Hundreds of flights were cancelled or delayed on Monday after construction crews in New Jersey accidentally cut a Verizon fiber cable used for air traffic control.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said that a circuit failure led to the discovery of the severed fiber cable, ABC News reports. The outage hammered airports across the Northeast, causing ground stops at all three major New York City airports.

In a statement to CNBC, Verizon said that it bore “no responsibility for this incident,” putting the blame on “construction contractors working in the area” that “dug up and cut our cable.”

Ironically, it looks like trains make have taken out the planes, but fingers are still being pointed. US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said an Amtrak crew accidentally cut the line, but AP reports that Amtrak blames a New Jersey Transit crew for the disruption. “This incident occurred on New Jersey Transit property and involved a New Jersey Transit contractor,” an Amtrak spokesperson told NBC4.

As of Monday evening, Duffy said that “the telecom lines have been repaired, and all airport operations in the Northeast are resuming,” but cautioned that it will take “some time to clear all existing delays.” According to FlightAware, there were over 1,000 canceled flights today in the US

On Friday, the president threatened to ban CNN, MS Now, and Politico from the White House. It could have just been another one of his Truth Social fever dreams, but it turns out it’s very real. All three publications were turned away from the White House this morning, NPR reports, marking an escalation in the administration’s war on the First Amendment.

Politico tried to get to the bottom of it, asking why now? It reports that “many senior [White House] staff were surprised by the directive” (what’s new?), and that it was done “while chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town.” Apparently he’s been talked down from this kind of sweeping move before, but Trump has already banned journalists from the White House. In 2025, he barred AP reporters from the White House and Air Force One; the AP sued and is still in litigation over the matter. He also revoked CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s credentials in his first term, though CNN won them back in court. Clearly, the administration is not too worried about adverse judicial rulings.

This isn’t just about a few publications in the White House. It’s part of a broader attack on journalism and the First Amendment that has exploded during Trump’s second term. The Department of Defense (now the Department of War, though that change was not authorized by Congress), has also pushed reporters out of the Pentagon. Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Friday that he “fully supports” Trump’s ban on CNN, MS Now, and Politico, blithely stating “we are grateful these outlets already chose to self-deport from the Pentagon” and echoing the president’s bullshit about fake news.

And journalism and broadcast organizations have faced repeated attack by Trump’s FCC, which is wielding its immense power against anyone who dares to question the president’s conduct. The president has proved he is willing to use almost any lever at his disposal to curb critical speech of himself and his government, which is the beating heart of the First Amendment.

The newly-banned organizations will surely challenge this measure in court, and unless our constitutional order has completely fallen apart, they’ll likely win. But that doesn’t erase the damage — the distraction, cost, and chaos that this kind of thing will cause.

Here are statements from CNN, MS Now, and Politico on the bans.

CNN:

Early today, CNN journalists were denied access to the White House grounds. CNN’s mission to report on the US government will continue regardless of any attempts to restrict physical access to the White House and other government buildings, or any other attempts to impede our journalism. We have a right under the US Constitution to do our reporting without hindrance or interference from the government and this ban is an illegal assault on this fundamental right.

We will not be deflected from our duty to hold the government and other public bodies to account, and we will continue to report on the actions and processes of this administration without fear or favor.

CNN stands fully behind our White House team.

MS Now:

Earlier this morning, MS NOW journalists were denied access to the White House grounds. The White House belongs to the American people, and the decisions made inside are funded by our tax dollars.

MS NOW intends to take any and all steps necessary to defend our First Amendment rights and the essential role of independent journalism in our democracy.

We stand firmly behind our anchors, our reporters, and our newsroom.

We will continue to report on the president, the administration, and the issues that impact the American people.

Politico, statement from Global Editor In Chief Jonathan Greenberger:

A few minutes ago, our colleague Cheyenne Haslett attempted to enter the White House to do her job as a POLITICO reporter. Secret Service denied her entry to the complex and confiscated the pass that allows her access to the White House. We stand by her and all reporters here covering the White House. As we said yesterday, we will vigorously defend our First Amendment rights.

1Password faced immediate backlash from customers this week over a $300,000 pledge in support of a Linux distro created by David Heinemeier Hansson, who has regularly published overtly racist blog posts that include comments calling for deportation of ethnic minorities in Europe. The popular password manager is now a “distinguished corporate patron” of Omacom, the nonprofit foundation that oversees a popular Linux distribution known as Omarchy.

One viral blog post declared that 1Password “Supports the Ethnic Cleansing of Europe” because of the donation. Others on social media asked for suggestions for alternative password managers so they would not support the funding of a project from Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH. 

The donation has also resulted in internal pushback from employees of 1Password who are disappointed by the affiliation, The Verge has learned. 1Password CEO David Faugno and cofounder Roustem Karimov have since posted internal messages addressing what Faugno describes as “concerns, both internally and externally” that have been raised “due to the polarizing nature” of DHH. 

DHH is a Danish entrepreneur best known for creating Ruby on Rails, Basecamp, and the Hey email client. Omarchy is DHH’s “opinionated” version of Linux, meaning it’s Linux the way he likes to use it. It’s based on Arch Linux, with certain apps that install by default. It’s also, apparently, one of 1Password’s big customer environments.

The backlash to 1Password’s funding should have been predictable; DHH’s reactionary comments aren’t new. Way back in 2023, Duke University Libraries dropped one of DHH’s products, Basecamp, citing “harms we see perpetuated by the leadership of Basecamp’s parent company, 37signals,” which is co-owned by DHH. At the time, Duke noted DHH’s attack on DEI programs and The Verge’s reporting on Basecamp banning “societal and political discussions” at work.

This year, DHH has published rants that appear to call for ethnic cleansing in Europe. In his July 21st blog post titled “Wolves, sheep, and gypsies,” DHH implies that immigrants are “wolves.” His solution? “When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.”

In an internal Slack message obtained by The Verge, 1Password’s Karimov downplayed the overtly racist comments from DHH, telling staff the following:

As I said, people have different personal opinions. You believe in your heart that DHH is evil, that you have the moral high ground, and that nothing will change your mind. 

However, not everyone believes that. It is not fair to claim a monopoly and ostracize team members who might disagree with you.

There are people who are afraid to speak up simply because they will be personally attacked.

1Password CEO Faugno took a different approach, trying to reassure staff that “1Password does not endorse hateful, dehumanizing, or exclusionary views, including those shared publicly by DHH.”

Nonetheless, it seems the company has sacrificed a moral position for a “mission-driven” position. In the same message to staff, Faugno says “the scale and growth of [Omarchy’s] use among our customers is significant – Omarchy has grown to be the second most used Linux distribution among 1Password users.”

Faugno then tries to create distance, telling staff that its contribution is “to the Omacom Foundation, not an individual.” Still, he says “we recognize that Omarchy is associated with DHH, its founder. Our donation is not in any way an endorsement of his personal views or conduct.”

We asked 1Password for comment on its funding of the Omacom Foundation on August 31st, and again today. We did not receive a response in time for publication.

The Omacom Foundation is also funded by 12 “founding patrons” who each contributed $1 million, including Stripe’s CEO Patrick Collison, Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey, and Shopify’s Tobias Lütke — who recently endorsed the idea that wealthy Canadians should have more voting power in democracy than poorer people. Even before 1Password contributed, this page looked like a rogues’ gallery of tech. (DHH himself also gave $1 million to the project.)

1Password employees don’t seem impressed by its leaders’ comments based on dozens of emoji reactions we saw in their internal Slack conversations. 1Password’s CEO says the company will speak more about it internally at an all-hands meeting.

Another day, another sad thing to report about our compromised Federal Communications Commission. Chairman Brendan Carr has followed through on his 2025 threat to kill long-term broadband speed goals established during the Biden administration, which aimed for eventually getting us to gigabit download and half-gigabit upload speeds. How dare we dream of spreading great download and upload speeds across the country!

It’s wild that 13 years after Comcast said Americans don’t need gigabit internet we’re somehow back in this conversation. Especially since the private sector has delivered, albeit unevenly, on super high speeds in certain areas; For example, the apartment I’m about to move into offers 5 gigabit synchronous internet speed which will require a new PCIe network card to handle. Those speeds are ludicrous, but why are we not aiming for the moon across the country?

It took years for the FCC to finally admit publicly that the outdated 25Mbps definition of “broadband” speed sucked. Remember Ajit Pai, the guy with the giant Reese’s mug who killed net neutrality? He once said we didn’t need more than that. (The standard was raised from 25/3 to 100/20 in 2024.) Pai’s successor Brendan Carr — who is far worse in almost every category — is repeating the same stuff but in an even more cynical way. Here’s part of what the FCC says about its decision to abandon the gigabit speed goal:

At present, it is impossible to predict long-term technological developments and the evolution of consumer preferences.

This is one of the least-impossible things to predict. Who would possibly choose for things to be slower if they could be faster? This is peak regulatory arrogance from an administration that is generally not shy about lying through its teeth to the public.

But, no worries. The abandonment of the gigabit goal is wrapped inside a broader broadband report that claims everything is just fine! The FCC says speeds are up, competition is up, and prices are down. Too bad, as Ars Technica notes, that some of these insights are sourced from industry lobby groups and no adverse research from advocacy groups.

Why is the FCC doing this? Who knows, but here’s a solid guess: the FCC has been further captured by industry interests that would love for their pet projects (like satellite internet) not to look bad when compared to high standards. Just how much has the FCC been captured? Incidentally, The Guardian reported just today that Brendan Carr has been exceptionally cozy with the White House and right-wing media. It’s an easy bet to make that killing the broadband goal has nothing to do with public interests.

In 2018 I bet my reputation and self-worth on a huge crowdfunded game design project. It could have been a failure for many reasons, but the one I became most worried about was losing all of the work that was stored locally on my home-built PC — a scenario that would have left a lot of people very upset and placed me in deep trouble. I wasn’t irresponsible, I had local backups, but at some point I found myself in custody of so many important files that it scared me. And no matter how many redundancies I could build at home, they’d all still be in the same place — a risky bet. So I bought a subscription to Dropbox. Years later, it’s still one of the best software subscriptions that I happily renew each year.

It was great to have all that work backed up in the cloud — both for peace of mind and because it made working with collaborators breezier, letting them upload stuff directly to my drive, and letting me transfer files up to 50GB in size. In quick order I had built a trove of incredible artwork and complicated InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator files. The original goal for my Dropbox configuration was to make sure I wouldn’t lose any data in a worst-case scenario, so I set it up to mirror everything living on my work partition. Eventually, I ran smack into a worst-case scenario. Not once, but twice.

I’m still not sure why, but my latest home-built PC chewed through two separate 2TB Samsung 970 Evo SSDs. It’s difficult to tell what went wrong with them, but in each case I woke up one morning to find when I tried to boot up that no drive could be detected. I can still feel my stomach trying to sink into the floor when I press that power button these days, never knowing if my drive had died in its sleep.

Fortunately, both times, after some process-of-elimination testing I learned that just the drive had gone bad and everything else in my system was A-OK. Maybe I should have ditched Samsung after the second disaster, but I’m now on an 2TB 990 Evo Plus. Knock on wood, this thing better not fail. That drive now costs almost twice what I originally paid for it thanks to our new outrageously priced world of parts.

My Dropbox bill is about $204 a year for a family plan ($17 a month), which includes up to six members. If you’re just in it for yourself you can get it for $9.99 a month billed yearly (about $120 a year), which comes with 2TB of storage. You can upgrade to 3TB for around $143 a year. That might be a tough sell for people who already have dozens of subscriptions, but I find it to be a decent price for excellent digital insurance.

There are other powerful options out there, especially for professionals working with heavy files or complicated workflows. Backblaze, for example, has a personal backup plan with unlimited data for $99 a year and no restrictions on file size. And, of course, if you live on the Mac, Apple iCloud Plus isn’t a bad option — especially if you’re already paying for an Apple One subscription. Even Adobe offers file backups through Creative Cloud if that’s your jam, but I would not recommend using that clunky software suite for anything other than doing the work you need to do.

I prefer Dropbox because the software works consistently well across multiple operating systems and is usually neither seen nor heard. The Windows client is snappy and I’ve found with a fast internet connection that its real-time syncing is efficient and painless. Anytime a file is modified in the partition I have mirrored in the cloud, Dropbox quietly begins uploading it and making changes to my mirrored files in the cloud. After using it for about eight years now I can’t recall a single time the service failed or faltered. It’s so fast and reliable I often forget it’s even there.

Now, for the important caveat: This might not work for you if you have poor internet speeds. It really depends on how much data you’re regularly moving around on your computer and how quickly you make changes to it. This could particularly be a problem for asymmetrical data plans that commonly boast lightning-fast download speeds while offering pathetic upload speeds. I’ve done fine averaging only about 20Mbps upload, but if you’re on something even lower you should try a free trial for a backup plan before committing. You can also find plenty of download time calculators online; at my gigabit download speed it usually takes around two hours to download the 1TB of files I have synced in the cloud.

And one more caveat: Putting everything (or even just many things) on your computer in the cloud isn’t for everyone, and I completely understand why many folks wouldn’t or shouldn’t do that for sensitive files. I once built local RAID drives and even airgapped storage systems to avoid having everything online. These things are still possible but getting more expensive by the day as storage prices spike. You’re the best judge of how and where your data should be protected.

That sinking feeling of potentially losing my whole PC? It was immediately followed each time by the assurance that I’d only lost a computer’s body and not its soul. When I got my PC back up and running with new storage, it ended up taking less time to resync all my files than it did to troubleshoot and install new hardware. I can almost hear Billy Crudup doing a Mastercard commercial in my head: New solid state drive, three hundred eighty-nine dollars. Yearly Dropbox subscription, two hundred and three dollars. Never worrying about losing your data? Priceless.

Donald Trump’s Homeland Security regime has been at the center of two critical stories in the past two weeks. In the first, federal agents shot and killed a man and quickly got to work justifying the use of force under the flimsiest of pretenses. In the other, it made house calls to people who said mean things to them online.

Since taking office last year, the Trump administration has been telling us that fighting the good fight of white supremacy will make you look cool and noble. The DHS under former Secretary Kristi Noem spent $220 million to help her cosplay as a cowboy and call up ICE recruits as if we’re fighting a new World War, this time against our friends and neighbors. It’s all very embarassing.

The propaganda is cringeworthy. But the immigration crackdown it services has been, undoubtedly, cruel and deadly. In Texas just this Tuesday, an ICE officer shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father of three who lived in the US for 35 years building houses and caring for his family. The agency immediately released a statement justifying lethal force on someone it alleges tried to “weaponize his vehicle.” Videos showing parts of the confrontation already suggest it’s probably another bullshit story like the ones we’ve seen from Minnesota. The feds later admitted they were looking for an entirely different person. Salgado Araujo nonetheless ended up dead.

ICE has proven it can’t handle public confrontation. That’s bad. But it also can’t even handle emails and Instagram posts. It’s demanding a total lack of accountability not only from the law, but from society itself.

Over the past year, DHS has invented its own novel version of “doxxing” — once the domain of angry gamers on the internet — wherein the public now dares to unmask and name federal agents who have been responsible for horrors like the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. The government doesn’t want us to talk about the agent accused of shooting her to death (whose name, by the way, is Jonathan Ross). Before being shot to death, Good told agents, “I’m not mad at you.” They killed her anyway, then called her a “fucking bitch.”

The government is very upset that people are criticizing it for shooting innocent mothers to death in the street. DHS stalked and intimidated a man who protested against state-sponsored killing, issuing him a “WARNING NOTICE” as flimsy as the nonjudicial “warrants” it uses now to bust into people’s homes. It’s like if Jay and Silent Bob showed up at your house because of an online comment you wrote, except with guns and the force of the federal government. It’s both deadly serious and deeply unserious. What are they afraid of? Well, we already know. Accountability in any form.

Minnesota officials had to sue the federal government for access to evidence that would aid in investigating ICE shootings because the feds won’t cooperate. It would be a weird thing for the feds managed by an allegedly pro-cop party to do, except when you consider it’s not really a pro-cop party, what with the January 6th insurrection. The current White House webpage about January 6th calls it “a date which will live in infamy” while moping about cop-killers being unfairly treated and saying Democrats did the real insurrection. Yeah, they’re lying. But also, seriously: weak crybaby stuff.

This of course all ladders up to Trump, whose project for more than a decade has been to accumulate power while eliminating the concept of shame and accountability. The man cannot tolerate a single slight without going off the rails, nor can his subordinates. This posture has trickled down to his army of fellow losers who mirror him in several ways: (1) denying any wrongdoing, (2) blaming others, and (3) intimidating anyone who crosses them. In some really bad cases, (4) obstructing justice. Then there’s also (5), looking really lame while doing it.

These people feign outrage and aggrievement at any opportunity. Almost immediately after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Noem maligned the victims by invoking the language of “domestic terrorism” — a truly malicious thing to do while bodies are still warm and evidence is being gathered. When they were shot to death, Good had just finished dropping off her 6-year-old child at school; Pretti, an ICU nurse, was helping someone prone on the street, like any good nurse would.

Federal incitement reinforces things Americans already reasonably fear about policing. As I wrote for the country’s recent birthday, state and local police are also demonstrably bad at upholding our rights (especially the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments) and routinely conduct themselves like weaklings who can’t handle the slightest criticism. Police are often witnessed struggling to maintain calm at the slightest challenge to their authority. So what happens when they get superpowered by federal intervention? Things like reporters getting allegedly intentionally assaulted by cops.

Policing in America has always been complicated, but the Trump administration has made it a runaway train of abuse fueled by billions of dollars and unapologetic racial animus. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has gotten so much money and permission from Trump that it operates its dear leader’s fundamentally racist mission of mass deportation with impunity. ICE agents have kidnapped people, knocked down doors without warrants, assaulted reporters, terrorized the general public (including children and infants), and even shot dead innocent people in broad daylight. And that’s just the brief summary of events.

ICE is a menace to democracy and its murderous conduct should be soberly considered. But we should also recognize that these people are weak and sad and ought to be made fun of. Even for their stupid outfits, which look ripped from a “how to be tacticool” buying guide. And Americans are ridiculing these people. What better way to protest an army of clowns than by showing up as Portland did with a human frog at the front? Cops arrested that frog. Trillions of dollars later, we’ve learned nothing about counter-insurgency, because now there’s a frog legion.

These ICE agents are so small that they wear masks in public like a bunch of cowardly Patriot Front wannabes, who probably got a similar amount of training. You’d think the average DMV worker would have been masked up for years based on the abuse they get, but then again, the average government employee is far braver than these fools.

ICE is now the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government. If you know anything about the actual waste, fraud, and abuse of federal funding for defense, you’ll know this is not something that guarantees quality or competence. This is just Donald Trump’s new private domestic army. I’d call them Stormtroopers except for the fact I’m pretty sure some of them are getting their uniforms and body armor from Temu.

The United States of America recently turned 250 years old. What a spectacle! The fireworks were amazing, and millions of proud people celebrated across the nation — even around the world. France lit up the Eiffel Tower; Japan had fireworks. French fighter jets flew above New York City with trails of red, white, and blue — our first major ally streaking our shared colors through the sky. Meanwhile, shameful white nationalists paraded through our nation’s capital. This has always been a country of paradoxes.

Our 250th birthday counts back to the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The declaration was a radical and astonishing document that still serves as America’s soul. But the beating heart of the nation wouldn’t come until more than a decade later, when the Constitution was ratified. That document is why I’m able to write this to you today. And we need you to help protect it.

The First Amendment to the Constitution is so potent that people across the world who live in places untouched by US law often seem to think they have the same rights it establishes. The First Amendment is our day-one theory of what makes a free society. It’s literally the first cure by the framers for a project they knew would be forever imperfect and incomplete — fixable only by way of the right to free expression.

The Verge exists today because of this great project. We believe in it deeply. The First Amendment affords us the knowledge that we’re likely free from imprisonment from expressing our freedom to speak. But journalism and speech are always under assault. It’s one of the reasons why we’ll always need lawyers despite likely having the strongest editorial ethics policy in the industry.

Here’s what the First Amendment says: 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This is a compelling and beautiful idea. But we’ve had to fight to keep it alive from the beginning.

John Adams, one of the fiercest revolutionaries who railed against British tyranny and helped secure independence, completely fucked up the First Amendment when he became the second US president. Adams’ series of Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 look positively Trumpian in retrospect, railing against foreigners, expanding presidential power to arrest, imprison, or deport people, and perhaps most insidiously, making it a crime for American citizens to print “scandalous and malicious” writings against the government. Adams surely loved the country he created, but nonetheless shrunk before the magnitude of its liberties.

Fast-forward to World War I, when the First Amendment was again under attack, this time by the Supreme Court. The court’s fearful message about free speech still sticks with us. You’ve probably heard the phrase “you can’t shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” — not actually true. The misquoting and misinterpretation here is darkly funny: Trevor Timm, in The Atlantic, notes the court decision the phrase refers to was actually about whether an American socialist “could be convicted under the Espionage Act for writing and distributing a pamphlet that expressed his opposition to the draft.” It almost sounds ripped from contemporary headlines. (Nearly a century later, the Espionage Act would be used again to target, this time, a New York Times journalist.)

Misunderstandings about the First Amendment still abound. On the front lines we most readily see it in police confrontations where armed agents of the state bungle their constitutional duties with disastrous results.

Cops are routinely so terrible at understanding America’s foundational law that there’s now a cottage industry of streamers and influencers who work as “First Amendment auditors” — people who intentionally flex their right to record in public to bait dummies into abridging their freedom of speech. It’s easy to go down TikTok rabbit holes where you’ll find someone recording an illegal traffic stop from inside their car, or a fully kitted streamer recording harassment on a public sidewalk. When the police inevitably show up to hassle someone for exercising their rights, the stakes are immediately raised.

In a best-case scenario, a higher-ranking cop arrives and dispels their colleagues’ unconstitutional conduct. In other cases, someone ends up getting detained or arrested for completely protected behavior.

It’s even worse than usual in 2026, because we now live under an administration that’s flooding cities with barely trained federal agents who see constitutionally protected behavior as a threat. This has resulted in deaths, assaults on reporters, and an untold broader cost of regular people having to endure the immense burden of confronting the justice system simply for doing things they have the fundamental right to do. The right to speak and assemble is especially valid when it’s in protest of the government. That’s the whole point of this thing! And yet.

The latest assaults on the First Amendment have been encouraged by people all the way up the chain of command. We’re being betrayed by officials who are supposed to protect us, people who swore an oath to the Constitution and ought to know better. The FCC is not supposed to regulate speech but has nonetheless become a nightmare of incompetence and civil rights suppression. Do you miss Stephen Colbert on The Late Show? Thank the Trump administration, which now operates a mob-like patronage system that has cowed the billionaire princes who own America’s broadcast networks. Or ask Jimmy Kimmel, who got kicked off the air after conservatives went nuclear over his tame remarks about Charlie Kirk, a man who spent his time poisoning our national discourse with none of the grace or wit employed by national talk show hosts.

The Trump regime in general has an incredibly disturbing record on free speech, from science to the operations of the largest social networks. Donald Trump rails against anyone who doesn’t bow to him, and the list of his victims is too long to enumerate. But here’s an important one: The president once threatened to jail Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for life. Zuckerberg is far more wealthy and powerful than Trump in many respects, but what did he do? Two years after the threat, Zuckerberg showed up on the White House lawn to celebrate Trump’s insane UFC fight show. He tapped out against a bully.

This is what makes everything really messy. We live in an age dominated by communication platforms that are so wealthy, powerful, and pervasive that they seem practically unrestrained by the US government, but paradoxically must still cozy up to a regime that has no actual respect for them or for their free speech. Trump once threatened to blow up the entire internet because he wanted platforms to censor things to his advantage. The CEOs of those companies still indulge him with flattery and photo ops.

This blurring of public and private interests has fueled a funhouse-mirror idea of “free speech culture” that’s actually designed to crack down on free speech. The loudest people crying about free speech culture do so as if theirs is not the freest ever in history, while simultaneously supporting actual government censorship, like banning books. 

I can’t say it better than Ken White has, so just go read him on this point. White explains how “free speech culture” has emboldened the Trump admin and others to engage in real censorship. “When enough people think that all of free speech—including free speech law—is bullshit, then free speech rights won’t be enforced,” he writes.

Our constitutional punchbowl has been spiked by madmen who profit from confusion about our rights and the rule of law. It doesn’t have to be this way. Just remember: The First Amendment is a restraint on the government that prevents it from prohibiting your speech.

Moreover: Actual censorship is government suppression of speech. It’s entirely understandable that we’re confused about what censorship is because of how hard many people have worked to keep us confused. A social media platform moderating your post is not censorship — it’s actually free speech. Yes, that sounds completely counterintuitive, but it’s true. The alternative is a situation where the government forces private citizens to publish things they don’t want to, including hate speech.

Much was unsaid here, including the history of immense pain and suffering that has kept the First Amendment and our broader rights alive. I won’t claim to know what the fix is for our current mess, but I’ll say I really hate when our leaders say things like “this is not who we are” when they talk precisely about the things that define who we are. And part of who we are is a coalition that claims to want free speech in theory while simultaneously suppressing it in practice.

So what can you do? Yes, of course, vote. But there’s much more to do. Write or call your congresspeople (I promise this does matter). Participate in local elections, especially for school boards, which are on the front lines of book banning. And if you’re reading this, thank you for subscribing — but consider also supporting other newsrooms.