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Tag: First Amendment

  • Jane Fonda revives her dad’s First Amendment group, enlisting hundreds of supporters

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    Drawing upon her personal and political past, Jane Fonda has revived an activist group from the Cold War era that was backed by her father and fellow Oscar winner, Henry Fonda.

    Jane Fonda announced Wednesday that she had launched a 21st-century incarnation of the Committee for the First Amendment, originally formed in 1947 in response to congressional hearings probing screenwriters and directors — notably the so-called “Hollywood Ten” — and their alleged Communist ties. Signers of the new organization’s mission statement include Florence Pugh, Sean Penn, Billie Eilish, Pedro Pascal and hundreds of others.

    Wednesday’s news comes in the wake of Jimmy Kimmel’s brief suspension by ABC over his on-air comments after conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination. President Trump was among those who had called for Kimmel to be fired, and FCC Chair Brendan Carr also made statements criticizing Kimmel, urging ABC to “take action” and saying in an interview: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” 

    “The federal government is once again engaged in a coordinated campaign to silence critics in the government, the media, the judiciary, academia, and the entertainment industry,” the Committee for the First Amendment’s mission statement reads, in part.

    “We refuse to stand by and let that happen. Free speech and free expression are the inalienable rights of every American of all backgrounds and political beliefs — no matter how liberal or conservative you may be. The ability to criticize, question, protest, and even mock those in power is foundational to what America has always aspired to be,” the statement reads.

    Other famous supporters from the list of more than 550 people included Alyssa Milano, Barbra Streisand, Ben Stiller, Julianne Moore, Lily Tomlin, Mandy Patinkin, Melanie Griffith, Natalie Portman, Nicolas Cage, Olivia Wilde, Susan Sarandon, Viola Davis, Whoopi Goldberg and Winona Ryder.

    The Fondas each have had long histories of activism, whether Jane Fonda’s opposition to the Vietnam War or Henry Fonda’s prominent support for Democratic Party candidates, including John F. Kennedy, for whom the elder Fonda appeared in a campaign ad in 1960.

    In recent years, Jane Fonda has been using her platform to draw attention to climate change. She founded the Jane Fonda Climate PAC in 2022 to help “climate champions” win in mayoral, city council, state and presidential races.

    “This isn’t just about the environment,” she told CBS News in September 2024. “This is about the whole planet.”

    In 2019, she was arrested five times during Fire Drill Fridays, a protest series she started in Washington, D.C., that was designed to draw attention to global warming. Fonda even spent the night of her 82nd birthday behind bars. The last time Fonda had spent the night in jail was in 1970, when she was 32, while on a speaking tour protesting the Vietnam War. 

    Jane Fonda in a mug shot following her arrest in Cleveland, Ohio, on Nov. 3, 1970.

    Kypros / Getty Images


    Henry Fonda, who died in 1982, joined the 1947 First Amendment committee along with such actors and filmmakers as Humphrey Bogart, John Huston, Lucille Ball and Frank Sinatra. Although highly publicized at the time, the committee had a short and troubled history. Bogart and others would find themselves accused of Communist sympathies and would express surprise when a handful of the Hollywood Ten, including screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, turned out to have been Communist Party members at one time or another.

    By the following year, Bogart had published an essay in Photoplay magazine entitled “I’m No Communist,” in which he confided that “actors and actresses always go overboard about things” and warned against being “used as dupes by Commie organizations.” Trumbo and others in the Hollywood Ten would be jailed for refusing to cooperate with Congress and found themselves among many to be blacklisted through the end of the 1950s and beyond.

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  • Federal Court Rules Speech-Based Deportations of Non-Citizen Students and Academics Violate the First Amendment

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    Today, in AAUP v. Rubio, federal district Judge William G. Young (appointed by Ronald Reagan) ruled that speech-based deportations of foreign students and academics violate the First Amendment. Here is his summary of his long and detailed ruling (which runs to 161 pages in all):

    This case -– perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court –- squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally “yes, they do.” “No law” means “no law.” The First Amendment does not draw President Trump’s invidious distinction [between citizens and non-citizens] and it is not to be found in our history or jurisprudence… No one’s freedom of speech is unlimited, of course, but these limits are the same for both citizens and non-citizens alike.

    With this constitution ruling firmly undergirding its approach, the Court here held a full hearing and a nine-day bench trial on the issue of whether the rights of these
    plaintiffs to constitutional freedom of speech have been unconstitutionally chilled by the deliberate conduct of any or all of these Public Official defendants. The Court heard 15 witnesses and admitted 250 exhibits consisting of documents, photographs, and video clips.

    Having carefully considered the entirety of the record, this Court finds by clear and convincing evidence that the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, together with the subordinate officials and agents of each of them, deliberately and with purposeful aforethought, did so concert their actions and those of their two departments intentionally to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble of the non-citizen plaintiff members of the plaintiff associations. What remains after issuing this opinion is to consider what, if anything, may be done to remedy these constitutional violations.

    Much of the opinion is a long detailed recitation of the extensive evidence showing that the administration does indeed have a policy of targeting non-citizen students and university employees for deportation based on their anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian speech. One can quibble with some of the details here. But the combined weight of evidence is overwhelming, in so far as high officials from the president on down have openly said that is what they are doing. In several cases, such as that of Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, they have indeed tried to deport people whose only offense was to engage in speech disapproved of by the administration. Thus, Judge Young is right to conclude there is a basis for a lawsuit by the AAUP and the Middle East Studies Association, both of which have members vulnerable to deportation under the policy.

    The latter part of the opinion (beginning at pg. 116) has a solid explanation of why the First Amendment’s protection for freedom of speech applies to non-citizens present in the US, and why Supreme Court precedent supports that position, or at least does not preclude it. Here is one key point:

    Lastly,…. this Court observes that, on its face, the First Amendment does not
    distinguish between citizens and noncitizens; rather, it states simply, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech[.]” U.S. Const. amend. I. As the Supreme Court’s now  frequently cited statement in Bridges v. Wixon confirmed, this text at least arguably implies that “[f]reedom of speech . . . is accorded aliens residing in this country.” 326 U.S. 135, 148 (1945). It also suggests something a little less obvious, but still worth saying, which is that its chief concern is with the character and quality of the “speech” that occurs on American soil, in what Justice Holmes called “free trade in ideas,” which is “the best test of truth,” Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616, 630 (1919), and ensuring that Congress may not twist that speech in the federal government’s preferred direction….

    As I have pointed out previously, the First Amendment, like most constitutional rights is phrased as a generalized limitation on government power, not a privilege limited to a specific group, such as citizens. A few rights, are explicitly confined to citizens (such as the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment) or to “the people” (such as the Second Amendment right to bear arms), which may be a euphemism for citizens. But that makes it all the more clear that rights not explicitly limited to citizens apply to everyone, without exception.

    I have defended applying the First Amendment to non-citizens in greater detail elsewhere (e.g. here and here), including responding to the view that speech-based deportations are permissible because non-citizens have no inherent legal right to be in the US:

    The text of the First Amendment is worded as a general limitation on government power, not a form of special protection for a particular group of people, such as US citizens or permanent residents. The Supreme Court held as much in a 1945 case, where they ruled that “Freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.”

    A standard response to this view is the idea that, even if non-citizens have a right to free speech, they don’t have a constitutional right to stay in the US. Thus, deporting them for their speech doesn’t violate the Constitution. But, in virtually every other context, it is clear that depriving people of a right as punishment for their speech violates the First Amendment, even if the right they lose does not itself have constitutional status. For example, there is no constitutional right to get Social Security benefits. But a law that barred critics of the President from getting those benefits would obviously violate the First Amendment. The same logic applies in the immigration context.

    While Judge Young’s ruling – following Supreme Court precedent – applies a distinction between speech-based initial exclusions and speech-based deportations (allowing greater scope for the former), I would argue both are equally unconstitutional.

    As Judge Young notes, today’s ruling follows a number of previous court decisions reaching similar conclusions about  Trump’s speech-based deportations. But his analysis is particularly thorough and compelling.

    Judge Young’s opinion includes a number of rhetorical flourishes that some might consider inappropriate for a judicial ruling. For example, the beginning and end are framed as a response to an anonymous postcard sent to the court:

     

    If I were in the judge’s place, I probably would not have done this. While I share Judge Young’s dismay at the administration’s illegal actions, these remarks are unlikely to persuade readers who aren’t otherwise inclined to agree with his reasoning. And the predictable controversy they engender could divert attention from the substantive reasoning underlying the court’s ruling. They might also provide critics with an excuse to dismiss that reasoning without seriously engaging with it, by claiming that the judge was acting inappropriately.

    That said, the debate over the appropriateness of some of the rhetoric in the opinion should not detract from the substance of Judge Young’s reasoning, which is strong, and a good model for future court decisions on this issue.

    In addition to the factual record and the constitutional questions, the ruling also covers claims under the Administrative Procedure Act, and a number of procedural questions (e.g. – associational standing for the plaintiffs), which I will not attempt to assess here.

    The legal battle over speech-based deportations will continue. I hope higher courts will follow Judge Young’s and other district courts’ lead, and hold there is no immigration exception to the First Amendment.

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    Ilya Somin

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  • Diddy’s First Amendment Gambit

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    For weekly updates on all the most pivotal and dramatic moments from Diddy’s trial, sign up for our newsletter: Court Appearances: United States v. Diddy, and check out the rest of our trial coverage here.

    Sean “Diddy” Combs’s lawyers doubled down on claims that his actions were protected by the First Amendment during a hearing this morning as part of their ongoing push for acquittal. (Yes, the same amendment that’s under attack from President Donald Trump.)

    “He was a producer of amateur porn,” Alexandra Shapiro, one of Diddy’s many expensive lawyers, told Judge Arun Subramanian in court on September 25. Diddy’s team is hoping for an acquittal by trying to point out major legal problems in the case. “He’s a consumer of amateur porn,” Shapiro said. “It’s well settled that this type of amateur porn, whether it’s live or recorded, is protected by the First Amendment.” The protection also extended to times Diddy didn’t record encounters, she claimed. “It’s often simply only a livestream back and forth,” Shapiro said, who also mentioned OnlyFans. “Somebody’s watching someone on-camera. It’s not recorded. It’s just happening in real time.”

    Diddy was found guilty on July 2 on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. This charge relates to Diddy’s shuttling of male escorts across state lines for the drug-fueled, dayslong sexual encounters known as Freak-Offs. These encounters were often recorded and were “highly choreographed.” Shapiro also mentioned the recordings had “mood lighting” and costumes to bolster the claim that this was performance, not prostitution.

    Diddy, who wore khaki jail scrubs at this proceeding, seemed to be in good spirits. When he walked into Subramanian’s courtroom around 11 a.m., he hugged several of his lawyers.

    Prosecutor Christy Slavik, who spoke on the First Amendment issue, insisted that Diddy’s hiring male escorts across state lines didn’t involve free speech. “There’s no symbolic speech,” she said, which would have First Amendment protections. “The act that violated the law was the transportation, which was not protected symbolic speech.”

    Diddy’s Avenger-like legal counsel detailed their First Amendment claims in late July court filings. “The freak-offs and hotel nights were performances that he or his girlfriends typically videotaped so they could watch them later,” his lawyers wrote in court papers posttrial. “In other words, he was producing amateur pornography for later private viewing.”

    Generally speaking, most pornography is protected so long as it doesn’t involve children or “obscenity.” Prosecutors have insisted, however, that Diddy wasn’t paying prostitutes just to make blue movies in their own court filings. “The record shows that the defendant was anything but a producer of adult films entitled to First Amendment protection — rather, he was a voracious consumer of commercial sex, paying male commercial sex workers on hundreds of occasions to have sex with his girlfriends for his own sexual arousal,” they argued in court papers. “Moreover, the conduct proscribed by the Mann Act — causing the interstate transportation of an individual for the purpose of prostitution — is not entitled to First Amendment protection.”

    Subramanian will rule later on the defense’s push for acquittal. Diddy is scheduled to be sentenced on October 3.

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    Victoria Bekiempis

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  • Democrats to Trump: Stop Jawboning, That’s Our Job!

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    In last week’s newsletter, I focused on the Trump administration’s obvious jawboning hypocrisy when it comes to Jimmy Kimmel: Trump folks railed against the Biden administration for pressuring social media companies to censor conservatives, yet are now engaged in a variation of the exact same thing.

    There’s plenty of hypocrisy to go around, however. Indeed, in their responses to this whole kerfuffle, Democrats have revealed that their solution is not a solution at all, but a threat to up the ante the second they regain power.

    To recap, Kimmel’s removal from the airwaves has alarmed many defenders of free speech—not because Kimmel has the right to a stage, a show, and an audience, but because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) involved itself in a decision that should be made by private entities. By threatening to take regulatory action against media companies that platform Kimmel, FCC chair Brendan Carr earned a rare rebuke from several members of his own party, including Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas), Rand Paul (Ky.), and Dave McCormick (Pa.).

    When a government actor tries to extort a private actor into taking some action, it’s called jawboning. In this case, the desired action was the silencing of Kimmel, who used his show’s opening monologue last week to imply that the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson, was part of the “MAGA gang,” i.e., that the shooter was identified with the right. This was neither funny nor true. Kimmel can and should suffer the market consequences of his claims: His viewers can desert him, his bosses can punish him, and companies that broadcast him can find something else to air in the 11 p.m. hour. The government shouldn’t force him off television, however, and the FCC shouldn’t imply that it will makes things very difficult for his corporate masters unless they muzzle him.

    Like I said last week, there’s absolutely nothing unprecedented about what’s going on here. Carr’s directly threatening language—address the Kimmel situation “the easy way or the hard way”—was perhaps a less subtle example of jawboning, but it’s well in keeping with the previous administration’s actions on disfavored speech. Biden White House Digital Strategy Director Rob Flaherty, for instance, repeatedly pressed social media companies to take down content that was contrary to Biden’s interest.

    So perhaps it should come as no surprise that Democrats are not responding to the Kimmel situation by demanding some new limit on the FCC’s ability to regulate speech. They are not vowing that a future Democratic administration would respect the sacrosanct First Amendment rights of private speech. On the contrary, they are promising to punish the victims of the jawboning—the private companies.

    Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) made this explicit during a recent interview on MSNBC.

    Murphy said that if the Democrats regained control of the presidency and Congress, they would move swiftly to regulate and break up large media companies—and presumably, Big Tech companies—that kowtowed to Trump. If you think about it, what he’s basically saying is kowtow to us, not the GOP, or else!

    One can’t help but feel a little sympathetic to the owners of the companies, who really just want to be left alone, make profit-maximizing decisions, and avoid punitive regulation. But they’re damned if they do—MAGA will hurt them—and damned if they don’t—Democrats will hurt them.

    As long as Democrats remain the party that is more inclined to favor sweeping regulatory action aimed at breaking up the largest and most successful tech and media companies in the U.S.—in other words, the party of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders—the Republican Party might seem like the more welcoming team, even if Trump is as bad a jawboner (heh) as anyone else.

     

    YouTube has announced that everyone kicked off the platform for violating pandemic-era content rules is now welcome back, following an investigation by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R–Ohio) into the Biden administration’s jawboning of parent company Alphabet. Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown had an excellent write-up of this decision in her own newsletter, so I won’t dwell on it in too much detail.

    I am particularly satisfied by this outcome, however, since my show, Rising, was unjustly suppressed by YouTube in 2022. The platform suspended us for a week, ostensibly because we violated an election integrity policy: denying the validity of the 2020 election. But of course, no one on the show made any such claim—rather, we played a news clip of Trump making the claim. In any case, it’s always nice to get some recognition that the moderation policies of that era were heavy-handed and motivated by government malfeasance.

    Here was my commentary on Thursday’s episode of Rising, discussing YouTube’s change of heart.

     

    I’m joined by Amber Duke to discuss Kamala Harris’s revenge tour, and much else. Also, I’m currently recording an episode with Andrew Heaton, which will debut later this week!

     

    I just finished two things I’ve been working on: The second season of Netflix’s Wednesday, and the Cormac McCarthy novel Blood Meridian. One is a timeless meditation on man’s inherent capacity for violence and the savage roots of the American experiment, and the other is about cowboys.

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    Robby Soave

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  • College Professor Who Called Charlie Kirk a ‘Nazi’ Handed…

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    A tenured college professor at the University of South Dakota was handed a temporary legal win on Wednesday after a judge halted his impending firing for remarks made immediately after the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

    Newsweek reached out to the school via email for comment.

    Why It Matters

    The case involving the professor who called Kirk a “hate spreading Nazi” online, according to a court document, is at the center of a larger national debate over the limits of free speech for educators, public employment and political discourse.

    The recent federal court ruling that the university cannot terminate the professor for his social media post exemplifies the ongoing tension between academic freedom and public accountability, with broad implications for First Amendment rights in educational settings.

    Kirk, 31, was a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump and a face of the MAGA movement for younger generations. He utilized social media platforms to engage with younger people about culture war topics, foreign policy, religion and other notable conservative values.

    What To Know

    Professor Phillip Michael Hook’s win follows his lawsuit against the university for “unconstitutional retaliation in violation of the First Amendment,” the court document says.

    U.S. District Judge Karen Schreier, nominee of former President Bill Clinton, noted in her ruling in part: “The public has a compelling interest in protecting its First Amendment rights.”

    Hook, in the late afternoon of September 10—the day Kirk was fatally shot during a question and answer session at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah—posted remarks about the Turning Point USA CEO on his private Facebook account, the court document shows.

    “Okay. I don’t give a flying f*** about this Kirk person. Apparently he was a hate spreading Nazi. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the idiotic right fringe to even know who he was,” Hook’s post said, per the document. “I’m sorry for his family that he was a hate spreading Nazi and got killed. I’m sure they deserved better. Maybe good people could now enter their lives. But geez, where was all this concern when the politicians in Minnesota were shot? And the school shootings? And Capitol Police? I have no thoughts or prayers for this hate spreading Nazi. A shrug, maybe.”

    In a follow-up post hours later, Hook said, according to the court document: “Apparently my frustration with the sudden onslaught of coverage concerning a guy shot today led to a post I mow [sic] regret posting. I’m sure many folks fully understood my premise but the simple fact that some were offended, led me to remove the post. I extend this public apology to those who were offended. Om Shanti.” (“Om Shanti” is a call for peace, often found in Buddhist and Hindu writings and prayers.)

    Hook was then made aware of the university’s intent to fire him, days after the post, the ruling outlines. The letter, sent to Hook by the university’s dean of the College of Fine Arts, Bruce Kelley, said Hook violated policy.

    Schreier ultimately sided with the professor, ordering: “Hook’s motion for temporary restraining order (Docket 3) is granted. Defendants are required to temporarily set aside their determination to place Hook on administrative leave. Defendants shall reinstate Hook’s position as a Professor of Art at the University of South Dakota, retroactive to September 12, 2025, to remain effective until the preliminary injunction hearing on Wednesday, October 8, 2025, at 9:00 a.m. in Sioux Falls Courtroom 2.”

    What People Are Saying

    Republican South Dakota Governor Larry Rhoden, on X earlier this month: “When I read this post, I was shaking mad. The Board of Regents intends to FIRE this University of South Dakota professor, and I’m glad. This individual stands in front of South Dakota students to educate them. We must not send the message to our kids that this is acceptable public discourse. We need more Charlie Kirks on campus and less hatred like this.”

    What Happens Next

    Petitions to reinstate Hook and other educators continue to gain support online, reflecting the national reach of these disputes.

    The temporary restraining order remains in place until October 8, when a preliminary injunction hearing is scheduled.

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  • Jimmy Kimmel Makes STRONG Late-Night Return With Messages Of Freedom & Unity – WATCH! – Perez Hilton

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    Jimmy Kimmel is back on the air!

    The late-night TV host marked Tuesday night as his return to the airwaves after that abrupt suspension last week following comments he made about the death of conservative political pundit Charlie Kirk.

    Fans have been waiting to see what would happen upon the return of Jimmy Kimmel Live! to ABC. And even though Tuesday’s comeback wasn’t aired on all ABC affiliates across the country, the episode still marked a momentous occasion for Jimmy, his staff, and his viewers — oh, and social media users, too, of course.

    Related: John Oliver BLASTS ‘Cowards’ At ABC & Disney Over Kimmel Suspension!

    Tuesday night’s guests were actor Glen Powell and musical guest Sarah McLachlan. And look, no shade intended towards them, but… nobody was there to see them do their thing. Nahhhh, everybody tuned in to see what Kimmel would say about getting pulled off air!

    So, without further ado, here we go…

    Kimmel entered the studio to ROARING applause, with the audience giving him a standing ovation, chanting “Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy,” and more. See for yourself:

    He thanked them for their support, then started his comeback monologue by joking:

    “If you’re just joining us, we are preempting a regularly scheduled encore episode of Celebrity Family Feud to bring you this special report.

    The 57-year-old comedian then referenced RFK Jr.’s “autism announcement” that was dropped on Monday, quipping:

    “I’m not sure who had a weirder 48 hours, me or the CEO of Tylenol.”

    By the way, experts have largely refuted the MAHA claim that the only doctor-approved painkiller for pregnant women is a cause for autism, but we digress…

    He continued:

    “It’s been overwhelming. I’ve heard from a lot of people over the last six days. I’ve heard from all the people all over the world, over the last reached out 10 or 11 times, weird characters from my past, or the guy who fired me from my first radio job in Seattle, not airing tonight by the way.”

    He also thanked right wing voices like Ted Cruz‘s that warned against such retaliation and what it means for the first amendment.

    “It takes courage for them to speak out against this administration. They did and they deserve credit for it.”

    Kimmel then made it extremely clear his intention was to never make light of Kirk’s death, saying:

    “I have no illusions about changing anyone’s mind, but I do want to make something clear, because it’s important to me as a human and that is, you understand that it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man. I don’t think there’s anything funny about it. Nor was it my intention to blame any specific group for the actions of what it was obviously a deeply disturbed individual. That was really the opposite of the point I was trying to make.”

    Remember, he never actually made a joke about the death of Kirk. In fact, he strongly condemned the assassination the day it happened and sent his sincere condolences to the family. No, he was pulled over his comments about the gunman and the right wing reaction to it all.

    Regardless, he still knows it was wrong and unAmerican for ABC affiliates to respond the way they did, calling out Donald Trump‘s FCC Chairman Brendan Carr for publicly saying the network would get pressure regarding Kimmel’s comments when Carr said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” and “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

    Overall the entire monologue was a poignant message of unity for all Americans and our first amendment rights. It was also one for healing. He ended on a note about Erika Kirk‘s speech from the podcaster’s memorial service on Sunday, specifically her public forgiveness for the gunman. Kimmel said that’s what the teachings of Jesus Christ are all about it — forgiveness. Through tears he admitted it touched him deeply, saying “if there is anything we should take from this tragedy, it’s that.”

    Watch it all for yourself (below):

    BTW, Jimmy Kimmel Live! will welcome Ethan Hawke, Lisa Ann Walter, and musical guest Yungblud on Wednesday. Then, on Thursday, Peyton Manning, Oscar Nuñez, and musical guest Alex G will show out.

    Reactions, y’all?? Drop ’em (below)!

    [Image via Jimmy Kimmel Live/YouTube]

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    Perez Hilton

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  • 60 years ago, Ayn Rand denounced FCC censorship. Brendan Carr should listen.

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    Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr has received much criticism after appearing to pressure broadcast channels to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air following the comedian’s misinformed monologue about the motivations of Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer. Republican Sens. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), Ted Cruz (R–Texas), and Dave McCormick (R–Pa.), all chastised Carr for seemingly using his position to steer the editorial decisions of private companies—a serious breach of free speech principles.

    Carr is not without his defenders, however. Nathan Leamer, tech policy expert and advisor to former FCC Chair Ajit Pai, asserts that Carr’s actions fall squarely within his duty to promote the “public interest” on television, as defined by the Communications Act of 1934. He also assails “libertarians” in particular for not caring about how the FCC works (his words), and suggests that such skeptics are incorrectly or selectively railing against the public interest standard in the Kimmel case.

    But of course, libertarians have been warning that broad interpretations of the public interest standard will empower the FCC to engage in censorship for decades. Just ask Ayn Rand.

    In 1962, Rand penned a prophetic warning about the public interest standard, which then FCC Chair Newton Minow was citing as justification for pressuring television companies to create more educational programming. Minow famously railed against a supposedly “vast wasteland” of shoddy television shows, and claimed that the FCC’s charter empowered him to push for editorial changes to the medium that would align with his view of the public interest.

    “You must provide a wider range of choices, more diversity, more alternatives,” said Minow in his well-remembered 1961 speech. “It is not enough to cater to the nation’s whims; you must also serve the nation’s needs.”

    Minow repeatedly claimed that he was not in favor of government censorship, and was not trying to tell broadcasters what they could and could not say. Rather, he charged them to make nebulous and ill-defined improvements to the product that he believed would be better appreciated by the American public—i.e., the public interest.

    And that’s precisely what Rand disliked about his approach. Her essay, “Have Gun, Will Nudge,” published in The Objectivist Newsletter in March 1962, makes clear her disdain not just for abject censorship, but also for a reality in which the FCC chair makes vague statements regarding the actions that private actors should or should not take.

    “It is true, as Mr. Minow assures us, that he does not propose to establish censorship; what he proposes is much worse,” she wrote. She continued:

    Censorship, in its old-fashioned meaning, is a government edict that forbids the discussion of some specific subjects or ideas—such, for instance, as sex, religion or criticism of government officials—an edict enforced by the government’s scrutiny of all forms of communication prior to their public release. But for stifling the freedom of men’s minds the modern method is much more potent; it rests on the power of non-objective law; it neither forbids nor permits anything; it never defines or specifies; it merely delivers men’s lives, fortunes, careers, ambitions into the arbitrary power of a bureaucrat who can reward or punish at whim. It spares the bureaucrat the troublesome necessity of committing himself to rigid rules—and it places upon the victims the burden of discovering how to please him, with a fluid unknowable as their only guide.

    No, a federal commissioner may never utter a single word for or against any program. But what do you suppose will happen if and when, with or without his knowledge, a third-assistant or a second cousin or just a nameless friend from Washington whispers to a television executive that the commissioner does not like producer X or does not approve of writer Y or takes a great interest in the career of starlet Z or is anxious to advance the cause of the United Nations?

    What makes it possible to bring a free country down to such a level? If you doubt the connection between altruism and statism, I suggest that you count how many times—in the current articles, speeches, debates and hearings—there appeared the magic formula which makes all such outrages possible: “The Public Interest.”

    The title of the essay was inspired by Rand’s contention that a man who holds a gun to your head and demands your wallet is surely deploying impermissible force rather than mere encouragement. When the FCC chair proclaims that a private company can “do this the easy way or the hard way,” he is providing a similar kind of nudge.

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    Robby Soave

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  • The FCC’s Involvement in Canceling Jimmy Kimmel Was ‘Unbelievably Dangerous,’ Ted Cruz Says

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    Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) is happy that ABC decided to indefinitely suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show. But like Fox News political analyst Brit Hume, Cruz is not happy about the role that Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), played in that decision. By threatening TV stations that carried Jimmy Kimmel Live! with fines and license revocation, Cruz warned in his podcast on Friday, Carr set a dangerous precedent that could invite similar treatment of conservative speech under a future administration.

    “I hate what Jimmy Kimmel said,” Cruz declared, referring to the September 15 monologue in which the late-night comedian erroneously suggested that Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old man accused of assassinating conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a college in Utah five days earlier, was part of the MAGA movement. “I am thrilled that he was fired. But let me tell you: If the government gets in the business of saying, ‘We don’t like what you, the media, have said; we’re going to ban you from the airwaves if you don’t say what we like,’ that will end up bad for conservatives.”

    In an interview with right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on Wednesday, Carr warned that there are “actions we can take on licensed broadcasters” that dared to air Kimmel’s show, including “fines or license revocations.” He added that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Either “these companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel,” he said, “or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

    Hours later, Nexstar, which owns 32 ABC affiliate stations, announced that it would preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live! “for the foreseeable future beginning with tonight’s show.” Sinclair, which owns 38 ABC affiliates, likewise said it would “indefinitely preempt” Jimmy Kimmel Live! beginning that night. ABC, which produces the programming aired by those affiliates and owns eight of the network’s stations, fell in line the same night, saying it would “indefinitely” suspend the show.

    Cruz likened Carr to a mafioso. “He says, ‘We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way,’” the senator noted. “And I got to say, that’s right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar [and] going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

    In fact, Carr’s threat was more explicit than that. “This sort of status quo is obviously not acceptable,” he declared, saying it was “past time” for “these licensed broadcasters” to say, “Listen, we are going to preempt, we are not going to run, Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out, because we licensed broadcaster[s] are running the possibility of fines or license revocations from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.”

    That rationale for punishing stations that carried Kimmel’s show was absurd on its face. The policy to which Carr alluded applies to a “broadcast news report” that was “deliberately intended to mislead viewers or listeners” about “a significant event.” While Kimmel’s remarks were certainly misinformed, it is doubtful that he intended to “mislead viewers.” It seems more plausible that he committed to a partisan narrative without bothering to ask whether it was supported by the facts, an example of carelessness rather than deliberate deceit. But whatever you think of Kimmel’s intent, a comedian’s monologue is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a “broadcast news report.”

    By abusing his power to exert pressure on ABC and its affiliates, Cruz said, Carr was setting an example that Democrats are apt to copy. “Going down this road, there will come a time when a Democrat…wins the White House,” the senator said, and “they will silence us. They will use this power, and they will use it ruthlessly. And that is dangerous.”

    Although “it might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel,” Cruz said, “when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it….It is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying, ‘We’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying.’”

    Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) agreed that Carr’s involvement in kiboshing Kimmel was “absolutely inappropriate.” The FCC’s chairman “has got no business weighing in on this,” Paul said on Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press. “If you’re losing money, you can be fired. But the government’s got no business in it. And the FCC was wrong to weigh in. And I’ll fight any attempt by the government to get involved with speech.”

    Conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson perceives a similar danger in Attorney General Pam Bondi’s response to online commentary that celebrated Kirk’s murder or justified violence against conservatives more generally. “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,” Bondi said last week, erroneously asserting a constitutional distinction between “free speech” and “hate speech.” She later claimed she had in mind “threats of violence that individuals incite against others.” But the speech that offended Bondi generally would not meet the First Amendment test that the Supreme Court established in the 1969 case Brandenburg v. Ohio, which requires advocacy that is both “directed” at inciting “imminent lawless action” and “likely” to have that effect.

    “This is the attorney general of the United States, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, telling you that there is this other category…called hate speech,” Carlson remarked on his show last Wednesday. “And of course, the implication is that’s a crime. There’s no sentence that Charlie Kirk would have objected to more than that.”

    With good reason, Carlson said: “You hope that a year from now, the turmoil we’re seeing in the aftermath of his murder won’t be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country. And trust me, if it is, if that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that, ever. And there never will be. Because if they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think.”

    It is encouraging that at least some of President Donald Trump’s allies recognize that freedom of speech is unreliable unless it protects their political opponents. But Trump himself seems oblivious to that point. When asked about Cruz’s criticism of Carr on Friday, Trump described the FCC chairman as “a great American patriot,” adding, “I disagree with Ted Cruz on that.”

    Of course he does. For years, Trump has been eager to wield the FCC’s powers against broadcasters who air programming that offends him. During Trump’s first administration, he averred that “network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked.” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai rejected that suggestion in no uncertain terms. “I believe in the First Amendment,” he said. “The FCC under my leadership will stand for the First Amendment, and under the law the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.”

    Trump’s views on the subject have not changed. Last week, he cheered Kimmel’s suspension as “Great News for America” and urged NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, two other late-night comedians who are often critical of him. “Do it NBC!!!” he demanded. In case there was any doubt that Trump was not merely offering advice as a businessman or TV critic, he signed that Truth Social missive “President DJT” and later clarified the underlying threat. “You have a network and you have evening shows, and all they do is hit Trump,” he complained to reporters. “It’s all they do….They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.” When network newscasts “take a great story” and “make it bad,” he averred, “that’s really illegal.”

    The difference this time around is that the FCC’s Trump-appointed chairman, an avowed free speech champion, has no constitutional compunction about using his powers to bully broadcasters into submission. “They give me only bad publicity or press,” Trump said on Thursday. “I mean, they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away. It will be up to Brendan Carr.”

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    Jacob Sullum

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  • Republicans support free speech, unless it offends them

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    Last week, a gunman in Utah shot and killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk. It was a brutal and tragic event, regardless of one’s politics. And yet the fallout of Kirk’s murder has revealed a disturbing hostility toward free speech on the political right.

    Republicans have long cast themselves as defenders of free speech against cancel culture and the censorial impulses of the political left. And there was merit to the argument—Reason has covered many cases of overreach.

    But over the last week, MAGA Republicans have scoured social media for government employees posting about Kirk’s murder, contacting employers in an attempt to get them fired. “Kirk’s online defenders have snitch-tagged the employers of government workers over social media posts saying they don’t care about the assassination, that they didn’t like Kirk even as they condemn his assassination, and even criticizing Kirk prior to his assassination,” Reason‘s Christian Britschgi wrote this week. Even for nongovernmental employees, social media detectives apparently compiled a database with tens of thousands of people who criticized Kirk, including their names and employers.

    Of course, that’s just people online. It’s not like those with government power are advocating such a thing, right?

    “I would think maybe their [broadcast] license should be taken away,” President Donald Trump told reporters this week on Air Force One, about TV networks. “All they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.”

    “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer,” Vice President J.D. Vance said while guest-hosting Kirk’s podcast this week. “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”

    Vance’s argument bears a striking resemblance to the comments made just a few years ago by his ideological enemies. When certain public and not-so-public figures received backlash for offensive statements, some commentators noted that this was not cancel culture, it was “consequence culture”—people merely experiencing the consequences of their actions.

    It’s no surprise that Trump has no principles on free speech—from the beginning of his first term, he called the press the “enemy of the American people.” But Vance’s position marks a notable pivot from just a few months ago.

    “Just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite,” Vance said in a speech at the Munich Security Conference in February. “Under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square, agree or disagree.”

    Now, Vance seems less keen on defending someone’s right to offer views that he personally disagrees with. Unfortunately, he’s not alone.

    This week, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr criticized TV host Jimmy Kimmel for comments made about Kirk during his show. Carr openly intimated that ABC should take action or potentially face reprisal; within hours, the network suspended Kimmel’s show indefinitely. (Trump later praised Carr as “outstanding. He’s a patriot. He loves our country, and he’s a tough guy.”)

    Of course, when the opposing party was in power, Carr recognized the error of such a threat. In 2022, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that during the 2020 election, Facebook artificially decreased the spread of a story about Hunter Biden in response to a request from the FBI.

    “The government does not evade the First Amendment’s restraints on censoring political speech by jawboning a company into suppressing it—rather, that conduct runs headlong into those constitutional restrictions, as Supreme Court law makes clear,” Carr posted on X in response. Now that government power is in his hands, Carr apparently has fewer qualms about wielding it like that.

    Other officials have made their shifting beliefs more blatant.

    “Under normal times, in normal circumstances, I tend to think that the First Amendment should always be sort of the ultimate right. And that there should be almost no checks and balances on it. I don’t feel that way anymore,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R–Wyo.) told Semafor on Thursday. “We just can’t let people call each other those kinds of insane things and then be surprised when politicians get shot and the death threats they are receiving and then trying to get extra money for security.”

    Lummis’ complaint sounds like a more aggressive version of the heckler’s veto, a “form of censorship, where a speaker’s event is canceled due to the actual or potential hostility of ideological opponents,” wrote Zach Greenberg of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. In Lummis’ telling, the government must punish people for saying offensive or inflammatory things because of how others might respond.

    That’s not only completely wrong, it’s unconstitutional.

    “The First Amendment to the Constitution protects speech no matter how offensive its content,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union. “Speech that deeply offends our morality or is hostile to our way of life warrants the same constitutional protection as other speech because the right of free speech is indivisible: When we grant the government the power to suppress controversial ideas, we are all subject to censorship by the state.”

    Lummis, Vance, and Carr apparently see no problem policing offensive speech, at least when they’re the ones who are offended.

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    Joe Lancaster

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  • Abolish the FCC

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    FCC

    The Trump Administration Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) recent efforts to intimidate broadcasters into taking anti-Trump comedians off the air are blatant violations of the First Amendment. They also lend weight to longstanding libertarian arguments for abolishing the FCC.

    FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened to pull ABC’s broadcast license unless it stopped broadcasting comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show (which ABC quickly did). Earlier, the FCC similarly threatened CBS, which then canceled Stephen Colbert’s show (Colbert is another anti-Trump comedian). Trump now threatens to use similar tactics against other broadcasters who air shows that attack him.

    Robert Corn-Revere, electronic media expert with FIRE, has a helpful analysis of the reasons why such attentions are unconstitutional. As he notes, just last year, in NRA v. Vullo, the Supreme Court unanimously reiterated the principle that “the First Amendment prohibits government officials from relying on the threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion . . . to achieve the suppression of disfavored speech.”[quotations omitted]. In Vullo, the Supreme Court struck New York officials efforts to coerce the NRA into curbing its pro-gun rights speech, at the behest of liberal Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo. That reasoning applies to Trump and Carr, as well. If anything, their unconstitutional motives are even more blatant than Cuomo’s were.

    If the Trump FCC targets more broadcasters, hopefully they will sue and win. But there is a deeper problem here: an agency that has broad power to grand or deny licenses to broadcasters is an inherent danger to freedom of speech. That’s especially true officials hides their unconstitutional motives more carefully hidden than Trump and Carr have done.

    This is not a new problem. Only a few years after the establishment of the FCC in 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt used the agency to target conservative broadcasters opposed to the New Deal. Later John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson used the “Fairness Doctrine” – developed by the FCC as part of its regulatory authority – to target critics of their policies. The Fairness Doctrine continued to be used as a tool to restrict speech until the Reagan FCC got rid of it in 1987.

    Until now, recent presidents have not used the FCC as abusively as FDR, JFK, and LBJ did.  But the danger remained, and Trump is now exploiting it. Even if open attempts at censorship are struck down the courts, the FCC can still intimidate broadcasters by using its powers to deny and grant licenses, restrict mergers, and the like, citing seemingly neutral pretexts. Fear of such action may be why ABC and CBS have – so far – chosen not to go to court.

    In his classic 1959 article, “The Federal Communications Commission,” the great libertarian economist Ronald Coase warned of this danger, and advocated the abolition of the FCC (Coase later won the Nobel Prize in Economics in part for this work):

    The situation in the American broadcasting industry is not essentially different in character from that which would be found if a commission appointed by the federal government had the task of selecting those who were to be allowed to publish newspapers and periodicals in each city, town, and village of the United States. A proposal to do this would, of course, be rejected out of hand as inconsistent with the doctrine of freedom of the press. But the broadcasting industry is a source of news and opinion of comparable importance with newspapers or books and, in fact, nowadays is commonly included with the press, so far as the doctrine of freedom of the press is concerned.

    If newspapers and magazines had to be licensed by the government before being allowed to publish, there would be obvious opportunities for favoritism and abuse. The exact same danger exists with broadcast licensing.

    The standard rationale for broadcast licensing by the state is that broadcast frequencies are scarce resources that government must protect from “interference.” If two networks try to broadcast on the same frequency, chaos might ensue and neither would be effectively transmitted. But the same is true of traditional media. Printing presses, ink, and other production supplies are also valuable scarce goods. Two newspapers cannot use the same printing press at the same time, or print their publications on the same pieces of paper. Yet rightly rely on markets and private property rights, not government licensing and central planning, to allocate these resources.

    As Coase explained, the same system of property rights can work with broadcast frequencies. Let private broadcasters own individual frequencies, and let free exchange and market competition decide who uses which one.

    This solution is even better with the rise of cable television and then internet broadcasting. No longer is it plausible to argue that a fully private system would be dominated by just a handful of major networks, as was perhaps true in the pre-cable age. Owners of individual broadcast networks, radio stations, and websites can decide what viewpoints they want to platform. Market forces will incentivize new entrants to promote viewpoints that incumbents neglect, but audiences might like to see. We have seen how right-wing networks like Fox and Newsmax arose to challenge more liberal traditional media. More recently, there is no shortage of websites (including social media sites) espousing a range of different ideologies. Elon Musk’s generally right-wing Twitter/X site, for example, contrasts with more left-wing Bluesky (among others). I am one of many users who have accounts on both.

    I oppose Musk’s politics and disapprove of  many of his policies for managing X. I don’t always love everything that goes on at Bluesky either. But I support both sites’ rights to manage the speech on their property without government interference.

    This market system isn’t perfect. I myself have long argued that consumers do a poor job of acquiring and processing political information, in part because they have bad incentives. That applies to our consumption of both traditional broadcast media, and more recent internet and social media products. But market competition and private property are far preferable to allowing the FCC to decided who gets a license, and to intimidate critics of the incumbent president into submission or self-censorship.

    Elsewhere, I have assessed a number of possible approaches to dealing with the problems of misinformation and political ignorance. There is no easy answer, though some options are potentially promising. Letting the FCC intimidate and coerce broadcasters isn’t one of them. It’s long past time to recognize that Ronald Coase was right, and the FCC should be abolished.

     

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    Ilya Somin

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  • Michigan Republicans claim to defend free speech while pushing bills to silence it

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    Michigan Republicans have branded themselves as defenders of free expression, but a recent spate of bills threatens to erode the very First Amendment rights they claim to defend. 

    A group of GOP lawmakers recently introduced a House bill, called the “Anticorruption of Public Morals Act,” that would ban all online pornography, including depictions or descriptions of transgender people. The bill makes it a felony punishable by up to 25 years in prison to “distribute or make available” prohibited content, including what it describes as “a disconnection between biology and gender.”

    “Don’t make it, don’t share it, don’t view it,” lead sponsor Rep. Josh Schriver, R-Oxford, wrote on social media, alongside a call to add porn distributors to the sex offender registry. He said the measure was a tool to “defend children” and “safeguard our communities.”

    The bill flies in the face of the U.S. Supreme Court’s long-held position that pornography is protected under the First Amendment unless it meets a narrow definition of obscenity. 

    Schriver is also among the Republicans who condemned negative remarks about conservative activist Charlie Kirk after he was fatally shot in Utah on Sept. 10. But many of those remarks just pointed out that Kirk stoked divisions and inflamed tensions across the country with racist, misogynistic, and homophobic rhetoric. 

    “The celebration of this assassination is an encouragement for more,” Schriver said in a newsletter Monday, urging the government to “raid online networks to end pipelines of violence.” 

    That rhetoric is at odds with his own remarks a year ago, when he declared in a newsletter, “No Michigan resident should fear jail time or criminal charges for exercising their 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech.”

    Schriver previously lost his committee assignments after promoting the white nationalist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.

    On Tuesday, Republicans in the House passed a bill that would criminalize protesting in the street without a permit. Blocking traffic, which is currently a civil infraction, would become a misdemeanor punishable by jail time and fines. 

    During the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020, Republicans said they were expressing their First Amendment rights when they jammed the streets in Lansing and ignored stay-at-home orders. They claimed Democrats were the enemies of free speech. 

    After the assassination of a Democratic state lawmaker in Minnesota and the wounding of another, Michigan Republicans were largely quiet, even when it was discovered that the shooting suspect Vance Boelter created a hit list for six Michigan Democrats. 

    By contrast, when Michigan Republicans claimed President Donald Trump was in danger of political violence, they introduced a bill in May that would criminalize the phrase “8647,” which they claim is a coded call for Trump’s assassination. 

    In reality, the number “86” is commonly meant to expel or discard, like removing a drunk person from a bar, while “47” is a reference to Trump’s role as the 47th president.

    In the case of Rep. Matt Maddock, who co-sponsored both the porn ban and the “8647” bill, the contradictions are even more glaring. He has repeatedly cast himself as a free speech defender and filed a First Amendment lawsuit against Democratic leaders earlier this year for rejecting the use of tax dollars for political mailers. 

    Just a day before Kirk was shot, Maddock introduced a “free speech bill” aimed at protecting conservative student journalists from censorship. 

    “Suppression of conservative free speech is under constant attack and ridicule by the left in schools,” he wrote on X. “This protects free speech and allows students to bring civil action against the suppressor.”

    Maddock also said Kirk “embodied the best of the 1st Amendment.” 

    But the Milford Republican has also sponsored proposals that would muzzle others. In 2021, he introduced the “Fact Checker Registration Act,” which would have forced fact-checkers to register with the state and post $1 million bonds. Democrats and others called it an affront to free speech. 

    At a fundraiser last year for the Trump “fake electors,” who included Maddock’s wife Meshawn Maddock, the lawmaker unleashed his own incendiary rhetoric, warning that the prosecutions of Republicans could lead to bloodshed. 

    “Someone’s going to get so pissed off, they’re going to shoot someone,” he said after claiming Democrats were communists. “That’s what’s going to happen. Or we’re going to have a civil war or some sort of revolution. That’s where this is going. And when that happens, we’re going to get squashed. The people here are going to be the first ones to go.”

    The extent of Republicans’ concerns for speech and violence shift based on the situation. After Kirk’s death, Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist and Sen. Jeremy Moss, both Democrats, faced death threats and bomb scares. GOP voices were largely silent.

    But when people said Kirk’s hateful rhetoric helped fuel the violence that claimed his life, Republicans sought to silence their free speech, either through legislation or calling for their firings.  

    Their self-described loyalty to the U.S. Constitution also oscillates. Rep. Joseph Fox, another Republican sponsor of the porn ban, pushed a bill in 2023 requiring schools to teach that America was founded on “Christian ethics,” a measure Democrats said clearly violates the separation of church and state. 

    Rep. Jennifer Wortz, also a co-sponsor of the anti-porn bill, was called “a staunch free speech advocate” when she was endorsed last year by Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by political activist David Koch.

    Republicans also have a pattern of dismissing gun violence until one of their own is killed. It’s usually “thoughts and prayers” when children are gunned down in schools. But after Kirk was killed, Republicans demanded new laws to crack down on speech they dislike and turned their ire on liberals, instead of the man who pulled the trigger.  

    The national party is no different. Seizing on the fear, anger, and division, Trump said Wednesday he plans to designate the anti-facism group Antifa “a terrorist organization,” even though he pardoned about 1,500 people convicted for their role in the violent Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Two of the most violent groups that day were the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, far-right extremist organizations that have long histories of violence and intimidation. Their leaders were convicted of trying to overthrow the government through force. 

    Trump’s attorney general Pam Bondi recently said the administration would “go after” so-called hate speech, only to backtrack when pressed about First Amendment limits. Outside the White House on Tuesday, Trump was asked by ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl about Bondi’s plan to “go after hate speech.”

    Trump responded, “We’ll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they’ll come after ABC.”

    Speaking of ABC, the network on Wednesday indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show following comments he made about Kirk’s killing, including that “many in MAGA land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk.”

    He’s not wrong.


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    Steve Neavling

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  • Did you ask the FCC if you can make that joke?

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    Jimmy Kimmel pulled off the air: Yesterday evening, ABC News (a subsidiary of Disney) announced it was suspending comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show “indefinitely” following factually inaccurate comments he made about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

    Of course, comedians have no obligation to be factually correct. Kimmel’s show is intended as a hybrid between comedy and news, though, so it’s fair to wonder whether he does. “The MAGA Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” said Kimmel during his Monday night monologue. “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.” A montage of President Donald Trump followed, making fun of how, though people have claimed Kirk was like a son to the president, he’s moved on rather quickly.

    It wasn’t especially good or funny. It also was somewhat anodyne. To overly psychologize for a moment, I wonder whether Trump pivoted to talking about construction at the White House when reporters asked him about Kirk’s death because he is, in fact, distraught about it but didn’t feel up to going there. We can’t know. Kimmel’s shot felt cheap. But Kimmel is allowed to be bad—he’s been bad for a while.

    The issue is that Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Brendan Carr suggested the agency might punish ABC, pulling its broadcast license in retribution. On conservative Benny Johnson’s podcast, Carr suggested Kimmel’s comments were part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people,” and that the FCC was “going to have remedies that we can look at.”

    “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” said Carr, ominously. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the F.C.C. ahead.”

    “Just before ABC’s announcement, Nexstar Media Group said that its stations that are affiliated with ABC would pre-empt Kimmel’s show ‘for the foreseeable future beginning with tonight’s show,’” reports CNBC. Nexstar, which owns 10 percent of ABC’s affiliate stations, is in the process of securing FCC approval for a $6.2 billion merger with Tegna, which owns roughly 5 percent of the affiliate stations.

    “Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED,” wrote the president on Truth Social. “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!”

    Courage sure is an interesting word choice, given that Trump’s own agency threatened them with consequences (though he’s not wrong if we’re solely judging him as a media critic).

    “I don’t think this is a legal issue,” said former federal prosecutor Joseph Moreno on CNN. “I don’t think this can be pointed to the FCC or the Trump administration and say, well, this is about them going after Kimmel because of what he said. Personally, I think it’s more of a cultural issue. And I got to tell you. I’m about as moderate a Republican as you can get. I’m from New York. I have not been comfortable watching late-night television for 15 years because when you have conservative leanings and you’re constantly mocked and you’re constantly feel like you’re doing something wrong, you shut it off. You don’t watch it anymore.”

    Some people have made the point that the FCC might have given Disney/ABC cover to do something they already wanted to do, and do it in a way that makes the Trump administration look like the bad guys:

    I also think this point is very fair, which is that this didn’t start yesterday. If you haven’t noticed the extraordinary media jawboning—indirect censorial pressure directed at private companies from the federal government—over the last few years, you haven’t been paying much attention:

    “The government pressured ABC—and ABC caved,” wrote Ari Cohn of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “The timing of ABC’s decision, on the heels of the FCC chairman’s pledge to the network to ‘do this the easy way or the hard way,’ tells the whole story. Another media outlet withered under government pressure, ensuring that the administration will continue to extort and exact retribution on broadcasters and publishers who criticize it. We cannot be a country where late night talk show hosts serve at the pleasure of the president. But until institutions grow a backbone and learn to resist government pressure, that is the country we are.”

    Cohn makes a good point, both that this is the direct result of government coercion that is wrong and disturbing, and that these institutions should not be in the business of caving. It’s disturbing to see massive law firms, media outlets, and organizations that should have some amount of fuck-you money choose the path of cowardice. But given that Disney has been interested in fighting the government before (albeit in a different context), the fact that they weren’t willing to do so this time makes me think maybe Kimmel was already a goner.

    Jawboning done so explicitly, so publicly, serves to intimidate other networks and generate compliance. But jawboning done by the Biden administration, during the COVID-19 pandemic (both to suppress public health information and to promote Democratic candidates and bury scandals), possibly disturbs me more, because it was covert, hard to uncover and to see the full extent of. I can’t decide; both are horrible. No matter which party’s in power, you get government coercion—you just get the privilege of deciding which flavor.

    Scenes from New York: “A Long Island cop swindled a sick fellow officer out of $200,000 with claims of business investment—but instead blew the cash on OnlyFans, gambling and luxury living like a new car, prosecutors said,” reports The New York Post. “Nassau County police officer Leonard Cagno, 39, allegedly duped his colleague out of the cash as he recovered from an unnamed serious illness then blew it all within two months, cops said Wednesday as he was slapped with a grand larceny charge.”

    QUICK HITS

    • For a contrast in how comedy can be dealt with, consider Charlie Kirk’s reaction to being parodied on South Park.
    • The right-wing take on all this, from Lomez, which I don’t agree is aspirational but I think identifies the problem and describes the MAGA mindset quite well:

    “We are finally seeing the first real consequences of major institutions having spent the last decade undermining the facade of liberal neutrality they at least used to claim as an ideal. This facade actually mattered quite a lot, and even though it was obviously never entirely sincere and even though conservatives were always out numbered and often poorly represented, they at least felt like participants and stakeholders in these institutions. During the Trump years this all went away. Conservatives were aggressively ousted, even as token voices, and the facade came down to reveal a perverse and illiberal set of political and cultural directives underneath it that were explicitly antagonistic to more than half of the country and denied them as legitimate participants in public life. Despite this, MAGA won (again), and, surprise, surprise, do not intend on preserving the institutions that declared them illegitimate political actors. This is, in fact, MAGA’s core promise.”

    • “An immigration judge in Louisiana has ordered pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the U.S., deported to Syria or Algeria for failing to disclose certain information on his green card application, according to documents filed in federal court Wednesday by his lawyers,” reports Politico. “Khalil’s lawyers suggested in a filing that they intend to appeal the deportation order, but expressed concern that the appeal process will likely be swift and unfavorable.”
    • “America loves cocaine again,” by The Wall Street Journal. “Cocaine sold in the U.S. is cheaper and as pure as ever for retail buyers. Consumption in the western U.S. has increased 154% since 2019 and is up 19% during the same period in the eastern part of the country, according to the drug-testing company Millennium Health. In contrast, fentanyl use in the U.S. began to drop in mid-2023 and has been declining since, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

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    Liz Wolfe

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  • Trump says he’ll designate antifa as a terrorist group but offers few details

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    President Donald Trump said early Thursday that he plans to designate antifa as a “major terrorist organization.”Antifa, short for “anti-fascists,” is an umbrella term for far-left-leaning militant groups and is not a singular entity. They consist of groups that resist fascists and neo-Nazis, especially at demonstrations.It’s unclear how the administration would label what is effectively a decentralized movement as a terrorist organization, and the White House on Wednesday did not immediately offer more details.Trump, who is on a state visit to the United Kingdom, made the announcement in a social media post shortly before 1:30 a.m. Thursday local time. He called antifa a “SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER.” He also said he will be “strongly recommending” that funders of antifa be investigated.Antifa is a domestic entity and, as such, is not a candidate for inclusion on the State Department’s list of foreign terror organizations. Dozens of groups, including extremist organizations like the Islamic State and al-Qaida, are included on that list. The designation matters in part because it enables the Justice Department to prosecute those who give material support to entities on that list even if that support does not result in violence.There is no domestic equivalent to that list in part because of broad First Amendment protections enjoyed by organizations operating within the United States. And despite periodic calls, particularly after mass shootings by white supremacists, to establish a domestic terrorism law, no singular statute now exists.In an exchange with reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump said he would pursue a domestic terrorism designation for antifa if such a move had the support of Attorney General Pam Bondi and others in his Cabinet.“It’s something I would do, yeah,” Trump said. ”I would do that 100%. Antifa is terrible.”Wednesday night, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., praised Trump’s announcement, saying: “Antifa seized upon a movement of legitimate grievances to promote violence and anarchy, working against justice for all. The President is right to recognize the destructive role of Antifa by designating them domestic terrorists.” In July 2019, Cassidy and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, introduced a resolution in the Senate to condemn the violent acts of antifa and to designate the group a domestic terror organization.In 2020, in the midst of the George Floyd protests, Trump also raised the idea of designating antifa as a terror organization.Trump’s previous FBI director, Christopher Wray, said in testimony that year that antifa is an ideology, not an organization, lacking the hierarchical structure that would usually allow it to be designated as a terror group by the federal government.

    WASHINGTON —

    President Donald Trump said early Thursday that he plans to designate antifa as a “major terrorist organization.”

    Antifa, short for “anti-fascists,” is an umbrella term for far-left-leaning militant groups and is not a singular entity. They consist of groups that resist fascists and neo-Nazis, especially at demonstrations.

    It’s unclear how the administration would label what is effectively a decentralized movement as a terrorist organization, and the White House on Wednesday did not immediately offer more details.

    Trump, who is on a state visit to the United Kingdom, made the announcement in a social media post shortly before 1:30 a.m. Thursday local time. He called antifa a “SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER.” He also said he will be “strongly recommending” that funders of antifa be investigated.

    Antifa is a domestic entity and, as such, is not a candidate for inclusion on the State Department’s list of foreign terror organizations. Dozens of groups, including extremist organizations like the Islamic State and al-Qaida, are included on that list. The designation matters in part because it enables the Justice Department to prosecute those who give material support to entities on that list even if that support does not result in violence.

    There is no domestic equivalent to that list in part because of broad First Amendment protections enjoyed by organizations operating within the United States. And despite periodic calls, particularly after mass shootings by white supremacists, to establish a domestic terrorism law, no singular statute now exists.

    In an exchange with reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump said he would pursue a domestic terrorism designation for antifa if such a move had the support of Attorney General Pam Bondi and others in his Cabinet.

    “It’s something I would do, yeah,” Trump said. ”I would do that 100%. Antifa is terrible.”

    Wednesday night, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., praised Trump’s announcement, saying: “Antifa seized upon a movement of legitimate grievances to promote violence and anarchy, working against justice for all. The President is right to recognize the destructive role of Antifa by designating them domestic terrorists.” In July 2019, Cassidy and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, introduced a resolution in the Senate to condemn the violent acts of antifa and to designate the group a domestic terror organization.

    In 2020, in the midst of the George Floyd protests, Trump also raised the idea of designating antifa as a terror organization.

    Trump’s previous FBI director, Christopher Wray, said in testimony that year that antifa is an ideology, not an organization, lacking the hierarchical structure that would usually allow it to be designated as a terror group by the federal government.

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  • ‘The free market is handling it just fine’: How left and right responded to Charlie Kirk’s murder

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    The assassination of Charlie Kirk is reorienting the policies of the conservative movement, with major Trump administration leaders such as Vice President J.D. Vance and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller vowing to launch a vast crackdown on left-wing groups that they say are implicitly responsible for inspiring political violence. Some members of the conservative movement are also conducting a campaign of mass cancellation against people who have justified the murder of Kirk on social media.

    In the latest episode of Free Media, I discussed with Amber Duke the responses to Kirk’s shocking death from conservatives, the Trump administration, and the mainstream media—as well as our own personal reactions. For her part, Duke was understandably dismayed by the sheer number of people she saw on social media who seemed to approve of Kirk’s demise.

    “It’s very disheartening, because I obviously shared a lot of Charlie’s views, as did many people in the conservative movement,” says Duke. “To know so many average people would celebrate our death if that happened to us is quite terrifying.”

    Duke said that while she didn’t think people should be canceled for merely criticizing Kirk, people who evince support for his assassination are in a separate category; this is materially different from the kinds of cancellations spearheaded by woke progressives, she says.

    While I agreed that I’ve seen far too many pro-murder takes from random and obscure people, I noted that the response from major figures, including people who clearly did not agree with Kirk, was overwhelmingly to condemn the violence as appalling. I also questioned whether it was fair to blame the infrastructure of the left—activist groups, wealthy liberal donors, academia—for the actions of a lone figure who does not seem particularly connected to any broader movement.

    “It was online radicalism, not brainwashed by a professor, or brainwashed by George Soros,” I say. “There’s a kind of, maybe conspiratorial thinking is too unfair, but it’s, ‘They’re out to get you…the billionaires are out to get you.’ That sounds itself like leftist thinking. This person was radicalized by his peer group online, probably.”

    Duke and I definitely agreed, however, on the foolishness of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s response to the tragedy, which was to vow to take legal action against so-called hate speech.

    “She just used the left’s favorite turn of phrase to criminalize free speech,” says Duke. “We don’t need the DOJ to arrest people for not celebrating Charlie Kirk. The free market is handling it just fine.”

    Watch the full episode here, and subscribe to both the ReasonTV and Free Media YouTube channels.

     

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    Robby Soave

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  • The perverse incentives for snitch-tagging teachers who criticized Charlie Kirk

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    It’s often said that the First Amendment exists to protect unpopular speech. Benign comments about the weather or statements in support of things everyone already likes aren’t likely to be the subject of government censorship.

    In the case of First Amendment protections for government workers’ off-the-job speech, this dynamic is reversed.

    Public employees have robust protections against being fired for such speech, unless it proves exceptionally unpopular.

    This feature of First Amendment jurisprudence, and the bad incentives it creates for cancel culture campaigns, is on full display following the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk last week.

    In the wake of the conservative influencer’s murder, a lot of people said unkind, uncharitable, and even obscene things about the man, including, in some cases, explicit praise for his assassination.

    In a country where some 22 million civilians are employed by the government, the pool of people who’ve made nasty comments about Kirk naturally includes some public sector workers.

    Public school teachers seem to be overrepresented in this demographic. They’ve become a specific target of conservatives’ cancelation campaigns.

    Unlike most private employees who can be fired at will, government employees have robust protections against being fired for their off-the-job speech.

    As Eugene Volokh detailed in a post at The Volokh Conspiracy shortly after Kirk’s death, government employees can only be disciplined for their speech when that speech is said as part of their job duties, the speech is not a matter of public concern, and the damage of the speech to the government’s own ability to do its job is outweighed by the benefit of the speech.

    Volokh stresses that these protections even cover comments supporting violence, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Rankin v. McPherson, in which a majority of justices ruled that a police department employee’s firing for praising the Ronald Reagan assassination in a private conversation violated the First Amendment.

    The facts of that case would seem to offer a pretty close parallel to public school teachers who praised Kirk’s assassination on social media. Their speech was not made on the job, and speech about Kirk’s assassination is obviously a matter of public concern.

    At first blush, this would suggest that even government employees who explicitly praised Kirk’s assassination have First Amendment protections against being fired for that speech, however distasteful.

    Whether or not they can, in fact, be fired turns on how much their comments disrupt government operations.

    Consequently, the more outrage that can be directed at a particular public worker’s employer, and the more of a headache retaining that worker becomes as a result, the less the First Amendment will protect them from losing their job.

    That creates a powerful, toxic incentive to gin up anger at individual government workers as a means of erasing First Amendment protections they have for off-the-job speech.

    Organic outrage about a public employee’s private statements from people who heard them directly and have to interface with that person is one thing.

    In the case of comments made on social media, people who would never have to deal with a government worker can see their intemperate thoughts and use them to get them fired.

    This encourages Kirk’s supporters to actively go hunting for comments they find offensive. The harm created by those statements becomes almost self-inflicted.

    It’s hard to imagine a better recipe for creating cancel culture mobs.

    Over at National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes that “the critique of cancel culture wasn’t intended to protect all speech from normative judgment, but to preserve the necessary space for democratic deliberation and contestation.”

    Professionally penalizing people for reveling in Kirk’s assassination, he argues, is distinct from going after people for merely expressing a negative view of him.

    That’s a reasonable distinction to draw. But it misses the fact that cancel culture pile-ons are not particularly discerning once they get going. Already, we’re seeing efforts to identify people who literally celebrated Kirk’s death morph into efforts to get people fired for merely posting something critical about him.

    Kirk’s online defenders have snitch-tagged the employers of government workers over social media posts saying they don’t care about the assassination, that they didn’t like Kirk even as they condemn his assassination, and even criticizing Kirk prior to his assassination.

    With enough online outrage, even relatively benign critical comments could potentially become firing offenses.

    This is particularly concerning given that government officials themselves are urging people to be outraged.

    “So, when you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out and, hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility,” said Vice President J.D. Vance while guest-hosting Charlie Kirk’s podcast yesterday.

    Texas’ education commissioner has encouraged school superintendents to report teachers’ “inappropriate comments” to state officials, as have the top education officials in Florida and Oklahoma.

    There’s always been the thicker critique of cancel culture made by folks like Reason‘s Robby Soave, who condemned efforts to go hunting for the worst comments made by nonpublic figures in the heat of the moment to their small social media followings.

    It makes for a less vindictive world and more robust discourse when we can agree to avoid massive pile-ons of even repugnant comments made in that context.

    Kirk was undoubtedly a polarizing figure. The strong feelings, both negative and positive, that he elicited in people are one reason his murder has become such a huge public conversation.

    It’s inevitable in that context that some people will say intemperate, mean-spirited things about the man.

    It’s foolish to trust online snitch-taggers to be judicious in determining who they’re going to try to get fired, particularly when the more outrage they can generate serves to route around First Amendment protections for government workers’ speech.

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    Christian Britschgi

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  • Federal judge upholds Hamtramck’s Pride flag ban, dismisses lawsuit

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    Viola Klocko

    Someone waves a Pride flag in front of Hamtramck City Hall.

    A federal judge on Monday upheld Hamtramck’s ban on flying Pride flags on city property, dismissing a lawsuit that argued the restriction was unconstitutional.

    U.S. District Judge David M. Lawson said the city’s flagpoles are reserved for government speech, not a public forum for residents.

    In his 12-page opinion, Lawson ruled against Hamtramck Human Relations Commission members Russ Gordon and Cathy Stackpoole, both of whom filed the lawsuit in November 2023. In an act of defiance, Gordon and Stackpoole displayed a Pride flag on public property on Joseph Campau Avenue on July 9. Two days later, the city council removed the pair from the commission.

    As a matter of law, the plaintiffs’ claims under the First and Fourteenth Amendments fail, the judge ruled, saying the “well-settled rule that government speech in a nonpublic forum is not subject to First Amendment regulation.”

    The ruling is a victory for mayor Amer Ghalib and Hamtramck’s all-Muslim city council, which in June 2023 unanimously adopted a “flag neutrality” ordinance allowing only government and national flags to be displayed on public poles. Although the resolution barred religious, political, and ethnic flags, it was widely understood to target the Pride flag after months of heated debate in the city, where more than half of the residents are believed to be Muslim.

    In their lawsuit, Gordon and Stackpoole argued the flag ban violated their free speech and equal protection rights.

    “It is unconstitutional for the government to select what speech will be permitted, and what speech will be prohibited, based on the content or viewpoint of the message conveyed by the speech,” the lawsuit alleged.

    But Lawson rejected that argument, holding that Hamtramck was entitled to close the flagpoles to private expression and reclaim them “for government speech.”

    “The First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause does not prevent the government from declining to express a view,” the judge wrote.

    Lawson also dismissed claims that the ordinance favored religion or discriminated against LGBTQ+ residents, noting that the resolution only authorized American, Michigan, Hamtramck, and Prisoner of War flags, along with flags of nations reflecting the city’s international character.

    Police remove an LGBTQ+ Pride flag in Hamtramck. - Viola Klocko

    Viola Klocko

    Police remove an LGBTQ+ Pride flag in Hamtramck.

    “No such transparent motive to advance religiosity is patent in the resolution entered here, which did not endorse the flying of any banner representing any religious sect or creed, and where the roster of flags prescribed consists exclusively of secular standards of local, state, national, and international entities,” Lawson wrote.

    City attorney Odey K. Meroueh said the decision vindicated the city’s policy.

    “Today’s ruling confirms that Hamtramck has the right to decide what it communicates on its own property,” Meroueh said in a written statement. “The Court’s decision vindicates Mayor Amer Ghalib and the City Council for adopting a neutral policy that treats every group and every viewpoint the same. The plaintiffs were removed from their appointed seats on the Human Relations Commission because they knowingly violated a valid rule while acting in their official roles. This case was about neutral rules, fair enforcement, and responsible city governance, not about suppressing anyone’s speech.”

    The case highlights a growing cultural clash in Hamtramck, where conservative Muslims have teamed up with right-wing groups opposing LGBTQ+ rights. Since the 2023 ban, residents have reported vandalism of Pride flags on private property and growing hostility toward LGBTQ+ people.

    The ordinance reversed a 2021 council vote that allowed the Pride flag to fly outside City Hall. That decision was one of the final acts of then-Mayor Karen Majewski, who lost reelection after Ghalib campaigned against the flag policy.

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    Steve Neavling

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  • Trump hits ABC, NBC as ‘FAKE NEWS,’ says he’d support FCC revoking licenses

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    NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

    President Trump went on a late-night attack against NBC and ABC News on Sunday, deriding them for what, in his view, was “biased” coverage and said he would be in favor of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) revoking their licenses. 

    The Republican president said the news outlets had given him negative coverage on “97%” of stories. 

    It wasn’t clear from where Trump was citing the “97%” figure. A study released earlier this year by the conservative media watchdog group, Media Research Center (MRC), found that coverage of the president’s first 100 days in office was “92% negative.” 

    “IF THAT IS THE CASE,” Trump wrote in his characteristic use of all caps, “THEY ARE SIMPLY AN ARM OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND SHOULD, ACCORDING TO MANY HAVE THEIR LICENSES REVOKED.” 

    BROADCAST BIAS: NETWORKS SNOOZE AS TOP BIDEN AIDES TAKE THE FIFTH ON BIDEN-DECLINE SCANDAL

    President Donald Trump, in foreground, listens to a question from a reporter as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich, from left, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth look on in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Monday, Aug. 11, 2025, in Washington.  (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

    Trump said he would be “totally in favor” of the move because – according to him – these outlets are “so biased and untruthful, an actual threat to our Democracy.” 

    The president followed up with another post attacking both outlets as “FAKE NEWS” and “two of the absolute worst and most biased networks anywhere in the world.” 

    TRUMP TAKES AIM AT CNN AND NEW YORK TIMES OVER IRAN STRIKE COVERAGE, BUT JOURNALISTS ARE SHRUGGING

    Trump questioned why both entities aren’t “paying Millions of Dollars a year in LICENSE FEES.” 

    NBC News sign

    A logo of NBC News.  (REUTERS/Mike Segar)

    “They should lose their Licenses for their unfair coverage of Republicans and/or Conservatives, but at a minimum, they should pay up BIG for having the privilege of using the most valuable airwaves anywhere at anytime!!!” Trump wrote. “Crooked ‘journalism’ should not be rewarded, it should be terminated!!!” 

    Fox News Digital has reached out to both ABC and NBC News for a response to Trump’s posts. 

    Being national networks, ABC and NBC News do not hold FCC licenses for news content but provide programming for local affiliates across the country – which are regulated by the FCC and require licensing to operate in the U.S. 

    TRUMP THRASHES CNN AS ‘GUTLESS LOSERS’ FOR COVERAGE OF US STRIKES ON IRAN

    TV stations pay fees and annual regulatory fees based on station type and market, while cable outlets pay their own regulatory fees. Only congress has the authority to impose and collect such fees, which are deposited in the U.S. Treasury. 

    Any move to revoke licenses based on real or perceived news bias would run afoul of First Amendment protections. Similar attempts in the past have been struck down by the courts. 

    ABC building

    A corporate logo for the ABC television network hangs on the side of their corporate headquarters on April 17, 2024, in New York City.  (Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)

    This is not the first time Trump has attacked broadcast outlets or threatened to strip their licenses. Last year, Trump settled a defamation suit against ABC for $15 million, and he famously hosted “The Apprentice” on NBC before entering the world of politics. 

    CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

    And earlier this year, Paramount Global and CBS agreed to pay out a settlement over the president’s election interference lawsuit against the network. 

    Fox News Digital’s Brian Flood contributed to this report. 

    Bradford Betz is a Fox News Digital breaking reporter covering crime, political issues, and much more. 

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  • ACLU sues Vail over Indigenous artist’s canceled residency – The Cannabist

    ACLU sues Vail over Indigenous artist’s canceled residency – The Cannabist

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    The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado is suing the town of Vail over its dismissal of artist Danielle SeeWalker from an artist-in-residence program, following an April complaint about SeeWalker’s past work.

    The suit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court, states that the town violated SeeWalker’s First Amendment rights in canceling her residency over political reasons before she’d even painted a single brushstroke.

    “… SeeWalker’s free speech rights under the federal and state constitutions were violated when the town of Vail abruptly canceled her residency after she expressed her personal views on the war in Gaza on her social media page,” according to an ACLU of Colorado statement.

    Read the rest of this story on TheKnow.DenverPost.com.

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    John Wenzel

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  • Prosecutor declines to charge Wayne State protesters arrested during pro-Palestine demonstration

    Prosecutor declines to charge Wayne State protesters arrested during pro-Palestine demonstration

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    click to enlarge

    Steve Neavling

    Wayne State University police arrested several pro-Palestinian activists on Thursday morning.

    Pro-Palestinian protesters who were arrested after setting up an encampment at Wayne State University will not face criminal charges, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy announced Monday, saying the activists were exercising their First Amendment rights.

    “The right to peacefully protest and demonstrate is deeply woven into the American fabric,” Worthy said in a statement. “The WCPO has thoroughly studied and examined these cases and we have determined that they do not rise to the level of criminal behavior. We will also be asking that the tickets issued to some of the protesters be dismissed.”

    The students were arrested on May 30, the same morning that police tore down the pro-Palestinian encampment.

    Police requested charges against five people who were arrested during the protest, which was organized by the group Students for Justice on Palestine. Worthy said her office reviewed body-worn camera footage from seven officers and determined there was not enough evidence to support criminal charges.

    But that doesn’t mean the students are off the hook. On Sept. 12, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel charged 11 people involved in a similar encampment at the University of Michigan after the Washtenaw County Prosecutor’s Office declined to file charges.

    The WSU protest escalated when university cops tore down an encampment and then confronted protesters who were on a public sidewalk.

    At 6:30 a.m., a 22-year-old student was singled out by officers for using a bullhorn as she marched with the crowd. According to the prosecutor’s review, an officer grabbed her from behind, holding onto her bag and jacket, before other officers assisted in taking her to the ground. The student was arrested and charged with trespassing, even though the protest was taking place in an area near the College of Engineering, where protesters had been advised they were allowed to demonstrate.

    While officers were arresting the student, a 53-year-old woman, identified as her mother, tried to intervene, exclaiming, “That’s my daughter!” She was also arrested and charged with trespassing.

    In a related incident, a 19-year-old student, who attempted to hold on to the 53-year-old woman, was arrested, and her hijab was dislodged during the arrest. She was also charged with trespassing.

    “There is insufficient evidence to prove that the three women committed the crime of trespass,” the prosecutor’s office said.

    In a separate incident at 8:15 a.m. on Merrick Street, WSU cops alleged that a 20-year-old woman was cursing at officers while filming them with her phone. It was further claimed that she struck an officer’s shield while gesturing with her arm, which led to her arrest for assault. However, the review of the footage showed that while she was gesturing, she did not make contact with the shield. Prosecutors concluded that no crime had occurred and declined to charge the woman.

    During her arrest, a 24-year-old male protester intervened, attempting to pull her away from police. He was pushed to the ground by officers, and when he stiffened his arms to resist handcuffing, he was arrested for resisting and obstructing an officer. However, the review found that his actions did not rise to the level of a criminal offense, as he was aiding a woman who had not committed a crime.

    Other protesters were issued tickets during the protest, but the prosecutor’s office announced that those citations will also be dismissed.

    In a statement, Worthy emphasized the importance of the right to peaceful protest, but reiterated that violence or non-peaceful behavior will not be tolerated.

    “I want to make it exceedingly clear that this office will not ever tolerate protesters that engage in behavior that is not peaceful or turns violent in any way,” Worthy said. “But that is not present in these cases.”

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    Steve Neavling

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  • AG Nessel charges 11 over pro-Palestinian demonstrations at University of Michigan

    AG Nessel charges 11 over pro-Palestinian demonstrations at University of Michigan

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    Doug Coombe

    A collective of student groups that calls itself the Tahrir Coalition organized a protest encampment on the University of Michigan Diag with the aim of convincing officials to divest $6 billion from companies tied to Israel.

    Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Thursday that she is filing criminal charges against nine people involved in a pro-Palestinian protest encampment at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

    Most of those charged are alumni and students who refused to vacate the encampment on May 21 after police ordered them to leave.

    In addition, two people, including a U-M alumnus, have been charged for separate incidents during a counter-protest on April 25. One is charged with disturbing the peace and attempted ethnic intimidation, while the other faces charges of malicious destruction of personal property for allegedly breaking and discarding protestors’ flags.

    Two people have been charged with trespassing, a misdemeanor punishable by up to 30 days in jail, for refusing to leave the encampment after repeated lawful orders.

    An additional seven people face charges of trespassing and resisting or obstructing a police officer, a felony punishable by up to two years in prison. These charges are reserved for those who allegedly made physical contact with officers or obstructed arrests.

    The charges follow an extensive examination of evidence that included body-worn camera footage, police reports, communications between university officials and local authorities, and various university policies and bylaws. The Solicitor General Division also evaluated all charges for potential First Amendment violations.

    Following the review, the Attorney General’s Office declined to prosecute protesters involved in two specific incidents: the Honors Convocation on March 25 at Hill Auditorium and the protest outside the University of Michigan Museum of Art on April 22. However, the investigation into incidents at the homes of U-M Regents remains ongoing.

    The charges announced Thursday stem from protest activities on the Diag, a central park area on the U-M campus, where demonstrators established an encampment in April. The encampment, which grew to approximately 60 tents, raised significant safety concerns, including fire hazards and blocked egress paths, according to the U-M fire marshal. Despite multiple meetings between university officials and student liaisons, the encampment remained in place, prompting the university to request police assistance to clear the area.

    At 5:38 a.m. on May 21, police issued a dispersal order, giving demonstrators 10 minutes to vacate the area. When the order was ignored, police moved in, encountering resistance from several demonstrators who placed and threw objects to block the officers’ path, according to Nessel. During the operation, some demonstrators physically obstructed the police.

    But protesters countered that police used excessive force. Officers dressed in riot gear used batons and pepper spray to drive protesters back from the encampment before tossing tents, supplies, and students’ belongings into trash containers.

    A similar clash occurred at an encampment at Wayne State University in Detroit on May 30.

    “There were dozens of demonstrators in this encampment that morning who promptly obeyed the officers on the scene and dispersed,” Nessel said. “For those who did not, trespassing is a 30-day misdemeanor. In this case, we charged only those who made an effort to impede the officers clearing the encampment. Resisting or Obstructing is a much more serious offense, and for the seven demonstrators we have charged with that felony, we allege that every one of them physically placed their hands or bodies against police who were conducting their duty to clear the hazardous encampment, or physically obstructed an arrest.”

    Nessel emphasized that while the right to free speech and assembly is protected under the First Amendment, illegal activities will not be tolerated.

    “Conviction in your ideals is not an excuse for violations of the law,” Nessel said. “A campus should not be lawless; what is a crime anywhere else in the city remains a crime on university property.”

    Charges were filed Wednesday in 15th District Court in Washtenaw County, though none of the defendants have yet been arraigned, as of Thursday morning.

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    Steve Neavling

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