I’m about to leave Philadelphia, where the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) just held its Soapbox 2026 event, featuring everyone from Afroman to former ACLU President Nadine Strossen to Bob Guccione, Jr. to Comedy Cellar owner Noam Dworman, who as keynote speaker and fellow comedian Adam Edelman noted, didn’t “have the decency” to show up in person.

Virtually everyone who’s been an unembarrassed defender of free speech in America in the last decade-plus was there, which was both the strength of the event and, as Archibald MacLeish might have put it, the “black pall” hanging above the Bellevue-Stratford hotel where the friendly circus was held. Turnout was robust, FIRE has become the legal powerhouse the First Amendment needs, but once Edelman began telling jokes that hurtled the crowd back to an earlier time when none of this was controversial, many attendees — I know I felt this — became unpleasantly conscious of the lonely outlook for free expression.

“The bad news is, this has come down on us,” said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. “A tiny community defending free speech.”

The good news, as legal director Will Creeley, Executive VP Nico Perrino, and many others noted, is that this has often been the situation across America’s history. In the 20^th century the line was held not only by the ACLU of Ira Glasser and David Goldberger (honored with FIRE’s Silverglate award last night) but also the Free Speech League of Theodore Shroeder and muckraker Lincoln Steffens, and the National Liberal League and the National Defense Association before them, and before them the anti-Slavery Society, etc. There have always been advocates to keep what FIRE calls the “spark” alive.

That didn’t change the unnerved vibe among event-goers. Creeley quoted longtime Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, author of the sadly predictive Free Speech for Me But Not For Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.