Tag: free speech

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First Amendment rights insider corruption

The Biden’s Four Ways

Joe Biden, censorship, mind control, obey, obedience, free speech

In response to controversies about pandemics, elections, and whatnot, Congress did not quite pass — nor President Biden quite sign — a new law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. (As far as I know.)

Biden’s government did act, regardless, with the force of law to shut people up. According to the Media Research Center’s new report on Biden censorship — ready to be shared with all who contend that his administration perfectly respected our freedom of speech — the cabal I call The Biden censored Americans using four approaches:

Direct action. For example, ordering a big tech firm or a judge to censor somebody. White house advisors, agency bureaucrats, and others exerted this kind of pressure.

Policy or rulemaking. Examples include the State Department’s agreement with foreign nations “to pressure Tech platforms to censor more” and Homeland Security’s attempt to create a Disinformation Governance Board to police speech.

Partnerships with state and private actors to censor speech. Biden’s National Security Council collaborated with the UK’s Counter Disinformation Unit to impose UK censorship on Americans.

Grants to organizations to attack and flag utterance of incorrect speech, which the government could then censor.

These were effectuated, by MRC’s count, with 57 initiatives.

As soon as he began his second term, President Trump issued executive orders to combat such muzzling of debate. Congress must do its part too.

No matter what defenses are put in place, though, we will see further attempts by government goons to gag us. We must be vigilant.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

A Free Speech Order

“Will President Trump be a free speech president?”

On January 21, David Keating, president of Institute for Free Speech, asked this question. And he refers the reader to his Wall Street Journal op-​ed published last month in which he offered suggestions about how to stop the federal government from censoring people via social media or in other ways.

The new president sure seemed to get off to a good start restoring the First Amendment. One of his thirty or so executive orders signed on the 20th, his first work day, is entitled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.”

Section 2 says that it is U.S. policy to “secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech,” ensure that no federal employee or agent “engages in or facilitates” unconstitutional abridgement of speech, and “identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.”

Section 3 says no federal employee or department may act in a manner inconsistent with Section 2.

Maybe this broad order needs to be supplemented with many more specific orders that say: Really. Don’t engage in censorship here or there or anywhere.

This is where specific suggestions like Mr. Keating’s come in handy, such as preventing the IRS from penalizing taxpayers for criticizing political candidates, repealing SEC limits on political donations, and instituting specific regulations to “force disclosure of most government contacts with social-​media organizations asking to take down third-​party posts,” thereby scuttling most future such contacts.

It’s a start. Let’s keep going.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

The Defi(l)ers of the First Amendment

free speech, censorship, corporations

Early on, we carefully phrased our objections to the suppressions of dissident opinion on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. 

We knew (because we had been making the distinction for years) that when companies and private parties engaged in discrimination on the basis of opinion, including “de-​platforming” of opinion-​mongers, these weren’t, at least on the face of it, First Amendment violations. The First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech apply to the federal government and, by the stretch of the 14th Amendment, to state and local governments.

These were corporations.

Sure, corporations thriving under government liability rules, and with sometimes-​cushy contracts with government.

And social media companies’ actions were clearly partisan, obviously opposing Donald Trump. The dreaded Orange Man had used social media to get elected in 2016, running rings around the gatekeepers of Accepted Opinion; the ultra-​partisan censorship a reaction.

Only with the release of the Twitter Files, after Elon Musk bought Twitter, did we get the crucial facts in the case: Agents of the U.S. government (many of them eerily in the Deep State nexus) pushed the censorship.

Now, with Mark Zuckerberg’s very recent and very public pulling back from the excesses of DEI as well as government-​coerced content moderation, we’ve learned more of the manner of the duress in which his companies caved to censorship demands. Government agents called up Facebook managers and content moderators and screamed at them to suppress certain stories and “memes.”

The sharing of visual memes really, really bugged the Deep State, which was hell bent on delivering to everybody a jab in the muscle with gene therapeutics allegedly to “vaccinate” us against a disease that … well, their buddies in the Deep State helped China, it just so happened, create. 

Worldwide, millions died in a pandemic whose origin was actively covered up through violations of the First Amendment in America. 

Defend free speech to defend life itself. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

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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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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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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