Longtime follower of the 4chan case, Smash JT, covers the Department of State’s revelation that federal shield legislation modeled after Wyoming GRANITE is inbound imminently.
JT says that this whole effort “started with one dude.” I should correct him there. While I was the first one out of the gate against the UK Online Safety Act enforcement effort targeting US citizens in March 2025, and while I have, as the lawyer for all of the American targets in 2025, had visibility into all of the various moving parts, I am not doing this alone and we could not have gotten as far as we did without a lot of help. There were many who came before me and many who joined our fight along the way.
Outside of the federal government, this fight – which has seen Ofcom largely freeze outbound enforcement to the U.S. targets with no UK nexus since August – would never have even gotten off the ground without my co-counsel in the DC case against Ofcom, Ron Coleman, who joined the fight in July and has done a ton of pro bono work. Ron was indispensable: without him, we would not have had Ofcom’s admission on the record about sovereign immunity – meaning no justification for a GRANITE Act. We were also assisted by Robert Dougans of Preiskel & Co. LLP in London with service of the suit and had some helpful touchpoints with lawyers on both sides of the pond who I will decline to name at this time.
On the Wyoming GRANITE Act, Wyoming Deputy Secretary of State Colin Crossman and Representative Daniel Singh joined the fight in October, each of whom has also done a ton of drafting and political work. Colin’s work on GRANITE was simply brilliant and utterly transformative.
My thanks also to Bruce Fenton, Representative Keith Ammon and Representative Calvin Beaulier who played a significant role in starting the New Hampshire effort that has been shelved this session but which we will be resuming later this year.
On the journalism front, there are many writers and podcasters, including Taylor Lorenz, Toby Young, Marc Sidwell, Smash JT, Bryan Lunduke, Tom Harwood, Meagan O’Rourke, Aaron Mak, Andrew Tettenborn, Owen Evans, Adam Edwards, Laurie Wastell, David Atherton, Walker America, Alex Thorn, Tom Pacchia, Harry Cole, Connor Stringer, Madsen Pirie, Adrian Dittmann, and David Shipley, who have covered this story and been instrumental in getting the message out about this issue. So too has been everyone over on X and Substack who has posted or reposted content on this issue, including folks who are in this space like Shoshana Weissmann and Will Chamberlain – those posts and re-posts are seen in Washington.
Mike Shellenberger and Mike Benz, in particular, are titans in this field and have been indispensable in sounding the alarm about foreign censorship in DC, not just in 2025-26 but many times in prior years. They laid the groundwork which made it possible to get the government’s attention on this issue and these cases over the past several years with their extensive reporting on the censorship-industrial complex. They also played a huge role in popularizing the idea of a foreign censorship shield law, early and often. Mike Benz was talking about this idea a few years back. When cogitating on GRANITE, I simply picked up what he put down.
In the federal government, of course, which really woke up in November and December, there are a ton of people working on this problem, many of whom who shall remain nameless for now. They have been working on it quietly for a year. A number of public figures in the federal apparatus have stated positions on this issue that have been reflected in official action or promises to take official action, chiefly the members of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Jeff Van Drew, Senator Mike Lee, Senator Eric Schmitt, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers.
And finally, of course, there are my clients, who, in the face of a nuclear-armed G7 member state threatening them with fines and imprisonment, bravely took a stand and said “no.”
Every single one of these people, and many others who cannot be named or are working on their own angles for their own clients outside of my visibility, have been working hard in the trenches and they all deserve our thanks, and this blog post is my thank-you note to them.
It doesn’t feel lonely anymore – counting all of our supporters on X alone, there are literally thousands of us in the fight now. It is a fight I am increasingly confident we can win.
