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 yesterday, 10 members of the U.S. House of Representatives today, 10 additional public officials Wednesday and 10 outstanding advocates of free speech in non-governmental organizations Thursday.
On Monday, MRC announced its Senate honorees. Today, it is recognizing ten members of the U.S. House of Representatives who have stood strong for Americans’ free speech rights, especially on social media.
The recipients of the MRC’s 2024 Free Speech Awards are Reps. Jim Banks (R-IN), Dan Bishop (R-NC), Ben Cline (R-VA), Tom Cole (R-OK), Harriet Hageman (R-WY), Darrell Issa (R-CA), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Rich McCormick (R-GA) and Jay Obernolte (R-CA).
MRC Founder and President Brent Bozell hailed these lawmakers in a statement announcing the awards as part of Free Speech Week.
“We mark the second day of free speech week with the 2024 Top 10 House Members to defend the First Amendment,” Bozell said. “Speaker Mike Johnson, along with Chairmen Jim Jordan and Tom Cole, have led the effort to investigate and halt censorship efforts from the federal government.”
Bozell continued: “It is truly astounding how much the deep state was able to censor during the Biden-Harris years, and how much these defenders of free speech have been able to halt through their Congressional efforts.”
Five awarded congressmen have faced online censorship as documented in MRC’s exclusive CensorTrack database.
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA)
Speaker Johnson has marshaled Congressional leaders, in an unprecedented way, to fight for the preservation of the First Amendment by defunding censorship initiatives throughout the Biden-Harris administration and for ensuring that the Kids Online Safety Act stayed focused on protecting children, not censoring constitutionally-protected speech.
He defunded the Biden-Harris censorship initiatives across three separate appropriations bills, which defunded the censorship acts of the departments of State, Homeland Security, and Defense, all of which are heavily involved in the Censorship Industrial Complex.
As a former member of the House Judiciary Committee, Johnson forcefully called out government-tied censorship, delivering an epic smackdown of embattled Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas after MRC Free Speech America unveiled that DHS funded a program that drew parallels between conservatives, Christians and Republicans with hate groups.
“The reason the Framers of our Constitution did not create an exception for ‘false information’ from the First Amendment is because they didn’t trust the government to determine what it is,” Johnson said. “And you have whole committees of people in your agency trying to determine what they, they determined, they defined as false or misinformation.”
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: Rep. Jim Banks
Rep. Banks remained a strong and consistent ally in defending First Amendment free speech rights, advocating for policies that protect Americans’ right to freely express their views.
In September, Banks launched an investigation into the Department of State after its press office claimed Banks’s efforts to expose censorship were somehow Russian disinformation.
In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Banks affirmed that such retort was a “sloppy and hypocritical lie” typical of the Biden-Harris State Department’s “repeated attacks on the First Amendment and Americans’ free speech rights.”
In August 2020, Banks introduced the Campus Free Speech Restoration Act, seeking to strip “speech codes” curtailing free speech at public universities. The bill would have required learning institutions to disclose policies related to free speech.
“Like so much else Americans cherish, the modern radical left wants to destroy Free Speech. This twisted worldview originated in universities, where it entrenched itself and is now moving to silence all dissent," Banks said of the proposed legislation. "Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to fund the subversion of America's most valuable principles. Without free political expression, we can't preserve what's made America great."
Proud to receive @theMRC inaugural Free Speech Award! I will always defend our first amendment rights 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/dWHG7vlJKX
— Jim Banks (@RepJimBanks) September 19, 2024
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: Rep. Dan Bishop
Rep. Bishop led the initiative to block the federal government from exploiting taxpayer-funded dollars to subsidize the Censorship Industrial Complex. He is running to become North Carolina’s next attorney general, calling this election a “pivotal moment for free speech.”
In April, Bishop rebuked Wikipedia after co-founder Larry Sanger alleged the digital encyclopedia colluded with the U.S. intelligence community to fix entries.
“The censorship-laundering enterprise, fed by government money and other resources, is pervasive,” Bishop wrote in response to the scandal. “Sunlight is the best weapon to defend/restore freedom, and exposure of the crazed ideologues in positions of power [sic] the best version of that.”
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: Rep. Ben Cline (R-VA)
Rep. Cline has led the initiative to defund the Biden-Harris Administration’s censorship initiatives and to expose National Public Radio (NPR) for its censorship activities. He has also been one of the most vocal critics of the federal government's efforts to censor Americans.
In September 2023, Cline sought to defund the United Nation’s efforts to launch an AI-fueled fact-checking tool dubbed “iVerify.” This tool would have labeled and censored speech online under the guise of fighting mis-, dis- and mal-information.
“That’s wrong and goes against the very principles enshrined in the First Amendment,” Cline said of the infamous program. “We must prevent taxpayer dollars from playing any part in censorship on a global scale, and my bill will do just that.”
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole
Rep. Cole has provided unprecedented leadership as the House Appropriations Committee Chairman to defund the Biden-Harris Administration’s censorship initiatives throughout the executive branch of government.
He led the defunding of several government-tied censorship initiatives at the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and State. House Republicans’ message to government censors was loud and clear: No taxpayer dollars will ever be used to censor Americans.
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY)
Rep. Hageman spearheaded the investigation into the DHS’s censorship regime and fought to strip qualified immunity from government censors who sought to infringe upon free speech.
In 2023, Hageman pressed DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas after MRC Free Speech America exposed the taxpayer-funded Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention grant program that tied conservatives to hate groups and terrorist organizations.
In July 2024, Hageman introduced the Standing to Challenge Government Censorship Act, a bill that would provide a right of action against federal employees and agencies that collude with social media platforms to censor Americans.
“Our forefathers ratified the First Amendment recognizing that government actors would always seek to control public discourse in order to protect their power structure,” Hageman said in a statement announcing the bill. “No one has a monopoly on truth, and the Biden administration and federal agencies are not entitled to declare that American’s speech is ‘mis-information,’ ‘dis-information,’ or ‘mal-information’ ... We will continue to fight to protect our First Amendment rights.”
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA)
Rep. Issa fought to hold the National Science Foundation accountable for its weaponization of Artificial Intelligence against conservatives and worked to expose the Biden-Harris administration’s broader censorship regime.
In October 2024, Issa pressed the Department of State to act against the anti-free speech actions taken against tech mogul Elon Musk and his social media platform X.
“The Brazilian Supreme Court’s actions to ban social media platform X in the world’s seventh most populous nation is a grave breach of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, of which Brazil is a Member State,” Issa wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH)
Judiciary Chairman Jordan led the first-ever congressional investigation into the Biden-Harris administration’s anti-American censorship regime, investigating the NSF, FBI, DHS and the State Department. He has also led the battle against the deceptively-named censorship outfit, the “Global Alliance for Responsible Media.”
Most recently, Jordan successfully pushed Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to admit the federal government pressured Facebook into censoring the Hunter Biden laptop scandal before the 2020 election. The shocking admissions came years after Zuckerberg slow-walked his collaboration with the House Judiciary Committee and after the federal government faced a damning lawsuit over censorship collusion.
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA)
In both 2024 and 2023, Rep. McCormick led the fight to prevent the U.S. Department of Defense from funding the censorship of conservative ideals through anti-censorship provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act.
In 2024, the House of Representatives blocked the Biden-led Department of Defense from weaponizing taxpayer dollars for the second conservative year for contracts with self-described media ratings firms like NewsGuard, Ad Fontes and the Global Disinformation Index.
McCormick cited several studies by the Media Research Center that exposed NewsGuard and Ad Fontes’s ratings overwhelmingly favoring leftist media outlets.
“Congress has a real opportunity to do something about that by reining in for-profit censors that have been funded by our own government like NewsGuard and GDI,” McCormick told MRC in 2023.
♦ 2024 MRC Free Speech Award Winner: Rep. Jay Obernolte
Rep. Obernolte was a leading voice in pushing for Section 230 reform to prevent Big Tech platforms from continuing to censor constitutionally-protected speech, ensuring accountability in the digital age.
Speaking at a congressional hearing in May about how policies seeking to end potentially harmful content may violate the First Amendment, Obernolte said, “We've got these problematic situations that have originated on social media that I think everyone can agree is not healthy and should not be permitted and needs to be stopped but then we have this idea which that's the intention with that which is that we don't want to chill free speech.”
He added, “So we're here talking about repealing Section 230 to create more liability on social media platforms and this is where I start to have a problem because … it seems like the premise of repealing 230 is that the world would be a better place if we just all sued each other more often and I reject that premise. I'm not sure that this solves the problem.”
MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider and MRC Free Speech America Staff Writer Tom Olohan contributed to this report.
