by Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann As was proven during the 2024 election cycle, we are well beyond the scope of mere bias in the legacy media. Given the shrinking audience influence coupled with massively declining income from severe loss of cable subscriptions and advertising revenue, American media outlets have chosen…
Read More
A federal appeals court ruled Friday to uphold a law that will force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to sell the platform or have it banned in the U.S.
A panel of three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled unanimously that the law forcing ByteDance, TikTok’s parent firm, to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese company or face a U.S. ban is legal, clearing the way for the law to take effect on Jan. 19, 2025. In their ruling, the judges characterized TikTok as a national security risk because the Chinese government is able to manipulate the app to its advantage and stated that the April divest-or-ban law does not run afoul of the First Amendment, as some of the law’s critics have contended.
Read More
Chris Crowley, a conservative attorney in Florida, filed an appeal with the Florida Supreme Court last month contesting a 60-day suspension of his law license for exercising free speech during his political campaign for the state attorney’s office in Florida’s 20th Judicial Circuit.
Read More
Some of the most prominent elite universities in the nation have been ranked lowest for freedom of speech, according to a report released Thursday.
Harvard, Columbia, New York University (NYU), the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and Barnard College make up the bottom five in a free speech ranking of 251 universities, according to a report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and College Pulse. The report cited several incidents of “suppression of free expression” at the schools, including disruption of events and sanctions on students and staff for expressing their views as the reasoning behind the schools’ low rankings.
Read More
A month after Matthew Garrett secured a $2.4 million settlement from the Kern Community College District over termination proceedings for the “dishonesty” of disagreeing with colleagues on diversity issues and “unprofessional conduct” of questioning the data used to create a “racial climate task force,” the former Bakersfield College tenured history professor isn’t done yet.
He has started a campaign to pressure the KCCD Board of Trustees to rescind a contract extension and pay boost for the human resources official who oversaw his proceedings, citing newly obtained sworn testimony of the colleague who he says sicced students on Garrett with racially charged complaints that were “ultimately found to be baseless” – and used class time to do it.
Read More
Two campaign staffers for Vice President Kamala Harris were previously involved in efforts to censor Americans for spreading purported “disinformation” about COVID-19 while working in the Biden-Harris White House.
Then-administration officials Rob Flaherty and Aisha Shah are named as having been involved in the government’s efforts to censor Americans in legal filings related to the Murthy v. Missouri lawsuit, which alleged that the federal government violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to censor content related to the pandemic and other hot-button topics. On the Harris campaign team, Flaherty is now a deputy campaign manager and Shah is the director of digital partnerships, according to their respective LinkedIn profiles.
Read More
Free speech suppression on college campuses and social media censorship often spur debates over how far the First Amendment should go to protect Americans’ rights to express their opinions – and who should be entrusted with those decisions.
About 53% of Americans believe the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it protects, according to a new poll by the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE.
Read More
The U.K.-based Economist speculates that Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer could save her party from defeat in November if she replaces “doddering” President Biden on the ticket, by nationalizing her Great Lakes State strategy of “relentless targeting of suburban swing voters with simple messages: abortion rights, jobs and infrastructure.”
Voters might ask this scion of a political family, who acted out her motto “get sh*t done” by shutting down in-store gardening sections and in-state travel to second homes to defeat COVID-19, why she’s allegedly forcing counselors to help mentally fragile children “undergo permanent, life-altering medical procedures that many will come to regret.”
Read More
The Founding Fathers recognized that an educated citizenry was vital to the survival of our republic. Thomas Jefferson, for example, saw education as essential to giving every citizen the opportunity to participate meaningfully in a free society.
Writing in 1818, our third president described public education as “the means to give every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business … to express and preserve his own ideas … to improve his morals and faculties … to understand his duties, and to exercise his rights.”
Read More
Last week, in Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court hammered home the distressing conclusion that, under the court’s doctrines, the First Amendment is, for all practical purposes, unenforceable against large-scale government censorship. The decision is a strong contender to be the worst speech decision in the court’s history.
(I must confess a personal interest in all of this: My civil rights organization, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, represented individual plaintiffs in Murthy.)
Read More
Democratic Manhattan District Alvin Bragg’s office defended on Wednesday keeping former President Donald Trump under his gag order, requesting that it stay in place at least through Trump’s sentencing hearing in late July and any post-trial motions.
Trump attorney’s asked Judge Juan Merchan on Tuesday to lift the order, writing in a letter that the “concerns articulated by the government and the Court do not justify restrictions on the First Amendment rights of President Trump” now that the trial has concluded. Prosecutors disagreed, responding that the order was intended to protect more than just the trial proceedings.
Read More
Indiana University is violating students’ First and 14th Amendment rights through its “far-reaching” bias reporting policy, a civil rights organization alleges.
Speech First filed a federal lawsuit against Indiana University on Wednesday arguing that the school is violating the rights of students by enacting a speech policy that “is designed solely to deter, discourage, and otherwise ‘prevent’ students from expressing disfavored views about the political and social issues of the day.” Under the policy, students can report others for “any conduct, speech, or expression, motivated in whole or in part by bias or prejudice meant to intimidate, demean, mock, degrade, marginalize, or threaten individuals or groups” on some aspect of their identity, like race or gender identity, according to Indiana University’s website.
Read More
This summer the Supreme Court will rule on a case involving what a district court called perhaps “the most massive attack against free speech” ever inflicted on the American people. In Murthy v. Missouri, plaintiffs ranging from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to epidemiologists from Harvard and Stanford allege that the federal government violated the First Amendment by working with outside groups and social media platforms to surveil, flag, and quash dissenting speech – characterizing it as mis-, dis- and mal-information – on issues ranging from COVID-19 to election integrity.
The case has helped shine a light on a sprawling network of government agencies and connected NGOs that critics describe as a censorship industrial complex. That the U.S. government might aggressively clamp down on protected speech, and, certainly at the scale of millions of social media posts, may constitute a recent development. Reporting by RCI and other outlets – including Racket News’ new “Censorship Files” series, and continuing installments of the “Twitter Files” series to which it, Public, and others have contributed – and congressional probes continue to reveal the substantial breadth and depth of contemporary efforts to quell speech that authorities deem dangerous. But the roots of what some have dubbed the censorship industrial complex stretch back decades, born of an alliance between government, business, and academia that Democrat Sen. William Fulbright termed the “military-industrial-academic-complex” – building on President Eisenhower’s formulation – in a 1967 speech.
Read More
The Supreme Court unanimously held Thursday that the National Rifle Association (NRA) “plausibly alleged” that a New York official violated its First Amendment rights, finding that government officials cannot “use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.”
The justices allowed the NRA to pursue its First Amendment claim against former superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) Maria Vullo, vacating a lower court ruling that found the NRA failed to show Vullo “crossed the line between attempts to convince and attempts to coerce.” They held that the gun rights group has a plausible case that Vullo “violated the First Amendment by coercing regulated entities to terminate their business relationships with the NRA in order to punish or suppress gun-promotion advocacy.”
Read More
American federalism is alive and well after all. On April 19, the Biden Education Department announced its disastrous new Title IX rule that guts due process and imposes gender ideology in educational institutions. Within days, however, officials from eight states publicly instructed their schools to ignore it. Then, within a week, 16 states sued the administration alongside nonprofit groups such as Parents Defending Education and several Louisiana school districts. Since then, the number of states suing has climbed to 26—more than half the states in the nation. Their court filings say the rule violates not only the United States Constitution and the federal Administrative Procedures Act but also Title IX itself. Game on!
While feminists weaponized Title IX to their hearts’ content in the Obama years, alleging a phony campus rape crisis to rationalize their kangaroo courts and to silence those questioning their power, the world is a different place under Biden. Feminists have met their match in American parents and and in red states—especially their education officials.
Read More
On Tuesday, the Chinese social media app TikTok and its parent company filed a lawsuit against the federal government of the United States over a new law threatening to ban the app if it is not sold to another company by next year.
ABC News reports that the lawsuit, filed by TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance, claims the new law is a violation of the First Amendment rights of TikTok’s users. The bill was signed into law by Joe Biden last month, with the TikTok ban being one provision of a larger $95 billion foreign aid package. The law requires ByteDance to sell TikTok within 9 months, or else the app will be banned from use in the United States.
Read More
The Supreme Court declined Monday to stop a police officer’s lawsuit against a Black Lives Matter activist who led the 2016 protest where he was injured by another individual.
Read More
For all its gesticulations about “free speech,” the conservative mainstream often plays a supporting role in America’s censorship regime. It’s a two-step dance: The Right styles itself as the sworn defender of free speech and the mortal enemy of censorship while simultaneously downplaying or outright ignoring brazen censorship of speech that ventures a bit too far outside the Overton window. By claiming to defend all free speech in principle but only defending some in practice, the Right concedes, by omission, that certain ideas fall outside the bounds of free expression — and that it’s perfectly appropriate (or, at least, not particularly objectionable) to bring the full force of regime power to bear against any individual so unwise as to express them.
Read More
Fulton County Superior Judge Scott McAfee on Thursday denied former President Donald Trump’s motion to dismiss the indictment against him and 14 co-defendants involving alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.
Read More
When you watch a political ad, often you’ll see a disclaimer of who the ad was paid for by, usually a political action committee, but what about the donors to the committee? Or the donor’s donors?
That’s the bridge that a San Francisco campaign finance law seeks to cross — now being challenged at the U.S. Supreme Court in No on E v. Chiu — and to prohibit an incredibly common practice in campaign finance, which are donations from anonymous sources.
Read More
The Pacific Northwest has a message for foster and adoptive parents: Agree to affirm a child’s self-determined “sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression,” including using their preferred pronouns and taking them to Pride parades, or leave the program.
Washington state adopted new Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity/Expression (SOGIE) regulations after accepting a permanent injunction against the “nearly identical” Policy 6900 to settle a First Amendment lawsuit by would-be foster parents in July 2021, non-renewed foster parents claim in a new lawsuit.
Read More
Elon Musk on March 21 in a post on the X platform outlined what he called “centrist” positions on issues like securing the border, protecting American cities, reducing federal spending, ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) reverse discrimination policies, ending youth transgender surgeries and protecting freedom of speech under the First Amendment to the Constitution, saying these are not “right-wing” positions.
Musk wrote, “This is a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke mind virus. My positions are centrist: … Secure borders … Safe & clean cities … Don’t bankrupt America with spending … Racism against any race is wrong … No sterilization below age of consent … Is this right-wing?” In a second post in the thread, he added, “And, although it shouldn’t need to said, I believe in the Constitution and freedom of speech.”
Read More
Federal officials privately scold reporters and attempt to shape or even stop their coverage on a regular basis, without getting sued for First Amendment violations.
How close is that to White House aides privately and repeatedly badgering their counterparts at social media companies and President Biden publicly accusing Facebook of “killing people,” for insufficient censorship of disfavored narratives on COVID-19?
Read More
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Friday that there are circumstances when government officials can permissibly block a constituent from their social media pages, provided they are not claiming to speak on the state’s behalf.
The case, Lindke v. Freed, stemmed from Port Huron, Michigan, resident Kevin Lindke’s First Amendment lawsuit against city manager James Freed, who blocked Lindke from his Facebook page over comments criticizing the city’s response to COVID-19. While officials may look like they are “always on the clock,” not every encounter is “part of the job,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the opinion of the court.
Read More
Advocates for faith won several major victories this year through the legislature and the court, despite a growing hostility toward religious communities.
There were several examples of anti-religious sentiment over the past year, some of which included an FBI-drafted memo targeting traditional Catholics as “potential domestic terrorists” and the University of West Virginia’s transgender training labeling Christians as oppressors. However, 2023 also boasted several victories for religious Americans in schools, the workplace and the pro-life movement.
Read More
President Joe Biden’s administration is getting some big-name allies as it defends against a landmark free speech infringement lawsuit. Their argument: protecting Americans from indirect censorship by government officials undermines the First Amendment, national security, and public health.
Advocacy groups for journalists, academics, doctors, technologists, and big business, and a powerful senator, made various forms of these arguments in friend-of-the-court briefs to the Supreme Court in the days before and after Christmas.
Read More
A wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C., doesn’t inherently object to shielding even older students from sexually mature material. It just doesn’t want to give the choice to parents.
Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools pulled a novel that celebrates a promiscuous gay teen sex columnist from high school libraries even as the district was arguing in court that parents cannot opt out their pre-kindergarten children from LGBTQ “storybooks” that portray sex workers, kink, drag, elementary-age romance and gender-identity transitions.
Read More
Often, yours truly has expounded (okay, ranted) upon the term “narrative,” which is just an artful euphemism for “lie.” A device drawn from fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, it facilitates lying by eliding the need for providing the facts and proving the truth of one’s assertions. Consequently, it is a boon to propagandists, who can harp on a “narrative” ad nauseum to provoke and persuade the public to do as the purveyor of the lie seeks.
Read More
Free speech has long been one of the most sacred American values. Until recently, commitment to free speech in general was bipartisan and widespread. Almost every American from every political persuasion valued free speech.
There used to be some debate on the margins. Conservatives were wary of extending free speech protection to corrosive things like pornography, and liberals were wary of official speech endorsing religion. But, as recently as the 1990s, neither side believed its opponent should be censored, and the idea of exempting “hate speech” from the normal rule against censorship did not have much traction.
Read More
Late Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Missouri v. Biden, a case that may end the Biden administration’s circumvention of the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to Big Tech. The case was initially filed by the states of Missouri and Louisiana, along with various private plaintiffs who allege that social media platforms censored them at the behest of federal agencies. U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty ruled for the plaintiffs on July 4, enjoining the agencies from communicating with platforms about “content moderation.” The Biden administration sought relief from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and lost again, making a Supreme Court clash inevitable.
Read More
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office’s requested gag order against former President Donald Trump is not quite as “narrowly tailored” as he claimed, legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Prosecutors asked U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Sept. 15 to issue a “narrowly tailored” gag order barring Trump from making public statements that are “disparaging and inflammatory, or intimidating” toward any “party, witness, attorney, court personnel, or potential jurors,” as well as any statements “regarding the identity, testimony, or credibility of prospective witnesses.” The scope and circumstances surrounding the request — which a hearing scheduled for Monday will consider — are far outside what is normal in criminal trials, experts told the DCNF.
Read More
One unexpected blowback from the medieval Hamas’s barbaric murdering of hundreds of Israeli civilians is the revelation of current global amorality.
More than 20 Harvard university identity politics groups pledged their support to the Hamas murderers—to the utter silence for days of Harvard President Claudine Gay.
Read More
Fifty-six years after it exempted antiwar teenagers from First Amendment protections while on campus, a federal appeals court in America’s heartland affirmed students’ speech rights in public schools on an equally contentious subject today.
The St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a preliminary injunction Monday against an Iowa school district policy that threatens suspension and expulsion for “intentional and/or persistent refusal … to respect” a peer’s gender identity, finding it’s likely too vague to survive legal scrutiny.
Read More
To save America, first save the court system. Because it may be the last institution in the country doing its job — repelling progressive insanity. Four sound, sage judgments last Friday battered the Left all the way up from a local school district to the White House. Two of them made it a very bad day for the trans movement. But all stress the urgency of voting conservative to maintain righteous normalcy, far more than political circuses like last Wednesday’s Fox Business/Univision/RNC-mounted Republican Primary Debate.
Read More
The Supreme Court announced Friday that it would hear two cases regarding social media laws in the states of Texas and Florida.
The laws attempt to forbid social media platforms from banning users based on political views, according to The Hill.
Read More
Cooper Middle School in McClean, Virginia, gave students an age- inappropriate reading list for their 7th grade English class this year, a concerned parent told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Students in the English class were assigned a wide variety of books on topics that spanned from illegal immigration to Black Lives Matter (BLM), according to a copy of the list. Although the reading list clarifies that students will not have to read every single book, one teacher at the middle school said students would have to choose books to read from the provided options unless a parent offered an alternate, school-approved book, an orientation video welcoming students to the class showed.
Read More
A congressional report released by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Thursday describes the “long-standing and pervasive degradation of First Amendment rights” on college campuses.
The report, titled “Freedom of Speech and Its Protection on College Campuses,” details the committee’s findings on First Amendment violations such as “cancellations” of events to please “one-sided woke faculty and administrators.” The report provided legislation suggestions to protect freedom of speech and prevent a “plague of illiberalism,” including disclosure requirements of free speech policies and mandated neutrality to prevent colleges from commenting on public policy or social issues.
Read More
Elon Musk’s X Corp. sued California to block a law requiring social media companies to publish their content moderation policies, alleging it violates the First Amendment and coerces censorship.
X, formerly known as Twitter, asserted that California’s Assembly Bill 587 infringes upon its freedom of speech under the First Amendment and California’s state constitution, according to court documents. The law mandates social media companies release reports on how they moderate issues including hate speech, extremism, disinformation and misinformation.
Read More
A federal judge has ruled that a Texas law requiring pornography sites to install age-verification measures violates the Constitution’s First Amendment prohibition against free-speech restrictions.
The law also requires such sites to prominently display warning labels about what some consider the dangers of porn.
Read More
A medical nonprofit and two California doctors are suing the state medical board to block a law requiring mandatory implicit bias training in continuing medical education.
“Under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the government cannot compel speakers to engage in discussions on subjects they prefer to remain silent about,” the suit argued.
Read More
Constitutional law expert Hans von Spakovsky has seen his share of questionable prosecutions in his distinguished career.
But he says he’s seen few more abusive than this week’s indictment brought by far left Fulton County, GA, District Attorney Fani Willis against former President Donald Trump.
Read More
In a post to his locals.com page Georgia attorney Robert Barnes took subscribers on a little trip down memory lane about the 2020 Georgia election challenges.
Read More
Idaho professors and teachers unions are alleging that a state law violates their First Amendment rights by preventing them from teaching pro-abortion viewpoints, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by the ACLU.
Idaho passed the No Public Funds for Abortion Act in 2021, which prohibits state contracts with abortion providers and bans public employees from promoting abortion, according to Idaho’s legislative website. Public employees who violate the law can be charged with a felony and fired, and professors argue the law has forced them to alter their course modules by taking out entire sections related to abortion due to fear of repercussions, according to the lawsuit.
Read More
A U.S. District Court judge allowed a Utah law requiring age verification for porn websites to remain in effect, dismissing a lawsuit that argued the legislation infringed on the First Amendment and individual privacy, according to a press release.
The Free Speech Coalition (FSC) filed a lawsuit on May 3 after a law went into effect in the state of Utah that required porn websites to use age verification screening or face potential civil suits from Utah citizens. Judge Ted Stewart dismissed the lawsuit Tuesday, allowing the law to remain in place, but FSC announced that they plan to appeal the decision, according to a press release.
Read More
“If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
That is what federal judge Terry Doughty wrote in his decision ordering a number of Biden administration officials and agencies from communicating censorship requests to social media companies.
Read More
A Catholic sidewalk counselor petitioned the Supreme Court Friday to reverse a prior ruling that permits states to enforce laws targeting pro-life counseling outside abortion clinics.
In response to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in June 2020, Westchester County, New York passed a law creating a 100-foot “buffer zone” outside abortion clinics where it is illegal to approach another person to engage in “oral protest, education, or counseling” without consent. The law is similar to one the Supreme Court upheld in its 2000 Hill v. Colorado decision, which sidewalk counselor Debra Vitagliano, backed by Becket Law, now asks the justices to overrule.
Read More
The House Judiciary Committee on Monday sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg asking questions about possible censorship occurring on Threads, Meta’s latest social media platform.
“Given that Meta has censored First Amendment-protected speech as a result of government agencies’ requests and demands in the past, the Committee is concerned about potential First Amendment violations that have occurred or will occur on the Threads platform,” Committee chairman Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, wrote in the letter.
Read More
Silicon Valley community college officials said “White gays and lesbians” were not welcome in its LGBT center, called Jews “White oppressors” and refused repeated requests to address antisemitism, and forced staff to mouth a “land acknowledgment” that misidentified local indigenous tribes, according to a former diversity official.
The First Amendment lawsuit by Tabia Lee builds on allegations she made against De Anza College, Foothill-De Anza Community College District and officials after they declined to renew her contract this spring, which she called retaliation for challenging its “empty ‘antiracism’ gesture[s]” that reinforce racial stereotypes such as the “noble savage” and for acting like “an ‘uppity’ Black woman.”
Read More
A federal judge denied the Biden administration’s attempt to pause an injunction that bars federal officials from communicating with social media companies for the purposes of censoring protected speech on Monday.
The Biden administration appealed Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty’s July 4 injunction on Wednesday, also requesting an emergency order to pause the injunction while the appeal is pending on Thursday night. Doughty denied the administration’s emergency order Monday, finding that plaintiffs would likely succeed in proving the government colluded with social media companies “to engage in viewpoint-based suppression of protected free speech.”
Read More
A Louisiana federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Biden administration to limit its contact with social media platforms, determining that the government likely violated the First Amendment by working to censor disfavored political viewpoints online. Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointed U.S. District Court judge, issued a preliminary injunction barring federal officials and agencies from contacting social media firms to seek the removal of protected speech, Politico reported.
Read More