For the second segment of GrassRoot Ohio, We get the update of the current Anti-Protesting Bills (HB 22, HB 109, and SB 41).  Bills that would fine, create penalties or even felonize peaceful protests, and chill our First Amendment Rights of speech and assembly.  Kristen Beireis and Joan VanBecelaere, organizers with Our Voices Together and Unitarian Universalist Justice Ohio, are here to update us and tell us how we can help Stop These Bills - to register and get more information:  https://www.facebook.com/UUJusticeOhio
&
http://www.uujo.org/

Grassroot Ohio ENDING

Ohio Anti-Protest Bills - Statehouse Stomp

For decades, a federal tax exemption has allowed tax-free housing for pastors who live in their church communities, until a lawsuit from an atheist organization challenged the housing allowance. Pastor Chris Butler gives us a look inside his southside Chicago church and explains why his community, and others like it, rely on this tax rule—and what would happen if it disappeared.

Live Where You Serve

I fly off to London on Friday.  Very much looking forward to all the gigs around England, Scotland, events around COP26, etc. -- but I'm especially looking forward to singing at the rally against extraditing Julian Assange to the US on Saturday, October 23rd.  While still here in my little home studio in Portland, I thought I'd render a version of the song I'll be singing that afternoon outside the Royal Courts of Justice.

The song can also be found as the latest episode of This Week with David Rovics, wherever podcasts are found.

Behind These Prison Walls

In the 3rd installment on free speech, we examine first amendment struggles with new media. Social media-- unchecked, internet speech on private platforms where, often, nobody is held liable-- is the obvious, pressing example. BUT it's still Halloween-adjacent, so we're taking a lighter look at the War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938, too.

"War of the Worlds" to Social Media, Free Speech Pt 3

Jay and Eric discuss how people are starting to stand up and speak out against Cancel Culture while leaders in The Unites States are doubling down on divisive rhetoric. President Joe Biden and Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen call on Social Media to censor users to combat "Misinformation," while 48% of registered Democratic voters want to side with the establishment and give State and Federal Governments the authority to criminalize 'dissenting voices' against the narrative. 

Also, hundreds of doctors and scientists call for the censorship of podcasters who question the science behind COVID19 origins, vaccines, and their side effects. And who or what is this 'Blackrock' corporation, and why does it matter?

Plus a clip from Tulsi Gabbard with reactions from Jay and Eric.

Dystopia Is Upon Us. Again. (January 2022 Edition)

We talk a lot about free speech in different countries, and about the history of free speech in the US — but what about the global history of this fundamental concept? A new book released today, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media by Jacob Mchangama, tackles exactly this subject in great and insightful detail. This week, Jacob joins us on the podcast to discuss the sweeping story of free speech throughout the ages and around the world.

The Techdirt Podcast

A Global History Of Free Speech

In Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, the Danish activist and scholar Jacob Mchangama argues there has always been a tension between "elite speech" and "egalitarian speech" and that today's battles over Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the latest in a long line of attempts by the powerful to silence the masses.

The 43-year-old founder of the think tank Justitia tells me how the "Danish cartoon controversy" intensified his commitment to free speech, why hate speech laws empower authoritarians and hurt the people they are designed to protect, and why he's optimistic that the current global "free speech recession" will be eventually be beaten back.

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The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie

Jacob Mchangama: How Hate Speech Laws Punish Minorities

A highly partisan bill about citizen militias gathering in public is set to go before the Idaho Senate this session.

HB 475 Passes House On Partisan Vote

The United States Federal Government's policy against “Mis, Dis, and Malinformation” basically outlaws many First Amendment Rights. Jason Cousineau and Eric Renderking Fisk discuss the latest efforts from Washington D.C. through the new 'Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency' agency and the penalties for speaking out against the official narrative or simply asking questions about COVID origins and vaccine mandates. [Recorded February 18th, 2022.]

The Fedora Chronicles Radio Show

Podcasting as an Act Of Violence Against The Establishment.

Show Links & Sources

HOST KiM MONSON [00:23:55]We're at a defining moment in America. And as messy and complex as this is, there's this blessing that the truth is coming out on all of this. Let's finish up with January 6, -- as you now call it, J6 -- because I guess you're getting to know it very well. Where is that in [inaudible]? [17.6s]
 
JOHN EASTMAN [00:24:13]So, you know, they've subpoenaed everybody that had anything to do with raising questions about the election, as if somehow that provoked what happened at the Capitol on January 6th. And so they couldn't get the information for me because I've got attorney-client and other constitutional right privileges that I asserted before the J6 committee. So they subpoenaed my phone company. We filed a court action to block my phone company from turning over-- not just all of my emails, my -- [correcting himself] excuse me, not e-mails -- my texts and my phone communications -- but those of anybody else on my account -- so, my wife, my son, my daughter. [laughs incredulously]. ... You know, this is what you call classic fishing expedition, to try and find something. We have a Fourth Amendment designed for -- this is like the old British king that [says], "I don't know if there's any been crime committed, but I know you people well enough to know that you must have been committing crimes. So, I'm going to issue a general warrant to allow my officers just to look at whatever they want, to see what they find. And then if they find any evidence of illegality, or anything that can be portrayed as evidence of illegality, we'll then bring charges." This is what the Fourth Amendment was designed to prohibit. And yet the J6 committee subpoenas are doing exactly that. They're massive fishing expeditions.  When they couldn't get it from my phone company because of the lawsuit we filed, they discovered that my emails on my old employer at Chapman University had been archived, unbeknownst to me. When I removed them, when I left that university, they were supposed to be gone. But they had -- and they were going to turn over 94,000 pages of documents of my emails that were in the archive system, without my ability to even review them for privilege. I ran a legal clinic at Chapman University. I had dozens of clients whose attorney-client privilege materials were going to be in that cache of documents, and this was not anything specific to Jan. 6: "Did Eastman have any communications with the Proud Boys or anybody that's been indicted or any or arrested? We wanted everything from November through January in any way related to the election. This goes after core political speech in a very substantial way. So, they are First Amendment rights. It's like I said, an unreasonable dragnet looking -- a general warrant -- it's Fourth Amendment. It's protected material that I've asserted Fifth Amendment privilege over. It's attorney-client material, so my clients are being deprived of their Sixth Amendment rights, to have counsel in confidential conversations. I mean, they are shredding four of the ten Bill of Rights in their unfettered effort to try and build a narrative that will salvage the hemorrhaging on their political aspirations. This is egregious! And by the way, if anybody wants to help, I've got lawyers in D.C.. I've got lawyers in California. I've got lawyers elsewhere in the country, helping. We set up a legal defense fund.  And I didn't do GoFundMe because I didn't want them to fund unfund me! [laughs] [142.4s]

On KLZ with Kim Monson, John Eastman discusses Jan. 6 committee subpoena, Feb. 11, 2022

Oral argument before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on December 9, 2021 in Leonard Mazzola v. Anthony Togliatti, et al., Case Numbers 20 - 4103 20 - 4105. Case alleging First Amendment Retaliation. For more information, visit www.ChandraLaw.com.

2021 - 12 - 09 - Mazzola v. Togliatti, et al. - Case Nos 20 - 4103 20 - 4105 ORAL ARGUMENT

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar and Melissa Chen are the outspoken, courageous co-founders of Ideas Beyond Borders (IBB), a nonprofit that translates books about pluralism, science, civil liberties, and critical thinking like John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now into Arabic and distributes them for free as e-books throughout the Middle East. They've also translated thousands of Wikipedia pages on the same topics and made them available to an audience desperately interested in new ways of thinking about culture, politics, and ideas.

Faisal left Iraq after extremists killed his brother and threatened his life, and Melissa was once a persona non grata in her native Singapore due to free speech activism. Founded in 2017, IBB is also funding underground girls schools in Afghanistan, actively helping Afghans find refuge from the Taliban, and running a campaign against censorship at endbannedbooks.org. Disclosure: I'm on the board of Ideas Beyond Borders.

This Reason Interview podcast was taped live on Monday, May 2, 2022, as part of the Reason Speakeasy series, held monthly in New York City. Go here for podcast and video versions of past events.

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The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, Melissa Chen: Bringing Enlightenment Values to the Middle East

ski🎿

In the late 1970s, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) famously—and controversially—defended the right of neo-Nazis to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, which was home to many Holocaust survivors. It was a defining moment for the group and for the idea that free speech, no matter how vile, must be guaranteed to everyone.

But over the past 20 years—and especially over the past few years—the ACLU has seemingly retreated from its unwavering defense of free speech in favor of supporting progressive candidates and causes. It ran ads supporting Stacey Abrams in her gubernatorial campaign in Georgia, for instance. It's called for the forgiveness of $50,000 in student loan debt. It even ghostwrote and placed the Washington Post op-ed about domestic violence that led to Amber Heard losing a defamation case against Johnny Depp.

Its lack of focus on its traditional mission of defending free speech has gotten to a point where its former executive director, who led the group during the Skokie controversy, has become one of its biggest critics. "If the Skokie case happened again," Ira Glasser told me in 2020, "would the ACLU take it? I don't know."

But if the ACLU is retreating, another free speech group is expanding to fill the void left behind. Founded in 1999 to combat speech codes on college campuses, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—FIRE—has announced a new name and an expanded mission of defending free speech off-campus as well as on. 

The new name is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the group has announced "a three-year, $75 million litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values." FIRE's longtime president is Greg Lukianoff, the co-author of the bestselling book The Coddling of the American Mind, and, as it happens, a former employee of the ACLU—a group for which he has lots of praise. 

In today's episode, he tells me about why he's concerned that support for what he calls the "culture of free speech"—broad-based belief in the value of tolerance and civil disagreement—has been declining for the better part of a decade and how FIRE is going to work to turn that around.

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Greg Lukianoff: Saving the 'Culture of Free Speech'

A University of Miami School of Law professor is proposing a “redo” of the First and Second Amendments in order to eliminate free speech, the free press, and the right to bear arms.

Liberal law professor proposes a ‘redo’ of First and Second Amendments - 061022

In 2018, heroic foster care mothers had to give up their life’s work when the City of Philadelphia forced a 200-year-old Catholic foster care agency to close because of its religious beliefs. This is the story of how Sharonell Fulton, Toni Simms-Busch, and their foster care agency fought for their right to serve vulnerable children and won—unanimously—at the Supreme Court.

Free to Foster

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishop’s has established July 22-29 as Religious Freedom Week in the United States. Religious freedom allows the Church, and all religious communities, to live out their faith in public and to serve the good of all. As Catholics, we are encouraged to pray, reflect, and act to promote religious freedom. Joining hosts Jen Mauro and Mike Walsh this week is Father Joseph D. Wallace, Diocese of Camden director of Ecumenical and Inter-religious Affairs and pastor of Christ the Redeemer Parish, Atco. Fr. Wallace, a columnist of the Catholic Star Herald, has written extensively on religious freedom and the relationship between the Catholic Church and the other world religions. 
[Producer’s note: this episode was recorded before the SCOTUS decision on Dobbs was announced.)

To learn more about Religious Freedom Week, check out https://www.usccb.org/committees/religious-liberty/religious-freedom-week 

To read more from Fr. Wallace, check out all his Catholic Star Herald columns at: https://catholicstarherald.org/author/father-joseph-d-wallace/ 

Listen to Talking Catholic everywhere podcasts can be found, at https://talking.catholicstarherald.org/show/talking-catholic, or catch us on Domestic Church Media radio Sundays at 11 AM or Mondays at 4 PM domesticchurchmedia.org.

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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TalkingCatholic
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Religious Freedom Week 2022

Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix, by Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty, tells the story of how people such as Robert Crumb, Trina Robbins, and Art Spiegelman redefined not just what comic books were capable of but what gets counted as art.

Beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s, the characters Doherty writes about shook up pop culture and the high art world, but they also fought for radical, creative, individualized expression in an age of figurative and literal censorship. In today's world of cancel culture and speech codes, there's a lot of lessons to be learned from their struggles. Nick Gillespie interviews Doherty about all that, plus his previous books such as This Is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground and Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. 

This episode of The Reason Interview was recorded in front of a live audience in New York City on Monday, June 20, 2022, as part of our Reason Speakeasy series, where we host monthly conversations about free speech, creative expression, and maverick thinking.

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Brian Doherty: From MAD Magazine to Maus

The Techdirt Podcast, hosted by Michael Masnick.

Touring singer/songwriter, frequent contributor to Counterpunch, host of the podcast, This Week with David Rovics.

Founded in 1968, Reason is the planet's leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Our podcast offerings include:

The Reason Roundtable
Every Monday, the libertarian editors of the magazine of “Free Minds and Free Markets”—Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Peter Suderman—discuss and debate the week’s biggest stories and what fresh hell awaits us all.

The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie
Want to know what comes next in politics, culture, and libertarian ideas? Reason’s Nick Gillespie hosts relentlessly interesting interviews with the activists, artists, authors, entrepreneurs, newsmakers, and politicians who are defining the 21st century.

The Soho Forum Debates
Reason presents a libertarian-themed debate series recorded monthly before a live audience in New York City. Moderated by former Barron's Economics Editor Gene Epstein, the Soho Forum features Nobel prize winners, radical thinkers, and other public intellectuals facing off over the future of bitcoin, veganism, sex work, illegal drugs, electric vehicles, abortion, robotics, government debt, and other controversial topics.

Pop Culture & Current Events from classic film snobs, nerds & retropunks. True Crime, Conspiracy Theories & Paranormal, too. Author interviews, media reviews - All with self-deprecating humor.

Co-hosts Mike Walsh, Mary McCusker, Marianela Nunez and Kari Janisse interview Catholic leaders from in and around the Diocese of Camden about what brought them to where they are now and how they are bringing the faith to their communities.

In Season 2 of Stream of Conscience, we dive deeper into religious liberty to explore its two major components, the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. What did the framers of the Constitution mean when they forbade the “establishment” of religion? Who gets to decide what “free exercise” of religion includes? What’s the difference between the two clauses, and how do we argue cases arising under them? 

Season 2 also introduces cases that are not strictly religious liberty cases. We’ll talk about how other fundamental freedoms, like the freedom of speech and the right to property, intersect with religious liberty, and why it’s so important to understand these connections as we defend our freedoms.

GrassRoot Ohio radio/podcast- Fridays 5:00pm EST, streams @WGRN.org, 94.1FM Columbus.
Conversations with every-day people working on important issues, here in Columbus and all around Ohio.

In season 1, XXceedingly Persuasive (Mackenzie Joy Brennan, Court Attorney for the NY Supreme Court, and Brooke Rogers, politics writer), tackles the fearsome world of law and policy one issue at a time. 
XXceedingly Persuasive offers nuanced analyses in digestible doses-- adding the cultural, historical and political context to current issues. As young women from different backgrounds and fields, Mackenzie and Brooke show that these issues can be hashed out in a way that feels like a chat with friends: with an eye toward reason, an openness to learning and one or three Michelob Ultra(s)™️.

On Instagram @BrookeAngeline & @MkzJoyBrennan
On Twitter @BkeRogers & @MkzJoyBrennan
To watch video episodes or submit questions, go to mkzjoybrennan.com!

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Cover Photo by Natasha Wilson; text excerpt edited from United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515, 546 (1996)




(Hosts’ views are expressed solely in personal capacities and should not be imputed to the Court System, Judges or judicial officers therein, or any publication. No content is intended as political endorsement or formal legal advice.)

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