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.
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“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 Sheridan Macy
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
