Member Spotlight: Defending Rights & Dissent
Former Communications Director Cody Bloomfield from Protect the Protest member organization Defending Rights And Dissent (DRAD) was interviewed by Caitlin Howard from Breach Collective and Audrey Caines from International Corporate Accountability Roundtable. At the time of this interview, Cody was still on staff at DRAD.
Please start by introducing yourself, your role, and your organization.
I'm Cody Bloomfield, Communications Director at Defending Rights and Dissent (DRAD). Under different names, DRAD has been around since the 1960s. We've been working on issues of protest and policing and all sorts of issues around Americans' right to know what their government does behind closed doors and their freedom to act for social change.
We got started when our organizational founder was fired from the LA Public Housing Authority because they suspected him of being a communist, because he wanted to build public housing at the site of what became Dodger Stadium. He instead became an advocate for First Amendment rights and constitutional freedoms.
We have had a bunch of names. We were the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. And then we were the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation. So we fought against the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 and the expansion of material support for terrorism statutes in the 1990s. We were the Bill of Rights Defense Committee in the 2000s where we were fighting to pass resolutions of non cooperation against the Patriot Act in jurisdictions across the country during the War on Terror. We've been a lot of different organizations, but Defending Rights and Dissent is the most recent.
Talk to us about how your work overlaps with the fight to stop Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) and relatedly why you're a part of the Protect the Protest coalition itself.
We first got involved in anti-SLAPP work around 2008. There was a big SLAPP case from Smithfield Foods, which was a hog farmer, against the United Food and Commercial Workers International, which was a union. In that case, there was the classic SLAPP dynamic of scrappy crew of organizers and people fighting for social change against a massive corporation with a lot of money to spend running up legal bills and a lot of power to hijack the legal system.
In this case, Smithfield Foods claimed that core union organizing activities were part of a RICO conspiracy against the business. The suit targeted activities like boycotts (which are protected dating back to civil rights era boycotts of discriminatory businesses), issuing press releases (which is protected speech), coalition building (which is freedom of association), and protests (which implicate the freedom to petition the government).
Smithfield Foods claimed that all those activities were part of a RICO conspiracy to defraud the business. DRAD got involved when Smithfield Foods started making claims that union members testifying at an environmental hearing or trying to get resolutions passed were activities worthy of lawsuits and silencing. One of the lawyers for Smithfield said it was “economic warfare” against this hog farmer. So we got involved in anti-SLAPP work then.
In 2010 we followed another SLAPP case against people who had organized a spoof Chamber of Commerce press conference. They got a bunch of reporters to show up, and they announced things like, ‘Great news! The Chamber of Commerce is now going to actually address climate change.’ And this was newsworthy enough and an effective enough parody that some reporters bought it. And then the Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit over cyber piracy and trademark infringement. We also pushed for a federal anti-SLAPP bill in the middle of that fight.
We've always maintained that defending the First Amendment doesn't just involve restraining what the government's able to do, but it also has to do with making sure that bad actors can't hijack the system, which is exactly what we see in SLAPPS.
We joined Protect the Protest and have been a proud member ever since, fighting against SLAPPS both in the narrow corporate lawsuit context and in the more expansive definition of what SLAPPS entail, like the government abusing laws, taking laws out of context, trying to get activists to stand down, etc.
Why are First Amendment rights important to the work of your organization?
The First Amendment is absolutely core to our work. We are a First Amendment organization and we do work around the First Amendment when it's most under siege. This happens often with really controversial issues.
We work on whistleblower issues where whistleblowers have brought news of government misconduct to the press, and then the government strikes back with the Espionage Act and sends these whistleblowers to jail, giving them virtually no chance at a public interest defense. We see that as a First Amendment issue of impeding Americans’ right to know what the government does.
We also work on issues of the First Amendment and terrorism. Again, with terrorism, whenever we see really live wire issues, then the First Amendment becomes most controversial and most under siege. We've done work trying to expose how counterterrorism authorities can be used to surveil and infringe upon the rights of activists.
We put out a couple publications related to the First Amendment and protected speech. For a couple months now, we've put out the Gaza First Amendment Alert that draws attention to how pro-Palestine free speech is under siege, whether it's Congress sending incessant letters calling for investigation into organizations organizing protests and dissent, to abuse of immigration authorities against grad students who are organizing for Palestine, or absurd over-policing on campuses. We also publish Protest Under Fire, which covers the repression of protest through policing, prosecution, bad faith investigation, and legislation. And we do a bunch of action alerts and investigative reporting around First Amendment issues.
How has the reception been for the Gaza First Amendment newsletter?
We've seen a really positive reception to the Gaza First Amendment Alert. The response to the Gaza protests is probably the biggest crisis in civil liberties we've seen over the last decade. We're really glad to have the opportunity to be able to share what that threat looks like with people. We've been very positively surprised by the reaction to the Gaza First Amendment Alert in terms of people really mobilizing and caring about these threats to protest. So that's been encouraging, but we have a tough battle ahead.
We've long felt like whenever terrorism is mentioned in the context of advocacy, it's a very potent tool that the government often uses to separate out some advocates within a space from everyone else. We saw this in the Green Scare. We see it chronically with Palestine – advocates for social change being characterized as terrorists.
“We've long felt like whenever terrorism is mentioned in the context of advocacy, it's a very potent tool that the government often uses to separate out some advocates within a space from everyone else. We saw this in the Green Scare. We see it chronically with Palestine – advocates for social change being characterized as terrorists.”
Over the last year, there's been so much of an upswing of activism around Palestine that I think there's greater awareness of how the terrorism label is used and abused against advocates, and I think that that kind of solidarity among organizations will be super important as we move into the next phase of fighting this.
What work undertaken by PtP has been most meaningful to you either personally or as a member of your organization?
I found it really meaningful that we've expanded from just looking at corporate SLAPPs to looking at abuses of the legal system more generally, since we're starting to see a lot of experimentation among those in power who are trying to suppress protest and trying to silence protesters. As we've seen in Georgia with the state sending trial balloon after trial balloon out against the Stop Cop City protesters, the coalition has really mobilized into trying to address these novel legal threats to the right to protest.
I've also found it really valuable that we've included in the definition of SLAPP a disproportionate response to protest: where protesters might have on the letter of the law broken the law, but the actors on the other side of SLAPPs are trying to pursue really expansive consequences in response.
For example, I've been really proud of our response to the Mountain Valley Pipeline protests, where the protesters have trespassed, but then the pipeline company has stepped in with SLAPPs trying to enjoin those protesters from even showing up anywhere close to the property and are trying to seek massive damages. I've been proud of us stepping in there.
I've been proud of our work on Cop City. As Greenpeace faces its existential SLAPP threat, I've been proud of how we’ve shown up as a coalition in absolute solidarity with Greenpeace, mobilizing to fight the SLAPP both in the courts and also on the communications front and on the organizing front.
It's a great space of people who aren't afraid to confront the corporations pursuing SLAPPs, who aren't afraid to go up against pretty tough legal odds, and who are willing to band together to fight against the constriction of civic space.
“It's a great space of people who aren't afraid to confront the corporations pursuing SLAPPs, who aren't afraid to go up against pretty tough legal odds, and who are willing to band together to fight against the constriction of civic space. “
What gives you hope in the fight against slaps or this broader sense of fighting for their First Amendment rights?
This coalition and people like those in this coalition, who are seeing all these things go awry in the world, and who are seeing SLAPPs come down against people who are fighting for social change, and taking an unequivocal stand that this isn't acceptable, that to defend the First Amendment, we have to protect people against SLAPPs. It also gives me a lot of hope to see the people who are the targets of these SLAPPs emerge with a commitment to resist them.
I'm also very excited about the anti-SLAPP bill that's about to be re-introduced into Congress. Having a federal SLAPP protection will cut off one venue for corporations pursuing SLAPPs and will protect all Americans from SLAPPs. Currently anti-SLAPP legislation only exists on the state level, and only in a limited number of states. In the federal venue, everyone is vulnerable to being targeted by corporations and other powerful actors for exercising their First Amendment rights to speak out on issues of public concern. It gives me a lot of hope that this federal anti-SLAPP bill is going through the legislative process with support from both sides of the aisle.
To learn more about DRAD, visit their website and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. You can also subscribe to theirs newsletters Gaza First Amendment Alert and Protest Under Fire.
