The Institute for Free Speech promotes and defends the First Amendment rights to freely speak, assemble, publish, and petition the government through strategic litigation, communication, activism, training, research, and education. Our dedicated professional staff works tirelessly to protect political speech under these freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. We are the nation's largest organization dedicated solely to protecting First Amendment political speech rights. Free political speech guaranteed by the First Amendment is the most important right. It is the right that allows citizens to criticize, challenge, and ultimately improve their government. Despite its importance, the Institute for Free Speech is the only organization with a dedicated professional staff and mission seeking to promote and defend American citizens' First Amendment political speech rights.
Site Navigation
Search
Latest Stories
Join a growing community committed to civic renewal.
Subscribe to The Fulcrum and be part of the conversation.
Top Stories
Latest news
Read More
A memorial in Tyrone honors residents who served in World War I.
Photo by Jay Paterno.
Selling War Like a Brand Is Disrespectful to Those Truly in Harm’s Way
Mar 15, 2026
Each day in America as late morning approaches, families of service members stationed in the Middle East probably grow nervous as nightfall nears seven time zones away. On military bases or aircraft carriers, pilots are fueling up and taking off for missions over Iran. In countries across both sides of the Persian Gulf, civilians await the terror of missiles and bombs whistling through the darkness.
Back home, a mother worries about her son in his plane. A spouse, with a young child, worries about their service member while balancing the everyday stresses of holding a family together. At night, the seriousness of war emerges, and the distant drumbeats pound amid the silence.
All those miles away, United States service members, both women and men, have already been wounded or killed. And all those miles away, missiles and bombs fall on innocent people, young and old, who have nothing to do with the ambitions or
In America, we have an administration posting videos on social media platforms with clips from movies, video games, and animated films. Thirty-second clips, based on fantasy with high-energy music, were used to both justify and excite the base for war. “Epic Fury” warfare is being packaged with a slick name and social media clips like influencers trying to sell us clothes, drinks, or vacation destinations.
It is a calculated sales job that is disrespectful to the solemn conduct of war.
Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “I hope our wisdom will grow with our power. I hope that we understand that the less we use our power, the stronger it will be.” Over two centuries later, the use of war power is made easier because we’ve walled off a segment of our population from the actual costs. But if we look, there are reminders everywhere.
The words written in The Gettysburg Compiler on July 7, 1863, should still haunt us: “Every name…is a lightning stroke to some heart and breaks like thunder over some home, and falls a long black shadow over some hearthstone.”
There is an incredibly powerful scene in the movie “Saving Private Ryan.” A mother of four World War II soldiers is busy in her kitchen doing the routine tasks of an ordinary day. We see a U.S. Army car driving up the winding, dusty lane to her farmhouse, and we know the men in that car carry devastating news that three of her sons have been killed. Her head is down as she washes dishes in the sink, so she doesn’t look out the window to see what we see.
In her reality, her sons will all remain alive until that car arrives. But with that approach, that moment will forever change everything in her life. How you wish that car never arrived.
As her dogs bark, she looks up and sees the car make its final turn toward her house. Her face reveals a reluctant and tragic understanding that something horrible is coming. She walks quietly to the door, opens the screen door as the officers’ car comes to a stop. As a chaplain gets out with the officers, she falls to her knees on the front porch without a word.
This is the reality of war.
Years after our wars, names are engraved in stone or cast in bronze on memorials in small towns and big cities, marking our history. In towns like Bedford, Bellefonte, Boalsburg, Tyrone, or on campus at Penn State, we see them. The people who carried these names are largely lost to history, but their names represent lives cut short by the horrors of real war, rather than an alternate reality of slick imagery. The Lt. Michael P. Murphy memorial at the Veterans’ Plaza on Penn State’s University Park campus. Photo by Jay Paterno
A man named Alexander Russell, killed just nine days before the end of World War I, is remembered in Boalsburg. In Bellefonte, Alexander Green’s name appears for his Civil War service as a member of what was then known as the 6th U.S. Colored Regiment. At Penn State, Lt. Michael Murphy’s name is remembered for his ultimate sacrifice just over 20 years ago in Afghanistan. These men were taken in the days of youth, when, but for the waging of wars, their futures of possibility seemed to extend before them.
All wars represent humanity's failure. Whether the wars were just or not, it no longer matters to the individual soldiers who have lost. Their loss struck sorrow in the hearts of friends and families, leaving people wondering what if and what it all meant.
War is tragic for others, too. Innocent civilian casualties are no less tragic, and the long black shadow also falls on their hearthstone. No memorial will bear their names, and we dismiss their deaths all too easily.
The slick packaging of war, the dehumanization of people who do not look like us or worship like us allows us to go on accepting and cheering propagandized marketing campaigns. We even have a sanitized way to describe the death of innocents using words like “collateral damage.”
Through the noise, bots on social media hammer home the “patriotic” imagery. The videos of missiles striking targets become a voyeuristic source of entertainment. But that is our world in 2026. Everything is about selling “the brand” from consumer products to entertainment to war.
Nothing could be more dishonest or disrespectful to the people who are truly in harm’s way. The people who serve this nation and innocent people on the ground are caught in a crossfire stoked by small people with big egos who find it all too easy to order planes, soldiers, bombs, and missiles into “action.” They rain destruction and death on our fellow human beings.
But back home, there are families for whom the potential cost of war extends far beyond higher gas prices.
As people of faith in this country, we pray that the means of war be employed sparingly and only in the cause of what is just, after all other serious attempts at good faith diplomacy are exhausted. One hopes that the people in power come to a more respectful understanding and portrayal of the horrible power of war. False bravado is the refuge of cowards.
Tonight, as the bombs fall, man’s inhumanity to man continues. The lights of explosions in the dark flash to expose the terror in the eyes of those trampled under the hooves of the four horsemen of the apocalypse: War, Death, Famine, and Conquest.
And somewhere, a stone cutter is sharpening his tools, and bad news may be making its way to the home of a mother or a spouse. And innocents are crushed under the weight of a war waged by others.
Selling War Like a Brand Is Disrespectful to Those Truly in Harm’s Way was first published on StateCollege.com.
Jay Paterno is a former quarterbacks coach for Penn State University, ran for lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania in 2014, and consults on a variety of issues.
Keep ReadingShow less
Recommended
Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts, Jr attends U.S. President Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 04, 2025 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The Unitary Executive Myth Is Fueling Dangerous Overreach
Mar 14, 2026
The “Unitary Executive” doctrine has become a talisman for expanding the sphere of Presidential prerogatives. Chief Justice John Roberts has been a key architect of this doctrine. It underlies the Supreme Court’s use of its shadow docket to reverse many detailed, well-reasoned lower federal court decisions over the last year. Those decisions, after carefully hearing and assessing the facts and the law, had enjoined unprecedented, far-reaching presidential actions (including the imposition of tariffs) that were almost certain to inflict immediate and substantial harm on millions of people and on the functioning of government itself.
As a lawyer, I have grave concerns about the so far unconstrained actions of this Executive branch and what they mean for the rule of law and the survival of our personal liberties. But even those too jaded to care or who think naively, “it will never happen to me,” should be concerned about ineptitude, greed, and waste. These are the costs imposed on all of us when government resources and employees are deployed on personal vendettas or redirected from critical government functions to support impulsive, arbitrary, and often futile actions.
Without limits and accountability, we abandon both the rule of law and the discipline required for the effective, functional operation of a national government.
Think of all the people that DOGE or others fired, whom the government now struggles to replace; of all the projects suspended midstream: of the contracts breached, and the committed funds withheld, on which so many charities, businesses, and people rely. Over 650 cases have been filed against the Administration’s executive actions (excluding most habeas cases involving individual immigrant detentions). The government has lost the majority of cases that have resulted in judicial rulings, including interim decisions. These lost cases divert attention from other issues, waste court resources, distract agencies from their core missions, and impose high costs on litigants.
The courts in places with heavy immigration dockets, such as Texas and Minnesota, have had to call on sister districts, diverting them from already more than full dockets; U.S. attorneys decry the inability to attend to their real law enforcement duties. Government attorneys have resigned rather than assist in what they believe would be lawless and unethical behavior; vacancies exist that the government cannot fill; years of irreplaceable experience and loyal service have been lost to it—and to us--forever.
Invoking the phrase “Unitary Executive” justifies none of this. It is not a phrase found in the Constitution. It seems a misnomer when applied to the edicts of this President and the actions of this Administration, which seem so changeable, disjointed, and far from unitary. And “unitary “is not a synonym for arbitrary, authoritarian, ad hoc, and absolutist.
The President’s duty is to execute faithfully the laws passed by Congress with the funding Congress provides and within the limitations it specifies. Even in areas like foreign policy, where a President’s scope of discretionary action is broadest, it is never boundless.
The framers of the Constitution were fearful of recreating a strong leader without accountability, like the king whose rule they were endeavoring to escape. They imposed restraints on the powers they conferred on the executive branch. They granted to Congress, not the President or the Executive Branch, the most basic powers of government—establishing its laws, funding its operations, even declaring whether the country is at war. They hemmed in the President’s power still further by reserving to the States the power of local rule (including over Presidential elections). And they made some actions forever off limits, no matter what a President might wish, in the Bill of Rights. Important as the president’s role is, it is one of temporary stewardship.
We talk colloquially about giving the President freedom to pursue an “agenda “that a narrow majority supposedly endorsed by voting for him. The priorities of the President are entitled to great weight, but so are the priorities of Congress and thousands of state and local officials we also elect. A President may have his wish list, but the real bullet points in the nation’s agenda are the statutes and funding bills passed by Congress. And the framework is the rule of law, the Constitution, and the weightiest priorities of all—the Bill of Rights. Let a President brush all that aside, and we are in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, not the United State of America.
There will be costs over the years, including personnel vacancies, diversion of attention, loss, waste, and misuse of resources, and litigation expenses. Other costs, like the loss of credibility of the United States as a trading partner, ally, and protector of its own people, and the evisceration of long-standing civil rights protections, are ones from which we may never wholly recover. We cannot afford to let them continue.
We have a power-hungry breakaway Executive, not a unitary one, and it is past time to rein it in.
James B. Kobak, Jr. has been a lawyer for over fifty years. He is a former president of the New York County Lawyers Association and is Vice President of the New York Bar Foundation and Chair of the National Center for Access to Justice. He prepared this article as a volunteer with Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
Keep ReadingShow less
U.S. American flags under clear sky
Photo by Kevin Lanceplaine on Unsplash
New Fellowship Empowers Young Leaders to Renew U.S. Democracy
Mar 14, 2026
On February 27, nine young leaders gathered in New York City for the first convening of the Democracy Architects Council, a new fellowship presented by The Bridge Alliance Education Fund and Civics Unplugged. The event marked the official launch of a year-long initiative designed to do something at once simple and audacious: put the future of American democracy in the hands of those who will inherit it.
The Democracy Architects Council is a paid, one-year fellowship for eight fellows between the ages of 18 and 28, each selected for their work across a distinct sector of democratic life — joined by a ninth, Civics Unplugged's own Zoë Jenkins, who participates as a peer and project coordinator. Together, they are charged with developing an actionable playbook for American democracy in 2030 and beyond that is grounded in evidence, shaped by stakeholder input, and built for real impact.
A cohort that reflects the breadth of democratic work: The fellows represent a wide spectrum of approaches to strengthening democracy:
Movement‑builders and civic organizers
- Averie Bishop, an advocate with Asian Texans for Justice, brings experience leading a Gen Z‑driven Texas State House campaign that mobilized more than 80,000 door knocks and built a social media platform of over one million followers to make civic life accessible to young people.
- Lily Joy Winder — a Diné, Southern Ute, and African American advocate and Stanford graduate student — founded #PeopleNotMascots at age 18, a national campaign to retire Native mascots from public schools, and has since led campaigns at the intersection of Indigenous rights, environmental justice, and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People crisis, amassing more than 300,000 followers.
Policy innovators and institutional reformers
- Isabel Sunderland, policy lead for technology reform at Issue One, has advised Congress, the White House, and the United Nations on children’s online safety, data privacy, and Big Tech accountability.
- Arielle Galinsky, Co‑Founder of The Legacy Project and a joint JD/MPP candidate at Yale Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, focuses on intergenerational connection as a pathway to democracy reform.
Narrative shapers and cultural strategists
- Anatola Araba, a Forbes 30 Under 30 filmmaker and founder of Reimagine Story Lab, has spoken at the United Nations four times and made history when her art was sent to space on NASA’s first Moon mission since 1972 — all in service of her belief that imagination is infrastructure for democratic futures.
- Alex Edgar, Youth Engagement Manager at Made By Us and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, has spent his career rethinking how institutions share power across generations; his co‑founding of Youth250 has reached more than 2.3 million people ahead of the U.S. 250th anniversary.
Civic technologists and justice reformers
- Imre Huss, a high school senior from Cleveland, co‑founded Govvy, a civic technology platform for local government engagement, and has already co-authored eight articles in The Fulcrum.
- Jackson Parrott, a Yale undergraduate and Executive Director of Pardoned for Innocence, brings years of nonprofit leadership rooted in criminal justice, civic education, and wrongful conviction reform.
Cross‑sector coordination and trust‑building
- Joining them as the ninth member is Zoë Jenkins, Director of Civic Trust at Civics Unplugged. A National Geographic Young Explorer and University of Virginia graduate, she has been featured in The Washington Post, NPR, and The Tamron Hall Show for her work elevating the voices of Kentucky’s least‑heard students.
A year of research, collaboration, and public engagement
Over the next twelve months, each Democracy Architect will convene roundtable discussions with sector stakeholders, write essays and reports for publication in The Fulcrum, track emerging trends, and collaborate on a comprehensive sector playbook to be released at the end of the fellowship. Monthly full-cohort convenings will allow cross-sector knowledge sharing and strategic alignment. Fellows will be compensated with a $10,000 annual honorarium, supported by research staff from Civics Unplugged, and amplified through The Bridge Alliance's media and advocacy networks.
A working session, not a ceremonial launch
The February summit was less a ceremonial launch and more a deliberate working session. Fellows spent the day pairing up to analyze barriers in their own sectors, building cases for interventions, and casting votes on which paths to prioritize. The afternoon turned to a deeper examination of networks of power and influence, mapping who holds sway over democratic systems, how those relationships shape what change is possible, and where emerging leaders can most effectively intervene. The fellows also dove into competing theories of democracy and how those interface with power networks, culminating in a central concept that fellows will continue to build out.
A deliberate wager on the next generation
The council represents a deliberate wager: that young people don't just deserve a seat at the table when it comes to democracy's future — they deserve to set the agenda. Rather than slotting emerging leaders into existing reform frameworks, the Democracy Architects Council was designed to let them (re)define the framework itself.
Trust in institutions is fragile, polarization is entrenched, and civic participation among young Americans remains inconsistent. It is precisely in moments like these that the future passes from one generation’s hands to the next. Every generation reaches this moment when it must decide whether to accept the world as it is or dare to remake it. The Democracy Architects Council exists because older generations can no longer pretend that incremental fixes will be enough, and because these young leaders have already shown they are willing to shoulder a responsibility they did not create but will inevitably inherit. What they are building is not just a playbook; it is a promise that the future of American democracy will not be shaped by resignation, but by imagination, courage, and the belief that renewal is still possible.
The Democracy Architects Council is presented by The Bridge Alliance Education Fund and Civics Unplugged. To follow the Council's progress, visit the websites and social media channels of The Bridge Alliance, Civics Unplugged, and The Fulcrum for regular updates, event announcements, and new publications from the fellows.
The Fulcrum is committed to nurturing the next generation of journalists. Learn more by clicking HERE.
Keep ReadingShow less
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters during a news conference at Trump National Doral Miami on March 9, 2026, in Doral, Florida. President Trump spoke on his administration's strikes on Iran.
(Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images/TCA)
Donald Trump’s Iran war without rhyme or reason
Mar 14, 2026
If you ask President Trump, he’ll tell you we’ve already won the war in Iran.
When asked for an update by Axios on Wednesday, Trump responded with the kind of upbeat nonchalance and flippant boastfulness you’d usually see when asked about the progress on one of his hotels.
“The war is going great,” he said. “We are way ahead of the timetable. We have done more damage than we thought possible, even in the original six-week period.” He then offered that there’s “practically nothing left to target.”
As for an ending? “Any time I want it to end, it will end.”
How, exactly, is it “going great”? What is the “timetable”? Shouldn’t it end when the mission is achieved and not when Trump simply wants it to?
His administration has simultaneously given no rationale to justify our strikes on Iran — failing to prove we were the target of an imminent attack — and all the reasons why we had to, from regime change, to oil, to support for Israel.
It’s sent mixed messages on timing, promising both that it’s practically over and that it could take a while. And it’s been unreliable in its own accounting of what’s actually happened. Have we decimated Iran’s nukes? (I thought we’d already done that.) And who is responsible for the attack that killed 160 schoolchildren in Iran?
We still have no answers to these important questions. When pressed on the school attack, for one, Trump has said everything from Iran was responsible to, most recently, “I don’t know about it.” But an initial report determined the U.S. was at fault, the result of a targeting mistake.
As for the nukes, which the White House declared“ obliterated” last June, our own intelligence assessment just found that Iran can still access about 60% of its enriched material stored at Esfahan. As the non-partisan Arms Control Association notes, “Although strikes can set back Iran’s nuclear program and destroy key infrastructure…military force cannot eliminate Tehran’s proliferation risk.”
Trump’s version of events, as is so often the case, isn’t based on facts, but wishcasting, projection, bombast and bluffs.
And abroad, it isn’t working.
In France, for example, Le Monde derides Trump’s treatment of the war as “spectacle,” lambasting his “celebratory tone.” It noted his grotesque joke that it’s “more fun” to sink Iranian warships than to seize them,” and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s boast that “we are punching [the Iranians] while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
In The Guardian, columnist Rafael Behr points out the chaos and incompetence of Trump’s war: “Regime change was the plan, but Trump finds it easier to change plans than regimes. He says he has won, but also that he has more winning to do. This is the familiar stage of rhetorical climbdown, indicating dawning awareness that a problem is more complicated than the president initially thought. Complexity resists his whim. It bores him.”
And in Germany’s Bild, Europe’s highest-circulating newspaper, the question is pointed: “Whose pockets is Trump filling with bombs?” It declares “the clearest winner in the biggest Middle East conflict in decades is the U.S. arms industry” and Trump’s sons, who are conveniently now in the drone business.
The world can see through Trump’s charade, but do American voters? Most polls show more voters oppose the war than support it, but by a slim margin.
That margin will widen with time, most certainly. And then Trump’s slick sales pitch will be less and less effective. Or maybe I’m the one who’s wishcasting.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
Keep ReadingShow less
Load More