​The United Kingdom, birthplace of free speech, is still showing a disturbing trend towards censorship. Look no further than the heated debate over the UK’s grooming gangs, cabals of vile criminals that exploit young women. Though it has become unfashionable to voice basic facts in Britain, the truth is that 83 percent of defendants prosecuted for group-based child sexual exploitation had Muslim names.
 
That’s unfortunate, but true. And we need to be able to talk about it.
 
The Public Order Act of 1986 made it a statutory offense to use threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behavior, or to display any writing, sign, or other visible representation that is threatening, abusive, or insulting. In 2019, then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn ushered in the adoption of a form of such threatening speech – “Islamophobia,” which is “a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”
 
How far did the law go? In 2006, an Oxford man put that law to the test when he was arrested for calling a police horse “gay.” The absurdity of this and similar cases led to Parliament removing “insult” as a crime. But you can still be arrested in Britain for saying “the wrong thing” – or the right thing if you are factual. As Sadanand Dhume points out in the Wall Street Journal, even talking about Islamic men committing crimes is considered jumping on the “far-right bandwagon,” and is thus threatened as forbidden speech.
 
This is nonsense on stilts, designed to shut down discussion of any community with a minority of adults who are creating a problem. We cannot address the reality of, say, America’s Klu Klux Klan without implicating the minority of white men who join that organization. We should not pretend that immigrant- or ethnic-based criminal organizations, whether La Cosa Nostra or the Russian mob, don’t have an ethnic basis. And it is a fact that more than 1,400 girls in the town of Rotherham in Northern England were sexually exploited by a group of British men who were mostly of Pakistani descent.
 
Speaking about this should not be a crime. Yet one father of an abused girl was arrested by the police when he tried to persuade his daughter to leave a brothel. Another was forcefully told by local law enforcement to quiet down about his daughter’s abuse, or else he might cause the community to “erupt.”
 
At the red-hot center of controversy is Elon Musk, who used X to criticize Prime Minister Kier Starmer in harsh terms for his purported failure to fully investigate and prosecute these crimes when he served as the UK’s director of public prosecutions. This prompted UK Justice Minister Heidi Alexander to talk about strengthening sanctions against “misleading and inflammatory statements” in the Online Safety Act, which goes fully into effect this year.
 
Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Reform movement, said Musk had used "very tough terms” about Prime Minister Starmer, but that: “In public life, tough things get said. They get said by both sides of the debate.” Farage said he believed in free speech:
 
“… even if what people say is offensive, if you find it offensive, if most people find it offensive. This man [Musk] happens to be the richest man in the world, but equally, the fact that he’s bought Twitter now actually gives us a place where we can have a proper open debate about many things … We may find it offensive, but it's a good thing, not a bad thing.”
 
In the United States Mark Zuckerberg has recently ended fact-checking by Facebook’s resident arbiters of “truth.” But in London, Prime Minister Starmer seems poised to go for more linguistic crackdowns. One outsider’s perspective in the New Indian Times accurately described the situation:
 
“Many social media videos show British police arresting people holding anti-Hamas placards while violent protestors calling for the death of Jews march free on the roads. British woke culture has a lot to answer for.” 
 
Perhaps Labourites need to break out their Milton. The poet declared: “Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”

​When Linda McMahon, President Trump’s nominee to be Education Secretary, arrives at the Senate for her upcoming confirmation hearing, she will be the prospective leader of a paradigm shift in how America’s children are taught.
 
President Trump made this clear on Thursday by directing the Secretaries of Education and Labor to review their discretionary grant programs and submit plans to “expand education freedom for America’s families and teachers.”
 
If confirmed as Secretary, McMahon will issue guidance to states on how to use federal funds for school choice. Other agencies, from the Department of Defense to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Department of Health and Human Services will also look to repurpose block grants to “expand educational choice.”
 
This is a bold move that puts existing federal grants behind the exploding school choice movement. Twelve states have recently adopted some form of universal school choice. Texas appears poised to become the next sometime this year.
 
Now, thanks to this brisk action by the Trump Administration, existing funding will be redirected to bolster educational competition. Though the president’s actions were denounced by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers “as a direct attack” on public schools, the evidence says otherwise. Out of 28 studies that explored the causal relationship between school choice and the performance of public schools, 25 found that school choice improves educational attainment in traditional school systems.
 
School choice fulfills the promise of the First Amendment by allowing parents to exercise their right to extend their values across generations. Competition brings out the best in all of us. Now federal agencies will be competing to be the best in realizing the president’s school choice vision.

​Operator: “Bias hotline.”
 
Puck: “I’d like to report three men who are making remarks that denigrate people’s identities. Some of their remarks have to do with race, some with religion, some with personal characteristics.”
 
Operator: “There are three of them? Are they some kind of gang?”
 
Puck: “Yes, three, obviously some kind of extremist organization, and they are making these remarks in front of large crowds of drunk, jeering people who egg them on.”
 
Operator: “That’s terrible. Do you know who they are?”
 
Puck: “I do. Their names are Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, and Bill Burr.”
 
Operator: “Can you spell those for me?”
 
At first, we at Protect The 1st didn’t believe it. There are a lot of unsubstantiated allegations floating around; this had to be another crazy internet rumor. The idea that blue states, where more than 100 million Americans live, are operating snitch lines to keep records of unsubstantiated accusations of jokes or remarks that are alleged to show bias had to be an internet myth.
 
It just couldn’t be true, we thought. Surely we are not so far gone from the spirit and letter of the First Amendment that our government is taking down anonymous accusations of bad speech.
 
And yet here we are.
 
California, Illinois, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont are running “bias reporting hotlines” that people can call and report bad or hateful speech. Washington State is preparing to launch its own hotline soon.
 
Like many rotten ideas, the bias hotline started out with a commendable concern. Some high schools and then colleges had hotlines through which students who felt bullied could turn for confidential reporting. In America today, however, no good idea goes unperverted. Once adopted by colleges and universities, the bias hotline morphed into an all-purpose receptacle for anything anyone didn’t like.
 
For example, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) reports that a “bias incident report” at the University of California, San Diego, was written up about a student humor publication that satirized “safe spaces.”
 
The bias incident hotline concept then migrated to the states, latching on to legitimate hate crimes hotlines, to include offensive jokes or “imitating someone’s cultural norm or practices.” So we went from reporting hate “crimes,” to reporting vague infractions of anything offensive. So much so that in states like Vermont the police are now keeping faithful records of people accused of making statements that are “biased but protected speech.”
 
Why? In some states, authorities can reach out to the purported offender and urge them to seek counseling. In Oregon, self-reported “victims” of “non-crime hate incidents” can receive public assistance for therapy, security cameras, and even ask the state to pay their rent.
 
The worst aspect of these hotlines is that they are easily weaponized. They give a perfect opportunity for an aggrieved person to snitch on their landlord, ex-lover, or the barista who forgot their skim latte order.
 
Worse, the definition of bias – even hate speech itself – is inherently subjective. It is vague enough to encompass the inoffensive, the tasteless, and the despicable. Yet even what reasonable people would agree is hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. That doesn’t make it okay. But it does make it legal.
 
Consider: While the three comedians’ routines are often borderline, they are used to hold up a mirror to society. And they are worth protecting because Chappelle, Rock, and Burr are funny, edging their comedy with humility and humanity. Of course, genuine hate speech is real. But no government agency can change hearts and minds. Only culture, faith, community, and a little bit of public shaming every now and then can do that.
 
But sending authorities to someone’s house to tell them to tone down their language is a recipe for inspiring more hate speech. And dispatching someone with a gun and a badge to police speech, even if no arrests are made, threatens to create a national speech nanny like the one emerging in the United Kingdom.
 
Why don’t these states get this? “If it is not a crime, we sometimes contact the offending party and try to do training so that it doesn’t happen again,” Saterria Kersey, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, told The Washington Free Beacon.
 
We say if it’s not a crime, the authorities have no business poking their noses into it. And hey, Saterria, you sound like a nice person. Please give us your home address. We’d love to swing by your house and share our take on the First Amendment.
 
Or not: After we re-read that last paragraph again, it sounded vaguely threatening. We certainly didn’t mean it that way, we swear! But that’s the point.

​The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond to determine whether it violates the Free Exercise Clause to deny state funds to an online Catholic school solely because of their religious character. This is the latest in a string of cases in which the Court has had to push back on states’ unequal treatment of religious schools. It is also an opportunity to functionally invalidate the unconstitutional Blaine Amendments that litter many state constitutions. Above all, it is a chance for parents to reaffirm their right to choose schools that align with their values.
 
The Oklahoma Supreme Court ordered the state’s Charter School Board to rescind a contract with the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa to establish St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. According to the court, the Board’s approval of public funding for a sectarian school violated the Oklahoma Constitution, the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act, and the Establishment Clause. As we wrote at the time, the opinion is “buttoned down, logical, and eminently overturnable,” relying on “that state’s version of a Blaine Amendment, a movement that gathered momentum when American politics was infected with anti-Catholic bigotry.”
 
Blaine Amendments in 37 states prohibit public funding for schools run by religious organizations. They were passed in an era when Catholics faced wanton discrimination in a largely Protestant America. Doubts as to their unconstitutionality were raised by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Espinoza v. Montana (2020), which found that state-based scholarship programs providing public funds for students to attend private schools cannot discriminate against religious schools under the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause. The Court, quite specifically, took the Blaine Amendments to the woodshed, writing that they were “born of bigotry.”  
 
Congress should end the revolving door of state defiance of clear judicial precedent by overriding the Blaine Amendments and reiterating that Espinoza and the similarly reasoned Carson v. Makin meant what they said and remain the law. The Court has plenty of reasons to overturn the Oklahoma ruling. Oklahoma Justice Dana Kuehn’s dissenting opinion spells them out:
 
“St. Isidore would not become a ‘state actor’ merely by contracting with the State to provide a choice in educational opportunities. By allowing St. Isidore to operate a virtual charter school, the State would not be establishing, aiding, or favoring any particular religious organization. To the contrary: Excluding private entities from contracting for functions, based solely on religious affiliation, would violate the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.”
 
Further, Judge Kuehn wrote:
 
“Contracting with a private entity that has religious affiliations, by itself, does not establish a State religion, nor does it favor one religion over another. Allowing St. Isidore to operate a charter school does not give it any preference over any other qualified entity, sectarian or otherwise.”
 
The Constitution’s prohibition of an established religion does not diminish the free exercise of religion. Religious schools must be free to apply for state funding to the extent that they meet mandated standards in English, math, history, science, and other subjects. Such allowances, in turn, will give more parents the opportunity to choose schools that reflect their values, the ultimate expression of the First Amendment.
 
We agree with Gov. Kevin Stitt, who said:
 
“This stands to be one of the most significant religious and education freedom decisions in our lifetime. I believe our nation’s highest court will agree that denying St. Isidore’s charter based solely on its religious affiliation is flat-out unconstitutional.”
 
Stay tuned.

​The city of Bryan, Ohio, last week successfully prosecuted a local pastor for keeping the doors of his church open for the homeless overnight during minus-5-degree weather.
 
The guilty party is Pastor Chris Avell of Dad’s Place, a church that offers free haircuts and a “warming center” in cold weather for homeless people. The city conducted seven surprise fire-code inspections of the church, before leveling 18 criminal charges against the pastor in a local court.
 
With help from the First Liberty Institute, Pastor Avell is appealing to the federal Sixth Circuit, which has issued a stay. In a filing, Avell describes rough treatment by the city. He learned about the charges against him from a local newspaper. Bryan officials chose to serve the criminal complaints against the pastor in front of his congregation on a Sunday morning just before services began.
 
The city’s case is not without substantive claims. The city charges Dad’s Place with violating municipal fire and safety codes, including blocked exits, electrical outlets that need to be reinstalled, and a lack of a fire suppression system. Defenders of Dad’s Place say that the church in the town center has been targeted and harassed to enforce a widespread not-in-my-back-yard attitude toward the homeless.
 
“Only government officials could say with a straight face that people are safer in the sub-zero temperatures on the street than inside the warmth of a church,” said Ryan Gardner, counsel for First Liberty, which represents Pastor Avell.
 
On the surface, this case appears to be a dispute about enforcing zoning ordinances. But Dad’s Place raises serious issues with the guarantee of free religious exercise under the First Amendment as well as the Ohio Constitution. It also implicates the guarantees of the Religious Land Use and Institutional Persons Act, which among other things mandates strict scrutiny when houses of worship are targeted by zoning laws.
 
Pastor Avell can present a strong case that Dad’s Place is a victim of targeted enforcement of the zoning code and pretextual enforcement of the fire code. But at the core of his case is a lack of appreciation by local and state governments that the charitable function of a church is integral to its practice of religion. In a similar vein, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to decide Catholic Charities v. Wisconsin, in which state bureaucrats decided that charitable activities a diocese has provided for a century to the disabled, the elderly and the poor are not part of the church’s exercise of religion.
 
In Christianity – as in all other major world religions – caring for the outcast, the poor, and the helpless is not a hobby, or a side venture. It is the very practice of – the soul, if you will – of religion. The Sixth Circuit should recognize this. And if it doesn’t, perhaps the Supreme Court will.

​King Henry II, after having his royal prerogatives blocked time and again by the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas à Becket, blurted out “will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?”
 
Some Republicans felt the same when President Trump and his family attended an Episcopal service the other day. The president was subjected to a sermon by Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of Washington, D.C., who appealed to the new president to “have mercy on the people who are scared now,” including immigrants, refugees, and sexual minorities.
 
President Trump himself took it all in stride (and with a comeback tweet or two). This was all in keeping for a president who had just decisively defended free speech in his inaugural address and then bolstered it hours later with an executive order. But at least one prominent critic of Bishop Budde had a different response. He asked that the bishop be put on the “deportation list.”
 
It would be right and fair to come back at the bishop with some substantive riposte, as the president did. But the Right Rev. Budde, as an American citizen born in New Jersey, cannot – and must not – ever be considered for deportation because of how she chooses to exercise her First Amendment rights. For an American citizen, a threat of deportation is never a good joke.
 
Critics should keep in mind that overreaction tends to valorize rather than intimidate. After King Henry’s call, several followers overreacted to the king’s frustration by drawing their swords and killing Archbishop Becket at the altar.
 
This, of course, led to Becket becoming a saint.

“If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country,” Donald Trump declared in a campaign speech. “When I am president, this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large.”
 
Now President Donald Trump has taken a strong step toward fulfilling that promise. We urge him to continue his defense of free speech by protecting another part of the First Amendment, a free press, by supporting the PRESS Act.
 
But first, let’s celebrate this welcome recognition for the central place of the First Amendment in American life. In his inaugural address, President Trump denounced “illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression.” He said “never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.”
 
Hours later President Trump issued an executive order that begins by denouncing government trampling of “free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.”
 
The executive order declares: “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.” We certainly agree and look forward to such practices ending under the current and all future administrations.
 
Congress prepared the president’s way by defunding the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) that distributed blacklists of American publications to advertisers. The GEC had coordinated in secret with the FBI, CIA, and the rest of the alphabet to collect content government agents found objectionable, then issued threats to social media companies to censor those views.
 
The GEC shuttered its operation before the beginning of the year. Better to quit than wait around to be fired.
 
The president’s executive order now forbids any officer, employee, or agent to engage in or facilitate any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen. The use of the word “agent” is a shrewd choice, since it would cover groups like the UK-based NGO Global Disinformation Index, which received direct State Department grants to compile that enemies list of U.S. publications, including RealClearPolitics, Reason, and The New York Post. This prohibition should stand against any administration’s future violation of these principles.
 
The next order of business, we respectfully suggest, is for President Trump to extend and enforce the Justice Department News Media policy that prevents the government from seizing the notes and sources of journalists. For similar reasons, this is also the moment for President Trump to announce his support for the Protect Reporters from Exploitive State Spying (PRESS) Act, which was passed by a Republican House last year and essentially codifies the Department’s policy.
 
Rule-making is not enough and won’t bind the next administration. Consider: outgoing Attorney General Merrick Garland first formalized the Justice Department’s News Media Policy, forbidding compulsory legal processes to obtain the newsgathering records of journalists in 2022. But this rule did not deter the FBI from raiding the Tampa home of journalist Tim Burke the following year to seize his computer, hard drives, cellphone and all they contain.
 
Clearly, a mere departmental rule is not enough to keep the FBI and some in the Department of Justice from interfering in journalism, just as the GEC interfered with free speech in social media. Surely President Trump appreciates the courageous reporters who revealed IRS persecution of conservative non-profits, the highly politicized FBI investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016, and the truth behind the Hunter Biden laptop. Many of President Trump’s media allies – small, thinly funded independent journalists – have a lot to fear from federal agents pawing through their personal effects.
 
Such protections extend to Donald Trump’s media critics as well as his media fans. That is the essence of free speech. And supporting those measures would be a courageous example for Donald Trump to set and in keeping with his pledge to end the weaponization of the power of the state, whether against him and his supporters, or against his own political opponents.
 
We can’t think of another president who came to the defense of the First Amendment in his inaugural address and then followed up on it with an executive order just hours later. We respectfully suggest that President Trump’s support for the PRESS Act would be a great addition to this legacy.

​How much scrutiny must a court apply to a Texas law that requires porn sites to use age verification procedures or technology to prevent minors from accessing pornography?
 
What are the security and reputational risks for adults who upload their IDs or submit to biometric analysis?
 
How can such a law be squared, if it can be, with the First Amendment and past precedent?
 
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments about Texas law H.B. 1181, which requires some media platforms that display sexual material to age-gate some or all of their site to verify that all users are 18 years of age or older.
 
Erik Jaffe, Protect The 1st Policy Director, in this lively Federalist Society webinar, breaks down the oral argument, the issues, and the precedents the Court must now consider.

WATCH HERE:

​Today we celebrate Religious Freedom Day, 2025, the anniversary of The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson’s model for the First Amendment’s guarantee of the “free exercise” of religion. In our era, the danger to religious liberty comes not from those who would establish a theocracy for their denomination or religion, but from those who would use state power to scale back the right of Americans to engage in the free exercise of their beliefs.
 
We should heed the words of Jefferson, who as governor of Virginia disestablished the Church of England as his state’s “official” church and granted religious freedom to all Virginians. Jefferson’s proclamation denounces:
 
“The impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible[.]”
 
The U.S. Supreme Court is currently weighing whether to hear cases on the religious liberty rights of Americans at the hands of just such fallible civil officials. One case under consideration is Mahmoud v. Taylor, which concerns the rights of parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, to opt their children out of teachings about sexuality contrary to their religion. Another case, Apache Stronghold v. United States, seeks protection for the long-recognized sacred site of the Apaches in Arizona whose very existence is under threat by a mining company more concerned about profit than about the Apaches’ religious beliefs. Courts have also had to deal with the state of Maine, which continues to defy the plain language of Supreme Court precedent by isolating and defunding religious schools.
 
Every year on this day, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty releases its “Religious Freedom Index,” assessing the degree to which religious liberty is respected nationally. The news here is heartening. While bureaucrats and officials try to narrow the scope of religious liberty, a solid and growing majority of Americans understand and support religious liberty for all. In 2024, Becket’s index, based on 21 questions put to a representative sample of 1,000 Americans, revealed its highest level of support for religious freedom ever.
 
Becket’s findings include the following:

• 75 percent of Americans accept and support the freedom for people to choose a religion – up nearly 20 points since 2020.

 

• 80 percent of Americans completely or mostly support the freedom for people to run their business or private organizations according to their religious beliefs. Some 78 percent believe that this freedom is an essential or important part of religious freedom – a seven-point increase since 2020.

 

• 70 percent of Americans oppose requiring objecting religious nonprofits to cover abortions for their employees.

 

• There is strong support – 77 percent – for parental opt-outs from instruction on sexuality, as parents are seeking in the Mahmoud case

 
Most interesting of all, even Gen Z’s support for religious freedom is growing. Becket’s survey also finds that a plurality of Americans looks first to the courts to safeguard religious freedom over state governments, Congress, and even the president. This confidence will only be bolstered if the U.S. Supreme Court decides to take up both Mahmoud and Apache.
 
As Thomas Jefferson put it, “Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself.”

​Joe Rogan’s recent interview of Mark Zuckerberg was a bro-fest, complete with discussions of the joys of hunting, Nordic curls, and ju-jitsu. The CEO of Meta also recounted how he got boiled by degrees in giving in to the demands of government agencies and the Biden Administration in censoring content.
 
“They pushed us super hard to take down things that honestly were true. Right? I mean they basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take them down. And I was like, we’re not gonna do that …”
 
Zuckerberg pointed to the voluminous report by Chairman Jim Jordan of the Judiciary Committee documenting the government’s efforts to manipulate content. The committee’s analysis and the government’s documents show the reality of government “jawboning” on social media.
 
“I mean basically these people from the Biden Administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse,” Zuckerberg said. “They want[ed] us to take down this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV talking about how 10 years from now or something, you know, we’re going to see an ad that says, okay, if you took a COVID vaccine, you’re eligible … for this kind of payment, like, some sort of like class action lawsuit type meme. And they’re like, ‘no. You have to take that down.’ We’re not gonna take down humor and satire. We’re not going to take down things that are true.”
 
When Meta resisted some of the persistent demands of the government to remove content, Zuckerberg notes that President Biden in a 2021 press conference accused social media companies of “killing people.” The Federal Trade Commission launched antitrust lawsuits and investigations against Facebook and a number of other big social media outlets. Zuckerberg said, “all these different agencies and branches of government basically just started investigating, coming after our company. And it was brutal.”
 
Any suggestion that jawboning by officials at the White House and in the agencies was purely a matter of advice should be laid to rest by the Judiciary Committee’s analysis and postings, as well as Zuckerberg’s description of being on the receiving end of this treatment. As Zuckerberg said, “you can’t censor that if it’s real legitimate information because it’s not ideologically convenient for you.”

​Does an inaccurate poll constitute consumer fraud? That’s the question at issue in an Iowa lawsuit in which President-elect Donald Trump is taking pollster J. Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register to court for a pre-election poll indicating a slight Harris advantage in the Hawkeye State. This late bit of news in the election buoyed the Democrats and sent a ripple of worry through the Republican camp. And for good reason – late campaign news like that has the potential to affect turnout.
 
It is easy to see why Donald Trump is miffed – he won Iowa by 13.2 percent, a landslide.
 
Selzer is a Des Moines-based pollster once described as “the best pollster in politics” by FiveThirtyEight, which also awarded her company an A+ for accuracy. In both 2016 and 2020, Selzer correctly predicted Trump’s Iowa victories. But polling is increasingly an inexact science (just ask FiveThirtyEight), and the prognosticators now get it wrong more often than not. Often very wrong. This is the new reality of polling in an age of social media and spam filters.
 
After the race, Selzer said she had made the “biggest miss of my career.” She publicly shared her poll’s crosstabs of demographic and attitudinal groups, as well as her methodology. This did not deter the lawsuit. Now, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has announced it will be defending the pollster. Is FIRE right to do so?
 
President-elect Trump alleges that Selzer is biased against him. While Selzer’s record would tend to disprove that, President-elect Trump is well within his rights to think so given how far off this poll was. The deeper question is: What if Selzer is biased against Donald Trump? Many polls on the left and right are considered more as expressions of political activism than as the kind of professional polling that Selzer does. Even if you buy the notion that Selzer is a partisan hack, however, the First Amendment would still protect her.
 
President-elect Trump’s argument is a legal square peg failing to fit a statutory round hole. His lawsuit asserts that Selzer violated the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, which requires the president-elect to “identify a fraudulent or deceptive statement ‘in connection with the advertisement, sale, or lease of consumer merchandise, or the solicitation of contributions for charitable purposes ...’”
 
Putting aside the obvious joke about a “bill of goods,” it’s readily apparent that Selzer’s poll had nothing to do with selling merchandise or soliciting contributions.
 
FIRE says that President-elect Trump’s lawsuit amounts to a “strategic lawsuit against public participation” (SLAPP). Such lawsuits, they say, “are filed purely for the purpose of imposing punishing litigation costs on perceived opponents, not because they have any merit or stand any chance of success.”
 
There is widespread bias across the media landscape, especially in unfair reporting about things Donald Trump has allegedly done or said. No question. But if we were to grant politicians power against media bias, perceived and real, that power would inevitably lead to the kind of official censorship that Donald Trump campaigned to end. After future elections, such a grant of power to politicians is guaranteed to end with results that Trump supporters will not like. Fox News could be targeted during Democratic administrations just as CBS could be targeted during Republican administrations.
 
Selzer, for her part, owned up to her bad call. She has been transparent, showing once again that sunlight remains the best disinfectant. We advise President-elect Trump to bask in the glory of winning the electoral college, the national popular vote, and Iowa – by a country mile.

​The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments Friday in TikTok v. Garland, setting the table for a quick ruling – or potentially even an administrative stay, although the Court has already denied such relief once – on the question of whether the government can force China’s ByteDance to divest its holdings in the popular social media platform.
 
Based on the line of questioning from the Justices, the Court seemed inclined to uphold the ban on national security grounds. Chief Justice John Roberts said that the law is “not a burden” on the speech rights of TikTok or its users. Rather, it targets “a foreign adversary … gathering all this information about the 170 million people who use TikTok.”
 
Justice Brett Kavanaugh expressed similar concerns over the future implications of allowing a foreign-owned corporation to gather data about platform users, information that could be used in the future “to turn people, to blackmail people – people who a generation from now will be working in the FBI or the CIA or in the State Department.”
 
Justice Elena Kagan questioned whether speech rights are relevant at all, noting that: “The law is only targeted at this foreign corporation, which doesn’t have First Amendment rights.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson seemed to agree, at one point suggesting the platform was “wrong” to rely on ByteDance’s putative speech rights. Freedom of association, Justice Jackson suggested, may be the more plausible legal basis for TikTok’s case.
 
It's never wise to predict where the Supreme Court will land based on questioning during oral arguments. Justices tend to lean into the devil’s advocate role, coming up with difficult questions and often esoteric extrapolations based on the fact patterns at play. Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch did just that, with the latter wondering if requiring warning labels about the dangers of foreign data manipulation would suffice to fill the role of “counter-speech” often cited as the best remedy for bad speech.
 
But this particular exercise felt a little more straightforward – possibly due to the abbreviated timeline in which the Justices must render a decision. The divestiture deadline for ByteDance is Jan. 19th – one day before Donald Trump’s inauguration.
 
The once-and-future president, for his part, has asked the Court to hit pause until after he takes office. According to a brief filed on his behalf, he seeks “a negotiated resolution that could prevent a nationwide shutdown of TikTok, thus preserving the First Amendment rights of tens of millions of Americans, while also addressing the government’s security concerns.” Many civil liberties organizations have expressed concern over the forced divestiture of a media platform. It is undeniably a drastic action. Yet the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found that the measure is the result of intense legislative debate in the service of the most compelling of government interests – national security.
 
It’s hard to argue with the national security assessments of Congress, and the high Court is historically loath to do so.
 
True, the Supreme Court might do what the incoming president wants and issue a stay, sidestepping the danger of a sweeping, potentially problematic precedent. Josh Blackman, in a post published on the Volokh Conspiracy, believes that is exactly what the Court will do, particularly given the law’s tight deadline.
 
Or the Justices might, as National Review’s Dan McLaughlin writes, rule narrowly on the national security issue. Taking a position on the connected issue on “covert manipulation” of TikTok’s newsfeed is a sticky wicket with serious implications for domestic platforms, too.
 
In any event, we likely won’t have to wait long to know the Court’s decision – and begin to parse its implications.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, announced the company will adopt X standards that reduce the number and grounds on restrictions on speakers and their speech. This new policy will be in effect across Facebook, Instagram, and Meta platforms. Meta will also end its third-party fact-checking program to focus more intently on removing content that is criminal or fraudulent.
 
Jonathan Turley, George Washington University law professor and author of The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, writes in RealClearPolitics:
 
“Around the world, free speech is in a free fall. Speech crimes and censorship have become the norm in the West. A new industry of ‘disinformation’ experts has commoditized censorship, making millions in the targeting and silencing of others. An anti-free speech culture has taken root in government, higher education, and the media … 
 
“For the free speech community, it [Zuckerberg’s announcement] was like the United States entering World War II to support Great Britain. Where [Elon] Musk stopped the progress of the global anti-free speech movement, Zuckerberg could actually help us regain ground around the world.”

​On Tuesday, the First Circuit Court of Appeals heard opening arguments in St. Dominic v. Makin, a case that challenges Maine’s renewed attempt to circumvent the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Carson v. Makin. That 2022 opinion should have settled the question of the participation of religious schools in secular programs. It prohibited the exclusion of religious schools from Maine’s tuition assistance program “on the basis of their religious exercise.” But now, Maine has chosen, as we have said before, to go full Confederate in nullifying the authority of the U.S. Supreme Court.
 
Here's the backstory: Maine has a tuition assistance program that for many years allowed parents to use government funds to send their children to the schools of their choice – whether religious or secular. Then, in 1981, the state began excluding religious institutions based on the conclusion that allowing such use violated the Establishment Clause. In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris in 2002, the Supreme Court found that this constitutional interpretation was incorrect.
 
Maine then adopted a new strategy, continuing its exclusionary policy towards religious schools based on the sectarian “use” to which any governments funds might go. Twenty years later, the Court ruled again, concluding that “the prohibition on status-based discrimination under the Free Exercise Clause is not a permission to engage in use-based discrimination.”
 
True to form, Maine pivoted again, this time amending the Maine Human Rights Act (MHRA) to explicitly condition the receipt of state funds by religious institutions on compliance with state non-discrimination policies. The new law’s effect is to ensure that a religious school cannot accept tuition assistance if its beliefs and practices conflict with the state’s take on gender issues like traditional marriage.
 
Under the new law, a religious school cannot express preference in admissions for students of that same religion – a condition that applies to Christian, Muslim, and Jewish schools. They must hire teachers whose views or lifestyles are inconsistent with school beliefs. And they must permit countervailing speech within school walls under a new “religious expression” rule that would require an allowance for “dissenting religious views” – even if those views completely undermine the school’s mission.
 
To borrow a quote from the Becket Fund, which represents the plaintiffs, this is a “poison pill” that continues the tuition exclusion in a different guise. Moreover, it’s an obstinate and cynical ploy that displays contempt for both the high Court and for the rule of law.
 
Maine’s maneuvering has real, harmful impacts on people like appellants Keith and Valori Radonis, who want only to send their children to a school that upholds their beliefs. As we’ve written about many times over, educating your children is among the most fundamental and consequential expressions of speech. Maine’s new policy puts the state squarely between families in need and their free exercise of religion and those beliefs.
 
As Becket explains in its opening brief, the new provisions are patently and quite obviously unconstitutional. First, they violate Carson “by simply re-enacting the same exclusionary practices in a different code section.” They “entangle Maine officials in judging the internal religious practices of religious schools ...” And they “violate the Free Speech Clause because they compel religious schools to speak in ways that are contrary to their beliefs and force them to include speakers who reject the schools’ core commitments.”
 
After Maine moved its exclusion policy to a different code section, one law professor wrote a piece in the New York Times entitled, “There’s a Way to Outmaneuver the Supreme Court, and Maine Has Found It.” Now, the state finds itself back in the principal’s office on the same issue with likely the same result. The First Circuit should find for the plaintiffs, upholding the First Amendment and the rule of law.

​On Jan. 10 the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in TikTok v. Garland to decide whether the First Amendment requires the Court to block the law requiring the social media platform to undergo a forced sale by its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or be shuttered.
 
Many civil liberties organizations have come to TikTok’s defense in recent months, making the point that if the government can silence one social media platform, it can close any media outlet, newspaper, website, or TV channel. And they are right that forcing a private media company to sell or go out of business is a drastic action usually associated with authoritarian rule.
 
President-elect Trump filed an amicus brief with the Court asking the Justices to stay the legislative deadline that falls on Jan. 19, one day before his inauguration. The incoming president wants to be free to negotiate a solution for TikTok that will not require the blunderbuss of a forced sale or closure. His brief seeks “a negotiated resolution that could prevent a nationwide shutdown of TikTok, thus preserving the First Amendment rights of tens of millions of Americans, while also addressing the government’s security concerns.”
 
The president-elect’s brief also contained a nod to the real danger in TikTok’s accumulation of the personal data of its 170 million American users, including 67 percent of U.S. teens. A year-long, bipartisan investigation in the House concluded that TikTok is being used by Beijing to spy on American citizens. The Senate agreed by voting for a bipartisan aid bill that included the “ban-or-sale” measure.
 
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the law as constitutional, concluding that the measure satisfied strict scrutiny due to the national security necessity of preventing China from secretly collecting the data of United States citizens (and covertly manipulating content, too). As one TikTok official said in a leaked communication, “Everything is seen by China.”
 
As we reported, TikTok also surveils journalists like Emily Baker-White from Forbes. Want a good way to chill speech in America? How about permitting an adversarial nation to spy on reporters and their sources? 
 
With such facts in mind, Judge Douglas Ginsburg, who wrote for the court, declared that the law does not violate the speech rights of users. Nor does it necessarily even curb disfavored speech. Judge Ginsburg wrote:
 
“Content on the platform could in principle remain unchanged after divestiture and people in the United States would remain free to read and share as much [People’s Republic of China] propaganda (or any other content) as they desire on TikTok or any other platform of their choosing.”
 
In short, the lower court has held that the First Amendment should not apply to the corporate subsidiary of a hostile foreign adversary. The D.C. Circuit suggests that since the measure is the narrowly tailored result of considered legislative processes in furtherance of a compelling government interest, it can be allowed.

The court understands that the government could never ban a media outlet for its content. But could it ban an online website that distributes foreign spyware on the computers of its readers? That’s not so far off from what so many have concluded is happening here. Yet forcing the sale or closure of a media outlet is an extreme measure for any democracy to take.
 
The Court will have much to consider. Stay tuned.

​On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit delivered a stinging rebuke to those who believe social media companies should be treated as common carriers. One of those true believers is Tim Wu, former Biden administration advisor and widely regarded as a thought leader of progressive policy. Wu wrote:
 
“Since its activation, the First Amendment has presupposed an information-poor world, and it focuses near-exclusively on the protection of speakers from government, as if they were rare and delicate butterflies threatened by one terrible monster.”
 
Wu’s quote, in which the monster is the government, comes from a 2018 Michigan Law Review piece entitled “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” In The New York Times more recently, Wu protests that “liberal as well as conservative judges and justices have extended the First Amendment to protect nearly everything that can be called ‘speech,’ regardless of its value or whether the speaker is a human or a corporation.”
 
The implication here, of course, is that we need smart regulators who can spot the difference between speech that has value, and that which should be discarded. Wu also seems to suggest that corporations – collections of humans that can range from ExxonMobil to the ACLU – shouldn’t have First Amendment rights at all.
 
More than anything, Wu’s conceit is that we should live under a noocracy (rule by the supposed wise, as attested to by their Ivy League degrees). Wu advocates reducing large social media companies to common carrier status, to be regulated by the government.
 
This is all relevant today because it was Wu who coined the term “net neutrality,” a set of rules adopted by the Federal Communications Commission to force all internet service providers to give all content in their pipeline the same priority. The Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati bought none of this when it struck down the FCC’s net neutrality rules.
 
The court’s reasoning was prosaic. Under Loper Bright, a recent Supreme Court opinion that limits (Chevron) deference to government agencies, such sweeping rule-making by the FCC would require authorization by Congress. Transforming social media companies into common carriers to be regulated like railroads or airlines is an act that must be rooted in a statute. Congress has passed no law authorizing common carrier status for social media companies or net neutrality.
 
But issues of grand principle were also protected by the Sixth Circuit. First, the court protected the financial model that incentivizes investors to fund companies like Verizon or Comcast to build out and maintain the national networks of fiber optic cable. Without this incentive, there would be no internet to regulate.
 
Second, and most important, if internet companies become common carriers, then the way in which they handle content can also be regulated. The FCC’s rules would have put speech itself in the hands of regulators. And then the one terrible monster truly would be destroying the butterflies.
 
Protect The 1st salutes the Sixth Circuit for a wise decision that protects speech from those who believe they know which speakers have “value” and which ones don’t.

​Texas is politically poised this year to become the last big red state to adopt a statewide public school choice program. Vince Bielski of RealClear Investigations surveyed the school choice movement in the aftermath of this development and reports that it is now ready to push into blue-state territory.
 
Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania is the Democrat most likely to break open the first cracks in the blue wall public teachers unions have erected against school choice. After being compelled to line-item veto a voucher proposal for low-income children, Gov. Shapiro called school choice “unfinished business.” Bielski reports:
 
“The fate of another voucher program [in Pennsylvania] may depend on whether a few Democrats are willing to break with House leadership and risk political payback, according to a veteran of Pennsylvania battles … ‘Governor Shapiro has a chance to deliver on his promise to expand educational opportunity for underserved children,’ said Tommy Schultz, CEO of the advocacy group American Federation for Children. ‘It will require bold leadership to bring House leadership to the table and get it done.’”
 
Opponents of school choice charge that vouchers for private schools will lead to two separate school systems, leading to the defunding of public schools. However, Bielski reports that such programs “have been restricted mainly to lower-income parents who may be dissatisfied with lax discipline and lackluster instruction – problems exacerbated by the pandemic – at their public schools. All told, private choice programs enroll only about 2% of all K-12 students.”
 
That number shows there is both room for competition to inspire improvement among public schools, and much more room for private school choice in states both red and blue.

Protect The 1st kicked off January with House passage of the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (PRESS) Act, which would establish a federal journalistic privilege to safeguard confidential news sources in legal proceedings, while offering reasonable exceptions for extreme situations.
 
This is not the first time the House has passed the PRESS Act. And it is not the first time the Senate has ignored the strong bipartisan support for shielding journalists and their sources from government intrusion. False concerns about the PRESS Act were raised at the 11th hour. When the 119th Congress gavels in on Jan. 3, it will mark another opportunity for advocates to push this commonsense legislation – which already exists in some form in 49 states – over the finish line. Protect The 1st will be advocating in public and on the Hill, supporting the PRESS Act every step of the way.
 
We saw movement on school choice, with the Educational Choice for Children Act favorably clearing the House Ways and Means Committee. It’s the furthest a school choice measure has ever made it in Congress. If passed, the bill would provide tax credits for charitable donations to Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) that support needy children, paving the way for millions of families to access better educational opportunities that align with their intergenerational, First Amendment-protected expression of their values and needs.
 
Federal progress on school choice mirrors the national, bipartisan movement. Since the pandemic, 12 states have passed some form of universal school choice, with Alabama and Louisiana joining the ranks this year. South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas are edging closer to adopting similar measures. With support for school choice at an all-time high – 76 percent of voters according to RealClear Opinion Research – we’re likely to see the issue gain even greater prominence in 2025.
 
In 2022, Protect The 1st ranked 6th in the nation for filing amicus briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2024, we kept up the momentum, commenting on or filing briefs in many critical First Amendment cases across the country.
 
In January, one such case was decided in favor of religious liberty: Young Israel of Tampa v. Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority (HART). The 11th Circuit found that HART’s policy prohibiting ads that “promote a religious faith or religious organization” was vague, reasoning that “HART’s policy, even if viewpoint neutral, is unreasonable due to a lack of objective and workable standards.”
 
In February, our Senior Legal Advisor Eugene Volokh filed a brief in X Corp. v. Bonta, opposing a California law that forced social media companies to disclose their content moderation practices. Volokh said the law’s “intent is to strongarm social media companies to restrict certain viewpoints – to combine law and public pressure to do something about how platforms treat those particular viewpoints, and not other viewpoints.” The Ninth Circuit accepted the reasoning in our brief, ruling that the California bill was “not narrowly tailored to serve the State’s purported goal of requiring social media companies to be transparent about their policies and practices.”
 
In May, we also filed an amicus brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in a pivotal case challenging Michigan’s Blaine Amendment, which prohibits state aid to private, religiously affiliated schools. Although the Supreme Court denied certiorari, we will continue to affirm the importance of educational choice and religious freedom, ensuring that all families have the right to educate their children in a manner consistent with their beliefs. In the meantime, Congress should kill state Blaine amendments – remnants of 19th century anti-Catholic sentiment – by enshrining recent Supreme Court precedents, Espinoza v. Montana and Carson v. Makin, into federal law.
 
We had more success on the issue of equal access to public funding in Loffman v. California Department of Education. The Ninth Circuit found that a California prohibition on distributing special education funds to religious schools violated the First Amendment.
 
The Supreme Court stayed busy this year, ruling on several critical First Amendment cases. Murthy v. Missouri could have been a major turning point in setting limits on government “jawboning” to pressure private actors like social media companies to restrict speech. Unfortunately, in this instance the Court punted, finding an insufficient connection between government action and the ultimate deplatforming decisions at issue.
 
On the other hand, the Court came through in a big way with NRA v. Vullo, where it found that a New York insurance regulator improperly coerced Lloyd’s of London to sever ties with that Second Amendment advocacy group. 
 
Debanking or otherwise deplatforming individuals or groups because of their beliefs remains a major threat to free speech; something we covered extensively this year. We also covered donor doxing, an increasingly common tactic in states that intimidate donors supporting a particular cause. As Chief Justice Roberts wrote in a 2021 repudiation of such a law in California, “compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may constitute as effective a restraint on free­dom of association as [other] forms of governmental action.”
 
2025 promises to be a busy year in protecting speech, religious expression, and other freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. We couldn’t do all that we do without you!