Amber Heard, the ACLU, and the Future of Free Speech

“I think there have been better moments for freedom of speech when it comes to the culture,” says FIRE’s president, Greg Lukianoff. “When it comes to the law, the law is about as good as it’s ever been. But when it comes to the culture, our argument is that it’s gotten a lot worse and that we don’t have to accept it.”

Lukianoff tells Reason that FIRE’s new initiatives have been in the works for years, but gained urgency during the COVID lockdowns. “Pretty much from day one, people have been asking us to take our advocacy off campus to an extent nationally,” he says. “But 2020 was such a scarily bad year for freedom of speech on campus and off, we decided to accelerate that process.” Despite 80 percent of campuses being closed and doing instruction remotely, Lukianoff says that FIRE received 50 percent more requests for help from college students and faculty. He also points to The New York Times‘ editorial page editor, James Bennet, getting squeezed out after running an article by Sen. Tom Cotton (R Ark.) and high-profile journalists such as Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, and Matt Yglesias “stepping away from [their publications], saying that the environment was too intolerant.”

FIRE is also expanding its efforts beyond legal advocacy and into promoting what Lukianoff calls “the culture of free speech.” As Politico reports, it will spend $10 million “in planned national cable and billboard advertising featuring activists on both ends of the political spectrum extolling the virtues of free speech.”

via reason.com

Yours truly has the honor of being one of those “extolling the virtues of free speech” in FIRE’s planned advertising. Who woulda thunk it? Free speech is one of those ideas that gets better and better the more you think about it. It is also the absolute bane of tyrants everywhere.