Email from The Institute for Free Speech The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech January 10, 2025 Click here to subscribe to the Daily Media Update. This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected]. In the News Kansas Reflector: Overland Park lawsuit leads judge to narrow Kansas’ definition of political action committee By Tim Carpenter .....A U.S. District Court judge decided a small Kansas organization primarily engaged in local-issue advocacy shouldn’t be compelled under current state laws or regulations to register as a political action committee despite campaigning for election of a specific candidate for Overland Park mayor. The dispute was between Fresh Vision OP, with a membership ranging from two to six people, and the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission. KGEC had ordered Fresh Vision to file paperwork as a PAC following the group’s expenditure of more than $100 to champion the 2021 mayoral candidacy of Faris Farassati with mailers and a website. The Overland Park city council member, who agitated against certain building development incentives, finished a distant third in the election. Voice of Maine (audio): REWIND 12 31 IFS’s Chip Miller 1330 .....Ed. note: IFS Senior Attorney Charles "Chip" Miller talks to the Voice of Maine about our lawsuit challenging Maine's restrictions on super PAC contributions. Read more about the case here. NH Journal: Bow Soccer Ref Apologizes to Dad in XX Pink Wristband Lawsuit By Damien Fisher .....The high school soccer referee who reportedly threatened to cancel a Bow girl’s soccer game because parents wore pink “XX” wristbands issued an apology as part of a settlement agreement in the ongoing federal lawsuit. Soccer dads Kyle Fellers and Anthony Foote, as well as Nicole Foote and Eldon Rash, filed the lawsuit against the Bow School District after they were ordered to remove their pro-girls sports wristbands at a Sept. 17 Bow game against another girl’s team that includes a transgender player. Fellers and Anthony Foote were later slapped with no trespass orders by the Bow School District. Referee Steve Rossetti, who officiated the game, was named in the lawsuit for reportedly threatening to cancel the game if the parents did not remove the wristbands. But Rossetti was dismissed as a defendant this week. As part of an agreement reached with the parents, Rossetti wrote Fellers a letter of apology for swearing at him during a heated exchange. “I did not choose my words very carefully during our exchange, and I regret any offense I may have caused you,” Rossetti wrote to Fellers. Supreme Court SCOTUSblog: Supreme Court allows Trump’s New York criminal sentencing to go forward By Amy Howe .....A divided Supreme Court on Thursday evening cleared the way for President-elect Donald Trump’s criminal sentencing to go forward on Friday morning. In a brief unsigned order issued just after 7 p.m., the justices rejected Trump’s plea to halt the sentencing proceeding in his New York hush money case, where he was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide reimbursements made to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Four of the court’s conservative justices – Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh – indicated that they would have granted Trump’s request. Trump would have needed five votes to prevail, which means that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberal justices in voting to allow the sentencing to proceed. The New York Review: Free Speech for TikTok? By David Cole .....On January 10 the Supreme Court will hear argument in an unprecedented First Amendment case that will determine the future of TikTok, a social media platform used by about 170 million Americans, or more than half the country’s population. In 2023 alone Americans uploaded 5.5 billion videos to the platform, which were viewed thirteen trillion times. The content ranges from dance videos to cooking and makeup tutorials, but TikTok is also a central locus for political speech. Nearly 40 percent of American adults under thirty regularly get news from the site, which offers information, political and otherwise, from across the globe. During the presidential campaign, Biden and Trump campaign TikToks were viewed over 6 billion times. For more on TikTok’s evolution and the backdrop for the controversy, see Yi-Ling Liu, “Planet TikTok,” NYR Online, July 9, 2024. Senator Rand Paul: Sens. Paul, Markey, Rep. Khanna File Bipartisan, Bicameral Amicus Brief Urging SCOTUS to Protect Free Speech and Reverse TikTok Ban .....Ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court hearing Friday, U.S. Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Edward J. Markey (D-MA), along with Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA-17) recently submitted a bipartisan, bicameral amicus brief urging the Court to reverse the D.C. Circuit Court’s decision in TikTok Inc. v. Garland, which upheld a TikTok ban established under the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. In the brief, Sens. Markey and Paul and Rep. Khanna argue that the TikTok ban lacks evidence and directly conflicts with the First Amendment, undermining the rights of over 170 million Americans who use the platform. The Courts FEC Weekly Digest: Week of December 23– 27, 2024 .....DCCC v. FEC (Case No. 24-2935) On December 20, Plaintiff filed a First Amended Complaint for Declaratory Judgment and Injunctive Relief in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.  End Citizens United PAC v. FEC (Case No. 22-5277) On December 20, the Commission filed an En Banc Brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): Defamation Lawsuit Over Statements Related to 2020 Georgia Ballot Counting Controversy Dismissed By Eugene Volokh .....From Pick v. Raffensperger, decided Nov. 22 by Judge Eleanor Ross (N.D. Ga.), but only posted several days ago on Westlaw (an appeal is pending): The Texas Tribune: Ken Paxton files second lawsuit against TikTok for exposing minors to explicit content By Ayden Runnels .....Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday sued TikTok for the second time in recent months, accusing the social media company of violating deceptive trade law by downplaying its addictiveness and exposing children to explicit material. The suit argues that TikTok, a short-form video app, violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act by listing itself on app stores as appropriate for children and not enforcing its community guidelines effectively. The Apple App Store lists TikTok as rated for those 12 and older, while the Microsoft and Google Play Stores list the app as appropriate for users who are 13 and older. The 66-page filing, which has several redactions, details several TikTok posts containing inappropriate material that seemingly violate the guidelines and ways the app can circumvent parental controls on smartphones through an in-app browser. Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): 9th Cir. En Banc Upholds Oregon's Ban on Surreptitious Recordings of Conversations By Eugene Volokh .....An excerpt from yesterday's en banc decision, written by Judge Morgan Christen, in Project Veritas v. Schmidt (reversing the July 2023 panel decision); the full opinions are over 20,000 words long, so this just gives a flavor of the analysis: Nonprofits Chronicle of Philanthropy: How Trump Could Target Nonprofits — and How to Protect Yours By Mike Berkowitz .....Since Donald Trump entered the political arena, federal and state officials and lawmakers have increasingly used legislative and regulatory power, as well as intimidation, to repress views and advocacy with which they disagree. Donors and nonprofits are attacked by name, smeared in the media and court of public opinion, harassed and threatened online, and investigated on questionable grounds. Not since the Civil Rights era, when pro-segregation state governments attempted to undermine charitable organizations like the NAACP, has civil society faced such an acute threat. Now the re-election of President Trump has placed American civil society in its most vulnerable position in a generation. President Trump has declared that nonprofits “get away with spending all of their time and money on ‘getting Donald Trump,’” adding, “We are watching these thugs and sleazebags closely!”  NY State Comptroller: The Critical Role of Nonprofits in New York .....Nonprofit organizations exist for a variety of purposes and provide a wide range of services. Some, commonly thought of as charities, are organized to provide services to the poor or disabled. Others include hospitals, nursing and rehabilitation homes, educational institutions, theaters, and athletic leagues. Many serve as partners to state and local governments. Nonprofits also play an important role in state and local economies. In 2022, there were over 33,500 nonprofits in New York operating in nearly every industry. Nonprofits provided over 1.3 million jobs with $96.8 billion in total wages, ranking the State among the highest in the nation for these measures. In the aggregate, nonprofit organizations represented 5 percent of New York’s private sector establishments, but more than 20 percent of private sector jobs in several regions in the state. However, nonprofits in New York have been shrinking since 2017, both in number of establishments and in number of jobs, while expanding in the rest of the nation. In all the State’s regions, nonprofit employment in 2022 was lower than in 2017. Online Speech Platforms RealClearPolitics: The Age of Censorship Is Ending By Ben Shapiro .....While Democrats claimed for years that Trump represented tyranny, the truth is that it was the Democratic Party and its media apparatchiks that routinely used the tools of power to silence their opposition in authoritarian ways. The cudgeling of Facebook represents a perfect example of such quiet authoritarianism. Before the 2016 election, Facebook was considered a darling of the left: an open platform that could be used by heretofore underrepresented people to spread their political messages. Barack Obama's 2012 campaign met with high praise for its creative use of Facebook, for example. The same held true for the Arab Spring. And then Donald Trump won. Democrats and the legacy media decided that social media had to be clubbed into place. Alternative media outlets like my own company, The Daily Wire, were far too successful: Democrats were upset that conservative content was reaching a wide audience, and legacy media were upset at the competition. And so by early 2017, the Democrat-Media Human Centipede set its narrative: that only the perversity of social media -- and its hijacking by evil Russian masterminds -- had allowed the election of Donald Trump. Read an article you think we would be interested in? Send it to Tiffany Donnelly at [email protected]. For email filters, the subject of this email will always begin with "Institute for Free Speech Media Update." 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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