden or anti-Democratic Party slogans sold online, chanted at rallies, or posted on social media are evidence of criminal intent.

Whatever one thinks of Comey’s seashell arrangement, it falls comically short of the level the Constitution requires for prosecuting a “true threat.” Under the First Amendment, all speech is protected unless it falls under one of a small number of narrowly defined categories. “True threats” are one such category, but the threshold requires a serious threat to commit an act of unlawful violence.

The government will soon learn just how narrow that category is. The First Amendment gives plenty of “breathing room” for even “vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks,” including on presidents. The brilliance of these words — from Watts v. United States (1969) — is that they don’t take sides. They protect the anti-war protester just as much as the Trump rallygoer, the pro-life demonstrator, or the gun-rights activist.

In Watts, a young man attending a rally on the National Mall complained about the Vietnam War draft, stating, “If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.” Watts was convicted for threatening President Lyndon Johnson.

The Supreme Court overturned Watts’ conviction in 1969, holding that his remarks were constitutionally protected “political hyperbole.” Recognizing that the “language of the political arena” can be “abusive” and “inexact,” the court emphasized that Watts’ “only offense” was a “kind of very crude offensive method of stating a political opposition to the president.”

In other words, Watts merely used sharp rhetoric to criticize a war effort he saw as unjust. Comey’s shells are no different. If anything, they’re even further outside the category of true threats than Watts’ statement about training a rifle on Johnson. But any ambiguity here is exactly why conservatives and liberals alike shouldn’t want prosecutors rummaging through our social media feeds, fishing for any hostile political slogan that could be construed as a threat.

What’s more, just because the government brands Comey’s shells as a threat doesn’t make it so. As the Supreme Court recently said in Chiles v. Salazar, “the First Amendment is no word game.” So too here. The government can’t magically disappear criticism by using ominous buzzwords like “harassment,” “misinformation,” or “threats.”

As the Supreme Court said in Watts, our “profound national commitment” to “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” political debate requires our public officials to keep their hands off the levers of criminal charges whenever they’re offended by a critic.

The DOJ should not have brought these charges. Thanks to the First Amendment, they likely won’t stand up in court. But they may leave a lasting impact on our political culture and our willingness to tolerate sharp criticism. The next target may not be a former FBI director with elite legal representation and national media attention. It could be you: a county party member, a student with minority views on campus, or a parent who posts online about what their kids learn in school.