Last July, the LA City Council banned the words "nigger" and "cunt" from their public comment period. And while you may hate those epithets, it's a dangerous power to grant—one the council president is admittedly keen to abuse. My first for the @latimes: latimes.com/opinion/story/20…

it’s insanely fun when you find ppl who will endlessly riff with you about virtually anything. like something stupid, profound, maybe something even offensive, a half baked idea, or just complete garbage. you just keep tossing thoughts back & forth forever. this is one of the most underrated forms of compatibility. if you have friends like these it makes ordinary time feel unusually alive. & if you have a relationship like this it’s even more valuable cuz most of life is thousands of random dinners, car rides, walks, errands, & nights on the couch. if the two of you can make basically anything entertaining to each other you’ve solved a surprisingly large part of the problem.

I’ll be on CNN live at 11 pm to discuss what the First Amendment has to say about this

I’ve watched this 20 times it’s like de niro’s face is on baldwins skull

Maybe there WAS someone you forgot to ask

How it feels to hyphenate an adjectival phrase but not hyphenate an identical noun phrase

Christopher Reeve would have been 74 years old today. His portrayal of @Superman remains unparalleled. But it's his real-life perseverance and activism with the @ReeveFoundation that made him a true hero. My review of the 2024 documentary Super/Man: cinemantics.org/p/superman-i…

If you mean @mtaibbi, @bariweiss, or @billmaher,, then name them and fight it out with them. I will bring cheddar popcorn. But don’t use “free speech warriors” and the “anti-cancel culture brigade” as broad terms of derision and then act surprised when actual free speech advocates push back. Some of the best people I have ever met in my life are people at FIRE, or people I’ve met through FIRE, from all across the political spectrum. They have spent years defending people they disagree with, often intensely, because they actually believe in the principle. They fought censorship and cancel culture when it came from the left, and they fight it now when it comes from the right. And they absolutely get caught in the blowback from this kind of dismissiveness . There is a very common habit of trying to score points against your political enemies by implying that “free speech people” are all hypocrites—that nobody really believes in this stuff, everybody is secretly partisan, and consistency is a fraud. I’m tired of that cynicism. I’ve spent most of my adult life around people who prove it wrong every day. So don’t casually smear an entire community of people doing difficult and genuinely admirable work. If you mean, other people name them, and they will get a chance to defend themselves. Consistent defenders of free speech exist. A lot of them are my friends and colleagues. And they deserve better than the constant eye-roll assumption that everyone is as cynical as their critics.

They discovering the radio by first principles.

I am a lot of things but I’m never disingenuous. If your point is “partisan folks argued free speech for their side.” No kidding. That always happens and right left and center do it all the time. But when you spread cynicism about free speech by smearing “free speech warriors” and opponents of cancel culture you are besmirching a lot of folks who have been extremely consistent. AND it usually comes from people who have NOT done a good job of defending speech for people they dislike which is literally THE ONLY test of whether you believe in it as a principle.

I really hate this genre of tweet because its purpose is to create cynicism about people who actually defend free speech. And this is a particularly funny example. Did Mehdi actually read the report? The ACLU/Amnesty report repeatedly cites my organization, @TheFIREorg, and credits us for defending pro-Palestinian students, professors, and protesters. It cites our work involving Tulane, Brandeis, the University of Florida, Texas Tech, Penn, and our First Amendment briefs in major litigation. We were involved with practically all of the incidents in someway. And FIRE is hardly alone. @CatoInstitute, @EFF, @PENamerica, Knight, @NCAC, the @rcfp, @Rutherford_Inst, the First Amendment Lawyers Association, and others have been fighting these battles too. So where are the “free speech warriors”? They’re in the report. They’re in the footnotes. They’re writing the letters and filing the briefs. And on cancel culture, Mehdi has actually acknowledged that people sometimes get wrongly fired and self-censor. Where we disagreed was that he dismissed concern about left-wing cancel culture as largely a “moral panic,” while correctly pointing out that there was also a serious threat from the right. The left-wing “moral panic” claim was partisan nonsense. The evidence of cancellation from the left was overwhelming. But the threat from the right was real too. If you actually care about free speech, the answer is not to pick your preferred censor. It is to stand up to both. We did. @RIKKISCHLOTT and I wrote an entire book about it, The Canceling of the American Mind. We took on cancel culture from the left AND the right: amazon.com/dp/1668019140

LAWSUIT: Eight officers raided his home before dawn. His offense? He filmed an officer speeding, criticized him when he got to a drive-thru, and embarrassed the department. In a free country, criticizing police shouldn’t end in handcuffs. In 2022, Joshua Gibbons filmed a Kingsport, Tennessee police SUV speeding without lights or sirens, violating state law. He caught up with the officer at a drive-thru and had salty words about his disregard for the law. That exchange lasted all of one minute. The consequences for Joshua lasted four years. After someone complained about a different video — an officer flipping Gibbons off — police scoured Gibbons’ YouTube channel for ammunition. Before dawn the next morning, while Gibbons was still in bed, eight armed officers raided his mother’s home to arrest him — for speeding using a cellphone while driving, and disorderly conduct. A judge dismissed the speeding and cellphone charges but convicted him of disorderly conduct, saying he was “offended by the way” Gibbons was “talking to that officer.” Gibbons appealed. At a second trial, a jury again found him guilty. In June, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals unanimously reversed that conviction and dismissed the charge. The court found “no evidence” that Gibbons’ criticism prevented anyone from doing anything lawful. The court recognized — as many courts had held — that even “profane and insulting” words alone aren’t a crime, especially when directed at police officers, who are trained to exercise restraint. With FIRE’s help, Gibbons is suing to vindicate his First Amendment rights. The First Amendment protects your right to film and criticize police. Kingsport PD needs to hear that message loud and clear.

Yup.

Secret service agents turned them away and confiscated hard passes *after* knowing that the court issued its TRO. The Secret Service complied with an unlawful presidential order to continue the ban despite the court ruling ending it.

Judge Kelly orders the White House to respond by 12:30 p.m.

Wrote about MY (yes MY) long covid lesbian bar and the broader trend of small business implosion for @TheFP thefp.com/p/last-ditch-covid…

Court orders are not optional. The law requires all Americans to abide by court rulings, regardless of whether they disagree with the ruling. Refusal to abide by a court ruling has a name: contempt. And contempt has clear consequences. Judge Kelly explicitly ordered the Trump administration to “immediately return, reinstate, and restore” CNN, MS NOW, and Politico’s “hard pass” credentials to the White House. Refusing to abide by Judge Kelly's clear order would be a dangerous escalation and an affront to the rule of law.

“I do not regard discussion as an evil in itself. I regard it not as an enemy, but as a friend. It has served us well at other times in our history, and I hope it may serve us well at this time.” More on free speech and Frederick Douglass, by @JMchangama. jacobmchangama.substack.com/…

1/ Frederick Douglass spent two decades insisting free speech would defeat slavery. Emancipation came. Amendments passed. For a moment, “a reform absolutely complete.” Then Reconstruction was dismantled. What does a man do with first principles when victory proves fleeting?🧵

lol they are all wrong. I broke this story on September 5th. blockedandreported.org/p/epi…

This would be a profoundly stupid way to start a constitutional crisis. Let's hope it's just a matter of early morning confusion.