May 1, 2024

In the News

The Gazette: Editorial: State Democrats assault free speech

By Editorial Board

.....The Institute for Free Speech is suing Democratic leaders for prohibiting words the majority deems “misgendering” and “deadnaming” — the latter a term for using a transgendered person’s original name...

If we didn’t have the right to say controversial things, we wouldn’t have gay rights or women’s suffrage. We wouldn’t have a successful transgender movement. We wouldn’t have haters speaking truth about themselves, helping more reasonable people to shun and avoid them. We wouldn't have a free market of ideas.

New from the Institute for Free Speech

Free Speech Arguments – Episode 8: Spectrum WT v. Wendler

.....Spectrum WT v. Wendler, argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on April 29, 2024…

Statement of Issues (excerpted from the Brief for Plaintiffs-Appellants):

1. Plaintiffs wish to perform a PG-13 charity drag show at West Texas A&M University, which the University’s president agreed is “performance” and “artistic expression.” Did the district court err in concluding that Plaintiffs’ drag show lacks First Amendment protection?
2. Before anyone took the stage, West Texas A&M’s president banned drag shows in campus forums open to student expression because, in his view, drag shows promote values that clash with his own. Did the district court err in not enjoining this viewpoint-based prior restraint on protected expression?

Supreme Court

SCOTUSblog: Court allows Texas to enforce age verification for online porn sites

By Amy Howe

.....The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to temporarily block a Texas law that requires pornographic websites to verify their users’ ages. In a brief unsigned order, the justices turned down a request from a group of challengers that included an adult industry trade association to put the law on hold to give them time to seek review of a ruling by a federal appeals court.

There were no public dissents from Tuesday’s order.

The law, known as H.B. 1181, was originally slated to go into effect last September. But the challengers, led by the Free Speech Coalition, went to federal court in August, challenging the law’s constitutionality.

Senior U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra barred the state from enforcing the age-verification requirement, concluding that it likely violated the First Amendment. 

The Courts

Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): "If He Did Not Want to Be Called a 'Rioter,' Plaintiff Should Not Have Admitted … to 'Participation in … [a] Riot'"

By Eugene Volokh

.....An excerpt from Hiles v. CNN, decided yesterday by Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen (E.D. Va.), where plaintiff sued for libel in a CNN article (read the whole opinion for more):

Congress

Politico: Antisemitism bill clears House Rules panel following partisan feud

By Bianca Quilantan

.....Lawmakers on the House Rules Committee advanced a bipartisan bill Monday night attempting to codify a definition of antisemitism — after the panel’s Democrats bashed the measure at length.

The legislation — H.R. 6090, the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023 — is one of several bills introduced in Congress since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the burst of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. But ahead of Monday’s 7-4 vote, Democrats, including New York Rep. Jerry Nadler, told the Rules panel the measure was deeply flawed.

“This bill threatens to chill constitutionally protected speech,” Nadler, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said. “Speech that is critical of Israel alone does not constitute unlawful discrimination … the bill sweeps too broadly.”

The bill, led by Rep. Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.), has 13 Democratic co-sponsors and would codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964...

Just the News (Video): Rep. Tenney demands crack down on ‘dark money’ fueling anti-Israel campus protests

.....Representative Claudia Tenney (R-NY) calls to defund college-affiliated organizations that accept “dark money” and promote antisemitic behavior on campus. Rep. Tenney says universities will lose their non-profit funding and tax-exempt status if they don’t put an end to the anti-Israel student protests.

Free Expression

The Atlantic: Those Who Preach Free Speech Need to Practice It

By Will Creeley

.....As the legal director of a First Amendment advocacy nonprofit, I teach students across the country that the government can’t silence speakers because of their beliefs, even—and perhaps especially—if those beliefs are unpopular or cause offense. That’s a foundational principle of free-speech law. But many of the crackdowns appear to be a direct reaction to the protesters’ views about Israel.

After sending a phalanx of state law-enforcement officers into the University of Texas at Austin campus, for example, Governor Greg Abbott announced on X that students “joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.”

But no First Amendment exception exists for “hate-filled” speech. And for good reason: In our pluralistic democracy, everyone has their own subjective idea of what, if any, speech is too “hateful” to hear, making an objective definition impossible. And empowering the government to draw that line will inevitably silence dissent.

Archive.today link

Reason: Americans Favor Freedom of the Press, Sort Of

By J.D. Tuccille

.....The good news is that Americans overwhelmingly support freedom of the press. The bad news is that a good half of the population doesn't seem to have the slightest clue what that means, favoring content controls even if they restrict free expression. How do you reconcile these views? You can't, unless you accept that many people want freedom only for publications and ideas with which they agree.

The Atlantic: No One Has a Right to Protest in My Home

By Erwin Chemerinsky

.....As a constitutional scholar and the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, I strongly defend the right to speak one’s mind in public forums. But the rancorous debate over the Israel-Hamas war seems to be blurring some people’s sense of which settings are public and which are not. Until recently, neither my wife—Catherine Fisk, a UC Berkeley law professor—nor I ever imagined a moment when our right to limit a protest at a dinner held at our own home would become the subject of any controversy.

Archive.today link

Reason: Should Free Speech Pessimists Look to Europe?

By Jacob Mchangama

.....Free speech pessimism is on the rise among America's elites.

"Free Speech Is Killing Us," read a 2019 op-ed in The New York Times. Recently, an article in The New York Times Magazine concluded, "It's time to ask whether the American way of protecting free speech is actually keeping us free." George Washington University Law School professor Mary Anne Franks has written two books arguing that the First Amendment is "deadly" and "eroding our democracy."

This First Amendment rejection is often combined with envious praise for European-style speech regulations—rules seen as mature democracies taking proactive steps to shield themselves from the deluge of hate speech and disinformation that is a consequence of the unchecked right to free speech.

The allure of European regulation is understandable—they claim to protect democracies from the supposed harms of unregulated speech. After all, who can look at the world of the past decade or so and claim that free speech does not entail serious risks and even occasional harm?

However, this narrative overlooks the critical freedoms that American free speech protections provide.

Candidates and Campaigns

Politico: How online donations are fueling the election

By Jessica Piper, Madison Fernandez, Paula Friedrich, and Anna Wiederkehr

.....The revolutionary impact of online political donations was on vivid display in the last fundraising quarter, showing how small contributions have helped level the field between the most powerful people in the country and a range of charismatic candidates, folk heroes, ideological crusaders and people running in especially high-profile elections.

The ease of giving has dramatically expanded the pool of donors in just a few election cycles and helped campaigns bring in greater hauls than ever before. And as online donations ballooned in recent years, they became a majority of funds raised by congressional candidates. Now, a POLITICO analysis shows how it has helped establish new dynamics in campaigning and fundraising.

National Review: Hillary Clinton, Recidivist Election-Theft Conspirator

By Andrew C. McCarthy

.....Rich’s excellent column today recalls the 1992 Clinton-campaign escapades that would have to be deemed actionable election theft under today’s Bragg standards — i.e., the prosecutorial guidelines applied by Manhattan’s elected progressive Democratic district attorney, Alvin Bragg.

I pile on just to point out that Hillary Clinton — who, as Rich remarks, was “an active participant” in what Bragg would frame as a conspiracy to steal an election by suppressing negative information in violation of federal campaign-finance laws — is a recidivist offender, having similarly schemed to steal the 2016 election. What’s more, on that latter occasion she employed the same pretend-it’s-legal-fees artifice that the Clintons used in 1992 and that her rival, Donald Trump, is also alleged to have used in 2016.

The States

Penn Live: Advocates call for constitutional amendment to take ‘dark money’ out of politics

By Jan Murphy

.....Concerns about outsized influence of sometimes untraceable political donations drew a small group of people to the state Capitol Rotunda on Tuesday to call on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to allow state and federal lawmakers to enact campaign finance regulations.