Tag: free speech

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First Amendment rights judiciary

Untruth Speaker, Untruth Speaker

Donald Trump

“You can’t call anyone a liar?” Judge Patricia Millett asked federal prosecutors, “with a tone of incredulity,” according to The Washington Post report.

Millett, along with Judges Cornelia T.L. Pillard and Bradley Garcia, serves on the three-​judge panel of the federal Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. This week they devoted two hours to the appeal of a federal district judge’s gag order placed on former president Donald Trump.

Under Millett’s questioning, federal prosecutor Cecil VanDevender agreed that under the order Mr. Trump could say that someone testifying against him was “an untruth speaker” but not call that person a “liar.”

“He has to speak ‘Miss Manners’ while everyone else is throwing targets at him?” inquired Judge Millett. “It would be really hard in a debate, when everyone else is going at you full bore.”

She noted that the First Amendment importantly protects inflammatory speech, adding with some exasperation: “Your position doesn’t seem to give much balance at all to the First Amendment’s vigorous protection of political speech.”

Trump’s attorney argued that the current leading Republican presidential candidate has taken advantage of the order’s stay, pending this appeal, by “posting about this case almost incessantly since the day it was filed and they haven’t come forward with a single threat that’s even arguably inspired by any evidence in his social media posts.”

The three-​judge panel, at least as The Post reads the hearing’s tea leaves, “indicated it may narrow the order prohibiting the former president from attacking individual prosecutors … or from calling potential witnesses against him ‘liars’ in the heat of next year’s campaign.”

It should. Unless the speech is specifically criminal it should be freely allowed. Orange Man should have the same rights we all rightly possess.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture Internet controversy social media

Domination by Pseudo-experts

Biden, censorship, sniffing

It’s official.

The overt and covert censorship of social-​media posts over the last several years has been extensively documented in a new congressional report, “The Weaponization of ‘Disinformation’ Pseudo-​experts and Bureaucrats: How the Federal Government Partnered With Universities to Censor Americans’ Political Speech.”

Anyone paying attention knew that this was happening. We knew that Google, Facebook, pre-​Musk Twitter and others of the biggest social-​media companies were systematically stopping account holders from uttering opinions that contradicted official government doctrines about COVID-​19, elections, and other matters.

We also knew that government officials were publicly and vehemently “suggesting” that social media companies try harder to stomp speech that some government officials disagree with.

We didn’t know — until government emails and other documents came to light thanks to various lawsuits — how routinely, behind the scenes, many federal officials were directing the censorship of specific disapproved posts.

The report’s authors say that as the 2020 election approached and the pandemic raged, people sought to discuss “the merits of unprecedented, mid-​election-​cycle changes to election procedures” and other controversial matters. But “their constitutionally protected speech was intentionally suppressed as a consequence of the federal government’s direct coordination with third-​party organizations, particularly universities and social media platforms.”

We have other sources of many of the facts here outlined. But the fact that the abuses are being formally acknowledged and detailed by the anti-​censorship wing of the federal government — instead of being swept under the rug, as is traditional — may help prevent this form of election interference from happening again.

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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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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First Amendment rights general freedom judiciary

High Court Too Busy

California, gig, contractor, speech, censorship

What is the U.S. SupremeCourt thinking by refusing even to listen to arguments about the effects of California’s AB5 law, which effectively outlaws certain kinds of freelancing and gig work, on the right to speak out and petition in California?

The case is Mobilize the Message, LLC v. Bona. Plaintiffs were challenging the constitutionality of AB5 because it bans independent contractors from doing door-​to-​door canvassing for candidates or initiative campaigns yet allows independent contractors to do the same kind of work if they’re doing it as newspaper carriers or salesmen.

Of course, if AB5 were completely consistent in its assault on independent contractors, that wouldn’t make it any less injurious to political work and freedom of speech. But the separate and unequal provisions of the act do mean that political workers are being forced to abide by different rules than certain nonpolitical contractors.

That’s not right, not just.

As the Institute for Free Speech puts it, “The only distinguishing feature separating the two [kinds of contractors] is the content of the speech they are paid to promote, a distinction that is presumptively unconstitutional under the First Amendment.”

Lead counsel for the plaintiffs, Alan Gura, says that the Court’s decision will “price political speech beyond the reach of many citizens.”

What’s the deal, are the justices too busy? 

We’re all busy. 

On the other hand, they have a job. A lot of folks in California could use one, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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