“Our final MRC Free Speech Awards for 2024 are for Top Thought Leaders on Free Speech,” lauded MRC Founder and President Brent Bozell.
For our first annual Free Speech Awards, the Media Research Center (MRC) is honoring 35 champions of the First Amendment, including five members of the U.S. Senate, 10 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, 10 additional public officials and 10 outstanding advocates of free speech in non-governmental organizations.
Today we are honoring 10 free thinkers who have championed free speech and spoken out against censorship through their advocacy and organizations.
These recipients of the MRC’s 2024 Free Speech Awards include prominent names like Rachel Bovard, Mike Davis, The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, Seth Dillon, Kara Frederick, Elon Musk, Terry Schilling, Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Jonathan Turley.
Bozell specifically noted the work of X owner Elon Musk. “Elon Musk is now the chief advocate of free speech, stepping in to buy Twitter and make it into X, the new home for free speech. This platform became especially crucial during this year’s presidential election, with many people only finding out about stories like Joe Biden’s diminished mental faculties to Kamala Harris’s plagiarism thanks to Musk’s efforts.”
He added, “From leaders like Kara Frederick at The Heritage Foundation working to reform section 230 to Seth Dillon’s noble stand for satire to Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger’s honest investigative reporting, we have quite the group of honorees this year. A hardy congratulations are in order.”
Eight of the 10 honorees have had their content censored by Big Tech platforms as documented by MRC Free Speech America’s exclusive CensorTrack database.
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: VP of Programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute, Rachel Bovard
Bovard is the Vice President of Programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute. She worked on Capitol Hill for over a decade including as Sen. Rand Paul’s legislative director and was recently the Executive Director of the Senate Steering Committee. In 2021, The American Conservative awarded Bovard the Conservative Mind Award. Last year, she also made The Hill’s list of the 25 Staffers Who Make Capitol Hill Run. In 2013, she was named one of the National Journal’s 2013 Most Influential Women in Washington under 35.
Bovard has been a pioneer in the free speech movement. Her extensive writing and advocacy have outlined a better approach for how conservatives should understand the government’s role in protecting free speech rights from abuses perpetrated by Big Tech platforms.
For example, when she appeared on the MRC uncensored podcast, she aptly explained how the free speech issue of an entrepreneur choosing not to service a client differs in “scale and function” from Big Tech choosing to censor certain types of speech. “These are not just speech platforms they are vectors of commerce in very critical ways,” she said. “So I think that these are two completely separate issues on the right, the idea of the individual property owner, the individual business owner having rights to speech and being able to turn away clients and that kind of thing and these tech companies which have morphed into something that is sort of pseudo-governmental in its function.”
Her insights have also been published by The New York Times, Fox News, MSNBC, New York Post and The Federalist, among others.
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: Diana Davis Spencer Foundation
The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, named after its current executive chairman Diana Davis Spencer, originated from the Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation, founded in 1962, and the Kathryn W. Davis Foundation, founded in 2004, each named after her father and mother, respectively. The foundation works to bolster the American founding principles of “freedom and individual responsibility” and the foundation’s mission to preserve the ideals of Shelby and Katherine Davis.
“[W]e learned and really have tried to replicate what my parents believed in, which was a strong America, which meant self-reliance, entrepreneurialism, free speech,” Diana Davis Spencer told the Independent Women’s Forum in 2022.
The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation has been a leading champion in the fight to protect free speech rights and to hold Big Tech accountable. Davis Spencer’s dedication is evidenced by the foundation’s support for schools in the U.S. that uphold the freedom of speech. Wheaton College even honored her for her dedication to the First Amendment when it named one of its buildings: “The Diana Davis Spencer Discovery Center Dedicated to Free Speech and Innovation.” The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation also supported local station MPT PBS’s programming “A More or Less Perfect Union,” a show that explored and educated the public on the U.S. Constitution and freedom of speech.
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: President of the Internet Accountability Project, Mike Davis
Davis founded and serves as president of the Internet Accountability Project (IAP), where he has shown strong leadership and advocacy in the fight to reign in Big Tech’s censorship of constitutionally-protected free speech.
IAP has focused on combating politically-biased censorship, pushing for much-needed amendments to Section 230 and promoting data privacy and anti-trust for bloated Big Tech companies.
"Here's the problem with Section 230," he said on Newsmax’s Spicer & Co. last year. “It was passed back in 1996 to protect internet infants like CompuServe, Prodigy, America Online, so they didn't get sued off the map by publishers based on what people posted on these online community bulletin boards."
Davis added that things have changed. "Fast forward more than 25 years and through this bad combination of Section 230 immunity and antitrust amnesty, these internet infants have transformed into Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple — trillion dollar Big Tech monopolists that use their market power to crush competition, shutter small businesses, and cancel conservatives and others with whom they disagree. Congress needs to fix this law."
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: CEO of the Babylon Bee, Seth Dillon
As the “Bee Chief” of satire news site The Babylon Bee, Dillon has stuck to his guns when it comes to free speech even when it came at a high cost. Dillon’s Babylon Bee has become a “Trusted Source for Christian News Satire” through its memes, videos, articles and podcasts that mock absurd woke culture. As CEO of The Babylon Bee, Dillon fought against legislation to suppress free speech and has shown an eagerness to educate the public about the importance of political speech and satire.
Never was this more clear than when Dillon appeared on the Not Noise show by Just The News and said that Big Tech censorship is “the issue for our time.” He added that, “the control that’s being exerted over what you’re allowed to say and how you’re allowed to say it, even who you’re allowed to make fun of or what types of jokes you’re allowed to make, it’s really detrimental to society to have one side allowed to voice their opinions and to make assertions and claims and the other side to be, to be silenced and marginalized and ostracized for what they think and what they believe.”
Dillon and The Babylon Bee have also made an unparalleled effort to expose Big Tech censorship while facing it firsthand. Dillon, The Babylon Bee, its sister site Not the Bee, and a few people affiliated with the sites have been censored no fewer than 30 times, as recorded in CensorTrack.
Most notably, in 2022, Dillon and his team refused to delete a tweet naming “transgender” U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health, Rachel Levine its “man of the year.” The Babylon Bee account remained locked until Musk bought the platform.
The Babylon Bee is also a member of the MRC-led Free Speech Alliance.
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: Director of Tech Policy at The Heritage Foundation, Kara Frederick
Fredrick has been to the belly of the beast. She previously led Facebook’s Global Security Counterterrorism Analysis Program and has worked as a Senior Intelligence Analyst for a U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command, a Counterterrorism Analyst at the Department of Defense and a liaison to the National Security Agency (NSA).
Now the Director of the Tech Policy Center for The Heritage Foundation, Fredrick knows what’s at stake when censorship advocates argue to silence free speech in favor of safety. Yet, she has led The Heritage Foundation’s effort to reform Section 230 so as to prevent Big Tech platforms from censoring constitutionally-protected free speech.
During a 2021 hearing before the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology Frederick argued that “Holding Big Tech accountable should result in less censorship, not more. The First Amendment should also be the standard from which all Section 230 reforms flow.” She also put the issue into perspective showing how dangerous censorship truly is. “We cannot let tech totalitarians shape a digital world where one set of thinkers are second-class citizens,” she said.
Frederick has written numerous articles, shared testimony before Congress and made countless TV appearances in which she has advocated for freedom of speech and spoken out publicly against pernicious censorship.
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: X Owner, Elon Musk
X owner Musk thrust himself into the free speech advocacy spotlight when he bought a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter in April 2022 and put a major dent in the armor of the government-Big Tech collusion. He would go on to buy the entire company for $44 billion allegedly in part to free The Babylon Bee from Twitter jail.
Since acquiring Twitter (now X), Musk has been the chief industry advocate for free speech rights among the Big Tech platforms and has used his moral authority to preserve constitutionally-protected speech for all Americans.
Just over a month after purchasing Twitter, he released internal Twitter documents to independent journalists including Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang and others. The documents, known as The Twitter Files unveiled pervasive collusion between Big Tech, so-called misinformation researchers and government officials to censor Americans.
Moreover, Musk has made changes that have significantly increased free speech on the platform, including overturning numerous lifetime account bans, including former President Donald Trump.
Musk has also repeatedly called free speech “the bedrock of democracy,” and earlier this month he spoke to the further importance of Free Speech at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania. “ If people don’t know the truth, if you don’t know what’s going on, how can you make an informed vote?” he said. “You must have free speech in order to have a democracy. that’s why it’s the first amendment!”
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: Independent Journalist, Michael Shellenberger
Author, journalist and a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” Michael Shellenberger has done incredible investigative reporting regarding The Twitter Files, exposing the Biden-Harris censorship regime. He has written on the growing drug and crime crisis and homelessness in San Francisco among other things and now runs the Substack newsletter Public.
Shellenberger has become more well-known for his strong defense of free speech in recent years. Shellenberger was also awarded one of the first annual Dao Prizes for excellence in investigative journalism for his extensive work on The Twitter Files. Many of the stories uncovered the pressure campaign perpetrated by the federal government and the Biden-Harris campaign to encourage Big Tech to censor Americans.
Shelleberger particularly uncovered how the FBI primed Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth to censor the Hunter Biden laptop scandal for months. Shellenberger has been publicly outspoken about the need to protect free speech and has even testified before Congress about his findings.
Last year, during a hearing before the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government he asked Congress to zero out funding for federal censorship programs and stressed the seriousness of the issue. “All of this is profoundly un-American,” Shellenberger insisted. “One’s commitment to free speech means nothing if it does not extend to your political enemies.”
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: American Principles Project President, Terry Schilling
Schilling stands at the helm of the American Principles Project (APP), a group devoted to the preservation of the family and conservative values, including freedom of speech. He has led the organization’s efforts to reform Section 230 so as to prevent Big Tech platforms from censoring constitutionally-protected free speech.
In 2022, the organization published a report exposing how Big Tech companies used censorship to aid President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s 2020 presidential win. In 2020, APP proposed a framework for how to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in such a way that protects and incentivizes free speech online.
In a 2021 Newsweek op-ed, Schilling noted how the problem of censorship was intensifying. “In what began as a slow purge of fringe voices by certain online platforms has intensified in recent months into a full-blown attack on certain ideas,” he wote. “Prominent voices in the media, Big Tech and even the halls of Congress call for proponents of views they deem "misinformation" to be completely de-platformed.”
APP is also an active member of the MRC-led Free Speech Alliance.
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: Independent Journalist, Matt Taibbi
Taibbi is an acclaimed journalist who has done incredible investigative reporting on regarding The Twitter Files, exposing the Biden-Harris censorship regime.
Taibbi worked as an editor and journalist for Rolling Stone for 17 years. He has written 10 books, received the National Magazine Award in 2008, and the Izzy Award for “outstanding achievement in independent media” in 2020.
Like Shellenberger, Taibbi was one of the recipients of the inaugural 2023 Dao Prize for excellence in investigative journalism for his groundbreaking work on The Twitter Files. He wrote the first of a litany of damning reports unveiling the ubiquitous government-Big Tech censorship machine perpetuated by the Biden-Harris administration. He also offered great insights into the FBI’s role in pushing censorship. Taibbi publishes his work on his Substack newsletter Racket News.
During a hearing with the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, he summarized his most important takeaway from writing The Twitter Files. “If there's anything that The Twitter Files show, it's that we are in danger of losing this Democratic right [free speech] without which all Democratic rights are impossible.”
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: George Washington University Law Professor, Jonathan Turley
Turley, an author, constitutional scholar and a law professor at George Washington University, has been a crucial thought leader in the pro-free speech movement. He has produced unparalleled scholarship to hold Big Tech accountable and to preserve constitutionally-protected speech.
The law professor has described free speech as a human right and said that we are seeing censorship like we never have before. “If you believe that free speech is a human right, then it’s not just your right to speak in terms of its good for Democracy but that free speech makes people completely human,” he said at the 2024 National First Amendment Summit on Oct. 22. He later added that we are now living in “the most anti-free speech period in our history because we’ve never seen an alliance with the government, media, academia, corporations like this one.”
Turley has written extensively on the topic of freedom of expression both on his blog, Res ipsa loquitur, and in his new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage. In this book, Turley explored the importance of freedom of expression and the threats historically posed to the First Amendment. In his blogs, Turley expounds upon current events that have serious implications for freedom of speech.
