On Thursday, March 5, Minnesota’s Free Speech Coalition, a new activist group in the state, called on legislators to repeal the state’s anti-boycott laws during its first day on the hill. The laws prohibit anyone seeking a contract for more than $50,000 with the state of Minnesota from boycotting Israel or any company that does business in Israel.
The Free Speech Coalition was formed by more than 35 grassroot Minnesota organizations in 2025. Other organizations and concerned citizens like “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” member Bob Goonin have been meeting with state legislators to push for the repeal of the laws since they were passed in 2017. Goonin views them as a violation of first amendment rights.
“There was a Supreme Court ruling in 1982 that said that boycott is a form of free speech,” Goonin said. “And so it’s in that context that we are looking for a repeal.”
To Goonin, repealing the law is particularly important for two reasons. The first is the historical effectiveness of boycotts.
“[Boycotts have] worked,” he said, “which is why there’s an effort to take [them] away.”
Goonin emphasized a long history of boycotts as the lynchpin of successful political movements in the United States, pointing to the 1955 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycotts.
“Think about the farm worker union boycott around rates of farm workers. I think that was a great boycott,” he added. “And the boycott of South Africa was really the driving force behind bringing down apartheid in South Africa.”
The second reason lies in the origins of the bill. The anti-boycott law in Minnesota, and many others like it, were crafted by an organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Goonin describes ALEC as “a right wing group that writes legislation so that across the country, legislators can just adopt it right for their own state.”
The group describes its mission as “dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.”
Near-duplicates of Minnesota’s anti-boycott law now exist in 38 states, according to Goonin, making Minnesota’s law just one part of what he sees as a coordinated national campaign to suppress boycotts.
To Goonin, the most frightening part about this is the precedent it could set for other kinds of boycott movements.
“You can put gun manufacturing into that slot in the template,” Goonin continued. “Now any movement for limiting firearms can’t boycott gun manufacturers. Or you can’t boycott mining, which is a big deal out in the Boundary Waters area.”
While Thursday’s “day on the hill” was the Free Speech Coalition’s first, Goonin made it clear that the organization will continue with its work for the entirety of the legislative session. Right now, he said, they’re focusing on securing commitments to support the bill.
“The interim step is: we have to have a hearing of the bill in both the Senate and House, and that’s where the bill can be actually debated in open discussion,” Goonin said. “We will be doing everything possible to get legislators to commit in advance of that hearing that they in fact support the bill, because then it needs to be brought forward for a vote on the fall in the full house, in the full Senate.”
On that front, the coalition has already made progress. The authors of the most recent iteration of the repeal bill include multiple legislators, including one who voted for the 2017 law it seeks to replace.
Ideological shifts like that one are part of the reason Goonin feels particularly optimistic about the upcoming legislative session.
“Now, for the first time, we have actual repeal bills that have been introduced in both the House and the Senate,” Goonin said. “And we are now working with legislators to say, look, the bill is here. All you need to do is support it.”
