Kirk, Kimmel and Free Speech

With the cancellation of Stephen Colbert's late night show, and the news that ABC has temporarily suspended Jimmy Kimmel, we explore the changing landscape and moving goalposts of 'free speech.'On Today's Show:Two Atlantic staff writers, Ashley Parker and Adam Serwer share highlights and discuss the latest from the world of politics, where President Trump's administration and its allies have taken aim at critics of Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination. 

The Trump administration's recent lethal strikes on purported drug boats in Venezuela drew widespread condemnation from experts in international law. On Today's Show:Brian Finucane, senior adviser at the International Crisis Group and a non-resident senior fellow at Reiss Center on Law and Security at NYU Law, talks about the strikes and the legal issues around them. 

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has issued a report on the state of children's health.On Today's Show:Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent, KFF Health News and host of the What the Health? podcast, talks about the details of the report and where it fits into the Trump administration's MAHA initiative.

Almost immediately after Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, videos were circulating on social media, and many people saw the gruesome crime without meaning to just by logging on.On Today's Show:Adam Clark Estes, senior technology correspondent at Vox, talks about how little content moderation big tech companies are doing these days, how the algorithm fed off people pausing to watch the video, and how content like this may traumatize vast swaths of people. 

Democrats in the Senate are debating whether to allow the government to shut down when it runs out of funding later this month.On Today's Show:Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent at Vox and the author of The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World (PublicAffairs, 2024), talks about what's at stake in the debate over whether to go along with the Republican plan to fund the government or withhold their votes in protest.

On today's show: Kelly Drane, research director at Giffords Law Center, Ned Parker, investigative reporter at Thomson Reuters, and McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Romney: A Reckoning (Simon & Schuster, 2023), talk about guns and the state of political violence in America, after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at an event on a Utah college campus.

On Today's Show:Ben Casselman, chief economics correspondent for The New York Times, talks about the adjustments to hiring numbers showing 911,000 fewer jobs were created in the 12 months before March 2025, as listeners share their real-world job search stories.

After a string of losses in lower courts by the Trump administration, in an unsigned order on Monday, the Supreme Court lifted a restriction on ICE from conducting indiscriminate stops and raids in Los Angeles that have been decried as racial profiling. On Today's Show:Lindsay Nash, professor of law at Cardozo Law, co-director of the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic and co-director of the Center for Immigration Innovation, offers legal analysis of the ruling, and its implications for previously established protections against racial profiling.

Cristian Farias, legal journalist who writes for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and other publications, and the host of The Bully’s Pulpit, a podcast of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, talks about the many legal issues the Trump administration is running into, related to sending the National Guard in to LA and DC, deportations and more. 

Recent developments on the world stage may be shifting the geopolitical calculations of the Israel-Hamas war. On Today's Show:Jane Arraf, international correspondent covering the Middle East for NPR, talks about the latest developments in Gaza as Israel clamps down on volunteer doctors and threatens more restrictions on humanitarian aid amid reports of famine.