​A former FBI intelligence official is accusing the Bureau of caving to official pressure to investigate protesters solely for exercising their First Amendment rights.

In February 2025, volunteers in Southern California used bullhorns, sirens, and social media to alert neighbors to immigration-enforcement operations. As KPBS reported, organizers described their activities as nonviolent efforts to inform residents and remind them of their rights. A former ICE official warned that these tactics could endanger officers and approach the line separating lawful activity from unlawful interference.

Where we draw that line matters. So does whether anyone actually crossed it.

According to Jill Fields, a former supervisory intelligence analyst in the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, her squad was ordered to conduct “pre-assessment checks” on protesters shown on TikTok using bullhorns in the city of Alhambra. Fields says the squad lacked evidence of a crime and that FBI policy prohibited opening investigations solely on the basis of protected First Amendment activity.

Official annoyance over a protest is no substitute for evidence. If Fields’ account is accurate, the apparent sequence is chilling: identify the speakers, demand arrests, and send investigators looking for a justification.

Fields also alleges that administration officials demanded an investigation into the activities of anti-ICE protesters outside a federal building in California. She says she faced retaliation for raising constitutional concerns and ultimately resigned. These remain allegations, but they warrant independent scrutiny.

The administration denies wrongdoing. The White House says the investigations concerned criminal conduct, while the Justice Department and FBI defend their responsibility to investigate potential federal offenses. “Assaulting and obstructing law enforcement is a crime,” a White House spokeswoman said.

Of course it is. But that statement leaves the central question unanswered: What evidence linked these particular protesters to assault, unlawful obstruction, or another federal crime?

Calling speech “obstruction” does not establish that it is criminal. Nor does frustration with protesters establish grounds to investigate them. The government must distinguish peaceful opposition from unlawful conduct, even when that opposition complicates enforcement or embarrasses officialdom.
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An FBI investigation can chill dissent long before anyone is charged. Americans must be free to question, criticize, and peacefully oppose government policy – even noisily – without wondering whether a viral video will put them in the crosshairs of a federal investigation.

Frederick Douglass said that the suppression of free speech is a “double wrong” because it “violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
 
Douglass had no lack of such speech suppressors to contend with, both in antebellum American and during the time of Jim Crow. But he likely never imagined that one day those who would be foremost in dismissing their own rights and those of others to hear would be in colleges and universities.
 
This dispiriting realization emerges from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which has released its 2027 College Free Speech Rankings. Before we look at FIRE’s ranking of colleges, first take in the results of FIRE’s survey of their students.
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• FIRE reveals that almost 70 percent of college students surveyed said that shouting down a campus speaker is acceptable under rare conditions.
  
  
• Fifty percent said it is acceptable to block some speakers.
  
  
• And 30 percent said using violence to stop a campus speech is sometimes acceptable.

 
These are responses to survey questions, not evidence that those students have disrupted an event or committed violence. But they reveal a dangerous confusion about what it means to protest. Students have every right to challenge a speaker, organize a competing event, or walk out. They have no right to prevent others from hearing a speech, much less to attack the person giving it.
 
The consequences of this misunderstanding became horrifyingly clear when Charlie Kirk was murdered during a campus event at Utah Valley University in September 2025. His killing tells us why the boundary separating argument from violence must be bright and inviolable.
 
FIRE’s new college rankings also describe a wider failure of campus openness.
 
Of 261 ranked schools, 121 received an “F” for their punitive speech climate. The University of Chicago came in first place for its open speech climate. New York University came in last.
 
At 61 schools, more than half of surveyed students said Kirk was difficult to discuss. Nine schools lost points after punishing faculty over comments about his death. Other campuses saw efforts to deny recognition to chapters of the organization he founded, Turning Point USA. 
 
Colleges should defend students’ freedom to condemn Kirk’s views, criticize responses to his murder, and debate the issues he raised. They should defend that same freedom for his supporters. Administrators can make the rule credible by protecting events from disruption and applying speech policies consistently, especially when the views at issue are unpopular with those on the far left or far right.
 
The troubled state of speech in American higher education is revealing that repression breeds repression. Or, as Douglass said: “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”
 
The answer to a speaker you oppose is to make your case so well that others will want to hear it. A campus that teaches students to answer words with words is doing its part to preserve both free speech and peace.

Do businesses have First Amendment rights that allow them to reject compelled speech?

The Miami Herald thought so. It went to court to fight a 1970s Florida law that attempted to give political candidates a “right to equal space to reply to criticisms and attacks.” The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with the newspaper in 1974, holding that Florida law could not commandeer the paper’s “exercise of editorial control and judgment.”

The Justices’ respect for the editorial judgment was central to The Herald’s victory. The Court recognized that a “newspaper is more than a passive receptacle or conduit for news, comment, and advertising.”

What is true for a newspaper should also be true for other businesses, none of which relinquish their First Amendment rights simply because they earn profits. Protect The 1st Foundation advanced this principle in an amicus brief that urges the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold Apple’s free-speech rights.

The dispute arose after Epic Games sued Apple over rules requiring developers to use Apple’s in-app purchasing system. Although Epic lost its federal antitrust claims, a district court barred Apple from prohibiting developers from including content – buttons, external links, and other calls to action – directing users to alternative purchasing systems.

Apple allowed external links but continued to regulate their language, appearance, and placement. For this, the Ninth Circuit held Apple in civil contempt for violating the “spirit” of a permanent injunction to carry developers’ pitches for purchases outside its App Store.

PT1st’s amicus brief demonstrates that such a vague standard is especially dangerous when an injunction regulates speech. It leaves a speaker “to constantly seek guidance and permission from whatever judge communes with that spirit before engaging in First Amendment activity.”

Worse, “the Ninth Circuit wrongly held that the First Amendment was not even implicated by the letter or the spirit of the injunction.”

Like a newspaper, the App Store is not a passive conduit. Apple decides which apps to admit, which to reject, how to categorize them, and which to promote. It rejects often lawful content from apps it deems as inappropriate, such as sexually themed or gambling apps. In 2024 alone, Apple rejected more than 1.9 million submissions for fraud, privacy violations, and other failures to comply with its guidelines. Those editorial standards support Apple’s promise that the App Store is “a safe and trusted place to discover and download apps.”

The injunction degrades that promise by overriding Apple’s decisions about the messages presented within its own curated storefront. As our brief explains, Apple is required to “host Epic’s pitch for purchases outside the Store – and to do so in Epic’s style, language, format, and placement.” That is “an order requiring Apple to publish someone else’s speech that Apple would otherwise have declined to host at all.”

The Supreme Court addressed closely related principles in Moody v. NetChoice. Florida and Texas had enacted laws limiting large social-media platforms’ ability to filter, prioritize, label, or remove user content. Texas went further, prohibiting platforms from censoring expression based on viewpoint.

The Supreme Court vacated the lower-court judgments and required a proper assessment of the laws’ full range of applications. But it also made the controlling First Amendment principle clear: Selecting, excluding, organizing, and presenting third-party speech is expressive activity. When government orders excluded material to be included, it interferes with editorial judgment and “confronts the First Amendment.”
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PT1st urges the Court to uphold Apple’s speech right, releasing it from any obligation to adhere to an unwritten “spirit” of a ruling.

Three news organizations – CNN, MS NOW, and Politico – have now been banned from the White House.

The New York Times reports that CNN has retained First Amendment lawyer Ted Boutrous, a sign that a court challenge may be coming. But is this really a violation of the First Amendment?

You can scour the text of the Constitution’s premier amendment without finding a provision that reads, “the right of the press to occupy real estate in the White House complex shall not be abridged.” The president could, if he chose, remove the White House briefing room and restore the indoor swimming pool beneath it.

The rub, however, is that this action targets some news outlets but not others.

Because this action stems from the president’s publicly stated displeasure with the reporting of these news organizations, a legal challenge could have a considerable chance of success. Withholding access on that basis could well be determined by the courts to be viewpoint discrimination – a violation of the First Amendment.
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The nation’s fourth president recognized that official discomfort with the press is part of the price of a free society. When devising what eventually became the First Amendment, Madison wrote: “The freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.”
To be continued…

We’ve regularly reported on aggressive moves by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr to threaten the broadcast licenses of local stations in an effort to punish networks for politically significant speech.

While the FCC pioneers new ways to use official power to try to regulate speech, the Securities and Exchange Commission is setting the opposite example. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins is scrubbing old rules that have long curtailed the First Amendment rights of Americans working in financial services.

In May, Chairman Atkins rescinded Rule 202.5(e), a gag rule that prevented defendants who settled with the agency from ever publicly challenging its allegations.

As one such defendant, Thomas J. Powell, wrote about that rule:

“While the SEC remained free to publish allegations against those it accused of violating securities regulations, even when no court had tested those allegations, the rule compelled settling respondents to stay silent about their own cases.”

The shelving of that gag rule was a major victory for the First Amendment, even though the SEC is rarely thought of as an agency whose work implicates speech rights.

Now Atkins is proposing to rescind another speech-curtailing regulation: 206(4)-5, or the SEC’s so-called “pay-to-play” rule. That rule generally prohibits an investment adviser from providing compensated services to a government entity for two years after that adviser or certain employees make covered political contributions. Exempted contributions are limited to $350 when the contributor is eligible to vote for that candidate, and $150 when that contributor is not.

The theory behind this Obama-era rule is that political contributions could influence elected officials who may play some role in selecting appointed officials responsible for choosing firms to manage public pension funds.

As worthy as preventing favoritism may be, Chairman Atkins correctly noted that local ordinances and state laws, along with federal election regulations, are the better suited to police political donations than the SEC.

And make no mistake, this restriction has curtailed speech rights.

“I can’t speak up, and I can’t fight for what I believe,” Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, complained. “Doesn’t that violate my First Amendment rights?”

Atkins said that the harm from this policy radiated throughout entire organizations. He said:

“Many firms simply impose blanket prohibitions on employee political contributions rather than navigate the rule’s complexities. People should not have to choose between their political speech rights and a job in a particular industry.”
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Questions about speech arise much more often in the domain of Chairman Carr’s FCC than in that of Chairman Atkins’ SEC. Perhaps the FCC Chairman might see in Atkins’ actions a praiseworthy example to follow. We would much rather have reason to commend the FCC’s actions than condemn them.

​The angels may appear to be on the side of ABC in its lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission, but the devils are in the details.

We’ve followed the Disney-owned corporation’s spirited First Amendment defense against the FCC’s extraordinary decision to subject the broadcast licenses of eight ABC-owned stations to an early review. These licenses are in jeopardy over official ire at the liberal bias of ABC shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live and The View.

Leave it to Thomas Hazlett to tell the rest of the story – that the broadcasters’ regulatory predicament is the result of a trap they helped set for themselves.

Hazlett, a professor of economics at Clemson University and a former chief economist at the Federal Communications Commission, is a renowned scholar of telecommunications economics and policy. Hazlett writes in The Wall Street Journal that “there’s a loophole” in the First Amendment treatment of broadcasters. Hazlett observes:

“While most media operate in a laissez-faire regime, terrestrial radio and television broadcasting are licensed, and their airwave access has sometimes been deemed a privilege, not a right.”

Hazlett quotes comedian George Carlin, who said that radio and television are “the only two parts of American life not protected by the free-speech provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution. I’d like to repeat that because it sounds vaguely important.”

Hazlett points out that the 1927 Radio Act’s “public interest” language, which opens the door for regulation of broadcasters’ speech, was written by the National Association of Broadcasters. Hazlett concludes:

“The broadcasters traded freedom for free licenses and a lucrative, protected market.”

In the early television age, this regulatory protection shielded legacy broadcasters from new entrants. Hazlett then proceeds to describe how these restrictions were turned on the industry that designed them. In 1973, to cite one example, President Richard Nixon’s political allies challenged the license renewals of two Florida TV stations for failing to meet their “public interest” obligations. It just so happened that both stations were owned by the same company that owned The Washington Post, where two reporters named Woodward and Bernstein were publishing an investigative series about the crimes of the Nixon White House. The Washington Post Company’s stock price plunged 50 percent. Similar intrusions from the FCC occurred under Democratic administrations going back to John F. Kennedy.

We draw two lessons from this history lesson.

First, government overreach – whether in speech, privacy, or other basic rights – is rarely just the story of officials behaving badly, though there is plenty of that. It is often the result of businesses seeking regulatory advantage to boost their competitiveness and handicap their competitors. Many executives and stockholders are shocked when the monster they helped create turns on them.
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Second, broadcasters might consider a new arrangement with the government. Paying a reasonable market price to secure their spectrum rights might enable broadcasters to control, as Hazlett puts it, both their spectrum and their content.

​This can’t be an easy week for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr.
 
He sits on a dilemma – one horn being a direct and public request from President Trump to “punish” NBC journalist Kristen Welker, the other being mounting public and Republican criticism of the FCC’s heavy-handed forays into policing broadcast speech.
 
To date, Chairman Carr has followed President Trump’s desire to use the regulatory authority of the Federal Communications Commission to retaliate against media critics.
 
Carr pressured Disney-ABC to fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, only to be criticized by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for making a statement to the network (“we can do this the easy way or the hard way”) that the senator likened to a mobster’s threat.
 
When Carr opened an investigation into whether the daytime talk show The View improperly gave airtime to Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, he prompted Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) to say that the FCC was exploring the “foothills of violating the First Amendment.”
 
Whatever directives the White House may have given Chairman Carr about these actions in private, there is no mistaking the charge President Trump has now given him in public.
 
Kristen Welker drew the president’s ire by saying on NBC’s Meet the Press that he has had “some mixed results” in his endorsement of Republican candidates. While the president has had extraordinary success in backing his preferred Senate candidates – replacing two incumbent Republican senators with his picks – it is true that he has been far less successful in backing gubernatorial candidates.
 
The president immediately fired back, saying Welker would be “reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment” for the crime of “purposeful inaccuracy.”
 
The president added on his Truth Social account: “The Press is a Disgrace to our Nation, and I hope that Chairman Brendan Carr, and the fine people of his Commission, will take this Threat to our Country very seriously.”
 
And on what basis might the FCC assert authority over the comments of a journalist? The president answered that question: “How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves.”
 
This is in keeping with Chairman Carr’s oft-stated rationale for his investigations, predicated on the New Deal-era rules governing broadcasters’ access to public airwaves.
Carr told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo said that broadcasters “struck a deal with the American people. You broadcasters get subsidized access, free access to a valuable public resource, the airwaves, worth billions of dollars. In exchange, you have to operate in the public interest.
 
“Look, as a country, we should have a trusted, respected news media, and we’re not there. So I hope more broadcasters return to their public interest obligations.”
Thus, the president’s demand to “punish” and “rebuke” a journalist is clearly based on the theory that the use of public airwaves by broadcasters entitles the government to regulate their reporting until, in the judgment of the government, the news media are “trusted” and “respected.” For decades, the “public interest” obligation has traditionally meant that broadcasters have a general duty to be responsive to local events and needs, avoid obscenity, and give political candidates relatively substantially equal access outside “bona fide news interview programs.”
 
Now the president is proposing to interpret these broad and general obligations into an asserted authority to micromanage speech. Could there be a better example of policing speech than “punishing” a journalist for the relatively mild suggestion that the president’s political endorsements are not always successful?
 
We don’t discount conservative complaints that most corporate news organizations are biased. The best solution to the perception of biased speech has proven to be more speech, creating a market for alternative perspectives in which Fox News has prospered. But regulatory policing of speech is a recipe for authoritarianism.

For more than half a century, the Securities and Exchange Commission offered people accused of violating securities laws a coercive choice: Fight the federal government at enormous expense, or settle and surrender the right to tell your side of the story.

That practice finally ended in May, when the SEC rescinded Rule 202.5(e), commonly known as its “gag rule.” Make no mistake – withdrawing the gag rule is a victory for the First Amendment. But unless the courts or Congress act, another SEC majority could easily reinstate this rule.

How the Gag Order Worked

Since 1972, the SEC had refused to settle an enforcement action imposing a sanction unless the defendant agreed to never contest the agency’s allegations publicly. Defendants were usually permitted to say that they “neither admit nor deny” the accusations. But they could not claim innocence, dispute the SEC’s account, or even create the impression that the agency’s allegations lacked a factual basis.

The restriction was permanent. As Thomas J. Powell, the lead petitioner in a constitutional challenge to the rule, writes in The Wall Street Journal:

“In 2021 the SEC settled a proceeding involving a firm I led. The commission never proved the allegations underlying its findings. Its lawyers drafted the order without a hearing and without contested adjudication, inside the agency’s own forum, where the SEC served as accuser and judge …”

“While the SEC remained free to publish allegations against those it accused of violating securities regulations, even when no court had tested those allegations, the rule compelled settling respondents to stay silent about their own cases.”

The rule also required settling defendants to withdraw court filings to the extent those filings denied the SEC’s allegations. If a defendant later violated the gag order, the agency reserved the right to ask a court to vacate the settlement and return the case to active litigation.

Chairman Paul Atkins’ Course Correction

Calling such an agreement “voluntary” ignored the realities of federal enforcement. Individuals and businesses often settle not because they accept the government’s account, but because they cannot afford years of litigation against an agency backed by federal resources. The government should not be allowed to use that imbalance to extract a lifetime waiver of First Amendment rights.

Facing Powell’s Supreme Court petition and 16 supporting friend-of-the-court briefs, the SEC abruptly rescinded the rule. Protect The 1st commends Chairman Paul Atkins, who correctly declared that “speech critical of the government is an important part of the American tradition.” The SEC also promised not to enforce gag provisions contained in earlier settlements.

The Power to Gag Has Been Shelved, Not Repealed

Any celebration should, however, come with a caution. The Supreme Court subsequently declined to hear Powell v. SEC, never ruling on whether the gag rule violated the First Amendment. And because the SEC repealed the rule administratively, a future commission could restore it administratively.
​
Chairman Atkins and the SEC deserve credit for ending an indefensible policy. But constitutional rights should not depend on who happens to chair a federal agency. Congress should prohibit the SEC – and every federal agency – from conditioning settlement on a promise never to criticize the government or dispute unproven allegations.

​Sometimes an opposing party makes your argument for you.

In Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, the City and County of Boulder are seeking damages from Suncor and ExxonMobil for the alleged local effects of global climate change. At the certiorari stage, Boulder presented the lawsuit principally as a conventional application of state tort law, invoking nuisance, unjust enrichment, trespass, and civil conspiracy.

Protect The 1st’s amicus brief urged the U.S. Supreme Court to look past those labels. We explained that Boulder’s theory of liability turns substantially on speech – specifically, claims that the companies misled the public about fossil fuels, emissions, and climate change – despite the complexities of this issue.

Boulder has now filed its merits brief. Right at the outset, it confirms what we said all along.

The brief characterizes the lawsuit as one seeking damages “for deceptive marketing and sales (rather than emissions).” It later alleges that the companies, “through their advertising,” misled the public about climate change and the role of fossil fuels. Its table of contents even devotes a section to arguing that “the deception claims are not preempted.”

To be precise, Boulder’s statutory consumer-protection claims were dismissed without prejudice and are not before the Supreme Court. But its surviving tort theories still rely heavily on the same allegation: The companies caused harm by communicating a deceptive message. That is inescapably about speech.

A similar lawsuit brought by Honolulu, which failed before the Court, shows how far such theories can reach. Plaintiffs there sought to depose hundreds of third-party witnesses, including alleged “climate-denial leaders and authors of climate disinformation,” public-relations strategists, scientists and academics, media organizations, think tanks, and interest groups. Such sweeping discovery targets not just commercial advertising, but public commentary and expressive associations engaged in scientific and political debate.

Misleading commercial speech can, of course, be regulated. But government plaintiffs cannot evade First Amendment scrutiny merely by declaring contested speech about a controversial issue as indisputably false and then packaging that speech as nuisance, trespass, and unjust enrichment. Courts must distinguish provably deceptive commercial claims from protected participation in public debates.
​
Agree or disagree with what the companies said, Boulder has now made it clear that the case turns substantially on just that.

We’ve long been critical of the brutal suppression of speech on college campuses, from the shouting down of a federal appellate judge at Stanford Law School to a Yale University noise riot that shut down a panel on – irony alert – censorship and free speech.

Institutions of higher learning are awakening to the need to end their tolerance of the heckler’s veto, often accompanied by coarse language and physical threats. But if the facts reported by WLRN public radio are accurate, Florida International University is punishing students not for disrupting an event, but simply for expressing a disfavored message.

In March, seven FIU students reportedly entered a “fireside chat” hosted by university president Jeanette M. Nuñez. The students wore shirts reading “ICE OFF FIU” to protest the university’s working arrangements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The students stood in silence for a moment and quickly left.

WLRN reports that FIU brought disciplinary charges against the students under a policy prohibiting “expressive conduct” indoors. The university maintains that the rule protects its operations from disruption. Yet Jehnny Rivera, executive director of FIU’s Office of University Protocol, Ceremonies and Events, reportedly told an investigating officer that the protest did not disrupt the event or other university operations. If that is true, it is difficult to see what legitimate interest FIU’s punishment serves.

The First Amendment protects expression that is controversial and unwelcome. At a public university, officials should not convert a rule against disruption into a general prohibition on silent political expression inside campus buildings.

The students’ assigned punishment raises an additional concern. According to WLRN, FIU ordered them to record “original” and “thoughtful” videos explaining which university policies they had violated. The university can require the students to redo those videos until administrators find them satisfactory.

That sounds less like education than compelled contrition – the sort of thing one expects at a Maoist struggle session, not as a disciplinary measure at a university. The First Amendment generally protects Americans not only against being silenced, but also against being forced by the government to deliver a message they do not believe.

Universities can impose reasonable, viewpoint-neutral rules governing the time, place, and manner of demonstrations. They should punish protesters who shout down speakers, block access, threaten others, or materially interfere with an event.
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But seven students silently displaying a message and then leaving do not constitute, on the reported facts, such a case. FIU should drop the disciplinary charges – and remember that a public university should be a marketplace of ideas, not a school for compelled conformity.

We expect state and local governments to keep the streets safe and clean, and the water running. But every so often, city and state officials survey the condition of the streets and, finding everything satisfactory, go looking for someone’s speech to regulate.

Consider three recent examples.

Joshua and Stephanie McDonald are going to federal court to challenge a South Carolina law that prohibits tattoos above the collarbone. The McDonalds’ lawsuit asserts that tattoos, tattoo artists, and their customers all engage in expression protected by the First Amendment – above and below the collar.

To be sure, we would get down on our knees and beg our adult children not to get a teardrop, or three-dots signifying mi vida loca, or any other tattoo on their faces. Facial and neck tattoos can be professionally limiting, socially off-putting, and the subject of unwelcome conversations at Thanksgiving dinner.

But adults own their heads, faces, and necks – as well as their natural right, protected by the First Amendment, to turn themselves into human billboards. A city can enforce reasonable health and sanitation standards for tattoo parlors. It cannot simply decide that the human head is a speech-free zone.

Then there is Richard Hershey, who stood on a public sidewalk outside the Brookshire Grocery Arena in Bossier City, Louisiana, distributing pamphlets on behalf of the Christian Vegetarian Association before a Christian rock concert.

With memories of Easter brunches featuring glistening hams, we are surprised to learn that Christian vegetarianism is a thing. But it is. And Hershey was peacefully promoting it in one of the places where First Amendment protection is strongest: a public sidewalk.

Police and arena security officers reportedly threatened Hershey with arrest and forced him to leave while allowing a representative of a commercial radio station nearby to remain. Hershey sued, but the Fifth Circuit granted the officers qualified immunity because he could not identify a prior case with nearly identical facts.

Cato and the Law Enforcement Action Partnership are now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case. Their brief argues that officials should not escape accountability for an obvious constitutional violation merely because no earlier court has ruled on the precise combination of Christian rock, vegetarian pamphlets, and a Louisiana sidewalk. If constitutional accountability requires a precedent matching every fact, qualified immunity becomes absolute immunity for government officials.

Finally, Jacksonville, Arkansas, has an ordinance allowing political yard signs only during the 60 days before an election and requiring their removal within 10 days afterward. Real-estate and yard-sale signs, however, can remain up year-round.

The city attorney has now concluded that this content-based distinction is unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Reed v. Town of Gilbert.

Which raises an intriguing question: What would have happened under the ban if a Jacksonville resident had posted a political sign protesting the political-sign ban outside the permitted period? Would the city have removed it, thereby proving its point? Perhaps the sign could have read: “This Message Will Be Constitutional Again 60 Days Before Election Day.”
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Tattoos, pamphlets, and yard signs may seem like small matters. But the First Amendment is often tested in small places by officials wielding modest powers. The answer in each case is the same: The government does not get to decide that some surfaces, sidewalks, or seasons are off-limits to speech.

​When it comes to freedom of expression, the law cannot discriminate against viewpoints. The First Amendment is neutral, making it a guardrail against today’s speech police on the right and the left. As much as some might wish otherwise, the First Amendment contains no exception for regulations protecting dignity, flags, or anyone’s idea of speech that is reasonable or unreasonable.

Nor does the Constitution say anything about course catalogs at universities, as a Trump-appointed judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit reminded Florida last week. The state’s 2022 Stop WOKE Act restricted how public higher education institutions can teach students about ideas concerning race and gender.

Judge Britt C. Grant previously ruled that by “limiting its restrictions to a list of ideas designated as offensive, the Act targets speech based on its content,” and that by “barring only speech that endorses any of those ideas, it penalizes certain viewpoints – the greatest First Amendment sin.”

In last week’s appellate ruling, Judge Grant doubled down, calling the law “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse.”

Viewpoint judgments will always provide slippery standards for would-be speech police. Viewpoints cannot be effectively controlled or legitimately adjudicated by law, or by official pressure campaigns and jawboning.

Protect The 1st has long been critical of the ideological monoculture on many U.S. campuses. The proper response to one-sided academic ideology, however, is not to pass laws that attempt to dictate countervailing ideology. Such efforts are doomed to fail, and not just in court. Attempting to legislate or regulate the inherently slippery nature of speech is a fool’s errand.
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The best approaches must be cultural. It is perfectly legitimate for legislators and donors to pressure universities to open discussion to all sides by declaring their institutions neutral forums – the very kind of spaces that should flourish under the First Amendment.

​The disappearance of Nancy Guthrie is the stuff of nightmares.

The 84-year-old mother of “Today” co-host Savannah Guthrie vanished from her home in the Catalina Foothills outside Tucson on Feb. 1. Investigators found evidence that she had been taken against her will, including Guthrie’s blood at the scene. Security footage showed a masked, armed figure tampering with a doorbell camera. Five months later, Guthrie remains missing, and the FBI says the case is still being investigated as a kidnapping for ransom.

It is hardly surprising that this story has attracted intense public attention and the usual pop-up conspiracy theories. It has also attracted a collection of true-crime streamers and YouTubers who have camped out near Nancy Guthrie’s home, livestreaming developments and offering their theories to online audiences.

Some of their behavior has been, to put it mildly, appalling. Neighbors have complained of harassment, public urination, filming of residents, and creators turning their quiet neighborhood into a stage for online speculation. Law enforcement has every right to enforce laws against trespassing, obstruction, harassment, and other unlawful conduct.

But as Taylor Seely of The Arizona Republic reports, law enforcement records raise a different question: Were some streamers arrested not for breaking the law, but because authorities did not like who they were or what they were doing?

Three streamers – Alexander Zabel, Troy Bradshaw, and Damian Enderle – were arrested or cited in June on public nuisance or obstruction charges. “But unlike Zabel, neither Enderle nor Bradshaw were accused of urinating in public,” Seely wrote. “They were not on private property, and, on this day at least, they were not obstructing the roadway. Incident reports of their arrests list the crimes of ‘live streaming and lingering.’”

One detective revealed a troubling attitude in an incident report, describing the streamers as “so-called journalists” who exploit tragedy “to increase their social media followers and potentially benefit financially.”

He may well be right. But unprofessionalism is not a First Amendment standard.

The First Amendment does not authorize police officers, sheriffs, or judges to distinguish between noble journalism and crummy journalism. It does not protect only reporters with press passes, journalism degrees, editors, or respectable business models. Nor does constitutional protection disappear when someone is sensationalistic, tasteless, self-promoting, or hoping to make money.

If it did, government would be empowered to decide who counts as a “real” journalist. That power would inevitably be used to reward favored media and punish disfavored speakers.

The Supreme Court has long recognized that freedom of the press belongs to more than an officially recognized professional class. In the digital age, the line between journalist, citizen journalist, blogger, podcaster, livestreamer, and ordinary citizen with a cellphone is increasingly difficult to draw.

This does not give YouTubers a license to trespass, block roads, threaten neighbors, or urinate on someone’s property. Conduct can be regulated through neutral laws that apply to everyone. But police cannot transform “public nuisance” into a catchall for people whose reporting they regard as exploitative or distasteful. Nor should the words “so-called journalist” ever become a predicate for arrest.

The tragedy of Nancy Guthrie deserves compassion, restraint, and serious journalism. Some online creators fall far short of those standards.
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The First Amendment protects them anyway.