Americans don’t appreciate the critical work on their behalf being done by groups like Turning Point USA, FIRE, and Prof. Jacobson’s Equal Protection Project, all of which would be termed “threats to democracy” under Joe Biden’s rhetoric.

This time it was Turning Point that stepped up. Riley Gaines, the gutsy and articulate former college swimmer who has become the de facto leader of opposition to allowing biological males compete as women against female athletes, was scheduled to speak at the University of New Mexico. The event was sponsored by Turning Point’s student organization on campus. The University told the students that they would have to employ extra security staff because Gaines would naturally be a catalyst for potential violence since the current mutation of student progressives like violence. (That wasn’t exactly what they said, but I’m acting like a journalist this morning.) TP-UNM told the University that it expected around 100 attendees and that the Gaines event would would last around three hours. It then received an email including an invoice that charged the students $10,202.50 to let a conservative speaker give her views on campus (well, again, that wasn’t exactly what the email said. It’s just what the email meant.) The charge covered the use of 33 security officers, or one for every three anticipated attendees, in the discretion of the university.

If your First Amendment alarm doesn’t sound after reading that, it might not have been installed correctly.

After the event, which went on without incident and minimal protesting, the final invoice that UNV delivered was about half the original amount. I’m guessing a UNV lawyer told UNV, “Mmmmm, I think $10,000 is too obviously a ‘Shut up, you bigoted conservatives!’ message. You might get away with $5,000.”

It didn’t. Turning Point sued, and yesterday, in Leadership Institute v. Stokes, a court struck down the UNV policy and its inflated, speech-constricting invoice. “Plaintiffs have shown a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of their overbreadth claim because the security fee policy does not contain limiting language that includes “narrowly drawn, reasonable and definite standards[,]” and it does not include anything to prevent UNM administrators from exercising their discretion in a content-based manner….,” the court ruled.

Good.

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Pointer: The Volokh Conspiracy

Virginia is a so-called “purple state,” and even though Northern Virginia is Woke Central (Remember my neighbor who had a giant “Black Lives Matter” display in front of her house for almost three years?), there are plenty of Republican, conservatives and Trump supporters. And yet I have driven my car and walked Spuds all over the area, and I see only Harris-Walz signs. Why is that?

I think it is because Republicans have been intimidated. Professing fealty to the Leftist totalitarians who propped up a puppet President and covered up his disability, then appointed his successor while blathering on about how they were protecting Democracy, is considered proof of virtue. Expressing a contrary view risks being Dershowitzed and cancelled. I see the same phenomenon on Facebook. The vast, vast majority of my friends write the most fatuous, absurd pro-Harris propaganda imaginable, but the conservatives I know are posting pictures of their dogs and talk about movies and TV.

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