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The fundraiser was held at Lucas sprawling Indiana estate in Carmel, Pences adopted hometown since moving back from Washington, D.C., in 2021. Tickets to a private roundtable sold for $6,600 per person, while reception tickets went for $1,000. The host committee included Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, Rep. Larry Bucshon and Fred Klipsch, the stereo magnate, among others.

Hes now redefining who he is, said Smith, a Pence backer who has maxed out to the Hoosier candidate. He just needs to stay under the hoop.

In a memo to donors following the debate, Pence campaign manager Steve DeMaura wrote that even after weathering two years of attacks from Trump, Our strategy is not sexy. It does not take $150 million today. And does not involve trying to be a Trump clone or single-mindedly running to repudiate him. The campaign did not disclose whether Pence saw a post-debate bump among small-dollar donors.

Pences allied super PAC, Committed to America, also saw a spike in fundraising. The PAC saw an additional $250,000 flow in the day after the debate, Mike Ricci, a spokesperson, told POLITICO.

Pence has been polling in single digits in the primary, though post-debate polling has yet to be released. In Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state, he was bunched up at 6 percent with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the recent Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll. But the fundraising bump is noteworthy for a candidate some pundits have left for political dead.

Pence, among the later candidates to announce, has already qualified for the second GOP debate, surpassing the donor and polling thresholds not long after he qualified for the first. Pences Advancing American Freedom nonprofit built a pool of 140,000 donors prior to his presidential campaign, many of whom are donating to him now.

Some dire headlines just last month raised concerns about his fundraising ability, but some of Pences biggest donors say they expected the timing of his candidacy would mean he would qualify for the first debate later than other candidates.

He raised a substantial amount of money in a short period of time and did it in a couple of weeks, but it took Nikki Haley and the other candidates months, said Art Pope, the former chair of Americans for Prosperity and a Raleigh, N.C.-based Pence donor.

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'Where did that guy come from?' Pence nets post-debate fundraising bump - POLITICO

Former Vice President and current Republican presidential candidate Mike Pence on Tuesday said that if elected, he would immediately end Biden-era telework policies,institute a spending freeze for non-defense federal agenciesand ban all federal funding of gender affirming care for minors. The proposals werepart of a laundry list of executive actions Pence said hewould undertake on his first day in the White House.

The former vice president remains a distant fifth place for the Republican presidential nomination at 4.5%,according to FiveThirtyEights national polling average. Former President Trump retains a commanding lead in the raceat 49.9%, based onFiveThirtyEight's polls.

President Biden weakened us at home and he weakened our place in the world, Pence said. With all humility, I believe Im the most qualified, best prepared candidate in this field, and we will be ready on Day One to move policies that will turn this country around, and our Day One executive action plan is an attempt to lay out a vision for those initial actions we believe will begin to set our nation right.

First, Pence vowed to reverse an automatic 1% decrease in defense spending that would take hold if lawmakers cannot reach a full-year appropriations deal by May 2024 and, conversely, freeze non-defense spending, which he argued has contributed to inflation. However, inflation has been on the decline since last fall.

Well get runaway spending under control by freezing non-defense federal spending on Day One of my administration, he said. Well also reverse all of the Biden administrations energy executive orders and unleash American energy and open up access to all of Americas reserves and through leasing programs for oil and natural gas.

Pence also suggested that he would roll back the telework policies developed during the COVID-19 pandemic and continued during the Biden administration, saying he would end work from home for federal workers. Pences plan was light on details, however.

Americans around the country have gotten back to work since the pandemic ended and are working to get this economy moving again, his campaign wrote in a blog post Tuesday. Meanwhile, federal employees are still working from home at record rates . . . Federal bureaucrats should be working just as hard as the American workers they are supposedly serving. Thats why President Pence will issue an executive order to get federal employees back to work immediately.

A number of proposals Pence revealed Tuesday on health care issues could also have ramifications for federal workers. The former vice president said he would end policies within the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments aimed at preserving federal workers and veterans access to abortions, as well as endthe Justice Departments work in support of litigation challenging state abortion bans. And he said the federal government would cease funding of programs that help transgender minors receive gender-affirming care.

I would end any fundingdirect or indirectfor child transgender procedures anywhere in the United States, and we would block funding to schools that promote child transgender chemical or physical procedures. We simply have got to protect our kids from the radical gender agenda of the American left, as well as reinstate protections for religious groups of any persuasion in federal contracting.

Once again, the details of Pences plan remained vague, but such a measure could endanger federal workers and their families access to gender affirming care through their employer-sponsored insurance, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.

Today, the Department of Health and Human Services official guidance to medical providers states that early gender affirming care is crucial to overall health, the Pence campaign wrote. President Pence will reverse these misguided policies on Day One and make it clear that government health agencies will never advocate for radical transgender ideology. President Pence will also issue executive orders directing all agencies to defund any programs that accept federal money and provide surgical or chemical gender reassignment on children in the U.S. or around the world.

Transgender advocates argue that conservatives vastly overestimate the number of people receiving gender affirming care, and in fact, the process to gain access to treatments is often long and arduous.

Notably absent from Pences Day One agenda is any mention of a systematic effort to make it easier to fire federal workers or target the so-called deep state, such as Schedule F, an abortive effort at the end of the Trump administration to make federal workers in policy-related positions effectively at-will employees. Both Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have said they would reinstitute the proposal immediately upon taking office, and the Heritage Foundation has endorsed the idea as part of its 1,000-page presidential transition handbook.

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Pence 'Day 1' plan includes a telework rollback, spending freeze ... - GovExec.com

With the beginning of the college academic year, those of us teaching this fall are drafting various course syllabi seeing what might be worth revisiting, such as new readings that might be added.

But all too often, the upfront syllabus boilerplate sections are overlooked since they are cut and pasted from previous versions of the same course or similar ones. Unfortunately, a section dealing with free expression in the classroom is missing in many.

This is a more focused area than campus speech, which continues to attract national headlines as outside speakers from the right and left are disinvited or shouted down. The issue here is less about censorship which may be referenced in a syllabus by linking to an established campuswide free-expression policy or the University of Chicago Principles adopted by dozens of universities and more about self-censorship.

The latter concern often is more difficult to identify since it involves an unwillingness to speak freely in light of actual or perceived consequences for doing so. Data and personal experience suggest this needs to be addressed head-on.

For example, the Heterodox Academys 2023Campus Expression Surveyasked more than 1,500 full-time college students from universities across the country about how reluctant they are to share their views on various topics in class and what variables are associated with students reluctance.

Just over 58 percent of the respondents said they were reluctant to share their views on politics, race, sexual orientation, gender or religion in the classroom.

I concur with the observation of Nicole Barbaro, the organizations director of communications and marketing.This is a real problem that should concern all educators, especially across the social sciences, biological sciences and humanities where these topics are most likely to be central to academic research and discussions. If students arenot comfortable talkingabout these topics in class a space intended for exploring ideas, discussing research and critically thinking about problems then our universities are, in part, failing at their intended purpose.

Classroom self-censorship is a two-sided phenomenon. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) surveyed almost 1,500 college faculty members nationwide to dig deeper into the issue. Its data show that a third of faculty (34 percent) reported they self-censor on campus fairly or very often.

According to FIRE, faculty members are more likely to self-censor today than during the Joseph McCarthy era of the 1950s.

Based on its survey, this observation again rings true to me and probably to countless other faculty members. It is hard to comprehend the fact that the very group of people charged to showcase how viewpoint diversity and healthy debate functions are themselves limiting their expression at rates higher than the students they are supposed to teach.

Ten years ago, I served as the inaugural professor of communication in residence at Northwestern University in Qatar. Unlike the United States, there was no First Amendment there to reference. My students were brought up in a culture where free speech was not encouraged and, in fact, could be punished severely as a matter of law.

By discussing self-censorship in class with my students at the outset, I was gratified how an explicit conversation at the beginning of the semester supported and reinforced with each class session produced a high level of viewpoint diversity and dissenting voices. I saw how the students felt free to engage with me in covering the course material, not just learning about free expression as an ideal but also experiencing it in practice.

Given the wave of classroom self-censorship that has hit U.S. college classrooms in the intervening years, I intend not just to discuss this when I provide a course overview but also explicitly remove classroom self-censorship guardrails that may exist, even if they are not acknowledged.

The course syllabus is the ideal place to convey this, especially since it will be referenced by the students continuously throughout the semester.

Stuart N. Brotman is an endowed professor of journalism and media law, enterprise and leadership at the University of Tennessee. He wrote this forInsideSources.com.

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Its time to address college self-censorship - Maryland Daily Record

By Pete McGinnis Real Clear Wire

Welcome to the Censorship Industrial Complex. Its rather like the old military industrial complex, which was shorthand for the military, private companies, and academia working together to achieve U.S. battlefield dominance, with the R&D funded by the government that buys the final product.

But the censorship industrial complex builds algorithms, not bombers. The players arent Raytheon and Boeing, but social media companies, tech startups, and universities and their institutes. The foes to be dominated are American citizens whose opinions diverge from government narratives on issues ranging from COVID-19 responses to electoral fraud to transgenderism.

When first exposed a few months ago, many of the actors and their media defenders perversely claimed that they, as private entities, were acting out of concern for democracy and exercising their own First Amendment rights.

However, the records and correspondence of an advisory committee to an obscure government agency tell a different story. The Functional Government Initiative (FGI) has obtained through a public records request documents of the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The committee was composed of academics and tech company officials working with government personnel in a much closer relationship than either they or the media want to admit. Several advisory committee members who appear throughout the documents as quasi-federal actors are among those loudly protesting that they were private actors when censoring lawful American speech (e.g., Kate Starbird, Vijaya Gadde, Alex Stamos).

But the advisory committee members met often and worked so closely with their government handlers that the federal liaison to the committee regularly offered members his personal cell phone and even reminded them to use the committees Slack channel. Your average concerned citizen doesnt have a Homeland Security bureaucrat on speed dial.

What were they working on? CISAs Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-information (MDM) subcommittee discussed Orwellian social listening and monitoring, and considered the governments best censorship success metrics. Who was to be censored? CISA was formed in response to misinformation campaigns from foreign actors, but it evolved toward domestic threats. Meeting notes record that Suzanne Spaulding of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said they shouldnt solely focus on addressing foreign threats [but] to emphasize that domestic threats remain and while attribution is sometimes unclear, CISA should be sensitive to domestic distinctions, but cannot focus too heavily on such limitations. So CISA should combat high-volume disinformation purveyors before the purveyor is attributed to a domestic or foreign threat and not worry so much about First Amendment niceties.

More telling is the groups attitude toward what it called mal-information typically information that is true, but contrary to the preferred narratives of the censor. Dr. Starbird wrote in an email, Unfortunately current public discourse (in part a result of information operations) seems to accept malinformation as speech and within democratic norms Therein lies a dilemma for the censors, as Starbird wrote: So, do we bend into a pretzel to counter bad faith efforts to undermine CISAs mission? Or do we put down roots and own the ground that says this tactic is part of the suite of techniques used to undermine democracy?

It is chilling that there is no consideration of whether the information is true or of the publics right to know it. Democracy in this formulation is whatever maintains the governments narrative.

Accordingly, the group discussed recommendations for countering dangerously inaccurate health advice. It contemplated the roles of the FBI and Homeland Security in addressing domestic threats, and a CISA staffer felt the need to remind the subcommittee of CISA's limitations in countering politically charged narratives.

CISA couldnt censor all the people the advisors wanted. And it could face the same outrage that greeted President Bidens Disinformation Governance Board, led by singing censor Nina Jankowicz. Americans didnt want that body deciding what they could say, and Biden shut it down within three weeks. CISAs advisers were acutely aware their work could be conflated with that of the DGB, and even considered changing the name of the MDM subcommittee. Dr. Starbird noted in an email that shed removed monitoring from just about every place where it appeared and made other defensive word changes/deletions. Similarly, Twitters Vijaya Gadde cautioned the group against pursuing any social listening recommendations for the time being.

The group also sought cover from outside and inside the government. They spent an inordinate amount of time talking about socializing the committee and its work something DGB apparently hadnt done. And like a partisan campaign, they looked for natural allies. Meeting notes record that they sought to identify a point of contact from a progressive civil rights and civil liberties angle to recruit as a [subject matter expert].

A government committee that seeks partisan allies, obfuscates its purpose, and cant even be honest about the nature of its members participation is going to sort out online truth for Americans? Welcome to the Censorship Industrial Complex.

Pete McGinnis is director of communications at the Functional Government Initiative.

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Docs offer glimpse inside Censorship Industrial Complex - The Highland County Press

Attacks on gender and sexuality in the American school system need not be direct. According to a new report from PEN America, they are often insidious and harmful all the same.James Tager

The report illustrates the frequency and volume with which legislative action goes beyond just overt content bans, instead creating chilled climates that deter the teaching of such content in schools.

These educational intimidation bills (EIBs) function not through blatant censorship but through fear, supervision, pressure, and the supporting of opposition, all of which lead to self-censorship, the authors of the report wrote.

Put simply, these educational intimidation provisions, as we dub them, empower the use of intimidation tactics to cast a broad chilling effect over K12 classrooms by mandating new and intrusive forms of inspection or monitoring of schools, as well as new ways for members of the publicincluding, in some cases, citizens with no direct connection to the schoolsto object to whatever they see that they do not like, the authors wrote.

The report together with the organizations Index of EIBs lists the state-level educational intimidation bills in the past three years. 392 were introduced between January 2021 and June 2023, and 39 have been passed into law since. And while these policies have a less than 10% pass rate, they can be reintroduced or recycled for future legislative sessions, the report authors wrote.

At least 19 U.S. states have educational intimidation tactics in place, and many local districts are also experimenting with similar sentiments, according to the report.

All but 15 of the 392 bills introduced since January 2021 were sponsored exclusively by Republicans, and both Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump have touted these educational policies on the presidential campaign trail, the reports authors wrote.

EIBs come in various forms and many share similar strategies. The report categorizes 12 common provisions, including burdensome content inspection requirements; broad and vague opt-out policies;expansions of what counts as 'harmful to minors';and monitoring and surveillance access.

What these EIBs do is set the stage for systems where people whether it be teachers, librarians, supervisors, or school leaders are incentivized to err on the side of caution so as not to include potentially controversial topics or content, said James Tager, research director for PEN America.

We have to think about the fact that it's not just the individual teachers who are sort of the targets of these bills. Because an individual teacher or librarian may feel brave enough to put, at times, their job on the line, Tager said. But often it can be the higher-ups who feel incentivized to follow the notes of caution that these laws impose on an entire school.

It incentivizes school districts and schools at large to basically streamline the process so that anything remotely controversial, anything that can be objected to, anything that an ideologically driven member of the community or individual parent may object to, they just kind of remove that from the curriculum or library."

And gauging just how pervasively EIBs are silencing educators can be difficult, given that many of these instances will be invisible and never reported on, Tager said.

Floridas Dont Say Gay Act

One prominent example of an EIB is DeSantiss 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act commonly called the Dont Say Gay law which espouses parental rights but has privacy and safety risks for LGBTQ+ students.

PEN Americas report explains how the bill legally obligates teachers to notify parents of their childs well-being and health. Though seemingly well-meaning and innocuous, the bill requires educators to let parents know if there is asuspicionthat their children might be LGBTQ+, even if the student may not want to disclose that information, the authors wrote.

Its also just simpler to play it safe, as demonstrated by how the governor-turned-presidential candidates bill has led at least one school district to remove Safe Space stickers for LGBTQ+ friendly campus locations. Pasco County did so, not because of opposition to safe spaces, but because of the ambiguity that comes with discerning why a student would be there in the first place, according to the report.

A student being there could possibly warrant a parental notification. So instead, the stickers were removed to avoid misinterpretation and a potential violation of the law, according to the report.

For the states passing these bills, the fear is the point, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in an email statement. Teachers are walking on eggshells because their freedom to teach, and kids freedom to learn, is under siege.

Amid the current political environment across the nation, there must be more done to prepare and support future teachers and administrators, said Dr. Robert Teranishi, professor of social science and comparative education at UCLA.

We also need to express support for teachers and principals when they communicate their commitment to create a safe and inclusive learning environment, he said in an email statement.

Parental rights

Using arguments hinged on parents rights, make it an uphill battle for opponents of EIBs, said Dr. Nicholas D. Hartlep, the Robert Charles Billings Endowed Chair in Education at Berea College.

"They utilize parents' rights and concerns as cover for policies and laws that ultimately harm democracy and children, a lot of times, said Hartlep, a father of three. Parents love their children. And no matter what party you are,it's hard to dismiss parents.

Society loves parents. And so, these policies and strategy are effective because they're using parents as a form of censorship. You see that with anti-trans bills and rhetoric."

Local policies and decades-old federal laws including the 1974 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the 1978 Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment already exist to ensure parental input and curriculum transparency, the report stated.

EIBs instead extend the reach of some parents to govern more than just their own children, Tager said.

No one here is saying that parents don't have a major role to play in their child's education, Tager said. But what we're seeing is the idea that some parents' rights get to trump the rights of other parents, that the more ideological a parent is, that these laws basically impose the preferences of a few parents over the preferences of the majority of parents, students, and teachers."

Such legislation and resulting censorship ultimately lead to watered-down education and poor preparation for todays students, Tager stressed.

"We basically incentivize school districts, teachers, and librarians to present this sort of sanitized, inoffensive, milquetoast version of American history, of access to literature and specific books, Tager said. This ill-prepares kids to operate in the modern world. It ill-prepares them to interact with people from other backgrounds. It ill-prepares them to engage in robust civic debate.

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Report: 'Educational Intimidation Bills' Result in Fear and Educator ... - Diverse: Issues in Higher Education