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Note: This is an unedited rush transcript. Please check any quotations against the audio recording.

Nico Perrino: Okay, folks. Welcome to ��֭����'s monthly webinar. It's December, happy holidays. To returning members, I think you all know how this goes. It's member-driven questions. So, I do a little bit of framing here at the beginning. You all can go to the bottom of your screen to the Q&A button and start typing in your questions about any free speech-related matter. And we do our best for the next hour to get to as many of them as we can. I think there's been one month where we've gotten to all the questions. We're going to aim to achieve that goal here again in December as a holiday gift to all of you.

But we have many new people coming to this monthly webinar because we did open this webinar up to the general public as a way to entice the public to become FIREmembers before the end of the year. These, again, are monthly calls that we've heard from our members you guys enjoy. So, if you like this call, you like doing the ask FIREanything deal, please consider becoming a FIREmember before the end of the year.

What does membership get you? It costs $25.00, but it gets you access to these monthly webinars, FIREevents that we host across the country. You get access to our quarterly publication. It comes to you in the mail. And you get a FIREmembership card to show that you're a member of the free speech movement.

Will Creeley: That sounds like it would be a great gift for loved ones as well, and friends, too.

Nico Perrino: We do have a program that allows you to gift FIREmembership. So, go to ��֭����'s website. Go to the ��֭����.org/donate. You can find out all the different ways to donate. FIREgets 50% of our support here at the end of the year. The last three months of the year, people are trying to get their tax deductible donations in before the end of the year. So, please consider becoming a member. And if you have the means to, support FIREbeyond that as well. We need as many people joining the free speech cause as possible.

So, as I introduce my distinguished colleagues on this call, I was almost going to say extinguished.

Ari Cohn: It's been quite a week. I'm not quite extinguished yet.

Nico Perrino: You guys are on fire. You're on fire. Please start putting your questions into the Q&A feature there at the bottom of your screen. We're joined by recurring webinar guest, Robert Shibley. Robert is ��֭����'s special counsel for campus advocacy. We also have Will Creeley, who is ��֭����'s legal director. And we are joined by a new participant in ��֭����'s monthly webinars. Although you were in a separate webinar last month, Ari Cohn recently rejoined FIREas our lead counsel for tech policy. So, welcome everyone to the webinar.

We received some questions ahead of time, so I'm going to start with one line of questioning that many people have asked. Is the TikTok ban a permissive exception from the freedom of speech?

We also have another question. That question is from Stephen. We have another question from Larry. “I agree with ��֭����'s position that TikTok should not be forced to sell unless the government can demonstrate it is a national security risk. Has FIREconsulted with any experts on China to determine for itself if there is a risk?” Larry continues, “I'm a longtime FIREmember who served for 27 years in US intelligence, and I believe there is a 100% certainty that any part of CCP, Inc., has to comply with government information demands and that such demands will be made.”

Will, do you want to kick us off here? Tell us what happened at the DC Circuit about a week and a half ago and where things stand now and what ��֭����'s position is.

Will Creeley: Sure. Let me just say I spared you all wearing my Christmas hat today, but I am feeling festive and I am happy to talk about Tic-Tacs or TikToks, whatever you got. Let's start with TikTok. Last week, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, just one step below the Supreme Court, they have exclusive and original jurisdiction over the constitutional challenge to this law that was passed by Congress, signed into law by President Biden.

And they said it's constitutional. They consolidated the TikTok challenge and the uses of TikTok challenge, and they said they assumed without deciding, the act had to pass the highest level of constitutional scrutiny, and they said that it did. There are national security concerns here that are so compelling that even this unprecedented step of banning an entire platform of communication passed First Amendment scrutiny. Now, just yesterday, folks may have heard in the news that TikTok is filed with the Supreme Court asking the court to issue an injunction and then, review the constitutionality of the law itself.

FIRE, breaking news for all you members and would be members on the call, FIREwill be filing with the Supreme Court today encouraging the court to indeed grant an injunction and take a look for itself at the constitutionality of the law. So, that answers, I think, just the table setting to Stephen's question. ��֭����'s position is that, no, this is not within the limited exceptions to the First Amendment.

When the government bans a speech platform used by 170 million Americans, it's just about half the country, it's got to do more than just say there's a national security concern. It's got to prove it. And we didn't see anything in the public record, which is all the DC Circuit relied on that would amount to anything more than conjecture, either with regard to the two concerns that the government identified, manipulation of the content on TikTok and data security. And as our brief, which we'll file today, and you can check it out at our website, argues, both concerns are pretty much conjectural.

The DC Circuit itself admitted that there was no specific intelligence as to whether or not China was manipulating the content on the app. And as for the data concerns, we raised a number of points in response there. If the act is targeted just at data, it could have done far less sweeping restrictions on an entire expressive medium to address that concern.

It seems like it's targeting TikTok because lawmakers didn't like the speech on TikTok. In fact, there were statements by lawmakers on the record. So, long story short, the thing acts as a big FIRErestraint on speech. It's an unprecedented step, and FIREwill oppose it. The government has to put up when it's trying to take a step that big.

Nico Perrino: Ari, did you have anything else you wanted to add there?

Ari Cohn: Oh, Will stole my put up or shut up line. Just to reiterate that, this is not some small thing. This is quite unprecedented. And the fact that the DC Circuit not only just gave the government a massive amount of deference, but also said, “Well, they haven't proven that it happened or will happen, but it's a maybe it could possibly happen.” That just cannot be enough for the magnitude of what the government is doing here. It has to be more than just some hypothetical, we are worried that such a thing might exist.

[00:07:00] Imagine trying to restrict speech in any other context based on some hypothetical, we are worried that maybe someone might react violently to this speech. We are worried that maybe someone might throw bottles at you. Nobody would agree that that is sufficient. So, I don't think we should put up with it here either.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, it's worth noting, and Erwin Chemerinsky wrote about this in an op ed, this is the first time I believe that the United States government has banned a speech platform. Full stop. And we've been concerned at FIREfor years now about the banning of speech platforms internationally, whether it's X in Brazil or China or Russia banning many of America's social media platforms. In all those cases, it's done on national security grounds and national security justifications for banning speech date back to the early days of American history.

And many of those justifications we now look back on as wrongheaded, whether you're looking at John Adams Sedition Act, which was justified based on the quasi war with France, or you look at the espionage and sedition acts that were passed during World War I, which jailed thousands of Americans for opposing America's entry into World War I or the draft.

Or you go to the Pentagon Papers case revealing information about Vietnam, all those free speech cases dealt with national security justifications. There are a couple of things that the government likes to come in based on a conjectural theory to justify censorship. And what is our job as civil libertarians? Remember, FIREis a free speech organization. Our job as civil libertarians is to hold the government to a high bar when it's trying to use a national security justification to censor speech.

And that's what we're doing here. There was a sealed record in this case, and we thought maybe there might be something in the sealed record that the court would rely on to justify banning TikTok.

But no, it said everything that it was using to justify its ban and upholding the law was in the public record. And for us, that's just not good enough.

Ari Cohn: One more quick note if I may, Nico, just to jump in here. This is slightly beyond ��֭����'s ambit, but I still want to make this point. When we expanded, we put up billboards around in certain cities that said something like was it banning speech doesn't make you China, but it's a red flag. I feel a little bit the same way here, right? You don't want to oppose a totalitarian adversary by becoming a little bit more totalitarian yourself, right? It's a justification that will be seized upon by dictators and would be foes across the globe to say, “Look, America is not really the liberal shining beacon of liberty on a hill.” I’m trampling that quote, but you know what I mean? America doesn't really mean what it says.

They'll ban free speech anytime they find it convenient to do so. I want to stick to our principles here and lead by example.

Nico Perrino: Sabrina asks with Ari on staff, welcome Ari, will FIREfocus more on litigation and social media internet cases, or just public and government advocacy? Will?

Will Creeley: Ari is going to be our jackknife. What did I assign you on Day 1? Something like write 800 words on Section 230 and quickly –

Ari Cohn: Anderson, yeah.

Will Creeley: Yeah. Anderson, the third circuit's opinion in Anderson holding social media platforms liable to parents for fads and the harm that might happen to minors for following TikTok. It started out from a tragic death of a young woman. And I said, “Ari, let's go with something about that because that's a dangerous theory that's taken hold in the public discourse that speech is something like a product.” It's like a liability concern that dangerous speech is the same as opening a bad can of tuna fish.

And if you get really sick then, you should be able to hold the speaker liable in the same way you'd hold the can reliable. If we start indulging that theory, good luck. And maybe we can talk a little bit about that with Donald Trump, too. But long story short, Ari's got a billion things to do. We've had him tasked on a number of things and he's busy. Would you agree, Ari?

Ari Cohn: I love the chaos. This is great. But we'll try to do everything and everything that we have the time to do. It's just always a matter of having the people with the time to do it. FIREknows that that's a premium.

Will Creeley: Yeah. In a typical day, Ari, you will talk to allies. You'll talk to media. You'll talk to lawmakers. You'll talk to us. You'll look at briefs. You'll make arguments. We'll put Ari to work. He's our I would say utility infielder, but that doesn't quite capture it. How about an all-star outfielder who can play any position on the diamond?

Ari Cohn: I’m pretty good on second base. That's fine.

Will Creeley: There you go.

Nico Perrino: We have a question from Melanie. Where a US university has banned mandatory DEI statements, as any department within such university ever successfully mandated these for department faculty members on what basis or bases? Robert, do you want to talk about DEI statements here?

Robert Shibley: Yeah. There's different levels of bans on DEI statements. There are some universities that have said they're just not going to require them as a matter of course anymore. And they're going to leave that up to the different departments. And there are the universities that have said, “No, nobody's asking for DEI statements.” So, I don't know of any school where the school has said, “Look, nobody's allowed to ask for these DEI statements,” and the departments have gone ahead and done that. So, I think that's the quick answer to that question.

Nico Perrino: And so, folks who are new to the conversation are aware DEI statements are diversity, equity, and inclusion statements that require faculty who are applying for a job at a university or seeking promotion or tenure to issue a statement on how they will advance diversity, equity, and inclusion on their campus.

And we've seen some examples of this weeding out up to 70% of applicants in the university of California system, for example, before their application is ever reviewed on the merits of their scholarship, for example.

Robert Shibley: And sometimes, these are required in their annual evaluations, too, not just for tenure. But they'll be asked. I think we got a case submitted just today where somebody was asking about what I'm supposed to say in this particular DEI statement. How much room do I have here to interpret DEI, interpret inclusivity the way I want, or do I have to follow the university's prescribed beliefs? And so, that’s the fundamental problem is you can understand why if you really want to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion, you would ask people that because if you asked to measure it, you're going to get some more of that.

But at the same time, it has been proved to act as a very effective filter based on politics. And so, it ends up, unfortunately, being a litmus test, I think more often than not.

Nico Perrino: And faculty see it as such.

Robert Shibley: Yeah, there's no question for our faculty survey, it just came out now, and Malvi, it looks like maybe dropping it in the chat that faculty also see it that way. And that while even liberal faculty are more or less divided on DEI statements, overall the overwhelming consensus is that faculty don't believe there is a reason to be asking for DEI statements. And that makes sense.

Nico Perrino: It's like 90% of conservative faculty think they're political litmus tests.

Robert Shibley: Yeah. And even close to I think 30 or 40% of liberal faculty. So, there isn't that much mistaking about what's going on here. And it's good to see that faculty members are aware of that.

Nico Perrino: Also, Robert, to stick on the subject, we got a question from Luke. How does FIREplan to address coerced speech as an issue intimately related to free speech? Examples would be DEI or social justice statements on applications for jobs. Luke is a member of the medical profession and has seen this percolate in his industry as well. Robert, can you talk about the relationship between DEI statements or forced speech as Luke puts it and free speech? Are they one in the same or identical twins, maybe?

Robert Shibley: Well, they're definitely not. So, I guess to start out, coerced speech has always been something that FIREhas been opposed to early on. We thought of this more in the context of thought reform. And in the earlier days of political correctness, people were urged, I think more often than they are now, to actually literally take diversity pledges and things like that. They would go through trainings that were very coercive. Sometimes, people would come out crying from them, etc. And that sort of died off and then seems to have come back in a different form. But we've had a number of cases over the years where, I'll give you an example, schools will say, “All right, you have to do your yearly diversity training and it's online.” And so, you go online and you can't register for class until you've filled out this survey.

And so, it tells you about diversity and then, it'll ask you a series of questions and you have to get them right or you have to get a certain number right to pass. And when those questions ask something along the lines of what is the right thing to do here, and then the right thing to do is this very politically overdetermined, make sure you always think about whoever you might be talking to and their subjective response to it before you talk.

When on these divisive issues like gender, sex race, etc., that's the kind of thing that we say, no, that's coerced speech. You're saying that, literally, I cannot register for class unless I say that is the correct way to believe about things. And so, we've always been opposed to that. The world outside of campus stuff is so big. I know that it is a big issue in the medical profession right now and things like that. So, I think that's something we'll be working through. But coerced speech is, in many ways, the antithesis of free speech.

There's a lot of things you can say that are even worse. Prior restraint is one of them when you can't even start to say it. But I think another one is dictating what you must say rather than what you must not say or cannot say or should not say.

It is very intrusive on your own conscience.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. That's how George Orwell's 1984 ends.

Robert Shibley: It is. That's exactly right.

Ari Cohn: Gin streaked tears going down his face.

Nico Perrino: We have a question from Ricky here. On January 15, SCOTUS will hear the case regarding Texas's age verification law. Will you discuss the possible outcomes and discuss whether this case will impact age verifications already in place across the country? Ari, you've been making the rounds across the country talking about age verification and its relationship with free speech in the First Amendment. Do you want to take this one?

Ari Cohn: Yeah. So, the district court in that case came up with a really, really good decision. And I say that partially because I wrote an article about that case and the opinion, basically, mirrored my article like word for word. And I felt very proud of myself.

Nico Perrino: Can you go back a little bit? What's the case? What's it about?

Ari Cohn: Yeah. So, the case is about a Texas law that targets technically commercial sites that offer more than 33% pornography. And it required two things. It requires age verification. And it also required these warnings about what porn does to you. I never knew you could lose weight by watching porn, but that's –

Will Creeley: In 14 point font, right?

Nico Perrino: And age verification requires you to submit or, in effect, submit something that proves your age before accessing the content.

Ari Cohn: Right. And the district court had a great opinion saying, “Listen, yes, times have changed since we held age verification unconstitutional back 20 years ago,” but nothing has changed materially enough to change that outcome. Age verification is still unconstitutional.

And as well, these warnings are compelled speech, and the extremely unconstitutional fifth circuit takes it up. They agree on the warnings, which kind of surprised me. But they reversed the district court on the age verification part. And the decision was tortured in my opinion. But the court, basically, held all speech related to sex to the standard that you can restrict that kind of material for kids. So, adults are now held to the same kind of constitutional standard, the lower standard that the government has to satisfy when regulating kids. It really kind of just misplaced the analysis. The Supreme court will take it up.

I am hoping that they continue to be sick of the fifth circuit’s shenanigans and send it back down saying, “No, you did this analysis wrong. Strict scrutiny is the most rigorous constitutional scrutiny that should have been applied here.”

But it's hard to tell because sex is different for a lot of people. It makes people think differently about issues they would feel otherwise about if sex were not involved. That is just a reality.

Will Creeley: Let me jump in here real quick with two additional points. First of all, to Ricky's good question, if the Supreme court upholds the, in ��֭����'s view, terrible fifth circuit opinion, it will be at odds with every other district court to consider the constitutionality of these age verification laws. They've been routinely enjoined on First Amendment grounds because they burden adult access to protected speech. We're not talking about obscenity here, something that's beyond the First Amendment protections.

We're talking about adult content and sometimes very vaguely defined adult content that is protected by the First Amendment. So, when you make grown adults jump over a hoop in order to access protected content, you've got a First Amendment problem.

So, every other court has found this way. The fifth circuit is the outlier.

Nico Perrino: Including the Supreme Court.

Will Creeley: Including the Supreme courts are alluded to four times just a generation ago. I don't even know if 20 years is a generation. So, this would be a big break in First Amendment jurisprudence and it would, effectively, overturn those good holdings in other states. The fifth circuit is the outlier and ��֭����’s filed a brief of the Supreme court trying to keep it that way.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. The fact here is that you need to turn over your government ID to access constitutionally protected speech. And it's not like just turning over your government ID to get a copy of Playboy at the newsstand. This is actually going to log your information, right? As it would have to be because if the companies that are required to do age verification need to demonstrate that they are complying with the age verification, they need to have a log of who accessed their website. And as we have seen in the past, many social media platforms, even the federal government itself, have been hacked.

It will almost certainly be hacked. And it'll be used as a political weapon to learn about people, essentially.

Will Creeley: Yeah. We're worried about data security with regard to TikTok, but given the government...

Robert Shibley: One of the things I find interesting also is back in the old cases back in the early ‘00s/late ‘90s, one of the things that the court said is this age verification back then was an affirmative defense to a statute. And the court said, “This is effectively unavailable because there is no real way to verify someone's identity over the internet.” Back then, it was done by credit card information. And I think, in my opinion, the same thing is true now. On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. It is just as easy to take your brother's driver's license and submit it to the website. It is very easy to trick selfie verification.

There is actually no way to prove that whoever is putting in that information is the person that they say they are.

It's just almost impossible over the internet to conceive of a way to really do that. One difference I do want to note is if the Supreme Court does uphold this, it does not necessarily affect age verification laws with respect to say social media. It's very possible that we could see decisions at odds, one for pornography, one for social media. I hope that's not the case but I could see it happening.

Ari Cohn: Oh, 2025, what interesting things you may hold? We shall see.

Nico Perrino: Sabrina asked, “Do you have thoughts on states using ‘addictive features’ to regulate minors’ access to social media to avoid making the regulation content-based?” I think Ricky, I'm scrolling up here, asked a similar question. “Would the bans on social media for young people be a First Amendment violation if it's government mandated?” So, social media access for young people, there's been a big debate across the country since Jonathan Height’s book came out earlier this year, “The Anxious Generation.”

I just saw on social media that it sold one million copies as of, I guess, this week Penguin announced. People are definitely concerned about the effect of social media on young people. And there has been debate in Congress over the Kids’ Online Safety Act that would regulate how social media is presented to kids and how kids can access social media. Ari, do you want to take the lead here in explaining what –

Ari Cohn: I'm going to try and speed run you all through this?

Nico Perrino: Let's try and speak broadly here about some of what it's trying to do because it's not just KOSA and the federal government that are trying to mandate some of these approaches to regulating social media access for kids, but we're also seeing it in the states as well. So, it would be helpful to articulate what those arguments are and how FIREviews them from a free speech, First Amendment perspective.

Ari Cohn: So, I’ll take Ricky's question first because it's an easy one. Yes, banning kids from social media is absolutely a First Amendment violation. Minors have First Amendment rights and for good reason. Judge Posner put it probably the best way I've ever seen it put in a case called American Amusement Machine v. Kendrick out of the seventh circuit, where he went on a multi-paragraph spiel about how children don't pop out at 18 and automatically know how to navigate the world. They have to have training wheels. You have to actually raise them with getting experience for them to become productive members of society at 18.

You cannot just toss an 18-year-old into life without any context or any experience and expect them to do anything but flounder. And I think that is especially true with social media. We joke about Nigerian print scams, but can you imagine an 18-year-old logging onto Facebook for the first time at 18 having no idea what's going on and they're going to get suckered by all kinds of different things.

Terrible for media literacy as well. To go on to KOSA, and some of its analogs, the big thing about KOSA is it’s trying to prevent certain harms to minors. Eating disorders, suicide, depression, anxiety, things like that. The problem is a lot of that content is entirely constitutionally protected. Just because it might be harmful does not make it unprotected. And it's difficult to regulate. So, what they have tried to do is say, “Okay, you have a duty of care in your design features.” So, it's not necessarily that you are liable for the content that people post on your site.

It is the design features that you then use to feed that content to the minor users, which is really a distinction without a difference. If you say you have a duty to prevent or mitigate say eating disorders in the operation of your algorithm, well, the recommendation algorithm by itself devoid of content could not possibly cause an eating disorder.

It can only be justified with reference to the content that the algorithm serves up. So, it's very clearly still directed at content. First of all, if you don't trust social media platforms in the first place, saying that they now should be responsible for preventing and mitigating serious harms to your child seems crazy. Second of all, kids are not a monolith. They experience content differently. They are individuals. And they also from the age of 10, the age of 17 are very different experiences in life, can handle different levels of content.

And what it, basically, is forcing the platforms to do is either A). know what's going to affect each individual child in a particular way, impossible, or B). make decisions based on kids as this blob of a group and what might be harmful to them, which is possible, but entirely unhelpful due to the differences in individuals and age ranges.

And to touch on the addiction thing for just a second, I find it very, very troubling that we have moved to a point where we are starting to talk about regulating addiction to ideas. And that's really what this is, addiction to speech. The entire purpose of media, of every single form of media is to get your attention and keep it. That is the whole point. Choose your own adventure books do that. Cliff hangers at the end of the season do that.

Nico Perrino: What about binge watching? Yeah.

Ari Cohn: Yeah. So, the idea that we can punish people for creating content that people want to keep consuming is just extremely troubling to me.

Nico Perrino: And the question of whether minors have First Amendment rights goes back to Justice Antonin Scalia writing in a case involving access to violent video games. Justice Scalia struck that down with the court's majority in that case. It was a California law that regulated the age at which minors could purchase video games.

Will Creeley: And we're just talking about age verification. These efforts to address design features would incentivize and functionally require verification because the platforms would now be on the hook for understanding who their users would be. So, there goes anonymous speech for adults, right? There goes the unburdened access to protected speech content online that now marks the Internet. Yeah. It's a big European style regulation of speech here in the United States that doesn't pass constitutional muster on a number of fronts. However well-intentioned, the obligation has to still be with the parents and the children themselves.

There's no one size fits all government mandate that's going to address whatever problem social media may or may not be causing.

Nico Perrino: I know many of our members have concerns or have had concerns historically with social media censorship. If you hated social media censorship and how these platforms moderated their content, this is only going to supercharge those concerns because it's going to saddle them with excessive liability or very burdensome liability that's going to just push them to be risk averse and take down content. What this law is is a European style social media regulation. And if you don't like how Europe and these foreign countries have approached social media regulation, we shouldn't try and emulate it here in the United States.

So, where the law stands right now, or the bill I should say stands right now, it was passed in the Senate. It's being held up in the House. It doesn't look like it will be moved for a vote before the end of this Congress.

So, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the house, has talked about revisiting it in the new Congress, and has expressed some concerns about its implication for free speech. And, hopefully, there are changes to it that would address the extensive free speech and First Amendment concerns and FIREwill be on the lookout and we'll provide commentary.

Ari Cohn: The change I would suggest is dumping it in the trash and starting over again.

Robert Shibley: I think I'm the only one of the four of us who actually has kids who are right smack in it. I have a 16 and 14-year-old daughter. And for me, this is a very real concern. I don't let them have accounts on social media. Obviously, they see posts and everything. They're always sharing it on text. I do let them text, etc. I kind of wish I hadn't sometimes, but hey, it is what it is. I am very sympathetic to the concerns of people like Height and other parents who are concerned because I think it's hard to viscerally understand how threatening it can seem, the power of that culture that's coming through these social media things.

But the thing that really tips it over for me is that the fact is that we know the government will abuse any kind of age verification system to pierce your anonymity. And I know it can be tempting to say, “Well, the NSA is already reading all of our mail anyway.” And that's probably right, etc. But giving them more legal cover to decide to go after anonymous speakers or people who just would prefer not to be destroyed legally or in their job, that's a power that we can't afford to give them.

Nico Perrino: Steve asks, “Ari, while it is currently impossible for websites to verify the identity of people who are posting, couldn't an app be developed, which would allow people to validate their identity online. So, you've this argument.

Ari Cohn: Yeah. And I was actually just typing an answer to that. The problem is, again, when you're doing it through a mobile device and there's you on one end and a machine on the other end, there really isn't a way to tell who is putting the information in, whether they are the person they say they are. Take, for instance, the selfie verification. You have to upload your driver's license and then take a selfie. Well, first of all, again, if I have my older brother next to me, I can have them do it and then just hand my phone back to me. But I could also take their ID. And I am not joking.

If you go on Google and search for how to fool selfie age verification, the first page has at least 10 links that will tell you how to do it easily with free software that any modern 12-year-old –

Will Creeley: They're going to tell us we have to block that on Google. Come on, dude. Think about it.

Ari Cohn: I haven't seen a solution yet that really gets around the problem of not knowing who is handing the information. When you go to a bar, you hand your driver's license to the bartender. They can look at the license and look at you, see it's the real person. That analog doesn't exist when you're doing it digitally. And I don't know how to get around that.

Nico Perrino: Trina asks, “Re the huge problem and prevalence of citizens’ First Amendment rights being violated while making comments during public comment periods of city, county, and school board public meetings, does FIREhave the interest or resources, including possibly availability of interns who could work on it to proactively go state by state, county by county with letters informing, warning these government entities about citizens’ rights so these incidents stop happening?”

Will Creeley: Let me take the swing at this one. Yeah. Trina, if it's the Trina I'm thinking of, thanks for tuning in. Thanks as always for your support. Trina has given us some good leads on cases over the last few months and I'm grateful. Yeah. What we've tried to do, our public advocacy team headed by Aaron Tear and his good folks over there, they will write in whether it's props being banned and that includes the American flag at Edison, New Jersey, which is a recent victory of ours.

Nico Perrino: We have a question about that, too.

Will Creeley: Okay. We'll get there. Or our client, Rebecca Massey being led off in handcuffs. Just a shocking case. I can't even talk about it without getting angry, in front of her 10-year-old daughter in Surprise, Arizona. Yeah. We're going to keep fighting this fight to make sure that town councils, state legislative bodies have to be able to deal with the fact that citizens are going to petition them to redress their grievances. And they're going to exercise their First Amendment rights and show up at public meetings and do so. Are we going to go state by state?

Well, what we've done in public advocacy is when we win a victory, we will use an old method that we used to use on the campus context. We'll write to other schools on campus when we win one of our cases. And we'd say, “Hey, look what the folks down the road are doing. You should do that, too.”

And we're starting to import that model into our public advocacy work to kind of multiply the effect of these victories. And we do think that a little bit of publicity here has a strong deterrent effect and folks will do the right thing. They don't want to be on the nightly news like the town council in Edison, New Jersey was. They want to get it right to start. So, stay tuned. We got more to come on that front in 2025. And Trina, thanks again for your support.

Nico Perrino: And what happened in Edison, New Jersey, Will?

Will Creeley: They had a broad ordinance that prohibited the use of props for citizens coming to speak out during public comment periods at their town council meetings. And that included the American flag.

Nico Perrino: And a copy of the Constitution.

Will Creeley: And a copy of the Constitution. Actually, this is kind of a fun FIREtrivia fact. So, many of our cases involve people for years, students handing out copies of the Constitution, or just wanting to hold a copy of the Constitution. I think instantly of our guy, Kevin Shaw, who was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the community college in Los Angeles who was handing out Spanish language copies of the Constitution.

And he was doing it outside of the free speech zone, which is about the size of a parking spot. And he got busted for that. We won that lawsuit. But yeah, Edison, New Jersey, they're trying to crack down on props during public meetings, without the necessary fact of disruption, right? We're just saying blanket ban on you bringing anything here. What if it's a photo of the time that the town garbage truck dumped all that garbage in front of your lawn? You can't bring that and show the council and say, “Hey, look, we got a problem here?” Come on. You just can't do that.

So, Edison looks like they're on the path to getting it right. We're going to find out for sure next month when they meet and modify or repeal that ordinance that banned props. And we'll do that. We're here for the long run. And if you know folks who are dealing with these kinds of issues, send them our way.

Nico Perrino: We sent the town council and Edison a letter and the council held that up at the meeting that evening and said, “We're going to reverse this prop ban because I got this letter here from ��֭����.” And now, just the way that city government works in New Jersey, I think it takes a couple of meetings for –

Will Creeley: You got a notice and you'll do it at the next meeting. But I have no doubt that they do not want to be on the wrong side of that one because who wants to fight against the First Amendment? I mean, come on.

Nico Perrino: We also had a mobile billboard and our activism team was out there handing out FIREt-shirts. It was a fun day, although I guess it was raining, too, which rained on our parade a little bit.

Will Creeley: Part of the fun here for us, I think I speak for all of us on the call, is that there's an educational component here. We’re laughing about it. It seems ridiculous. But until First Amendment rights are made real for folks, until you really feel it like, “Hey, you're telling me I can't have this flag at a public meeting in my own town?” I thought this was America. Until you're on the wrong side of that, you don't realize it. So, ��֭����'s job is to make the First Amendment real in your life so that you understand, you educate folks around you that know if I stand up for these rights, there's an organization that's going to back me. That's where we come in.

Robert Shibley: I just want to bring up a profound piece of the wisdom of our founders and add the right to petition the government for the redress of grievances. We used to joke a little bit about that at ��֭����. We're like, “Yeah, we need some right to petition cases.” That's one of the five parts of the First Amendment we never get. And now, it is amazing. And I think actually it may have grown in part out of the way colleges treat things too much. But the lengths to which government agencies and authorities will go to avoid even being asked questions that they don't want to answer, even when they have the authority to just listen to the question, answer you and do nothing about it. It is amazing the lengths that they will go.

And now that I've brought that up, I think everybody on here will see it. You'd be like they're just trying not to answer the question, even though they could totally get away with it. That is the playbook universities have been using forever. And it is totally destructive to having a participatory democracy.

Will Creeley: Damn right, Robert. I got breaking news here. One tab over from our colleague, Aaron, who I referenced, who heads up our Public Advocacy Department.

He says, “I'm almost done with the template letter to 20 Michigan cities with problematic public comment policies citing our litigation victory in East Point and the Sixth Circuit decision in Ison.” He says, “You probably won't see this in time for your answer though.” There you go. Thanks very much, Aaron. I appreciate you tuning in as well.

Nico Perrino: One of the things that you find when you litigate cases, especially ones that become high profile, especially ones that have video, which are more likely to make them high profile, as many of these town council censorship cases are, is that you get more of these cases that come your way. And we are not big enough that we can take all of these cases, although we hope we will one day. We've only expanded off campus for, what, two and a half years now?

Will Creeley: We're like a busy deli counter. Take a number, we'll get there. But I tell you what, we're cranking through. Those folks over in public advocacy, they won that case in record time. It's what, 24 hours? It was quick. It's really quick. We're going to keep doing it, too.

Nico Perrino: Emily asks, “Restrictions on social media access seem to be the way to deal with the addiction that social media can cause, but that would be a violation, as we've discussed, of people's free speech rights.”

“If social media cannot be dealt with like drugs and other addictive substances, how can social media addiction be dealt with?” Does anyone want to take that? Ari?

Ari Cohn: Well, it's important to recognize that the reason that we can't deal with social media like we do say cigarettes is because the right to smoke a cigarette is not enshrined in the Constitution, whereas social media, which is an expressive platform, directly implicates our First Amendment rights. So, I see that tension a lot. People say, “Well, why can't we just regulate this like big tobaccos?” Because different things are different. It all has to come down to parents being involved, parents knowing their children. And I know this sounds careless, in a sense, because parenting is hard, and parenting today is extremely hard, and I am sympathetic to that.

Robert Shibley: Why do my kids have to know what happens at a party? I didn't tell them.

Will Creeley: I tell you what, again, as Ari says, the big difference is that this is speech. We're talking about speech. We're talking about words. We're not talking about tobacco or some kind of –

Robert Shibley: Well, and how successful have the efforts against drugs and tobacco been?

Nico Perrino: That's right. That's a great point.

Robert Shibley: You can grab somebody's cocaine or heroin or fentanyl or whatever, but it's an idea.

Will Creeley: Let me recommend folks to the great sub stack called Pessimists Archive, which Nico put me onto some months ago. It's great. It rounds up contemporary accounts of what we would now call moral panics, whether that's about video games, whether that's about photography. People were worried that photography would usher in the same kind of concerns we now have about deep fakes, whether that's about heavy metal music or comic books.

And when you see in the fullness of time, with the wisdom of the decades passing, that every generation is going to go to the ramparts with worry and anxiety about what's happening to kids these days. And it's not to lessen the very real anxiety that a parent like Robert or a parent like myself has about kids. It's always hard to raise kids. But at the end of the day, there's no government regulation cure that's ever going to be just talking to your kids and trying to be as present as involved as possible. I truly believe that.

I remember folks freaking out about rap music or PlayStations or whatever the hell it was. And I don't know, we made it out okay. Right, Robert?

Robert Shibley: Free societies are hard. We fool ourselves thinking that they're not. North Korea is probably very wholesome childhood wise, I would assume, in terms of depending on your version of wholesome. If Kim Jong Un is in it, you're probably not getting up to too much mischief, right? But I don't think we want that.

Will Creeley: That's perfectly stated.

Ari Cohn: I think it's also important to not delude ourselves into thinking that we can create an entirely safe internet. There's always going to be dangers. Crossing the street is always a danger. Nothing is 100% safe. And the more we try to legislate or regulate our way into total safety, the more blind spots we're going to create for ourselves. And that, ultimately, doesn't serve us well.

Nico Perrino: Question here. Corporate media threatens the freedom of the press after Donald Trump. Does this put an impact on the freedom of speech? This might actually give us an opportunity to discuss the recent lawsuit filed by President Trump against the Des Moines Register and Ann Seltzer over the polling that they did in Iowa leading up to the presidential election where Ann Seltzer and the Des Moines-Iowa poll, which has been held by many pollsters to be the gold standard poll, if I'm recalling correctly, it predicted that Kamala Harris would win by three percentage points in the state of Iowa.

This was a surprise to a lot of people. Donald Trump ended up winning the state of Iowa by something like 13 percentage points. The poll got it wrong, wildly wrong. Many polls have gotten the Donald Trump campaigns wrong going back to 2016. He's now arguing that this poll was a form of consumer fraud. And FIREhas posted a statement arguing that running polls for a newspaper is First Amendment protected activity. There's no exception to the First Amendment for getting a poll wrong. But folks are arguing, well, there might have been some malicious intent in the background here. Let's get this case to discover and find out.

Or that this was deliberate election interference. What do we as free speech First Amendment advocates make of that?

Will Creeley: I tell them the President-elect's got to toughen up a little bit. There's going to be a lot of speech out there that he doesn’t like in a lot of newspapers. That's America. That's the way it's been. That's the way it always should be. When we were working on that statement, I said something like, from 1776 to 2024, free press has kept America great, to use the lingua franca of the President-elect and his supporters. And that's the way it should be. And then, my colleague J.T. Moore said, “Well, what about John Peter Zenger in the proto-revolutionary period?” So, I want to give a shout out to John Peter Zenger as well. The free press keeps us honest, and you're going to see stuff in the free press that you don't like, whether that's a poll that gets the numbers wrong, or an interview like the one with Stephanopoulos that ABC recently settled over.

And we got to watch out here. The President-elect is on record saying he wants to straighten out the press. And if that means filing baseless lawsuits about protected speech, ��֭����'s going to be on the case.

Nico Perrino: What's the problem, Will? What's the problem, Ari and Robert, with filing these lawsuits and seeing what's there, right? The argument on the other side is that we suspect there's something going on here that might violate, in this case, a consumer protection law.

Ari Cohn: There is absolutely nothing that they could possibly find that could remotely, even plausibly, be a basis for this lawsuit. It will be a miracle if the lawyers don't get sanctioned. Even if there was malicious intent and they said, “Oh, yeah, we're going to put out this fake poll,” guess what? That's also constitutionally protected because lies are not ipso facto devoid of constitutional protection. They can be defamatory. This certainly was not. But just publishing a poll because you want to hurt someone's campaign is no different than publishing a news article saying this person is a terrible candidate for X, Y, and Z.

Will Creeley: Yeah. Let's say the Onion ran a poll two weeks before and distributed it to every household in Iowa saying that Ronald McDonald was polling at 240% and all the other candidates were at zero. We would laugh this out of court, right? And we're talking about a respected pollster who's gone way back.

Getting a poll wrong is not the equivalent of product liability fraud, right? It's not election interference to get a poll wrong. And as Ari says, even if you go in and say, “Oh, look, their sample size is under sampling Trump supporters and that's how they got this,” even then, you're not there. Wake me up when they run something that says like, “Hey, Trump supporters, Election Day is actually the day after. It's actually going to be on that Wednesday.” Then maybe we'll have a conversation. But even then, I doubt it. Robert, you want in on this?

Robert Shibley: Yeah. With regard to the consumer fraud thing, too, my understanding is that she was doing these polls for the Des Moines Register. So, let's say that Seltzer took a bribe and just defrauded the poll, just made it up or whatever. I think what a court would say is maybe somebody did get defrauded, but it's the Des Moines Register who is paying for the poll. I can understand why people would be concerned that pollsters who are respected, if it turns out they're taking payoffs, etc.

But even though I spent a couple of years in private practice, I have a certain amount of sympathy for men. I know these guys are up to something. Let's give it a discovery and see what it is. It's not really supposed to be the way the legal system works just so you can go rummaging through other people's emails. That said, we would not like it if that were the rule.

Will Creeley: No, it's practically a strategic lawsuit against public participation. It's designed to chill the free press. It's designed to get people to shut up or think twice before they run a poll with numbers that a powerful person doesn't like. It's un-American.

Nico Perrino: And Will, just to talk about that, SLAPP, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, these are cases that FIREhas been involved in over the past couple of years. These are essentially efforts by people to shut up their critics by filing lawsuits, often frivolous.

Will Creeley: It's censorship by suit. That's right.

Nico Perrino: It's censorship by lawsuit. You tie people up in litigation. You force them to spend a lot of money. You make them scared to speak out because what other lawsuit's going to come down the pike.

And even the people who are filing lawsuits often with deep pockets know they're going to lose, but it's the process that's the punishment. And that's why you have states across the country that have passed so-called anti-SLAPP lawsuits or anti-SLAPP laws to protect against these sorts of lawsuits to make them less damaging for the defendants. But my understanding is that Iowa does not have an anti-SLAPP law.

Will Creeley: That's right. And I want to pause for a second here and take this opportunity to recognize one of our brave plaintiffs who's here today in the chat, Gary Godwa, who just got a tough ruling from the Idaho Supreme Court. But we still got your back, Gary. We're going to keep fighting for you. Folks can check out Gary's story on our website. Maybe we'll throw a link in there. But as Gary says, “I firmly believe the size of your voice should not be dictated by the size of your wallet.” Right on. Everybody's got a First Amendment right, whether you are a billionaire or a pollster or a newspaper or Gary in Idaho.

And we've got your back, Gary. We're going to keep fighting. Gary was the subject of an anti-SLAPP suit, and we're still representing him in court. So, that case is ongoing. But yeah, just as you say, Nico, the process is the punishment here. It's censorship by suit. It's designed to make folks think twice before saying something that might offend somebody in power. And again, I will reiterate, it's un-American, and we'll keep fighting against it.

Ari Cohn: Yeah. And Ricky says, “Frivolous lawsuits, won't they start getting thrown out of court?” Yes, most likely. But the thing a lot of people don't realize is the cost of getting it thrown out of court can be enormous. In federal court, the average motion to dismiss is about $25,000.00 for a single count, for a basic lawsuit. It can be extremely expensive just to get to the point where you get it tossed out of court. And that's why this tactic works.

Nico Perrino: A question from an anonymous attendee. “How do you distinguish the freedom of speech versus freedom from social consequences?” This is speaking to a lot of the debate that happened during the height of so-called cancel culture. Robert, do you maybe want to take this? Are social consequences a form of freedom of speech?

Robert Shibley: Well, I mean, they are. So, I would first recommend to everybody, and I always do, is On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. Chapter 2 is the only one you really need to read. But he talks about this, and it's probably the most readable philosopher that's out there. But he talks about this and points out that the easy answer and one of the correct answers is that when it is the government doing it or people who have been put in authority in an official sense of the ability to punish you, that that's when you should be free from official consequences for what you say. And that's kind of like the easy mode answer to that question.

The harder one is what does it mean when you have a culture that is so hostile to what you are saying that you get these consequences that seem wildly out of proportion to what the offense is?

And admittedly, what seems out of proportion can vary widely. But Mill points out that he talks about the difference between England and France. France, at the time, had more restrictive laws, but he noticed that people in France were willing to talk about more controversial things than England. And I think that, I'm paraphrasing here, but he says you don't need a law to ban somebody from saying something if you can just prevent them from having a job if they say it. Prevent the baker from the means to make his bread or however we put it.

And so, you cannot draw a bright line there because you do want there to be some social consequences because you can't have a marketplace unless things are valued greater and lesser, right?

And so, you have to have some of that. But can people coalesce around the idea that, generally speaking, if your job has nothing to do with what you're saying, maybe you shouldn't lose it for that? That's the kind of thing that you would find a lot of support for. But boy, I'll tell you what, it is so easy to do it when it's people who agree with you and it's so difficult when it's people who don't agree. Like that Home Depot lady, I can't believe she said that thing about Trump or Biden or whoever it was.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, it was after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. There was some lady who was a low level employee at Home Depot who said something to the effect that she wished that the bullet had hit Donald Trump and people jumped on her and started calling Home Depot and asking her to get fired. I once wrote about free speech culture, which is admittedly a sort of mushy concept. And my definition of it was this, I'll take the moderator's privilege here to read it.

“Free speech culture is a set of norms that support free thought and our ability to share our opinions. These are norms that see value in curiosity, dissent, devil's advocacy, thought experimentation, and talking across lines of difference. This is critical for me. Where our first instinct in response to speech we dislike isn't to find a way to censor it or to cancel the speaker, but to meet it with more speech to defeat ideas we oppose with better ones.”

So, these are norms of course, but I think during the height of cancel culture, people's first instinct was to win arguments without actually winning arguments rather to get them fired from their jobs so that they felt like they could no longer speak up because their means of livelihood were taken away. That's First Amendment protected activity. You can definitely go and call someone's employer and say, “This person is an asshole. I don't want them to have a job anymore.” But is that really what you want in a society where your discourse devolves into just trying to get people fired from their jobs? It's not a society I want to live in. It's not the society I want my two sons to live in.

Robert Shibley: And categorical imperative to that, well, what if everybody's doing it kind of thing? Do you want to live in that kind of society? So, I wish it were more distinct. If you had Conti and categorical imperative on your bingo card for this webinar, you just won. Let me just real quick just quote ��֭����'s mission because it's right in line with what both of you are saying. FIREdefends and promotes the value of free speech for all Americans in our courtrooms, check, campuses, check, and our culture. Our vision is an America in which people overwhelmingly believe in the right of others to freely express views different from their own and expect their laws and educational institutions to reflect and teach this belief. Right on.

Nico Perrino: If you will indulge me here, we've got about two minutes left in the hour. I want to try and get through two more questions. We might go five minutes late here. We still have a bunch of people. So, people are enjoying the conversation seemingly and sticking around. We'll do two more questions and then, close it up. Steven asks, “Why would ABC give up on paying off the Stephanopoulos quote?”

“The suit would never have survived a First Amendment defense given the press's special defenses in these cases.” So, this is something that we referenced earlier. This is a defamation lawsuit filed by President-elect Donald Trump against George Stephanopoulos and the ABC News where George Stephanopoulos misquoted the civil findings against President Trump as he was found civilly liable for rape when actually it was sexual assault. That's my understanding. They recently settled that lawsuit and promised to pay, I think, a million dollars in attorney's fees and $15 million to President Trump's future presidential library.

Now, there are many in the First Amendment, free speech, free press community that are very concerned about ABC settling this lawsuit because they believe that it wasn't viable, that it should have been fought out and that it will just incentivize more frivolous defamation lawsuits that will cripple the free press and chill speech.

Ari, I see you shaking your head. Will, I know you've been reading up a lot about this. Does either of you want to start out here and give –

Will Creeley: I'm going to take the cop out. I just asked Malvi to send around the best piece I've seen about it. Thank you very much, Malvi. A piece by Richard Toffel, who is a long time press lawyer and headed up ProPublica for some years, and he asked these questions. We just don't know exactly right now what ABC's motivation was. There were depositions that were on deck, they were supposed to happen. Something is afoot there. Either it's corporate cowardice or there was something afoot. But those are the questions that ABC should answer for all of us. Otherwise, they've set this troubling precedent of bowing before power and that's no good.

So, if there was something there, we should know about it. And I think as Richard Toffel argues that ABC shareholders have a right to know about it and ABC journalists have a right to know about it in addition to the public. So, that's a great piece. I highly recommend it. And I'll leave it there since I know it's late.

Nico Perrino: Ari, did you have anything else?

Ari Cohn: No, that's fine.

Nico Perrino: I'll just say that the standard for defamation when you're talking about public figures is that there needs to be a false statement of fact that is made with actual malice or reckless disregard.

Will Creeley: Yeah, exactly right. Thanks, Niko. And that's a high standard. So, it really does make you wonder what's going on here.

Ari Cohn: I'll just say as a general proposition, it really irks me when huge companies with big bank roles can afford litigation rollover like this. It happens and it has happened even when there wasn't some kind of thing going on in the background. It just happens sometimes because the company just doesn't want to deal with it. And it really kind of screws everyone else over to an extent.

Robert Shibley: It'd be very easy for something bad in discovery to cost Disney more than $15 million.

Ari Cohn: One hot doc.

Robert Shibley: Alone. Right. That's not hard when you're a multi-bazillion dollar company.

Nico Perrino: Malvi, we have Nishi asking if we can share the link to my culture of free speech quote that I just shared. And I'm going to put it in the chat here for hosts and panelists because I can't figure out how to change that.

Will Creeley: Another good Christmas present. The Collected Writings of Niko Perrino. I'd buy that. Niko's got a book forthcoming next year. He’s too modest to let you know, but as soon as it's out, you can smash that pre-order and we're going to post it up. You can check my Twitter for it. We'll be ready for it.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, I have a book coming out. It'll probably be two years at this point. I've got to submit it by the end of the year. But it's looking at the expansion of free speech First Amendment rights over the past century from the perspective and through the stories of the people who made the expansion of those rights possible. There are a lot of old-school civil libertarians who I greatly admire and are retiring from the barricades.

I was inspired to begin this work back in 2017 at the funeral of the late great civil libertarian Nat Hentoff. It's what led me to make a documentary about former ACLU executive director Ira Glasser. And so, this book is going to open the aperture on that broader meta project to interview all these folks before they're gone and get their stories. Why did they defend free speech? Why did they expand First Amendment rights? And do they think those rights can endure? Last question here. I promise, as more questions keep coming in and it scrolls down.

Zach asks, “This is related to the recent case of a teacher in Iowa creating an unconditional and overly restrictive banned words list. With all the anti-free speech stuff going on in college campuses right now, how are things faring in K through 12 and what can FIREdo? Will, what can we do?

Will Creeley: Well, we can keep litigating, which is what we're doing. We can educate and we can use all the tools at our disposal to make sure that free speech isn't just some paper that students in K-12 situations, in K-12 schools know that the free speech is a real thing.

Right now, we're litigating before the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on behalf of students who were told that they could not wear Let's Go Brandon sweatshirts they received as Christmas presents. So, you can see a blog entry up on our site today about all the friend of the court support we've received from organizations across the ideological spectrum in support of the right of grade school students at our public schools to engage in political speech that's non-disruptive, totally protected by the First Amendment. Yeah, we'll keep doing the work.

We've got a couple of cases right now litigating on behalf of K-12 student speech rights. So, I firmly believe that, as the Supreme Court put it in the decided just a couple years ago, that our public schools are nurseries of democracy, to use Justice Breyer's phrase, and that if we don't teach students about free speech and teach them that it's a meaningful thing, that we really mean what we say when we talk about the Bill of Rights, when we talk about the First Amendment, that they'll grow up and they won't understand it.

To quote one of ��֭����'s co-founders, “A nation that does not educate in liberty will not soon hold it and won't even know when it's gone.” I think I'm paraphrasing Professor Kors there a little bit, but that's the sentiment. So, we're going to keep that work alive. You can ask my 10-year-old and my 7-year-old about free speech, and they'll tell you about it. I remember in that TikTok series you did with me, the one that got by far the most views was me saying that if I ever found out my kids are disciplined for not saying the Pledge of Allegiance at school, I'd be all over it.

But they do say the pledge. As my daughter explained to me, she wants to be a friend to the flag, as she put it, which I thought was very sweet. So, yeah, no, we're doing that work, and we'll continue to do that work. And if you've got cases, send them our way.

Nico Perrino: I apologize to everyone whose questions we didn't get to. There were 29 unanswered questions. Andrew, I see you there. I'm sorry that you've asked a question during this webinar and the last one. If you come to our next webinar, I will make it a point to get to your questions.

Robert Shibley: I emailed him. If you want to work with your college, just give me an email, robert.shibley@thefire.org, and I can connect you. We got resources.

Will Creeley: Right, and I'm going to be at my in-laws' place in Minnesota all next week, so you can email me at will@thefire.org, and I will write you back. And I've actually had great conversations with folks I've met through these monthly member webinars. So yeah, please keep them coming, will@thefire.org.

Nico Perrino: If you're interested in finding this webinar or past webinars, you can find them at the member portal on ��֭����'s website, thefire.org. Again, the��֭����.org, just go to the top there. There's a member portal. If you haven't created your credentials to log in, you can do so, and then you can get access to past member webinars. We also give you access to these through the So-to-Speak podcast Substack. If you are a paying member to So-to-Speak, you get these episodes in your restricted members-only podcast feed, which can be accessed through Substack.

If you are already a FIREmember and don't want to pay through Substack, just shoot us an email, So-to-Speak@the��֭����.org. We'll get you honored on the Substack side.

And this podcast though because it is open beyond FIREmembers to try and incentivize the general public to become FIREmembers before the end of the year, is going to be available on, So-to-Speak, the free speech podcast feed later this week. And I would just ask you all, if you appreciate the work that we're doing at FIREand you want to see it continue and you want to see it expand, please consider a donation before the end of the year. They are tax deductible, and they are what makes the work possible. We function entirely on donations and support from the general public, and we cannot do it without you.

I thank you all again for joining the webinar. We'll see you next month, and in the meantime, happy holidays and happy New Year.