A few days ago, I attended three of the four sessions of an extremely interesting and timely conference on the First Amendment at Yale Law School. Here are the talks I caught:
Friday, March 28
9:15 a.m. | Welcome/Opening Remarks | SLB 129
Organizers: Jack Balkin, Genevieve Lakier, Mikey McGovern
9:30 a.m. | Panel 1: Media Environment | SLB 129
Chair: Paul Starr, Princeton University
Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School
Mary Anne Franks, George Washington University School of Law
Eugene Volokh, Hoover Institution
11:15 a.m. | Panel 2: Polarization | SLB 129
Chair: Robert Post, Yale Law School
Nicole Hemmer, Vanderbilt University
Liliana Mason, SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University
Ganesh Sitaraman, Vanderbilt Law School
2:15 p.m. | Panel 3: Political Marketplace | SLB 129
Chair: Rick Hasen, University of California, Los Angeles School of Law
Rick Pildes, NYU Law School
Bradley A. Smith, Capital University Law School
Ann Southworth, University of California, Irvine School of Law
There was an additional panel Friday as well as several more Saturday but, unfortunately, I couldn’t make those. I wasn’t familiar with the views of all the speakers, and was concerned as I drove down from my Greenland-population-sized town north of Boston that the event would be something resembling a Yale choir performance in a lovely, Hogwarts-style echo chamber, but that was incorrect. While most of the speakers I heard were the sort of liberal legal scholars that one likely would have expected to learn from at a conference in these dire times, there were also two “conservatives” and at least one unfiltered socialist.
I assume all the papers will be available before long–if they aren’t already, but I wanted to give a sense of some of what I was continuing to mull over on my drive home. Some of the remarks below are directly from the written versions of the presentations which were provided a few days in advance of the meetings: I will put those in bold. Others are paraphrases of statements that I take either from my notes or recollections of presentations or conversations: those will be in italics. My own thoughts will be delivered in unaltered text, but put within {braces}.
Genevieve Lakier, Welcome/Opening Remarks
[I]f Trump came back to office, everyone knew that his administration was going to be a repressive one, despite all of his efforts to claim the mantle of free speech. Still, we did not know then, when we first began planning this event, how significant the scale of the crisis would be.
[S]tudent activists, meanwhile, face expulsion or severe institutional discipline of a kind that universities have not handed out in many cases for decades, as a result of the pressure the federal govt is placing on those institutions.
This concerted, aggressive and ambitious campaign of repression resembles in many respects the repressive practices of the McCarthy Era….During the 1950s it was the threat of subversion by the Fifth Column of international communism that the government relied upon to justify its actions. Today it is threat of the terrorist supporters or Hamasniks that populate our colleges, as well as the threat of the advocates of racial equality that does so.
[W]e are once again faced with a federal government that is utilizing all of the enormous power it possesses to chill the speech of its political enemies and to dominate what is supposed to be the “robust sphere of private liberty” that is the democratic public sphere.
The Trump administration is not putting people in jail for their speech—even though I am sure it would dearly love to do so—because putting people in jail for their speech, as we all know, is a really hard thing to justify under current First Amendment law. What it is doing is using more indirect tools to chill speech and punish those who fail to comply.
{As you see, Prof. Lakier delivered a very fiery and passionate opening to the conference.}
Yochai Benkler, Two comments on free speech, democratic crisis, and the collapse of neoliberalism
You cannot be a left-liberal party if you only lead among those in the top third bracket of income and trail everywhere else.
Democratic victories in the last decades generally helped upper-class, educated minorities. Democrats need to focus not on freedom generally, but specifically on freedom from want and fear.
It is difficult to understand the persistent refusal to report President Biden’s infirmity in late 2023 and early 2024; or the lock-step enthusiasm about the unchallenged ascendance of Vice President Harris other than a reflection of parallel propaganda feedback loops in the center-left that for a longer period have forced the center-right farther to the right.
[W]hile the business wing of the profit-reaping classes was telling working- and middle-class families that their work was no good, the progressive wing of the professional and managerial class told them their identity was no good.
In…classic "terrorism"/violence/danger cases, anarchists, pacifists, socialists, and communists got glorious dissents we celebrate to this day, but ended up losing. Precedents set in cases against immigrants like Abrams ended up legalizing the Espionage Act cases that led to incarceration of anti-war citizens, Debs most prominent among them.
{Throughout the day, Prof. Benkler distinguished himself in his comments, both by his focus on alleged economic failings of liberal democracy and because of his extremely wide erudition. I was particularly taken by his impromptu references to Lillburne and Wildman in connection with…well…something a speaker was discussing at the moment.}
Mary Anne Franks, From Watchdogs to Lapdogs: Selling Out the Fourth Estate for Scraps at Trump’s Table
The idea that conservatives have ever been attacked/suppressed by left media and government is just a lie. And what might be called a “censorship industrial complex” has grown up on the right as a result of this lie.
This take is not new. Dorothy Thompson said much the same thing in late 1930s.
The Jan. 6 insurrection caused social media to make a brief, limited effort to clean things up. But the big lie prevailed and by the time of Trump’s second inauguration, the big media companies had moved from their brief investigatory posture to a strong, unified support of Trump, and hence, the insurrection as well.
{FWIW, I thought Prof. Frank’s impromptu remarks were very incisive, and indeed superior to her prepared talk, which reads a bit like an op-ed piece one might find in Politico or The Guardian. I sometimes think the ferocity of her written work undermines its effectiveness. It may be necessary to hear her speak to understand how astute she is.}
Eugene Volokh, The Crisis of the Media Environment
{This paper begins with something of a prank. First there are expressions of consternation regarding media misinformation and disinformation, because those are alleged to have had a significant effect on the 2024 election of Donald Trump. Of course, this claim will be nothing new to those who watch CNN or MSNBC. But Prof. Volokh’s trick is that the sole example of disinformation he discusses is the continuing failure to report Biden’s alleged long-evident cognitive decline, something that only became obvious to the electorate because of his disastrous debate performance. It was this failure of the media that Volokh claims to have made Kamala Harris’s (allegedly weak) candidacy inevitable and so resulted in Trump’s victory. (I have to admit that his prank was successful in my own case: I was indeed surprised when he disclosed his sole example of Trump-helping dissemination of disinformation: on this view, the left is to blame for its own demise!) I must say it was kind of fun to watch his fellow panelists scowl at Volokh throughout his talk.}
The mainstream media was either intentionally misleading the public or was easily duped by the Biden Administration. Taking advantage of them in this way was fairly easy because they are predominantly leftists. Human nature simply took over, so they could not be effective watchdogs. Naturally, Biden staff had many reasons to be supportive of their chief, but one could hope that the media would see through this. That they didn’t (or wouldn’t) was a major reason for Trump’s 2024 victory.
Paul Starr, A Free Press at Risk: Three Stages in the Emerging Crisis
Hard as it may be to believe, the judiciary wasn’t a factor in the growth of a free press in the U.S. until the 20th Century. Rather, it was acts of Congress that were most responsible. Such subsidies as franking privileges for newspapers is but one example. So it wasn’t so much the negative requirements of the 1st Amendment as it was the positive contributions provided by Congressional acts that we have to thank for what we call “Freedom of the Press.”
Today, the way advertising is structured by media companies actually encourages the dissemination of fake news. And we should expect AI to make this situation even worse.
There is a growing alignment of media companies with autocratic regimes around the world. What is happening in the U.S. today closely resembles what Orban has brought to Hungary. Governments don’t actually need to “take over” media companies: they can simply arrange for their purchase by buyers that are extremely friendly to the regime.
It is worth remembering that consumption of news was largely an accidental thing for several generations of Americans. They may have bought newspapers for the sports or the funnies or watched Cronkheit while they waited for Andy of Mayberry to come on. All the television stations had news on at the same time, and nearly every paper had world and national news on its front cover.
{I found this talk very enlightening: it made me want to read Prof. Starr’s forthcoming book.}
Ganesh Sitaraman, Delaware, Horses and Parades
{Prof. Sitaraman was unable to attend; his presentation was read by Mikey McGovern.}
I think the crisis of free speech in the 21st century is, in part, a crisis of non-institutional thinking. By that, I mean that academics, policymakers, and jurists have not been thinking institutionally enough.
[W]here are the Federalist Papers of corporate law? Policymakers in the Gilded Age and Progressive era devised external constraints on corporations – antitrust laws, public utility regulation, taxation. Later theorists claimed that shareholder democracy would discipline the corporation, a claim that obviously fails, if we consider the vast power tech platforms have today. “How should the institution of the corporation be governed” is a question too often left to the law and economics crowd or the private law scholars, even though many of the central issues of public policy turn on this topic.
Decades after the rise of the tech platforms, contemporary debates around tech regulation have still insufficiently reckoned with the necessity of business-line specific regulations.
Meaningful progress on tech platform regulation requires disaggregating the technology sector into distinct business lines and then developing the appropriate regulatory regime for each business activity, in addition to assessing the specific First Amendment considerations that emerge in context.
I think we should be shocked that the Supreme Court, legal advocates, and scholars, seem to think it makes sense to analogize a social media platform to a parade….And yet, our First Amendment doctrine has developed in a way that debates over parades are one of the primary analogies for how to think constitutionally about social media platforms. This is ridiculous.
The unifying point is that across these areas – corporate governance, regulatory policy, and the First Amendment – I think there has been too little specific thinking about institutions.
{I was sorry Sitaraman wasn’t present, because I found his paper thought-provoking and important, particularly the section called “Horses.” It seems to me hard to deny that the U.S. hasn’t succeeded in producing any sort of coherent regulatory scheme for media platforms. It would have been nice to get a chance to discuss that issue further.}
Nicole Hemmer, How the Right Learned to Stop Worrying and Love “Free Speech”: Evolutions in Free Speech and Polarization
Misunderstandings of both terms and facts have led to authoritarianism and polarization. For the right, such misinterpretations are intentional, a tactic. Thus the fact of increased polarization shouldn’t be seen as a neutral matter that can be agreed upon by both sides. This is true of “free speech” as well. For it isn’t actually anything that ought to be called a “shared value.” Rather, the concept is used by the right as a strategy to get at least temporary agreement from liberals on some matter. The outcome of this faux alliance has been authoritarianism.
Republicans actively pursued polarization as a strategy for consolidating their base, disciplining their officeholders, and demonizing Democrats.
From the start of the Cold War, right-wing activists used claims of censorship to explain why they lacked power and needed to build their own alternative institutions. In the early 1950s, as right-wing activists began launching media enterprises to spread their political agenda, they repeatedly pointed to a “blackout” of their ideas in existing press outlets.
[A better understanding of this matter] helps explain why these self-professed defenders of free speech have been the most fervent advocates and agents of government censorship in the 21st century. (Donald Trump and Elon Musk now call for journalists to be jailed, interfere directly in university curricula, and have reshaped government communications and agencies around lists of banned words and concepts.)
Lilliana Mason, From Polarization to Speech: The Rejection of Pluralistic Democracy as Threat to Speech
While scholars have mostly focused on the political sorting of the parties over the last couple of generations, there has also been a “social sorting” going on. People who, like Trump, were already haters, have been increasing brought together and galvanized.
The American right has grown gradually more committed to the project of undermining democratic pluralism as a central requirement of American democracy.
[C]itizens’ sentiments toward politically aligned groups shape their partisanship regardless of their own group memberships, revealing the importance of sentiments toward both social in-groups and out-groups. We don’t just love our party because it is made up of people like us, we also hate the other party because it is made up of people we have long hated.
Trump organized a preexisting faction of intolerant Americans and gave them a great deal of control over a major political party.
[A noncommital/neutral framing of discussions of polarization] is, and has been, obscuring the largest threat to American democracy that has existed in decades. The polarization frame focuses our attention on the dispute between the parties instead of the threat posed by an authoritarian takeover that has occurred on the right – and now, across the national government.
{I found Prof. Mason’s presentation to be both interesting and compelling, but, as I mentioned at the conference, I think she needs to find additional support for two assertions: First, that “social sorting” didn’t simply result from the complete party sorting that took place largely as a result of APSA’s 1950 study on “responsible parties” (See my discussion of that mess here and here). And second, that a showing of disdain for DEI is sufficient to indicate a desire for rule by white, male Christians. I don’t say she’s not right about both of those claims, but I don’t think she’s made the case…at least I don’t think she’s done so here.}
Robert Post, Political Polarization, the Internet, and Free Speech
Polarization undermines the ordinary political processes by which public opinion is formed. If polarization becomes sufficiently severe, if it reaches the existential levels of friend/enemy opposition famously described by Carl Schmitt, then public opinion can no longer guide the state, and freedom speech will have lost its function. That is why Chantal Mouffe, while strongly insisting that politics must reflect relationships of profound opposition, nevertheless distinguishes “agonism” from the kind of “antagonism” in which “the two sides are enemies and who do not share any common ground” and so “treat their opponents as enemies to be eradicated.”
In prior forms of mass communication, gatekeepers warranted the epistemological authority of the news they conveyed. But Facebook features no such elite gatekeepers. The structure of epistemological authority produced on social media is more like that created in self-reinforcing circles of gossip.
Although traditional mass media often targeted discrete groups who were potentially at odds with each other, social media actually create such groups. As social media increasingly integrate the virtual public sphere into the conduct of everyday life, so does its potential to create powerful groups whose influence permeates ordinary living.
The implications for democracy of these developments are obviously profound. As we lose the ability to identify figures of authority whom the public can trust to distinguish truth from fiction, we correspondingly lose the capacity to establish common facts. Hannah Arendt has rightly observed that we cannot inhabit a common political world unless we acknowledge shared facts.
[T]he main theory of countering misinformation ‘seems to be to enforce an intellectual quarantine, policed by media fact-checking and authoritative expert statements. And I’m sorry, but that’s just a total flop. It depends on the very thing whose evaporation has made vaccine skepticism more popular – a basic trust in institutions, a deference to credentials, a willingness to accept judgments from on high’. [here quoting Ross Douthout]
Severe polarization thus potentially undermines the entire point of freedom of speech.
{I particularly enjoyed Prof. Post’s attempts to soften Prof. Benkler’s economic interpretations and solutions throughout the day by suggesting his own multi-causal approach, i.e., his more centrist liberalism. He mentioned that he was about to start a segment on Schmitt in one of his classes: and I must say that I'd love to attend that!}
Ann Southworth, How Should Courts and Others Conceptualize the Relationship Between Speech and Money?
The Supreme Court’s first major ruling on the constitutionality of campaign finance regulation, Buckley v. Valeo, gave opponents of regulation some of what they wanted. It upheld contribution limits and disclosure requirements, but it struck down caps on independent expenditures and limitations on candidates’ use of their own money in their campaigns. It found that the only permissible justification for campaign finance restrictions was to prevent corruption and the appearance of corruption, and it flatly rejected the notion that government could limit money in politics to promote political equality.
Citizens United’s broad holding—that independent expenditures by corporations and unions cannot be limited—led almost immediately to the D.C. Circuit’s ruling that contributions to super PACs cannot be limited. What little remains of federal campaign finance law appears vulnerable to attack under the logic of the current doctrine, which imagines freedom of speech as a restraint on almost any government action that restricts the ability of individuals and institutions to use money to influence elections, so long as those actions fall short of quid pro quo corruption.
The 2024 election campaign and President Trump’s inaugural fund attracted staggering sums from billionaires and from industry sectors (e.g., oil and gas, crypto, tech) with obvious interests in defeating regulation. Donald Trump did not hide the transactional nature of his fundraising requests. In some instances, he all but promised policy influence in return for financial backing, and he is now delivering on some of those implicit deals. Elon Musk is the most obvious (but hardly the only) example of a major donor who enjoys special access and clout in the new administration. He gave at least $288 million to super PACs supporting Trump, and now, as leader of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) and unofficial member of Trump’s cabinet, he is bulldozing the federal government and hobbling efforts to regulate his companies, domestically and abroad.
{Prof. Southworth’s cogent presentation made me think I should read her recent book, Big Money Unleashed: The Campaign to Deregulate Election Spending, but the general pessimism exhibited by the entire Political Marketplace panel definitely dampened that urge a bit.}
Rick Pildes, Democracies in the Age of Fragmentation
Nothing more dramatically demonstrates the previously unimaginable political power individual actors can now attain than the story of Germany’s “Rezo,” a twenty-six-year-old music producer on YouTube (his real name is unknown). One week before Germany’s 2019 elections for the European Parliament, surrounded by his guitars and synthesizers, he produced a slick, fifty- five-minute mash-up video that mixed analysis and expletive-filled polemics in a relentless attack on Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democrats, as well as the Social Democrats and other parties….Rezo’s video was seen a staggering nine million times in the week before the election, though he had no previous political involvement. The Christian Democrats thought his video was filled with lies, distortions, and misleading information, but addressing it quickly became a crisis. Scrambling to respond effectively, the party published an open letter—if you can imagine—addressing each line of Rezo’s attack. In this final week when the video appeared, the CDU plunged 7 percent in polls.
[Spain’s recent] Indignados movement was, at a minimum, an expression of outrage about the situation and the country’s political leaders; it was an anti-party movement of negation….Although the movement demanded change, its demands were nebulous. The “key message” of the protesters, wrote a participant and later student of the movement, “was a rejection of the entire political and economic institutions that determine people’s lives.”....The movement had at least one major political consequence: it spawned the fragmentation and paralysis of Spanish politics, described above, in which governments were so unstable that four national elections had to be held in four years.
In France, the Yellow Vest insurgency ironically disrupted Macron’s government soon after he was elected. Macron himself—a political novice, who formed his own party just a year before his election—had come to power as “le disrupteur” of French politics. Yet the Yellow Vests, set off initially by Macron’s proposal to raise taxes on diesel fuel as a means to combat climate change, staged fifty-two consecutive weekly protests and….Macron became effectively trapped in his office, trying to remain “invisible,” because any public appearance would lead to the nearly instant mobilization of spontaneous, yet somehow organized, large street crowds of Yellow Vest protestors.
The last decade has also witnessed the almost overnight emergence of digital, pop-up political parties with major effects on politics. The most successful of these digital parties thus far is Italy’s Five-Star Movement (M5S). Officially launched in 2009, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, its leaders believe that representative, parliamentary democracy has run its course and that “[w]e live in an era of disintermediation, where we are bypassing the old middlemen.”....In the 2018 general elections, M5S received the largest vote of any party.
For Five Star, Beppe Grillo, its co-founder, exclusively owns the movement’s brand. Through his ownership he exercises complete control over the party’s strategic decisions; once the party won seats in government, many elected members left the party because of Grillo’s dominating control.
In the UK, after the Brexit referendum in 2016 and the collapse of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), Nigel Farage decided to model a new UK party— the Brexit Party—directly on the Five Star model….Announced in March 2019, the Brexit Party quickly became the fastest growing party in British political history.
The overnight success of these parties has not made them effective at governance. Quite the contrary in fact. Sometimes they say they don’t want laws at all. Sometimes, it’s impossible to locate a specifi position being endorsed. Furthermore, they are undependable and generally incompatible with other parties in parliamentary coalitions.
Opposition to government action, or demands for the government to act or act differently, will be easy to mobilize and constant. Politics and government will be continually turbulent, but less able to deliver effective responses on the issues roiling the day….But if democratic governments cannot overcome the profound challenge political fragmentation now poses and deliver on the issues their citizens find most urgent, dysfunction and distrust could give way to worse.
{I didn't think Prof. Pildes talk was entirely apposite to campaign finance or "the political marketplace," and pondered whether it was just an excerpt from another paper he's working on or has already published. But it was interesting nonetheless.}
Bradley A. Smith, Campaign Finance and Free Speech: The Extreme and the Mainstream
What has struck Prof. Smith most in both his studies and litigation regarding free speech issues over the years is the extent to which focus has been placed on “extreme speech.” Fake fires in theaters, pornography, racist remarks and the like have received so much of the attention, while the staunching of more mainstream political speech has been largely ignored, particularly by the left.
[T]he true test of one’s First Amendment bona fides comes when speech is on the line that is not patently offensive or does not represent the extreme fringes of political discourse. It is when we encounter speech that has greater value, that has the ability to affect public policy, that may in fact shape our great experiment in democracy and self-government, but with which we disagree or firmly wish was not stated, that the First Amendment rubber truly meets the road.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly said, and I think most people would intuitively agree, that the core of the First Amendment is political speech. “The First Amendment,” the Court has said, “affords the broadest protection to such political expression in order ‘to assure [the] unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the
people.’
In my experience, many a “man on the street” will react to a claim of constitutional protection against campaign finance regulations by saying, “money is not speech.” But few who have really thought about it—including that same “man on the street” after one or two questions and a few moments thinking—will deny that campaign finance regulations deeply embroil the First Amendment. That campaign finance regulation cuts at core First Amendment liberties is not terribly controversial amongst scholars, and certainly not amongst judges.
What is most unique about campaign finance regulation is that it is not aimed at “offensive,” “extremist,” or “low-value” speech—it is aimed directly at the mainstream expression of views that happen to be inconvenient for or disliked by persons who have the power to suppress that speech.
Fortunately, the Roberts Court has been solicitous of free speech in the form of campaign spending and contributions, often to near hysteria from the left. After all, a case such as Citizens
United…was ultimately about whether the government could prohibit the distribution of a documentary movie about a major political candidate merely because it was distributed by a corporation—like every other movie you see on cable, streaming, or in the theater.
{I admit to being a bit surprised at the demotion of Citizens United here to a minor league, fairly obvious ruling. Surely the person on the street–as well as the mainstream media–has long made quite a big deal about whether free speech rights should have been extended by SCOTUS to non-natural persons. And the denial that such an extension is appropriate doesn’t seem to conflict with very many people’s views about what political rights absolutely must be protected in a democracy. However, after considering the contents of Rick Hasen’s remarks as well as discussing that matter with him, I do think the importance of Citizens United may really have been a bit overblown. I mean, roughly a zillion dollars was donated by oligarchs in the last presidential election without need of any assistance from corporate donations. After Buckley v. Valeo, all seems to have been pretty much lost on the campaign finance front. I’d still like to see a return to the Zapple Rule myself though. See my book (pp 199-204).}
Rick Hasen, The Rise of the Nine-Figure Donor as a Prelude to American Oligarchy
In the 2024 elections, the top six donors supporting or opposing federal candidates each reported contributing at least $100 million, according to data compiled by Open Secrets. These
donors—Elon Musk ($291.5 million), Timothy Mellon ($197 million), Miriam Adelson ($148.3 million), Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein ($143.5 million), Ken Griffin ($108.4 million), and Jeffrey and Janine Yass ($101.1 million)—all exclusively supported Donald Trump and other Republican candidates (except for the Yasses, who gave a nominal $1,500 contribution on the Democratic side). The biggest donor on the liberal side (after Trump-supporting $64.8 million donor Paul Singer) was former New York City mayor and publisher Michael Bloomberg, who gave $64.3 million total, with all but $1 million going to the Democratic side.
These numbers do not include all of the spending and contributing by these ultrawealthy individuals (including amounts contributed to non-disclosing political organizations organized under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code). Take the spending of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Even the $291.5 million figure does include the value of content on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), which reaches hundreds of millions of users. Musk reportedly tweaked the platform’s algorithm to promote content favorable to Donald Trump, something quite valuable but hard to precisely value.
The nine-figure donor emerged in American politics in the last few election cycles because of Supreme Court decisions relying on deregulatory bootstrapping under conditions of intense political polarization. In the 1976 case, Buckley v. Valeo, the United States Supreme Court interpreted the First Amendment of the United States Constitution to allow an individual to spend unlimited sums independently supporting or opposing candidates for office, a ruling that limits meant to equalize the voices of those in society to influence elections were “wholly foreign to the First Amendment.”
The actual holding of Citizens United v. FEC was less important than the reasoning employed by the Supreme Court; roughly speaking, the Court made a number of doctrinal moves facilitating campaign finance deregulation. Most importantly, the Court significantly narrowed the definition of corruption from one that included the sale of access to political figures by large donors to one more akin to quid pro quo bribery.
Open Secrets data show that the top 100 donors gave almost 70 percent of total money to outside groups like super PACs. The top 1 percent of donors gave 98% of the outside money. And thanks to changes in technology such as the rise in social media, the ultrawealthy have new ways to transform their economic heft into political might without running afoul of any regulation.
One should not pooh-pooh what the data show about how much money oligarchs are putting into campaigns based on the theory that tons of small contributions may have countervailing effects, as they did in the Trump-Harris election. That's because we do not see huge numbers of small donations in campaigns smaller than nationwide affairs. E.g., there will certainly not be enough small donations to counteract what Elon Musk is up to currently with respect to the judicial election in Wisconsin.
Plutocracy and oligarchy, rule by the wealthy and superwealthy, threaten democracy….[S]ocietal attempts to achieve political equality (or at least minimize grotesque political inequality) [should not be seen as] “wholly foreign to the First Amendment.”
