​Within the last week, two Members of Congress were physically assaulted in public settings – grim reminders that political violence in America is no longer hypothetical.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) was physically attacked on Tuesday during a town hall meeting by a man who used a syringe to squirt an unknown substance at her face. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) reported that on Friday he was punched in the face by a man at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

These attacks bring to mind House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), who was shot along with three other people at a congressional baseball game in the Washington, D.C., area, in 2017. Rep. Scalise almost died.

Rep. Omar’s assailant has been described by his brother in the media as a “right-wing extremist.” Rep. Frost’s attacker appeared to be drunk and reportedly mouthed racial slurs. Rep. Scalise’s attacker was a left-wing activist with a history of domestic violence.

When extremists and unstable people attack elected officials, there can be no room for equivocation. Political violence is not a protest, is not justifiable by passion, and it is most certainly not speech. It is the negation of speech.

The normalization of such behavior would be a profoundly dangerous trend. In 1856, after Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina used a walking cane to beat and almost kill Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Senate floor, fury spread among the citizens of those states. The assault was not dismissed as an isolated outburst. It was understood, rightly, as a symptom of a nation losing its ability to resolve moral and political disputes without force. The resulting embitterment helped spark the Civil War, a bloodletting that didn’t end until more than 600,000 Americans were dead.

We might admire or deplore a given Member of Congress. But we must remember that every Member has been chosen in an election in a district that typically includes more than 700,000 Americans. Any physical attack on a representative is therefore an attack on the represented.
​
Whenever we hear someone whose views strike us as blinkered, stupid, hypocritical, or radical to the left or to the right, the best solution is to take a deep breath and resolve to exercise our First Amendment rights.

A woman in Maine was using her cellphone on Friday to record the public actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
 
When one agent began taking pictures of her and her car, she said: “It’s not illegal to record.”
 
“Exactly, that’s what we’re doing,” the agent replied.
 
“So why are you taking my information down?” she asked him.
 
“Because we have a nice little database,” he replied. “And now you’re considered a domestic terrorist, so have fun with that."

This is consistent with a report by Ken Klippenstein on his independent news site that a federal law enforcement official told him that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has ordered immigration officers to collect information on anyone video-recording ICE agents at work. The official told Klippenstein that intelligence agents use this data to perform a “work-up” on targets that likely includes running their license plates and criminal history checks, and even analyzing their social media profiles.
 
Why is the federal government building intelligence files on Americans engaged in activity that is plainly protected by the First Amendment? Will Americans in this database suddenly find themselves facing legal restrictions, such as appearing on a “No Fly” list, barring them from air travel?
 
That would run counter to rulings by seven federal circuits that have recognized Americans’ “right to record” – the right to hold up a smartphone and make a video of law enforcement in action. One of those – the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals – noted that “recording police encounters creates information that contributes to discussion about governmental affairs.”
 
Yet DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said that “videotaping ICE law enforcement and posting photos and videos of them online” is a crime, and that “we will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law.”
 
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem seems to have a similar view. After the shooting of Renée Good, Noem connected her to  “domestic terrorism.” And McLaughlin labeled Alex Pretti – slain by agents after he filmed them – as also committing an “act of domestic terrorism.” 
 
Preemptively labeling Good and Pretti as terrorists when official investigations have hardly begun seems counterproductive. And the current administration would do well to remember the Biden Administration, which linked parents who got into heated discussions at school board meetings and “radical traditional Catholics” to “domestic terrorism.” Remember, too, that the Woodrow Wilson administration freely labeled Americans as “disloyal” and worse if they criticized America’s participation in World War I.
​
History has been unkind to every administration that has tried to stretch charged words like “terrorism” to cover lawful dissent. The Trump Administration would do well to make a clean break with these broad-brush depictions of Americans exercising their First Amendment rights. Let us hope that such a break will be part of President Trump’s recently announced “reset” of his administration’s immigration enforcement policy.

​Iran did not merely censor dissent last week. It turned off the lights on an entire nation.

In a recent post on X, Greg Lukianoff, a free speech lawyer and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), pointedly reminded defenders of liberty what the tumult in Iran represents:

“So, my international free-speech brethren: this is a big one. A tyrannical theocracy has shut down the internet for an entire country so the world can’t see the brutal tactics it plans to use to crush a free Iran. In my view, this is the biggest free-speech story in the world.”

Behind these drawn curtains, international observers believe that thousands of protesters were tortured and executed. Many U.S. commentators are asking why American college students, who so vigorously protested the human rights dimensions of Israel’s actions in Gaza, have been largely silent about Iran. This is a double standard in which Israel and other democracies are always fair game for severe criticism and protest, but tyrants, perhaps because they are expected to behave badly, get a free pass. (Not all campuses have been quiet. The Iranian Student Association of Northeastern University in Boston occupied the campus quad and chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho. Ayatollah must go.”)

Every American, not just college students, should be alarmed at the ease with which the Iranian regime cut off dissidents and protesters from the world. This incident shows how internet access has become the oxygen of safety and free speech. Shutting it down, like stepping on an oxygen tube, is an act of authoritarian aggression against people. As FIRE’s Sarah McLaughlin posted, with internet blackouts, the repression of information goes hand-in-hand with brutal violence:

“Iran isn’t just using brute force to escalate the crackdown on its people. It’s also deploying a repressive tactic that’s become increasingly common: suppression of the tools government critics use to broadcast their message on a mass scale. Authorities’ ultimate aim is to limit what their subjects can say – and what the rest of the world can know about it.”

And while Tehran is a repeat offender, it is by no means alone:

“Last year marked the most severe year yet for internet shutdowns, with researchers tracking nearly 300 disruptions and blackouts in dozens of nations. India, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Russia stood among the worst offenders.”

No doubt, Iran’s tyrants are deeply worried. Authoritarians, McLauglin points out, wouldn’t work so hard if they thought their populations were powerless. When they believe their people are cowed, they are happy to let them have their digital distractions.

What’s happening in the world’s dictatorships is also happening in democracies in quieter, more bureaucratic forms (see more on India). “The future of freedom depends on the internet,” writes McLaughlin. “We must start acting like it.”

That means recognizing internet access not just as a convenience or source of entertainment, but as a critical civic infrastructure – no less essential than open roads, courts, or elections. When governments claim the power to silence networks “temporarily,” they are asserting the power to disappear people permanently. Iran’s blackout is not a foreign aberration. It is a stress test – and one free societies should not assume they will pass by default.

​We didn’t hear church bells pealing on Jan. 16 after New York State sounded the retreat. Chalk it up to modesty.
 
After almost a decade of trying to force Catholic and Anglican nuns, and faith-based social ministries, to pay for abortion coverage, state officials finally surrendered to the reality that their demand violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of free religious expression. They dropped their case.
 
This victory only required these religious organizations to endure years of litigation that included two trips to the U.S. Supreme Court.
 
“For nearly a decade, New York bureaucrats tried to strong-arm nuns into paying for abortions because they serve all those in need,” said Lori Windham, senior counsel at Becket and an attorney for the religious groups. “At long last, the state has given up its disgraceful campaign. This victory confirms that the government cannot punish religious ministries for living out their faith by serving everyone.”
 
This case arose out of a New York law that included an abortion mandate for health care plans. Despite early promises that religious groups were exempt, New York reneged on its promised protections and extended the mandate to apply to religious groups that hire or serve people of other faiths.
 
In 2021, the Supreme Court remanded the case to lower courts, ordering them to reconsider it. After New York courts refused to follow Supreme Court guidance, these religious organizations had to return to the Supreme Court to ask it intervene.
 
In a similar case, the Court in 2025 ruled unanimously against Wisconsin bureaucrats, Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin. The Court held that the state had violated the First Amendment by denying a Catholic social ministry an exemption from state unemployment taxes. Wisconsin sought to force Catholic Charities to violate its beliefs by funding contraceptives and abortifacients.
 
“It is fundamental to our constitutional order that the government maintain ‘neutrality between religion and religion,’” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority. “There may be hard calls to make in policing that rule, but this is not one.”
 
This is relevant because Wisconsin’s theory resembled New York’s, declaring that if a charity serves people of other faiths, it must comply with the mandate. Taken literally, these states would have religious charities either abandon their beliefs about the sanctity of life or ask the needy about their religious beliefs and discriminate against those who are of other faiths or non-believers.
 
In remanding the Catholic Charities case, the Court included language that the “government cannot use schemes like New York’s to discriminate among religious people.” The Court thus held out New York as an example of what not to do. That undoubtedly convinced New York State to stop rowing toward yet another legal waterfall.
 
Will New Jersey and Pennsylvania get the message as well?
 
After also losing before the U.S. Supreme Court – twice! – these states are pressing a new theory to try to force the Catholic nuns of the Little Sisters of the Poor to comply with a federal contraception mandate. New Jersey and Pennsylvania offer a convoluted argument under which they are trying to compel the federal government to uphold an administrative requirement for groups to “self-certify” – even though the feds themselves hold that requirement to be “optional.”
 
Attempting to force expressive organizations – whether atheists or evangelicals – to violate their core beliefs is offensive to the Constitution. Yet some states remain Inspector Javert-like in their obsession with enforcing ideological conformity, even when the Supreme Court has told them to stand down.
 
It is time to cut it out.

​Take your mind back to October 7, 2023. Hamas fighters, amped up by amphetamines and toxic ideology, sprinted from Gaza into Israel. They massacred young concertgoers. They raped Israeli women. They slaughtered babies in their cribs and murdered children in front of their parents.
 
More than 1,200 Israeli civilians were killed.
 
Three days later, University of California, Davis, American Studies professor Jemma DeCristo reacted to that event with the above statement on X. For the obtuse who still didn’t get her point, DeCristo added emojis of a knife, an axe, and three giant drops of blood.
 
For obvious reasons, this post sparked outrage around the world. Unlike many similar posts, it didn’t seek to justify violence in a distant land. It called for doxing and murder – how else is one to interpret axes and blood? – against American journalists and their children. After a two-year investigation, the university last week decided not to fire DeCristo, accepting her argument that the post was meant to be “sarcastic.”
 
This story highlights many academic controversies, from rising antisemitism on the American campus to the capture of many departments by far-left ideologues (DeCristo is a self-described “anarchist”). For our part, we see this case as a Gordian knot of First Amendment issues.
 
For example, did DeCristo have a First Amendment right to post this?
 
It could be argued that since DeCristo called for violence against an identified group of Americans – journalists and their children – DeCristo’s post met the U.S. Supreme Court’s definition of speech likely to incite imminent lawless action. The saving grace is that no such violence occurred. If this post wasn’t incitement, however, it was right up against the line.
 
Another issue: Would U.C. Davis – which put a letter of censure in her file – have been within the parameters of the First Amendment if it had fired DeCristo?
 
While the “right of expressive association” is not explicitly articulated in the Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the right of expressive association is inherent in the First Amendment’s protection for free speech. Consider the impact on a group’s speech if the NAACP were forced to include the Klan in its leadership? Or the Freedom from Religion Foundation had to include clergy on its board?

Groups centered around a message have the right to set the terms of their membership and leadership, or else the integrity of their speech is destroyed. Perhaps the obverse of that principle is also correct. A First Amendment culture cannot thrive in the face of threats against people based on their race, religion, or gender. The U.C. Davis investigation confirmed that the post “injured members of the Jewish community, who felt scared, isolated, and angry to see this type of violent and hateful rhetoric from a U.C. Davis professor.” 

Professors enjoy wide latitude under the rubric of academic freedom. That is a good thing. But is that latitude infinitely elastic? U.C. Davis, as a public university, also has some degree of accountability to the California Legislature and the taxpayers of California. And it has a right to employ professors who convey respect for the values of tolerance and civility.  

One lesson should have been clear since 1956, when Autherine Lucy had to be driven from class to class by the dean of women at the University of Alabama while more than a thousand men screamed threats at her and pelted the car. Were they merely expressing their First Amendment rights through their rage at a Black woman who had the temerity to study at Alabama? If a professor had been among them, would he have been protected by the doctrine of academic freedom? 
​
Concerning the latter, we have to ask how vibrant the First Amendment can be in today’s academic monoculture. It is, for example, just and necessary to give students a full understanding of the ugly history of slavery in the United States. But shouldn’t students also know that if you scan world history – the empires of China, Persia, Greece, Rome, and ancient Mexico – you will not find another civilization waging a civil war against itself in order to eradicate slavery?
 
And yet the academic discipline to which DeCristo belongs literally seems to have nothing good to say about America, as detailed in a recent Wall Street Journal article by Richard Kahlengberg and Lief Lin entitled, “American Studies Can’t Stand Its Subject.” They found that of 96 articles in the flagship journal of the discipline, American Quarterly, 77 percent focused on American racism, imperialism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. Not a single positive article was found over a three-year period – not one about America’s dominance in Nobel Prizes, the defeat of Nazi Germany, or the moon landing.
 
The First Amendment won’t thrive if the academy succumbs to a crabbed, ideological, and frankly pathological view of America – now spiced by hatred of American Jews – with screeds crowding out scholarship. Nor will it be restored by the clumsy, top-down efforts of some in the current Administration to dictate instruction by fiat.
 
What is needed is a cultural shift back to open debate and curiosity. A good first step would be to redirect Jemma DeCristo’s salary to an earnest American Studies scholar who will challenge students with hard questions about our nation’s complex history and culture.

​The media has had a field day with indignant headlines over Texas A&M University forbidding the teaching of Plato – in a philosophy class! There must be an Aggie joke in there somewhere.

But underneath the headlines are some deeper issues worthy of discussion.

The Texas A&M University System’s Board of Regents voted in November to require professors to seek the approval of their campus presidents in advance for any courses that “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” They simultaneously prohibited faculty from teaching material inconsistent with a course’s approved syllabus.

Since Texas A&M is a public institution, it can be directed – or at least influenced – by public policy in a way that a private university cannot. The board was responding to the widespread conviction within the conservative majority in the Texas Legislature that “gender studies” is too ideological and crowds out serious studies with turgid, jargony papers.

But Plato is anything but turgid or jargony. The philosopher who invented the concept of academia had a lot to say about sex. The many facets of Plato’s discussion on eros provoke critical thinking, as it was meant to.

The proposed curricula included parts of Plato’s Symposium in which seven characters express varying views on sexuality. One speaker praises homosexuality as a way to create virtuous and courageous armies. Another extols the supposed benefits young males receive when having relations with older men. The drunken Alcibiades regrets that he couldn’t seduce the elderly, homely, Socrates.

Socrates, as usual, seems to speak for Plato when he turns from these earth-bound considerations to spiritual ones. He recounts a relationship he had as a young man with an older woman, Diotima. She taught him about the “ladder of love,” an escalation from physical attraction to a love of knowledge, ultimately to a sublime appreciation for Beauty. Socrates concludes by extolling the “pregnancy of the mind,” which gives birth to insights and virtue.

These passages would have also given Texas A&M students insights into Socrates’ unique take on eros as an invitation for the soul to climb the ladder of love. It certainly wouldn’t have corrupted them (leave that to the internet). Corruption of youth is the charge behind the sentence that resulted in Socrates drinking hemlock. Today, we just make the professor pull the course.

Texas legislators and leaders of the Texas A&M system alike should consider that their backlash is a mirror image of what they are reacting against. Is this action no less a betrayal of the First Amendment’s protection of the free expression of ideas than was the preceding, decades-long hostility towards conservative ideas (often disguised as “speech codes”)?

“This is what happens when the board of regents gives university bureaucrats veto power over academic content,” wrote Lindsie Rank of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “You don’t protect students by banning 2,400-year-old philosophy.”

If all of this strikes you (as it does us) as impinging on academic freedom, you’re not alone.

“That’s not education,” tweeted FIRE, “it’s risk management.” The purpose of higher education, from a First Amendment perspective, remains the opposite of that, namely intellectual risk taking. Should faculty follow their syllabi? Common sense requires that they do. But the content of those syllabi – by whom should that be governed?
​
After he founded the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson declared to his Enlightenment pen pal William Roscoe, “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

Will Smith sang of Miami, “the heat is on all night.” In Miami Beach, it’s on all day too, especially if one is brazen enough to criticize the mayor.

A couple of weeks ago, resident Raquel Pacheco left a hot comment on a Facebook post by Mayor Steven Meiner. The mayor had posted, “Miami Beach is a safe haven for everyone,” adding, “We will always stand firm against any discrimination.”

In response, Pacheco commented:

“The guy who consistently calls for the death of all Palestinians, tried to shut down a theater for showing a movie that hurt his feelings, and REFUSES to stand up for the LGBTQ community in any way (even leaves the room when they vote on related matters) wants you to know that you’re all welcome here.”

She then added three clown emojis.

Two police officers were soon dispatched to knock on her door. One of the officers was later identified in a photo taken at a residential campaign event for the mayor in October.

Both Pacheco and Meiner are Jewish, but they have very different views when it comes to Israel, culture, and politics. To be clear, Pacheco’s post was hyperbolic. The mayor has never called for the death of Palestinians. He did, however, attempt to break the city’s lease with a theater that was showing what he considered to be a film that contained anti-Israeli hate speech. As for LGBTQ issues, community reviews are far from glowing.

Pacheco’s comment and additional replies contained inaccuracies, sarcasm, and exaggeration. But nothing in it justified a police visit, which could be taken as a thinly disguised attempt at intimidation. Agree or disagree with her words, they strike us as a traditionally, and perhaps uniquely, American approach to political discourse – which is to say, rude –  yet guaranteed by an at-times inconvenient First Amendment. This isn’t Germany, after all, or the UK, where comedians are arrested for tasteless jokes.

Which leads us to wonder, was it the clown emojis that pushed the mayor and his team over the edge? We wouldn’t envy anyone the task of explaining emojis to James Madison and his fellow founders, but we feel confident they would recognize them as symbolic communication, the substance of all human language, and therefore something to be given a wide berth when confronted by thin-skinned authorities.

The only truly scary line uttered by anyone involved in this entire imbroglio came from one of the attending police officers. Whether speaking on behalf of his boss or not, he told Pacheco:

​“What we’re just trying to prevent is someone else getting agitated or agreeing with the statement.”

Send in the clowns.

On January 14, FBI agents raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson and seized her phone, two laptops, and a Garmin watch.

This story has brought the Privacy Protection Act (PPA) of 1980 back into focus. In theory, that law protects journalists from having their notes or “work product” seized unless they themselves are criminal suspects. And while the affidavit has yet to be unsealed, Natanson and The Post were told that they are not targets of the government’s probe. Yet clearly, she is being targeted as if she were a criminal. First Amendment watchdogs are understandably barking mad.

As Chris Cillizza recounts in his concise summation of recent history on the law and past raids on reporters, the PPA has inspired creative ways by administrations of both parties to circumvent it. The government doesn’t like it when a reporter knows more about a crime than the Department of Justice does. In such cases, what’s an administration to do? In the case of Fox News reporter James Rosen, Obama’s Justice Department in 2013 declared Rosen a co-conspirator with an actual criminal in order to confiscate that reporter’s notes. Then-Attorney General Eric Holder later admitted he never suspected Rosen of an actual crime.

To quote Cillizza, after the Obama Administration “stretched the rubber band” on First Amendment press protections, it “never went back.” The First Trump Administration stretched the rubber band some more. So did the Biden Administration. And now the second Trump Administration appears to be giving the method for getting around the law even more elasticity. Gabe Rottman of Reporters Committee has meticulously chronicled the long struggle between free press advocates and these successive administrations.

It is not a tale that inspires hope. Consider how the Department of Justice embraced an internal policy of protecting reporters, only to violate its own policy, then rescind it altogether.

As dysfunctional as the media may sometimes be, it still performs a vital role in national hygiene – bringing to light corruption and malfeasance in government. Time after time, we’ve seen administrations act under the banner of “national security,” when they are in fact seeking primarily to avoid political embarrassment.

This worsening trend in press freedom in recent years suggests that the Privacy Protection Act is an insufficient guarantor of journalistic rights. As aggressive and overreaching as Attorney General Bondi’s move against Natanson was, it is the logical continuation of the policies of the last four presidential administrations.
​
Only by passing the Protect Reporters from Exploitive State Spying (PRESS) Act – a genuine press shield law – will the feds respect the role of journalists in a First Amendment society.

​The conventional wisdom has long held that religion in America is steadily retreating from public life. Faith, we’re told, is becoming ever more private – something to be practiced quietly at home or in church, but kept out of schools, workplaces, and civic debates.

Becket’s newly released 2025 Religious Freedom Index tells a very different story.

According to the latest national polling, Americans’ support for religious liberty has reached an all-time high. The Index’s composite score climbed to 71 percent in 2025 – up from 2024 and five points higher than in 2020 – marking the strongest public backing for religious freedom since Becket began tracking attitudes. 

Even more striking is where that support is growing.

Faith Is Re-Entering the Public Square

One of the clearest trends in the 2025 data is a renewed confidence in public expressions of faith. Fifty-seven percent of Americans now agree that religious freedom is “inherently public,” meaning people should be free to share their beliefs at school, at work, and online – a five-point jump since 2020. 

That shift matters. It suggests Americans are pushing back against the idea that religious conviction must be hidden to be acceptable. Instead, they increasingly see faith as part of ordinary civic life – no more out of place than political views, cultural identity, or personal values.

At a moment when public discourse feels deeply fractured, this trend is unexpectedly unifying. Becket’s polling finds that support for religious liberty cuts across political, demographic, and generational lines, making it one of the few issues that still brings Americans together.

Parents’ Rights Are a Rallying Point

Nowhere is that unity clearer than on the question of parental rights in education.

Seventy-three percent of Americans support allowing parents to opt their children out of public-school curriculum they find objectionable – an increase of ten points since 2021.

That growing consensus mirrors recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions affirming that parents’ authority over their children’s moral and religious upbringing does not stop at the classroom door. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court required Montgomery County, Maryland to offer curriculum opt-outs, recognizing that parental rights extend into public education. Becket’s data shows that 62 percent of Americans agree with that ruling – a rare moment when public opinion, constitutional principle, and judicial decision align. 

The message is clear – parents expect the law to respect their role as the primary guardians of their children’s values.

Protecting the Sacred Still Matters

Another revealing result concerns one of the oldest religious practices in the Western world – the Catholic sacrament of confession.

Washington State enacted a law that would have forced priests to report anything they heard in confession related to abuse or neglect, effectively breaking the age-old seal of the confessional. This law made no sense as a law enforcement measure. In the confessional, a priest can urge a wrongdoer to turn himself in. Under this statute, the process of turning someone toward repentance and the law would be discouraged.

Becket challenged the law, and a federal court struck it down.

The poll shows that Americans overwhelmingly side with that outcome. The Index found strong support for protecting priests under the First Amendment in this context, affirming that even serious policy goals cannot justify trampling core religious practices.

This isn’t merely a Catholic issue. It reflects a broader public instinct that the government should not insert itself into sacred spaces – whether that’s a confessional, a synagogue, a mosque, or a prayer meeting.

School Choice Gains Ground

Colorado barred families from receiving state funding – available to most private schools – if they choose to send their children to Catholic schools. Americans also approve of the idea that when tax credits and funding are available for private schools, religious schools should be treated equitably. Three in four Americans now favor allowing public education funding to follow families who choose religious schools for their children.

Americans increasingly see educational funding as belonging to families, not systems. If parents decide that a religious school best serves their child, many Americans believe the government should respect that decision rather than penalize it.

A Cultural Rebalancing

Taken together, these results point to something larger than any single Supreme Court case or policy debate. They suggest that after years of cultural turbulence – from pandemic shutdowns to ideological battles in schools, to rising mistrust of institutions – Americans are once again coming to value the stabilizing role of religious freedom.
​
Becket’s 2025 Index shows that this vision resonates far beyond church pews. It resonates with parents who want a say in their children’s education, with workers who don’t want to check their beliefs at the office door, and with citizens who still believe that pluralism, not enforced secularism, is the hallmark of a healthy democracy.

​Once upon a quainter time, America’s elected leaders understood that it is unwise and improper to fully exercise their First Amendment rights by commenting on an ongoing homicide investigation. Just because the Constitution allows you to speak does not make all speech wise, prudent, or necessary.
 
President Richard Nixon learned this the hard way in 1970 when he declared Charles Manson, then on trial, “guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason.”
 
This set off a firestorm of criticism, despite the fact that Manson was obviously guilty of inciting the murder of actress Sharon Tate and seven others. The president’s comments interfered with the due process of an ongoing trial, potentially giving Manson’s defense attorneys an unexpected gift.
 
Within hours, the Nixon White House released a statement:
 
“To set the record straight, I do not know and did not intend to speculate as to whether the Tate defendants are guilty, in fact, or not. All of the facts in the case have not yet been presented. The defendants should be presumed to be innocent at this stage of the trial.”
 
Like many other long-respected guardrails, the prohibition of official interference in homicide investigations and prosecutions has been cast aside. It started with the early verbal conviction by politicians of the police officer who was ultimately found guilty of the murder of George Floyd. The emergence of politicians as judge and jury escalated with another fatal shooting in Minneapolis, that of Renee Nicole Good at the hands of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer on January 7.
 
Within days of that event, former Secretary of State and U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton posted on X: “Last night, at the corner where an ICE agent murdered Renee Good, thousands of Minnesotans gathered in the frigid dark to protest her killing.”
 
President Trump chimed in on Sunday. Speaking to reporters, he said: “At a very minimum, that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement.”
 
This prompted Mike Fox, a legal fellow at the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice, to tell The New York Times: “As far as I can tell … she’s just a local woman who lived in the community. But it doesn’t really matter, right? You don’t get to kill someone because they engage in conduct that you disagree with or find distasteful or deplorable. If cops could just kill people any time they get annoyed or frustrated, my God, we would be in trouble.”
 
Whatever your views about Americans treating the police with disrespect – and to be clear, while we exist to defend speech, we hate it when people insult police officers – courts have long upheld that speaking disrespectfully to the police is protected by the First Amendment. Courts have even upheld the right of Americans to curse at cops, so long as their words are not threatening violence. Perhaps you disagree. But we hope you agree that in this country, we don’t shoot people in the head for being “very, very disrespectful.”
 
Tom Homan, White House “border czar,” is one public official who has kept his head. He told Tony Dokoupil of CBS:
 
“I am not going to make a judgment call on one video when there’s a hundred videos out there. I wasn’t on the scene. I’m not an officer that may have body cam video. It would be unprofessional to comment on what I think happened in that situation. Let the investigation play out and hold people accountable based on the investigation.”
 
While the FBI having taken over the investigation have made some people suspicious and others defensive, the wiser course is still to let the legal process play out before litigating it in the court of public opinion.
 
That is far better than convicting an officer of murder while an investigation into his actions is still under way, or suggesting that – “at a minimum” – Americans are subject to being shot to death for exercising their First Amendment rights.

​Imagine you’re a Roman Catholic and you go to confession. After spilling your guts about things you’ve done that weigh on your conscience, the priest says, “Actually, don’t sweat it, I don’t believe there is such a thing as sin. Do whatever feels right to you.” You would understandably feel confused as you stumbled out of the confession booth.

This never actually happens because the Roman Catholic Church, like all religions, insists that its clergy believe in its precepts. And in Roman Catholicism, the need for confession and the forgiveness of sins is definitely one of them.

This makes religious organizations different from a business. If a corporation were to tell a job applicant, “sorry, you’re well qualified for this position, but we don’t hire Jews (or Christians, or Muslims, or atheists),” that would be a gross violation of federal civil rights laws. And it should be.

But the law cannot force the Catholic Church to employ a priest who is a stone-cold atheist, or a synagogue to employ a rabbi who wishes to share the Christian gospel. In order for religious groups to have integrity – in the sense of being a coherent whole – they must be able to use their right of free association, as implied by the First Amendment, to only hire their co-religionists.

That is, in essence, what the law means by a “ministerial exception.” Without that exception, religions would have no coherence, rendering the First Amendment’s promise of the free exercise of religion meaningless.

So far, so good. But does the ministerial exception extend to staff? What about the IT guy who keeps the organization’s computer system running? Does he have to adhere to the faith?

That was the question at stake for the Union Gospel Mission of Yakima, Washington. This Christian mission group offers services to the homeless, the hungry, the sick, and the addicted. It operates shelters, health clinics, soup kitchens, and faith-based recovery services. That organization insists that its support staff uphold its beliefs and practices, which includes “abstaining from any sexual conduct outside of biblical marriage between one man and one woman.” Again, in any ordinary context, such a standard by an employer would be – and should be – illegal. But what about a church?

A case against this mission group has bounced several times between a lower court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals over a violation of the state’s Washington Law Against Discrimination – perhaps the most robust anti-discrimination law in the United States. On Jan. 6, the Ninth Circuit ruled – and it came down in favor of the Union Gospel Mission on the basis of a broader “church autonomy doctrine.”

Judge Patrick Bumatay wrote: “The church autonomy doctrine encompasses more than just the ministerial exception. It forbids interference with ‘an internal church decision that affects the faith and mission of the church itself.’”

Judge Bumatay noted that Union Gospel requires “employees attend daily prayers and weekly chapel services, and are encouraged and expected to pray for one another and share devotionals … Union Gospel’s religious beliefs guide everything it does … It expects its employees to participate in the group’s evangelism and be an example to others of what Union Gospel believes it means to be a Christian.”

The court found that the hiring of non-ministerial positions isn’t necessarily a religious matter. The religious institution must be able to show – as Union Gospel did – that it has a sincere religious belief in the religious mission of these staff positions.

Judge Bumatay, noting in his opinion that “personnel is policy,” wrote that “this applies perhaps even more so for religious organizations.”
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In the end, the Ninth Circuit did not say that churches get a blank check to discriminate – but it did say that when a religious organization can show that every role is bound up in its spiritual mission, the Constitution gives that judgment real weight. The IT guy may not preach from the pulpit, but if his job is part of advancing the faith, the law will not force a church to separate belief from practice. That balance – between civil rights and religious autonomy – is exactly the line the First Amendment was meant to draw.

​Challenges to the First Amendment kept coming throughout 2025 – whether to freedom of speech, to the free exercise of religion, or to the freedom of the press. At every turn, Protect The 1st was there to advocate for First Amendment rights, before Congress, the courts, and the court of public opinion.

The Little Sisters of the Poor

In December, we told the states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey to get a life and stop harassing nuns. In our amicus brief supporting the Little Sisters of the Poor, we asked the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to remind the states that the Supreme Court has twice upheld the Catholic charity’s right to receive a religious exemption from an onerous Affordable Care Act mandate requiring employers to provide contraception in their insurance programs.

The Little Sisters have been fighting this battle for a long time. We will remain as persistent in standing up for their right of religious expression as we have for Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, and other believers and non-believers. And we will also continue to call on the Supreme Court to clarify how the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) – which prohibits the government from substantially burdening religious exercise – protects the rights of all religious groups.

Standing Up for Free Speech Online

In July, Protect The 1st policy director Erik Jaffe delivered a robust “old school textualist” defense of the First Amendment at the Federalist Society’s Freedom of Thought conference. While others called for more government control of algorithms, Jaffe warned against expanding government influence over anything speech-adjacent. He reminded us that algorithms, like other software code, are effectively “speech” tools that execute human editorial choices. The constitutional rules limiting them should be the same whether digital or analog.

Defending Unpopular Speech

Protect The 1st is committed to the principle that the First Amendment applies even when it’s inconvenient, protecting expression that many reasonable citizens might wish it didn’t. Such was the case with anti-Israeli activist Mahmoud Khalil. We also stood up to protect Jewish students who were targeted by anti-Israel activists, including those who tried to enforce “Jew-free zones” on campus. Likewise, we urged our followers to denounce the new wave of anti-Semitism arising on both the left and the right.

Mahmoud v. Taylor

In our amicus brief before the Supreme Court, we told the Court that public schools cannot compel young children to endure instruction that violates their family’s religious convictions without providing notice or the ability to opt out.

“Such manipulation of a captive and vulnerable audience” is as morally wrong as it is unconstitutional. Parents must be able to trust that their deeply held convictions will not be undermined without recourse. On June 27, 2025, in a 6-3 decision that cited Protect the 1st’s brief, the Court sided with the parents, holding that the government burdens parents' religious exercise when it requires their children to participate in instruction that violates the families' religious beliefs.

Advancing School Choice in Congress

Protect The 1st sees school choice as a First Amendment issue. Why? It advances the right of parents to preserve and express their values and beliefs across generations. For that reason, we advocated on Capitol Hill in support of both the House and Senate’s passage of landmark school choice legislation.

“For the first time in American history,” our senior policy advisor Bob Goodlatte said, “the right of parents to choose the best school for their children will be supported by a federal tax credit.”

Conservative Censorship Is Also Censorship

Throughout the Biden years, Protect The 1st consistently criticized that administration for secret jawboning of social media companies to deplatform conservative voices. We even reported on expenditures within the State Department to persuade advertisers to defund conservative publications.

When Brendan Carr, President Trump’s Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, pressured ABC to fire a late-night talk show host, we were no less outspoken. We saluted Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who denounced this heavy-handed attempt at government management of speech – likening the temptation to use official power to silence one’s critics to the almost unbearable temptation of the magical ring of power in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

The PRESS Act

We look forward to the passage of the Protect Reporters from Exploitive State Spying (PRESS) Act, which would protect the notes and sources of journalists from government prying. We criticized Attorney General Pam Bondi’s reversal of a Department of Justice memo that offered limited protections to journalists in leak investigations.

We will continue to work with a bipartisan coalition on Capitol Hill to fill the gap in journalist protections at the Justice Department by urging Congress to pass the PRESS Act. The PRESS Act would prohibit federal authorities from spying on journalists through the collection of their phone and email records, with reasonable exceptions for emergencies.

The PRESS Act has passed the House twice. With support from Republican Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) as well as Democrats like Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), we are hopeful that 2026 will be the year the PRESS Act becomes law. 
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We will continue to stand up for free expression – whether political, journalistic, or religious. Wherever some have been silenced, we will be loud in their defense. We will continue to advocate for the First Amendment because it gives you the right to have your voice heard in America’ diverse, democratic marketplace of ideas.

​A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals denied President Trump’s lawsuit against CNN for saying that his claims about the 2020 election were a “Big Lie.”

What’s the big deal about the Big Lie?

That propaganda term was coined by Adolf Hitler in the 1920s to describe a technique in which many people – who might doubt a small, unfounded accusation – are apt to believe an absurd, outlandish falsehood. Say that your opponent is beholden to special interests, and people shrug. Say that he sacrifices stray dogs to the Roman God Mars, and a surprising number of people will believe it must be true.

Why do some react this way? Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that it is because most people believe that no one “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

So, when CNN ran a story accusing Trump of peddling the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, the president was understandably offended by the comparison. He sued. But was he correct in telling the court that audiences would assume that he was doing exactly what “Hitler did in his monstrous, genocidal crimes against humanity”?

A cursory search shows that the “big lie” trope has been watered down by commonplace usage. During President Trump’s first term, then-Attorney General William Barr described the allegations that Trump’s 2016 victory occurred with an assist from Putin as a “big lie.” Sen. Mitch McConnell, then-Minority Leader, accused Democrats of pushing a “big lie” about Republican proposals for voter IDs. President-elect Joe Biden castigated Sen. Josh Hawley for being “part of the big lie” about the 2020 election.

The term “big lie” might have been defamatory in 1938. By 2025, it has been used so often and so elastically that it has surely lost much of its sting. That is one reason why the appeals court panel ruled:

“To be clear, CNN has never explicitly claimed that Trump’s ‘actions and statements were designed to be, and actually were, variations of those [that] Hitler used to suppress and destroy populations.’”

Two of the three judges were Trump appointees. The judges harked back to failed defamation cases in which one plaintiff was described as a “fascist” and another as “an outspoken proponent of political Marxism.” Courts found that such terms were, in the ruling on the first case, “so debatable, loose and varying that they were insusceptible to proof of truth or falsity.”
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Courts have long recognized that political speech deserves the widest latitude when it comes to defamation. Politics is not for the easily bruised. Still, with great freedom comes great responsibility. We would all be better off as a country if politicians and journalists alike were to dial back the rhetoric and stick with the facts.

​Nearly half of the residents of Westminster, California, are Asian American. So when an ancient Chinese religious symbol – a “bagua mirror” – appeared on the exterior entrance of the mayor’s office, it did not strike locals as exotic, unfamiliar, or out of place.

This particular bagua mirror, however, came to reflect a recurring but often misunderstood issue in First Amendment law: When does the government’s tolerance of religious expression cross the line into an establishment of religion?

For the uninitiated, a bagua mirror is an octagonal mirror with special design features that serve as a protective amulet to deflect harmful spirits and attract good fortune, in keeping with Taoist beliefs and feng shui principles.

In September 2024, Joseph Ngo, a candidate for city council, held a press conference in front of the mayor’s office, complaining that the bagua mirror offended him as a devout Catholic. When the candidate removed the mirror, he was promptly arrested by the Westminster police. (Hat tip: Eugene Volokh.)

Was this a justifiable act of civil disobedience by a citizen against a symbol in violation of the First Amendment’s prohibition against the establishment of religion? Ngo sued, claiming his arrest was a violation of his free exercise of religion and speech.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Autumn Spaeth came down with a decisive ruling – one that demonstrates that the Constitution does not require the eradication of all religious imagery. Nor does it allow an individual to use physical action – possibly vandalism – to curate what a community can post or see. Judge Spaeth quoted the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that the Establishment Clause does not “compel the government to purge from the public sphere anything an objective observer could reasonably infer endorses or partakes of the religious.”

It is for that reason that, in Lynch v. Donnelly (1983), the Supreme Court held that a city-owned and displayed Christmas nativity scene including the infant Jesus, Mary, and Joseph did not violate the Establishment Clause. The Justices noted that the very Supreme Court chamber in which oral arguments on that case were heard “is decorated with a notable and permanent – not seasonal – symbol of religion: Moses with the Ten Commandments.”

The case of the bagua mirror may seem like an outlier. But it is a timely reminder to many communities that while the Establishment Clause limits the state’s power to promote religion, it does not authorize citizens or the government to treat religious expression as presumptively suspect, much less as a contaminant to be scrubbed from public life.

The First Amendment was designed to restrain government coercion, not to mandate government hostility. A Constitution that required officials to sterilize the public square of every cultural or religious reference would not be neutral – it would be aggressively secular, and deeply illiberal.

Under such a regime, much would be lost.

“We must judge the tree by its fruits,” the philosopher William James wrote. “The best fruits of the religious experience are the best things history has to offer. The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, and bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have all been flown for religious ideals.”
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The Constitution, properly understood, leaves room for those flights – even when they appear by the door of a mayor’s office.

​Those words, penned by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, were revolutionary in every sense. They defined human rights not as gifts bestowed on people by their rulers, but as birthrights we all possess as human beings. In a provocative and thought-provoking essay published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Andrew Walker and Kristen Waggoner ask whether the right to free speech is related, as the Declaration suggested, to the will of our Creator.
 
Of course, for that question to make sense, one must believe in God. The late Nat Hentoff, author of Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee, was a confirmed atheist and passionate defender of free speech. He believed in the ethical roots of free speech – as well as its value for democracy. But Walker and Waggoner see moral roots in free speech – “not merely a political concession of liberal democracies but [one that] arises from humanity’s nature as rational agents made in the image of God, created to be seekers and speakers of truth.”
 
The rub, as Pontius Pilate asked, is: What is truth? The answer from belief is that truth is rock-solid and not subject to the relativism of politicians. “In general,” the authors write, “speech enters a ‘danger zone’ when people abandon the pursuit and expression of truth, allowing prurient (valueless), scandalous, malicious, and inciteful (physically animating) speech to predominate.” They later write: “Not all sinful speech should invite government regulation.”
 
On that note, we can imagine Lenny Bruce crushing a cigarette on the floor and saying – with a few choice expletives – “not any *@#$% regulation at all!” Walker and Waggoner, however, in defining their “Public Theology of Free Speech,” also see the dangers of government regulation: “We allow free speech as a political concession in service of a deeper moral and theological right – the right to seek and speak the truth.”
 
As theologians have argued for millennia, free will enables sin, but without that enablement, no virtue would be possible. The same holds true for speech. The Supreme Court allows government sanction of direct calls for violence, as well as the punishment of libel and false advertising. Going further than that risks tampering with free will. The authors quote Christ, who warned in the parable of the weeds, “lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.”
 
Whether the roots of free speech are divine or ethical, Walker and Waggoner converge with Hentoff on the value of free speech. The latter wrote:
 
“Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices – taking advantage of our freedom of speech – who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do.”
 
Is there a better use of humanity’s free will than that?

Wilmer Chavarria is a school superintendent in Vermont. He became a U.S. citizen in 2018 after arriving in the United States a decade earlier to get an education. In April, he refused to sign his state’s request to certify to the U.S. Department of Education that no school district in Vermont was using “illegal” DEI practices.

He did so publicly, noting that his district is Vermont's most diverse. The controversial DOE request was one that 19 states, including Vermont, ultimately refused to comply with. Agree or disagree, Chavarria’s political speech should not make him a target for selective law enforcement.

Chavarria is making precisely that claim, suing the Department of Homeland Security for an incident at Bush Intercontinental that happened a suspiciously coincidental three months after he criticized the policy.

According to the lawsuit, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents detained him and demanded his device passwords. They threatened him and refused to say why he was being held. Only after agents promised not to look at confidential student records did he reluctantly relent. The agents then disappeared with his devices, returned them without comment, and immediately revoked his longstanding TSA Global Entry status, stating that Chavarria suddenly no longer met “program eligibility requirements.”

That day in July, he was returning home after visiting family in Nicaragua – something he had done many times before without trouble. When asked about such incidents, CBP consistently maintains that “lawful” travelers need have no fear of being detained. By that logic, it appears that New England schoolchildren and naturalized citizens are a greater threat to the republic than anyone previously realized.

In short, this story looks like political targeting, walks like it, and quacks like it. There are some 26 million naturalized U.S. citizens. And from the moment they finish swearing “so help me God,” they fall under the protection of the First Amendment, no less than a native-born citizen of Vermont or metropolitan Houston.
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As the lawsuit proceeds, Congress would do well to look under the hood of this detention and forced surveillance. If political dissent can trigger warrantless searches, credential revocations, and digital shakedowns at the border, then the problem is not one traveler – it’s the power over speech being exercised in our name.