Tag: 1st amendment

This Tennessee Man Spent 37 Days in Jail for Sharing an Anti-Trump Meme. He Says the Cops Should Pay for That.

In the aftermath of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s murder on September 10, his admirers were offended by online messages that denigrated him, condemned his views, and in some cases even celebrated his death. The people outraged by that commentary evidently included Nick Weems, sheriff of Perry County, Tennessee, who used the powers of his office to strike back at Kirk’s detractors.

As Reason‘s Joe Lancaster reported in October, Weems arranged the arrest of a Kirk critic, Henderson County resident Larry Bushart, on a flagrantly frivolous criminal charge. Because Bushart was unable to cover the staggering $2 million bond demanded for his release (which would have required him to “pay a bondsman at least $210,000,” Lancaster noted), he spent 37 days in jail before the district attorney for Perry County dropped the charge against him after the case drew widespread criticism.

Bushart’s arrest for constitutionally protected speech violated the First Amendment, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) argues in a federal lawsuit against Perry County, Weems, and Jason Morrow, an investigator in the sheriff’s office. The complaint, which was filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee, says the defendants also violated the Fourth Amendment by arresting Bushart without probable cause. And because they pursued a malicious prosecution, FIRE argues, they should be liable for punitive as well as compensatory damages.

“I spent over three decades in law enforcement, and have the utmost respect for the law,” says Bushart, whose career included 19 years at the Jackson Police Department, five years at the Haywood County Sheriff’s Office, and nine years at the Tennessee Department of Correction. “But I also know my rights, and I was arrested for nothing more than refusing to be bullied into censorship.”

Weems was irked by Bushart’s response to a candlelight vigil for Kirk that was scheduled for the evening of September 20 on the lawn of the Perry County Courthouse—an event that the sheriff himself had promoted on Facebook. That day, Bushart saw a post about the vigil on the “What’s Happening, Perry County?” Facebook page. Commenting on that message, Bushart shared eight anti-Kirk memes, including one highlighting a comment that Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, made the day after the January 2024 mass shooting at Perry High School in Iowa.

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Minnesota High School Threatens to Suspend Students Who Talk Positively About ICE

A Minnesota high school has threatneed to suspend students who talk positively about Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) agents.

Paul Paetzel, the principal at Edina High School in Minnesota, has warned that making reference to the work of ICE agents and President Trump’s policy of mass deportations goes against the “culture” that his school is trying to foster.

He wrote in a letter parents:

I want to speak directly and proactively about the culture we are committed to creating at Edina High School.

As we continue to grow as a community, it is essential that we are clear about the expectations we hold for language and behavior that honor the dignity of every student.

Making light of immigration threats or referencing ICE in ways that cause fear or humiliation is a serious offense and not representative of our core values.

Behavior of this nature fundamentally violates our commitment to providing a safe and equitable learning environment free from harassment.

Such language and behaviors directly contradict Edina Public Schools’ vision and mission, and what we expect of our students.

If this type of behavior occurs, we will honor the discipline policy and move forward with consequences up to and including suspension.

Our responsibility is to protect every student’s right to feel safe, respected, and valued at school.

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Trump Is Using the ‘Misinformation’ Censorship Playbook Republicans Attacked Biden For

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson recently complained about alleged “lies, smears and AI deepfakes that are designed to deceive Americans” about President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda. Pressed on whether the government was talking with social media platforms to stem this purported misinformation, the spokesperson said, “Yes and we are also putting resources forward to ensure DHS combats this.”

It wasn’t so long ago that candidate Trump and his Republican allies were decrying the Joe Biden administration for pressuring platforms to police misinformation. The Trump administration seems to have warmed to the idea. 

Many on the left, who previously supported giving the government greater power to combat so-called misinformation, are and should rightly be fearful of a Trump administration empowered to censor speech it disagrees with.

The DHS announcement signals a deeper shift toward government-driven moderation of online speech—a shift that threatens to turn every administration into a speech arbiter. The power to dictate what can be said on the internet is inherently prone to abuse, no matter who holds it. The stakes are high.

Jawboning for Me but Not for Thee

Under the First Amendment, federal and state governments cannot censor speech they dislike, so instead of blatantly shutting down a news organization or online platform, government actors often try to force a company to do their bidding through more subtle means. These demands often happen behind closed doors, backed by an implicit—or sometimes explicit—threat that refusal will bring government retaliation. Because the government wields so much power over businesses, these companies understand they are in a weak position to resist. This practice is called “jawboning.”

When the Biden administration made public and private demands that social media companies remove “misinformation” and “disinformation” related to the COVID-19 pandemic, it ended up at the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri. The Court ultimately punted by ruling that individual social media users who claimed their speech was suppressed lacked standing to sue. 

This was disappointing. Internal emails from various social media companies showed that senior leaders felt they had no choice but to comply with the administration. Meta’s leaders internally said that they needed to change policy because they had “bigger fish to fry with the Administration.” YouTube claimed it needed to keep Biden officials happy since they wanted to “work closely with the administration on multiple policy fronts.” Amazon moved to “accelerate” its policy changes ahead of a call with Biden officials. Thankfully, the Supreme Court did at least uphold the principle that jawboning is wrong and unconstitutional in another case, NRA v. Vullo. 

Today, the Trump administration appears to be invoking Murthy as cover for its own pressure campaigns against online platforms. Apple removed an app that allowed users to report sightings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in real time. After complaints from Attorney General Pam Bondi, Meta removed a Facebook group that shared information about ICE agents. Now, the DHS says it is communicating with social media companies about supposed immigration misinformation. It would be naive to suppose it hasn’t applied any pressure during those talks.

It is entirely possible that the government can point to specific acts of illegality. It’s also possible that some of this content violates platform policies. For example, Meta claimed it removed the Facebook page with information on ICE agents for violating its “policies against coordinated harm.” It is possible this group was persistently violating this policy. But as long as these companies remain vulnerable to government pressure, we cannot simply trust officials who insist their demands are legitimate.

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Portland jury clears black man of assault because white man he stabbed had said the n-word

A black man was acquitted of stabbing a white man in Oregon after he claimed the attack was self-defense because the victim called him a racial slur. 

Gary Edwards, 43, was charged with second-degree assault for stabbing a man in Portland near a light rail stop on July 8, KPTV reported.

However, he was found not guilty of the crime on October 31 after the jury learned the victim was using racial slurs in the aftermath of the altercation.

Edwards, who is homeless and has a previous assault conviction, admitted to knifing the victim, Gregory Howard Jr., but claimed it was in self-defense because the other man called him the n-word, according to Oregon Live.

Security cameras, with no audio, captured Edwards, with a fixed-blade knife in hand, approaching Howard as he sat on a beach.

Howard immediately jumped up and pushed Edwards, then the two scuffled until Edwards stabbed Howard in the shoulder.

Edwards defense attorney Daniel Small reportedly told the jury that his client was approaching Howard to see if he would trade his knife for cigarettes. 

‘What other than racism could explain why Mr. Howard perceived hatred, animosity and aggression from a complete stranger,’ Small said.

Moments later, body camera footage from security officers captured Howard shouting a racist slur at Edwards after he had been stabbed.

It is unclear if there is any evidence to suggest that Howard used the slur before he was stabbed.

Prosecutor Katherine Williams told the jury it did not matter what the victim said after he was stabbed.

‘The defendant is not scared for his life. He didn’t retreat, he sauntered up – and he sauntered away after he stabbed someone. The defendant created the situation,’ Williams said.

Despite the prosecutors pleas, the jury found Edwards not guilty.

Edwards lawyer insisted the case never should have gone to trial.

‘I laid my cards out on the table and told the state how the trial would go, but it didn’t matter,’ he told Oregon Live.

Edwards, who is homeless, spent about three months in custody before the trail after prosecutors argued he was a threat to the public due to his lengthy criminal record, according to the outlet.

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US Under Secretary Warns Britain That the First Amendment Isn’t Negotiable

This week, Sarah Rogers, the US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, touched down in the UK not to sip tea or admire the Crown Jewels, but to deliver a message as subtle as a boot in the face: stop trying to censor Americans in America.

Yes, really.

According to Rogers, the UK’s speech regulator, Ofcom, the bureaucratic enforcer behind Britain’s censorship law, the Online Safety Act (OSA), has been getting ideas. Dangerous ones. Like attempting to extend its censorship regime outside the United Kingdom and onto American soil. You know, that country across the ocean where the First Amendment exists and people can still say controversial things without a court summons landing on their doormat.

To GB News, Rogers called this attempt at international thought-policing “a deal-breaker,” “a non-starter,” and “a red line.”

In State Department speak, that is basically the equivalent of someone slamming the brakes, looking Britain in the eye, and saying, “You try that again, and there will be consequences.”

To understand how Britain got itself into this mess, you have to understand the Online Safety Act. It is a law that reads like it was drafted by a committee of alarmed Victorian schoolteachers who just discovered the internet.

The OSA is supposedly designed to “protect children online,” which sounds noble until you realize it means criminalizing large swaths of adult speech, forcing platforms to delete legal content, and requiring identity and age checks that would make a KGB officer blush.

It even threatens prosecution over “psychological harm.” And now, apparently, it wants to enforce all of that in other countries too.

Rogers was not impressed, saying Ofcom has tried to impose the OSA extraterritorially and attempted to censor Americans in America. That, she made clear, is outrageous.

It’s more than a diplomatic spat. Rogers made it painfully clear the US isn’t going to just write a sternly worded letter and move on. There is legislative retaliation on the table.

The GRANITE Act, Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny & Extortion, is more than a clever acronym. It is the legislative middle finger Washington can consider if the UK keeps pretending it can veto American free speech from 3,500 miles away.

The bill, already circulating in the Wyoming state legislature, would strip foreign governments of their usual protections from lawsuits in the US if they try to censor American citizens or companies.

In other words, if Ofcom wants to slap US platforms with foreign censorship rules, they had better be ready to defend themselves in an American courtroom where “freedom of expression” isn’t a slogan, it is a constitutional right.

Rogers confirmed that the US legislature will likely consider that and will certainly consider other options if the British government doesn’t back down.

Of course, the GRANITE Act didn’t come out of nowhere. Rogers’s warning didn’t either. It is a response to the increasingly unhinged state of free speech in the UK, where adults can be arrested for memes, priests investigated for praying silently, and grandmothers interrogated for criticizing gender ideology.

“When you don’t rigorously defend that right, even when it’s inconvenient, even when the speech is offensive,” Rogers said, “you end up in these absurd scenarios where you have comedians arrested for tweets.”

This is the modern UK, where “hate speech” has been stretched to include everything from telling jokes to sharing news stories about immigration. And now, under the OSA, that censorious spirit has gone global.

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Congress Goes Parental on Social Media and Your Privacy

Washington has finally found a monster big enough for bipartisan unity: the attention economy. In a moment of rare cross-aisle cooperation, lawmakers have introduced two censorship-heavy bills and a tax scheme under the banner of the UnAnxious Generation package.

The name, borrowed from Jonathan Haidt’s pop-psychology hit The Anxious Generation, reveals the obvious pitch: Congress will save America’s children from Silicon Valley through online regulation and speech controls.

Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, who has built a career out of publicly scolding tech companies, says he’s going “directly at their jugular.”

The plan: tie legal immunity to content “moderation,” tax the ad money, and make sure kids can’t get near an app without producing an “Age Signal.” If that sounds like a euphemism for surveillance, that’s because it is.

The first bill, the Deepfake Liability Act, revises Section 230, the sacred shield that lets platforms host your political rants, memes, and conspiracy reels without getting sued for them.

Under the new proposal, that immunity becomes conditional on a vague “duty of care” to prevent deepfake porn, cyberstalking, and “digital forgeries.”

TIME’s report doesn’t define that last term, which could be a problem since it sounds like anything from fake celebrity videos to an unflattering AI meme of your senator. If “digital forgery” turns out to include parody or satire, every political cartoonist might suddenly need a lawyer on speed dial.

Auchincloss insists the goal is accountability, not censorship. “If a company knows it’ll be liable for deepfake porn, cyberstalking, or AI-created content, that becomes a board-level problem,” he says. In other words, a law designed to make executives sweat.

But with AI-generated content specifically excluded from Section 230 protections, the bill effectively redefines the internet’s liability protections.

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Why Banning Hate Speech Is Evil

We often hear demands to ban so-called “hate speech.” Negative remarks about various groups, including women, black people, homosexuals, Jews, Muslims, can it is alleged, have a negative effect on members of the group who hear or see the speech. It encourages people to hate them and cements negative stereotypes about them in people’s minds. In addition, hearing or seeing “hate speech” offends the members of the group. Free speech may have some value, but whatever value it has it outweighed by the evil of “hate speech.” Almost any group can claim to be victimized by “hate speech,” except for white heterosexual males and Christians, but “hate speech” applies primarily to members of so-called “protected classes.”

From a libertarian standpoint, the question of banning so-called “hate speech” is a no-brainer. Banning any kind of speech, whether it is good or bad, is incompatible with a free society. As the great Murray Rothbard has taught us, all rights are property rights. Everyone can set the rules for speech on his own property, and no one has the right to control what anyone says on someone else’s property. This includes speech which counts as “offensive.” Of course, we don’t live in a libertarian society, but we should come as close as we can in practice to it. This means following the strictest possible interpretation of the First Amendment. “Congress shall make no law. . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” “No law” means “no law” and that includes laws against so-called “hate speech.”

Some states have “hate speech” laws on the books. New York is considering a law, already passed in California that requires social media companies to report “hate speech.” This is the “Stop Hiding Hate Act” and has been passed by the State’s Assembly. Here is an account of the measure from Vince Chang, who favors it:

“Under pressure from the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] and other groups, internet platforms have voluntarily adopted measures to regulate hate speech. The ADL described some of the measures that have been taken: Facebook prohibited Holocaust denial content, hired a vice president of civil rights, changed parts of its advertising platform to prohibit various forms of discrimination; expanded policies against content that undermined the legitimacy of the election; and built a team to study and eliminate bias in artificial intelligence. Due to pressure from ADL and other civil rights organizations, Twitter banned linked content, URL links to content outside the platform that promotes violence and hateful conduct. Reddit added its first global hate policy, providing for the removal of subreddits and users that “promote hate based on identity or vulnerability.”

We can see how such laws have a chilling effect on speech if we look at bans on so-called “hate speech” in foreign countries where they are already in operation. I want to focus especially on the Scottish Hate Speech Act.

Let’s first look at an official summary of the Scottish act, from the Scottish parliament site:

“Hate crime is the phrase used to describe behaviour which is both criminal and based on prejudice.

There are already laws in place to protect certain groups from hate crime.

This Bill aims to do three things. It updates these existing laws and pulls most of these laws into one Bill. It also adds to the groups currently specifically protected by hate crime laws.

Criminal courts can generally take into account any prejudice when sentencing a person. Also, people are protected from hate crime through specific laws that apply.

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Guess What This IL College Will Do to Students Who Follow Federal Law

This seems like a straight-up violation of the First Amendment and obstruction of federal laws.

The College of DuPage in Illinois is warning students that they will be punished if they report illegal alien students to authorities.

Here’s the highlighted portions of the text:

Will COD Police help ICE officers to apprehend and remove individuals from campus?

No, Illinois law prohibits COD Police from assisting federal agents in immigration enforcement. COD Police do not ask about immigration status, nor will they make arrests based solely on immigration status

…

Can a student be disciplined for calling immigration authorities on another student?

Yes, calling immigration authorities on another student could violate the COD Student Code of Conduct if the action is done with the intent to harass, discriminate, or retaliate against the other student.

The Department of Education and ICE might want to look into the College of DuPage for interfering with federal law enforcement. Blocking the school from receiving federal financial aid and tax dollars would be a great punishment for this blatant abuse.

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An Unexpected Con To End Free Speech

Rooting out terrorism and antisemitism was the supposed reason that plainclothed ICE agents arrested doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, after she coauthored an op-ed calling on Tufts University to divest from companies with ties to Israel due to the killing and starvation of Palestinian civilians. There is an international movement to boycott, sanction, and divest from Israel, but in the United States, President Donald Trump is imperiling the freedom even to publicly discuss such ideas, which should, in effect, be considered a test case for his larger attack on free speech. So far, the test is going well for Trump.

In what seems a long time ago, in 2024, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, released a blueprint for what it called “a national strategy to combat antisemitism” by addressing what it described as “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement.’” In essence, and in what’s amounted to an extraordinarily effective work of political theater that has been sold to my own state, Massachusetts, among other places, that foundation dubbed its political opponents “supporters of terrorism.” It also labeled organizations working in opposition to its agenda a “terrorist support network,” and claimed for itself the noble mantle of “combating antisemitism” — even as it deftly redefined antisemitism from hatred of Jewish people to criticism of the U.S.-Israel alliance. President Trump has put the Heritage Foundation strategy into action and gone even further.

It may be his most original idea. As political scientist Barnett Rubin put it in September, “President Trump always says he’s very creative and accomplishes things no one has ever done before. And now he is building a fascist regime which is legitimized by the fight against antisemitism. Nobody ever thought of doing that before.”

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Professor sues Millsaps College after being fired for ‘racist fascist country’ email

A former Millsaps College professor is suing the institution, alleging his termination for describing America as a “racist fascist country” in an email to students was censorship. 

Professor James Bowley’s complaint, filed in September, alleges that the small Mississippi college breached his tenure and its founding tradition connecting faith to free speech. Bowley taught politics and religion at the college for more than 20 years.

“Millsaps fired a tenured professor because he expressed a political opinion in an email to three like-minded students in a political seminar,” the complaint claims.

However, college spokesperson Joey Lee told The College Fix that the institution is “confident” about defending its actions in the case.

“Millsaps College is dedicated to academic excellence and open inquiry. We are also committed to providing a safe and supportive campus for all,” Lee said in a recent email.

“Due to the pending litigation, we will not go into any further details at this time, but we look forward to the opportunity to tell the whole story,” Lee said. “We believe the facts will speak clearly, and we are confident in our position and in the legal process ahead.”

The college placed Bowley on administrative leave in November 2024. Almost a year later, in September, Bowley was terminated, according to the complaint. Initial reports said Bowley was fired in January, but Lee told The Fix that he was still on administrative leave at the time.

The controversy stems from an email Bowley sent to three students after the 2024 presidential election. Bowley wrote that he was canceling his “Abortion and Religion” class to “mourn and process this racist and fascist country.”

According to the complaint, Bowley’s decision was “rooted in compassion for the emotional distress that he knew his students were going through” due to the election of Donald Trump.

The lawsuit also argues that he was justified in sending the statement because the campus culture was tense after a Millsaps student threatened Kamala Harris voters in a YikYak post. 

Bowley claims that the college violated his tenure when it fired him. “The faculty member’s expression of unpopular political views is not ‘cause for dismissal,’” the lawsuit states. 

The complaint also highlights the Methodist background of the institution.

It quotes Methodist founder John Wesley: “The Methodists alone do not insist on your holding this or that opinion; but they think and let think . … Now, I do not know any other religious society, either ancient or modern, wherein such liberty of conscience is now allowed, or has been allowed, since the age of the apostles.”

The complaint argues that the college’s Methodist background is a foundation for academic freedom: “The requirement that all Methodist colleges respect academic freedom remains enshrined in policies set by the Church, stating that all ‘colleges and universities are to ensure that academic freedom is protected for all members of the academic community and a learning environment is fostered that allows for a free exchange of ideas.’”  

It also connects open inquiry and freedom of speech and expression: “Challenge and discomfort are essential at Millsaps.”

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