Tag: 1st Amendment

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

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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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

GOP, ACLU, and NRA Together Again

ACLU, NRA, GOP, rights, free speech, self defense. 2nd Amendment, 1st Amendment

Occasionally, the stars align and adversaries become allies.

So it is that dozens of Republican congressmen have filed an amicus brief to support an NRA lawsuit against Maria Vullo, a former New York State regulator of the financial services industry. And so it is that the NRA will be represented before the Supreme Court by the American Civil Liberties Union.

After the 2018 Parkland shooting, Vullo pressured financial service companies to boycott organizations like the National Rifle Association that advocate Second Amendment rights.

The NRA sued, contending that Vullo had acted against their First Amendment rights. When the Supreme Court agreed to take their case, the NRA thought: who better to represent us before the justices than the ACLU?

The ACLU, which has not always been consistent in defending free speech, agreed.

Its national legal director, David Cole, says that “the ACLU has long stood for the proposition that we may disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Although this case is also about speech, more directly it is about using governmental force to try to stop people from conducting peaceful financial transactions.

If such intimidation of financial companies — or, what is being challenged in separate litigation, of social media companies — were allowed to stand, government would be fully unleashed to threaten market actors in order to prevent constitutionally protected actions and speech that officials dislike.

Our constitutional rights made meaningless.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights Internet controversy

Court Invokes First Amendment

hate speech, free speech, 1st Amendment

This is where we’re at. We must be in suspense about whether a judge will object when governments act to repress speech in the name of combatting “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “hate speech.”

Fortunately, Judge Andrew Carter sees the obvious and has blocked a new New York State law to regulate “hateful” online speech. The law was challenged by anti-​censorship video platform Rumble and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Carter says: “The First Amendment protects from state regulation speech that may be deemed ‘hateful,’ and generally disfavors regulation of speech based on its content unless it is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest.”

The alleged “compelling governmental interest” exception is vague and not really consistent with the First Amendment. But the judge otherwise makes sense.

Laws like New York’s constitute a cart blanche for government to repress speech — any speech.

Any controversial words can be labeled hateful, misinformative, disinformative. People have been censored for asseverating that there are only two sexes, that the COVID-​19 injections aren’t really vaccines, that the U.S. shouldn’t send more than $100 bazillion to Ukraine, etc.

It’s hatefully misinformative disinformation to proclaim that debates about such questions are impermissible. But people in any case have a right to be wrong; others, the right to refute them.

When the truth is on your side, you have an advantage. But you can’t beam your understanding into the minds of others.

You must be free to speak.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

The FBI Is Misinformed

disinformation, FBI, free speech, 1st Amendment

The FBI is misinformed if it thinks that prosecuting persons who misinform solely for misinforming is consistent with freedom of speech.

The utterance of false statements, whether unknowingly or willfully, is nothing new in human history. And such utterances are impossible to avoid in any kind of discourse — for example, political debates — in which people disagree with each other about facts as well as values.

Indeed, one often hears both true things and false things. We must evaluate claims as best we can, using observation, logic, common sense and so forth.

But, somehow, the FBI has decided that “misinformation” and “disinformation,” chronic in campaign ads, political pronouncements, and domestic quarrels, are a crime when communicated in the context of an election.

An FBI document leaked to Project Veritas wants to explain “What Are Election Crimes.” This document lumps misleading speech with such actual crimes as electoral fraud and intimidation of voters.

Robert Spencer has questions about this assumption for the FBI’s, ahem, Election Crimes Coordinator, Lindsay Capodilupo. For example, how does the FBI determine what is and is not misinformation? Will there be an appeals process given the fact that certain notorious so-​called “misinformation” — like the once-​upon-​a-​time contested claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop is indeed Hunter Biden’s laptop — has turned out to be true information?

And — most important — how can wrongspeak as such be classified as any kind of crime in light of the First Amendment?

Stay tuned for the FBI’s answers. But not with bated breath, okay?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

Public-​Private Censorship Partnership

censorship, mind control

When government pays people to help censor critics of its policies and talking points, this makes it even more obvious that it’s acting to repress speech and violate the First Amendment.

Thanks to a recent lawsuit against the Biden administration, we have been seeing emails confirming that government officials routinely ask Big Tech to censor this and that.

Now, Just the News reports that government agencies and liberal groups such as Common Cause and the Democratic National Committee worked with a consortium of private groups — the Election Integrity Partnership — during the 2020 election season to target and censor social media posts.

The EIP “set up a concierge-​like service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency and State’s Global Engagement Center to file ‘tickets’ requesting that online story links and social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech.”

About 35 percent of the many posts EIP flagged in 2020 were sanctioned in some way by Big Tech.

Millions of tax dollars have been funneled to consortium members to fund these efforts to censor “misinformation,” i.e., speech that government officials disapprove of.

The EIP remains active in 2022.

Of course, politically controversial speech is just the kind of speech that the Founders were concerned to protect. Madison and Mason didn’t expect that the ability to publicly debate whether Bach is better than Beethoven or the best way to shingle a roof would ever be in great jeopardy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Random Malefactor

Matt Walsh, free speech, doxxing, violence

I’m pretty sure I’d never heard the term “stochastic terrorism” until last week; now it’s everywhere.

What does it mean?

It sounds redundant, as if the first word didn’t modify the second so much as define it, but I could be wrong, so I … freespoke … it.

Freespoke is the new search engine I’m trying out, now that all the old ones seem compromised in weird ways.

Matt Walsh, of his Daily Wire podcast and his documentary film What Is a Woman?, appears to be one of the term’s current honorees. He is said to commit “stochastic terrorism” by calling attention (in one case) to the child abuse going on in hospitals in the form of “gender affirmation” treatments and surgeries. Merely by identifying something that is actually happening and judging it as bad qualifies because it has some unmeasurable likelihood of eliciting violence against those who are thus fingered — not ineluctably or directly or certainly or anything like that. 

Just randomly. 

Stochastic means random.

Of course, the charge against Walsh (or say, Trump, or anyone else) is that by identifying specific people in specific institutions he’s inviting random followers to engage in violence. But what Walsh is doing specifically is inviting his followers to protest and take political action against the malefactors he identifies. 

In familiar terminology, Walsh’s naming of names is similar to doxxing, and can be judged on that basis.

Yet, that hardly justifies calling non-​violent speech “violence.”

Furthermore, back to my opening concern, isn’t all terrorism random? Terroristic acts differ from insurrection and assassination in their randomness, the better to elicit a culture of fear in the populace. The randomness in “stochastic terrorism” is not in the targets but the terrorists.

In a heavily polarized political climate, all specific charges by one side against specific people on the other side could be seen as “stochastic terrorism.”

Better to tread carefully. And drop the term.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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