Jacob Gaba

Legal Fellow @theFIREorg
Admitted to the DC Bar
Opinions my own

[Jacob Gaba @jacob_gaba]

The Pentagon is trying to strip @SenMarkKelly of his Captain rank for merely stating the law. If the First Amendment means anything, civilians and veterans alike should be free to discuss — or even criticize — military policy without fear.

I explain:

https://t.co/bIiqyHPNCu

[FIRE @TheFIREorg]

VICTORY! A federal appeals court rejected Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” — a broad ban on what public university faculty may discuss in class — holding it violates the First Amendment.

“Though the government has plenty of ways to promote its own viewpoint, puppeteering every university professor in the state is not one of them. Forcing an official government line—in a college classroom of all places—is exactly the ‘pall of orthodoxy’ the First Amendment will not tolerate.”

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

$22,567 per day.

That’s what Perry County, TN will pay Larry Bushart for every day it kept him in jail over a Trump meme.

He lost 37 days of his life and his job, and missed his anniversary and the birth of his grandchild.

All for speech the First Amendment protects.

Proud that @TheFIREorg helped Larry fight back and win, and even prouder that the First Amendment still has teeth.

[FIRE @TheFIREorg]

The Trump administration should not have brought these charges against James Comey. Thanks to the First Amendment, they likely won’t stick.

But be careful: they may still have a lasting impact on politics and our willingness to hear criticism.

✍🏻: @jacob_gaba
📰: @thedispatch

[FIRE @TheFIREorg]

We just filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Senator Mark Kelly, who was censured and faced efforts to cut his rank and pay after criticizing military officials and telling servicemembers they can refuse unlawful orders.

This is unconstitutional retaliation.

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

Calling all free speech fanatics and law students!

@TheFIREorg is inviting paper proposals on the historical foundations of NYT v. Sullivan and the actual malice standard.

As courts lean harder on “history and tradition,” getting that history right matters more than ever.

[FIRE @TheFIREorg]

In a free speech victory, the Supreme Court held 8-1 that Colorado's ban on conversion therapy for minors violates the First Amendment.

“The First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech.”

FIRE couldn’t agree more.

[FIRE @TheFIREorg]

https://t.co/RiqM0KYhuN

[Will Creeley @WillatFIRE]

Good.

Fighting back against unconstitutional bullying was the right decision. It always is.

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

My reluctant attempt to try to break through in this new…oh dear god…"post-literate society."

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

The government can absolutely decide not to contract with a company that won’t build the product it wants. That’s normal procurement discretion, and nobody should pretend otherwise.

What’s NOT normal is escalating from “okay, we’ll take our business elsewhere” to “we’re going to brand you a supply chain risk unless you change your internal rules.” That label is supposed to be about genuine security vulnerabilities—foreign control, compromised systems, coerced access—not about an American company drawing lines around what it will and won’t build. Using it as a pressure tactic is a dangerous category mistake.

And right there is where the First Amendment problem starts to come into view—not as some abstract argument about whose viewpoint wins, but as a very concrete free-speech issue: compelled speech. If the government uses extraordinary leverage—blacklisting-style designations, emergency authorities, or other coercive tools—to force a private company to generate outputs it would not otherwise produce, that’s not ordinary contracting anymore. That’s the state coercing a private speaker to speak.

The reported threat to invoke the Defense Production Act takes it into even darker territory. The DPA is meant to prioritize or compel production for genuine national-defense needs, not to function as a “rewrite your model’s rules or else” mechanism. Using it that way would be a breathtaking precedent: the government effectively reserving the power to commandeer the policies of a leading AI company when it doesn’t like the answer “no.”

That should worry anyone who cares about free speech—and about reality-testing. Once the government normalizes coercive pressure to make AI systems behave as it prefers, you’re no longer just talking about procurement choices. You’re talking about government power shaping one of the core tools we increasingly use to understand what the world actually looks like.

[Jacob Gaba @jacob_gaba]

@TheFIREorg is suing AG Bondi and Sec Noem for strong-arming Facebook and Apple to censor groups and apps that use public information to report ICE activity. I address concerns here:

https://t.co/69KinnLqqq

[FIRE @TheFIREorg]

UPDATE: Sources are now reporting that the government is no longer pursuing its case against a group of Democratic lawmakers who posted a video urging servicemembers to refuse to carry out illegal orders.

This is a positive development for free speech, but the investigation should never have happened in the first place.

As FIRE has said, in the United States, everyone — from a sitting U.S. senator to an everyday American — has the First Amendment right to say our troops should refuse to carry out unlawful orders.

All federal officials, from President Trump on down, take an oath to uphold the Constitution. Attempting to have political opponents — or anyone — investigated for their protected expression flatly violates that oath. The Framers intended the First Amendment to prohibit precisely such an abuse of power.

[Caitlin Flanagan @CaitlinPacific]

Seeing an honest man telling the truth against the interests of his party is a beautiful and rare thing.

[Jacob Gaba @jacob_gaba]

Shocker: the 'free speech' president wants to sue a comedian over a joke. If this does happen though, discovery will certainly be interesting.

[Jacob Gaba @jacob_gaba]

"In a free society, journalists play a vital role in documenting and reporting on events of public concern, including illegal conduct. Manufacturing federal crimes out of the facts we’ve seen so far chills that core function."

[FIRE @TheFIREorg]

https://t.co/yTobQWKZyT

[Jacob Gaba @jacob_gaba]

The Trump administration publicly hinted that it had something more than speech on pro-Palestine protestors – but as I explain below for Expression @TheFIREorg, it never did: https://t.co/bdG42AZzQz

[Alisha Glennon @acglennon]

"Americans have the right to criticize our government. We have the right to come together in protest. We have the right to record law enforcement. When we exercise our First Amendment rights, we shouldn’t fear we will be detained, surveilled, added to government databases, assaulted, or worse."

[FIRE @TheFIREorg]

https://t.co/lBpGBapVga

[Jacob Gaba @jacob_gaba]

@3YearLetterman @AP Essentially, we've made the choice that letting some criminal activity go unnoticed is worth protecting the innocent. Otherwise, ICE could raid your home tomorrow night by mistake, and you'd have no recourse.

[Jacob Gaba @jacob_gaba]

@3YearLetterman @AP It applies to everyone. The point of procedural rights is they protect law-abiding citizens from government abuse. Same principle as innocent-until-proven-guilty – in a free society, we'd rather be sure that the innocent are protected against unfair exercise of govt power.