It's Time to Fight for Actual Free Speech

If you are obsessed with corporate PR and its power, as I am, eventually you butt up against the question of whether and how to regulate it without engaging in censorship. Which leads you down a rabbit hole into the history of corporate free speech, a hole I have been living in for the past year because I'm working on a book about it (hence the unplanned pause in this newsletter, but I'm back, baby!)—well, about the corporate capture of the information ecosystem and the havoc it's wreaked—but corporate free speech, the creation and normalization of it, is a very big part of the problem. And of course you can't think too long about corporate free speech without thinking about individual free speech and whether there are or should be any limits on it.

The neat trick a lot of the so-called free speech warriors have been playing recently is to conflate the two and propose that any limits on a corporation, or even basic requirements that, for example, a social media platform take any responsibility whatsoever for the content it publishes, is "censorship." In this way, fact-checking becomes censorship, labeling of unverified information is censorship, and Europe's Digital Services Act—which places basic guardrails on digital c0ntent—is definitely censorship. Meanwhile, the assault on the free speech rights of actual citizens is escalating without comment from these self-proclaimed defenders of the First Amendment.

Tomorrow (Monday, March 10, 2025), a cohort of environmental advocates is planning a demonstration outside CERA Week, the oil and gas industry's annual self-congratulatory conference. It will be keynoted by fracking CEO-turned-energy secretary Chris Wright, and feature talks and panels by many of the same fossil fuel executives who funded Trump's campaign in hopes of securing exactly the sort of influence they now have over the administration. The conference is being held in Houston and many of the protestors are community members who want to voice their dissent over the polluting projects that are being sited in their neighborhoods, exposing their kids and family members to harmful toxics. But they have been literally locked out of the conference. After fundraising to purchase tickets to the event last year, three local community organizers were denied entry and given their money back when the conference organizers realized who they were. In the process of planning the protest this year, organizers went through all the official city channels to obtain a permit for a peaceful demonstration, and were denied. "We tried to explain to them that us citizens also have a right to assemble, not just the executives who paid to have a conference, but they have denied us permits to peacefully demonstrate," Dominic Chacón, Houston regional coordinator with Texas Campaign for the Environment said.

Chacón spoke with me from a gathering on Sunday meant to bring everyone together for a celebration before the march on Monday. "We've got a good 300 people here, it's great to see," he said. "We wanted to have a little celebration, so we're not only coming together in outrage."

When I asked if he or the other activists who plan to protest had any concerns about police presence at the conference, his response was immediate, "Oh sure, definitely."

I caught myself thinking, "yeah dumb question, of course they are." But hello, isn't that the free speech threat we should be worried about? The actual government suppression of individual citizens' speech? Two years ago we launched a Drilled series we called "The Real Free Speech Threat." Since then the criminalization of protest has only intensified, both in the U.S. and beyond.

This week, the Trump administration announced its intention to punish any university allowing "illegal protests" by cutting their federal funding. According to the First Amendment, which Trump's "originalist" backers claim to be so fond of, there is no such thing as an illegal protest. The government punishing people for speech it doesn't like is exactly what the First Amendment was written to defend against.

Meanwhile, my colleague Alleen Brown is in Bismarck, North Dakota at the moment attending every single day of a trial that no true democracy would ever even allow. [Make sure you're following Alleen on BlueSky and subscribing to her newsletter for ongoing updates on the trial!] Energy Transfer, the company that built the Dakota Access Pipeline, filed suit against Greenpeace and two individual Indigenous activists for conspiring to defame and defraud the company by...protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline.

They allege that it was Greenpeace's idea, not the Standing Rock Sioux, whose water was threatened by a pipeline they worried would leak (spoiler alert: it has), who orchestrated the massive protests against the pipeline, and that Greenpeace funded and encouraged property damage, never mind that the organization is famously against damage of any kind and has trained thousands of activists in nonviolent direct action tactics. Ironically, it was the pipeline company's massive overreaction to the protests—sending in a militarized private security force with drones and attack dogs—that drove a huge wave of protestors from all over the country to join the resistance to the pipeline. The pipeline was built and has been transporting hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil a day for years now, but Energy Transfer still wants to punish protestors nine years later and it's doing so by pursuing a damages claim so high it would put Greenpeace out of business, and send a message to all organizations that they better think twice before engaging in protest.

Famously, one of the key outcomes of Energy Transfer's reaction to the Standing Rock protests was the rapid passage of so-called "critical infrastructure laws" in nearly half of all U.S. states. These laws increase the jail time and fines associated with trespass and property damage, often target organizations as well, and solely serve to suppress protest (all of these states already had trespassing and property damage laws that dealt with those issues). The law firm defending Energy Transfer, Gibson Dunn, claims to be a top First Amendment firm. One of its top partners, Ted Boutrous, provides or has provided 1A legal support to many top newsrooms, including The New York Times, CNN, the Center for Investigative Reporting (Reveal and Mother Jones), and Pro Publica. Boutrous also sits on committees or boards for several free-speech focused nonprofit organizations. At the same time, he is the attorney who often speaks for the oil company defendants in multiple climate liability lawsuits making their way through courts all over the country, and has made, on their behalf, a free speech argument defending the companies' right to spin climate science however they like in pursuit of particular political outcomes. Relatedly, Gibson Dunn is also the firm that argued and won Citizens United, a seminal case in the expansion of corporate free speech rights. The firm has also fought to minimize damages payments paid by corporations, arguing that a damages claim that might put a company out of business goes beyond the sort of justice civil law was meant to enforce. The same does not go for a nonprofit or a citizen, I guess?

These are just the examples that happen to be top of mind for me at the moment, but there are many, many more. So why aren't we hearing Bari Weiss or Michael Shellenberger or Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson or any of the other folks who have claimed over and over again in recent years that the biggest threat to freedom and democracy is "censorship" loudly decrying these clear First Amendment violations? Perhaps more importantly, why aren't progressives seizing this opportunity to reclaim and re-frame the free speech argument? It's completely bizarre that the people we see most often speaking out loudly and proudly in defense of free speech are alt-right pundits.

And of course, as social scientists predicted, in the face of mounting suppression and increased criminalization, protests are becoming more disruptive and people are becoming more comfortable with the idea of violence as a necessary component to change. Sociologist Dana Fisher, author of Saving Ourselves and American Resistance, and director of the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity and a professor in the School of International Service at American University, attended the D.C. Stand Up for Science rally and brought along a research team of six to survey the crowd. 344 people completed the team's survey, 22 percent said it was the first protest they'd ever participated in. It was a highly educated crowd—lots of scientists, unsurprisingly—so the fact that 35% agreed with the statement, "Because things have gotten so far off track, Americans may have to resort to violence in order to save our country," is pretty shocking. 22 percent of respondents fell into the "neither agree nor disagree" camp on that question, which means only 43% disagreed with it.

Another fascinating finding: Political engagement from the March for Science, which took place in 2017 during the first Trump administration, to the Stand Up for Science protests seems to have declined significantly. On every metric—contacting an elected official, attending a town hall, contacting the media to express a view, participating in direct action, and boycotting a particular product or company—Stand Up for Science participants had done less of it. The vast majority of participants had not heard about the protest via any sort of media, but rather through friends, family members, school or work. Interestingly BlueSky was also cited as a key place for information, with 18% of participants saying they were mobilized via the social media platform; that's a significant departure from Twitter, which notoriously rarely mobilized people to do anything but reply to or share tweets. Look for more from Fisher in the coming weeks; and speaking of BlueSky, I highly recommend following her there for regular updates on all things activism.

A positive step I've noticed recently, because I realize this is all quite grim: media of all kinds seems to be doing increasingly more and better coverage of the many protests against various aspects of the Trump administration. After a couple of eyebrow-raising national media stories declaring the "resistance" dead, outlets seem to be finding their footing when it comes to covering the pushback to Trump and his right-hand man, Elon Musk. The protests themselves are also growing in size and frequency, which of course helps. This week, almost every national outlet and several local outlets ran coverage of the Stand Up for Science protests held all over the country, for example. The New York Times even ran two! In one of them, the paper quoted an organizer in Montana who had told the reporter that several invitees to his rally at Montana State University had declined for fear of repercussion from the state or federal government or their tenure committees, yet another clear First Amendment problem. I've got a thread of protest coverage going over on BlueSky in case it's helpful to see it all in one place. The more people see other people standing up for their rights, the more empowered they feel to do the same: this is how we start protecting individual free speech rights.

As Chacón put it to me, "Why should we be ashamed to advocate for future generations when they so boldly fight for their profits?"

Latest Climate Must-Reads:

Tesla Takeover: How the Protests Against Elon Musk Signal a National Turning Point, by Alex Winter for Rolling Stone

Science, Politics, and Anxiety Mix at Rally Under Lincoln Memorial, by Alan Burdick for The New York Times

The Nature Conservancy's Embarrassing Capitulation to Trump, by Kate Aronoff for The New Republic

Trump's Tariffs and New State Regulation Could Increase the Cost of Power in Texas, by Arcelia Martin for Inside Climate News

Firings at U.S. weather and oceans agency risk lives and economy, former agency heads warn, by Seth Borenstein for The Associated Press

It's more important than ever to speak truth to power and report on climate through an accountability lens. It's also riskier and more expensive than ever. Please consider supporting our work via a paid subscription if you're not already a paid subscriber. Thank you!