E-Pluribus |July 22, 2025
Defunding NPR was the right move. X defeats FBI gag order in court. White House punishes WSJ.
A round-up of the latest and best insight on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Robby Soave: The Senate Was Right To Defund NPR and PBS
Now that the Republicans have finally made good on their decades-old threat to defund NPR, critics of the decision are rehashing equally dated arguments in support of public media. At Reason, Robby Soave doesn’t buy any of them, including the claim that cutting NPR’s funding is an attack on the free press:
Unsurprisingly, mainstream media voices are already describing this vote as part and parcel of the Trump administration's attack on a free press. To be sure, President Donald Trump has undermined press freedom in numerous ways: He has sued media organizations over their editorial choices, and his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has threatened to remove the broadcast licenses of channels that criticized him. Both Republican and Democratic members of Congress routinely browbeat media companies for speech-related reasons—a practice known as jawboning, which violates the spirit of the First Amendment if not its literal text.
But defunding NPR does not constitute censorship of NPR. On the contrary, forcing taxpayers to subsidize it represents a kind of compelled speech. NPR should be free to make its own editorial choices—even ones that are pathologically unfriendly to Trump—and Americans should be free to choose whether they want to pay for it.
X Global Government Affairs: Elon Defeats FBI’s Pernicious Gag Orders in Federal Court
Social media platforms were previously prohibited by federal gag order from alerting the public when they received government search warrants and subpoenas. No more, courtesy of a just-announced X victory in the DC Circuit Court:
In a victory for transparency and free speech, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has unanimously ruled in X’s favor to limit the U.S. government’s ability to issue gag orders. These gag orders prevent X from notifying the public when it receives government search warrants and subpoenas.
Last year, X received a subpoena from the federal government demanding the personal information of two former FBI agents, Kyle Seraphin and Garrett O’Doyle. This was accompanied by a gag order requiring X to keep the subpoena secret. Seraphin and O’Doyle were whistleblowers who had disclosed to Congress that the FBI was improperly targeting certain politically disfavored groups.
Following their whistleblowing activities, Seraphin and O’Doyle were fired from their jobs and subject to a criminal investigation, suggesting retaliation by the government. Yet when X wanted to transparently disclose the government’s subpoena to the public, it could not do so because the government had obtained a gag order.
Eli Stokols and Irie Sentner: White House removes Wall Street Journal from Scotland press pool over Epstein bombshell
In a move that has already raised the hackles of some 1st Amendment advocates (see below), the Trump Administration has banned the Wall Street Journal from the pool of reporters covering the president’s upcoming trip to Scotland. Politico has the story:
The move follows the Journal’s report alleging that President Donald Trump sent a sexually suggestive message to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003.Trump has denied the existence of the letter and POLITICO has not verified it.
Tarini Parti, a White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal, had been scheduled to serve as the print pooler for the final two days of Trump’s four-day trip to his golf courses in Turnberry and Aberdeen, Scotland.
But the White House, which earlier this year took over control of pool rotations from the White House Correspondents’ Association, removed her from the trip manifest, Leavitt said.
Parti was not one of the two bylines on the Epstein story.
“As the appeals court confirmed, the Wall Street Journal or any other news outlet are not guaranteed special access to cover President Trump in the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One, and in his private workspaces,” Leavitt said in a statement. “Due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the thirteen outlets on board. Every news organization in the entire world wishes to cover President Trump, and the White House has taken significant steps to include as many voices as possible.”
Around X
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) leads the charge against the White House for ousting the Wall Street Journal from the press pool.
We tend to think of free-speech in a modern American context. But the reality is that the battle for the right to speak our minds goes back thousands of years, as this thread reminds us.
The UK has truly lost its way on free speech. Not even the country’s pubs — historically sacred spaces for light-hearted banter and beer among friends — are safe from the government’s ever-expanding assault on individual liberty.
