Category: First Amendment rights

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First Amendment rights Ninth Amendment rights too much government

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charity, regulations, rights

Kindness; generosity; aid — even these need defending from government.

In “Performing Charity Is a First Amendment Right,” C. J. Ciaramella writes about the difficulties people have had in feeding the poor in their towns and cities.

The problem is not lack of charity — unless you mean the lack of charity that local governments sport.

In Houston, Texas, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Santa Ana, California — and in many other communities around the country — local governments have fined and prohibited the charitable from doing the good they do, often on grounds of “health and safety.” 

Houston even set up a hyper-specific charity area — reminiscent of the “free speech zones” set up for political rallies in recent years — in a parking lot near a police station. Just the kind of place that the destitute want to hang around in!

After the usual forms of police harassment came the court cases . . . and appeals to the First Amendment.

And as I read through Ciaramella’s article, the attempts to defend charity as a right of “religious expression” struck me as odd. Santa Ana politicians, for example, characterized charity as “incidental” to the core religious missions — a bizarre tack to take when dealing with Christian doctrine anyway! — and for once the U.S. Justice Department took the common-sense position on this. Thankfully.

But charity as “expression” leaves a bad taste. Charity’s more basic than “expression,” isn’t it? Some might see the art of giving as a duty, others as a rite, and others as mere generosity for its own sake. Jesus spoke of charity as something one did without speaking about it.

Could it even be more basic than free exercise of religion? Might it not more accurately be a Ninth Amendment right — one “retained by the people”? 

So fundamental there seemed no need to spell it out specifically. 

Our most basic rights are general rights, and charity is fundamental to being human.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights partisanship too much government

Insane in the Meme Brain

Hillary Clinton, conspiracy, Donald Trump, deprogramming, cult

Sane Republicans do exist, says Hillary Clinton. Even in the House of Representatives!

We know this because they voted to continue federal government operations by raising the debt limit. Or so Mrs. Clinton says. It’s just “common sense”!

Talking with Christiane Amanpour on CNN, last week, the former presidential candidate explained that these sane Republicans are “intimidated,” adding, “they oftentimes say and do things which they know better than to say or do.”

To get to common ground with these compromised GOP folks, however, the measures that intimidate them — while exciting their extremist, insane MAGA proponents — must be roundly defeated. 

No compromise.

In times past, our representatives in Congress could work together; but back then, argues the former First Lady, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State, “there wasn’t this little tail wagging the dog of the Republican Party.”

That is, conservative representatives would kindly admit defeat every time the green light was given to more and more spending. Now they won’t cooperate.

It’s extremism, in Hillary’s judgment, to oppose the ceaseless growth of the warfare-welfare state.

But, Hillary being Hillary, she had a corker to unleash. “Maybe at some point there needs to be a formal de-programming of the cult members.”

Just like Mrs. Clinton to generously offer re-education camps to her opponents.

Followed by an admonition: “we have to be smarter.”

How is it smart (or sane) to continually grow the federal debt, its mere service now larger than the defense budget?

By talking about formally deprogramming MAGA extremists Hillary Clinton skillfully deflects her supporters’ attention from the real need: informally deprogramming their own insane debt-piling status quo mindset.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling First Amendment rights

Campus Critic Defended

censorship, free speech, education, university, college

In an interim victory for freedom of speech that may lead to an important precedent, a court has refused to dismiss a lawsuit against the University of Texas.

According to Richard Lowery’s complaint, filed in February 2023, university officials threatened his “job, pay, institute affiliation, research opportunities, [and] academic freedom” as part of a campaign to stop him from criticizing various stupid and/or horrific policies of the school.

An example of Lowery’s language that has the school’s administrators gunning for him is a College Fix piece, “At UT-Austin, teaching white 4-year-olds that they’re racist is funded by taxpayer dollars.”

Administrators repeatedly pressed a superior of Lowery, Carlos Carvalho, to “do something about Richard.” When Carvalho resisted, Dean Lillian Mills threatened to oust Carvalho as executive director of a Center at the school.

Officials also “allowed, or at least did not retract, a UT employee’s request that police surveil Lowery’s speech, because he might contact politicians or other influential people.”

Professor Lowery is represented by attorneys at the Institute for Free Speech, whose senior attorney Del Kolde stresses what should be obvious to the administrators: “Professors at public universities have the right to criticize administrators and speak to elected officials. The First Amendment protects such speech and, in a free society, DEI programs and UT’s president are not above public criticism.”

The goal of the lawsuit is, in part, to enjoin University of Texas officials from further threatening Lowery’s liberty to speak . . . and from acting on their previous threats.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom social media

Must Known Musk

Elon Musk, hate speech, free speech, X, Twitter

Enthusiasts for prohibiting political dissent must know that the First Amendment protects the right to utter controversial speech.

They must know that there’s no constitutional loophole for speech that they disagree with. 

Another “must know”? That calling the public statements of political opponents “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “hate speech,” etc. is no substitute for open discussion.

They just don’t care. 

They just know that if they keep plugging away, struggling to muzzle the badspeech, they’re more likely to get their way than playing by the rules of free speech and open debate.

Their determination is well shown in a new California law, AB587, passed about a year ago. The law compels social media companies to institute moderation policies to squelch “hate speech,” “extremism,” “disinformation,” “misinformation,” “radicalization,” etc.

Although AB587 is anti-transparently called a “transparency measure,” main author Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel admits the point: to force social media companies to “moderate or remove hateful or incendiary content on their platforms,” like “hate speech and disinformation.”

Since Elon Musk’s Twitter is affected by the new law, Musk is suing to block it.

According to his lawsuit, AB587 “compels companies like X Corp. [Twitter] to engage in speech against their will, impermissibly interferes with [their] constitutionally protected editorial judgments” and “has both the purpose and likely effect of pressuring companies . . . to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally protected speech that the State deems undesirable or harmful.”

Politically, Mr. Musk has emerged as one of the country’s most frustratingly contradictory figures, often doing great things, sometimes very bad ones. With this lawsuit, even his enemies must know he is in the right.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom local leaders

De- and Re-certified

doctor, medicine, association, group think, censorship

“Around the country, a slew of doctors had board certifications removed and licensure threatened for sharing their COVID-related opinions,” explains The Epoch Times, in an article devoted to one of those persecuted, Dr. John Littell of Florida.

Early in the pandemic, “Dr. Littell, a longtime family physician in Ocala and a medical school professor, began posting videos sharing his thoughts about COVID-19 testing, treatments, and vaccines early in the pandemic,” Natasha Holt’s Epoch Times article narrates. “He was frustrated to find his content often was pulled down from his YouTube channel.” 

But the establishment’s efforts didn’t stop there. “[I]n January 2022 and again five months later, he received warning letters from the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM), the organization that issued his certification for his medical specialty.”

His videos on YouTube and then the safe, free-speech haven Rumble, spread “medical misinformation,” the board charged, warning that he could lose certification. But these were warnings. The board got a bit more serious and physical when they removed Littell from a public meeting, giving him the bum’s rush.

And then the board de-certified him.

It’s a long story, but appears to have a happy ending, with Littell re-certified and organizing a support group for medical professionals’ free speech rights, and the basic need to practice independent, patient-centered medicine, and to disagree with the gimcrack “consensus” policies that establishment organizations impose.

While there are multiple medical certification boards in America, these are not free-market concerns competing for customers. The government is heavily involved at every level. And the policies and “science” that Dr. Littell and others ran up against were not only political, but wrong — medically and morally. 

As we are increasingly discovering.

Which makes medical freedom more important than ever.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability First Amendment rights government transparency

Overly Broad Stonewalling

United States, censorship, intelligence agency, FBI, CIA, free speech, First Amendment

How specific do requests for records of unconstitutional activity have to be?

In February, the Federal Bureau of Investigation pretended an inability to fulfill America First Legal Foundation’s freedom-of-information request for documents about the FBI’s pre-election efforts to censor Twitter users. The agency declared the request to be “overly broad.”

What’s been “overly broad” is the policy of censorship, disinformation, and more by the Deep State using private partners. Meaning their real problem is doubtless that the requested documents are “overly incriminating,” too unmistakably what AFL wanted.

So the FBI stonewalled. 

And AFL has sued, in its complaint concluding that the agency’s “blanket denial of AFL’s FOIA request is contrary to law and should not stand.”

Thanks to evidence brought to light by other litigation and by Matt Taibbi’s reporting on Twitter’s internal records, none of us is just guessing that the FBI has acted to censor constitutionally protected discourse. We know that the FBI’s National Election Command Post flagged at least 25 Twitter accounts for “misinformation.”

But the only party to the censorship revealing relevant information voluntarily is Twitter itself, thanks to decisions by Twitter’s new management under Elon Musk.

With respect to everybody else colluding to censor social media — the FBI, the DOJ, the White House, Google, Facebook, etc. — looks like it’ll have to be lawsuits every step of the way.

The First Amendment’s stricture upon Congress to “make no law” abridging our “freedom of speech, or of the press,” does not allow the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and other agencies to simply subcontract. Nor are they free to mold public opinion. 

A government-controlled “press” is not a free press.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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