Category: First Amendment rights

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

Girls [sic] Sports Saved

The only thing that should have been required to save the T-shirt? 

An apostrophe.

The T-shirt boldly proclaimed “Save Girls* Sports.”

But matters were more complicated for students of Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Riverside, California, who wore the shirts to protest their school’s decision to let a boy claiming to be a girl join the girls’ cross-country team.

The school sent students wearing the shirt to detention, allegedly for violating the dress code. Two of the girls who wore it said that school administrators compared the wearing of it to wearing a T-shirt with a swastika.

Those two students and their families sued the school and school district on constitutional grounds.

Maybe it was the lawsuit, or maybe it was the show of solidarity — but something caused MLK High to cave. And hundreds of other students did show up wearing the “Save Girls Sports” T-shirt, willing to buck the dress code or thought code, whatever it is, to support their classmates.

Somehow the school failed to place these hundreds of students in detention and has apparently dropped the detention policy.

Students at other schools in the area had also started wearing the T-shirts.

With regard to the policy of letting boys play on girls’ sports teams, the Riverside Unified School District says that its hands are tied. “RUSD is bound to follow California law,” which requires letting students “participate in sex-segregated” activities in a way “consistent with his or her gender identity.”

Laws are meant to be changed, however, if not through California’s legislature, then through the state’s citizen initiative process.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 * We leave the [sic] for the title.

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Politically Exposed Persecution

fascism, freedom, business, censorship

National socialism, as operated by the actual Nazis, did not seize all the major industries and run them as collectives or state-owned businesses. The Nazis applied party control directly to big business, as a political-regulatory matter. 

How different is what woke Democrats have been doing to business today, here in America, using multiple agencies of the United States federal government’s regulatory apparatus?

Marc Andreessen, investor, innovator, business genius, and early Internet pioneer, explained how in a discussion on the Joe Rogan Experience, last month.

Start with debanking, which the regulators can tell banks to do to “politically exposed persons.” Mr. Andreessen told Joe about a friend who was debanked, apparently because his job title was involved in the business use of crypto-currency. 

And debanking is exactly what you think it is: de-platformed from the financial system.

Don’t worry, statist: you are not “politically exposed.” This only applies to critics of our quasi-fascist system.

This commercial censorship is run pretty much like censorship on the social media companies after 2016, by soft pressure . . . the “raw power” of a “privatized sanctions regime.” Government functionaries notify a bank that a person or business is “politically exposed,” and the bank — fearing getting on the bad side of regulators — kicks the customer off the rolls. 

Politicians can haughtily state that it was the bank that did it. Banks, after all, are not obliged to serve everyone! They can pick and choose their customers.

Besides, there is no First Amendment right to have a bank account.

This is how woke bureaucrats can rule like Nazis.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs

Professional Idiot?

Germany, censorship, authoritarianism

Police in Germany are raiding and arresting unpowerful citizens for committing the sin of speaking harsh words about sitting officials. 

Or forwarding harsh words about them.

Animus toward free speech isn’t a new thing in Germany, even post-twentieth-century Germany. But it seems that the censorship, aka hate-speech hatred, is getting more intense lately because of an election.

One recent victim is a 64-year-old pensioner, Stefan Nieoff, who forwarded a “meme” about Green Economy Minister Robert Habeck. Habeck wants to be chancellor. According to the “meme,” Habeck is a “professional idiot” (Schwachkopf Professional). 

But in consequence of Herr Nieoff’s reckless act of disseminating information of merely figurative accuracy, Bavarian police (a) raided the man’s home and (b) arrested him. Incidentally traumatizing his daughter, who has Down syndrome.

Why, exactly? Because the Bavarian police are idiots acting at the behest of other idiots.

In a video posted on X, Nieoff says, as Google-Translated: “What they did to me is awful. I’m going to court. It can’t be that everyone keeps their mouth shut and lets themselves be oppressed like that. . . . So please, Mr. Habeck, I beg you, come to my kitchen table sometime. Like the police officers from the Schweinfurt Criminal Investigation Department.”

The Alternative for Germany party asserts that although Habeck “presents himself as a ‘people-friendly’ candidate for chancellor, his critics are being relentlessly pursued.”

Reports say that Habeck, a member of the Green Party, has little chance of becoming chancellor. Let’s hope his chances are sehr schwach.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Musk Avoids a Trap

Elon Musk, UK, censorship, freedom

After reports that British MPs wanted to summon Elon Musk to interrogate him about the role of his company, X (Twitter), “in disseminating ‘disinformation’ during the summer riots,” I didn’t suppose that he’d be eager to rush across the pond to be grilled by enemies of freedom of speech.

One of his would-be interrogators, Chi Onwurah, a Labour committee chairwoman, said she wanted to “cross-examine him to see . . . how he reconciles his promotion of freedom of expression with his promotion of pure disinformation.”

What a mystery. How can someone champion freedom of speech and letting people say things with which others disagree? Isn’t freedom of speech only for government-authorized speech, the kind King George III would have approved?

On X, a Malaysian commentator sought to warn Musk: “This is a trap,” tweeted Miles Cheong, “They’ll detain him at the border, demand to see the contents of his phone, and charge him under counterterrorism laws when he refuses.”

If we were concerned even a little that Mr. Musk might fall into this or a similar trap, we needn’t have been.

In reply to Cheong, Musk asserted that MPs will, rather, “be summoned to the United States of America to explain their censorship and threats to American citizens.”

In September, in response to being pointedly and publicly not invited to a British investment conference, Musk had said, “I don’t think anyone should go to the UK when they’re releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Censors Slapped at Start

Kamala Harris, satire, free speech, censorship

Californians may now be allowed to see and laugh at “falsehoods” after all.

The Golden State legislature and Governor Newsom will probably fail in their attempt, made in open violation of the First Amendment, to ban certain parody and satire that communicates what they call “falsehoods.” (California hasn’t yet outlawed political novels.)

The battle isn’t over yet. But a court has issued a preliminary injunction against recently passed legislation, declaring that it “does not pass constitutional scrutiny.”

Cited in the ruling is this excellent insight: “‘Especially as to political speech, counter speech is the tried and true buffer and elixir,’ not speech restriction.”

Further, by “singling out and censoring political speech, California hasn’t saved democracy — it has undermined it. The First Amendment does not brook appeals to ‘enhancing the ability of . . . citizenry to make wise decisions by restricting the flow of information to them.’” Though the judge determined that California has “a valid interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,” the current legislation “lacks the narrow tailoring and least restrictive alternative that a content based law requires under strict scrutiny.”

What could such “narrow tailoring” have consisted of? The repudiated legislation has everything to do with speech that should be unhindered and nothing to do with protecting the electoral process. 

AB2839 and a related law, AB2655, were the rapid response of California’s kingpins to an effective parody video of a “Kamala Harris” “ad.” In it, “Harris” explains that she is a vacuous “deep-state puppet.”

The First Amendment protects the right to utter truth, falsehoods, and the kinds of satirical fictions and parodic exaggerations that everybody but opponents of free speech understand to be fictions and exaggerations.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling First Amendment rights

Don’t Mention the Menace

school board, education, schools, gangs, censorship

“It was a chaotic ending to the public comment period during Tuesday night’s Loudoun County [Virginia] School Board meeting,” reports WJLA, the ABC affiliate in our nation’s capital, “when Chair Melinda Mansfield ended that portion of the hearing after giving multiple warnings to parents raising concerns about a current student with alleged gang ties [who] was arrested last year for carrying a gun and making threats to kill a classmate.”

Well, a public official did indeed put parents on notice not to talk further about the problem they came to discuss. However, a student who carries a firearm to school and threatens to murder his or her peers does perhaps warrant some smidgen of dialogue. 

“According to sources with knowledge of the situation,” WJLA informs, “the student is allegedly connected to the MS-13 gang and is in the U.S. illegally.”

Parent Abbie Platt divulged that her “daughter is terrified to go to school with him.”

Four parents addressed the school board regarding this student; each was cut off by the board’s chair who accused them of “breaking the school board policy” by “providing information that could identify the student.”

“Everything that was brought up in this public comment is already public knowledge,” explains Tiffany Polifko, a parent and former school board member, telling the board that to “stop your constituents from speaking” is a classic violation of the First Amendment.

A spokesperson for Loudon County Public Schools defended the board’s speech squelching: “Even some minor details could lead . . . to the identity of a student, that’s just not a situation we’re comfortable with, that we’re going to accept.”

So, your kid needs to accept the risk of brutal torture and death, and you need to be quiet about it — because even discussing the danger might reveal the identity of the murder-and-mayhem-threatening student.

Those are public school priorities. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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XX Marks the Offense

armband, censorship, free speech

Educators, used to tyrannizing the young, are too often tempted to turn their powerlust to their charges’ parents. Yesterday, I discussed Michigan educators keeping their curriculum secret from members of their community. Today we turn to the way officials at Bow High School in New Hampshire have treated Kyle Fellers, Anthony Foote, Nicole Foote, and Eldon Rash. 

These parents and a grandparent attended a girls’ soccer game while non-disruptively wearing wristbands labeled XX to protest a policy allowing a boy to play on the opposing team. The “XX” refers to the sex chromosomes of females.

Because Fellers, Foote, Foote, and Rash wore the wrong apparel, school officials and a police officer told them to remove the wristbands or leave. When they refused, the school scolders threatened them with arrest for “trespassing.”

For attending a game where their kids were playing?

The school later banned two of the wristband-wearers from school grounds and events, among other things making it harder for them to pick up their kids after a game.

“The idea that I would be censored and threatened with removal from a public event for standing by my convictions is not just a personal affront — it is an infringement of the very rights I swore to defend,” says Andy Foote, who has a long career in the Army under his belt.

Now, with the help of the Institute for Free Speech, the renegade wristband-wearers are suing the school in hopes that it will, on First Amendment grounds, be enjoined from restricting “nondisruptive expression of political or social views at extracurricular events. . . .”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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California vs. Inconvenient Speech

Kamala Harris, parody, satire, free speech, censorship, deep fake

California Governor Newsom wants to outlaw all political speech annoying to himself. If legislation he’s just signed is allowed to stand, he’ll be well on the way to doing so.

One target of California’s two new laws, the Babylon Bee, is filing suit against them.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents the Bee, says that the subjects of the lawsuit, California’s AB2839 and AB265, “censor speech through subjective standards like prohibiting pictures and videos ‘likely to harm’ a candidate’s ‘electoral prospects.’. . . AB 2655 applies to large online platforms and requires them to sometimes label, and other times remove, posts with ‘materially deceptive content.’”

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon observes that, contrary to the wishes of “self-serving politicians [who] abuse their power to try and control public discourse and clamp down on comedy,” the right to tell jokes they dislike is secured by the First Amendment.

The vague nature of the laws would enable California officials to “police speech they disagree with,” according to ADF and Captain Obvious.

One of the laws requires a disclaimer to be attached to satirical content, a mandate that also violates the First Amendment.

The immediate incentive for fast-tracking the censorship bills into law was a parody video of Kamala Harris that includes a simulation of her voice. The video does bill itself as parody but that is obvious regardless. This video “should be illegal,” Newsom asseverated.

No, it shouldn’t. 

Anyway, watch the hilarity on YouTube . . . while you can.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Hillary Disinformation Hunt

Hillary Clinton, disinformation, censorship, mind control, thought control

Have you heard? It’s open season on disinformation.

Disinformation spewed by Hillary Clinton, that is.

Mrs. Clinton has escaped jail time for all her previous crimes, whether committed singly or in partnership with her husband. But now we are going to have a brand-new crime to charge her with. And boy, is she a serial offender!!!!!!

The irony is, we would not even be able to charge anybody with this new category of crime — if indeed we’ll be able to; there’s still some controversy about it — but for the contempt of Hillary Clinton and politicians like her for the First Amendment rights that a large minority of Americans hold so dear.

Hillary Clinton, on MSNBC: “I think it’s important to indict the Russians . . . who were engaged in direct election interference. . . . But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrent.”

Yes, Hillary Clinton “got away with” everything else. But can she get away with all her lies and, let’s face it, downright disinformation, certainly heavily disseminated by her around election times? 

Heck, even if the new category of criminal offense won’t be applicable retroactively, thus giving her a free pass for the last umpteen years, are we in any danger of running out of actionable Hillary disinformation going forward? Does a leopard change its spots?

Maybe she’s counting on selective enforcement.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights media and media people political challengers social media

The Ignorance of Censorship

Covid, censorship, surveillance, PSYOP, mind control

Why is Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, governor of Minnesota right now?

Perhaps because government censors — functioning through agents like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook — made it harder to hear his opponent, Dr. Scott Jensen, during Walz’s 2022 re-election campaign.

A shift in a few percentage points would have tilted things in the challenger’s favor. But Jensen had made the government’s response to the pandemic — including the tyrannical policies of Walz’s state government — a central theme of his campaign.

And in those days (as in these), all-out censorship of various deviations from the government line was de rigueur. Disagreement about COVID-19, both the nature of the infection and the wisdom of the government’s response, was among the targets.

Jeffrey Tucker asks “Why Did Zuckerberg Choose Now to Confess” to the fact that Facebook had done so little, in Zuckerberg’s words, to resist repeated pressure “from the Biden administration, including the White House . . . to censor certain COVID-19 content”?

The answer to the uninteresting question “why now?” is standard CYApolitical calculus. In any case, the confession isn’t quite exhaustive; Zuckerberg doesn’t acknowledge the extent of the censorship. As Tucker notes, “every single opponent of the terrible policies was deplatformed at all levels.”

The single COVID-contrarian piece by Tucker himself that slipped through the social-media censorship net “by mistake” got an atypical tsunami of response. So what if Dr. Jensen’s message and arguments had not been perpetually smothered by government-pressured social-media companies?

Jensen may still have lost (Walz got 52 percent) but the point of elections goes further than a horse race. Where there is free speech, voters can learn something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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