Recently, activist and filmmaker Annie Leonard released a video titled “The Story of Citizens United v. FEC,” an eight-and-a-half-minute criticism of last year’s Supreme Court case of the same name.


Well, sort of.


Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Lee Doren made his own video critique in response to Ms. Leonard’s offering, and points out quite clearly that Ms. Leonard doesn’t really deal with any actual constitutional problems in her position—essentially ignoring the decision and its rationale—and instead spends most of her time corporation bashing.


Lee was kind enough to cite, inter alia, a blogpost I wrote last year about what “corporate personhood” does and does not mean. If Ms. Leonard was going to ignore the decision, it may have at least served her well to read that post before producing her video. As I pointed out, under the logic she puts forth, “individuals acting through corporations should be denied their freedom of speech because corporations are ‘state-created entities.’ The theory goes that if a state has the power to create corporations, then it has the power to define those entities’ rights.” Ms Leonard’s video was made by (or coordination with) Free Range Studios—a corporation—and thus she’s making the argument that Congress should be able to keep her from or punish her for making that video because Free Range Studios shouldn’t have rights.


Despite the misinformation in Ms. Leonard’s video, we believe she and Free Range Studios have every right to be wrong as publicly as they see fit, even if she doesn’t.


Please watch Lee’s full video below, and look for the Cato shout-out around the 12:20 mark. If you’re in the Chicagoland area, I’ll be speaking about corporate rights and corporate personhood at John Marshall Law School tomorrow at 10:15AM local time. Feel free to stop by and please introduce yourself.