Free Speech
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An Attack on Free Speech: The Censorship Industrial Complex April 03, 2025
In this episode of The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, we examine a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing led this week by Chairman Schmitt, which investigated the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the suppression of free speech ...
The Right Is Coming for Free Speech March 18, 2025
Last week, the Trump administration sent a letter to Columbia University demanding, among other things, that its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department be placed under federal receivership for five years. It’s unclear what exactl...
Vance Delivers a Historic Defense of Free Speech February 20, 2025
In “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” J.D. Vance wrote, “I don’t believe in epiphanies. I don’t believe in transformative moments, as transformation is harder than a moment.”Despite that profound point, on Feb. 14, Vance ...
Europe Has a Free Speech Problem February 19, 2025
Last week, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance shocked an A-list group of European political and military leaders at the Munich Security Conference in Germany with a blunt message: Europe has gone too far in restricting speech. According to Vance, the mai...
Zuckerberg Opts for Free Speech—After Thinking It Over January 16, 2025
Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to “get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram” marks an astonishing turnaround in the long, twilight struggle over information in the digital age. In this conflict, it should be noted, Zuckerber...
The Unmutable Morrissey January 13, 2025
The pop singer Morrissey made news on his just-wrapped American tour, but it wasn’t for the music so much as for speaking out about his outcast status. “As you know, nobody will release my music anymore. As you know because I’m a chief exponent of fr...
REVIEW: Hateful Jane Austen January 09, 2025
Hate is bad. Minnesota governor and failed vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz declared during the 2024 presidential campaign that there is “no guarantee to free speech on . . . hate speech.” Meanwhile the nation’s most successful entertainment comp...
A More Practical Argument for Free Speech November 06, 2024
One of the most persistent pitfalls in political argumentation is a version of the fallacy of false equivalence. A friend dubs it the fallacy of ripe apples and rotten oranges. In a political context, it's when an advocate compares an idealized or be...
On Name-calling October 10, 2024
In his analysis of “Newspeak” in 1984, George Orwell called attention to the important issue of having the courage to call things by their right names. Newspeak was a Satanic mill designed to grind into dust the semantic links that tether us to reali...
A People’s History of Free Speech October 10, 2024
There is a well-established tendency in American politics to declare whatever problem we happen to be facing at the moment to be an “unprecedented” one. We do this, I think, to signal that the problem is serious and requires our urgent attention. But...
The Amy Wax Affair October 03, 2024
Last week, Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania (“Penn”) and three-time recipient of awards for excellence in teaching, was stripped her of her chaired professorship, suspended for a year at half pay, and de...
How to Fight Back Against the Censors October 02, 2024
I was once taught you should always open an important speech by making reference to a shared experience.So what do all of us at Rescue the Republic have in common? Nothing!In a pre-Trump universe, chimpanzees would be typing their fourth copy of Haml...
The Coming Strangulation of Free Speech September 25, 2024
It’s the First Amendment for a reason: free speech is a fundamental prerequisite for liberal democracy. But The Guardian, with logic that Stalin would have appreciated, insists the concern over free speech has been “concocted” by the Right. This is o...
The Slow Death of Free Speech in Britain September 25, 2024
Slowly, yet perceptibly, free speech is dying in Britain. On July 4, 2024, the people of Britain elected a new government. They did so decisively in terms of seats won, but rather less conclusively with the share of the vote. The new Labour governmen...
FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings September 09, 2024
For the fifth consecutive year, FIRE has delivered its annual College Free Speech Rankings. This year, we paired the largest survey of college student attitudes on free expression ever conducted (almost 59,000 students surveyed!) with the most compre...
Jail the Tech Bros September 04, 2024
Speak now, or forever hold your peace. Saturday, X went dark across Brazil, as Alexandre de Moraes, a judge in name, but something more like a dictator in terms of power, not only banned the platform from operation, but introduced exorbitant daily fi...
Free Speech Is Not Enough August 27, 2024
The corrupted state of American higher education has become a primary item on the national agenda. The ever-ballooning expense of college, coupled with growing doubts about the value of what our colleges are fostering—and not fostering—in our young p...
Musk’s Two-Tier Vision of Free Speech August 16, 2024
According to the feverish visions of some in the US at the moment, England has undergone a radical transformation. Gone are all those entrancingly acerbic dowager duchesses, curtseying maids, wizards and crumpets. Right now, asylum-seeking grooming g...
Supreme Court Says Censorship Is OK July 04, 2024
Mid-morning today the ruling came down from the Supreme Court. The august body, seat of wisdom, said that it was OK for the Biden administration to bully/partner with social media companies with the aim of limiting and suppressing speech. Basically t...
Why John Milton’s Free Speech Pamphlet Still Matters June 19, 2024
Renowned English author and revolutionary John Milton is most famous for writing the epic poem “Paradise Lost” — the Genesis story aimed at “justifying the ways of God to men.” But if you’re a fan of free speech, Milton’s most important work for you ...
Supreme Court to Decide the Future of Free Speech June 05, 2024
The current Supreme Court term includes a cluster of cases that could well shape the future of online free speech. These cases invite the Court to determine the power of both government officials and social media platforms concerning “content moderat...
Private Thought and Public Speech May 27, 2024
The past decade has witnessed a notable rise in the deployment of outrageous speech and censorship: opposite tendencies, on the face of things, which actually strengthen each other’s claim. My aim in this essay is to defend the traditional civil libe...
Canada’s Assault on Free Speech May 24, 2024
In late February, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party introduced in the Canadian Parliament the long-awaited Online Harms Act, which provides the government with extensive and explicit authority to regulate “content that foments hatred.” With the stated g...
The Radical Case for Free Speech May 13, 2024
If you read certain columnists or follow a particular set of writers and pundits on social media—including me—you know that the First Amendment is always in crisis. Nearly every incursion, whether it’s the shouting down of a conservative speaker on a...
The End of Social Media: An Interview With Jack Dorsey May 10, 2024
There is perhaps no leader in technology more misunderstood than Jack Dorsey, the enigmatic founder and (twice) former CEO of Twitter, now X. Through Covid, and America’s first real era of broad, highly-politicized social media thought policing, he b...
