The First Amendment starts with a pretty radical bet: people can be trusted with ideas, even bad ones. That experiment has worked out pretty well. Happy Constitution Day to the amendment built on the unfashionable idea that nobody gets the final word on what may be said!

Yeah, and my take overall is that you can believe that the threat is potentially real AND have concerns about onerous regulations that create a monopoly or duopoly or otherwise restrict the right to say, for example, open source AI technology, AND while knowing full well we are in a potentially existential battle with China about who can dominate AI. Indeed, all of these things SHOULD be considered in the analysis. @adgo and I tried to explain a sensible First Amendment approach here, which both addresses the potential of catastrophic harm, which almost exclusively comes from when AI is given delegated authority, from helping keep the state’s grubby mitts off of what counts as knowledge. Also, it's a good reminder that if you place too much hope in the idea that code is speech and the First Amendment protects it, the law is decreasingly on your side. But there are other ways of protecting inquiry, information, knowledge, and truth.

FIRE won a huge First Amendment victory today. And before anyone mischaracterizes it: This ruling does NOT say the government must admit anyone, issue anyone a visa, or grant anyone citizenship. It says that once a person is lawfully here, the government cannot deport them because they engaged in protected speech. The government cannot tell a legal immigrant: An American is free to say this, but if you say it, you’re out. That’s the principle we sued to defend. And today we won.

What if some of the ideas meant to make students feel safer are actually making them more anxious, depressed, and helpless? @theFIREorg data from more than 55,000 students reveals an ideological mental health gap. I break it down on ERI with Andrea Honeycutt:

Talk about an academic finding that replicates that our K through PhD system has encouraged people to actively ignore. We are replicating mistake after mistake that were conclusively shown by the close of the 20th century, precisely because of massive educational failure. And, of course, the people who advocate for policies that inevitably raise costs don't know they don't know that it's a harder problem to solve than it should be.

Everyone should read @Tyler_A_Harper’s extraordinary Atlantic cover story, “Confessions of a Token Black Professor.” It is one of the best accounts yet of how bad American campuses became between roughly 2015 and 2025, peaking from 2020 to 2023. It was a disaster for academic freedom, free speech, and higher education’s credibility. It also helped destroy trust in shared facts, because people stopped believing that our supposed referees would scrutinize claims that fit their own ideology as aggressively as claims from the other side. Now there is a concerted effort to pretend either that none of this happened, or that it was merely a strange youthful indiscretion we can laugh off, much as people tried to do with the first great age of political correctness. We must not let them wish it away. If you experienced the quasi-religious groupthink that overtook institutions supposedly devoted to inquiry, write about it. Record what happened, what people were afraid to say, and why. Otherwise, this period will be rewritten by many of the same people who defended the status quo while casting themselves as brave underdogs. Looking at you, @rottenindenmark, among others. Doing PR work for a $1 trillion industry is not exactly fighting for social justice. I also have always seen this through a class lens. Elite higher education is a gigantic industry that disproportionately benefits people who are already well-off. Yes, people like me can get through it and have our lives transformed. But we are a small part of the story. There is an older intellectual history here. Thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse confronted a frustrating problem: the working class often failed to behave as intellectuals expected and an awful lot of working people hated intellectuals. Ordinary Americans liked their country, distrusted elites, and seemed perfectly capable of living without philosopher-kings directing them. The solution was an newideology that allowed highly educated elites to regard working-class people with contempt while still seeing themselves as champions of the oppressed. That became academia’s problem when universities built departments, bureaucracies, hiring systems, and professional cultures that treated deeply contestable political doctrines as moral dogma. You can see the results throughout Tyler’s story: classism, utter contempt for locals, exaggerated self-importance, ordinary disputes transformed into battles of good and evil, and politicized administrators remarkably skilled at weaponizing elite ideology against their own institutions. Tyler’s piece is both testimony and warning. There are excellent university presidents trying to right the ship, but too many faculty organizations and professional associations still seem to believe the ideology was never the problem—it simply wasn’t imposed consistently enough. We need to document what happened and build institutions less vulnerable to another episode like it. Because this was never some weird, isolated campus disaster. It spread into journalism, science, philanthropy, corporations, K–12 education, government, and politics. It damaged the credibility of the institutions we depend on to tell us what is true. A society that loses faith in its knowledge-producing institutions eventually loses something more important than the reputation of its universities: its ability to see the world as it is.

Maybe @amprog got the facts wrong. Maybe troop presence in my old hometown of DC reduced crime, maybe it didn’t. President Trump is free to make his case with the biggest bully pulpit in the world. What he must not do is threaten the donors who helped make their reporting possible. When a president suggests that people may be sued simply for supporting an organization that criticized him, the message is hard to miss: You may not be the speaker, but backing the speaker can make you a target too. As the president of a donor-supported organization that regularly criticizes people in power, this one hits especially close to home. Organizations like @theFIREorg can only do their work because people are willing to support them, including when that work is unpopular. That kind of threat can do enormous damage without a single lawsuit ever succeeding. It encourages people to withdraw support, or avoid controversial organizations altogether. In other words, it can shrink the space for dissent by making association itself feel risky. The government should not be in the business of making people afraid to support its critics. Whatever your politics, the First Amendment principle here should be easy.

One thing Monty Python’s @JohnCleese said has stuck with me: “If you’re constantly stopping to ask whether an idea might offend someone, you’ve already interrupted the creative process.” Getting to talk to him was a real treat.

Folks, hate speech laws mean your society has decided free people must live by the norms of those in charge. It’s anti-democratic, anti-intellectual, and always enforced on the basis of politics. We should be thankful the First Amendment prohibits them—and fight those who try to circumvent that protection.

That’s why viewpoint diversity is central to @theFIREorg’s identity. We do not merely preach it. We practice it because intellectual seriousness requires people who challenge assumptions, test conclusions, and correct mistakes. My latest for ERI 👇

Free speech allows us to resolve conflict through persuasion instead of violence. That may sound obvious. Historically, it is anything but. For most of human history, disagreement was settled by force, or the threat of it.

I left hip hop off the American exceptionalism list, which is like writing about Rome and forgetting the roads. Zydeco, comic books, basketball, diners, theme parks, skateboarding, superheroes, the personal computer, and the Chicago Dog. The list is ridiculous. And so is the country. In the best way.

FIRE is suing DHS over sending agents to intimidate people who criticize its policies. ICE didn't just send an unconstitutional threatening letter to David Streever and send agents to his home--they somehow tracked him to his hotel to harass him too. We can't let this stand.

Frustrating that people still propagate this myth. The average includes infant and child mortality. For those who survived the early years, average life expectancy was 60 to 70. 20 was definitely not considered "middle aged" 😅

LAWSUIT: We’re suing DHS after agents tracked down a Rochester, NY, man for sending a critical email to ICE’s director. This is America at 250. Dispatching federal agents to your doorstep because you criticized a public official is an insult to the First Amendment.