Real Assaults on Free Speech

If your only source of information about the First Amendment was Wisconsin's mainstream media, you would think that contemporary assaults on freedom of speech and expression are the product of "cancel culture," or social media censorship carried out by private tech companies, or the alleged hesitation of conservative students to speak out on UW campuses. While cancel culture, private censorship and free speech at the UW are all important and deserve attention, allowing them to dominate the media space allotted to First Amendment issues ends up diverting attention away from much more substantive and disturbing attacks on free speech rights. In this post I'm going to describe four current assaults on free speech and expression that have certainly been covered in the mainstream press, but not with the sense of urgency given to the issues previously mentioned. We need to reverse that. 

Free Speech Assault #1: The Murder of Laura Ann Carelton. The great writer George Bernard Shaw famously said, "Assassination is the extreme form of censorship." In August we saw a chilling example of that, when 66-year-old Laura Ann Carelton, an "unapologetic LGBTQ ally," was shot dead by an individual who objected to her display of pride flags. 

Laura Ann Carelton was murdered for flying a pride flag. Her killer's social media presence featured extreme anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. Such rhetoric is has increasingly become normalized on the political right. 

Carelton's assassin, who was himself killed in a shootout with police, maintained a social media site dripping with hatred of the LGBTQ community. Anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric occurs against a backdrop of the Republican Party sponsoring hundreds of bills in the last few years that would restrict LGBTQ+ rights in a number of areas. When allies like Ms. Carelton are targeted, it sends a chilling message to other activists who dare use their free speech rights to stand for equality. 

Free Speech Assault #2: The Marion County Record under siege. Also in August, police in tiny Marion County, Kansas, apparently at the behest of a local businesswoman upset with the Marion County Record's reporting about her, staged an unprecedented raid on the of the office of the newspaper. They even raided the home of the paper's publisher Eric Meyer (who previously spent almost twenty years at the Milwaukee Journal). Meyer's 98-year-old mother Joan, who was co-owner of the paper, literally died the day after the raid. What an awful tragedy and travesty. 

The paper has a long history of hard hitting reporting, which is increasingly rare for local newspapers. In fact it was the paper's brand of accountability journalism, not some bogus charge of enabling "identify theft" as claimed by the businesswoman, that led to the raid. The Reporters Committee For Freedom of the Press, along with 35 news outlets, condemned the siege. In a letter to the Marion police, they said in part: 

“Your department’s seizure of this equipment has substantially interfered with the Record’s First Amendment-protected newsgathering in this instance, and the department’s actions risk chilling the free flow of information in the public interest more broadly, including by dissuading sources from speaking to the Record and other Kansas news media in the future." 

It would be difficult to find a more stunning and stark violation of the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedom. To support the Marion County Record, you can subscribe here. 

Free Speech Assault #3: SLAPP in Wisconsin. One of the most shameless and shameful ways thin skinned, powerful individuals and interests attempt to silence their critics is through filing sham defamation lawsuits designed to bankrupt the critics. According to Cornell Law School's  Legal Information Institute, a  "Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation" (SLAPP) Suit, 

"refers to lawsuits brought by individuals and entities to dissuade their critics from continuing to produce negative publicity. By definition, SLAPP suits do not have any true legal claims against the critics. People bring SLAPP suits because they can either temporarily prevent their critics from making public statements against them or more commonly to make critics spend all of their time and resources defending the SLAPP suits." 

Wisconsin Republican Senator Cory Tomczyk is currently providing the nation with a textbook case of how to use a SLAPP suit to try and drive a publication out of business. The Wausau Pilot & Review in 2021 reported on a contentious meeting concerning a diversity resolution. As a part of the story, the reporter pointed out that Tomczyk, who was not in the Senate at the time, had been overheard calling a 13-year-old boy who supported the resolution a "fag." Tomczyk denies saying that, even though there were multiple witnesses who overheard it, but he did admit in a deposition to using that language at other times. His goal now seems to be to drive the newspaper out of business. 

Shereen Siewert is the editor of the Wausau Pilot & Review. The paper is fighting for survival because Wisconsin law does not allow defendants victimized by frivolous lawsuits to recoup legal expenses. 

In April a judge dismissed Tomczyk's lawsuit, which should have been the end of it. But he decided to appeal, for what appears to be a malicious desire to put the paper out of business. Because Wisconsin does not have anti-SLAPP legislation, what Tomczyk is doing is perfectly legal. Editor Shereen Siewert told journalist Bill Leuders,  "even if we win, we lose, because there is no way for us to counter sue or recoup our losses in any way … because we live in Wisconsin.”

On August 22, Wisconsin's State Senate Democrats introduced legislation that would allow Wisconsin to join more than 30 other states that ban sham SLAPP lawsuits. Unfortunately the legislation has little chance of passing, or even getting a hearing, as long as Wisconsin's legislature remains the poster child for extreme partisan gerrymandering. 

The Wausau Pilot & Review has set up a legal defense fund on GoFundMe. Please consider supporting them if you have the resources to do so. You will not only be helping to rescue a great newspaper, but also rescuing the First Amendment from a malicious attempt to undermine it. 

Free Speech Assault #4: Book Banning In Schools: Last month I posted a rant on the case of former Heyer Elementary School (Waukesha, WI) teacher Melissa Tempel, in which her termination was a direct result of her attempt to allow her first-graders to sing "Rainbowland" at a school sponsored spring concert. 

It turns out that so-called conservatives, who have spent years lamenting the loss of free speech, are promoting widespread censorship of literature in schools. According to a New York Times summary of a report from free speech advocacy group PEN America: 

From July to December 2022, PEN found 1,477 cases of books being removed, up from 1,149 during the previous six months. Since the organization began tracking bans in July 2021, it has counted more than 4,000 instances of book removals using news reports, public records requests and publicly available data.

The numbers don’t reflect the full scope of the efforts, since new mandates in some states requiring schools to vet all their reading material for potentially offensive content have led to mass removals of books, which PEN was unable to track, the report says.

The bulk of the censorship attempts appear to be aimed at any literature that includes LGBTQ+ or racial inequality themes. According to the NYT, in 2022 the most commonly banned books were  “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, “Flamer” by Mike Curato, “Tricks” by Ellen Hopkins, a graphic novel edition of “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood and “Milk and Honey,” a poetry collection by Rupi Kaur. Much of the censoring is done in the name of "parental rights." (Unfortunately it is hidden behind a paywall, but if you want to read an outstanding testimonial about what it is like to be a school official in a district besieged by a censorship regime, try Bridgette Exman's "This Summer, I Became the Book Banning Monster of Iowa" in the Sept. 1, 2023 New York Times.). If you are facing a censorship crusade in your own school district, the National Coalition Against Censorship has a good toolkit to assist fighting back. 

MSNBC's Ali Velshi has created a "Banned Book Club" podcast that not only keeps a running list of banned books in America, but also interviews authors of such books. In each and every case, the author is rational, reasonable, and interested in addressing serious topics in thoughtful ways that challenge the imaginations of readers of all ages. In other words, the authors are the exact opposite of those who seek to censor them. 

I hope this post has clearly demonstrated the extent to which freedom of speech and expression are under assault in the United States. Every victim mentioned in this post (Laura Ann Carelton, The Marion County Record, The Wausau Pilot & Review, and authors of banned books) represent good faith actors using their first amendment freedoms to promote tolerance, democratic participation, keeping officials accountable, and making people think. To be a patriotic American must mean, at least in part, that we would do what we can to intervene to prevent the assaults on such actors from occurring or continuing.