This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected].
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In the News
By Greg Piper
.....Faculty who challenge the antiracism orthodoxy of California's Kern Community College District, in the state's cattle-rich Central Valley, are like "livestock" to be "taken to the slaughterhouse," Vice President John Corkins said to chuckles at a board of trustees meeting in December 2022.
That quip showed up in a second lawsuit against the district by a history professor affiliated with the Renegade Institute for Liberty (RIFL) at Bakersfield College earlier this month.
Daymon Johnson took over as faculty lead for the right-leaning campus think tank from Matthew Garrett, fired by KCCD in a secret board vote in April after a contentious public meeting ended with no action against the tenured history professor for charges including the "dishonesty" of disagreeing with colleagues...
KCCD put Johnson through a "lengthy and intrusive investigation" for a similarly spurious reason, according to Johnson's lawsuit against district and college officials: "criticizing and questioning a colleague’s views on RIFL’s Facebook page."
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New from the Institute for Free Speech
Dear Governor Lombardo:
The Institute for Free Speech is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works to promote and defend the political rights to free speech, press, assembly, and petition guaranteed by the First Amendment. Americans’ ability to join groups and advocate on issues important to them without fear of government intrusion is fundamental to these rights. A.B. 258 includes important protections for Nevadans’ freedom of assembly.
In 1958, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled:
"It is hardly a novel perception that compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may constitute [an] effective [] restraint on freedom of association…. Inviolability of privacy in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association… (NAACP v. Alabama)"
Still, nonprofits are too often faced with government demands to expose the names and home addresses of their members and supporters. In 2021, after nearly a decade of litigation from three nonprofits, including the Institute for Free Speech, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a rule that charities must disclose their major donors to the California Attorney General prior to soliciting funds was unconstitutional (Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta).
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The Courts
By Jacob Newton
.....Chief United States District Judge for South Dakota Roberto Lange ordered Tuesday that a preliminary injunction should go into effect in a case between Dakotans for Health and the Minnehaha County Commission.
The commission on May 2 instituted a new policy requiring those gathering petitions for a ballot issue to stay within designated areas in front of the Minnehaha County Courthouse and Minnehaha County Administration Building. You can read the 35-page ruling here.
A lawsuit was filed on May 10 by Dakotans for Health, which is circulating petitions to place an amendment on the 2024 ballot to legalize abortion in South Dakota.
Dakotans for Health issued a statement on the order Wednesday, calling it a ‘resounding victory for freedom of speech.’
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.....A federal court in Pennsylvania declined to dismiss a county employee’s retaliation lawsuit against the elected Republican county deed recorder, who allegedly fired her for being a Democrat in violation of her First Amendment rights.
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By Erica C. Barnett
.....US District Court Judge Marsha Pechman issued an injunction yesterday barring the city of Seattle from enforcing its ban on graffiti in a case stemming from protests against police violence in early 2021. In the order, Pechman writes that the four plaintiffs—who wrote in “ordinary charcoal and children’s sidewalk chalk: on a temporary concrete wall outside SPD’s East Precinct—were “likely to prove that the Ordinance… violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments by being both vague and overbroad.”
The chalked messages included, among other slogans critical of police, “peaceful protest,” “Fuck SPD,” and “BLM.”
Seattle’s municipal code says a person is guilty of “property destruction,” a gross misdemeanor punishable by up to 364 days in jail, if “he or she… [w]rites, paints, or draws any inscription, figure, or mark of any type on any public or private building or other structure or any real or personal property owned by any other person.”
In her injunction, Pechman wrote that the current law threatens people with arrest for exercising their right to free speech under the guise of “preventing even temporary visual blight,” as the city attorney’s office wrote in its defense of the law.
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By Tyler Arnold
.....Pro-life activists are accusing New York Attorney General Letitia James of intimidation and suppressing free speech after the attorney general sued a pro-life group and asked the court to bar members from going within 30 feet of an abortion clinic.
The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York on June 8, targets the activist group Red Rose Rescue. The group’s members sometimes enter abortion clinics to discourage women from obtaining an abortion and provide them with resources that could help them through their pregnancy.
James is asking the court to ban any member, including five who are named as defendants, from coming within 30 feet of any abortion clinic or reproductive health care facility in New York.
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DOJ
By Nathan L. Gonzales
.....It may not have been swift, but justice was served in the case of a “scam PAC.”
Controversial former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke is still considering a U.S. Senate run in Wisconsin this cycle, but two lawyers just pleaded guilty to conspiracy over a “scam PAC” to get Clarke to run in 2017.
Jack Daly, 51, and Nathanael “Nate” Pendley, 61, pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit mail fraud and lie to the Federal Election Commission, the Department of Justice press release on Monday.
Both men have an extensive and questionable involvement in GOP campaigns over more than 20 years. In 2000, Pendley and Daly tried to recruit a homeless man to run against the incumbent North Carolina state auditor who had the same last name to spark confusion in the Democratic primary.
In Wisconsin, the Justice Department said Daly and Pendley falsely represented that donor contributions to the “Draft PAC” they founded in 2017 would be used to support an effort to draft Clarke to run against Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin. Instead, most of the $1.6 million raised was spent on operations to raise more money to personally benefit Daly and Pendley, not genuine efforts to convince Clarke to run for office, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Milwaukee.
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Congress
By Ronald Bailey
.....Sens. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) and Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.) want to strangle generative artificial intelligence (A.I.) infants like ChatGPT and Bard in their cribs. How? By stripping them of the protection of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which reads, "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." …
Does Section 230 shield new developing A.I. services like ChatGPT from civil lawsuits in much the same way that it has protected other online services? Jess Miers, legal advocacy counsel at the tech trade group the Chamber of Progress, makes a persuasive case that it does. Over at Techdirt, she notes that ChatGPT qualifies as an interactive computer service and is not a publisher or speaker. "Like Google Search, ChatGPT is entirely driven by third-party input. In other words, ChatGPT does not invent, create, or develop outputs absent any prompting from an information content provider (i.e. a user)."
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Online Speech Platforms
By Clare Malone
.....Given this lack of clear content moderation and Musk’s legendary capriciousness, it’s not particularly difficult to imagine a 2024 campaign scenario in which Republican candidates and causes receive deferential treatment when it comes to takedown requests that claim disinformation or defamation. Even without that layer of potential complexity, Twitter usage now means dealing with a certain level of unpredictability that political actors—campaigns or otherwise—might find unsettling. Take Musk’s decision to label news organizations such as NPR, PBS, and the BBC as state-affiliated—only to walk it back on the advice of his biographer, Walter Isaacson. Twitter, which once made propaganda posts by autocratic governments like Russia, China, and Iran harder to find, has lifted such guardrails. “All news is to some degree propaganda,” Musk tweeted, about the decision to remove so-called visibility filtering. “Let people decide for themselves.”
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Political Parties
By Michael Scherer
.....Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) recently sent letters to more than 6,000 people who had enrolled in the No Labels party in her state, notifying them of concerns that they may have been tricked into signing what they thought was a petition when in fact they were changing their party registration.
No Labels fired back at Bellows on Tuesday with a letter asking for the evidence that prompted her to target the voters individually who had signed documents. A No Labels attorney from Marcus Clegg, a firm based in Portland, Maine, alleged that Bellows’s actions potentially “had a chilling effect” on voters. In a clear suggestion of potential litigation, the letter cited Supreme Court precedent that says it is illegal to discriminate against “new or small political parties.”
Bellows responded to the letter in a statement to The Post on Tuesday.
“Ensuring that Maine voters have the information they need to exercise their First Amendment rights to associate with the party of their choice (or no party) is my main concern,” Bellows said. “The response we’ve seen from voters who received our letter has been overwhelmingly that of gratitude for the information provided.”
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The States
By Patrick Anderson
The Republican sponsored legislation ultimately passed 41 to 29. Twenty-seven Democrats joined all nine House Republicans to send the bill on to the Senate.
Progressive Democrats blasted both hiking the $1,000 maximum annual individual contribution to $2,000 and raising the maximum size of donations that can be reported anonymously...
Rep. Brian Newberry, the lead sponsor of the bill, said while the bill might allow top lawmakers rake in more campaign cash than they already do, he believes it would have a greater benefit to challengers who often struggle to raise the bare minimum to compete...
He said the motive of doubling the size of donations that can be reported in aggregate, that is, without personally identifying the donor, is to encourage contributions from small-dollar donors who don't want their name attached to a campaign.
"If you're challenging the Speaker of the House or the majority leader, nobody wants their name on your finance report ... not because they're trying to buy you with a huge project," he said. "There are people that want to participate. They don't want their boss knowing who they donated to. The aggregate is not there to hide dark money." ...
Other provisions of the bill that were generally supported by progressives include opening up public matching funds to primary candidates, although only to winning candidates after the vote.
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By James Brooks
.....Alaskans for Better Elections submitted a proposed ballot measure to the Alaska Division of Elections in early May. If approved by the division, and if the group gathers sufficient signatures, Alaskans will be asked in 2024 whether they want to limit the amount of money a donor can give to a politician running for office.
The proposal, modeled after a bill from Rep. Calvin Schrage, I-Anchorage, would prohibit someone from directly giving more than $2,000 per election cycle to an individual candidate’s campaign or more than $5,000 a year to a political party or other group.
Sponsors of the measure said they hoped that the Alaska Legislature would impose new limits after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Alaska’s old limits, some of the lowest in the country, in 2021.
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By Orlando Mayorquin
.....Taking a new tack in the ideological battle over what books children should be able to read, Illinois will prohibit book bans in its public schools and libraries, with Gov. J.B. Pritzker calling the bill that he signed on Monday the first of its kind.
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The Institute for Free Speech is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that promotes and defends the political rights to free speech, press, assembly, and petition guaranteed by the First Amendment. Please support the Institute's mission by clicking here. For further information, visit www.ifs.org.
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