Episode 767: Harris/Walz Attacks on Free Speech and Religious Liberty

Published Oct 26, 2024, 4:45 AM

Newt talks with Andrew Langer, president of Institute for Liberty, about the importance of privacy and free speech. Langer discusses his background and the significance of protecting donor anonymity. The conversation delves into historical and recent examples of government overreach, including actions by Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz, which threaten constitutional liberties. He underscores the dangers of exposing donor lists, citing cases like the NAACP vs. Alabama and recent incidents involving Kamala Harris and Leticia James. The discussion also touches on broader issues of government power, regulatory overreach, and the chilling effects on free speech.

On this episode of Newts World. Recently, a group of conservatives came together to sign a quote statement of principles opposing weaponization of nonprofit donor lists. Now, I have to confess to you, that's a pretty long, complicated idea, and for most Americans they don't realize how really, really important this is. In this statement of principles, the conservatives explained that they're quote united against unconstitutional violations of privacy and free speech perpetrated by Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Waltz throughout their respective political careers, against Americans who speak out in favor of conservative principles. One of the co signers of the statement is my guest, Andrew Langer, President of the Institute for Liberty. Andrew, welcome and thank you for joining me.

Listen.

It is a distinct honor and a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me.

Tell me a little bit about your own background and how you ended up becoming president of the Institute for Liberty.

I wear a lot of different hats in the policy world, but I started working for a gentleman on property rights issues back in the nineteen nineties, around the same time you became speaker. I was working for a blind lawyer. He happened to have been Reagan's Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Environment Division, and his area of expertise was property rights, and he was one of the authors of President Reagan's Executive Order on Takings. He was a constitutional scholar, and because he was visually impaired, I was reading to him everything that came across his desk, and I got a real education in conservative public policy and what's happening on a day to day basis, and developed an interest on the non profit side of the law, the group of nonprofit legal foundations that were out there. Worked for him, then worked for his wife at a group called Defenders of Property Rights, worked for a number of different nonprofit organizations, and have been doing this kind of work for the last fifteen years or so, both the hat that I wear with the Institute for Liberty, but also doing regulatory work for the SEAPAC Foundation. But these are issues and issues of speech and constitutional rights are very near and dear to my heart, and the idea that we have this fundamental right to associate privately and in some cases anonymously with others, especially when it comes to voicing our concerns about things. I consider that to be incredibly sacrisynct.

What attracted you to the Institute for Liberty.

I've been working for a trade association called the National Federation of Independent Business. Loved that organization, love the work that they do doing regulatory work. Wanted to branch out on my own and have a little bit more flexibility and to get involved in things that went a little bit further beyond the issues dealing with small business and entrepreneurship, which are issues that are still very important to me to this day. One of those happened to be the issue of speech and the issue of donor privacy and the attacks that were being made at the time by folks who were very unhappy with the idea that there was this issue of anonymous speech. I remember sitting down with a Republican staffer on the Senate side of the hill. This is probably around two thousand and six, two thousand and seven, and this staffer telling me that there was no anonymous right or right to anonymous speech, and I sort of had to walk them through why this was not the case. Stemming from a very important nineteen fifty seven case NAACP versus Alabama, and thankfully we were able to be back. But you know there has been this continuous push pull and nude, I know you know this very well. There is a continuous push pull and pressure being put to limit the infinite reas each of the Constitution and the rights that are protected Therein.

You're on to something central to our constitutional liberty, and that is, if you don't have the right to anonymity, then nothing can protect you from the state.

Right.

There's a wonderful scene in A Man for All Seasons where Thomas Moore talking to his son in law, and his son in law is a rabid supporter of King Henry and of the Reformation, and his son in law is arguing that if the law isn't useful, just knock it down. Moore says, so, let me understand this. If the devil is hiding behind a law, and to get it the devil, you knock down the law, and then the devil retreats behind another law. Don't get the devil, you knock down that law. Then when you have chased him all the way across England and he's standing in Wales, and he turns now that you've knocked down all the laws? What protects you from the devil? I mean, it's one of the great statements. And of course More only was beheaded because he wouldn't allow loyalty to the king to rise above loyalty to God.

Let me digress for a second and say, I was just having a conversation with a theater producer who was working on essentially, there's a playwright who has written a sequel to A Man for All Seasons, sort of focusing on what happens after Thomas Moore is beheaded, and I'm very interested to see where that goes.

Well, it's doubly interesting because the chancellor, who has sold out to the king and has More executed, is himself later executed by the king. Because once you establish a tautolitarian state, he can rewrite everything. It invents what it calls justice, which is power, and you have nothing to protect you from that power.

And it gets into what Laventi Barria, at least supposedly said the head of the Russian secret police under Stalin, you know, show me the man and I'll show you the crime. That when you have the law being so expansive as it is to you know, infect every aspect of someone's daily life.

Someone who has.

Not run a foul of the law may or may have inadvertently run a foul of the law, and the state can turn that against them. And the issue that you're talking about as you were teeming this up, this issue of nothing protecting somebody from the state. This was the central issue in the nineteen fifty seven case NAACPR versus Alabama. The State of Alabama wanted access to the NAACP's donor roles, and the Supreme Court rightly recognized at the time that the only reason why the State of Alabama wanted access to the NAACP's donor list was to be able to either harass those donors or discourage them from donating, the fundamental chilling effect on free speech that the First Amendment is supposed to guard against. And so that stood for a very long time as Supreme Court precedent. But of course, the folks who want to harass those donors and chill those donors, they've been trying to chip away at this for the next seventy years.

And you've had recent comments like John Carey who said in a recent public con meeting, you know, maybe we're going to have to set aside the First Amendment. There are people on the left who believe that if your cause is morally correct, there should be no limits, and therefore, by definition, you should be subordinated to the state right.

I seem to remember Gilbert and Sullivan pillaring that sentiment the Mikado. It is interesting because you then come to where we are today now. Of course, a couple of years ago we had a case in the Supreme Court, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation versus Bonta. Originally it was AFP Foundation versus Harris, but she was no longer Attorney General. California passed a law to try to do the same thing. The Supreme Court said, no, you have no power to do this. These organizations have a right to keep their donor list secret. But then it was a year later. Two years later Tim Waltz himself, who also recently on the debate stage, was talking about the limits to free speech. Tim Waltz, as governor of Minnesota, signed a law very similar to California's law. And this is even more arbitrary because the state of Minnesota would be demanding have access to these lists when they would demand it and it's very unclear as to what circumstances the state would do that. And we all, as you and I both know, you know, the more nebulous, the more subjective you make those standards, the more apt the state is to use and abuse them.

I think we don't teach often enough. Lord Acton's dictum that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. He drops the word tends. And what you have has been a steady growth of government power and therefore a desire by those who are powerful in government to have more and more and more control over the rest of us. Now, one of the most important things you've done is organized a group of significant conservatives to sign a statement of principles opposing weaponization of nonprofit donor lists. That's pretty sophisticated language, and I wasn't when I first read it. It didn't leap out of me like a good Coca Cola or McDonald's commercial. Talk about what you mean by weaponization of nonprofit donor lists?

Right, So this gets into this issue that the left is recognized over the years that there is enormous power in both Exposing is probably not the right word, but let's just say exposing for their terminology, exposing donors to greater public scrutiny, either a because you can harass the donors themselves into no longer giving or supporting organizations, or you send a message to others that if you support organizations or causes like this, you will be subjected to the same kind of scrutiny that these other folks have done. And it's a way of achieving the end of silencing someone's speech, but doing it in an extra constitutional manner. And we've been seeing more and more of this over the years, the use of extra constitutional methods of trying to silence this kind of speech. And there are lots of different ways that we can get into, but the basic idea, especially in modern times, comes in things like after California's Proposition eight referendum having to do with gay marriage, you had that donor list to the propa aid organization that got leaked publicly and the donors to that effort were harassed by leftist activists. Or on the climate change issue, the donors to certain conservative or free market limited government organizations having that information found out by legislators, by members of Congress, and members of Congress harassing those to the point at the end where you also had things like attorneys general in various states and commonwealths harassing donors to organizations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute. These are all what we're talking about when we're talking about the weaponization of donor lists and donor privacy and the attacks on donor privacy. The goal, at the end of the day is to silence, or to prevent, or to harass or to discourage folks from giving you these organizations, and thus at the other end, choking off the ability of these organizations to raise money. Again, the very things that the Supreme Court warned about an NAACP versus Alabama.

You make the point that as California Attorney General, Kamala Harris actually exposed findential donor list of thousands of nonprofits on a government website. Walk us through that case. I was really charli. I did not realize this. It's not gotten much play in the presidential campaign, but it's a very sobering example of government putting people at risk.

And that's exactly it. The situation occurred in which these organizations they make these filings. Let me take a step back there. So when an organization files its paperwork with a state and with the federal government. Right, so, nonprofit organizations they file, depending on what their tax status is, they file returns with the federal government and then with every state government in the states in which they're doing business. And it is presumed that all of this information is confidential. Right now, an organization's filings with the IRS are made public in a database that's out there, but the donor information is supposed to be redacted. Well, in Kamala Harris's case, this confidential information was actually exposed. And the question, of course is whether or not this was purposeful. There is every reason to think that it was purposeful, because again there is enormous power in getting this information out there and then making the donors to these making them vulnerable to being harassed by individuals.

So that's what happened there.

And so you get this AFP versus Bonta case again originally AFP versus Harris, and the Supreme Court says, no, no, no, We said this already once before, in nineteen fifty seven. These kinds of things. You have this right to associate with people privately and anonymously, You have this right to engage in this kind of discourse anonymously. Now, we as a people have decided that if you're giving to causes that are electoral in nature, that's a whole different kettle of fish. It's also governed by a different agency in a different set of statutes. But the bottom line here is for these purposes, for these entities that are governed under Section five oh one of the Internal Revenue Code, this is considered research and education and to some degree, advocacy, and this has a greater level of protection.

In my own personal experience, it has two kinds of chilling effects and donors. One is that you could end up being in direct trouble with the government. The other is you could end up with people who disagree with you, who put pressure on you, and you might, in some circumstances end up having legal fees to protect yourself. So it really moves to inhibit conservatives from being involved in holding the government accountable.

That's exactly it.

And a really prime example of this is what the Competitive Enterprise Institute face. You know, this is a free market, limited government think tank, not a traditional conservative organization, but one of the leading organizations on the issue of climate change skepticism, and most importantly getting our federal government to think more thoughtfully, to be redundant there, but to be a little bit more thoughtful about the policies that are being enact in response to some perceived thread of man made climate change. And so what happens is CEI has a fundamental right to do this. They're raising good and important questions, questions which need to be asked in terms of what the executive branch is doing. And so what happens is that several donors to CEI get exposed, most notably I want to say exon, but CEI was subpoenaed by the US attorneys in the US Virgin Islands and several other jurisdictions for information about their donors and for information about their correspondence with their donors and their correspondence with other interested parties.

About this issue.

And the idea was to get CEI to spend huge sums of money on this, but also to try to chill out their speech, to get them to think twice about doing this. And again that comes down to this constant push pull, this constant pressure that is being put on these organizations to try to get them to shut up and go along with the leftist dogma.

You pointed out that this happened in California, Well, Kamala Harris was the attorney general. But in twenty twenty two, Nicki Haley, as a presidential candidate, accused New York Attorney General Leticia James of leaking the donor list of her nonprofit. I mean, Politico apparently got a copy of an unredacted copy of Stand for America's tax returns that included a list of donors, which normally is kept private. Isn't this sort of a coercive act?

Not even sort of.

It is fundamentally a coercive act in other situations as well, where folks have spoken out and have found themselves to be on the wrong side of the state. So you got Nicki Haley on the one side, being faced with this and having her donors have to answer questions from the press about this by the same token, literally the day after Tulci Gabbard endorsed Donald Trump in this election cycle, we only know this because of a whistleblower. She found herself put on a watch list the Organs of Homeland Security, so that every time she enters an airport she is followed by a whole team of people. I mean, this is what they are now doing as a way of trying to silence the opposition.

Natassay Abercase I know her person. I like her a lot. She's served in the US military, she's been a member of Congress as well as the state legislator. The idea that they were assigning people to be air marshalls on planes with her and her husband, they had apparently put some signal on the computer. So wherever she showed up, TSA would give her a very thorough looking through all of her suitcases and said, this is madness.

It really is.

And of course we are very much through the looking class because it's exactly what the left accuses the right of doing right. Isn't this what we've been talking about for the last several weeks in this presidential election cycle, how Donald Trump will treat his political opponents when we've seen all of this happening over the years. Let me just come back to the CEI think for a moment if I could, because it underscores another aspect of this. And of course we're talking at Protectconservative Voices dot Com about the donor list and making sure that we can keep donors private, but The other part of this is the sort of the other abuses of power in terms of the silencing of these voices. You know, during the Obama administration, we had something called Operation Chokepoint, which was a way that they were again extra constitutionally. The Obama administration was pressuring banks and credit card institutions to shut down the accounts and credit card payment processing accounts of entities that they had an ideological animus against. It was payday lenders, it was gun and ammunition manufacturers and dealers, et cetera.

But it was also.

Small nonprofits, and they were opening up this idea that the left was trying to paint conservative advocacy as fraudulent in nature. On climate change, for instance, right the left says that climate change is settled science. Therefore anything that questions climate change or questions the policy recommendations that are being made, well, that is fraudulent. Therefore it is covered by a whole other set of statutes, and so we're going to go after them for that. And so this is part of this weaponization, the issue of lawfare and then the attempts to silence opposition.

I think it's important to recognize that if they're not stopped. They're going to multiply. In Britain, you now get arrested for complaining to the police because they didn't arrest a rapist or a robber. It is astonishing. Canada is a little bit down in that direction, not as bad as Great Britain has become. But you also have this whole problem which we lived through with COVID, where it turned out the people who are being blocked actually knew more and told the truth better than the people who we were told to listen to.

I will never forget this. I do a lot of work with a guy named Jerry Rodgers, and Jerry is the editor of Real Clear Policy and the editor of Real Clear Health, one of the best experts on healthcare policies, and and I both do radio together. And he was being pressured by the folks that he works with to not talk about COVID and what he knows about COVID, and he's like, you know, you do understand that I'm the editor of Real Clear Health. I'm reading this stuff on a daily basis. We did a couple of podcasts about sort of public health issues, and those podcasts were deplatformed by YouTube, which again was astounding that somebody else is going to substitute their judgment out there. Here's what I come back to them, and this is what gives me a little bit of hope.

I think you and I both agree.

In fact, i'm pretty certain you and I both agree that the only answer to speech you don't like is more speech, right, that's the idea. You subject speech you don't like to vigorous discussion, and there are still people on the other side of the aisle who believe that. I had a really great conversation force about a year ago with Bob Levy, who used to write for the Washington Post. He had a daily column in the Washington Post. Bob is a traditional progressive liberal in almost the classical liberal sense, not quite more in the progressive mold. But I asked him, I said, Bob, you know what's your greatest concern And he said, you know, the erosion of the First Amendment.

You have folks who recognize this.

Now we were losing them, but nevertheless, I think you have folks who are very much aghast at this, and it's a matter of making sure that all of those voices can continue to be heard.

It's not just government, but there's also a case which you said, were you head to Chase Bank closing the bank account of a religious freedom nonprofit and requesting access to their donor list. I mean this as grave a danger and a violation of your privacy rights. As anything.

This gets into what we call the extra constitutional ways of doing these things, and a great concern because what happens, and we saw this also during COVID Right, is that at the very least members of the government, even the progressive status members of the government, recognize that they can't out and out censor. So what they turn around and do is they turn around and they use the pressure, the coercive power of the regulatory state and they say to these entities, hey, it's a nice banking guide here, it's a nice credit card payment system here. We'd hate for anything to happen to it. With regards to regulation. Maybe you ought to do X, Y and Z on our behalf. You have that aspect of it. But then almost more pernicious because it's not coordinated from folks in government, is the effort on the part of these leftist activist organizations to use things like DEI versity equity inclusion and ESG environmental and social governance to infiltrate these corporate institutions and use those policies and that ideology and that inculcation of that ideology to drive what is not an economic or financial agenda within a business entity, but to drive a political agenda within that entity. And that's where you find situations where banks or other entities are saying, well, we're not going to do business with this anymore.

If you're a.

Gun store or you're an ammunition manufacturer or dealer, well we don't want your business anymore. Or if you're this kind of a nonprofit, well we don't want that. If you're advocating against I'm raising questions about climate change or climate change policy, we don't want that business here. And again, that is a very dangerous place to be because then we're talking about these systems in which there are very few of them. You know, it's the dangers of oligarchy. Used to be a situation in which the answer was competition, But if the deck winds up getting stacked and the barriers to entry are so high, it's very easy for oligarchs to turn around, or oligarchic businesses to turn around and take over the political agenda.

Under the Biden Harris administration, the FBI was listing Catholic churches as potential domestic terrorist threats. What do you think happened? It's such a weird position to.

Be in just this way.

Kamala Harris did an interview in which she was asked about compromises on abortion policy. What compromises would you consider compromises that would protect and I'm being much more eloquent than the interviewer was, but would you consider compromises that would protect the rights of conscience for people who have religious objections to these things? And Kamala Harris said no, there should be no objections whatsoever. And as shocking and as angering as that is, it's also not surprising given what this administration has done. And this gets into the work that I do on the world regulatory side of things. This administration, unlike just about any other, and even more than the Obama administration, has engaged in what I call and others frankly called the whole of government approach to ideology. They have a particular set of ideological goals that they want to achieve, and they use every different agency or as many different agencies as possible. So this administration is particularly against religious freedom. So at HHS they create a set of rules, or they revisit a set of rules that under the Trump administration protected a doctor's right to not participate in abortions on religious grounds.

They got rid of that.

They've attacked religious freedom on college campuses through the Department of Education. The things that they've done with the FBI, sending a swat team to the home of a father who was protecting his son as they were protesting outside of an abortion clinic Newton. They even went so far as to earlier this year, this is no joe, they were using the Department of the Interior to remove a statue of William Penn, the great icon of religious freedom in America, to remove its statue of William Penn from the William Penn Homestead in Philadelphia. It is all comprehensive. They hate religion, they hate the rights to religion, they hate the protection of people's rights to their religious freedom, and so they have gone about and attack them. And that will only continue under Kamala Harris. She promised it just the other day.

Picking Waltz to be her vice presidential candidate. I loved two of the things he did For Catholics, the communion is a central moment because it is the presentation of the body and blood of Christ, and going to commune at least once a week is a very significant act for at least half of the Catholic community. So at one point during COVID he closed down all the churches, but allowed them all of America to be open for the purpose of quote, retail things.

And the other part of this, of course is snitch line, which I don't want to get too far ahead of it, but that's exactly it. And of course Tim Waltz was not alone. We singled him out now because he wants to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. And he has also voiced that he doesn't believe in free speech. I'll come back to that in a second, but that's exactly it. In example after example in these democratic states, Maryland where I do radio, the mayor of Baltimore doing that. The governor who's running for Senate right now did that, Tim Waltz, Others all closed down churches. Gavin Newsom is a prime example of this. Right, Gavin Newsom can go to the French laundry and have a party, but you can't go to Communion. If you're a Catholic person living in California Central Valley, you can't do that. At the same time, with Waltz, he turned around and created this snitch line to go tell on your neighbors. For someone who claims to be a student of China and says that he is very critical of China, he's certainly been more than willing to embrace the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian approach to handling these things.

When I first read about the snitch line and the idea that he literally is asking people to spy on their neighbors, my first thought was the stasse in East Germany. After the collapse of East Germany, people suddenly realized how many of their neighbors had been reporting on them, and in that sense, Waltz is a perfect example of a proto to tolitarium. I want to commend you for what you're doing. I think the letter is important, and I think the work you're doing to educate the country on religious liberty and on the threat to our freedom and the threat to our rights is really important. Our listeners can find out more about the Institute for Liberty by visiting your website at Institute Forliberty dot org. And Andrew, I really want to thank you for joining me.

And folks should go and check out the letter at Protectconservative Voices dot com. Please do that. That's a great group. Proud to be a part of this effort. Partners at People United for Privacy. You've done a great job and thank you so so much for having me on. It's always great to chat with you.

Thank you to my guest Andrew Langer. You can find out more about his organization, Institute for Liberty on our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newsworld is produced by Ganid three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newsworld can sign up for my three free weekly columns at Gingrich three sixty dot com. Slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newsworld

In 1 playlist(s)

  1. Newt's World

    821 clip(s)

Newt's World

Join former House Speaker, professor, historian, and futurist Newt Gingrich as he shares his lifetim 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 814 clip(s)