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Dear Editor: There have been issues on campuses across the U.S. on free speech. As the argument of hate speech versus free speech continues, many speculate that public campuses have liberal biases. This is due to disproportionate numbers of conservative speakers getting rejected to speak on campuses compared to liberal speakers. A CNN article titled War on campus: The escalating battle over college free speech suggests that these speculations are true: The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education maintains an incomprehensive database of more than 300 attempts to disinvite campus speakers since 2000. About three-quarters of the attempts involved pressure from liberals.

In Wisconsin, GOP representatives have responded to these issues by proposing free speech policies on the UW System. These policies are suggested as precautionary, threatening future speech disrupters with suspension and/or expulsion. But such policies are criticized as damaging the rights of those who oppose the views of speakers and minorities.

The relationship between Americas future leaders and the United States First Amendment must continually be closely observed.

Currently on the Press Freedom Index, the United States is ranked at the 43rd position. Obamas onslaught on whistleblowers and Trumps attempts to thwart press coverage are listed as problems that contribute to the United States position.

Media conglomerates are an obstacle to press freedom. A statistic from morriscreative.com shows that in 2012, six media companies owned 90 percent of American media, compared to 50 companies that owned 90 percent of American media back in 1983.

These attacks on freedom of speech and press threaten one of our most sacred rights. People should care more about free speech.

Michael Flores

Madison

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Michael Flores: Attacks on our First Amendment need more attention - Madison.com

Thursday, July 27, 2017 at 8:32 a.m.

Adam Carolla cites President Obamas 2015 appearance on WTF With Marc Maron as a milestone ushering podcasts into the mainstream. I think its another modality for conversation, and thats always a good thing, the Adam Carolla Show host says of the medium. In the next election three and a half years from now or sooner, as they campaign theres probably going to be more politicians sitting down with podcasters.

The third annual unconventional political convention known as Politicon, intended to narrow the gap between Washington insiders and the public, takes over the Pasadena Convention Center on July 29 and 30. Nearly 150 politicians, consultants, journalists, entertainers and podcasters anchor the nonpartisan event fostering discourse via panels, interviews, readings and live tapings.

Along with the James Carvilles, Ann Coulters, Jake Tappers and Lesley Stahls of the lineup, attendees can catch comedians including Greg Proops, Al Madrigal, Anthony Atamanuik, Michelle Wolf, Trae Crowder and Lizz Winstead. A highly anticipated debate sees Chelsea Handler engaging former talk-show host Tomi Lahren. On Saturday evening, Carolla records a live interview with The Daily Shows Roy Wood Jr., followed by an audience meet-and-greet.

Im just interested in a lot of different opinions, Carolla says of Politicon. The exchanging of ideas, thoughts and occasionally fluids, so Im excited.

The North Hollywood native studied improv in the early90s, and in 1994 parlayed his amateur-boxing background into training KROQs Kevin and Bean show personality Jimmy Kimmel. He soon co-hosted the stations Loveline with Dr. Drew Pinksy before partnering with Kimmel for Comedy Centrals The Man Show and Crank Yankers.

In 2011, The Adam Carolla Show set the Guinness World Record for most downloaded podcast. His Carolla Digital network houses a dozen podcasts, and 10 episodes of Adam Carolla and Friends Build Stuff Live aired this spring on Spike. Hes a fan of quick naps and of going with his gut.

I do tons of things, and people say, Why? Why did you do Dancing With the Stars or Celebrity Apprentice,' or 'Why did you write a book? And I just go, Somebody asked me to do it.

Carollas current point of pride is his Chassy Media documentary company. Subjects include cars and sports; his personal favorite, Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman, combined both.

Next up is a crowdfunded film exploring political correctness and freedom of speech on college campuses. Carolla teamed on No Safe Spaces with conservative radio host Dennis Prager, with whom atheist Carolla doesnt share much in common but nevertheless respects intellectually. (Prager recently tweeted that the "news media in the West pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does," even though that he's a member of the news media.)The two have mounted a series of school speaking engagements denouncing the coddling of students and chronicled the results. (Prager subsequently told Fox News, "The only thing I regret about the tweet is that I didn't write the universities and the media in the West are a greater threat to Western civilization.")

It seemed like a simpler time when people wanted to hear opinions that were a little bit different than their own, recalls Carolla, who has publicly said Hollywood fears tackling the subject. A mid-2018 release is expected.

Then again, not all change is bad. Particularly for a guy who claims he doesn't really work for a living anymore.

I try to keep things in perspective, especially when its 119 degrees outside, he muses. I used to be on a construction site in Chatsworth with this kind of weather. And now Im sitting in an air-conditioned trailer. I try to keep that in mind.

Adam Carolla podcast and meet-and-greet, Politicon, Pasadena Convention Center, 300 E. Green St., Pasadena. politicon.com/speaker/adam-carolla.

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First Amendment Fan Adam Carolla Takes Politics Even More Seriously Than Podcasting - L.A. Weekly

FrontPage Magazine

The Left's War on the First Amendment FrontPage Magazine Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism. Once upon a time there was a liberal media. Like most left-leaning institutions it ...

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The Left's War on the First Amendment - FrontPage Magazine

The Church of Scientology maintains the universe is 4 quadrillion years old and that most of mankinds problems are traceable to an imperialistic alien named Lord Xenu. Some 75 million years ago, Xenu won an intergalactic battle by stuffing thetans sort of like human souls into volcanos, on which Xenu then dropped hydrogen bombs. Millions of these immortal thetans later attached themselves to humans, causing humans to become sick, confused, depressed and insecure.

The goal of Scientology is to help humans to clear their bodies of thetans by devoting hundreds of thousands of dollars to cleansing processes developed by the religions founder, L. Ron Hubbard, who holds the record for the greatest number of books published by one author (1,064). His sacred science fiction works are stored in a nuclear-blast-proof vault below the surface of planet Earth.

Despite having only 25,000 American members by some counts, the Church of Scientologys liquid assets of $1 billion exceeded those of the Roman Catholic Church in 2013. But the Los Angeles-based Church of Scientology almost collapsed in the 1990s under a $1 billion bill from the Internal Revenue Service for unpaid taxes. The IRS finally restored the organizations tax-exempt church status in 1993 in exchange for the church halting a barrage of lawsuits it had filed against the agency, including 2,300 Freedom of Information Act suits.

Today, a big labor union is using a strategy against the Freedom Foundation similar to the strategy the Church of Scientology used to defeat the IRS. The Service Employees International Union has filed multiple expensive lawsuits against the Foundation, an SEIU detractor, in hope of defunding it. To SEIU, bleeding the Freedom Foundation dry is as good as a court order blocking the Foundations freedom of speech.

Freedom Foundation Managing Attorney Greg Overstreet told me in June that SEIU is running out of arguments. Consequently, theyve hit us with a barrage of frivolous lawsuits and campaign-finance complaints. In substance, theyre no different from cases weve always won before. But each one requires a response. [T]he unions arent filing these new cases with any expectation of winning. Their true objective is simply to overwhelm our capacity to defend ourselves and thereby bankrupt their most persistent and effective adversary. It wont work.

I hope Overstreet is right that SEIUs strategy wont work, even though the same strategy has brought the IRS and other Scientology detractors to their knees. In 1973, the church sued Paulette Cooper, author of The Scandal of Scientology, 19 times and falsified evidence to arrange her indictment by a grand jury for sending bomb threats.

One advantage the Freedom Foundation has that the IRS lacked is citizen appeal. Few private citizens have gone to bat for the IRS. But history is rich with people willing to risk a great deal to defend freedoms supposedly protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Many of the people who should start sticking up for the Freedom Foundation would gain by doing so. The Freedom Foundations only crime is informing people about existing law. In 2014s Harris v. Quinn, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled SEIU violated the First and Fourteenth Amendment rights of home health caregivers by automatically extorting agency fees which are essentially union dues paid by non-members from them.

In the wake of Harris, the Capital Research Center reported in May 2017, the Freedom Foundation launched an outreach program that employed dozens of paid canvassers who have gone door to door all across the state and into neighboring Oregon to inform health care providers of their right to opt out of paying dues or fees to SEIU.

The Foundations outreach efforts were successful. In response, however, SEIU has orchestrated a litany of frivolous lawsuits against the Foundation to stop it from speaking to workers, Freedom Foundation Litigation Counsel David Dewhirst told me in July. The unions have even convinced the Washington State Attorney General, Bob Ferguson, to pile on and prosecute the Foundation for not reporting as campaign expenditures its various pro bono legal services to citizens across the state.

Laborers are being scammed, but not by an intergalactic alien monster. The West Coast has its own labor lord, and it has government reinforcements.

Michael T. Hamilton (mhamilton@heartland.org, @MikeFreeMarket) is a research fellow and editor at The Heartland Institute. He drew facts about the Church of Scientology from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lawrence Wrights book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013), which HBO made into a documentary in 2015.

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Big labor bullies First Amendment with Scientology playbook - OCRegister

Google is asking the California court to declare that the rights established by the First Amendment and the Communications Decency Act are not merely theoretical, in response to an order from the Supreme Court of Canada to de-list all instances of suspected fraudulent company Datalink.

Google has already de-indexed 343 Datalink sites from the Google Canada branch of its search engineby the early days of 2013, in cooperation with demands made by Vancouver-basedEquustek, from whom Datalink allegedly stole trade secrets and relabeled products.

Not content with its actions, Equustek is pushing for Google to be forced to completely de-list Datalink from its search engine worldwide, rather than limit itself to the Canada-specific Google.ca. A court in British Columbia granted that demand, which was further upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada.

In response, Google has asked the U.S. court to uphold its right to [publish]within the United States search result information about the contents of the internet. They assert that right under both the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which exempts them from liability for the actions of most users.

In their words, the Canadian order is repugnant to those rights, and the order violates principles of international comity, particularly since the Canadian plaintiffs never established any violation of their rights under U.S. law. And additionally, thatthe Canadian Order is further repugnant to United States public policy because it issued an injunction against Google, an innocent non-party, merely for the sake of convenience.'

Furthermore, forcing Google to edit access to content based on the order of a single foreign government creates a precedent that they must follow the restrictions of any government that objects to certain search results. In an e-mailed statement to Ars Technica, Google lawyer David Price said:

Were taking this court action to defend the legal principle that one country shouldnt be able to decide what information people in other countries can access online. Undermining this core principle inevitably leads to a world where Internet users are subject to the most restrictive content limitations from every country.

Staunch advocates for freedom of speech have taken a decisive stand with Google on their complaints. Among them,The British ColumbiaCivil Liberties Association, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Human Rights Watch.

In all of this, only Google has been targeted as the determinative player in allowing harm to occur. Yahoo and Bing have received no such orders, and continue to freely list all Datalink sites.

FollowNateChurch@Get2Churchon Twitter for the latest news in gaming and technology, and snarky opinions on both.

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Google Asks American Court to Protect its First Amendment Rights ... - Breitbart News