Last Month in Censorship: April 2026

Hi folks, Nina here- apologies for our long absence in your inboxes. As you know, since last year, ASP has been run and staffed by volunteers, and April was a busy month for us. Both I and Ken Syring traveled to the Cambridge Disinformation Summit early in the month. Benjamin Shultz has been teaching, writing, and starting work toward a PhD. And we’ve all been cooking up new programming ideas to bring the sunlight to more people.

In short: we could not get our ish together to get this out to you! But we’re still tracking the Trump administration’s censorship activities…even if we’re a little behind schedule. To keep you up to date, some of the items below are a little shorter than usual. We’ve put together a rapid-fire list of updates in addition to some deeper analysis about the SPLC lawsuit. Happy doomscrolling(?)!

As always, if you appreciate our work and want to help us spread awareness of the attack on First Amendment rights under this administration, comment, like, or restack this post and help Substack’s recommendation algorithm show it to more people. 🙏🏻☀️

And don’t forget: you can always see the up-to-date censorship count at TrumpCensorship.com!

Last week delivered the most aggressive escalation yet of the administration’s effort to weaponize federal law enforcement against organizations doing work it dislikes: the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center — one of the country’s most established civil rights organizations — using a fraud theory that legal experts across the political spectrum say cannot survive contact with reality. At the same time, the FCC opened yet another content investigation, this one into how children’s programming addresses “gender identity”; Trump abruptly dismissed nearly all members of the National Science Board; and a federal book-ban bill targeting LGBTQ-inclusive materials moved closer to a House floor vote. The administration is no longer building the infrastructure to punish disfavored speech. It is using it.

DOJ Indicts the Southern Poverty Law Center in Open Retaliation for Its Civil Rights Work.

On April 21, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel unveiled an 11-count federal indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, charging the 55-year-old civil rights organization with wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The government’s theory is that the SPLC defrauded its donors by using their money to pay confidential informants who had infiltrated white supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and the National Socialist Party of America — informants the SPLC says provided intelligence used to build the very legal cases that have crippled those organizations for decades. The indictment seeks forfeiture of every dollar associated with the program.

The case is being met with disbelief from legal experts, who told CNN it faces “major hurdles” because its theory “runs counter to the reality of the SPLC’s stated objectives over the years.” Retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner called the indictment “preposterous,” saying the SPLC has “long made public its mission of dismantling extremist groups,” and that “everyone understood the way they function and why they function and how that was part of the mission. So it is a curious indictment.” She predicted the case “will fall apart” because “there will be no witnesses to support what they’re saying.” Furthermore, the 14-page indictment offers no specific examples of donors who claim they were defrauded and names not a single complainant.

The indictment also demonstrates a pattern: an indictment of a civil rights organization, brought by an administration that has spent its second term attacking law firms, defunding public broadcasters, banning a major AI company for daring to insist on its terms, blacklisting universities, and now criminalizing the work of a watchdog group whose central function is documenting the activities of the very extremist groups the FBI claims to be combating.

And the retaliatory context is unmistakable. Last October, FBI Director Patel severed all bureau ties with the SPLC, calling the organization a “partisan smear machine” after conservative criticism intensified following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The SPLC had long supplied the FBI with research on hate crimes and extremist groups; Patel ended that partnership because the SPLC’s research had labeled a political organization founded by Kirk as extremist.

Writing in Just Security, former federal prosecutors noted that “nothing in the speaking indictment against the Center appears to meet the legal standard required” for either fraud or money laundering, and that the DOJ’s framing of the SPLC’s bank accounts as “fictitious” is contradicted by the indictment’s own admission that legitimate sole proprietorship paperwork existed for them.

SPLC interim CEO Bryan Fair said, “When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the civil rights movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system. There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”

Trump Fires National Science Board Members in Mass Purge

In late April, the White House terminated multiple members of the National Science Board — the body that sets policy for the National Science Foundation — effective immediately. Board members typically serve fixed six-year terms, a structure designed to insulate the nation’s scientific research priorities from political interference and ensure continuity across administrations. The dismissal letters, sent on behalf of the president by the White House Presidential Personnel Office, contained no rationale. The firings come as the administration has canceled nearly 1,400 NSF grants since returning to office and proposed slashing the agency’s budget by more than half in its FY27 budget request. The pattern — purging independent scientific oversight while gutting the funding infrastructure — fits a broader strategy of subordinating the federal scientific establishment to political control, similar to the administration’s earlier removal of career privacy officers at DHS who had refused orders to mislabel surveillance records.

FCC Opens “Gender Identity” Inquiry Into Children’s Programming

On April 22, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced a new inquiry into the television ratings system, focused on whether “issues of gender identity” are being included in children’s programming without being flagged to parents. Carr framed the inquiry as a response to “parents” raising concerns, posting on X that “New York & Hollywood programmers are promoting controversial issues in kids programming without providing any transparency or disclosures to parents.” First Amendment advocates immediately pointed out that the FCC’s authority over content is sharply limited and that the inquiry appears designed less as a regulatory action than as a vehicle to chill broadcasters into self-censorship. The inquiry adds to a list of ongoing FCC investigations under Carr that target nearly every major broadcast network — ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, and Comcast — with the conspicuous exception of Fox, which is owned by Trump ally Rupert Murdoch. Sole Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez has repeatedly characterized Carr’s investigations as part of an “ongoing campaign to censor and control speech.” Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats opened their own investigation into Carr last year, calling his FCC inquiries “bogus” and accusing him of weaponizing the agency to “harass and intimidate journalists and news outlets.”

See also…

• The President, White House, and Carr also called for action (and a potential criminal investigation) against CNN for accurately reporting a statement from Iran’s Supreme National Security Council…

• …and ordered a review of ABC’s broadcast licenses after Jimmy Kimmel told a joke they didn’t like. (Yes, again.)

• The President demanded that Fox take Democrat Jessica Tarlov off the air.

• FBI Director Kash Patel sued The Atlantic for defamation after they published a story about his “excessive drinking and unexplained absences.”

• The Bureau also investigated a New York Times reporter after she wrote an article about Kash Patel’s girlfriend. Ultimately, the Justice Department determined there was “no legal basis to proceed with the investigation.”

• As part of ongoing litigation, the State Department produced a memo from former-right-wing-shitposter-turned-diplomat Darren Beattie that preceded four disinformation researchers and a former EU official being barred from entering the United States, and this document is wild.

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Federal Anti-LGBTQ Book Ban Advances Toward House Floor Vote

HR 7661 — the so-called “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act,” sponsored by Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) — has cleared committee and may move forward for a House floor vote following Congress’s two-week recess. The bill threatens federal funding for any school or library that does not remove books containing what it broadly defines as “sexually oriented material” — a category written to encompass any content that “involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism.” The American Library Association, GLAAD, PEN America, EveryLibrary, and a coalition of more than two dozen organizations have mobilized against the bill, calling it the most sweeping federal censorship measure in recent memory. The legislation arrives against the backdrop of nearly 23,000 individual book bans in U.S. public schools since 2021, the overwhelming majority targeting books by or about LGBTQ people and people of color. As ALA director Cindy Hohl put it, the bill “steals the power to choose what kids read away from parents, local communities and well-trained educators and librarians, and gives it to politicians in Washington, D.C.” The Pressley-led “Books Save Lives Act” — which would classify book bans as federal civil rights violations — was introduced in early April as a counter-measure but has not advanced.

See also: the Trump Administration has issued new guidance for immigration officers, advising that “participating in pro-Palestinian protests and criticizing Israel [are] ‘overwhelmingly negative’ factors” in deciding whether to award a green card.

The legal vulnerabilities in the SPLC indictment are themselves a form of good news: even as the administration deploys the full machinery of federal prosecution against a civil rights organization, the case has been described by retired federal judges, former federal prosecutors, and Georgetown Law professors as legally untenable on its face. The First Amendment defense the SPLC will mount is robust; the speech-and-association theory has won repeatedly in federal court over the past six months. The case will be heard in Montgomery, Alabama, by U.S. District Judge Emily Marks — a Trump appointee, but one who has shown a willingness to rule against politically motivated prosecutions before. Meanwhile, civil society’s response to HR 7661 has been swift and broad: more than 25,000 people have signed EveryLibrary’s petition opposing the bill, and the American Library Association, GLAAD, PEN America, and a coalition of allied organizations have launched a coordinated lobbying campaign that successfully blocked the most aggressive book-ban provisions in last year’s federal budget.

On April 6, a federal court allowed the Trump administration to withdraw its appeal of an earlier ruling that struck down the dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services — preserving a vital source of federal library funding. And the National Science Board firings, while alarming, lead to loud pushback: bipartisan members of the science community, university presidents, and the leadership of the American Association for the Advancement of Science have all spoken publicly against the dismissals, with several former board members signaling they intend to challenge the legality of the terminations.

And the day after Kash Patel sued The Atlantic for defamation, his other defamation suit got roundly thrown out. Boo hoo!

Yes, the administration continues moving aggressively. But so are the states, lawyers, courts, and the public. Hang in there, and we’ll see you with the next newsletter.