FIREwire — February 20, 2026
Stephen Colbert defies CBS, Australian police declare café a crime scene, and the UK’s troubling mass arrests of peaceful protesters.
“Some of them claim to be in favor of free speech. We are in favor of free algorithms, totally transparent. Free speech is pure bullshit if nobody knows how you are guided through this.”
— Emmanuel Macron on social media platforms and the tech executives who run them, during a discussion in New Delhi on university partnerships between India and France.
Stephen Colbert defies CBS
Stephen Colbert said CBS lawyers told him not to interview, or even mention not being able to interview, Texas Democratic state representative James Talarico, who is running for U.S. Senate. Colbert then promptly blasted the decision on-air, accusing the network of over-complying with guidance by the FCC, which isn’t going after conservative radio stations that do something similar.
The reasoning is that this would violate “equal times” rules that say American broadcast stations must provide equal access to competing political candidates, but as FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere has explained:
Brendan Carr’s FCC is continuing its streak of naked partisanship by wielding the agency’s power in new and laughable ways . . . Candidate interviews have long been exempt from “equal time” rules for good reason. It would be wrong if a Democratic administration demanded conservative talk radio hosts give equal airtime when they interview candidates, and it’s wrong for the Trump administration to demand the same of late night talk show hosts.
Australian police declare café a crime scene
In Canberra, authorities declared a café a crime scene and took down satirical posters depicting world leaders in Nazi uniforms under newly enacted hate-speech laws.
The incident triggered backlash from artists and civil liberties advocates who argue this is an overreach that chills political expression and protest art.
Below the fold
The UK’s ruling on its Palestine Action ban has only cast even more doubt on the nation’s troubling mass arrests of peaceful protesters.
The UK Crown Prosecution Service appealed a court’s decision to reverse the guilty finding against Hamit Coskun, who burned a Quran outside London’s Turkish consulate last year. Speech advocates in the UK are anxiously awaiting the outcome of the appeal and Coskun is reportedly under consideration for asylum by U.S. authorities if he is again found guilty.
Today in history
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” Ernest Hemingway famously wrote. That book was published in the United States on Feb. 18, 1885. Following the story of Huckleberry “Huck” Finn as he travels down the Mississippi River with the runaway slave Jim, the novel is one of the most frequently challenged in the country, with school districts pulling it from curriculum and school libraries, often due to the book’s use of “nigger” more than 200 times, even though the book itself is a scatching indictment of racism.
By the numbers
It’s a common refrain that hyper-liberal colleges make students intolerant of conservatives and unwilling to engage them in productive conversation. But is that true? In this week’s data dive, we explore the question and consider why the effect doesn’t seem to work in reverse.
