In the News
Restoration News Media: Rittenhouse takes aim at free speech
By Corey Friedman
It’s often cheaper to pay a libel troll’s toll than to see a case through to its inevitable result…
News outlets should mount a vigorous defense, First Amendment lawyer Ari Cohn argues.
“Media companies that give nuisance settlements to meritless defamation plaintiffs are only slightly less of a threat to free speech than the plaintiffs themselves,” Cohn wrote in a Nov. 24 tweet. “We need widespread anti-SLAPP laws, but we also need the deep pocket defendants to suck it up and take a stand.”
Anti-SLAPP statutes put strategic lawsuits against public participation — which often take the form of flimsy libel and defamation complaints — on the fast track to dismissal and sometimes allow defendants to recover legal fees. This essential protection is currently lacking in 19 states, according to the Washington-based Institute for Free Speech.
[Ed. note: Read our recently released anti-SLAPP report here.]
Biden Administration
By Jacob Sullum
Last July, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory that called for a “whole-of-society” effort to combat the “urgent threat to public health” posed by “health misinformation.” Today Murthy asked tech companies to do their part by turning over data on “COVID-19 misinformation,” including its sources and its propagation through search engines, social media platforms, instant messaging services, and e-commerce sites, by May 2.
While Murthy himself has no power to compel disclosure of that information, the companies have strong incentives to cooperate, since the Biden administration can make life difficult for them by filing lawsuits, writing regulations, and supporting new legislation…
All of this is more than a little creepy in a country where people have a constitutional right to express their opinions, even when they are outlandish and ill-founded.
Donor Exposure
CBC News: Numbers suggest many American protest convoy donors also gave to Trump, Republicans
By Elizabeth Thompson and Roberto Rocha
Out of 200 of the top American donors to the convoy protest that paralyzed downtown Ottawa and blocked parts of the Canada-U.S. border, half have names matching those of donors to Republican candidates, the Republican Party or former U.S. President Donald Trump, according to analysis by CBC News.
A search of the U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) campaign finance database for 200 of the top American donations to GiveSendGo’s convoy crowdfunding campaign shows that 50 per cent of those donors have names and zip codes matching those of people who have donated in the past to the Republican Party, one of its political action committees or Republican candidates…
The names of the vast majority of Americans donors to the convoy protest would not have been known had the GiveSendGo donation site not been hacked. CBC’s analysis shows that more than three-quarters of those 200 American donors to the convoy campaign chose to publicly list their donations as anonymous, under their first names only or under an alias such as “Freedom.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said that the government should examine the role that money donated from outside Canada played in the protest.
“There are also reflections we have to have on misinformation and disinformation and looking at … the role of foreign money and foreign influence in attempts to undermine or even destabilize our democracy,” Trudeau told reporters last week when asked about lessons the government has learned from the protest.
[Ed. note: Read IFS Research Director Scott Blackburn’s recently published Reason op-ed on the truckers’ convoy and the importance of donor privacy.]
The Courts
Indianapolis Star: Todd Rokita says ACLU shouldn’t ‘waste the court’s time or taxpayers’ resources’
By Johnny Magdaleno
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita is asking a federal court to throw out a lawsuit that claims his office violated the First Amendment when it denied a political writer access to an in-person news conference last year.
In a three-page court motion filed Wednesday with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Rokita and his staff wrote that Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, a radio host at WIBC who also runs the news website IndyPolitics.org, has no grounds for a lawsuit because the Constitution doesn’t grant him the “right to hear a government official deliver a message in person, as opposed to through a livestream.”
Free Expression
Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): The New Blacklist: “Metropolitan Opera Says It Will Cut Ties with Pro-Putin Artists”
By Eugene Volokh
The New York Times (Javier Hernandez) reported this Sunday:
“The Metropolitan Opera said on Sunday that it would no longer engage with performers or other institutions that have voiced support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, becoming the latest cultural organization to seek to distance itself from some Russian artists amid Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.”…
I certainly don’t support Putin, but I don’t support ideological blacklists, either, whether it’s of artists who back Putin, or who back the Chinese government, or who back Trump or Biden or Ocasio-Cortez. Indeed, one problem with these blacklists is that they lead to calls for broader blacklists. (Indeed, what about Chinese performers who, whether out of ideological conviction or misplaced patriotism or fear of reprisal, have spoken out in support of Xi Jinping?)…
In some states, such blacklisting would indeed be illegal, at least when the artists are viewed as employees rather than independent contractors under state law (see my Private Employees’ Speech and Political Activity: Statutory Protection Against Employer Retaliation); indeed, I expect that would be true of my own California.
The States
Anchorage Daily News: Alaska campaign finance commission erases all limits on donations to political candidates
By Nathaniel Herz
The commission charged with enforcing Alaska’s campaign finance laws has lifted all limits on donations to candidates for governor, state legislative seats and municipal races — a decision that could allow a huge wave of cash to flow into Anchorage elections next month and state elections in August.
The Alaska Public Offices Commission, in an order released late Thursday, eliminated the caps in response to a federal court’s decision in a years-long lawsuit that pitted free speech rights against limits set by state lawmakers to curb the influence of money on Alaska politics.
The federal court had invalidated Alaska’s $500-a-year individual donation limit to candidates, saying it was too low. But it did not set new limits, leaving the question of replacement caps in the hands of the commission and the state Legislature.
City Journal: Silencing Parent Advocates
By Ethan Blevins
Around midnight on December 22, the New York City Panel for Education Policy wrapped up a seven-hour meeting by passing policy D-210, billed as a measure to combat harassment and discrimination. Unfortunately, the regulation risks chilling the speech of parent advocates by giving public officials a tool to silence dissent. Siding with free speech means rescinding this ill-conceived, constitutionally dubious rule.
Bangor Daily News: Bill to revive buffer zones at Maine abortion clinics tries to avoid free-speech challenges
By Jessica Piper
A bill in the Maine Legislature aims to prevent anti-abortion protesters from demonstrating directly outside of clinics, while avoiding legal challenges that threatened a similar effort in Portland nearly a decade ago.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Jay McCreight, D-Harpswell, would allow any health care provider to establish a “medical safety zone” within 8 feet of its doors and make it a misdemeanor for people to linger with some exceptions. It would make Maine the fourth state with a law on the books to limit protests within a certain distance of a clinic’s doors, according to the pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute.
Sacramento Bee: Virginia Supreme Court denies Devin Nunes’ appeal, says he can’t sue Republican strategist
By Gillian Brassil
The Virginia Supreme Court denied Devin Nunes’ appeal to continue suing a Republican strategist whom the former California congressman claimed had conspired to defame him… Nunes, who previously represented the area surrounding Tulare for about two decades, was suing the strategist, Liz Mair, alongside McClatchy, the parent company of The Bee, over a news story published in 2018. He sought $150 million from Mair in the case that was filed in Virginia’s Albemarle County Circuit Court.
“I thank the Court for upholding the First Amendment and my — and all Americans’ — rights of free speech,” Mair wrote in a statement to The Bee.
Albany Times-Union: Lt. gov.’s campaign expenses show conflicts with taxpayer refunds
By Chris Bragg
The Times Union found a dozen instances where Benjamin submitted vouchers claiming the full, taxpayer-funded reimbursement for traveling from New York City to Albany; during those same trips, a campaign-issued debit card was used to pay for gasoline. Each time he’d sought full taxpayer reimbursement for the 12 trips, Benjamin stated he was the one bearing the costs.
