This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected].  

Why Evolution is True (blog): California community colleges go off the rails with DEI

.....[T]he system has thrown its hat entirely in the DEI ring, making all faculty and staff pledge fealty not just to DEI, but to the extreme Ibram Kendian view of DEI. And if you don’t obey they’re rules for behaving as an “antiracist”, you could be demoted, fired, or denied tenure. To me, this is a clear and wide-ranging violation of both freedom of speech and academic freedom.

.....The Institute for Free Speech is pleased to announce that Helen Knowles-Gardner has joined the Institute as Research Director.

Helen has written extensively about various aspects of American law and politics, including co-editing/co-authoring two books about freedom of speech: Judging Free Speech: First Amendment Jurisprudence of U.S. Supreme Court Justices; and Free Speech Theory: Understanding the Controversies. Her third co-authored book about expressive freedom, Filming the First: Cinematic Portrayals of Freedom of the Press, will be published in 2024.

She is the author of four other books, including The Tie Goes to Freedom: Justice Anthony M. Kennedy On Liberty – the first book about Justice Kennedy’s jurisprudence, and numerous peer-reviewed and law review articles. Over the course of her career, she has been frequently interviewed by numerous media outlets.

Mercury News: Ninth Circuit overturns political fundraising ban for local government employees

.....A federal appeals court on Wednesday overturned a 1970s-era ban on local government employees directly seeking political contributions from each other, spurred by a group of South Bay public defenders who sued the state while supporting a colleague’s run for Santa Clara County district attorney.

At issue was a law signed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown in 1976 that became Section 3205 and relaxed rules on state employees turning to each other for political support, fundraising and otherwise, but preserved restrictions for public workers at county and municipal levels. Wednesday’s written decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which declared Section 3205 unconstitutional, recalled how even Brown’s own staff questioned the law’s soundness before he enacted it.

Reuters: U.S. urges appeals court to lift curbs on social media contacts

By Brendan Pierson

.....The Biden administration has asked a federal appeals court to lift an order sharply curbing government officials' communications with social media companies as a lawsuit accusing U.S. officials of seeking to censor certain views about COVID-19 and other topics online makes its way through the courts.

In a filing Tuesday evening with the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the administration argued that a lower court judge's July 4 decision was overly broad and would hurt the government's ability to fight misinformation on platforms in a crisis.

New York Times: Prosecutors Drop Campaign Finance Charge Against Sam Bankman-Fried

By David Yaffe-Bellany and Matthew Goldstein

.....Federal prosecutors pursuing the criminal case against the cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried said on Wednesday that they were dropping a charge that Mr. Bankman-Fried violated campaign finance rules.

Fox News: GOP bill lets Americans sue 'malicious' federal workers who conspire to censor social media posts

By Elizabeth Elkind

.....House Republicans are pushing to let U.S. citizens sue individual federal employees who help orchestrate the censorship of free speech on social media.

Wall Street Journal: The Covid Lab-Leak Deception

By Matt Ridley and Alina Chan

.....On March 17, 2020, the journal Nature Medicine published a paper by five scientists, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” that dismissed “any type of laboratory based scenario” for the origin of the pandemic. It was cited by thousands of news outlets to claim that the virus emerged naturally. But Slack messages and emails subpoenaed and released by the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic suggest that some of the authors didn’t believe their own conclusions. Before, during and even after the publication of their paper, they worried privately that Covid-19 was caused by a laboratory escape, perhaps even of a genetically engineered virus…

The mainstream media frequently cited the paper in ridiculing any discussion of a lab leak as a conspiracy theory favored by racists and right-wing extremists. Facebook censored the topic for a year. Yet now the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Energy Department—the U.S. intelligence agencies with the strongest scientific expertise—have assessed that the pandemic likely had a research-related origin.

National Review: Free Speech Crisis at ASU: Event Manager Fired after Booking Dennis Prager Urges State Board of Regents to Intervene

.....In a scathing Monday letter to the governing body of the Arizona university system, the former events manager at Arizona State University’s auditorium, who was fired after booking Dennis Prager and other right-wing speakers, accused the school of conniving to censor speech and punish employees who stood in its way.

Gothamist:  A probe into illegal donors for Mayor Adams touches a key member of his inner circle: the body person

By Elizabeth Kim

.....In the world of politics, body people are the often unsung personal aides who keep candidates and elected officials on track of their schedules. They see to their every need while enjoying an unrivaled level of access and proximity to power.

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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.