The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech August 15, 2022 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 Luke Wachob at [email protected]. In the News ProPublica: Mothers Behind Book-Banning Campaign Claim Their First Amendment Rights Are Being Violated By Nicole Carr .....A group of Georgia mothers has been trying to get certain library books banned by reading sexually graphic passages aloud at school board meetings. Now, after the board barred one of the mothers from attending, the group is claiming in a federal lawsuit that their First Amendment rights have been violated... Del Kolde, a senior attorney with the Institute for Free Speech Institute who’s representing the plaintiffs, said of the lawsuit: “It’s not about censoring the books. It’s about reading from the books in a public setting. We don’t see any irony.” ... According to Kevin Goldberg, an attorney and First Amendment specialist with the nonprofit free-speech advocacy group Freedom Forum, “There’s at least some merit to the suit. The premise is valid.” ... Goldberg points out that “the First Amendment provides a right for parents to petition.” And he notes that “the suit is not the first of its kind and likely won’t be the last, because it has legs.” The Center Square: Nevada one of the best in the country for political free speech, report says By Tom Joyce .....Nevadans enjoy one of the best places in the country for political free speech, a new report says. The state ranks fourth in the country in the best places for people to use various forms of speech to engage in politics, according to a new report from the Institute for Free Speech. The index measures how states perform on “free speech and association rights of individuals and groups interested in speaking about candidates, issues of public policy, and their government,” according to the report released earlier this week.v The Oregonian: PSU professor critical of equity initiatives sues to force UO equity Twitter account to unblock him By Betsy Hammond .....Portland State University political science professor Bruce Gilley, with backing from a national free speech group, has sued the person who ran the Twitter account of the University of Oregon’s Division of Equity and Inclusion to unblock him from seeing or responding to the account’s posts. The public university cannot, under the First Amendment, create a public online forum and prevent him from having equal access to it based on his point of view, the suit says. New from the Institute for Free Speech University of Oregon DEI Officer Sued for Blocking Critic on Twitter .....A local university professor filed a federal lawsuit on August 11 against an officer in the University of Oregon’s Division of Equity and Inclusion for blocking him from the division’s official Twitter account. “Apparently, the state’s flagship university has a concept of inclusion that does not include tolerance for differing viewpoints. When a government employee uses a Twitter account for official business, they are legally obligated to respect the First Amendment rights of those who respond,” said Del Kolde, Senior Attorney at the Institute for Free Speech. Supreme Court Colorado Politics: Colorado appeals to history, tradition in defending anti-discrimination law to SCOTUS By Michael Karlik .....The U.S. Supreme Court in its upcoming term will hear the case of 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, which asks whether Colorado law can compel Lorie Smith to create wedding websites regardless of sexual orientation, or if she may turn down requests based on her belief that marriage is only between men and women. On Friday, the Colorado Attorney General's Office submitted its response to Smith's opening brief, asserting that the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act does not impermissibly infringe on Smith's speech. Rather, it requires businesses providing goods and services to the public to refrain from turning away customers because of who they are. "A book is expressive; selling a book to the public is not. Designing a home is expressive; selling that design service to the public is not," the office wrote. "By regulating routine commercial conduct, the Act addresses what a business does and not what it says." The Courts Carolina Journal: Stein asks judge to block ruling, cites state elections board’s investigation .....U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagles refused on Tuesday to grant Stein a preliminary injunction against the Wake D.A. But Stein has filed an emergency motion for an injunction as he pursues an appeal at the 4th U.S. Circuit Court in Richmond. The attorney general’s latest filing highlights evidence that the N.C. State Board of Elections recommended in 2021 that an investigation into Stein’s ad should end. Epoch Times: Alex Berenson Says He’s Going to Sue Biden Administration for Pressuring Twitter to Ban Him By Zachary Stieber .....Journalist Alex Berenson said on Aug. 12 that he plans to sue President Joe Biden and other government officials for pressuring Twitter to ban him. “I don’t have a target date yet, but I would like to move as quickly as possible. I believe I have a powerful claim and I want federal courts to hear it,” Berenson told The Epoch Times in an email. Berenson plans to file the lawsuit in federal court and name Andy Slavitt, a onetime White House COVID-19 response official, as a defendant. Among the evidence backing the alleged First Amendment violation: internal April 2021 messages from Twitter employees discussing a meeting with Slavitt and other White House officials. “How was WH,” one of the workers wrote in an internal Slack channel, according to screenshots Berenson published on Friday. Wall Street Journal: The White House and Twitter Censorship By The Editorial Board .....Twitter is a private company. But evidence of a direct connection between White House pressure and Twitter censorship bolsters the argument that social-media platforms can be sued as “state actors” for restricting speech in violation of the First Amendment. Courts have been reluctant, and properly so, to allow such lawsuits to proceed without evidence linking specific demands from government officials to censorship. Mr. Berenson has now shown that White House officials sought to conscript the platform into silencing him, and perhaps others who don’t toe the White House line on Covid. Have Biden officials pressured other platforms to censor users who express contrarian views on other topics such as climate change? The Media New York Times: Defamation Suit About Election Falsehoods Puts Fox on Its Heels By Jeremy W. Peters .....First Amendment scholars say the case is a rarity in libel law. Defamation claims typically involve a single disputed statement. But Dominion’s complaint is replete with example after example of false statements, many of them made after the facts were widely known. And such suits are often quickly dismissed, because of the First Amendment’s broad free speech protections and the high-powered lawyers available to a major media company like Fox. If they do go forward, they are usually settled out of court to spare both sides the costly spectacle of a trial. But Dominion’s $1.6 billion case against Fox has been steadily progressing in Delaware state court this summer, inching ever closer to trial. There have been no moves from either side toward a settlement, according to interviews with several people involved in the case. The two companies are deep into document discovery, combing through years of each other’s emails and text messages, and taking depositions. Free Expression Daily Beast: Salman Rushdie’s Stabbing Shows the Danger of Conflating Words With ‘Violence’ By Greg Lukianoff and Robert Shibley .....Author Salman Rushdie was brutally stabbed on Friday prior to a lecture in New York state in front of a crowd of horrified onlookers. The motive for the attack is, thus far, unclear, but given that Rushdie spent nine years in hiding after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a 1989 fatwa authorizing his murder over his authorship of the novel, The Satanic Verses—which the Ayatollah considered blasphemous—and that Rushdie was attacked just as he was about to give a speech, an effort to silence Rushdie permanently through violence seems likely. The message sent by a successful attack on Rushdie is loud and unmistakable: your hurtful speech is the equivalent of violence against me and my values, and you deserve violence in return. It’s a message intended not just for Rushdie, but for anyone who might be tempted to follow in his footsteps. Candidates and Campaigns Daily Caller: Raphael Warnock Swore Off Corporate PAC Money — But Took Thousands From PACs Funded By Big Corporations By Gabe Kaminsky .....Sen. Raphael Warnock has collected tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from political action committees (PAC) funded by corporations this election cycle, records show. At the same time, the Georgia Democrat has said he’s “never taken a dime of corporate PAC money” and pledged not to do so. Axios: Associates of N.C. AG's 2020 opponent donated to Wake County DA By Lucille Sherman .....People close to North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein's 2022 opponent donated to the same Wake County district attorney whose office is pursuing a criminal investigation into Stein's campaign. Forsyth County DA Jim O'Neill's wife, assistant Forsyth DA Jennifer Martin, and a man who's O'Neill's business partner funneled cash into Freeman's campaign for reelection ahead of her May primary this year, campaign finance records show. Those donations came around the same time Freeman's office was deciding whether to take a case against Stein to a grand jury, court records show... The donations total just shy of $3,000, a fraction of the more than $200,000 Freeman has raised for her re-election so far. Freeman has emphasized that she recused herself in the case, which is being handled by Assistant District Attorney David Saacks... The other side: In an email to Axios Sunday, O'Neill said his wife has a "constitutional right to support the candidates she chooses to support." The States Politico: States want to better patrol social media. These are the challenges. By Katelyn Cordero .....In the weeks following a Buffalo shooting in May in which 10 Black people were killed at a supermarket, New York lawmakers passed two bills that would create mechanisms to require more oversight on extremist and violent messages... Ken Goldberg, a First Amendment attorney in Virginia, questioned that the vagueness of the New York law could lead to “unintended consequences.” “What we have here is the potential for mischief at the hands of law enforcement,” Goldberg said. “The executive order says we are going to monitor social media sites, and we are going to have a task force that does this. But there is often potential for abuse and abuse of this monitoring in a way that could disproportionately affect certain groups, so I think there is concern that you need some controls.” 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 First Amendment rights to freely speak, assemble, publish, and petition the government. 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