The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech November 4, 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 [email protected]. In the News San Francisco Chronicle: Beauty pageant has First Amendment right to exclude transgender contestants, court rules By Bob Egelko .....A national beauty pageant that bars transgender women as contestants is exercising its constitutional right of free speech to express its “ideal vision of American womanhood,” says a divided federal appeals court. Citing the Supreme Court’s 1995 decision allowing sponsors of the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Boston to exclude a gay, lesbian and bisexual group, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled Wednesday that Miss United States of America acted legally when it refused to allow Anita Noelle Green to compete in its 2019 pageant… The ruling was also praised by Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor who filed a brief on behalf of the Libertarian Law Council and the Institute for Free Speech in support of the pageant sponsors. The Courts Center Square: North Carolina attorney general argues law against false campaign statements chills free speech By Victor Skinner .....A North Carolina election law that prohibits false and derogatory statements against political candidates "threatens to chill speech at the heart of democratic process," state Attorney General Josh Stein argued in a federal court filing this week. Congress Center Square: Probe launched into Homeland Security’s 'taxpayer-funded censorship campaign' By Casey Harper .....House Oversight Committee Republicans are kicking off an investigation into what they they called a “taxpayer-funded censorship campaign” at the Department of Homeland Security. Reason: Senator Dick Durbin Doesn't Understand the First Amendment By Emma Camp .....It is a troubling sign when politicians seem eager to label speech they dislike as not "free speech." For one, it indicates a flawed legal understanding of the First Amendment—something particularly worrying from a top-ranked politician and the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. However, Durbin's statements also reveal a deeper problem than a mere legal misunderstanding: A censorious impulse, and the desire to quash the speech of your enemies under nebulous accusations of harm. Privacy Daily Caller: Left-Wing Group Appears To Threaten Americans Who Don’t Vote By Michael Ginsberg .....The left-wing organization America Votes distributed mailers appearing to use threats to bully Nevadans into casting their votes in the Nov. 8 midterm elections. “Who you vote for is private, but whether you vote is a matter of public record. We will be reviewing public records after the election to determine whether or not you joined your neighbors in voting,” the mailers say, according to one shared on Twitter by Nevada Independent CEO Jon Ralston. Candidates and Campaigns New York Times: Fueled by Billionaires, Political Spending Shatters Records Again By Jonathan Weisman and Rachel Shorey .....Fueled by an expanding class of billionaires, political spending on the 2022 midterm elections will shatter records at the state and federal levels, with much of it from largely unregulated super PACs financed with enormous checks written mainly by Republican megadonors. “We’ve broken records with our broken records,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the nonpartisan Open Secrets, which estimated on Thursday that total spending in 2021 and 2022 would reach $16.7 billion when tallied after Election Day, easily surpassing the previous midterm record of $14 billion set in 2018. Roll Call: Amazon, other PACs resume donations to electoral objectors By Kate Ackley .....After suspending donations to Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election, a collection of PACs, including those of Amazon and Caterpillar, restarted contributions ahead of midterm elections in which the GOP is favored to win House control. Online Speech Platforms The Atlantic: Is Gmail Silencing Republicans? By Kaitlyn Tiffany .....It started as strange conflicts sometimes do: with a couple of older people telling their son that something is wrong with their shared email account. “My parents, who have a Gmail account, aren’t getting my campaign emails,” Representative Greg Steube of Florida told Google CEO Sundar Pichai in July 2020, during a congressional hearing that was ostensibly about antitrust law. “My question is, why is this only happening to Republicans?” Though this exchange was widely regarded as goofy and kind of random, it started a conversation about Republicans’ relationship to the email inbox and Google’s alleged interference with it. This spring, the conflict escalated following the publication of a study conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, which found that Gmail sent most emails from “left-wing” candidates to the inbox and most emails from “right-wing” candidates to the spam folder. Over the next couple of months, Republicans in Congress took private meetings with Google’s chief legal officer and railed against the company in public. Then, in June, a group of Republican senators introduced a bill called the Political BIAS Emails Act, which would “prohibit providers of email services from using filtering algorithms to flag emails from political campaigns that consumers have elected to receive as spam.” 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. Please support the Institute's mission by clicking here. For further information, visit www.ifs.org. 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