Walk into any store in America, and you’ll see labels describing everything under the sun. But in Oregon, the state is unconstitutionally censoring vape shop owner Paul Bates—preventing him from using labels that truthfully describe the products he legally sells to adults.
This week, Goldwater Institute attorneys traveled to Oregon to defend free speech before the state’s Supreme Court, challenging a law that forces business owners like Paul to censor any vape packaging that state health bureaucrats arbitrarily deem “attractive to minors.”
“This case isn’t about whether minors should use vape products—they shouldn’t,” Goldwater attorney John Thorpe told the justices. “It’s about whether government can restrict expression aimed at law-abiding adults concerning lawful products.”
Last year, the Oregon Court of Appeals sided with Paul and his business. But the state appealed, and now the Oregon Supreme Court will have the final say. All business owners have the right—and the need—to communicate truthfully with their customers. Goldwater is fighting to ensure they can.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion—three words that are seemingly hard to oppose. But what may sound like a call for fairness now conceals a rigid left-wing ideology aimed at punishing merit and rewarding grievances, says political scientist Wilfred Reilly in the latest episode of the Goldwater Institute’s new Dismantling DEIpodcast. Listen here.
Reilly argues that what is now known as DEI is a concerted effort by far-left activists to label American society as inherently oppressive and to coerce equity—proportional outcomes regardless of merit. “It’s all downstream from Marxism,” he says.
DEI sends the racist message that minority students can’t succeed without special treatment, undermining their confidence and feeding public suspicion. Reilly argues in the podcast that DEI isn’t just bad policy—it’s a philosophical inversion of what made American worth defending in the first place.
Watch Dismantling DEI in its entirety here, or listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Every day, the Goldwater Institute fights to protect the civil liberties of Americans nationwide from overreaching government, and “we don’t mess around” because “that’s our job,” Board Chairman Tom Hatten said this week in a prominent interview.
Tom was a guest Friday morning on The Mike Broomhead Show, KTAR-FM in Phoenix, where he championed Goldwater’s mission of keeping the government in check and to stand up for the rights of everyday citizens. “We’re not for one party—we’re for the Constitution,” Tom says. “And that’s for everybody.”
