Category: Politics

Texas A&M University announced the resignation of its president, Mark A. Welsh III, on Sept. 18, 2025, following a controversial decision earlier in the month to fire a professor over a classroom exchange with a student about gender identity.

The university – a public school in College Station, Texas – fired Melissa McCoul, a children’s literature professor, on Sept. 9. McCoul’s dismissal happened after a student secretly filmed video as the professor taught a class and discussed a children’s book that includes the image of a purple “gender unicorn,” a cartoon image that is sometimes used to teach about gender identity.

The student questioned whether it was “legal” to be teaching about gender identity, given President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order – which is not legally binding – that said there are only two genders, male and female.

The video went viral, triggering backlash from Republican lawmakers who called for McCoul to be fired and praised the fact that the school also demoted the College of Arts and Science’s dean and revoked administrative duties from a department head.

Texas A&M officials have said that McCoul was fired because her course content was not consistent with the published course description. McCoul is appealing her firing and is considering legal action against the school.

Academic freedom advocates have condemned McCoul’s firing and say it raises questions about whether professors should be fired for addressing politically charged topics.

As a history educator researching curriculum design, civics education and generational dynamics, I study how classroom discussions often mirror larger cultural and political conflicts.

The Texas A&M case is far from unprecedented. The Cold War offers an example of another politically contentious time in American history when people questioned if and how politics should influence what gets taught in the classroom – and tried to restrict what teachers say.

Educators under suspicion in the McCarthy era

During the Cold War – a period of geopolitical tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that came after World War II and lasted until 1991 – fears of communist infiltration spread widely across American society, including the country’s schools.

One particularly contentious period was in the late 1940s and 1950s, during what is often referred to as the McCarthy era. The era is named after Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Republican who led the charge on accusing government employees and others – often without evidence – of being communists.

Beginning in the late 1940s, local school boards, state legislatures and Congress launched investigations into teachers and professors across the country accused of harboring communist sympathies. This often led to the teachers being blacklisted and fired.

More than 20 states passed loyalty oath laws requiring public employees, including educators, to swear that they were not members of the Communist Party or affiliated groups.

In California, for example, the 1950 Levering Act mandated a loyalty oath for all state employees, including professors at public universities. Some employees refused to sign the oath, and 31 University of California professors were fired.

And in New York, the Feinberg Law, approved in 1949, authorized school districts to fire teachers who were members of “subversive organizations.” More than 250 educators were fired or forced to resign under the Feinberg Law and related anti-subversion policies between 1948 and 1953.

These laws had a chilling impact on academic life and learning.

Faculty, including those who were not under investigation, and students alike avoided discussing controversial topics, such as labor organizing and civil rights, in the classroom.

This pervasive climate of censorship also made it challenging for educators to fully engage students in critical, meaningful learning.

The Supreme Court steps in

By the mid-1950s, questions about the constitutionality of these laws – and the extent of professors’ academic freedom and First Amendment right to freedom of speech – reached the Supreme Court.

In one such case, 1957’s Sweezy v. New Hampshire, Louis C. Weyman, the New Hampshire attorney general, questioned Paul Sweezy, a Marxist economist, about the content of a university lecture he delivered at the University of New Hampshire.

Weyman wanted to determine whether Sweezy had advocated for Marxism or said that socialism was inevitable in the country. Sweezy refused to answer Weyman’s questions, citing his constitutional rights. The Supreme Court ruled in Sweezy’s favor, emphasizing the importance of academic freedom and the constitutional limits on state interference in university teaching.

The Supreme Court also considered another case, Keyishian v. Board of Regents, in 1967. With the Cold War still ongoing, this case challenged New York’s Feinberg Law, which required educators to disavow membership in communist organizations.

In striking down the law, the court declared that academic freedom is “a special concern of the First Amendment.” The ruling emphasized that vague or broad restrictions on what teachers can say or believe create an unconstitutional, “chilling effect” on the classroom.

While these cases did not remove all political pressures on what teachers could discuss in class, they set significant constitutional limits on state efforts to regulate classroom speech, particularly at public institutions.

Recurring tensions from now and then

There are several important differences between the McCarthy era and current times.

For starters, conservative concern centered primarily on the spread of communism during the McCarthy era. Today, debates often involve conservative critiques of how topics such as gender identity, race and other cultural issues — sometimes grouped under the term “woke” — are addressed in schools and society.

Second, in the 1950s and ‘60s, external pressures on academic freedom often came in the form of legal mandates.

Today, the political landscape in academia is more complex and fast-paced, with pressures emanating from both the public and federal government.

Viral outrage, administrative investigations and threats to cut state or federal funding to schools can all contribute to an intensifying climate of fear of retribution that constrains educators’ ability to teach freely.

Despite these differences, the underlying dynamic between the two time periods is similar – in both cases, political polarization intensifies public scrutiny of educators.

Like loyalty oaths in the 1950s, today’s political controversies create a climate in which many teachers feel pressure to avoid contentious topics altogether. Even when no laws are passed, the possibility of complaints, investigations or firings can shape classroom choices.

Just as Sweezy and Keyishian defined the boundaries of state power in the 1950s and ‘60s, potential legal challenges like the appeal from the fired Texas A&M professor may eventually lead to court rulings that clarify how people’s First Amendment protections apply in today’s disputes over curriculum and teaching.

Whether these foundational protections will endure under the Supreme Court’s current and future makeup remains an open question.

Laura Gail Miller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

For weeks, there has been a great deal of reporting about an impending shake-up in the world of television news. Paramount Global CEO David Ellison is in talks to purchase The Free Press, an online media startup launched in 2021 as a conservative alternative to traditional news organizations.

Once the deal goes through, Ellison is weighing giving Free Press editor and CEO Bari Weiss the job of editor in chief at CBS News.

Should she get the job, Weiss will immediately become a “key figure in shaping the national news environment,” in the words of an article in The Guardian.

The writing Weiss has edited and produced over the years, which conveys a deep disdain for legacy news media, offers hints at what that “shaping” might look like. Among the examples: The Free Press has published essays accusing NPR of a “liberal bias” and arguing against diversity, equity and inclusion.

Weiss, who worked at The New York Times before starting The Free Press, quit her job in 2020 as an opinion editor and writer with a resignation letter that referred to the Times as a place where “intellectual curiosity – let alone risk-taking – is now a liability.”

Though it is too soon to say what, specifically, Weiss plans to do should she take over CBS News, her record at The Free Press suggests the network’s journalism would look radically different than it does now.

But even if Weiss dramatically changes people’s experience watching CBS News, it is unlikely those changes will affect how the public feels about CBS News.

This might seem counterintuitive. After all, isn’t someone’s reaction to media dictated by their experience consuming it? A movie is good if we find it entertaining and worthwhile, and it’s bad if the opposite is true.

Waning trust in journalism

Why isn’t the same true when it comes to journalism? We tend to take for granted that people will consume news despite the fact that most Americans find the news untrustworthy and the experience of following the news mentally exhausting. So, perhaps a better question is how people’s increasing distrust of journalism affects their interactions with and perceptions of individual news outlets.

As a scholar who researches the relationship between journalism and the public, I have spent the past five years trying to answer these questions. Since the spring of 2020, University of Oregon professor Seth Lewis and I have interviewed hundreds of Americans about their trust in journalists and journalism.

Our research, which has been published in academic journals and will be published soon in a book by MIT Press, suggests that people’s relationship with news is defined less by their impressions of individual news stories, journalists or organizations. Instead, the public’s views are shaped more by a broad skepticism toward the profession as a whole.

That skepticism has less to do with what the news actually looks like than it does with people’s assumption that journalism is compromised by the pursuit of profit. As one of our interviewees told us: “It’s profits over journalism and over truth.”

This sentiment suggests that for the public it may not matter much whether Weiss takes over CBS, given it will still perceive Weiss’ boss as being more motivated by money than mission.

A bipartisan distrust of news

This profit-oriented skepticism toward the news goes against the conventional wisdom that people trust news outlets that they feel align with their political ideologies and distrust those that do not.

If that conventional wisdom were true, a Weiss-led CBS might alienate a progressive subset of the public while bringing in a conservative one. Weiss’ audience from The Free Press would follow her to one of the largest, most established brands in journalism, while those who share Weiss’ ideological leanings but are not aware of The Free Press would be pleasantly surprised to find their views suddenly represented on CBS News.

This sequence of events makes intuitive sense. Yet it is inconsistent with what we’ve learned about how people think about and interact with news.

Instead, people are likely to see CBS’ new direction less as a sign of a sincere, bottom-up ideological shift by those working at the network and more as a top-down effort by corporate elites seeking to maximize profits.

The people we interview often describe journalists generally, and television news reporters specifically, as being pushed by their organizations’ owners to politicize and sensationalize their reporting in hopes of appealing to – and monetizing the attention of – as large an audience as possible.

“If you don’t get a certain number of views, you’re not making enough money,” one interviewee said.

Another explained that the people in charge of news channels suspect the public is too politically divided for unbiased journalism to be profitable. “Because there’s so much division now,” the interviewee said, “if a lot of journalists went toward being unbiased they will lose a lot of viewers.”

In other words, people are less likely to see the shift as a sign that those running CBS News now believe what they believe. Viewers are more likely to see it as a sign that the wealthy few who run CBS News are simply charting a new path toward monetizing the audience’s attention.

As one interviewee explained, news that the public encounters often ends up taking the form of “whatever the suits upstairs want journalism and reporting to be.”

A CBS News led by Weiss will likely be a very different network. That doesn’t mean it will find a different audience.

As Lewis and I have learned, and as Ellison and Weiss may soon find, people’s perceptions are a stubborn thing. When it comes to news media, those perceptions are less tied to the journalists themselves and more tied to assumptions about the corporations behind them.

Jacob L. Nelson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Some of the nation’s most prominent Black mayors are celebrating major drops in crime in their cities — and grumbling that President Donald Trump doesn’t seem to realize the accomplishment.

Trump has repeatedly insisted that cities, particularly those run by Democrats, are overrun with violence, despite the fact that 2025 is on track to have the fewest homicides ever recorded by the FBI. He deployed troops to Los Angeles and Washington and threatened to send them elsewhere.

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said that ignores the realities in cities like his, which recorded just five homicides in April, its lowest on record.

“When we accomplish those things, then the goal post gets moved,” Scott said Friday at a forum of mayors at the annual conference of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. “People are like, ‘well, what about stolen cars?’”

Scott’s views were echoed by other mayors at the event, including Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, Oakland’s Barbara Lee and Washington’s Muriel Bowser — all targets of the president’s rhetoric about safety in American cities.

Johnson, whose city is experiencing a 30 percent drop in crime and the fewest homicides it has seen in a decade, says the focus is no accident.

“I just want to lift up the fact that the very places that are under attack are all spaces that are led by Black leaders,” he said to a mostly Black audience. “We just got to name it. I know we know that, but I want to say it out loud that it’s very intentional, because there is an extremism in this country that has not accepted the results of the Civil War and they’re fully engaged in the rematch.”

Bowser said Trump deployed the National Guard to Washington under a “fake emergency” that was cover for immigration enforcement. The federal action, she said, has “been very menacing and has disrupted … the trust that our communities have with our own police.”

The federal law enforcement presence in Washington was originally set to last for 30 days ending earlier this month, but has since been extended.

Van Johnson, the mayor of Savannah, Georgia, said many Black mayors applaud and have taken notes from Bowser’s handling of the National Guard deployments and how to resist, but not forcefully agitate Trump in the process — all while juggling the expectations of their citizens.

“We live at the intersection of white fear and Black expectation,” said Johnson, head of the African American Mayors Association. “It’s a very, very unique intersection for us … [because the] white fear is that we’re doing too much, and Black expectation that we’re not doing enough. It is a very hard and very lonely place.”

​Politics

As the federal fiscal year draws to a close, an increasingly familiar prospect is drawing near in Washington, D.C.: a possible government shutdown. And for federal workers, it couldn’t come at a worse time.

In the fractious and polarized political landscape of the United States, Democrats and Republicans have come to rely on short-term, stopgap funding bills to keep the government operating in the absence of elusive longer-term budget deals.

With the parties currently wide apart over the terms of even a short-term budget resolution, the government is set to shut down on Oct. 1, 2025, barring an 11th-hour deal that appears far off. If the shutdown does happen, it would mark another difficult moment this year for a federal workforce that has so far shed more than 300,000 jobs. This is largely due to ongoing Trump administration efforts to downsize parts of the federal government and restructure or largely eliminate certain government agencies with the stated aim of increasing efficiency.

With a government shutdown, hundreds of thousands of federal employees would be furloughed – sent home without pay until funding resumes.

As a team of financial economists who study labor markets and public sector employment and have examined millions of federal personnel records spanning such government shutdowns in the past, we have found that the consequences reach far beyond the now-familiar images of closed national parks and stalled federal services. Indeed, based on our study of an October 2013 shutdown during which about 800,000 federal employees were furloughed for 16 days, shutdowns leave an enduring negative effect on the federal workforce, reshaping its composition and weakening its performance for years to come.

What happens to workers

Millions of Americans interact with the federal government every day in ways both big and small. More than one-third of U.S. national spending is routed through government programs, including Medicare and Social Security. Federal workers manage national parks, draft environmental regulations and help keep air travel safe.

Whatever one’s political leanings, if the goal is a government that handles these responsibilities effectively, then attracting and retaining a talented workforce is essential.

Yet the ability of the federal government to do so may be increasingly difficult, in part because prolonged shutdowns can have hidden effects.

When Congress fails to pass appropriations, federal agencies must furlough employees whose jobs are not deemed “excepted” – sometimes commonly referred to as essential. Those excepted employees keep working, while others are barred from working or even volunteering until funding resumes. Furlough status reflects funding sources and mission categories, not an individual’s performance, so it confers no signal about an employee’s future prospects and primarily acts as a shock to morale.

Importantly, furloughs do not create long-term wealth losses; back pay has always been granted and, since 2019, is legally guaranteed. Employees therefore recover their pay even though they may face real financial strain in the short run.

A cynical observer might call furloughs a paid vacation, yet the data tells a different story.

Immediate consequences, longer-term effects

Using extensive administrative records on federal civilian workers from the October 2013 shutdown, we tracked how this shock to morale rippled through government operations. Employees exposed to furloughs were 31% more likely to leave their jobs within one year.

These departures were not quickly replaced, forcing agencies to rely on costly temporary workers and leading to measurable declines in core functions such as payment accuracy, legal enforcement and patenting activity.

Further, we found that this exodus builds over the first two years after the shutdown and then settles into a permanently lower headcount, implying a durable loss of human capital. The shock to morale is more pronounced among young, female and highly educated professionals with plenty of outside options. Indeed, our analysis of survey data from a later 2018-2019 shutdown confirms that morale, not income loss, drives the exits.

Employees who felt most affected reported a sharp drop in agency, control and recognition, and they were far more likely to plan a departure.

The effect of the motivation loss is striking. Using a simple economic model where workers can be expected to value both cash and purpose, we estimate that the drop in intrinsic motivation after a shutdown would require a roughly 10% wage raise to offset.

Policy implications

Some people have argued that this outflow of employees amounts to a necessary trimming, a way to shrink government by a so-called starving of the beast.

But the evidence paints a different picture. Agencies hit hardest by furloughs turned to temporary staffing firms to fill the gaps. Over the two years after the shutdown we analyzed, these agencies spent about US$1 billion more on contractors than they saved in payroll.

The costs go beyond replacement spending, as government performance also suffers. Agencies that were more affected by the shutdown recorded higher rates of inaccurate federal payments for several years. Even after partial recovery, losses amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars that taxpayers never recouped.

Other skill-intensive functions declined as well. Legal enforcement fell in agencies that became short of experienced attorneys, and patenting activity dropped in science and engineering agencies after key inventors left.

Official estimates of shutdown costs typically focus on near-term GDP effects and back pay. But our findings show that an even bigger bill comes later in the form of higher employee turnover, higher labor costs to fill gaps, and measurable losses in productivity.

Shutdowns are blunt, recurring shocks that demoralize the public workforce and erode performance. These costs spill over to everyone who relies on government services. If the public wants efficient, accountable public institutions, then we should all care about avoiding shutdowns.

After an already turbulent year, it is unclear whether an upcoming shutdown would significantly add to the strain on federal employees or have a more limited effect, since many who were considering leaving have already left through buyouts or forced terminations this year. What is clear is that hundreds of thousands of federal employees are likely to experience another period of uncertainty.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The New York Times reports that a senior Department of Justice official recently “instructed more than a half dozen U.S. attorneys’ offices to draft plans to investigate” the Open Society Foundations – philanthropies funded by the billionaire George Soros.

Citing a document that the news outlet said its reporters had seen, the report listed possible charges the foundations could face “ranging from arson to material support of terrorism.”

The philanthropic institution denied any wrongdoing.

“These accusations are politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with and undermine the First Amendment right to free speech,” Open Society Foundations stated in response to the reported investigations. “When power is abused to take away the rights of some people, it puts the rights of all people at risk.”

The term “civil society” isn’t familiar to all Americans. But it’s part of what helped this country grow and thrive because it encompasses many of the institutions that uphold the American way of life. As a sociologist who studies nonprofits and civil society in the U.S and around the world, I have always been interested in the relationship between the health of a nation’s civil society and the strength of rights and freedom within its borders.

I’ve also noticed that often the term is used without a definition. But I think that it’s important for Americans to become more familiar with what civil society is and how it helps sustain democracy in the United States.

Civil society

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines civil society as “the dense network of groups, communities, networks and ties that stand between the individual and the modern state.”

This constellation of institutions consists of not-for-profit organizations and special interest groups, either formal or informal, working to improve the lives of their constituents. It includes charitable groups, clubs and voluntary associations, churches and other houses of worship, labor unions, grassroots associations, community organizations, foundations, museums and other kinds of nonprofits – including nonprofit media outlets.

Civil society does not include government agencies or for-profit businesses.

Political scientists and sociologists have long claimed that a healthy civil society, which in the U.S. includes a strong and independent nonprofit sector, helps sustain democracy. This is true even though most nonprofits don’t engage in partisan political activities.

My own analysis of survey data from 64 countries has shown that authoritarians have begun to use civil society groups to support their own purposes. But in the United States, at least, most civil society organizations still support democratic values.

Sometimes, scholars call civil society “the third sector” to distinguish it from the public and private spheres.

Most scholars agree that civil society strengthens and protects democracy, and that true democracy is impossible without it. These scholars distinguish between liberal democracies and illiberal democracies.

Liberal democracies have a separation of powers – meaning the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government. They protect individual rights, allow a free press, maintain an independent judiciary and safeguard the rights of minorities.

In illiberal democracies, there are periodic elections, but they are not necessarily fair or free. Civil society tends to be more restricted in illiberal democracies than in liberal ones.

An American strength from the start

The strength of America’s civil society helps explain the long success of democracy in the United States.

In 1835, when the French scholar and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville visited the country, he marveled at the tendency of Americans to “constantly unite.” They created associations, he wrote, “to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools.”

Whereas the government initiated grand projects in France and the nobility did so in England, in the United States voluntary associations of ordinary individuals were behind most great endeavors.

What happens in nondemocratic countries

One way to see how important a robust civil society can be is to look at what happens in countries that do not have one.

The totalitarian countries of the 20th century, particularly communist China and the Soviet Union, outlawed civil society under the pretense that the party and the state represented the people’s true interests.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the United States and Western Europe devoted much diplomacy and foreign aid to helping the former USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe develop civil society institutions, believing this to be a precondition of those countries’ transition to democracy.

Today, civil society flourishes in formerly communist nations that have successfully made the transition to democracy, such as the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Civil society is restricted in that region’s countries that don’t embrace democracy, such as Belarus and Russia.

Not your grandma’s authoritarians

Today’s authoritarian rulers realize that civil society has the potential to support democracy and pry loose their grip on power. But few of those leaders outlaw civil society organizations entirely.

Instead, authoritarian leaders subordinate civil society organizations to achieve their own ends. In China, which had no civil society before the 1990s, the Communist Party now creates government-organized nongovernmental organizations, or GONGOs, which look like nonprofits and are technically separate from the state, but remain under state control.

Some authoritarians who take power in countries that already have a civil society sector tame these organizations and harness their power through a range of oppressive tactics. They leave alone service-providing organizations, like food banks, free clinics and homeless shelters, and use them to show citizens how they are bringing them benefits.

However, they crack down on advocacy organizations, such as human rights groups, labor unions and feminist groups, as these are a source of potential opposition to the regime. They then cultivate pro-regime civil society institutions, providing them with formal and informal support.

When authoritarians crack down on civil society groups, they sometimes destroy offices and imprison the organization’s leaders and members of their staff. But they generally use more subtle means.

For example, they may pass laws restricting the amount of funding, particularly foreign funding, available to nonprofits. They add layers of red tape that make it hard for nonprofits to operate, such as audits, registration requirements and information requests.

Authoritarians may use those hurdles selectively. Nonprofits that are neutral or friendly to the regime may find they can operate freely. Nonprofits the regime perceives as opponents undergo extensive audits, are forced to wait a long time when they seek to incorporate, and face constant demands for personal information about their funders, members and clients.

Attacks in the United States

Even before news broke of the Trump administration’s reported demand that the Open Societies Foundations be investigated, there were mounting signs that the U.S. was becoming more like authoritarian countries than it used to be in terms of how it treats civil society.

In March 2025, for example, President Donald Trump signed an executive order restricting a federal program that forgives student loans for people who work in public service organizations or the government. The order said that employees of institutions that the Trump administration deems to “have a substantial illegal purpose,” such as providing services to undocumented immigrants or serving the needs of transgender clients, would become ineligible for loan forgiveness.

Over the summer, Congress held three investigative hearings on nonprofits. The Republican Party’s leadership signaled its disdain and distrust of those groups with hearing titles like “Public Funds, Private Agendas: NGOs Gone Wild, ”How Leftist Nonprofit Networks Exploit Federal Tax Dollars to Advance a Radical Agenda,“ and “An Inside Job: How NGOs Facilitated the Biden Border Crisis.”

After the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Vice President JD Vance threatened “to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence,” including the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations, despite the fact that there is no evidence that these organizations support violence.

Some nonprofits have published open letters, issued public statements and provided congressional testimony in opposition to the administration’s claims.

What happens next is unclear. The threat to strip organizations of their nonprofit status may be an empty one, given that the Supreme Court has already ruled that doing so is regulated by law and the president cannot do it on a whim.

Many scholars of nonprofits are watching to see if the United States takes more steps down this road to authoritarianism, stays where it is or reverses course.

We are studying how America’s flourishing civil society resists any restrictions that limit the freedoms that have largely been taken for granted – until now.

Christopher Justin Einolf does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Watching the space between two nations shrink became a regular pastime for Detroiters over the past decade as the segments of the Gordie Howe International Bridge gradually grew, extending meter by meter from Ontario on one side and Michigan on the other.

The gap finally closed in July 2024 with the two halves coming together in a long-awaited kiss.

The official grand opening of the bridge was originally scheduled for fall of 2025, but it seems now likely to be delayed into 2026.

I’m a sociologist who has worked alongside neighborhood revitalization projects in Detroit for the past 15 years. I’ve observed the bridge project – and the many tensions around it – from the perspective of adjacent communities of Delray and Mexicantown, communities that are largely home to low-income Latino, Black and white residents.

The costs and benefits of this binational behemoth are complex and intertwined.

Clearing a chokehold

Boosters on both sides of the border have spoken frequently of the bridge’s expected benefits.

Detroit and Windsor would finally be free of the perpetual chokehold produced by the privately owned Ambassador Bridge.

Auto parts will flow more freely over the border, according to the Cross-Border Institute at the University of Windsor. And the Detroit Greenways Coalition is celebrating that its advocacy led to the inclusion of free pedestrian and bike lanes.

People living close to the existing bridge will gain some relief from truck traffic and pollution. But this burden won’t simply disappear – it will be shifted nearby, where others will have to cope with increased traffic flowing over six lanes 24 hours a day.

A political football

The costs and benefits of the bridge were contested from the beginning.

In the early days, the debate concentrated on who would own the bridge and who would pay for it.

Once just a concept known by the acronym DRIC, or Detroit River International Crossing, the project became real under former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder. In July 2018, representatives from both Ottawa and Washington broke ground on the bridge situated in an area of Detroit empty enough to contain its significant footprint and bear its weight without fear of sinkholes from underground salt mines.

“Every Michigander should thank every Canadian,” said Snyder at the time, alluding to the agreement that Canadian taxpayers alone would pay for the bridge’s construction in exchange for collecting all the tolls.

The bridge’s designers attempted to honor the cultural and natural history of the region. It was named after the legendary Canadian hockey player who was also a longtime stalwart for the Detroit Red Wings. The bridge’s towers are adorned with murals by First Nations artists.

But serious questions remain.

Today the debates center on whether the Trump administration’s increased tariffs and trade conflicts with Canada could negatively affect the value of the bridge – and if it will ever pay for itself. Even before President Donald Trump took office for the second time, truck traffic on the Ambassador Bridge was down, falling 8% from 2014 to 2024.

One bridge was always a bad idea, (nearly) everyone agreed

Residents and politicians have long agreed that having a single, privately owned bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor was a bad idea. This felt especially apparent after the 9/11 terrorist attacks laid bare the possibility of suddenly losing critical infrastructure.

For many years, travelers’ only other connection between Canada and Detroit has been a tunnel that runs underneath the Detroit River. However, the tunnel doesn’t offer direct access to interstate highways, making it less suitable for commercial trucks.

Adding another bridge makes it harder to disrupt trade and transport.

But the project has had one stalwart critic. Matty Moroun, the trucking billionaire who purchased the Ambassador Bridge in 1979, ferociously protected his asset against potential competition. He actively sought to thwart the construction, launching numerous lawsuits against the state of Michigan and the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority, the entity managing construction of the new bridge.

Those lawsuits continued even after Moroun’s death in 2020, as his heirs asserted significant damages to the value of their property.

Was enough done for nearby homeowners?

Others have criticized the attempts to compensate the residents of Delray, a once-vibrant neighborhood that has been impacted by industrialization since the 1960s.

Benefits negotiated for residents and homeowners affected by the construction have not increased as the project’s costs ballooned and the timeline to complete it stretched out.

The cost of the Gordie Howe bridge is now estimated at around $6.4 billion Canadian – or about $US4.7 billion. That is $700 million more than the original projected cost. The project is at least 10 months behind schedule.

Simone Sagovac, director of the SW Detroit Community Benefit Coalition, said they did not anticipate the immense scale of the development and its continued effects on the community.

“That scale affected health and quality of life significantly every day, with years of continuous industrial dust causing sinus problems, headaches, and increasing asthma, and then there will be thousands of daily truck impacts to come,” Sagovac wrote to me in an email.

A baseline health impact assessment, issued in 2019 by University of Michigan researchers working closely with the coalition, expressed concern about the heightened airborne pollution that would likely activate asthma, especially in children. Matching the findings of so many other epidemiological studies, the assessment found that residents living within 500 feet (152 meters) of a truck route reported a significantly higher likelihood of experiencing asthma or allergies affecting their breathing.

Sagovac wrote that the project took 250 homes, 43 businesses and five churches by eminent domain, and “saw the closing of more after.” One hundred families left the neighborhood via a home swap program funded as a result of the benefits agreement administered by a local nonprofit. Two hundred and seventy families remain, but most businesses have left the area over decades of decline.

The families that remain are often long-term residents wanting or needing a cheap place to live and willing to put up with dust, noise and smells from nearby factories and a sewage treatment plant.

“They constantly face illegal dumping and other unanswered crimes, and will face the worst diesel emissions exposure and other trucking and industry impacts,” Sagovac wrote.

Heather Grondin, chief relations officer of the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority, wrote in an emailed statement
that they have taken steps to minimize impacts from construction and that they regularly meet with the community to hear concerns.

“Construction traffic is using designated haul routes to minimize community impacts, traffic congestion and wear and tear on existing infrastructure while maximizing public and construction safety,” Grondin wrote.

According to Grondin, cars will be forced to follow a “no idling” rule on the American side to minimize pollution. Other aspects of the Community Benefits Plan included $20,000 in free repairs for 100 homes, planting hundreds of trees and investing in programs addressing food insecurity and the needs of young people and seniors, Grondin wrote.

An updated Health Impacted Assessment is expected to be released later in 2025.

History lost

Lloyd Baldwin, a historian for the Michigan Department of Transportation, was tasked with evaluating whether local landmarks like the legendary Kovacs Bar needed to be preserved.

“Kovacs Bar was one among many working-class bars in the Delray neighborhood but stands out for its roughly eight-decade association as a gathering place for the neighborhood and downriver Hungarian-American community,” Baldwin wrote in one such report.

The bar was nonetheless demolished in November 2017.

This was not MDOT’s only loss. While the agency made some sincere efforts to leverage other benefits for residents who remained, dynamic factors at many levels were out of the agency’s control.

For one thing, the numerous lawsuits filed by the bridge company over parcels of contested land limited MDOT’s ability to talk openly to the public about the land acquisition process.

In the period of legal limbo, Baldwin said, “the neighborhood imploded.”

Baldwin gave the example of the Berwalt Manor Apartments, built in the 1920s and located on Campbell Street near the bridge entrance. MDOT committed to preserve the historic building and proposed to mitigate the environmental impacts on mostly low-income residents by paying for new windows and HVAC units once the bridge was built.

But the speed of development outstripped the pace of community compensation. The building passed through probate court in 2018 and has since changed hands multiple times, so it is now unclear whether there are any low-income residents left to benefit from upgrades.

Benefits yet to be measured

On the brighter side, environmentalists have pointed to the expansion and connection of bicycle trails and bird migration corridors as long-term benefits of the Gordie Howe bridge.

On the Canadian side, the bridge construction falls largely outside of Windsor’s residential neighborhoods, so it caused less disruption. As part of the project,bike lanes, enhanced landscaping, and gathering spaces were added to an approach road called Sandwich Street.

Cross-border tourism spurred on by a proposed system of greenways called the “Great Lakes Way” may provide new opportunities for people and money to flow across the Detroit River, improving the quality of life for communities that remain.

But if the trade war between the Trump administration and Canada continues, observers may question whether the bridge is a graceful gift of infrastructure to two nations or one of the world’s longest and skinniest white elephants.

Paul Draus is affiliated with the Downriver Delta CDC and Friends of the Rouge. The Fort Street Bridge Park, a project that Draus is affiliated with, received a donation for a public sculpture from the Windsor Detroit Bridge Authority in 2020.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Imagine a protest outside the funeral of a popular political leader, with some of the protesters celebrating the death and holding signs that say things like “God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11,” “America is Doomed” and “Don’t Pray for the USA.”

No matter the political leanings of that leader, most Americans would probably abhor such a protest and those signs.

What would tolerate such activities, no matter how distasteful? The First Amendment.

The situation described above is taken from an actual protest, though it did not involve the funeral of a political figure. Instead, members of the Westboro Baptist Church protested outside the funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, a U.S. service member killed in Iraq.

Through demonstrations like this, members of this group were conveying their belief that the U.S. is overly tolerant of those they perceive as sinners, especially people from the LGBTQ community, and that the death of U.S. soldiers should be recognized as divine retribution for such sinfulness.

Snyder’s family sued for intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other claims. A jury issued a US$5 million jury award in favor of the family of the deceased service member. But in a nearly unanimous decision issued in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the First Amendment insulated the protesters from such a judgment.

This holding is particularly instructive today.

The Trump administration has vowed to crack down on what it calls hate speech. It has labeled antifa, a loosely organized anti-fascist group, a terrorist organization. And it has sought to punish figures such as TV host Jimmy Kimmel for statements perceived critical of conservative activists.

What the First Amendment makes clear is that it does not just protect the rights of speakers who say things with which Americans agree. Or, as the Supreme Court said in a separate decision it issued one year after the case involving the funeral protesters: “The Nation well knows that one of the costs of the First Amendment is that it protects the speech we detest as well as the speech we embrace.”

But free speech is not absolute. As a legal scholar who has studied political movements, free speech and privacy, I realize the government can regulate speech through what are known as “reasonable time, place, and manner” restrictions. These limits cannot depend upon the content of the speech or expressive conduct in which a speaker is engaged, however.

For example, the government can ban campfires in an area prone to wildfires. But if it banned the burning of the U.S. flag only as a form of political protest, that would be an unconstitutional restriction on speech.

Protected and unprotected speech

There are certain categories of speech that are not entitled to First Amendment protection. They include incitement to violence, obscenity, defamation and what are considered “true threats.”

When, for example, someone posts threats on social media with reckless disregard for whether they will instill legitimate fear in their target, such posts are not a protected form of speech. Similarly, burning a cross on someone’s property as a means of striking terror in them such that they fear bodily harm also represents this kind of true threat.

There are also violations of the law that are sometimes prosecuted as “hate crimes,” criminal acts driven by some discriminatory motive. In these cases, it’s generally not the perpetrator’s beliefs that are punished but the fact that they act on them and engage in some other form of criminal conduct, as when someone physically assaults their victim based on that victim’s race or religion. Such motives can increase the punishment people receive for the underlying criminal conduct.

Speech that enjoys the strongest free-speech protections is that which is critical of government policies and leaders. As the Supreme Court said in 1966, “There is practically universal agreement that a major purpose of (the First) Amendment was to protect the free discussion of governmental affairs.”

As the late Justice Antonin Scalia would explain in 2003, “The right to criticize the government” is at “the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect.”

Restrictions on government action

The First Amendment prevents the government from taking direct action to curtail speech by, for example, trying to prevent the publication of material critical of it. Americans witnessed this in the Pentagon Papers case, where the Supreme Court ruled that the government could not prevent newspapers from publishing a leaked – and politically damaging – study on U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

But it also applies when the government acts in indirect ways, such as threatening to investigate a media company or cutting funding for a university based on politically disfavored action or inaction.

In 2024 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the state of New York’s efforts to punish companies that did business with the National Rifle Association because of the organization’s political positions violated the group’s First Amendment rights.

Similarly, in recent months, courts have ruled on First Amendment grounds against Trump administration efforts to punish law firms or to withhold funds from Harvard University.

And just last week, a federal court in Florida threw out a lawsuit filed by President Trump against The New York Times seeking $15 billion for alleged harm to the president’s investments and reputation.

Nevertheless, some people fear government retribution for criticizing the administration. And some, like the TV network ABC, have engaged in speech-restricting action on their own, such as taking Kimmel temporarily off the air for his comments critical of conservative activists in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing.

Before Kimmel’s suspension, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr described his negotiations with ABC’s parent company, Disney, to take action against him. “We could do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. And Trump said that some media companies might “lose their license” for criticizing the president. It is encouraging that, in the face of these threats, ABC has reversed course and agreed to put Kimmel back on the air.

The First Amendment protects speech across the political spectrum, even speech Americans do not like. Both liberal comedian Jon Stewart and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson have recently agreed on this. As Carlson said recently, “If they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think. … There is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human.”

Just last year in the NRA case referenced above, the Supreme Court clearly stated that even indirect government efforts to curtail protected speech are indeed unconstitutional. In light of that ruling, efforts to limit criticism of the administration, any administration, should give all Americans, regardless of their political views, great pause.

Ray Brescia does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation