Anonymity online can be a mask that allows people to say ugly, hateful or untrue things without taking responsibility for them. But it can also be a shield that protects women hiding from abusers, whistleblowers one step ahead of their pursuers, journalists reaching out to confidential sources about wrongdoing, and consumers searching online for answers to questions about their health that they’d rather not have anyone know about.

This is why the current effort by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to use emergency subpoenas to force Big Tech companies to reveal the identities of Americans who make critical posts about ICE is so dangerous. If this practice sticks, it will likely migrate to other federal agencies and erode anonymity online.

But the shedding of anonymous speech might come by a different route – not from executive-branch meddling or legislative mistakes, but from lawsuits claiming harms from child internet “addiction.”

Dan Frieth of the digital anti-censorship advocacy group, Reclaim The Net, listened to five hours of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony in a Los Angeles civil case and distilled it to a jarring and important warning – the age of anonymity could be coming to an end at the hands of the trial bar.

Zuckerberg testified in one of 1,600 lawsuits over internet addiction. In this case, a woman claimed that at age nine Meta’s Instagram addicted her, plunging her into a hell of anxiety, body dysmorphia, and suicidal thoughts.

Frieth notes that the science of internet addiction is “genuinely disputed.” He writes:

“None of this means the harms alleged are fabricated. It means the word ‘addiction’ is doing heavy rhetorical and legal work, and the policy consequences are far beyond anything a jury in Los Angeles will decide.

“‘Addiction’ is how you get a public health emergency. A public health emergency is how you get emergency powers and make it easier for people to overlook constitutional protections. Emergency powers applied to the internet mean mandatory access controls. And mandatory access controls on the internet mean the end of anonymous and pseudonymous speech.

“When social media is classified as a drug, access to it becomes a medical and regulatory matter” justifying “identity verification, access controls, and a surveillance architecture that follows users across every platform and device.”

Frieth notes that a win for the plaintiff in this case would strip the current law protecting platform design decisions. This danger is not theoretical. Frieth reports that Zuckerberg repeatedly suggested that any age verification mandate – and thus identification – be shifted from platforms to owners of operating systems. Zuckerberg would thus toss his liability hot potato from Instagram to Apple and Google.

“This is more than age verification,” Frieth concludes. “It is a national digital ID layer baked into the two operating systems that run the majority of the world’s smartphones.”

There are a lot of competing interests in this case – the safety of children, the nature of the internet, and the value of free speech. Juries don’t have to balance these equities. They can just side with the plaintiff and inadvertently make policy for U.S. tech – and by extension, the world.
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Any new approach to child safety should not require adults to give up speech rights recognized in this country since Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote collectively as the pseudonymous “Publius” in The Federalist Papers.

French President Emmanuel Macron at an AI summit in New Delhi on Wednesday said that U.S. objections about European crackdowns on free speech are, pardon our French, “pure bullshit.”

Macron argued that “we have no clue” how a social media “algorithm is made, how it’s tested, trained, and where it will guide you – the democratic consequences of this bias could be huge … Free speech is pure bullshit if nobody knows how you are guided to this so-called free speech, especially when it’s guided from one hate speech to another.”

So-called free speech? Let’s take a look at what’s missing from Macron’s analysis from the American point of view.

First, Who Gets to Define Hate Speech?

American law, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, doesn’t prohibit hate speech, unless it calls for imminent acts of violence. The reasoning is that once you begin parsing speech, the fine distinctions are endless and are apt to wind up with the kind of absurdities we’ve seen in Europe and Canada, where even well-reasoned, evidence-based criticisms of a minority social practice or a tenet of elite ideology are treated as too obscene to tolerate.

Once a society goes after “hate speech,” activists and bureaucrats start to draw the line. The House Judiciary Committee reports that such determinations are made for the European Union by a hodgepodge of left-wing NGOs that tend to find almost any critique of prevailing orthodoxy as “hate.” If this sounds overwrought, consider the former EU Commissioner who tried to censor an interview with Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign – as if the opinions of a former president and major-party nominee were something the public needed to be shielded from.

Second, Can the EU Censor Americans in America?

The First Amendment in the United States will not be harmed if Europeans censor Europeans in Europe. The problem is that when a post made by an American on an American-based platform is removed by the EU, the global nature of the internet necessarily means it is removed in the United States as well.

Forgive us, President Macron, but we find that to be “pure connerie.”

Third, Is the EU Taxing America’s Speech Platforms?

The European social media landscape is dominated by American companies because Europe has increasingly proven unable to innovate and compete in high technology. Many Americans believe that Europe’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, which effectively outlaw the business model of American social media companies, smack of rank protectionism.

For example, the EU is trying to compel U.S. companies to offer their services without selling user data to advertisers. This would cripple Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok by essentially requiring U.S. companies to provide their services for free. When Meta responded to European demands by creating a two-tiered system for Facebook and Instagram – one in which European users could consent to tracking in exchange for the free service or pay a subscription fee for no tracking – the EU slapped Meta with a €200 million fine.

The EU is also trying to compel U.S. companies to share the guts of their algorithms with competitors – virtually guaranteeing that China will gain access to their business secrets and possibly customer data.

Worst of all, Europe has found reasons to hit American tech firms with almost $12 billion in fines from 2021 to 2025. And its laws allow the EU to levy fines on U.S. companies of up to 10 percent of their global turnover or revenue. Even for corporate giants, these fines could have death-penalty consequences.

Is There Room for Common Ground?

The House Judiciary Committee has commendably detailed the censorship threat from Europe. American leaders have expressed outrage to Europe in no uncertain terms. Washington would be well advised, however, to lower the temperature and look for some common ground in defense of free speech before more damage is done.

There are many technical problems with making algorithms public property, as Macron suggests. But there may be ways for Washington and Brussels to promote more accountability and transparency online that would satisfy European concerns.
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in his recent speech in Munich, cleared the way for a more respectful discussion that could lead to productive agreements. It is time for the difficult spadework of business diplomacy to start. But first, let’s bury the bullshit.

​The latest furor over whether Stephen Colbert can air an interview with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico exposes a relic of broadcast regulation that no longer fits the modern media world: the FCC’s “equal time” rule. And what we’re seeing isn’t just awkward – it’s constitutionally and technologically outdated.

The rule, rooted in the Communications Act of 1934, requires broadcasters who give airtime to one political candidate to offer comparable time to opponents. In an era of three networks and scarce spectrum, regulators claimed such mandates served the public interest. Today, the rule feels as antiquated as a Philco radio crackling with the Eddie Cantor Show.

Even worse, enforcement is inconsistent. Traditional news programs are largely exempt from strict balancing requirements, while talk shows face a shifting and often opaque standard. When Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his California gubernatorial run on The Tonight Show in 2003, the FCC declined to invoke equal time. Yet now, Colbert faces scrutiny for doing what modern media personalities do every night – interview public figures.

Joe Lancaster, writing in Reason magazine, spells out how badly the equal time rule had become superannuated by 2024.
 
“Today the broadcast networks no longer have a stranglehold on what people can watch. Last year, according to Nielsen, the combined share of TV viewership that took place on over-the-air broadcasts or cable fell below 50 percent for the first time, as streaming skyrocketed. Only 20 percent took place on conventional broadcast television – meaning 80 percent of all TV viewership was not subject to any FCC content regulation, much less equal time rules.

“When the equal time rule was drafted, a far more limited number of frequencies were available across the broadcast spectrum. But that world no longer exists. We've reached the point where nearly 17 percent of American adults get their news from TikTok.
 
“The equal time rule imposes burdens on one group of broadcasters while sparing their cable or streaming competitors. Any public benefit that its drafters intended no longer meaningfully exists. Let's abolish it before the next election cycle begins.”
​
Lancaster points to some history that should be our guide.
 
In 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court in Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo overturned a Florida law that required publishers to print a reply to any political editorial or personal criticism, print version of the equal time rule.
 
At that time, a dominant newspaper held tremendous sway in a market. Today, in most cities, the local newspaper is just another website. As with newspapers, broadcasters are now just one of many media outlets constantly competing for our attention.
 
It is time for the law to adjust. Throw the equal time rule into the round file.

The FBI calls them “assessments.” Americans may experience them as First Amendment violations. 
 
A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report suggests that many supposedly preliminary inquiries function as probes in waiting – particularly when they involve politics, journalism, or religion. According to the report, posted by the Cato Institute, more than 1,000 individuals and organizations have been subjected to preliminary assessments for investigation, a scope that should trigger immediate congressional concern. (Hat tip to Cato’s Patrick Eddington.)
 
The most alarming category involves so-called “Sensitive Investigative Matters,” or SIM assessments. These are FBI inquiries potentially into political campaigns and candidates, elected officials, journalists, religious leaders, or any other Americans engaged in core First Amendment activities. If any government scrutiny demands transparency and restraint, it is surveillance that begins with our rights to freedom of speech, belief, and association.
 
The GAO found that the FBI converted 48 percent of SIM assessments into Preliminary or Full Investigations. Eddington reports that these sensitive cases were 3.5 percentage times more likely to escalate than ordinary assessments – a statistical red flag for anyone told these probes are narrow, cautious, or exceptional.
 
Eddington writes:
 
“That’s especially alarming since, under Preliminary or Full Investigations, the agents running the case can employ wiretaps or other extremely intrusive and clandestine investigative techniques.”
 
Those tools – from electronic surveillance to confidential informants and covert collection – once deployed, are difficult to unwind. Lawmakers should require the FBI to disclose whether SIM assessments have targeted:
​

• Members of Congress

 

• Political candidates and parties

 

• News organizations, think tanks, and NGOs

 

• News reporters and opinion journalists

 

• Churches, temples, and mosques.

At a minimum, the Bureau should provide the relevant oversight committees – especially the House Judiciary Committee – with a full accounting of past SIM targets and the total number of assessments elevated into full investigations. Congress should also ask who authorized these escalations. Were investigative decisions influenced by political appointees? 
 
And why are First Amendment-sensitive assessments more likely to escalate than ordinary cases?
 
The Founders knew the danger of unchecked investigations aimed at political and religious dissent. They rebelled against general warrants that allowed agents of the Crown to search first and justify later. SIM assessments risk reviving that same model – quiet surveillance justified by internal labels rather than public law.
 
Surveillance powers are easy to grant and hard to retract. Congress should press for an understanding of how existing authorities have been used against Americans exercising our most basic freedoms.

Sol Wachtler, former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, crafted perhaps the most famous aphorism in American law – that any prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.”

Jeanine Pirro, longtime television judge turned U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, may have thought it would be that easy when she tried to indict six Democratic Members of Congress for posting a video informing active-duty military personnel that they had an obligation to refuse illegal orders. What she got from a grand jury on Tuesday was a lot of mustard on her face.

Wachtler’s point was that grand juries almost never refuse to issue an indictment. The reason is simple – in grand jury proceedings, there is no defense counsel to challenge the facts as presented. The jurors hear what the prosecutor wants them to hear, and only that. In Pirro’s case, they were told that these six lawmakers had violated a World War II-era statute – of questionable constitutionality – that makes it a crime to “interfere” with “the loyalty, morale, or discipline” of the U.S. military.

And yet these jurors refused to indict two U.S. senators and four Members of the House, including former Navy pilot Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and former CIA analyst who served in Iraq, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI). The four House Members include two Navy veterans, a former Air Force officer, and a former Army Ranger.

Critics of this video post make the point that it appeared at a time when President Trump was ordering the military to fire missiles into what were believed to have been boats ferrying drugs destined for the United States. Whatever one thinks of the boat strikes, some made the legitimate criticism that these members were flirting with the encouragement of defiance of lawful orders.

Outside of that context, however, these Members of Congress made a flatly factual statement – that under the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice, service members are required to disobey orders that are direct commands to commit a crime or violate the U.S. Constitution.

In the grand jury hearing, it is likely that no one made the point that the unprecedented prosecution of sitting Members of Congress for speech would represent an assault by the executive branch on the legislative branch. Nor is it likely that anyone told them that such an indictment would degrade the First Amendment, criminalizing speech in a way that exceeds any abuses of the past.
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These American citizens came to these conclusions on their own. And in so doing, they demonstrated the value of the grand jury system as a check on overweening prosecutors. It isn’t just ham sandwiches, after all.

​If you’re going to tell a mean joke about Donald Trump – like Trevor Noah did last week at the Grammys – expect the president to threaten a lawsuit.

“Song of the Year,” quipped Noah. “That is a Grammy that every artist wants almost as much as Trump wants Greenland. Which makes sense, I mean, because Epstein’s island is gone, so he needs a new one to hang out on with Bill Clinton.”

Yes, the joke was factually off-center; Trump says he never went to Epstein’s Island, and there is no evidence that he did. Moreover, it wasn’t even a particularly well-written or clever joke.

But it’s still a joke – not a news report. Such distinctions are often lost on public figures, who seem not to understand the difference between slander and libel, versus humor. The former purports to be fact and is meant to be taken seriously, to be believed as true. With news reporting, the wisdom of New York Times v. Sullivan endures, which allows public figures to sue for journalism corrupted by malice.

Various forms of humor are by their nature not meant to be believed. A joke is funny precisely because it is off-kilter and hyperbolic. As such, jokes are protected as free expression under the First Amendment.

The threat of a lawsuit is perhaps inevitable, both because jokes can wound and because going to court is a perfectly American reaction. But, like a bad joke, frivolous lawsuits brought by billionaires can have a chilling effect on the public’s willingness to express views critical of those with power. Threatening to sue a comedian for insulting you is not censorship, but the expense of having to defend oneself against a billionaire who happens to be the President of the United States amounts to punishment by litigation.

Presidents have structural advantages as well. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that presidents can be sued for unofficial acts, but not for official acts. On the other hand, the president can sue at will, just like anyone else. And let’s not forget that this administration has shown no restraint in weaponizing the executive branch and using its regulatory authority to go after its critics (just ask Jimmy Kimmel).

What can be done about this imbalance in legal power?

Perhaps Congress should pass a law stipulating that a lawsuit filed by a president must be stayed until the occupant leaves office. Only once he is a private citizen again could the lawsuit move forward. Where state laws constrain or complicate this stipulation, the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause ought to override them.
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In the meantime, thin-skinned public figures in both parties and of all stripes need to learn how to take a joke – even bad ones. In a free society, the proper response to a bad joke isn’t a lawsuit – it’s a better joke.

​Does eating pork rinds make a Buddhist, who is also a convicted murderer, ineligible to be served Muslim Halal meat on death row? 

The meandering fact pattern of this case and its underlying principles were carefully parsed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which came to a firm “no” on that question. The Ninth Circuit’s majority opinion, penned by Judge Ryan D. Nelson, is a magisterial declaration on the limits of governmental adjudication of Americans’ religious beliefs. It offers a masterclass in the religious rights of convicts who have had most of their other rights lawfully stripped from them – and a reminder of how integral the free exercise of religion is to all Americans.

The Case – Why a Buddhist Selects Muslim Food

It would be hard to find a less sympathetic plaintiff than Maurice Lydell Harris. He was convicted in 1994 for murdering his girlfriend, Alicia Allen, and her unborn child. In the more than 32 years that have passed since his conviction, Harris has become a practitioner of Nichiren Buddhism, which originated in medieval Japan but is now popular throughout the world. Perhaps you’ve heard practitioners in a park chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo in an effort to cultivate their “Buddha nature.”

The founder of this school of Buddhism, a priest named Nichiren, was a vegetarian who left his followers free to eat meat. His only requirement was that practitioners “eat wisely” and with “mindfulness.” Harris, a meat-eater, interpreted this instruction to mean he should eat “clean” – avoiding foods that are highly processed, non-organic, or artificial.

California prisons offer four religious meal-plan alternatives, one of which is halal-certified meat slaughtered in accordance with Islamic religious requirements. Though he is not a Muslim, Harris decided that halal-certified food came the closest to his requirements as a Nichiren Buddhist.

Enter the Pork Rinds

Inmates who enroll in the prison system’s “Religious Meat Alternative Program” must agree to allow officials to monitor their discretionary food purchases to ensure compliance to their diet. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation screens out inmates who sign up for one diet or another out of preference instead of religious belief.

Harris was kicked out of the program when he made purchases at the prison canteen for very un-Islamic pork rinds and salami, as well as meat-flavored ramen and beef steaks. Harris made these purchases after the prison temporarily switched his diet to a vegetarian option which, he said, left him feeling lightheaded.

The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA)

This law requires government to use the “least restrictive means” of meeting a compelling government interest. It has been invoked to allow Sikhs to wear long beards in prison and to permit a Christian inmate facing execution to have his pastor touch him as he was to be injected with lethal drugs.

Harris’s claim for preliminary relief was denied by a federal district judge, who ruled that the diet the inmate chose “does not fulfill the dictates of the Plaintiff’s religion.” Judge Nelson, however, stood firmly in favor of allowing Harris to decide what his religious obligations were.

Judge Nelson wrote:

“Judges ought not to be Pharisees, decreeing from on high what practices are relevant to a prisoner’s understanding of his own faith … It is for Harris to determine whether being on [a halal diet] satisfies Harris’s Nichiren Buddhist beliefs. And if external forces cause Harris to fall short of the exact dictates of his religion, it is for him and his conscience, not us as courts, to decide what compromises are appropriate.”

Such “dictates” include pork rinds to cure lightheadedness. Judge Nelson continued:

“Harris’s departures from the Islamic diet – or even a Buddhist diet – do not demonstrate that his beliefs do not require him to adhere to that diet if possible … Each man’s faith is his own, and judges must avoid questioning whether a prisoner has strictly abided by the letter of his own sincere belief.”
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In other words, RLUIPA does not require prisoners to be flawless theologians – only that government refrain from acting as one.

​Irish comedian and television writer Graham Linehan testified this week before a House Judiciary Committee hearing: “But I warn you – the Atlantic is not as wide as you think.”
 
That is the thesis of a staff report from that same committee, also released this week, entitled, Europe’s Decade-Long Campaign to Censor the Global Internet and How It Harms American Speech in the United States.
 
This committee staff report, the second in a series, is informed by evidence from subpoenaed communications between ten U.S. tech companies and the European Union. It draws on thousands of documents and communications to present an eye-popping portrayal of Europe’s ambition to control speech across the Atlantic.
 
That report declares:
 
“The European Commission, in a comprehensive decade-long effort, has successfully pressured social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules, thereby directly infringing on Americans’ online speech in the United States.”
 
The EU’s enabling authority in this effort springs from the Digital Services Act (DSA), which went into effect in 2023. In December 2025, the European Commission finally cracked its knuckles and hit X with the first DSA fine, a whopping €120 million ($140 million). Of the several justifications for this punishment, the most telling was that X was charged with not being as forthcoming as possible in providing American data to “vetted researchers” around the world.
 
The first committee staff report in 2025 traced “these so-called researchers” back to academia and NGOs, finding them to be “uniformly left-wing and pro-censorship.”
 
The DSA also lists many content infractions, revealing a determination to restrict free speech in the United States and to curtail our First Amendment. The report details an EU handbook that helpfully lists “offending” categories, which include:
 
• “Populist rhetoric”
• “Anti-government/anti-EU” content
• “Anti-elite” content
• “Political satire”
• “Meme subculture”
 
To help enforce this censorship, a European disinformation “task force” is focused on specific disinformation topics, including “fact-checking, elections, and demonetization of conservative news outlets.”
 
The committee recounts how TikTok was forced to buckle to pressure from such groups. It was compelled to report to the European Commission how it censored over 45,000 pieces of alleged “misinformation,” including political speech on topics such as migration, climate change, security, and defense, ahead of the 2024 EU elections.
 
Most alarming of all is Europe’s desire to control American speech about American elections. The absurd lengths of Europe’s ambition were on full display when then-EU Commissioner Thierry Breton “threatened X with regulatory action under the DSA for hosting a live interview with Donald Trump in the United States during the 2024 elections, warning that ‘spillovers’ of U.S. speech into the EU could spur the Commission to adopt retaliatory ‘measures’ against X under the DSA.”
 
Such “spillover” is the EU’s excuse for trying to deny users of X around the world the ability to watch an interview with a former president who was a major-party nominee seeking to return to the White House. Whatever your view of Donald Trump, Breton’s actions revealed the breathtaking determination of Europe to try to manage our domestic political dialogue.
 
The report concludes that the EU’s Digital Services Act “represents a grave danger to American freedom of speech online: the European Commission has intentionally pressured technology companies to change their global content moderation policies, and deliberately targeted American speech and elections.”
 
In short:
 
“The European Commission’s extraterritorial actions directly infringe on American sovereignty.”

That conclusion should alarm anyone who values the First Amendment. Europe is not merely regulating its own digital marketplace – it is attempting to export its censorship regime to the United States by pressuring American companies to silence American speakers.

If American leaders allow foreign regulators to dictate what Americans may say, hear, or share online, the First Amendment will not be repealed. It will be quietly nullified, one “spillover” at a time.

An Irish comedian, a physician elected to the Finnish Parliament, and a lawyer defending speech rights in Europe – all testified about the growing danger that EU and UK censorship poses to the health of free speech in America and around the world.

Graham Linehan, longtime television comedy writer, who was arrested at Heathrow Airport for an off-color tweet:

“The First Amendment protects you from government censorship. It does not protect you from what the British government has learned to outsource.

“In the UK, police record ‘non-crime hate incidents’ against citizens who have broken no law. These records appear on background checks. They affect employment. They create a chilling effect without a single prosecution.

“But the state has also learned to let others do its work. When employers fire workers for protected speech, when banks close accounts, when publishers drop authors, when platforms suspend users – the government's hands stay clean. The censorship happens. The state didn't do it. In Britain, we have discovered that you can have formal free speech and no free speech at all.”

Dr. Päivi Räsänen, physician, member of the Finnish Parliament since 1995, and former Minister of the Interior, fighting in court for posting a traditional view on sexuality:

“I expressed my Christian beliefs about marriage and sexuality in a Twitter post … I added a picture of Scripture verses from the book of Romans …”

“For this exercise of my free speech, I was investigated by the police and interrogated for more than thirteen hours. The questions from police were shamelessly about the Bible and its interpretation. I was asked, ‘What is the message of the book of Romans and its first chapter?’ and ‘What do I mean by the words ‘sin’ and ‘shame’?’ A joke spread on social media that Päivi Räsänen was once again meeting for a Bible study at the police station …

“The crime of ‘agitation against a minority group’ falls under the ‘war crimes and crimes against humanity’ section in the Finnish criminal code and can carry up to two years of prison time. I did not insult or call for harm against anyone. I was being criminally charged for simply expressing convictions rooted in my faith and conscience …

“Even when courts ultimately acquit, our story shows how the process itself becomes the punishment. We have faced years of investigation, public scrutiny, and legal uncertainty. This creates a chilling effect, not just for Christians, but for everyone who holds views outside a narrow, state-approved consensus.”

Lorcán Price of the Alliance Defending Freedom International testified on the anti-free speech extremism of the European Union:

“The EU’s obsession with harmonization and regulation is at odds with the values of free speech and a free press. Those are supposed to be universal human freedoms as well as European values … In practice, the DSA undermines the right to express opinions, the freedom to receive and impart information, and the respect for media freedom and pluralism inherent in European human rights law …

“This opens the prospect of worldwide enforcement of draconian European hate speech laws, such as the law against insulting public figures in Germany … The effect of the DSA is to require U.S. companies to apply the lowest common European legal denominator to police memes, jokes, and controversial commentary across the globe.

“The DSA permits each EU member state to implement its own rules and procedures … Thus, the nightmare scenario X currently finds itself in includes active parallel investigations by two regulatory bodies, under differing procedures and in different legal contexts, both using sweeping powers to scrutinize the company and levy enormous fines against it. This fate will befall any company that refuses to bend the knee to the Commission’s demands …

“Germany, France, and every other European country have all adopted criminal speech offences in vague, overbroad, and ambiguously worded laws that are used to prosecute legitimate political speech. At times in a democracy, citizens will use robust, rude, irreverent, and sometimes offensive speech to express themselves on matters of public importance.”

***

The committee’s Democratic minority refused to cooperate with Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and the Republican majority in discussing the subject of the hearing, which was exploring European censorship. Democrats focused, instead, on the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota and elsewhere. From the Democrats’ protest, useful insights on free speech emerged – showing us that as egregious as European censorship is, we must also continue to practice vigilance at home.

Deepinder Mayell, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, spoke on the right to record law enforcement:

“Taking photographs and video of things that are plainly visible in public spaces is a constitutional right – and that includes police and other government officials carrying out their duties. Specifically, the First Amendment protects the right to photograph and video police conduct occurring in public, both because it protects the right to gather information about what public officials do on public property, and because it protects the right to record matters of public interest. This includes the right to livestream such content.

“The repression I have described is not just happening in Minnesota. From Illinois to Southern California, again and again, we have seen federal agents threaten peaceful protesters and physically assault them – including veterans, members of the clergy and the elderly.”

Overall, the hearing reinforced what Ronald Reagan said years ago:
​
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It has to be fought for and defended by each generation.”

​CNN reports that comedian Megan Stalter taped a video asking her fellow Christians to speak out against the heavy-handed tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis, only to be iced out of TikTok.
 
Her video was popular on Instagram, reposted more than 12,000 times. But several attempts to upload her video on TikTok failed. Others have complained of similar experiences. For its part, TikTok responded that power outages at a data center were to blame.
 
Even if TikTok’s behavior was completely above board, a little history shows the basis for users’ suspicion: Congress, concerned by the national security implications of a Chinese-owned company collecting the personal data of 170 million Americans, passed a law requiring TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform or face a U.S. ban by Jan. 19, 2025.
 
When Donald Trump was sworn in as president a day after the statutory deadline, he promptly refused to enforce that law. The president instead worked to secure a deal for U.S. ownership of TikTok. Last month, a group of investors led by Trump ally Larry Ellison of Oracle acquired TikTok’s U.S. operations.
 
With this deal brokered out of the Oval Office, is it any wonder that TikTok users immediately leapt to the conclusion that they were being censored to please the administration?
 
The distrust of these anti-ICE critics follows the distrust of conservatives, who still rankle from being deplatformed and shadowbanned on major social media platforms. During the Biden administration, eighty FBI agents in a program overseen by the White House quietly contacted social media companies to “jawbone” them into removing conservative content.
 
What the Biden administration did privately, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has done publicly. He threatened to withhold the approval of the Paramount-Skydance merger. Carr only relented when CBS News, owned by Paramount, agreed to pay $16 million to settle a weak lawsuit filed by President Trump regarding how 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris.
 
CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss – a noted critic of mainstream liberal journalism – entered the job saddled with this history. When she made the controversial decision to hold and revise a story about the Trump administration’s detentions of deportees to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison facility, there was an immediate outcry from fellow journalists. Her editorial judgment was quickly tainted by the perception that CBS was kowtowing to federal regulators for business reasons – and perhaps to CBS’s new owner, the Ellison family.
 
The Wall Street Journal summed up Holman Jenkins’ editorial on this debacle with this subhead: “The Ellison family is getting what it paid for when it acquired the journalistic mouthpiece.” 

Fair? Probably not. Weiss may have made a defensible editorial decision and TikTok may, in fact, be having technical issues. The problem remains that when government officials can reward or punish media companies through secret “jawboning” and selective enforcement of licensing and mergers, the line between private editorial judgment in the media and the political needs of administrations begins to blur.
 
When the business of media is entangled with political agendas and government wheeling and dealing, even innocent explanations are tainted.

Colorado calls its Universal Preschool program just that – universal. But as Protect The 1st demonstrates in our amicus brief before the U.S. Supreme Court, that promise comes with a catch.

Catholic preschools in Colorado want to participate in the state’s publicly funded preschool program on the same terms as secular private schools. The state excludes them – not because they fail to meet academic, health, or safety standards, but because they insist on maintaining a religious mission consistent with Catholic teaching. In response, the schools, parents, and the Archdiocese of Denver are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to step in.

Protect The 1st is supporting them with a brief urging the Court to take this case and correct a dangerous error by the Tenth Circuit. At issue is Colorado’s attempt to condition access to a public benefit on these Catholics’ surrender of their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.

Colorado objects that Catholic preschools require families to support the faith-based mission of the school, including traditional teachings on sexuality and marriage. Faced with that reality, the state offered a blunt ultimatum – abandon your religious identity or stay out of the program.

That is not neutrality. It is coercion – and it violates the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause. Supreme Court precedent is clear – when the government creates exceptions to its rules for secular reasons, it may not refuse to accommodate religion. In Carson v. Makin (2021), the Court made the rule unmistakable: “A State violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.”

Colorado’s regulations permit flexibility for many schools in many contexts while denying any accommodation to religious schools. That disparity between secular and religious schools should trigger strict scrutiny – a test the state cannot and should not pass.

The state’s demand also infringes on the schools’ right to expressive association.

Religious schools teach and transmit values as well as education. Forcing them to accept students whose families openly reject those values alters the message the school conveys to its community. The Supreme Court has long held that the government may not force private organizations to accept members in ways that undermine their expressive mission – nor may it achieve the same result indirectly by attaching improper conditions on funding.

The Tenth Circuit brushed aside these concerns, treating participation in the preschool program as a privilege the state may ration on its own terms. That reasoning is deeply flawed. The Constitution does not allow the government to do indirectly – through benefit programs – what it may not do directly through regulation.

If this decision stands, the implications extend far beyond Colorado. States could routinely exclude religious schools, charities, and social-service providers from public programs unless they conform their beliefs to official orthodoxy. That is not pluralism. It is pressure for ideological conformity.

The Supreme Court should grant review and reaffirm a simple principle – religious families do not forfeit their First Amendment rights when they seek equal access to public benefits.

​When federal agents clamped handcuffs on independent journalist Don Lemon at the Beverly Hills Hotel as he prepared to cover the Grammys, this made-for-headlines arrest immediately raised a serious question: Do journalists enjoy First Amendment protections when they are embedded in an unlawful protest?

Lemon was arrested after covering an anti-ICE demonstration that disrupted a Sunday worship service in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Jan. 18. This case exposes questions about the constitutional boundaries separating worshippers, protesters, and journalists.

Can you protest during a church service?

The protesters entered Cities Church, shouting “Justice for Renée Good!” This church was apparently targeted because one of its pastors, David Easterwood, heads an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office in that city. At least two of these protesters have been arrested, along with Lemon.

A federal indictment naming Lemon and other defendants portrays the protesters entering the church in a “coordinated, takeover-style attack” that caused congregants to flee and children to panic. The indictment claims one protester told two crying children: “Do you know your parents are Nazis? They’re going to burn in hell.”

The protesters might be found guilty of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a federal law from the Clinton era that protects both abortion clinics and churches from interference by protesters. Does the First Amendment, which is the supreme law over any statute, override the statute and protect these protesters on the basis of free speech?

Short answer: No.

Of course, churches are open to all. The protesters had every right to enter, just like anyone else. But if a church official considered them disruptive and told them to leave – and they didn’t – they were trespassing and also possibly guilty of a FACE Act violation. A first offense carries a penalty of up to six months in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Wait, how is the FACE Act not a violation of the First Amendment’s free speech clause?

If anything, the First Amendment protects the church, not the protesters.

While the “right of expressive association” is not explicitly articulated in the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court has held that this right of expressive association is inherent in the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. And it is likewise inherent in the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion. Indeed, if the government were to make a church exception to the enforcement of ordinary trespass laws, that would be blatant discrimination against religion in violation of the free exercise clause.

Think of it this way: How could any group of people, banding together for the same expressive or religious purpose, enjoy any associational and collective speech or religious rights if anyone could storm in and shout them down?

This principle applies to mosques, synagogues, churches, private university classrooms, board meetings, award ceremonies, and even Don Lemon’s online show.

So Lemon is in big trouble, right?

It depends on whether the allegations in the indictment hold up.

The federal government charges that Lemon met with other defendants at a shopping mall to plan the entry into the church. It also alleges that Lemon stood close enough to the pastor to restrict his freedom of movement in an effort to “oppress and intimidate” him. Did he do that, or was it an attempt to interview the pastor that he perceived as an attack?

What we can see online is that Don Lemon went into the service with a camera and interviewed both protesters and worshippers. Walking around a church sanctuary interviewing people is potentially disruptive, but it will take a trial to test the government’s allegations. Did Don Lemon lead or follow the protesters into the church? If he merely followed the protesters, he may have been reporting on a newsworthy disruption, not causing it. But if the government’s portrayal of Lemon being involved in planning the protest is proven, Lemon faces legal jeopardy.

C’mon, Lemon is a left-wing activist himself. Now he’s a “journalist”?

Lemon, who was fired by CNN for alleged rudeness and misogynistic remarks, is no Walter Cronkite. He’s an opinion journalist with a leftward, progressive slant. He is undoubtedly sympathetic to the protesters and their cause. That still makes no difference in this case.

A thought experiment brings home the principle protecting Lemon: Imagine if a Fox News reporter had been at Cities Church to cover the trashing of its service for an outraged audience. That hypothetical reporter’s sympathy in favor of the church would leave no one questioning his First Amendment rights (unless, of course, he was asked to leave and didn’t).

The same applies to Lemon and his sympathies. As long as he didn’t plan the protest – but merely followed up on a tip that there was a story brewing at the church – and did not ignore a proper request to leave the premises, he is likely protected as a journalist.

What will be the practical effects of this arrest?

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Lemon was arrested at her direction, posting: “WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP.”

That’s all well and good, with the all-caps warranted. But to convict Lemon, the government will need to prove its allegations.

If the government’s allegations don’t hold up in court, and Lemon is acquitted, it would hard be to imagine a greater gift AG Bondi could have granted a left-wing, web-based, independent journalist than to arrest him as an anti-ICE, free speech martyr in the very epicenter of his progressive base of viewers.
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What we can definitively say is that the losers will be anyone – including Lemon – properly found guilty of violating the FACE Act. Tip to the protest community: Wrecking a church service is not a good look for you, nor a help to your cause. It’s also against the law.