The court never heard the evidence, so we made the record public: twenty-five partner organizations and outlets, six programs, more than fifty bills tracked, a twenty-case lawfare docket, and the three things Congress must do about it. Launched on Constitution Day, in Washington.
Story at a glance
On September 16, the Senate Commerce Committee reported the JAWBONE Act (S. 4749) favorably to the floor, 18 to 10, and voted down, 13 to 15, a substitute that would have removed AI systems from the bill.
The next morning, Constitution Day, I announced Restore the First from the stage of Children’s Health Defense’s To Form a More Perfect Future conference in Washington.
The coalition exists because Finn v. Global Engagement Center was dismissed with prejudice on July 28, 2026, on procedural grounds, before one email was compelled or one witness heard.
Twenty-five partner organizations and outlets have joined. Six programs are live.
Three asks of Congress: preserve the records, hold public hearings, create enforceable protections. [Tell Congress]
Three bill numbers to remember: S. 4749, H.R. 10174, H.R. 2675.
On September 17, Constitution Day, I stood on a stage at the Grand Hyatt in Washington at Children’s Health Defense’s To Form a More Perfect Future conference, on a program that included Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Senator Ron Johnson, Senator Rand Paul, and Representative Thomas Massie, and announced Restore the First: a citizens’ coalition for the First Amendment, convened by people who were named on a list, penalized for lawful speech, and then told by a federal courthouse that there was nothing it could do. My thanks to CHD, a coalition member, both for the stage and for the date.
My full presentation is available to view here.
This is the founding dispatch. It is the one post to send to anyone who asks what Restore the First is, who is in it, what it has built, and what it wants. I have tried to make it complete.
§ 01 · The Courthouse
What the courthouse taught us
In 2021 a British non-profit published a list of twelve Americans and urged platforms to remove them. The White House and U.S. senators cited that list while pressuring platforms to act. Six of the twelve, Erin Elizabeth Finn, Rizza Islam, Dr. Christiane Northrup, Dr. Ben Tapper, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, and I, sued the U.S. Global Engagement Center and other defendants in the Middle District of Florida. Finn v. Global Engagement Center.
On July 28, 2026, Judge Wendy W. Berger dismissed the case sua sponte, with prejudice, ruling that our third amended complaint was an impermissible “shotgun pleading.” You should hear the ground from me before you hear it from a critic: the case died on the form of the paperwork. "Dismissal with prejudice is a serious procedural loss. What the court did not do matters just as much. It did not reach standing. It did not reach causation. It did not reach the truth of a single censorship allegation, and it made no evidentiary judgment on the merits. Two hundred and ten documents entered that docket between the complaint of May 15, 2025 and the dismissal. Not one email was compelled. Not one witness was heard.
What the case taught us is a pattern, and the pattern is the reason the coalition exists.
An American is designated by a government-funded intermediary. The American is then silenced by private hands acting on public instruction. And when the American goes to court, the courthouse explains that no one has standing to ask why.
That is the Catch-22 we describe on the front page of restorethe1st.com. You must name the chain, which official, in which agency, said what, to which platform, about you, before you are allowed to see a single document. The records that would reveal the chain sit inside agencies, platforms, payment processors, and intermediary organizations, and only discovery produces them. And discovery is exactly what you cannot get without naming the chain. Murthy v. Missouri (2024) closed the door on standing. Egbert v. Boule (2022) closed the door on damages against federal officers for First Amendment retaliation. Finn (2026) was dismissed before discovery.
The twelve of us were the visible casualties. The rest of the country was the unnamed one. Here is the arithmetic of that, in three figures from our record:
Those Americans got no report, no press release, and no day in court. They just got smaller.
So the coalition made a decision. If the courthouse would not build the record, we would build it in public, and we would build it to a standard a congressional committee could act on.
§ 02 · In Their Own Words
This is not an allegation. It is the public record.
Read three lines first. None is paraphrased. Each is a direct quotation from a government email, a sitting president, or a federal court, and each links to its source. That is the standard for every quotation on our site.
The Supreme Court never decided whether any of this was lawful. In Murthy it held the challengers lacked standing. In Finn the district court never reached the evidence. The full set of quotations, each linked to its source, is on the front page and in the Named-Target Record.
§ 03 · The Institution
What we built while the courthouse was closed
Restore the First is not a petition site. It is an institution with six programs, and a seventh door for the people who saw all of this from the inside. Each program gets one paragraph here; the depth lives on the site.
1. The Case
The Named-Target Record is the document archive the court declined to examine: the list, the emails, the platform files, the enforcement records, and all 210 court documents from complaint to dismissal, hosted directly from case counsel at Childers Law, with a public corrections log, so the record cannot quietly disappear. Alongside it sits our formal Oversight Submission to Congress, written the way a committee counsel would want it: every claim labeled DOCUMENTED, ALLEGED, or OPEN QUESTION, so no reader has to guess which is which.
→ The Record · The Oversight Submission
2. The Coalition
Twenty-five organizations and outlets, every one named below, because this is their launch as much as mine. The coalition is unincorporated and says so on its About page, shares no funding among members, and publishes a corrections policy. Its tagline is deliberate: for every American, of any viewpoint, targeted for lawful speech. We built the record out of the health-freedom fight because that is where the enforcement wave hit first and hardest. We built the coalition for everyone who is next.
→ The Coalition · About · Join
3. Policy
The Policy Blueprint organizes the coalition’s asks around the text of the First Amendment itself, religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition, plus a pillar we call speech infrastructure, for the AI systems, payment rails, and search layers that now sit between a citizen and an audience. Thirty-four specific policy solutions. More than fifty bills and two dozen cases tracked live from Congress.gov and the court dockets. Above the Blueprint sit three federal instruments, and Section V of this dispatch gives you their numbers: the JAWBONE Act, which just cleared committee; the First Amendment Remedies Act, our model text for the private right of action, a requested law, not a promised outcome, because Congress can create causes of action but cannot override Article III; and the GRANITE Act, the foreign-censorship shield, introduced August 27, referred to House Judiciary, and sitting today with zero cosponsors.
→ The Blueprint · JAWBONE · Remedies Act · GRANITE
4. Features
Five long-form sections, every one narrated in my own voice at the top of the page, for the drive or the walk. The Licensed Press traces the Crown’s 1662 licensing of printing presses to the present push to license AI models, the modern printing press. The Fifth Estate names what appeared around the year 2000: ordinary people publishing without permission, holding the press itself accountable. That is you, and the section carries the You Are the Media pledge. Foreign Censorship is a live tracker of the Ofcom enforcement wave, including the September 14 ruling that dismissed 4chan’s challenge to UK enforcement on foreign sovereign immunity grounds, leaving Congress as the only fix. Lawfare, launched this week, documents eight instruments now used against speakers: the bankrupting suit, the headline suit, the research suit, the regulator, the license, the private prosecutor, the foreign forum, and the Espionage Act. A twenty-case docket with a primary source for each. A follow-the-money page on the multibillion-dollar litigation-funding market that operates under no federal disclosure rule. And a rule we hold in every direction: we defend the procedure, not the plaintiff, which is why the same pages record courts ruling correctly in favor of organizations we have litigated against. Vote for Health Freedom is our sister coalition Stand for Health Freedom’s ballot-box arm, because a bill is only as durable as the people in office when the next law is written. The Lawfare hub’s audio edition alone runs twenty-two minutes.
→ The Licensed Press · The Fifth Estate · Foreign Censorship · Lawfare · Vote for Health Freedom
5. AI Rights
The live legislative front. Four bills across two capitals. A sixteen-event timeline. And an investigation into the network of well-funded institutions that is simultaneously funding frontier AI development, funding the “AI safety” field that argues for licensing it, and funding the media coverage of both. We document the relationships; we do not claim a conspiracy we cannot prove. What we can prove is that when a viewpoint-neutral anti-jawboning bill reached markup on September 16, a substitute was offered to carve AI systems out of it, so that government could keep an unlitigable channel for telling AI companies what their models may say. The committee voted it down, 13 to 15, and that roll call is now part of this section’s record.
→ AI Rights · Why AI Is a First Amendment Fight
6. News
The coalition’s newsroom: every essay, statement, and update since launch, in one place, so nothing we say ever has to be reconstructed from social media.
→ News
7. The seventh door: Come Forward
If you worked at an agency, a platform, an AI lab, a contractor, a grantee, or a regulator and watched government pressure shape what Americans were allowed to say, the record needs what you know. The Come Forward page encrypts everything you type on your own device, RSA-4096 and AES-256-GCM, in the browser, before it leaves it, using a key only the coalition’s designated custodian can unlock. The page loads no analytics, no third-party fonts, no trackers. We do not ask your name. Below the form is a live board of the eight things we are actively looking for. This program is in its first version and we say so plainly on the page; the forensic-verification protocol and custodian details are the next things we publish.
§ 04 · Stated Honestly
What has already moved
First, the offices that ran the pipeline we sued over have since been closed. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center is gone, and the most recent National Defense Authorization Act, now Public Law 119-60, defunded the Department of War’s misinformation-flagging services in its Section 1541. That is a real structural change. It is also reversible by any future Congress, which is why nothing about it lets us rest.
Second, the JAWBONE Act cleared committee 18 to 10, with the AI carve-out defeated. Many people worked on that bill long before we existed; the Knight Institute, the ACLU, and FIRE all endorsed it, and we are glad to stand alongside them. We did not cause the vote. We launched our first campaign and coalition alert asking Americans to contact their senators in the day before the markup. I endorsed the bill personally on September 15, as founder, and our action page routes every visitor to their senators to ask for a floor vote.
Third, the pipeline can be rebuilt, unless Congress locks the door. That sentence is on our front page for a reason. Nothing in statute today prevents a future administration from standing up a new intermediary, funding a new list, and applying the same pressure to the same platforms, or to the AI systems that will have replaced them. Your rights should outlast whoever holds office. Every program on the site exists to make that sentence true.
§ 05 · The Asks
What we are asking Congress to do
Three things. Each within Congress’s power today. Each protects every American, of any viewpoint, the next time a list is drawn up.
Preserve the records. Preservation demands and subpoenas to agencies, contractors, platforms, payment processors, and intermediary organizations: every email, referral ticket, escalation log, dashboard, and enforcement file, before they disappear.
Hold public hearings. Call the witnesses, the officials, platform employees, whistleblowers, and Americans across the ideological spectrum who were silenced, on the record and under oath. Publish findings.
Create enforceable protections. An express private right of action when federal pressure suppresses protected speech, plus records-retention, notice, and appeal rights, so the next American on a list has a door to walk through.
If you remember only three numbers
S. 4749 stops the jawboning. Cleared committee 18 to 10. It needs a floor vote.
H.R. 10174 answers the foreign censor. Introduced August 27. Zero cosponsors. Ask your Representative to be the first name on it.
H.R. 2675 bars foreign-state money from American lawsuits against American speakers. Reported by House Judiciary 15 to 11 and on the Union Calendar since June 15. It is ready for a floor vote. It needs one.
Above all three sits our model text, the First Amendment Remedies Act, prepared as a discussion draft for congressional counsel, for the day Congress is ready to write the door back into the law.
§ 06 · The Roll Call
No one restores the First Amendment alone.
These are the organizations and outlets that have put their names beside ours. Some were themselves named in the same reports that named us. Some fought this fight for decades before it had a name. Some come from food, farming, faith, education, and law, and joined because they understood that the pipeline does not check your viewpoint before it runs.
Organizations
Stand for Health Freedom · Children’s Health Defense · MAHA Action · Health Freedom Defense Fund · Global Wellness Forum · ICAN (Informed Consent Action Network) · React19 · Teachers for Choice · Renz Law · National Health Federation · United We Eat · Vaccine Safety Research Foundation · Moms Across America · Food Babe · Feds For Freedom · World Council for Health · Door to Freedom · Childers Law
Media partners
The Defender · The HighWire · Natural News · Brighteon · GreenMedInfo · DailyClout · The Robert Scott Bell Show
Two of these names are also carrying operational weight. Stand for Health Freedom built and runs the action infrastructure every visitor to our site uses. Children’s Health Defense gave this coalition its launch stage on Constitution Day.
To every one of you: thank you. You joined before the launch, when there was nothing to point to but a case that had been dismissed and a promise that we would build something worth your name. I hope this dispatch shows you that we meant it.
The door is open. If your organization tracks First Amendment issues and wants to be on this wall, the invitation is at restorethe1st.com/join.html. If you would rather endorse a specific bill than join the coalition, the endorsement kit is built for exactly that.
§ 07 · Five Minutes
What you can do right now
Three actions, all running through our partner Stand for Health Freedom, all on one page.
Tell your federal lawmakers to preserve the records, hold hearings, and pass enforceable protections. The form finds your members for you.
Sign the letter. If you were censored, throttled, deplatformed, demonetized, or silenced during those years, add your name to the record that says this was millions, not twelve.
Tell your story. In your own words, for the hearing record we are asking Congress to open.
Then, if you have two more minutes: call both of your senators, ask them to cosponsor S. 4749, and ask them to press leadership for floor time. If your senator sits on Commerce, ask how they voted, and thank a yes.
→ restorethe1st.com/#act · Call your senators on JAWBONE
§ 08 · Constitution Day
Forty-five words
Someone pointed out from the stage that September 17 is Constitution Day. I did not choose the date. Children’s Health Defense chose it when they set a conference called To Form a More Perfect Future on the anniversary of the signing, and they chose well.
The First Amendment is forty-five words long. It does not say that speech is free unless a foreign non-profit puts your name on a list. It does not say that the press is free unless the machine it uses requires a license. It does not say that the right to petition ends when a court decides that no one has standing to petition. Those exceptions were written later, by people who never had to put them to a vote.
Restore the First exists to put them to a vote.
Twenty-five partners. Six programs and a door. One amendment. The record is public. The bills have numbers. The asks are specific. And the door the courthouse closed is now something Congress can open with a statute.
Let’s go open it.
Start now. Five minutes covers the three actions: tell your lawmakers, add your name, tell your story. Two more covers the call to both of your senators on S. 4749. If you watched the pressure happen from the inside, the seventh door is open. And whatever else you do, send this dispatch to one person who was silenced during those years and never saw it written down. It is written down now. That is what a record is for.
Sayer Ji
Founder, Restore the First · restorethe1st.com
Restore the First is an unincorporated citizens’ coalition. Its members share no funding. Its corrections policy and contact addresses are published at restorethe1st.com/about.html. Statements of endorsement in this post are made by the author personally, as founder, and not on behalf of any partner organization.
Contacted my representative from New Jersey.
Don't think he will get on board, but let's make some noise.
Bold action