Cast your mind back to January 20, 2025, when, on his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” Or recall how Republican attorneys general sued the Biden administration for its collusion with social media companies to shadowban and deplatform so-called purveyors of misinformation.

Well, all of that stirring rhetoric looks hollow a year and a half into Trump’s second term. The latest outrage is a subpoena issued in the investigation of an alleged national security leak this month that landed on the front page of The New York Times. The story disclosed that the last-minute decision to fly the president and his entourage on the old Air Force One from the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, two weeks ago was in part because the new plane, a gift from the Qatari government, lacked the security features to defend against an attack.

It was no bombshell. The Times had already reported concerns that the new Qatari-gifted jet would not be properly retrofitted with the security gear necessary in the timeline the president had demanded to start using it. Nevertheless, the latest piece prompted the Justice Department to pull out all the stops. Not only did the DOJ subpoena the phone records of the Times reporters themselves, it also subpoenaed the phone records of two spouses of the reporters and one of the journalist’s mothers. The mother is a mental-health professional who has a right to keep her clients private. One of the spouses is a general counsel for a major law firm.

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When he was hired in December, Mengestu declared that “If we do not make room for the plurality and range of voices embodied in our literature, we endanger not only our culture, but our democracy.” That noble aim is incompatible with the zero-sum logic of the BDS movement, which makes “freeing Palestine” contingent on erasing Israel, and insists on anathematizing voices at odds with its master narrative.

The word “Orwellian” has lost its sting in a world where the mayor of New York promises to enforce “international law” by arresting the prime minister of Israel—in compliance with a court that has no jurisdiction in the United States or Israel—and where an Ivy League student accuses Columbia’s administration of withholding “basic humanitarian aid” because it will not send snacks and water to students illegally occupying a building in the name of “freeing Palestine.”

But Orwellian is indeed the word, as William Kolbrener, who teaches creative writing at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, demonstrates below in his beautiful open letter to Mengestu. One of those interviewed for “A Silent Moratorium,” Kolbrener speaks in the name of the Israelis—Christian, Muslim, and Jewish—whose homeless writing he did his best to publish, and whose voices, like his own, testify that a commitment to free speech, literature, and democracy still matters.

—The Editors

Dear Dinaw,

You resigned this month as president of PEN America, an organization founded to defend writers, to protest a report it had published, “A Silent Moratorium.” The report documented something plain: Israeli and Jewish writers have been quietly pushed out of literary life since October 7, 2023—dropped from festivals, passed over for translation or publication, and struck from prize lists. You called this an “unethical” legal campaign that threatened the rights of those who wished to silence them.

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Let me back up.

In early 2000, the internet was a very different place than it is today. It was much freer—tools of censorship weren’t nearly as advanced—but it was also harder to use, and finding information took much longer. The need to make the internet more user-friendly was clear to those of us who spent a lot of time online. We needed a free, fair storehouse of knowledge: an encyclopedia built by, and open to, the public.

It was exhilarating to build Wikipedia at that time. Never before had a global, volunteer-written encyclopedia been shown to work. We applied the principles of open-source software to knowledge: All users would have a seat at the table, everyone would edit each others’ work, and the results would be free for all.

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On March 31, The Free Press published an article by Jacob Siegel accusing “people” of trying to “censor” his book reviews. Your email newsletter to subscribers led with this story, calling it a “surreal” case in which a review of his book was “purged” from the magazine The Baffler after “a person mentioned in the text requested a correcti…

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What this means is that it is now illegal in Finland for Christians to defend traditional Christian teaching about homosexuality. You can’t write or speak about the matter without risking arrest. This, in Europe, in 2026.

Räsänen, a physician by training, wrote the pamphlet in 2004 to inform debate within the Finnish Lutheran Church over the church’s policy on homosexuality and related issues, like gay marriage and adoption. Räsänen is theologically conservative, and explained at length traditional Christian teaching about sexuality and how, in her opinion, it should inform Christian thinking about the law.

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Last week, I published a book called The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. It describes how, as technology has advanced, American politics and government have been transformed by the shift in societal power from visible laws and institutions to opaque forms of digital and informational control.

As I explain in the book, one of the consequences of this shift has been the ability of the government-tech alliance—what I call “the information state”—to carry out mass censorship online over the past decade. This point was noted in a generally positive review of the book that ran on March 24 in a left-wing magazine called The Baffler. The information state, noted academic Richard Greenwald in his review, rests on “twin pillars—censorship and propaganda.”

So I could only savor the irony when, less than a day later, the magazine purged the review from its website.

What happened? Did The Baffler censor me? Did they censor the reviewer who, while criticizing parts of the book, also called it “at once a sweeping history of technocratic governance, a detailed exposé of the counter-disinformation apparatus, and an urgent meditation on what it means to live in a society organized around information as its ruling principle”?

I had written for The Baffler myself once before, in 2018. Perhaps, in the intervening years, someone at the magazine detected evidence that I hold unacceptable opinions. But if that were the case, why publish the review of my book in the first place?

If you’re looking for an answer, you won’t find it on The Baffler’s website. All it has, in place of the purged piece, is an editor’s note informing visitors that the magazine removed the review “after determining that it does not meet The Baffler’s fact-checking standards.” That is the kind of cryptic statement that raises more questions than it answers. Is the magazine accusing me of having made factual errors in my book, or is it leveling that claim at Greenwald? (Greenwald declined to comment for this article.) It’s impossible to say, because the note never specifies the facts that it purports to dispute.

To say that this is unusual by the standards of magazine publishing undersells it by a wide margin. Removing an already-published book review without so much as specifying the offense is not something done by any publication interested in maintaining a reputation as intellectually open and honest. Deleting articles after publication reeks of censorship. It erodes the trust of readers who are left to wonder what other machinations influence the publication’s editorial decisions. It tends to turn off independent-minded writers, who will reasonably suspect that their own work could be next on the chopping block.

Instead, when errors are found, editors generally add updates or corrections to an article so that readers can see both what it got wrong and what the publication now asserts is factually correct. If a magazine publishes something that generates significant controversy among readers or within its own staff—as happens frequently these days—the liberal thing to do is to publish a counterargument. To cite a “fact-checking” error without elaborating what it is leaves the public even less informed than before; it is an incoherent pretext and self-refuting by its own standards.

So, I set out to find what really happened.

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I noticed it especially in Megyn Kelly’s defense of Tucker Carlson, when she claimed that my issue with him—and recently, her—all boiled down to Israel. To be clear, Megyn is lying, and so is Tucker. They’re just lying. I started criticizing Tucker for his economic programs back in 2018. In the more recent, post–Fox News iteration, my critique centered on his trip to Russia to interview and suck up to Vladimir Putin while touting the magic of Moscow subways, and on his decision to host and effectively platform Nick Fuentes. My critique of Tucker has nothing to do with Israel; it’s about the fact that he gave a significant platform to one of America’s most prominent antisemites and largely laundered that Nazi’s views in the process.

I gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation on December 17, 2025, in which I argued at length that Tucker is not, in any meaningful sense, a traditional conservative. He has become a conspiratorial near-anarchist committed to tearing down the fundamental institutions of the United States. Go watch that speech. Israel is mentioned once in 35 minutes of material that is entirely about Tucker’s worldview and its departure from traditional conservatism.

Megyn’s claims are even more dishonest. My actual critique of her began when I asked publicly why she wouldn’t call out Candace Owens for implicating Erika Kirk in the murder of Charlie Kirk. That was it. I also challenged Candace on why she wouldn’t call out Tucker for platforming Nick Fuentes. Fuentes despised Charlie Kirk, and the enmity was mutual.

Megyn responded by claiming I was mischaracterizing what Candace had actually said—that Candace was, in her own way, defending Erika Kirk. That claim has not aged well.

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The actions of protesters and politicians, during and in response to protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), have become real-world lessons in the law of speech. The clashes have demonstrated which types of speech aren’t protected, along with passionate, angry, and unsettling speech that is protected. We’ve also gotten a chilling reminder of what goes wrong when the government pretends not to know the difference.

For starters, the Justice Department has issued grand jury subpoenas to Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, and at least three other Democratic officials in the state, as part of an investigation into whether state and local officials obstructed federal immigration enforcement. Grand jury matters are secret, so we may never see the subpoenas themselves. But the public justification keeps circling back to speech. Federal officials have portrayed Walz’s and Frey’s criticisms of ICE as incitement, which is not protected by the First Amendment.

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Higgins’s case against me concerns my involvement with the Twitter Files—a trove of the social media website’s internal communications that Musk sent to reporters, including me, after he acquired the company in 2022. I took significant heat for my coverage, which included Twitter employees’ deliberations about whether to suppress the report about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election. IRS agents made an unannounced visit to my home the day I testified in Congress about my findings, and delegate Stacey Plaskett falsely accused me of perjury and threatened to jail me.

Despite this, Higgins says I sold out—literally—by working on the Twitter Files. He claims that I “fully dispensed with any pretense of challenging power” after having “cash[ed] in” with my “benefactor,” Musk.

I’ve never taken money from Musk or any other “tech billionaire on the right,” as Higgins implies. And his lie isn’t harmless. The impressions of trading content for cash—or “selling jeans,” as the Russians call it—is extremely damaging to a reporter’s reputation. So I sued Higgins and Bold Type Books, a division of Hachette, in November for defamation.

I kept the lawsuit largely between us, but Higgins went public recently with a post on his Substack complaining, “Yes, I’m being sued by Matt Taibbi.” The post set off a wave of jeers from the online left-wing peanut gallery, who claim to think my legal challenge clashes with my avowed commitment to freedom of speech. “Not the guy free speech guy [sic]”, said influencer Sabrina “Sabby Sabs” Salvati, adding a laugh emoji. “Even if you disagree with Eoin’s book’s conclusion that Taibbi has sold out, it should be legal to make that criticism and Taibbi should respond by rebutting the claim not running to the courts,” said Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson, among many other critics.

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Sooner or later—and it’s usually sooner—the censors start finding “objectionable” material everywhere they look.

Including, we discovered recently, in The Free Press. Specifically, TGIF, Nellie Bowles’ witty take on the week’s news, is being censored in the UK.

This is because the UK this summer put in force its Online Safety Act, an omnibus law sold to the British public as providing protection for children against pornography, suicide promotion, and similarly dangerous materials. Ofcom (the “Office of Communications”), Britain’s media regulator, summarized the law in a few screenfuls of material, helpfully pointing out that the new law can keep children from seeing content that might promote, say, eating disorders.

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If that sentence sounds familiar, it’s because this was the second time Docherty has been arrested, for exactly the same reason.

In February, as my colleague Madeleine Kearns reported, Docherty was put in handcuffs and taken to a police station—because she had been silently holding the same sign outside the same hospital.

“I didn’t speak about abortion,” Docherty told The Free Press yesterday through her legal counsel. “I simply offered anyone the chance to chat about anything.”

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Linehan’s supposed crime? A series of posts on X deemed anti-trans by British authorities. As the Metropolitan Police put it, Linehan was under arrest on “suspicion of inciting violence.”

The closest he gets to that in his offending posts is a call to “make a scene, call the cops, and if all else fails, punch him in the balls” if any of his followers encounter a biological man “in a female-only space.” (It’s perhaps worth noting, again, that he is a comedy writer.)

The position Linehan finds himself in is all too common. Under the guise of protecting “public safety,” British authorities now routinely question or arrest people for online speech. According to The Times of London, police in the UK now make more than 30 arrests a day for purportedly offensive posts on social media.

J.K. Rowling’s blunt response to Linehan’s detainment was right: “What the fuck has the UK become? This is totalitarianism. Utterly deplorable.”

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Then he became one of Britain’s most outspoken critics of trans ideology. First Linehan was criticized for a 2008 episode of The IT Crowd which activists called transphobic when it re-aired years later. Then, in 2018, Linehan praised as “heroes” protesters at London’s Pride Parade who had carried banners that read “transactivism erases lesbians.” Ever since, Linehan has been the target of a relentless campaign by trans activists. He has been sued, repeatedly banned from X, and ostracized from the showbiz community. Linehan has said that accusations of transphobia have made it impossible for him to find work in Britain. Last year, he moved to the United States.

On Monday, Linehan was arrested by British police at Heathrow Airport, thrown in a cell, then rushed to the hospital for dangerously high blood pressure. All of this for the crime of three posts on X in April.

Today, we bring you Graham Linehan’s story, told from his hospital bed. —The Editors

Something odd happened before I even boarded my flight from Arizona to London. When I handed over my passport at the gate, the official told me I didn’t have a seat and had to be re-ticketed. At the time, I thought it was just the sort of innocent snafu that makes air travel such a joy. But in hindsight, it was clear I’d been flagged. Someone, somewhere, had made a phone call.

The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three posts on X. In a country where pedophiles escape prison, where knife crime is out of control, the state had mobilized five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for these three posts (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up).

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At his sentencing, a UK district judge told Coskun that his protest was “provocative,” concluding that he had been driven by “a deep-seated hatred of Islam and its followers.” But in the account below, Coskun insists that he was attacking ideas, not people. He warns that the same religious authoritarianism he fled in his home country is now infecting his adoptive country, too.

This piece was originally published in The Spectator.

—The Editors

My name is Hamit Coskun, and I’ve just been convicted of a religiously aggravated public order offense. My “crime”? Burning a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London. Moments later, I was attacked by a man in full view of the street. I was hospitalized. Then I was arrested.

Some may say that book burning is a poor substitute for reasoned debate. I would counter that it was a symbolic, nonviolent form of expression intended to draw attention to the ongoing move from the secularism of my country of birth to a regime that embraces hard-line Islam.

That act of expression constituted political protest, and the law, as I understood it, was on my side. Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) guidance makes clear that legitimate protest can be offensive—and on occasion must be—if it is to be effective. In that spirit, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects not just polite expression but expression that offends, shocks, or disturbs. Political expression, above all, is meant to enjoy the strongest protection.

Alas, the judge ruled otherwise. And the reasoning deployed to convict me raises troubling questions about whether Britain is witnessing the quiet return of blasphemy laws.

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They asked me to delete this part of the speech. I declined. My lecture was canceled.

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In the span of one week in March 2020, the entire school system in America shut down. The academic year for more than 50 million students was over, blasting a hole in the calendar three months wide. A master switch had been flipped by the governors of every state—a vast, unprecedented exercise of authority.

While we were told the decision was based on science—and was for our own good—there was no evidence for the benefits of what would soon become lengthy school closures. Well before we shut down our schools, evidence from outside the U.S. showed that children were largely unaffected by Covid-19, and that they were not the primary drivers of transmission.

After a brief shutdown, many of Europe’s schools reopened in the spring, welcoming back millions of children, and the data show what happened next: a long decline in cases. European Union ministers announced in May, and again in June, that they had seen no negative impact on society from opening schools. Their comments should have made headlines and quelled concerns in the U.S. Instead, they were largely ignored by our officials and the mainstream media.

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Khalil, a green card holder, Columbia University graduate, and chief organizer of the anti-Israel campus riots that ensued after October 7, was detained by ICE agents twelve days ago and is currently being held by the U.S. government in a Louisiana jail.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said the arrest was “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism,” and connected to “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.”

As of yesterday, a federal judge denied the administration’s request to dismiss Khalil’s challenge to his arrest. It’s just the beginning of what is sure to be a long and complicated legal battle.

We have covered this story extensively in The Free Press. We’ve broken news on the administration’s plans to use Khalil’s case as a blueprint for more arrests. Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld explained the thorny legal complexities that make this such a challenging case.

But there’s a more important, more basic question than whether deporting Khalil is technically legal, or how the government might go about doing it, and that is: Would his deportation be good or bad for America? Just because the government can do something—and in this case, that is fiercely contested—doesn’t mean it should.

Is deportation a reasonable exercise of our national sovereignty to protect the United States from somebody who despises—and wants to destroy—our culture and values?

Or is this a disturbing move intended to chill political speech—including by Americans—that violates one of our most precious freedoms?

Those are the questions debated in today’s installment of Free Press Fight Club.

Arguing in favor of Khalil’s deportation is Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy. He sees the move as a righteous act of self-defense. Taking the other side is The Free Press’s Eli Lake, who despises everything Khalil stands for, but believes his detention sets a dangerous precedent.

—The Editors

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Khalil, a recent graduate from Columbia University, has played a leading role in the anti-Israel protests there. He is said to be the primary spokesperson and negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which describes itself as “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” The group has been the engine behind much of the chaos on Columbia’s campus since October 7—including the encampments and takeover of Hamilton Hall last spring, Barnard’s Milbank Hall last month, and Milstein Library just last week, where Khalil allegedly led the occupation efforts.

Khalil was suspended from Columbia last April for his participation in the protests, but the school reversed his suspension the next day. Arrested on March 8, Khalil is currently being detained in Louisiana. On March 10, a federal judge in New York stayed his deportation pending a hearing.

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Her crime?

Standing outside a Glasgow hospital where abortions are performed and holding up a sign that said: “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.”

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That’s what Lord Jonathan Sumption thinks about Hong Kong’s abuse of the law—and how it’s silencing anyone opposed to the Chinese Communist Party.

A former member of the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court, Sumption became a “nonpermanent judge” on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal in December 2019.

But Sumption isn’t just any judge. He’s a famed medieval historian, and he is widely agreed to be among the best lawyers of his generation. An article in The Guardian almost a decade ago referred to him as “the brain of Britain.” He has also built a career as an independent-minded, free thinker—one who railed against Covid lockdowns and affirmative action-type quotas, but who has also fiercely criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Sumption, to put it simply, is nearly impossible to define into neat partisan labels.

His role in Hong Kong was to sit on a few cases on the territory’s highest court each month to ensure they complied with the country’s Basic Law and other statutes. He told me he thought he would have a positive impact on the legal system in the territory, which used to be a British colony until it was handed back to China in 1997.

But last year, he witnessed a situation “so unattractive” he didn’t “want to be part of it anymore.”

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