VoxPopuli: Let’s start with defining some terms. What do we mean when we talk about Ag Gag law or food libel? It’s more than Oh, this pizza sucks, right?

Bobby Block:  Imagine you're a strawberry grower, and someone accuses you of using a banned pesticide or doing something wrong and and creating the suggestion or the impression that somehow your product is unsafe. You know it's false, but even if you prevail in court, you lose because by the time the court would hear you and you go through it, your produce would be rotten; you would lose your crop.

So the idea was that perishable foods need a little bit of a lower defamation standard so that farmers couldn't be held hostage and their produce and their product could not be subject to frivolous lawsuits or accusations. It lowered the standard for defamation for specifically perishable agricultural products, and that's where the law comes from.

The problem was that in this particular Farm Bill that just passed, there was a provision that would extend that food libel protection, also known as an “Ag Gag law” to agricultural procedures and practices as well as non-perishable foods. The logic for the law makes no sense — except if you want to empower agricultural producers, particularly large agro-industrial ones, to basically go after critics. When you actually look at the non-perishable products the state of Florida produces, the only one with a powerful industry behind it is sugar.

The concern was the Legislature was handing Big Sugar a weapon that could be used against scientists, researchers, environmental activists, Everglades restoration activists, journalists and others, including research magazine outlets that would publish these studies. So it had real First Amendment impacts precisely because what they were doing kind of extended the original logic to something that really didn't need it.

VoxPopuli: How does this become a free speech concern?

A lot of the money that supports agricultural research in Florida is at universities, which as we have seen through the last years, have been subject to the whims and prevailing sensibilities of politicians in power. Imagine you’re a university, looking at research about water quality in coastal areas, and you know a research paper that challenges runoff from Lake Okeechobee could trigger a huge lawsuit. Chances are you would not pursue that line of research. Research is speech. What you're seeing is chilling of speech.

VoxPopuli: Let’s talk about the coalition that came together to help fight the Ag Gag law provision and ultimately succeeded in getting it removed from the Farm Bill. How did that happen?

Bobby Block: I looked to see who might be badly impacted that would be important to legislators and what groups would have a voice that the legislators would listen to. In terms of impact to the Florida economy, agriculture accounts for $9 billion but sports fishing accounts for about $13 billion.

I knew from friends of mine who were big fishermen and from my time as the managing editor at Florida Today that for years there have been research and complaints from fishermen that when Lake Okeechobee gets too high and they let the water out, a lot of that water goes into the Indian River Lagoon. There was research saying that Lake Okeechobee is where a lot of the runoff ends up from the pesticides and other things that Big Sugar plantations used. It was these nutrient-rich waters from Lake Okeechobee that were killing the nurseries and the ecosystem for the snook and the permit and all these other fish that fishermen love. So I reached out to fishing groups, and one group that has had running battles with Big Sugar, Captains for Clean Water, stepped up. They reached out to the MAHA Moms and a coalition was created.

The MAHA Moms (Make America Healthy Again), an offshoot of the MAGA movement following [Health and Human Services Secretary] Robert Kennedy Jr., was one of the groups that was most offended and most vocal in their opposition about this. They want clarity in labels. They are very concerned about foods and what they’re feeding their kids. Therefore food production becomes very important to them. They saw this as something that threatened their ability to talk about food production. They became one of the most important voices out there against this provision.

It's one thing if I say, This is dangerous, People could be affected. It's another thing when the people who are likely to be affected step up themselves and say, We're concerned, we're frightened, we're worried, we don't like this, rather than me speaking on their behalf.

So I just stepped back, and they're the ones that produced literally hundreds of speakers, some of which drove all the way from Key West to Tallahassee to express their displeasure, their concern and their anger over what this provision might mean to them and all the values and things that are important to their hobbies and to their parenting goals.

I think the sheer number of people, the power of the voice, the economic power that this group presented, in the end, the legislators just couldn't turn a deaf ear to it. And they ended up removing the provision from the bill because people really did feel that this was going to put them in the crosshairs of very powerful interests. The law, if it passed the way it was, it was not going to be amenable to them as defendants in these cases. And what would they be defending their cases from? Speaking out, writing research, making scientific findings, writing articles about what the research said? It turned the tide.

VoxPopuli: You know, at a time when the Trump Administration is gutting environmental protections, undermining the Endangerment Finding on greenhouse gases, and stripping away First Amendment protections for speech and press freedom, it’s heartening to hear about a conservative coalition fighting to protect those Constitutional rights.

Bobby Block:  Too many people out there see the Second Amendment is for conservatives and the First Amendment is for liberals and progressives. And the fact of the matter is neither of those are true. Those amendments are for all Americans.

What these kinds of threats do is it creates a more widely informed electorate and a wider group of people that understands how free speech really works, and that to be able to protect the things that you want to say, you ultimately also have to protect things that you might not want to hear.

Every little step, every little battle fought and won helps us at the same time. The threats are coming from government fast and furious, and we've not seen this [threat] level maybe since the first World War or even maybe during the times of McCarthyism. But we're in the midst of that kind of threat right now where constitutionally protected views are not necessarily shared by the people in power. And the reason the First Amendment Foundation exists is because the First Amendment doesn't protect itself. It takes people to protect it. It takes organizations to protect it, which is why we're here. We can't do this without public support. We do this for you, but we can't do this without you.