Tag: Freedom of speech
Can Suing People for Lying Save Democracy?
On December 3, 2020, Jen Jordan, then a state senator in Georgia, received a text message. “Get over to the capitol,” it read. “Rudy Giuliani is there and it’s bad.” When she arrived, she found the halls of the state capitol building, in downtown Atlanta, packed with Republican legislators, Donald Trump supporters, and Trump attorneys, including Jenna Ellis and Giuliani. “They were taking selfies like it was a party,” Jordan, a Democrat, recalled recently. The crowd soon moved to a
College Administrations Are Failing Their Palestinian and Jewish Students
“I lost 14 family members in the church bombing in Gaza,” Layla told me.
Layla requested that only her first name be used, due to safety concerns. She is a Palestinian American student at Columbia University. Grieving with dignity there, she said, has felt impossible. She has been repeatedly called a terrorist while walking on campus wearing a keffiyeh—a traditional Palestinian scarf, which has become a symbol of resistance. One student, she recalled, asked her if she was a Hamas … Read more
Why It’s Important to Defend Representative Rashida Tlaib Against Censure, Whether or Not We Agree With Her
True to its increasingly repressive and authoritarian agenda, the House GOP Conference moved this week to censure my colleague Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib for political comments she made that were clearly protected under the First Amendment and the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution. Although I told Representative Tlaib I strongly disagreed with her benign interpretation of the offending phrase (“from the river to the sea”), I rose on the House floor nonetheless to defend her as a Member against … Read more
Like It or Not, Cancel Culture Is Free Speech
How to Fix the Bias Against Free Speech on Campus
A recent investigation of eight abortion-rights supporters at American University, in Washington, D.C., offers yet more evidence that college administrators and diversity-and-inclusion bureaucrats—some of whom undermine free speech as if their job duties demanded it—need new checks on their power.
This matter began in May, shortly after the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked, prompting numerous law students at American to join an online chat about the impending diminution of abortion rights. One student
‘How You React Is the Only Thing You Can Control’
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
In my last newsletter, I asked readers, “What norms should govern jokes in our society? What, if anything, makes a joke harmful? What harm, if any, is there in punishing people for jokes or chilling the expression of jokes? How
The Silenced Students in the “Free Speech” Debate
‘There’s So Much That’s Not in the Constitution’
During oral argument at the Supreme Court in December over Mississippi’s abortion ban, Justice Sonia Sotomayor laid bare a fundamental truth: “There’s so much that’s not in the Constitution.”
Her point is a deep one, and salient to the abortion debate: The text of the Constitution does not explicitly affirm the right to abortion; no one disagrees with that. But the Constitution protects far more than what it literally describes. Unwritten ideas necessarily guide even the strictest readings of the
Maggie Nelson and the Evolving Politics of Liberation
Illustration by Katrien de Blauwer.
In July 2016, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign released an ad titled “Role Models.” It starts off with what appear to be exterior shots of a single-family home in the rural Midwest and then of an inner-city rowhouse. Next we see children, representing numerous target demographics, watching TV inside dimly lit living rooms as candidate Donald Trump’s voice emanates from a bright screen. Some of his greatest hits ensue: “I could stand in the middle of