Last month, Dr. Anthony Fauci returned to the center of the national debate when he appeared before a Senate committee and invoked his Fifth Amendment rights rather than answer questions about the government's COVID response.
I am not going to wade into the debate about Fauci and COVID, as I'm certainly not an expert in that arena. However, what really sticks out for me during the COVID era is the aggressive censorship that took place on social media platforms, including Twitter (pre-Musk), Facebook and YouTube.
For a time, questioning the lab-leak theory could get a person labeled a conspiracy theorist. On major social media platforms, certain claims about COVID’s origins and vaccines were restricted or removed, including claims that later became legitimate subjects of public debate.
That did enormous damage.
It did not simply suppress bad information. It also made many Americans more suspicious of good information. When people are told they are not allowed to ask questions, they do not become more trusting. They become more paranoid.
That is why the current free speech debate often feels so dishonest. When powerful people in government pressured social media platforms about so-called misinformation, many of the same voices now worried about media censorship today were quiet or dismissive. The attitude seems to be: censorship is not censorship if the right people are doing it for the right reasons.
But that is exactly when free speech matters most.
While there are some current legitimate concerns about free speech, there are also bogus free speech claims being made. When a television network hires a new editor, changes direction, or fires an employee who publicly attacks his bosses, that is not a free speech issue.
That is called management.
In October 2025, Paramount announced that it was acquiring The Free Press and that Bari Weiss, the publication’s founder, would become editor-in-chief of CBS News. To some critics, this was immediately treated as evidence that CBS was somehow being captured by the right. Then, in early June, longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley was fired after he reportedly challenged new leadership in a staff meeting and accused them of damaging the program.
I understand why Americans would care about the future of 60 Minutes. I understand why CBS employees would be anxious about new leadership, new priorities and a new editorial culture.
But anxiety is not censorship.
No one has a constitutional right to anchor a broadcast, occupy a corner office, or insult a new boss in front of the staff without consequences.
Weiss is often described by her critics as if she were a hard-right partisan. But that description tells us more about the critics than it does about Weiss. She built her career inside some of the most prestigious institutions in American media, and famously quit her job as an op-ed staff editor at The New York Times with a very public resignation letter accusing the paper of allowing ideological conformity and Twitter-driven outrage to narrow the range of acceptable debate.
In that letter, Weiss argued that the paper had become less interested in open inquiry than in enforcing a kind of newsroom orthodoxy.
One does not have to agree with every position Weiss has taken to recognize the irony. A Jewish woman in a same-sex marriage who came out of elite liberal media, and whose publication often reads like a home for politically homeless liberals, political independents and anti-authoritarian centrists, is now treated by some as if she were the advance guard of MAGA.
That is absurd.
I came to Weiss’s work more seriously after October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists slaughtered Israeli civilians. Around that time, I began reading The Free Press more regularly and listening to her podcast, Honestly. What struck me was not that Weiss was reflexively taking one side in the laziest possible way, but the opposite. She was doing what good journalists are supposed to do: asking hard questions, interviewing interesting people and allowing complexity into a story that too many people wanted to flatten into slogans.
That matters because Weiss is often caricatured as blindly pro-Israel. But even on Israel, her work is more nuanced than that description allows. On Honestly, she has interviewed a wide range of voices, including Lucy Aharish, one of Israel’s best-known Arab Muslim journalists and news anchors. Aharish is proudly Israeli, deeply critical in her own way and living proof that the country is more complicated than the cartoon version often presented in American political debate.
That is what serious journalism should do. It should complicate the story. It should introduce readers and listeners to people who do not fit neatly into our preferred categories. It should resist the easy slogan.
The Free Press is not a MAGA publication in any meaningful sense. Its sensibility is closer to an older kind of liberalism: skeptical of authority, open to debate, uncomfortable with ideological conformity and willing to publish writers who do not all agree with one another.
Today, however, many people define “MAGA” as anyone who does not fully submit to the current progressive catechism. A person can support same-sex marriage, free speech, pluralism, immigration, tolerance and civil rights — but if that person also questions DEI excesses, campus censorship, COVID-era restrictions, or the moral certainty of activist politics, suddenly that person is treated as a conservative threat.
This is how our politics has become so distorted. The goal posts moved, and then the people who refused to move with them were accused of switching teams.
The same pattern appears closer to home. Congressman Mike Lawler is a Republican, but on some social issues he would actually be to the left of much of the Democratic Party of the 1990s. Remember, in the 1990s, President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. Today, many Republicans, such as Lawler, openly celebrate Pride Month. That evolution should make us more careful when we throw around words like “extreme.”
To be clear, I am not saying that every concern about speech today is imaginary.
There have been moments when President Trump and his allies have crossed, or at least approached, a dangerous line. When a president publicly calls for networks to punish late-night hosts who criticize him, that is not healthy. When the FCC appears to use its regulatory power, or even the threat of that power, against broadcasters because of political content, that deserves scrutiny. Government should not use licensing, investigations, merger approvals or regulatory pressure as a way to intimidate media companies.
There are legitimate concerns about press access, including recent Pentagon rules that have made it harder for reporters to operate inside the building. Those rules deserve scrutiny. But if we call every disputed media policy “fascism,” the word loses meaning.
If everything is censorship, then nothing is censorship. If a company changes leadership, rethinks its editorial direction, or fires an employee who publicly attacks management, do not pretend the First Amendment has been repealed.
Free speech requires courage, but it also requires clarity.
And if we are going to defend free speech seriously, we have to defend it consistently. Not only when our side is losing power. Not only when our preferred institutions are changing. Not only when the speech in question is fashionable, credentialed, or approved by the right people, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The real test of free speech is whether we defend the principle when it protects people we dislike, including so-called conspiracy theorists, some of whom turned out to be asking fair questions about COVID policy.
Everything else is just politics dressed up as principle.
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