Can a Group Allied With the Right Defend the 1st Amendment for All?
FIRE, a product of the “academic freedom” campaign, wants to protect free speech for everyone. Yet its stances show deference to religious views and a persistent anti-queer strain.
An unflattering still of FIRE president Greg Lukianoff, from his TED talk in April 2025.
Opinion, by Billie Jean Sweeney
The whole notion that “trans people went too far” has been eagerly promoted for years by powerful right-wing donors who sought to use the First Amendment as a cudgel to elevate their viewpoint-based expression at the expense of all others.
This right-wing agenda—a corollary of which is “campus liberals went too far”—had been adopted in large part by more mainstream-sounding groups, like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. But as the Trump administration has pursued full-on censorship and the erasure of civil rights, this years-long allegiance is being severely tested.
Is it sustainable, philosophically if not financially, for a group like FIRE, ostensibly based on free expression and individual rights, to closely ally itself with hard-core right-wing groups that unabashedly seek to suppress speech and undermine rights?
Groups like Parents Defending Education, for example, which the Southern Poverty Law Center said is part of the broad “movement aimed at restricting LGBTQ+ rights” and “promoting far-right ideological narratives under the guise of ‘parental rights.’”
FIRE, working in concert with the conservative Manhattan Institute, filed an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit by the group that led to a federal circuit court ruling last month that effectively carves out a special constitutional protection for malicious and discriminatory anti-trans behavior in public schools. FIRE called an Ohio school district’s policy concerning pronouns “compelled speech,” though the factual record showed no absolute requirement existed and the parents group explicitly stated its claim was based on its “religious beliefs.”
Instead, as the dissent in the 10-7 court ruling noted, Parents Defending Education “seek for their children to be permitted to use non-preferred pronouns ‘repeatedly and at all times, including inside and outside of the classroom, in the classmates’ presence, and when referring to the classmates outside of their presence.”
That is, a license to bully.
The ACLU, by contrast, also filed an amicus brief in support of the parents group but on narrower grounds, saying the school policy was overly broad and should be rewritten. It made a point of saying “the First Amendment does not grant PDE or its members a general free pass to intentionally misgender their transgender classmates.”
A Rebranding
FIRE, long associated with the cause of “academic freedom” championed by right-wing donors who view universities as too liberal, rebranded itself in 2022, expanding its mission to include freedom of expression as a whole and positioning itself as a direct rival to the ACLU, which conservative groups have witheringly attacked for more than a decade. FIRE implicitly joined that chorus in 2020 with an elaborate documentary.
FIRE’s rebranding (its former name invoked “individual rights in education”) was celebrated in a series of articles published by the Charles Koch-funded Stand Together Trust, which identified itself as supporter. That year alone, the Koch organization funneled $5.8 million to FIRE, according to the liberal watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy.
FIRE does not disclose its donors on its website, in its annual report or in its Form 990 IRS filings, but the Center for Media and Democracy has reported that past donors have included a Who’s Who of the conservative movement, including the Adolph Coors Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, among others.
FIRE’s revenue rocketed from $13.7 million in 2020 to $37.1 million in 2022 — the year of its relaunch — before leveling off and dipping a bit, to $33.4 million for the fiscal year ending in June 2024, according to its public IRS Form 990 filings, tracked by ProPublica. The group itself cited a higher revenue figure, $40.8 million, in its most recent annual report, covering the fiscal year ending in June 2025.
FIRE’s annual report cites a growth in individual, membership-based donors, and its advocacy has tacked away from the hardest edges of the right wing in the past several months as the Trump administration and its allies have grown bolder in their attacks on speech and civil rights.
It took on the case of a Tennessee man jailed for a harmless meme posted after Charlie Kirk’s killing, represented the Iowa pollster Ann Seltzer in Trump’s meritless lawsuit against her, and spoke out on social media against gender-based academic attacks at Texas A&M and Angelo State University in Texas.
It failed to comment at all, however, when the right-wing group Turning Point USA launched a highly orchestrated media attack on a University of Oklahoma teaching assistant who gave a failing grade to a student for an essay on gender stereotypes that was reliant on Biblical allusions rather than documentable evidence.
The instructor was suspended.
In many ways the OU case underscores a principle FIRE has long said it champions: the defense of academic freedom in the face of politicized attacks. But it also points to the growing tensions inherent in its years-long allegiances with hard-core conservative groups (it once sponsored a Turning Point USA event, the International Business Times reported). In this case, the attack on the instructor came from the hard right.
FIRE did not respond to queries from Assigned Media as to whether it will ever take a position on the OU case. Nor did FIRE respond to a number of other questions from Assigned Media concerning its contributors, the principles guiding its selection of cases, or its recent support for conversion therapy.
A Bully Pulpit
While FIRE uses litigation and direct legal representation in its work, it relies far more heavily on the bully pulpit of social media and other digital methods to promote its advocacy.
One of its most widely cited tools has been an annual ranking of free speech on college campuses, though the survey has also been criticized for bias and a lack of rigor.
The report assigns letter grades — virtually every one of 257 colleges in the 2026 report received a “C” or below — but it also ranks campuses nationwide. Those rankings, based on self-selected respondents to a student survey, have produced some curious results: Florida public universities, which are subject to state curricula censorship on issues of race, were nonetheless rated in the top third in the 2025 report.
The rankings have also been criticized for their hands-off approach to prominent religious-affiliated colleges, many of which are simply omitted from the organization’s free speech assessments.
FIRE’s selective deference to religious-based viewpoints in free speech debates — or in some cases, its elevation of those views over all other constitutional considerations — has marked its approach to conversion therapy, an anti-queer form of counseling that has been widely described as cruel and unethical.
FIRE’s legal director last month called on the Supreme Court to strike down Colorado’s ban on the practice in Chiles v Salazar, in which the plaintiff, a counselor, said their “sincerely held religious beliefs” took precedence over the government’s ability to regulate medical practices and protect patient rights. The court is expected to announce its ruling in the coming weeks.
Though not a party to the case, FIRE’s piece sought to justify the use of conversion therapy on free speech grounds alone, invoking fanciful hypotheses — “let’s say some conversion therapy doesn’t include shock treatments, medicine, or any physical conduct” — to support its argument.
Conversion therapy, of course, does not typically involve assault or “shock therapy,” but it does rely on abusive and manipulative tactics that are designed to produce a predetermined outcome.
In an interview with Assigned Media last summer, Arielle Rebekah, an expert on trans issues and a survivor of conversion therapy, recalled being subjected to exhausting pseudo-therapy sessions intended to shame them, being forced to write essays tearing down their self-worth, and being shown baby pictures of themselves and told they were letting themselves down.
“The whole point of these programs is to indoctrinate young people, and undermine your sense of identity,” Rebekah said.
A persistent anti-trans, and more broadly anti-queer, thread runs through FIRE’s advocacy since its Koch-sponsored expansion into free expression. Last year, just as Trump was ramping up attacks on trans people, the organization published a lengthy essay that blamed trans people for “cancel culture,” a favorite trope of the hard right. FIRE’s argument has aged poorly: Trans people, a tiny and virtually powerless minority who pose no threat to anyone, have seen their rights virtually erased and their lives put in danger.
So who exactly was canceled?
FIRE formed a close and highly beneficial alliance with Koch and other hard-right groups in the decade leading up the 2024 election. Now that the political landscape has changed dramatically, in ways the radical right movement promoted, but in ways that threaten democracy and free speech themselves, how does a free expression group respond?
Conservative donors have had a powerful impact on nonprofits. The advocacy group FAIR, which had focused on opposition to critical race theory, was pushed by these donors to take on anti-trans advocacy as well, to decidedly mixed results. How well will FIRE’s longtime donor base tolerate any moderation in its case work?
Senior officials at FIRE have demonstrated an eagerness online to answer criticisms of their work in highly combative, even personal, terms that are unusual for a group that says it stands for free expression.
This flamethrower approach may have been effective in the amorphous arena of “academic freedom,” but will it serve the group so well on complex issues involving the First Amendment — which also ensures the separation of church and state and guarantees the right of freedom of association?
Deriding critics, who after all are exercising their own right to free expression, doesn’t reflect the sort of sober self-analysis that America’s unprecedented upheaval demands.
Billie Jean Sweeney (she/her) is a freelance editor, reporter and advocate. She helped direct international news coverage for The New York Times and coverage of New York City for The Associated Press. She also served as editorial director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she defended international press freedom. At The Hartford Courant she led an award-winning investigation into the deadly use of restraints in mental health institutions. For Assigned Media, she’s written about the right wing’s attacks on young trans athletes and how mainstream media adopted and spread anti-trans disinformation.