of course it will—a lot

At my first DC conference since the big rebrand. Very hard not to lol when Trump admin officials say "DOD" and quickly add "oh, I mean DOW ... I still have to remind myself..." #PatrioticCorrectness

CEI Prez Kent Lassman at their gala dinner: “we even have someone here from Brendan Carr's office tonight. I'm sorry I didn't run my monologue by him!” Good to see actual libertarians taking the piss out of “Mr Free Speech”

I'm really tired of hearing people say "this is not America" Maybe it *was* not America, but it is self-evidently America in 2025. In the campaign Trump promised to be a dictator on day one. All of this was spelled out in Project2025. A majority of American voters chose this.

Losing my ever-loving-mind watching the same people who were just clutching their pearls claiming censorship over mean emails from WH staffers to Twitter about COVID misinfo are now HAVING THE FCC CHAIR openly threaten broadcast licenses over a joke about the president AND THE BROADCASTERS CENSOR IT

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr putting pressure on ABC affiliates to suspend Jimmy Kimmel over his comments on Charlie Kirk is beyond McCarthyism. Trump officials are repeatedly abusing their power to silence ideas they don’t like, deciding who can speak, write, and even joke.

Louder for those in the back: It is hard to keep track of all the lies about the speech you’re protecting while simultaneously running an authoritarian state.

New dashboard! 🔎 Explore 30+ years of Digital Bills of Rights 📊 Track trends in digital rights, from privacy & AI to platform governance. The dashboard helps explore how values have shifted over time, region & stakeholder type. 🔗 Try it here: lnkd.in/d_dXZNpG #DigitalRights #REMIT

Reporter: Do you think it would have been fitting to lower the flags for Melissa Hortman who was killed as well? Trump: Uh, I’m not familiar, who?

Houston, we have a problem

Every time you see a story like this about the FTC, think about how its Chair promised Trump he’d use his authority to fight the “trans agenda.” Think about what they’ll do with reproductive health information. EVERY TIME.

“it was still possible ... to give Caesar the benefit of the doubt. So all-embracing and deeply rooted was the idea of the constitution’s permanence that it took a year or two before suspicions of his revolutionary intentions hardened into certainty that the days of the Republic were over for good.”

I'm sick after seeing the video of Charlie Kirk being shot. Violence against civilians is never okay. Political violence — no matter who is hurt — will always beget worse political violence. And it has no place in our country.

If you're one of the online ghouls celebrating a man's death, you're part of the problem. Don't @ me unless you're just looking for a quick block.

“The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.” —Hannah Arendt, On Violence

"If everything was magically going well and governments were great and benevolent and companies were doing the right thing, you wouldn't need a digital civil society or an organization filled with fighty lawyers, technologists, and activists." Cheers to a fighty lawyer's fighty lawyer!🥂

Every authoritarian regime is a bunch of bumbling, chaotic, fractious incompetents. That doesn't guarantee they will fail. They win when their opponents are also a bunch of bumbling, chaotic, fractious incompetents who don't take the danger seriously as an existential threat until it's too late.

There's still a lot of "oh he'll fail to consolidate a full-blown authoritarian regime," as if that means the threat can be dismissed, let's just keep going like we'll get our turn back in power soon enough. But that's entirely contingent on what we do now. There's no guarantee it won't go that far.

For so long, things we'd considered rote platitudes were so universal they could be taken for granted as the framework within which we have normal policy debates. To affirm American principles, the Declaration and Constitution and Liberty and Democracy and Rule of Law, *is* the policy debate now.

This letter is important. It is a careful, detailed, scholarly, and accurate explanation of the elements of the DSA and EU law that prevent the DSA from being a "censorship" law in the first place. The list of EU expert signatories is stellar. @hutko.bsky.social @joanbarata.bsky.social

Letter responding to FTC's claim that platforms complying with the DSA (which only applies in Europe and gives users more rights) are engaged in unfair and deceptive trade practices. This is BONKERS as a matter of FTC and 1st Am law, as @berinszoka.bsky.social explains. bsky.app/profile/beri...

Happening now: "Europe's Threat to American Speech and Innovation" --an extremely serious very real threat that Jim Jordan is spending American time & tax dollars investigating. Jordan has already mentioned "Big Academia" & his censorship industrial complex hoax. www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIvu...

FTC Chair Ferguson claims that moderating US content because of foreign laws “to appease a foreign power” might be unfair or deceptive. This claim is legally baseless. He's trying to reshape online speech in ways he prefers, which the First Amendment bars techfreedom.org/wp-content/u...

Horst Wessel except now she's bi

The GOP has long complained that its spam emails get flagged or blocked because of anti-conservative cEnSoRsHiP, not because it refuses to follow Google's clear anti-spam rules. The FTC has never before policed political bias and for good reason: the First Amendment bars it from meddling in speech

We’re Celebrating our 15th Anniversary! Join Lawfare for an in-person event on September 19. The evening will feature some of your favorite Lawfare voices, a look back on the key moments that have shaped our first decade and a half, and a sneak peek into what’s coming next. RSVP now:

Trump insists he can replace every official with a lackey? That's unpossible! Don't expect the Supreme Court to stop him, despite its aside, in the NLRB case, suggesting that the Federal Reserve is different because history.

Seen in the Denver Airport: red "F**K Democrats" t-shirt on very old, very sad, very white dude—who's probably pissed off that TSA wouodn't let him open-carry to the gate

The balkanized "future" of the internet has long been here--for decades the internet in Spain has looked very different from the internet in Canada. But I think this is one of the first times we're seeing a platform geo-blocking by *US State* and this way lies madness. bsky.social/about/blog/0...

Presidents since Reagan averaged 43 Executive Orders/year Trump has already issued 197 EOs (7.8x the average) So litigation in the Supreme Court's shadow docket reflects that - Cate Stetson, Hogan Lovells #tpiaspen

The FTC is crossing a constitutional Rubicon: policing non-commercial speech for political bias. Yesterday, TechFreedom filed comments on the FTC’s approval of the merger of what will be the the world's largest family of advertising agencies: Omnicom–Interpublic techfreedom.org/omnicom-ftc-...

The topic was a bit outside my domain, but writing a general-purpose anti-Ken Paxton piece @thebulwark.com has been the gift that keeps on giving. www.thebulwark.com/p/will-texas...

Not surprising. Holyoak's term expires in September. She was never going to convince the White House that she was MAGA enough. She'll be replaced with someone who's eager to wield the FTC as a weapon of Trump's vengeance against tech companies and his various perceived enemies

This was a great discussion of a big brewing topic. As public interest in middleware grows (great!) we will see terrible nonsense "middleware" laws, like the one the Missouri AG is pushing. We talk about the promise, the problems, & how Moody and @bsky.app fit in. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJfV...

Democracy Dies in Lameness

Word.

bsky.app/profile/acat... You're the British Army now, my dudes.

I just don't see how the Army celebrates 250 years on from the resistance to tyranny this week by sending the militia that assembled in Boston in 1775 to occupy LA in 2025.

If only the New York Times had made this big of a deal in December 2022 when Trump called for “termination” of the Constitution. (That ran on Page 13. Yes, Page 13.)

It’s a tough competition, but kicking out the cream of the global crop might be the most long term damaging policy of the Trump administration. We should be adding incentives to come!

“It’s a lot easier to destroy a thing than to build a thing.”

This isn't just about Harvard. Noem said "it is also a privilege to employ aliens on campus." If the White House can block Harvard from employing foreigners, it could also cripple tech companies. No, it wouldn't be as simple as flipping the SEVP certification switch, but H1-Bs can be canceled...

The Trumper obsession with Harvard is a cringe-inducing drama around status envy.

Textualism is too important to outsource to unreliable, opaque AI tools

Whether it was Joe Biden with his halting pauses or Donald Trump with his repeated promises to destroy our democracy and plunge us into a world of tyranny and economic collapse, both candidates gave voters plenty to worry about

If Comey has to answer questions for sea shells, it seems at least as reasonable for Davis to have to explain what he is asking for here.

LIVE NOW: How does the First Amendment limit the ability of government to reshape digital media? www.youtube.com/live/6e1rpU0...

Trump's FTC, FCC and DOJ are out to reshape the media, from social networks to broadcasters, to serve MAGA. Join us as we explore the legal theories they're exploring—either in DC on livestream.