Free Speech
Politico: Why Even Nazis Deserve Free Speech
By Greg Lukianoff and Nico Perrino
If your social media newsfeed doesn’t provide ample anecdotal evidence that free speech is suffering a public relations crisis, look to the polling: A recent Knight Foundation study found that fewer than 50 percent of high school students think that people should be free to say things that are offensive to others.
The New York Times opinion page, for its part, has run three columns since April questioning the value of free speech for all, the most recent imploring the ACLU to “rethink free speech”-the same ACLU that at the height of Nazism, Communism and Jim Crow in 1940 released a leaflet entitled, “Why we defend civil liberty even for Nazis, Fascists and Communists.”…
What does history suggest as the best course of action to win the benefits of an open society while stemming the tide of authoritarians of any stripe? It tells us to have a high tolerance for differing opinions, and no tolerance for political violence. What distinguishes liberal societies from illiberal ones is that liberal societies use words, not violence or censorship to settle disputes…
Gay marriage champion and author Jonathan Rauch reminds us that in the same way that breaking a thermometer doesn’t change the temperature, censoring ideas doesn’t make them go away-it only makes us ignorant of their existence.
Reason: A ‘Broader’ Understanding of the First Amendment That Excludes Right-Wing Racists
By Jacob Sullum
K-Sue Park, a critical race studies fellow at UCLA, takes a more nuanced (or maybe just more confusing) position, arguing that the ACLU’s reading of the First Amendment is too “narrow,” by which she means it is too broad…
By asking the ACLU to think about freedom of speech “in a broader context,” she is actually asking the ACLU to abandon the principle altogether. The whole point of the principle is that it applies regardless of who you are or what you are saying. If the ACLU gave up its “colorblind logic” and started using racial and ideological filters to pick First Amendment cases, it would no longer be defending freedom of speech; it would be defending the interests of particular social and political groups.
Freedom of speech does not require the “level playing field” of Park’s dreams. It is obviously true that wealth helps people get their messages across. So do fame, good looks, and verbal felicity. But those advantages do not render freedom of speech a nullity, any more than applying the Fourth Amendment to mansions as well as shacks or guaranteeing due process to rich as well as poor defendants makes those protections meaningless. To the contrary, legally guaranteed rights matter most to people without the social and political connections that might provide protection from official harassment.
Electronic Frontier Foundation: Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression
By Jeremy Malcolm, Cindy Cohn, and Danny O’Brien
All fair-minded people must stand against the hateful violence and aggression that seems to be growing across our country. But we must also recognize that on the Internet, any tactic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against others, including people whose opinions we agree with…
Protecting free speech is not something we do because we agree with all of the speech that gets protected. We do it because we believe that no one-not the government and not private commercial enterprises-should decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t…
We at EFF defend the right of anyone to choose what speech they provide online; platforms have a First Amendment right to decide what speech does and does not appear on their platforms. That’s what laws like CDA 230 in the United States enable and protect.
But we strongly believe that what GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare did here was dangerous. That’s because, even when the facts are the most vile, we must remain vigilant when platforms exercise these rights. Because Internet intermediaries, especially those with few competitors, control so much online speech, the consequences of their decisions have far-reaching impacts on speech around the world.
Reason: Protect Internet Companies’ Freedom to Refuse to Host Racists, or Anyone Else They Don’t Like
By Scott Shackford
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is worried that careless censorship by companies will bolster the efforts by governments to turn these decisions into demands…
There is no outcome to a speech conflict (or really any conflict that involves liberty) that doesn’t involve either the government or a private enterprise making a decision. A newspaper (a private commercial enterprise) decides what letters to run, what news stories to run, which quotes to use, and even who writes for them. The government determines when speech crosses over into incitement, libel, or another form of unprotected expression…
Further into the post, EFF takes a more nuanced position: What they really want is a more transparent process open to appeals before an internet service cuts off a customer’s ability to communicate.
That would certainly be a better business practice than how Prince decided to approach The Daily Stormer. But it is still CloudFlare’s decision. Prince and his colleagues can put a new process in place, but it’s still their process. They are still deciding who gets a platform. They are not surrendering the right to freedom of association, and they absolutely shouldn’t surrender that right.
FEC
Bloomberg BNA: FEC Debates Approving Planned App to Steer Contributions
By Kenneth P. Doyle
The Federal Election Commission discussed Aug. 17 but didn’t vote on a proposal from a pair of entrepreneurs for a new app that would allow users to round up the change from purchases and contribute that amount to certain Democratic congressional candidates.
The discussion followed a comment from a watchdog group supporting tougher campaign finance rules that suggested FEC approval of the proposal could grant too much power to a private company to steer contributions…
In other action on agenda items at the Aug. 17 open commission meeting, the FEC commissioners approved most findings of a staff audit of the Illinois Republican Party, which found thousands of dollars worth of apparent violations of reporting and recordkeeping rules. The commissioners voted to reject two findings related to payments for party committee mailings.
The FEC also approved unanimously an advisory opinion request AO 2017-08 made on behalf of Point Bridge Capital, a financial firm that wants to establish an exchange traded fund (ETF) of company stocks based on companies’ support for a particular political party and its candidates. The plan approved by the FEC would use campaign finance disclosure reports filed with the agency to gauge corporate support for parties and candidates.
Corporate Speech
Vox: Are corporations becoming the new arbiters of public morality?
By Tara Isabella Burton
In the aftermath of the white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia – and Donald Trump’s controversially tepid response – a surprising group has emerged as the self-proclaimed voice of public morality: corporations.
Members of Trump’s Manufacturing Jobs Initiative and his Strategy and Policy Forum, including the CEOs of companies like Blackstone and 3M, determined that Trump’s implicit association with white supremacists was bad for the nation – or at least, bad for business. They resigned from the advisory positions, prompting the president to eventually just shut the councils down completely.
The CEOs’ resignations are part of a broader trend of major corporations taking a public stand on issues of social justice…
The political decisions of corporations on both sides of the political aisle have influenced the spending choices of their supporters – or their detractors – as corporate branding has become even more politicized.
Candidates and Campaigns
BuzzFeed News: Trump’s Son In Crosshairs Of Special Counsel Mueller
By Aram Roston
While it’s unclear which law is at issue, federal law forbids campaign officials from soliciting or accepting “things of value” from foreign nationals. But for the violation to rise to a criminal matter rather than just an administrative one, it has to be a “willful” violation, lawyers explained. So to obtain an indictment against Trump Jr., prosecutors would have to establish that he acted with criminal intent, experts said…
Three public interest groups in July filed complaints with the FEC and the Justice Department, requesting an investigation into whether election laws were violated at the June 9 meeting. Lawrence Noble, general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit election law group that joined in the complaint, said that to get a criminal indictment prosecutors would “want to show that Donald Trump Jr. specifically knew that he was talking to a foreign national, and that he was encouraging them to take action that would support the campaign.” He said willfulness can be difficult to prove: “That means that you know what you were doing, and you knew it was illegal.”
The States
Kansas City Star: Deluge of dark money and secret donors could flood 2018 elections in Missouri and Kansas
By Editorial Board
Under its rules, the groups can spend millions supporting political candidates and causes without disclosing their donors.
That’s why it’s called dark money. It’s money that will soon blot out the political sun, like an eclipse…
We’d ask those groups to simply knock it off, but that wouldn’t work. Independent, secret spending is now embedded in our politics, enriching television stations, special interests and the political class.
But it isn’t too early to recommend that voters ignore political messages from outside groups.
Dark money campaigns will work only if voters allow them to. Dump mailers in the trash. Hit the mute button when a scurrilous commercial interrupts your favorite show.
Voters can’t stop outside groups from spending tens of millions of dollars on campaigns next year. They can make sure all that money is wasted by refusing to buy what dark money donors are trying to sell.
Albuquerque Journal: Committee raising tens of thousands of dollars to support publicly financed Keller
By Martin Salazar
As Albuquerque’s only publicly financed mayoral candidate, Tim Keller regularly tells voters that he’s “walking the walk” so that he’s beholden to the community and not to donors and special interests should he be elected mayor.
“How we get to City Hall matters,” Keller said at one mayoral forum earlier this summer. “I stand for keeping big money out of politics.”…
But Keller’s pronouncement isn’t stopping his supporters from contributing tens of thousands of dollars to a committee set up to back his mayoral bid…
To be sure, what ABQ Forward Together is doing is legal under the rules governing city elections, so long as the candidate and his campaign are not coordinating with the measure finance committee…
But not everyone sees the distinction.
“Keller’s grab of public funds and the huge donation totals in the committee run by his former campaign manager only feeds the skepticism and suspicions of the sucker taxpayers who now know there are no bounds for hypocritical politicians,” said Albuquerque attorney Pat Rogers, who is active in Republican Party circles.
