On his first day back in office in January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” More than a year and a half later, his administration is instead busy using government power to go after speech it dislikes. 

Last year, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr urged broadcasters to take action against Jimmy Kimmel over his comments following Charlie Kirk’s killing, and in September, Kimmel said the FCC again intervened to stop Kimmel’s late-night show from airing an interview with James Talarico, Democratic Senate candidate for Texas.

Also last month, Trump barred three news outlets — CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — from the White House over their coverage. That ban was quickly blocked by a federal judge, but both CNN and Politico have since been banned from traveling with the press pool on Trump trips.

Outside of the White House, the fight over free speech is also raging on college campuses. In states like Texas, Republican lawmakers have restricted when students can protest and given governor-appointed university boards more say over what gets taught. In 2025, 15 states passed laws that restrict what can be taught or weaken protections for free expression on college campuses.

To break down what all of this means for the state of free speech in the US — and the future of our First Amendment rights — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

How would you describe the kind of status of free speech on campus these days?

The status of free speech is in great peril, both on and off campus. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and it’s about as bad as I’ve ever seen it. 

When it comes to the Charlie Kirk backlash cases, we saw about 90 of them. It’s a remarkably high number. We saw an ex-cop go to jail for 37 days just for forwarding a Trump meme in response to a request to go to a candlelight vigil for Charlie Kirk. It’s not good.

If you look at the last two years, we’ve done so many episodes about free speech concerns. There was Jimmy Kimmel; there’s CNN being banned from the White House. 

There’s student protesters who are protesting what’s going on in Gaza. 

It really does seem like we’re at a moment where so many different types of people claim that their speech is being restricted in so many different types of ways. What is happening in the country?

My worry is I’m very much a small-L liberal. I come from an old ACLU background. That’s where I interned in law school. I went to law school to do First Amendment law. I hyper-specialize in it. This is my passion. 

For most of my 25-year career, you could rely on a civil libertarian aspect of the left and a libertarian aspect of the right that would often agree on almost nothing except for things like freedom of speech. And right now, I think we’ve become all culture war all the time, and we have more of a progressive left and more of a populist right. 

The only way that you show you believe in freedom of speech is by saying, “I hate that guy, but I think you should have freedom of speech.” If you’re saying, “I think my side should have freedom of speech,” that’s just self-interest. That doesn’t even count. 

All the worst people in history wanted free speech for their side. So I’m afraid we’re losing — or maybe even, I hate to say this dramatically, but maybe even have lost it as a shared value as a society.

Well, that’s quite grim.

Yeah. I’m feeling a little grim. 

The Trump administration came into office with a promise. And I remember it sounding something like this: “The woke left went too far. They canceled people. They restricted speech. They got out of control. President Trump is going to come back in, and we are going to restore sanity to the country. And as part of sanity, that will include your right to freely express yourself.” 

How do you square the promise versus what we’ve seen?

I think Trump is constantly frustrating everyone around him by being Trump. I think there probably were people in the administration who were like, “Yeah, we’re going to be pro-free speech.” And then Trump decides to declare — I mean, I think the recent White House press pool case is hysterical in a lot of ways because he had to get his team to give a sort of constitutional justification for why he was kicking out the press pool. But on Truth Social, he’s like, “It’s because of their viewpoint,” which is, by the way, something you can’t do under the Constitution. 

“I’m hopeful for the long-term future of free speech, but in the short term, I’m worried.”

His instincts are very authoritarian. They’re very top-down. So maybe there were people in the administration who, in their heart of hearts, are good on free speech, but Trump isn’t. And it’s the reason why when it came to the new administration, there were a lot of people on the right, but also people on the sort of heterodox left who were like, “Oh, this is going to be good for free speech.”

I was like, “Don’t kid yourself, guys. This is going to be bad.” Although I will say, it’s even worse than I was expecting.

President Trump at some point will be out of office. And what happens then? What do you think? Is there an optimistic scenario where we’re like, “Okay, we’re kind of tired of this crap. Let’s just go back to the way it was in the ’90s”?

It has been cyclical, to a degree. American society gets out of whack, and usually one of the things that does bring us together is that we were lucky enough to have…I’ll just say it, we have a brilliant Constitution. It is unusually clever about human nature, and the Constitution itself — you can have whatever opinion you want about the founders, but it is something to be proud of. And a lot of times those values kind of bring us back together. 

That’s my hope. But another thing I will say about Trump: He has played havoc with my ability to predict anything. So what it’s going to look like over the event horizon of 2028, I hope it will be better, and we will fight like hell to make sure it’s better here at FIRE, but will it be better? I’m not sure, and it definitely won’t be better if we think of free speech as something that belongs to my side, not yours.

One of the reasons why I do have hope for free speech in the long term is that free speech works really well. It’s how you know what your fellow citizens think. It’s how you get ideas out there. It’s how you actually be your authentic self. 

Societies that actually have freedom of speech are always going to have advantages, real and serious advantages, over ones that don’t. So I’m hopeful for the long-term future of free speech, but in the short term, I’m worried.

The Wisconsin gubernatorial race was one of the most closely watched Democratic primaries in the country this year, pitting a democratic socialist, state Rep. Francesca Hong, against Milwaukee Democrat David Crowley, who received the endorsement of the state’s sitting Democratic governor, Tony Evers.

Hong lost the race, setting up Crowley to face Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany in the general election this fall. But she’s already back on the campaign trail, this time trying to help Democrats win a trifecta in the state: the governor’s race and both legislative chambers.

Unifying the state’s voters to achieve that won’t be easy, though. Hong spoke with America, Actually host Astead Herndon about her own loss, Evers’s role in it, and whether or not the voters who felt so passionate about her own campaign would find enough to love in Crowley’s campaign — in particular on the increasingly important issue of data centers. 

Astead and Hong also talked about what Wisconsin means for the Democrats nationally, and what lessons the party should take from her race, including her loss.

“I said this, and I will continue to say it — the person who is most electable is the person who ended up getting the most votes, and that was Crowley this time around,” Hong said. “But I think there’s a disservice when you have the most powerful Democrat in the state choosing to ignore a lot of voters and people who were inspired and energized and coming out to participate in politics for the first time through our campaign. I think it was shortsighted to use electability almost as a fear tactic.”

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Hong, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

Part of the reason we wanted to come here was because we saw you were getting back on the campaign trail, and specifically around that idea of energizing Wisconsin toward a trifecta.

Now, just tell me the difference in terms of the importance of Democrats winning it all — not only the governor’s mansion, but both houses of the state legislature — versus just the governor’s mansion. How does that change the possibilities of what the party could do?

For the last 16 years, a Republican majority in the state legislature has meant that passing the types of policies that we know can drastically improve the lives of everyday folks here in Wisconsin stalled. And we have a historic opportunity to flip the assembly and the state Senate and hold the governor’s mansion and the entire executive branch to a Democratic majority, meaning the opportunity to pass the policies that the majority of our state supports — things like increasing minimum wage, things like legalizing marijuana, codifying abortion. 

We also need to repeal Act 10 [which dramatically restricted collective bargaining rights for public-sector employees]. Wisconsin is where workers’ rights, things like unemployment insurance, Social Security were born, and we moved backwards with the Republican majority. That’s all on the table with the Democratic trifecta.

It also, though, raises the political standard of what Democrats would have to do to achieve that, and some of it goes through these more rural communities.

Why do we think the party has fallen behind in more rural communities, and what could be done to reverse that?

I think it’s important to look at what’s happened in the rural communities when we’ve seen manufacturing jobs leave the state, when we’ve seen fewer and fewer supports for our small farmers.

And so much of this — what connects it — is actually the growth of massive wealth and corporate control and corporate greed, and more people feeling the impacts of that. There’s an opportunity right now to say, ‘Hey, Republicans have been in the legislature, they’ve been in power, and things have not improved for you or your community … Now’s the opportunity to make sure that we’re actually able to see our shared Wisconsin values of working hard and taking care of our kids be reflected back in Madison through laws.’

So much of your campaign was focused on data centers, stopping data centers. Should I think of that as a rural issue?

I think the issue around data centers is an everyone issue. It’s a democracy issue. It’s people wanting to feel like there are folks who care about what happens to communities, and that they have control and an actual say in what happens in their communities.

To that point, is it a mistake for David Crowley, the Democratic nominee, to have not gone as far as you did and say, “We won’t be building more data centers for a period of time”?

He’s fighting for communities and community control when it comes to data centers.

But it’s not a moratorium.

But it’s not a moratorium. It isn’t, but he’s also committed to 100 percent renewable energy, clean energy to power data centers.

And achieving that is going to be incredibly difficult, and it is going to be the developers having to pay their own way, and these are things that he’s committed to that we know can slow down the growth and development of data centers. 

Have you had time to reflect on your primary loss? If you had to diagnose, why do you think you lost?

I’m still doing a lot of reflection. But I think that I want to continue to look forward. And what I’ve learned from our election is that it’s so important to continue to stay grounded in becoming accessible to people. I think that as an organizer and an elected official, it’s my responsibility to continue to go to the people and remain very in touch with what’s going on on the ground.

I have a couple more questions about the nature of the loss. Evers’s endorsement changed that race, so much so that your opponent David Crowley was able even to win in some smaller communities, like places where you were pitching yourself as the voice of more rural communities.

Does that disprove any of this thesis around, say, data centers? If that was the top priority for Wisconsin voters, wouldn’t you be the nominee?

I think it wasn’t all rural communities. It wasn’t all suburban communities. We saw certain demographics but also ZIP codes where we outperformed David significantly.

And I think that where the governor’s endorsement played a bigger role was areas where he was also more popular. 

Did it surprise you when Evers endorsed Crowley?

I was disappointed.

Why?

I was disappointed because I was getting a lot of feedback from folks who hadn’t committed to any candidate yet that this felt like the governor was putting his thumb on the scale.

I wanted to ask about electability, because it seemed as if Evers’s endorsement was about a fear that maybe you couldn’t win in November.

So much of the primary concern was around the DSA label, even campaigning with folks like Hasan Piker. In retrospect, was any of that a mistake?

We knew going in that we would have to encourage new voters to come out, folks who typically do not come out for primaries, quote-unquote low-propensity voters. And we knew that we would have to campaign in places where folks weren’t expecting to see a gubernatorial candidate. And those included Twitch streams.

Those also included going to dive bars and bowling alleys and making sure that we were accessible and shaping our policies based on what the people were telling us they wanted to see happen and also what they wanted to see out of their governor. I think electability… I said this, and I will continue to say it — the person who is most electable is the person who ended up getting the most votes, and that was Crowley this time around.

But I think there’s a disservice when you have the most powerful Democrat in the state choosing to ignore a lot of voters and people who were inspired and energized and coming out to participate in politics for the first time through our campaign.

I think it was shortsighted to use electability almost as a fear tactic, when Democrats need to be inspiring and project a vision where everyone can see themselves in it as everyday working-class folks.

When you’ve got a party that has struggled with elitism to then cave to an establishment narrative … being more afraid of labels when I’m hearing from people on the ground that they’re interested in solutions and solving problems, maybe somebody who knows the hustle of the service industry and running restaurants and has worked across the aisle to pass bipartisan legislation. There are ways that we can maneuver around labels and what the loudest narrative might be.

I wish our governor hadn’t fed into that.

To be fair, to your point, the establishment label doesn’t fully fit even someone like Crowley, who comes from a working-class background. But am I hearing that you think Evers’s move made your life in the general election more difficult?

Is it harder to re-inspire if young people who are invested in the Hong campaign think that the establishment squashed them out?

We still had over 300,000 votes. We lost by fewer than 4,000 votes. I had more votes than Evers did during his primary. That’s not squashing our voices.

We’re still here, and it’s so important that people find avenues to continue to exercise their voice and their new organizing power. And I’m definitely going to continue to work to make sure that we get results and that we win the trifecta, and that’s the most important thing we should be focusing on right now.

I hear why a trifecta matters in the state context, particularly the state policy.

If I’m someone, though, who’s not in Wisconsin, who’s just worried about Donald Trump running amok in Washington, why should I care if Democrats win the governor’s mansion and the state legislature? Does that matter for folks outside of the state?

Because we will start to see that when you feel government actually working and you see change happening in your lives, these are then voters who are going to continue to come out and vote for Democrats.

We’re a pivotal state when it comes to the federal elections as well. We’re actually in a swing district right now. 

We have an opportunity, through Wisconsin, to actually start improving the brand for Democrats. And if we do that here, this trickles out to the rest of the country.

The premise being that delivering creates a connection for Democrats that is helpful in the presidential election, and it’s helpful in all these other ways too.

Yeah. We’re not going to be fighting every single midterm and presidential for our lives based on what’s happening in just one state.

But I think if we can start showing durable power for Democrats in a state like ours because of the policies that we’re prioritizing, and you have more folks coming out to vote for Democrats, that’s good for the health of democracy.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration is planning a public killing. 

What’s happening? On Thursday, the Pentagon announced that it would execute Nidal Hasan, a former Army major sentenced to death for a 2009 mass shooting on a military base, publicly and on livestream. 

The execution, if it happens, would be unprecedented: The last widely reported public execution in the US was 90 years ago, in Kentucky, but to stream a death live would be something else entirely. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has promoted the announcement with something approaching glee, telling a reporter that “we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it.”

What’s the context? According to the Pentagon, Hasan will be executed via firing squad on December 3 — the first such execution by the military in more than 80 years.

Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist, was sentenced to death in 2013 by a military jury following a court-martial for the 2009 shooting, when he killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 at Fort Hood in Texas. The execution is set to be carried out at the same Army post.

Will the Pentagon go through with this? It’s unclear, for multiple reasons. The Pentagon’s announcement that Hasan’s death will be livestreamed has generated a great deal of bipartisan pushback, as well as condemnation by religious groups, though that is unlikely to stop the execution itself. 

The head of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops decried the decision to livestream the execution as “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death,” and retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) called it the decision “beyond disgusting.” 

“Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do,” Tillis wrote in a post on X. 

On Friday, Vice President JD Vance also said that he was unsure if the livestream would take place. 

Hasan’s legal team could also delay the execution substantially — potentially for multiple years — by challenging his detention in federal court, though he has exhausted the military appeals process.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

The driest (non-polar) desert in the world, the Atacama in South America, was in full bloom late last month after record-setting rainfall. You can read more about the science behind the wildflowers here, or just enjoy some spectacular photos here (it’s a gift link). Either way, I hope it brings you some joy. 

The Logoff will be off on Monday for Indigenous Peoples’ Day, so we’ll see you back here on Tuesday. Have a good long weekend!