Email from The Institute for Free Speech The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech July 8, 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 CNN: Elon Musk wants to create a new political party. Building rockets may be easier By Hadas Gold .....Funding a new party has its own hurdles. The McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2022 set strict limits on donations to political parties. The current limit is just under $450,000 spread across different party purposes. Musk would need thousands of co-donors to help him fund his party, said Lee Goodman, an attorney and former chair of the FEC. “One very wealthy individual cannot capitalize a new national political party, the way he might start a business, because of federal contribution limits,” Goodman told CNN. “The prospect of a wealthy founder seed funding a national party to participate in federal elections around the country is not feasible in the current regulatory system.” Bradley Smith, another former FEC chair and who is now a law professor at Capital University Law School, said there are some ways around the current regulations. “There is some case law suggesting that some of the organizational activities of a party and starting a party right can be funded with larger contributions, until it actually qualifies for party status under the election commission regulations,” Smith said, but he noted it’s complex and difficult to do. “You can fund super PACs all you want. But you can’t fund a political party, as a strange part of American law,” he added. FIRE: FIRE amicus brief: First Amendment bars using schoolkid standards to silence parents' speech By David Volodzko .....Does the First Amendment protect passive, nondisruptive political speech of adults in a public forum? Under longstanding precedent and common sense, the answer is yes, of course it does. Yet a federal district court in New Hampshire ratified a viewpoint-based removal of parents from a high school soccer game. So FIRE filed an amicus brief in the appeal from that decision, explaining how the court went astray. In September 2024, as a form of silent protest against allowing a transgender athlete to play on the opposing girls’ soccer team against Bow High School, parents Kyle Fellers and Andy Foote donned pink “XX” wristbands during halftime. After about 10 minutes, school officials approached, along with a police officer, and demanded that the two parents remove the wristbands or leave the game. Worse, when the parents invoked their First Amendment rights, the officials threatened to arrest them for trespassing despite having no evidence that the wristbands, as opposed to the school officials’ conduct, was causing any disruption of the soccer match. Nor is there any evidence the transgender athlete saw the wristbands. So when a federal district court rejected the parents’ constitutional challenge to their treatment, it made two key mistakes. Grok! Nashua: Scaer: Nashua Mayor Jim Donchess Despises the First Amendment By Beth Scaer .....Nashua Mayor Jim Donchess has no problem with permitting the Satanic Temple to march behind him in the Nashua Pride Parade holding a flag and banner praising Satan, but the Pine Tree Flag is supposedly too controversial to fly on Nashua City Hall Plaza. Last year, Mayor Donchess turned down my request to fly the Pine Tree flag at Nashua City Hall Plaza, saying that it’s “not in harmony with the message that the City wishes to express and endorse.” Does that mean the city endorses Satanism? This year, he gave the green light for the Satanic Temple to march in the Nashua Pride Parade on June 21, just ahead of the communist Party for Socialism and Liberation. These are examples of personal whims, not free speech. The parade begins marching from City Hall Plaza, and no one joins the parade without Mayor Donchess’ approval. IRS Bloomberg Law: IRS Says Religious Groups Can Discuss Politics During Services By Laura D. Francis .....Churches can speak about political campaigns and candidates to their congregations without losing their 501(c)(3) status, the IRS said as part of a settlement of a constitutional challenge to rules surrounding religious organizations’ political speech. “When a house of worship in good faith speaks to its congregation, through its customary channels of communication on matters of faith in connection with religious services, concerning electoral politics viewed through the lens of religious faith, it neither ‘participate[s]’ nor ‘intervene[s]’ in a ‘political campaign,’ within the ordinary meaning of those words,” the agency and religious groups said Monday in a joint filing in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. Supreme Court Election Law Blog: Supreme Court Appoints Roman Martinez to Argue NRSC v. FEC By Richard Pildes .....Because the government believes the relevant provision of the campaign-finance laws is unconstitutional, the Supreme Court has appointed Roman Martinez to argue in defense of the constitutionality of this provision. Roman, with whom I’ve been on panels, is the chair of the Supreme Court practice at Latham & Watkins and has argued 15 cases before the Court. Earlier in his career, he served as a law clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts of the Supreme Court and to then-Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of the D.C. Circuit. New York Times: One of the Worst Industries in the World Gets Its Comeuppance By David French .....The porn industry just got what it deserved at the Supreme Court. On the last day of its term, by a 6-to-3 vote, the court delivered a decisive ruling against one of the worst industries in America. It upheld a Texas law that requires pornographic websites to “use reasonable age verification methods” to make sure that their customers are at least 18 years old. The court split on ideological lines, with the six Republican appointees voting to uphold the law and the three Democratic appointees in dissent. When you see what appears to be a sharp ideological divide on the court, it’s easy to jump to conclusions, to label, for example, the liberals on the court pro-porn compared with the conservatives, but that’s fundamentally wrong. In this case, the most important words from the court came not from Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion but from Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent. The Courts The Federalist: Lawsuit Aims To Prevent IRS From Targeting Conservative Groups Ever Again By Beth Brelje .....The mechanism that allowed the IRS to deny right-leaning groups legal nonprofit status during Barack Obama’s administration is still on the books, but this week a conservative group is challenging the provision in court to prevent it from being weaponized again… Lex Politica Attorney Chris Gober has been working since then to change the rule on behalf of Freedom Path, a now nearly inactive conservative issue advocacy organization that filed for tax-exempt status in 2011. After the IRS requested a list of Freedom Path’s donors in 2012, and the 2014 Lois Lerner scandal blew over, finally in 2020 — nine years after its application — the IRS denied Freedom Path nonprofit status on the basis of the same “Facts and Circumstances Test” weaponized against conservative groups in the scandal. Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): Government Employees May Generally Be Disciplined for Sufficiently Controversial Public Political Speech By Eugene Volokh .....From Judge Kevin Newsom's opinion today in Labriola v. Miami-Dade County, joined by Judges Robin Rosenbaum and Stanley Marcus: Politico: First Amendment advocates decry settlement in ‘60 Minutes’ lawsuit By Nicole Markus .....Press freedom groups and First Amendment advocates slammed Paramount’s $16 million settlement with President Donald Trump, saying the decision emboldened Trump’s attacks against an already-battered news industry. “The lawsuit is just as frivolous today as it was yesterday, there’s zero substance to it,” said Bob Corn-Revere, chief counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “All this really shows is that sometimes, a bully can get his way.” Donor Privacy Washington Examiner: The internet makes our privacy laws obsolete By Heather Lauer .....The first step is clear: Congress and state legislatures must act now to remove the home addresses of donors, voters, and elected officials from public-facing government websites. This isn’t about secrecy. It’s about safety. The goal isn’t to hide relevant information from journalists or watchdog groups, but to make sure that information doesn’t fall into the hands of someone who wants to do harm. Second, lawmakers must modernize old laws that expose personal information, such as our Watergate-era campaign finance laws, to reflect the realities of the digital age and protect privacy. Rules written in the 1970s weren’t designed for an era when personal information can be weaponized with a single click. These reforms would not reduce transparency in the areas where it’s truly needed and would not interfere with First Amendment rights. But a few commonsense safeguards, such as requiring someone to make a formal records request instead of downloading a spreadsheet online, can make all the difference in deterring those with malicious intent. The internet changed the game. It’s time our laws caught up. Political Spending Election Law Blog: “Disclosing Political Spend Wins Surprising Investor Support” By Richard Pildes .....At Law 360: While most shareholder activists are hitting a brick wall with environmental, social and governance measures at 2025 annual meetings, a proposal asking for increased transparency around corporate political spending has passed at five companies, surprising some experts. This proxy season, 13 companies have seen basically the same disclosure resolution on their ballots, according to figures from the non-partisan Center for Political Accountability, with the final one facing a vote last Friday. Of those 13 votes, which are advisory and not binding, the resolution has averaged nearly 42% support this year. That compares to the 2024 proxy season when the average shareholder support for the proposal was just 26.2%. And five majority votes in one season is almost unheard of. The resolution won one majority vote last year. In fact, Bruce Freed, CPA’s president and cofounder, told Law360 Pulse that the five wins were “a positive shocker.” Freed said he thinks the victories stem from “political disclosure and accountability being seen as risk management. It’s a governance issue, and it doesn’t carry the political baggage that environmental or social issues have.” Free Expression The Atlantic: What a ‘Spiral of Silence’ Can Do to a Democracy By Betsy Levy Paluck .....A protest can be a fine way to get people’s attention—particularly the attention of those in positions of power. But one of the most important, and most overlooked, functions of protest is to prevent the dreaded “spiral of silence,” which can begin when people wrongly believe that their own point of view is not widely shared. When political speech is considered socially sensitive or politically dangerous, people are more likely to sit out protests, mute themselves online, and keep quiet in everyday conversation. These small acts of silencing may seem merely polite or indifferent, but they can easily spiral. People sometimes take as many cues from silence as they do from noise. And because people interpret silence to mean quiet acceptance or approval of the status quo, they use it to inform their own decisions about whether to speak out. Silence begets silence, which begets further misunderstanding about what a society actually collectively believes or wants. Political and psychological scientists like me who study this phenomenon have found that a “spiral of silence” is one way that unpopular policies and regimes persist. One major reason is a muted, acquiescent public—the proverbial people watching the naked emperor’s parade. Candidates and Campaigns New York Times: She Spent Nearly $600,000 on Her Council Race and Lost. Was It Worth It? By Ginia Bellafante .....Last December, Elizabeth Lewinsohn, a longtime TriBeCa resident, entered the Democratic race to represent her district in New York’s City Council, eventually raising and spending far more money than any of the other 216 people running for the Council. Of the $568,665 her campaign put toward securing the Democratic nomination in a district that covers the bottom tip of Manhattan, $522,000 came from a source with whom she was intimately acquainted: Elizabeth Lewinsohn. The return on investment did not inspire; she effectively spent $72 per vote and lost by 20 points to the incumbent, Chris Marte… But the scale of Ms. Lewinsohn’s self-financing seems unprecedented in a contest of this kind. She opted out of the city’s matching funds program, which would have limited her spending. The prospect of a political novice beating an incumbent seemed daunting to the point of impossible, she told me, had she kept within the constraints of public financing, which cap spending for primary campaigns to $228,000. To put her gambit in perspective, the former hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson donated just under $15,000 toward his own failed bid to become mayor. Out of four candidates in the Democratic primary for the First District, Ms. Lewinsohn ranked second, despite outspending Mr. Marte, the son of a bodega owner, by nearly $400,000 — roughly the tab she would have run up had she taken the 7,905 people who cast ballots for her to the Odeon for a plate of steak tartare and a glass of Bordeaux. The States New York Post: Unfair fight: How lefty nonprofits — and taxpayer money — lifted Mamdani’s campaign By Betsy McCaughey .....New Yorkers are under the false impression that the taxpayer-funded city Campaign Finance Board is leveling the playing field to make Gotham’s elections fair. Just the opposite is true: The CFB is actually doling out obscene amounts of our money to tilt the scales for left-wing candidates, including Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. If November’s election is anything like 2021’s, taxpayers will shell out more than $100 per vote cast — while the board kneecaps Mamdani’s moderate rivals. The CFB, an independent city agency, was formed in 1988 to give political newbies a fair shot against established pols. The idea was to match small private contributions dollar-for-dollar with taxpayer funds. Since then, the match has increased sharply: Now it’s a staggering 8-to-1 in the primary, and another 8-to-1 in the general election. The CFB paid out nearly $63 million in taxpayer money to candidates in last week’s primary, and its general-election expenditures will likely double that figure. It’s a gold mine for political operatives, campaign professionals and candidates in the CFB’s good graces. As Zohran Mamdani apparently appears to be. But not everyone is. 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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