#1stamendment

Back in early 2025, DOGE bros Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh were handed multiple government roles with a simple mandate: go find the woke stuff and kill it. Fox and Cavanaugh had zero relevant expe…

Perhaps Matt Taibbi’s most famous bit of writing ever was his takedown of Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone (and then in a book that followed) that opened with the highly evocative metaphor: The…

Shortly before the Supreme Court inflicted enormous damage on the Voting Rights Act, the Reconstruction Amendments of the Constitution, any pretense of constitutionally guaranteed Equal Protection,…

Former judge Roy Moore made quite a name for himself while attempting to convert his sketchy judicial career into a presumably equally sketchy career as US senator. Prior to his run for office in t…

Brendan Carr’s FCC claims to be moving forward their their plan to “review ABC’s broadcast licenses” because Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about the president’s wife. And i…

James Comey is not exactly someone we’ve ever been a fan of on Techdirt. He was a terrible FBI director in so many ways. We’ve spent years criticizing the man — for his crusade against encryp…

Anonymous insiders tell the access journalists at Semafor that Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr is cooking up a “review” of ABC broadcast licenses after Jimmy Kimmel once again made the Pres…

Apparently we’ve reached the stage of the second Trump presidency when we’re doing reruns of the old hits. As you’ll recall, Donald Trump has been desperate to get late-night TV h…

In June 2025, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court upheld what would seem to have been an extremely obvious conclusion reached by the federal court handling the case: yes, it definitely violates the Con…

To have one defamation case about public allegations of your drinking as FBI Director would be unfortunate. To have a second dismissed the very next day would be, well, perhaps a sign that somethin…

The state of Virginia is trying to break with its racist past. It’s not pretending it doesn’t exist. But, better late than never, it’s trying to undo some of the damage still bein…

Back in 2023, Arkansas passed a social media age verification law so poorly drafted that the bill’s own sponsor couldn’t accurately describe who it covered. The law appeared to exempt T…

This story was originally published by ProPublica and Frontline. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. The National Guard soldiers in desert camo piled out of unmarked vans in East Los Angel…

For the better part of five years, we’ve been treated to an elaborate performance about the unprecedented constitutional horror of “jawboning.” Jim Jordan held hearings. Missouri&…

We’ve been covering Brendan Carr’s censorial ambitions for a long time now. When Trump first picked him to chair the FCC, we warned people that the “free speech warrior” branding was a total sham.…

As the boss of the country’s media and telecom regulators, there’s plenty of corporate malfeasance and corrupt shenanigans Brendan Carr could be targeting on any given day at the countr…