Email from The Institute for Free Speech The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech September 11, 2026 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]. New from the Institute for Free Speech Massachusetts Attorney General Declines to Certify an Initiative to “Limit Artificial-Person Powers” .....Americans do not lose their First Amendment rights when they join together with others to speak. Last week, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell affirmed that right in a new letter declining to certify Initiative Petition No. 26-03, also called the “Act to Limit Artificial-Person Powers.” The proposed law would have limited the powers of corporations, limited liability companies, limited partnerships, and nonprofit corporations by barring them from engaging in election activity and ballot-question activity. Last month, Institute for Free Speech Senior Attorneys Owen Yeates and Charles “Chip” Miller wrote comments to Attorney General Campbell regarding Petition 26-03, detailing how the Petition would not only violate the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and Articles 16 and 19 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, but also contradict established Supreme Court precedent. The Courts Carolina Journal: 4th Circuit jumps back into ad rate dispute involving Cooper .....But the 4th Circuit issued a new two-paragraph order Wednesday expediting the case at the appellate level. The order calls for the FCC to submit a response by Sept. 15 to the Democratic candidates’ request for an order called a writ of mandamus. The writ would order the FCC to make a decision about the challenged Media Bureau guidance. Courthouse News: Anti-abortion activist presses San Diego for evidence behind school speech restrictions By Quinn Welsch .....An anti-abortion activist in San Diego asked a federal judge on Friday to let San Diego allow him to pass out pamphlets to high school students on the edge of school grounds. Don Blythe asked the court to block the city’s ordinance creating buffer zones limiting what kind of First Amendment activity can take place 100 feet from the entrances and exits of schools, medical facilities and places of worship. “We are talking about quintessential First Amendment rights faced with a theoretical phantasm of blocked sidewalks and frustrated students,” plaintiff attorney Michael Millen argued. “There’s just no evidence. This is an ordinance that is looking for a reason to be there.” The city has, for the second time, failed to provide sufficient evidence the free speech activities negatively impacted any of the students and that this ordinance was necessary, Millen contended. He said the only evidence the city has provided in the past year is a staff report that doesn’t point to any specific incidents of harassment or obstruction. FCC The Hill: FCC commissioner: Kimmel’s ‘self-censorship’ shows Trump’s bid to ‘control’ media working By Dominick Mastrangelo .....The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) lone Democratic commissioner is pointing to ABC comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s decision not to broadcast an interview with Texas Senate nominee James Talarico (D) as evidence of what she called the Trump administration’s attempts to stifle free press. “Jimmy Kimmel’s decision to keep his interview with a Senate candidate off the air shows just how far this Administration’s campaign of censorship and control has gone,” said FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, an appointee of former President Biden, in a Thursday statement. “There is no way to know how many other editorial decisions across the country have quietly been shaped by this same pressure,” Gomez continued. “No host, local affiliate, or network should have to weigh federal retaliation before booking a guest for a newsworthy interview. Any attempt to pressure broadcasters into self-censorship undermines both press freedom and the public’s right to hear from candidates in their communities seeking public office.” Online Speech Platforms New York Times (gift link): Voters Are Asking A.I. About Elections. The Answers Can Vary by User. By Tiffany Hsu .....Voters who turned to artificial intelligence a day before Alaska’s primary election last month may have received information that was incomplete or tuned to who they were. When asked about “Dan Sullivan’s position on health care,” Claude, an A.I. model from Anthropic, excluded one of the two candidates with that name in the state’s Senate race. Instead, it focused on the Dan Sullivan who is the incumbent Republican senator. When the prompt came from a Democrat, Claude said the incumbent had recently “shown some flexibility” on health care. When a Republican asked, the chatbot said he was “generally aligned with G.O.P. priorities.” The Alaska test was part of a sprawling data collection effort publicly unveiled on Thursday by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The project will document what major A.I. systems say about an election, starting with the fragmented local terrain of a midterm cycle. Free Expression Fox News: I’m a university president. Our profession should finish what Charlie Kirk started By Dr. Kent Ingle .....One year ago this week, on Sept. 10, Charlie Kirk was killed on a college campus in the middle of a debate. He was 31 years old. He was sitting under a tent at Utah Valley University in front of roughly 3,000 people, taking a question from a student who disagreed with him, and he was shot in the middle of his answer. I have thought about that scene for a year, and the detail that still bothers me is the tent. Charlie had to bring his own stage, his own microphone and his own security to hold an open debate on an American campus. Every campus in this country has a hall built for that purpose. The room was ours. So was the job. Charlie and I sat down together at Southeastern University in 2022. No stage, no cameras, no audience. We talked about two things that turned out to be the same thing: how to fix American higher education, and where the next generation of leaders was going to come from. He wanted to know whether institutions like mine were still forming leaders or had settled for processing students. That was always his real test of a school, and most were failing it long before a gunman showed up in Orem, Utah. FIRE: 2027 College Free Speech Rankings: Kirk murder adds another difficult topic to dismal climate for student expression ....The assassination of Charlie Kirk generated a wave of censorship at America's colleges over the past year, further contributing to a climate in which too many students fear expressing themselves on campus. Encouragingly, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s seventh annual College Free Speech Rankings found the percentage of students who said it was acceptable to shout down a speaker, block entry to a campus speech, or use violence to stop a campus speech declined slightly from last year’s record highs. The survey’s average overall score (61.36) is the highest recorded in seven years but still corresponds to a D- on the report’s grading scale, an unacceptable state of affairs. Candidates and Campaigns Election Law Blog: Trump’s (Hard to Believe) Pledge to Give Every American Adult $5,000 If Republicans Win Control of House and Senate is Almost Certainly Protected by the First Amendment Against Bribery or Vote Buying Charges By Rick Hasen .....At last night’s Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Donald Trump told viewers: “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.” Some have questioned whether this is a form of illegal vote buying or bribery of voters. If a state tried to prosecute Trump for such behavior (his own DOJ certainly will not), Trump would have a strong First Amendment defense. The leading case, here, as I told the Times, is the 1982 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Hartlage, in which the court rejected a Kentucky attempt to remove a successful county candidate from office after he had promised not to take a salary in apparent violation of a Kentucky anticorruption law barring promises of things of value to voters. Dallas Morning News: Host committee for Dallas GOP convention says it will not disclose its donors, even after the event By Charlotte Kramon .....The Dallas 2026 Host Committee for the Republican midterm convention in Dallas will not disclose its donors, even after the event, the committee says. The States Reason: Texas Terrorism Law Chills Speech for Muslim Group By Ryan Curtis .....Last week, Southern Methodist University (SMU) informed the Texas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) that it could no longer host the group's Muslim Youth Leadership Symposium in September. The conference would bring together high school and college-age Muslim students from across the state for a "day of leadership and civic engagement," and include panels with community leaders, interactive workshops, and a visit to Dallas City Hall. In a statement to The Christian Post, Megan Jacob, SMU's director of media relations, said, "the University has determined that permitting the event to take place on campus, given the State of Texas' current designation of the symposium's organizer, is inconsistent with our mission and related University policies." The "current designation" referenced in the statement is Abbott's November proclamation, deeming the CAIR a "foreign terrorist organization" (FTO). Abbott's authority to designate the CAIR an FTO comes from Texas Senate Bill 1900, which the governor signed into law in 2023. Under this law, property owned by an FTO can be marked as a "public nuisance," making it easier for the state to sue and seize the land. Law enforcement organizations are also required to "compile and maintain in a local or regional intelligence database" reports on the potentially criminal activities of FTOs, and forward this information to a centralized state-run database. Finally, certain violent and drug-related crimes committed as a member of an FTO carry harsher sentences. Legislators initially couched the new law as a measure against Latin American cartel networks, but its wide-reaching definition of an FTO has allowed the law to be abused for political ends. S.B. 1900 defines foreign terrorist organizations as "three or more persons operating as an organization at least partially outside the United States who engage in criminal activity and threaten the security of this state or its residents." Orlando Sentinel via Archive Today: Disgusting waste. Florida taxpayers fund political campaigns By Scott Maxwell .....Florida’s race for governor is on a blistering financial pace with Republican Byron Donalds leading the way in record fashion. So far, Donalds has collected more than $100 million from gambling interests, data centers, billionaires and private prison operators — all of whom want something from the guy who might control their financial fate. The idea of special interests making down payments on public officials might make you queasy. But what should really make you wanna toss your cookies is knowing that Florida taxpayers are also funding Donalds’ campaign. And also the campaigns of David Jolly, James Uthmeier and others. That’s because all of these politicians decided to help themselves to what’s officially known as Florida’s “Public Campaign Finance” program — a program also known as “welfare for politicians.” The public-assistance initiative started with noble intentions, meant to reward candidates who choose to rely on small grassroots donations from individual citizens rather than giant checks from special interests. Today, however, the program is a perversion of what was originally promised. Original Reason ("Volokh Conspiracy"): Judge Recommends Fining Delivery Nurse for Vulgar TikTok Video "Wish[ing] a Gruesome Birth Injury on the White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, While She Was Pregnant" By Eugene Volokh .....From Dep't of Health v. Lawler, decided Sept. 1 by Florida Administrative Law Judge Robert Cohen... I don't think that the government may constitutionally impose such penalties on professionals for their public political speech, offensive and unprofessional as it might be. In most states, private employers would be free to discipline or even dismiss their employees for such speech (Lawler's employer indeed fired her), and public employers may sometimes do the same, if the speech proves disruptive enough (the rules are complicated). But I don't think this should be the business of licensing agencies who are using the government's coercive power over all regulated employees, public or private, in the state. Still, the recommended decision struck me as worth noting, whether you think it's right or wrong. Note that the state had argued that Lawler's license should be revoked, and it was indeed suspended on an emergency basis in January, but a Florida Court of Appeal had blocked the suspension, on condition that Lawler "practice nursing only in administrative roles that would require no patient contact, such as education, managed care case review, and records and claims auditing." Presumably if the Administrative Law Judge's recommendation is accepted by the Board of Nursing, her license would be fully reinstated. WHYY: ‘Politics of contempt’: Republican Utah governor joins Pa. Gov. Shapiro to push back against hateful rhetoric and partisanship By Carmen Russell-Sluchansky .....Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, joined Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, to urge Americans to reject politicians who encourage contempt for their opponents, warning that increasingly hostile rhetoric is pushing the country further apart and contributing to political violence. The governors from opposing parties appeared together Wednesday night at Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for a discussion about the First Amendment, free expression and how Americans can engage across political divisions. Read an article you think we would be interested in? Send it to Tiffany Donnelly at [email protected]. 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