Welcome to FIREside, Expression’s weekend companion to the FIREwire. Here you’ll find the previous week’s best essays, films, podcasts, and commentary on free speech.

To keep getting weekend editions for free, select “FIREside” in your subscription settings. You’ll also find the latest editions under Newsletters in the menu at the top of our homepage.

“If you don’t support free speech for people you disagree with, you’re effectively declaring that you cannot come up with a counter-argument that is more compelling.”

— Claire Lehmann, founder and editor of Quillette, writing on X

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Required reading

A cardinal rule of journalism: never back down in the face of intimidation.

Columbia Journalism Review’s Joel Simon has one of the week’s stranger press-freedom stories, in which he explains how ABC is trying to prove that government pressure violated its First Amendment rights by admitting that the pressure worked. In his essay, “Why ABC Self-Censored,” he explains that in a federal lawsuit, ABC says threats and investigations from the FCC changed whom The View booked and even influenced the network’s decision to carry a presidential address it otherwise would not have aired. That makes the suit both a potentially important First Amendment case and an extraordinary confession of editorial self-censorship.

The idea that protecting provocative speech by visitors and immigrants renders the Constitution a “suicide pact” might be one of the most absurd examples of snowflakery I’ve ever seen in my life. Millions of Americans share the views that thousands of student immigrants have expressed, and when you view those ideas as dangerous enough for deportation, we are foolish to believe — just as Jefferson warned — that only immigrants will face the administration’s wrath.

David French — FIRE’s former president — devotes his Wednesday column to the recent federal court ruling in our challenge to the speech-based deportation statutes, and uses it to make the case that the administration’s student-visa crackdown fails on the law, the founding, and even its own stated values.

In the frame

President Trump returned to office in 2025 vowing to defend free speech. In his latest 1AX film, FIRE’s Ronald Baez asks the question: Did the president keep his word?

Worth a listen

The Blessings of Liberty explores constitutional history, Supreme Court debates, and the “American Idea,” hosted by bestselling author and constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen.

In this episode, Colleen Shogan, CEO of In Pursuit, joins to discuss a new national initiative. In Pursuit, a More Perfect project, features a set of essays on U.S. presidents and select first ladies. Contributors — including three former presidents, three former first ladies, Chief Justice John Roberts, and seven Pulitzer Prize winners — reflect on each figure to distill a key lesson about the American experiment.

In this week’s Advisory Opinions, “Has the First Amendment Ever Been More Relevant?,” Sarah Isgur and David French discuss FIRE’s court victory over speech-based student deportations, government attempts to control classified information, political expression at school sporting events, and the First Amendment cases that may soon reach the Supreme Court. The FIRE case starts roughly a third of the way in, but the whole episode is an unusually concentrated dose of speech law.

Today in history

By

On Sept. 2, 1642, the Long Parliament shut every theater in London. Officially, it was crowd control. Civil war had broken out, and gatherings were dangerous. But the ordinance gave the game away in its own text, calling plays “Spectacles of Pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious Mirth and Levity,” unfit for a season of fasting and prayer. Puritan reformers had been after the stage for decades, along with mixed dancing, gambling, cosmetics, and fine clothes. The fact that the theater ran Royalist only gave the argument teeth.

The order was meant to be temporary. Plays would cease “while these sad causes and set times of humiliation do continue.” But the alleged sad causes lasted 18 years. By 1648, Parliament had dropped the pretense. Actors were punishable as rogues, playhouse seating ordered torn out, spectators fined for showing up. Raids ran through the decade. Richard Brome’s A Jovial Crew was reportedly the last play legitimately staged before the lights went out. But, of course, drama didn’t die. It merely migrated into dialogue pamphlets that smuggled political arguments onto a printed stage.

In the comments

Ink and opinion

Welcome to FIREside, Expression’s companion to the FIREwire. Here you’ll find all the previous week’s major essays, films, podcasts, and commentary on free speech.

To keep getting weekend editions for free, click the link below and select “FIREside.” You’ll also find the latest editions under Newsletters in the menu at the top of our homepage.

Subscribe to FIREside

“It represents the free thought and free expression of a free people.”

— Gen. George C. Marshall, on Stars and Stripes

Required reading

Atlantic writer James Loeffler returns to Charlottesville nine years on, arguing that the choice between protecting speech and protecting equal rights is a false one — but that Americans keep making it because we have no shared vocabulary for such hatred.

When hatred does not fit existing categories, we tend either to ignore it or to overcorrect—both responses that distort the boundaries of free expression. Our failure to reckon with the anti-Semitism of Charlottesville—on the right and the left—was not merely a missed opportunity. It helped create the opening into which illiberalism has since rushed.

New York editor Michael Calderone interviewed Erik Slavin the day before he sued the Pentagon, apparently for saying the government shouldn’t censor the news. Slavin:

The separation notice states that this was so egregious that they weren’t going to consider lesser punishments, which they’re allowed to do under the regulations they have, and yet they waited about five weeks to do it.

The Dallas County jail bans magazines, newspapers, and paperbacks for any prisoner with tablet access, which is nearly all of them. Prison Legal News editor Paul Wright writes in the Dallas Morning News that he sued over the same policy back in 2007, and won a decree promising it wouldn’t happen again. But it started back up in 2022, and now he’s moved for contempt.

Schools and libraries ban books based on content, but the public and students can still buy or access them elsewhere. That isn’t so for prisoners, who cannot access the publications at all.

In the frame

President Trump returned to office in 2025 vowing to defend free speech. In his latest 1AX film, FIRE’s Ronald Baez asks the question: Did the president keep his word?

Worth a listen

So to Speak takes an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define free speech — hosted by FIRE’s Nico Perrino.

In this episode, Joel Thayer of the America First Policy Institute and Kate Ruane of the Center for Democracy & Technology debate whether algorithms count as speech — covering design features, Section 230, COPPA, and whether an AI chatbot has anything like a First Amendment interest.

The Blessings of Liberty explores constitutional history, Supreme Court debates, and the “American Idea,” hosted by bestselling author and constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen.

In this episode, historian Ted Widmer joins to discuss his new book The Living Declaration, tracing the origins of the Declaration of Independence, where its ideas came from, and why they kept getting borrowed.

Today in history with

On Aug. 26, 1789, during the French Revolution, the National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The initial drafts came from the Marquis de Lafayette, who had fought in the American Revolution, in consultation with Thomas Jefferson. Abbé Sieyès and Mirabeau shaped the final text. Article 11 boldly calls the free communication of ideas one of the most precious rights of man.

Louis XVI ratified it that October, and it became the preamble to the 1791 constitution. Flouted by many revolutionaries and superseded twice in the 1790s, it outlasted them anyway. Indeed, the French constitutions in 1852, 1946, and 1958 were built on its ideas. Vive l’expression.

In the comments