Email from The Institute for Free Speech The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech October 6, 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 NPR: The Federal Election Commission is down to 2 members. So its work is at a standstill By Ashley Lopez .....[T]here is at least one cost to not having Republican representation, says Bradley Smith, who served as a Republican appointee on the commission from 2000 to 2005 and is now chair of the Institute for Free Speech. He said with Trainor's departure, the party has been left "without a spokesperson" at the FEC. "Oftentimes, people call the commission — reporters and so on — for comment on campaign finance matters," Smith said. "And the Republicans and Democratic commissioners often have somewhat different takes on the issues." … Smith said it is a "common misconception" that without a quorum people can get away with breaking the law. "The fact that nobody's there at the FEC, that there's not a quorum at the FEC, doesn't mean the FEC can't act on it," he told NPR. "They've got a seven-year statute of limitations for most offenses. So, you can be caught. There's lots of time for the FEC to bring a case." Jonesing for Nonprofits: Donor Disclosure: Update on Buckeye Institute v. IRS By Darryll K. Jones .....Buckeye asserts that the (c)(3) donor disclosure rules are unconstitutional and contrary to the holding in one of my favorite con law cases, NAACP vs. Alabama ex rel. Patterson. So far, Buckeye is winning, having obtained a ruling that strict scrutiny applies. Buckeye should rightly win the whole thing eventually. I have pointed out before that donor privacy is actually a legitimate human right in other places in the world. Our system is so awash with money and illegitimacy that we can’t hardly see or think straight. The Service filed an interlocutory appeal that is pending. I learned via a September 25, 2025 podcast (listen above) that briefs are due later this month. The nearly 30-minute conversation with Alt about donor privacy is fascinating and near the end he discusses his climb up Everest. Supreme Court Wall Street Journal: ‘Conversion Therapy’ at the Supreme Court By The Editorial Board .....Is counseling free speech? That’s the question at the Supreme Court on Tuesday, in a dispute over Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy.” A 2019 law says counselors can’t try to change a minor client’s gender identity or sexual orientation, including “behaviors or gender expressions.” The statute explicitly permits, however, “assistance to a person undergoing gender transition.” Kaley Chiles is a licensed counselor with a master’s degree in clinical mental health. She’s also a Christian who “believes clients can accept the bodies that God has given them and find peace.” She fears being punished if she discusses such things with minors experiencing gender dysphoria, according to her brief in Chiles v. Salazar. That’s a constitutional violation, she argues, because the First Amendment protects “private conversations between counselors and their clients.” Ed. note: Read our amicus brief in Chiles v. Salazar here. The Courts Holtzman Vogel: Holtzman Vogel Files Suit on Behalf of American Future Fund Challenging NYS Regulations Under First Amendment .....New York has adopted broad campaign finance regulations that require any organization that engages in issue advertisements to register with the New York State and New York City Board of Elections and disclose its donors if the issue advertisements touch on issues that are “distinctive” to any candidate running for public office in New York. American Future Fund is concerned about the rise of socialism in New York City and would like to run advertisements in New York City criticizing socialism and socialist policies without mentioning any candidate for public office. Concerned that doing so could be construed as a violation of New York’s broad and vague campaign finance regulations, American Future Fund has filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York challenging New York’s regulations under the First Amendment. Holtzman Vogel is proud to represent American Future Fund in this lawsuit. Wall Street Journal: Justice Department Takes Case Against Trump Supporter to Trial By James Fanelli .....A Justice Department firmly in Donald Trump’s control will soon be in the unusual position of putting on trial one of the president’s supporters and dredging up allegations of Chinese money flowing into his unsuccessful 2020 re-election effort. The Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office charged Xinyue “Daniel” Lou in March 2024 during the Biden administration. The Chinese-American businessman is accused of orchestrating a straw-donor scheme to circumvent contribution limits. Federal prosecutors said he recruited and reimbursed donors to a 2019 fundraiser at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida with the goal of helping Chinese nationals attend. Jury selection is scheduled to start Monday. The trial is expected to last a week. The case until now has flown under the radar, but already prosecutors have had to sidestep a major theme of Trump’s second term: the president’s view that he and some of his allies were unfairly targeted during the Biden years. Congress City Journal: Get the FCC Out of the Censorship Business By Joe Kane .....Both parties have a long history of trying to use the FCC to police the speech of their political enemies. But as legislators on both sides of the aisle have realized, using government authority to bully your enemies today will backfire tomorrow when it’s turned against you. Rather than encourage tit-for-tat censorship, Congress should pass a Free Speech Restoration Act, which would prevent the FCC from pulling broadcasters’ licenses based on the speech content in their programming. This new legislation should address two sources of FCC mischief. The first stems from World War II-era case law and some statutory provisions that give the FCC broad authority to regulate content, notwithstanding the First Amendment. This authority is rooted in the mistaken “scarcity rationale”—the notion that the FCC’s ability to regulate broadcasters’ content is implied by the limited number of radio frequencies—which the Supreme Court has cited to uphold content-based broadcasting regulations. While many legal scholars, and even Supreme Court justices, doubt that these cases are still good law, they remain on the books. Free Expression Wall Street Journal: False Charges of ‘Hate’ Encourage Violence By Kristen Waggoner .....The Anti-Defamation League last week retired its “Glossary of Extremism” amid backlash for having designated Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA as an extremist organization. The ADL isn’t alone in applying such inflammatory labels. Months before Kirk’s assassination, the Southern Poverty Law Center added Turning Point USA to its “hate map,” equating it with the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC labeled my organization a hate group in 2016, around the time we asked the Supreme Court to hear our case on behalf of Colorado cake artist Jack Phillips and his Masterpiece Cakeshop. These designations encourage violence: My car window was shot out shortly after I argued Masterpiece Cakeshop before the justices, and we see a spike in death threats whenever we receive fresh mention in the media. USA Today: A university censorship conference gets censored? This is Trump's America. By Rex Huppke .....Organizers of a Weber State University censorship conference canceled their event because a Utah anti-diversity law led university officials to put restrictions on what they could say. So a censorship conference was axed due to censorship. After years of hearing conservatives cry wolf about cancel culture and claiming campuses were “silencing conservative voices,” and on the heels of educators across the country getting fired for anodyne comments that followed the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, this is the cherry on the hypocrisy sundae. The primary culprit in the Weber State case is an anti-DEI bill – HB 261 – signed into law by Utah’s Republican governor. That law prompted the university’s vice president for student access and success, Jessica Oyler, to send an email Sept. 30 to the censorship conference organizers saying, in part: “Presentations should not describe legislation or policies in ways that take a side, such as labeling them ‘harmful’ or attributing them to a partisan ‘strategy.’ Even if the intent is to provide context, that language is difficult to reconcile with HB 261 when used in non-academic programming.” Related reading Wall Street Journal: Idiots Have Free Speech Too By Andy Kessler .....I believe in free-speech absolutism. Period. Mic drop. Even Hillary Clinton agrees, sort of. On Sept. 18, she told CNN, “You defend free speech in terrible times. You defend free speech that is used against holding people in power accountable through satire, humor, barbed attacks. You defend it when it is offensive.” You go girl! Except in 2016 she urged Congress to propose a constitutional amendment to nullify Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), a free-speech and campaign-finance decision that protected a movie critical of her. New York Times: Journalists at 3 Newspapers Quit Over Edits to a Charlie Kirk Story By Neil Vigdor .....Several journalists resigned this week from three newspapers in Alaska after the publications’ corporate owner made significant edits to an article about Charlie Kirk’s death, appearing to yield to pressure from a Republican state lawmaker who had criticized the coverage. The four journalists, who worked for The Homer News, The Peninsula Clarion and The Juneau Empire, wrote in a joint resignation letter on Monday that they were never consulted about the edits, made by the Alabama-based Carpenter Media Group. Candidates and Campaigns National Review: Dem AG Nominee Jay Jones Fantasized About Shooting Former Virginia GOP Speaker: ‘He Receives Both Bullets’ By Audrey Fahlberg .....On August 8, 2022, a Republican state legislator received a disturbing string of early-morning text messages from a former colleague, Jay Jones, this year’s Democratic nominee for Virginia attorney general… In a series of text messages obtained by National Review, Jones derided Johnson’s political centrism and scoffed at the “glowing” tributes that were being made in his honor by Republicans in the wake of his death. “Damn that was for mark,” he wrote to Coyner, suggesting he’d meant to send the texts to someone else. And yet that realization didn’t stop Jones from joking about what “that POS” Gilbert “would say about me if I died.” Then, the conversation took a dark turn. “If those guys die before me,” Jones wrote, referencing the Republican colleagues who were publicly honoring the deceased Johnson’s memory, “I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves” to “send them out awash in something.” Jones then suggested that, presented with a hypothetical situation in which he had only two bullets and was faced with the choice of murdering then-Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert or two dictators, he’d shoot Gilbert “every time,” prompting pushback from his former colleague: New York Times: Eric Adams’s Campaign Is Over. His Campaign Finance Problems Are Not. By William K. Rashbaum and Dana Rubinstein .....When Mayor Eric Adams of New York City announced that he was abandoning his bid for a second term, he cited, among other reasons, a decision by city regulators to deny matching funds to his campaign. But he made no mention of an ongoing inquiry by those regulators, the Campaign Finance Board, that is focused in part on whether to claw back $10 million in so-called matching funds from his successful mayoral campaign in 2021. The inquiry is extraordinary not only for the amount of money potentially involved, but because the regulators are seeking to use evidence from the federal corruption case against Mr. Adams, which was abandoned by President Trump’s Justice Department under highly unusual circumstances earlier this year… [The city’s campaign finance system has] been plagued by abuse, principally through the illegal use of straw donors, a practice by the mayor’s campaign that has been repeatedly exposed by news outlets and investigations. 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. Follow the Institute for Free Speech The Institute for Free Speech | 1150 Connecticut Ave., NW Suite 801 | Washington, DC 20036 US Unsubscribe | Update Profile | Constant Contact Data Notice