Minnesota activists and scholars are decrying the recent federal indictment of 15 people who took part in demonstrations against the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities metro region earlier this year. The indictment accuses the protesters of surveilling federal agents, disrupting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations…
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My husband, Martin Soto, was abducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) this February when he left our home at night to buy diapers for our 11-month-old son. Martin — who is a loving father, husband, son, church member, worker, and neighbor in the town of Kearny, New Jersey, where we live — was then jailed for four months at Delaney Hall, the ICE jail in Newark, New Jersey.
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On the evening of June 11, 2025, Shailynn Bray-Waters joined hundreds of other protesters at a demonstration outside an ICE field office in Spokane, Washington. She’d learned through social media that two of her former ESL students — Cesar Alexander Alvarez Perez and Joswar Slater Rodriguez Torres, both lawful asylum seekers from Venezuela — had been detained during a routine immigration check-in.
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Transcript
The following rushed transcript may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.
On the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration—January 20, 2025—the heads of many of Silicon Valley’s most powerful tech firms sat in the rows just behind Trump. It was a sign of Trump’s deep ties to the industry and to these powerful individuals who are transforming how we communicate, and not for the better.
In this episode, Michael Fox visits Silicon Valley to try to understand the stranglehold that tech has over our media and our airwaves. Hosts Michael Fox and Marc Steiner dig into the ways media consolidation, social media, and AI are strangling our free speech, even as they claim to be liberating it—and us—with incredible insight from professors Todd Wolfson, Mary Anne Franks, Fara Dabhoiwala, Ramesh Srinivasan, and Jeff Cohen, the founder of the organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, FAIR.
The Battle for Free Speech is a production of The Real News Network.
Hosted by Michael Fox and Marc Steiner. Theme music by Michael Fox, Jordan Klein and Daniel Nuñez. Other music from Blue Dot Sessions and Epidemic Sound. Production and Sound Design by Michael Fox and Stephen Frank. Editorial support by Kayla Rivara and Heather Gies. Research by Ben Schweiger.
Guests
Todd Wolfson
Mary Anne Franks
Fara Dabhoiwala
Jeff Cohen
Ramesh Srinivasan
Resources
Mary Anne Franks’ book, Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment
Fara Dabhoiwala’s book, What Is Free Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea
Todd Wolfson’s Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left
Marc Steiner’s Interview with Jeff Cohen, “How Democrats set the stage for Trump’s assault on free speech”
You can hear Ramesh Srinivasan’s Utopias Podcast here, or wherever you get your
On March 28, 18-year-old University of Southern California student Tucker Collins documented a protest outside the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center. “I didn’t even see any of the officers who had their weapons out,” Collins told Truthout. “[I was] standing back from the crowd and, you know, focused on trying to frame up the crowd, and then the next thing I know, I can’t see anything.”…
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Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.
Michael Fox: Hi Mark.
Marc Steiner: Hey Mike, how you doing? Good to see you.
Michael Fox: Good to see you.
Marc Steiner: What do you got for us today?
Michael Fox: All right. So late last fall I visited this place that I think you’ll appreciate for this episode. Sprout Plaza at the University of California campus.
Marc Steiner: I know exactly where you were.
Michael Fox: So it’s a beautiful blue sky out. Leaves are changing colors. It’s a crisp autumn afternoon and in front of me is this big long stoic building marble, four big long Roman columns at the top of a row of stairs. This is the administration building here at the University of California Berkeley and this is called Sproul Hall. And that is important because this was literally ground zero for the free speech movement of 1964 here at the University of California Berkeley. Like the Plaza where I’m at right now, which is Sprout Plaza, was where you just had daily marches, protests, speeches just constantly happening.
I think it is really poignant that on the ground in front of Sprout Hall, someone has written in chalk, Trump must go now, refuse fascism. And it’s chalked up in two different locations here. People still staking out their territory, demanding their right to speak their voice. I was there to get a sense of the feeling being there and kind of the legacy today. And of course this was ground zero for the free speech movement. And Mark, that’s something you know