Tag: 1st amendment

Trump Censorship Machine Loses Again in Court

The Trump administration’s crusade to crush campus criticism took another wallop on Friday in a California courtroom. Federal judge Noël Wise ruled that the Trump administration’s “ideological-deportation policy” brazenly violated the US Constitution.

The Stanford Daily—one of the best-known college student newspapers in the nation—sued the Trump administration for changing its “immigration policy and pattern of enforcement, namely by arresting, detaining, and deporting students with F-1 visas when those students use their freedom of speech to express opinions that the government does not like.” It asserted that the Trump administration’s “actions have specifically impacted Stanford Daily by decreasing the quantity and diversity of opinion pieces The Stanford Daily is able to publish on the conflict between Israel and Palestine.” Foreign students who had written on the issue requested that their previous articles be deleted, and other foreign students were no longer willing to comment on hot issues.

The Trump administration claims unlimited discretion to silence foreign students by deporting those whose opinions it disapproves of. Judge Wise wrote, “The language of the [First] Amendment makes clear that it is not the government that gives freedom of speech to the people. Instead, that freedom is imbued in the people. . . . It is not the government’s to take.” This is a notion that conservatives instinctively understand when it comes to the Second Amendment and the right of self-defense. But many people fail to recognize the same right for freedom of speech. Conor Fitzpatrick—the chief supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)—which represented the student newspaper, declared, “Today’s ruling proves that free speech isn’t a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child.” FIRE president Greg Lukianoff clarified the scope of the ruling:

This ruling does NOT say the government must admit anyone, issue anyone a visa, or grant anyone citizenship. It says that once a person is lawfully here, the government cannot deport them because they engaged in protected speech. The government cannot tell a legal immigrant: An American is free to say this, but if you say it, you’re out.

George Porteous—Editor in Chief of Stanford Daily—hailed the decision: “The reporters in our newsroom shouldn’t have to fear that writing a story will result in their deportation. Today’s victory means they won’t have to.” But it remains to be seen whether this latest judicial rebuff slows the Trump censorship juggernaut.

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Court Forbids Mom to Take Daughter, 13, to Normal Christian Church – Used the Word ‘Cult’ in Official Docs

The Maine Supreme Court this week upheld a lower court ruling preventing a mother from taking her 13-year-old daughter to a church it referred to as a “cult.”

The decision could set a bad precedent for other jurisdictions to grab onto nationwide. But the religious liberty law firm representing the mother, Emily Westbrook, in the case has promised an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

A look at Calvary Chapel of Greater Portland’s doctrines and description in the court opinion makes it sound like it believes in pretty standard Bible-based teaching: the Old and New Testaments are the Word of God; the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit); original sin; salvation through Jesus Christ; the Second Coming; and the rest.

Maine affiliate WMTW-TV reported that Westbrook challenged a 2024 custody order prohibiting her from taking her daughter to Calvary Chapel, arguing it violates her right to free exercise of religion guaranteed under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

“A district court judge sided with the child’s father, Matthew Bradeen, ruling that some of the church’s teachings could be psychologically harmful to the girl. The order allows Bradeen to solely decide on his daughter’s involvement with Calvary Chapel Church. When it comes to any other religious organization, the order states that the parents share rights and must discuss decisions,” WMTW further noted.

The Maine Supreme Court, in its unanimous decision Tuesday upholding the lower court’s order, said, “We are also unpersuaded by Bickford’s claim that the court evinced hostility toward her religion by describing her church in offensive terms, including referring to it as a ‘cult.’ The court used the word ‘cult’ only in describing the testimony of [Janja] Lalich, the stipulated expert on ‘cults.’”

“The court noted that ‘cult’ serves as a shorthand for what sociologists like Lalich call ‘closed social systems’ and that Lalich identified Bickford’s church as one of these systems. The court used ‘cult’ in summarizing Lalich’s testimony, but it did not otherwise refer to Bickford’s church as a cult or a closed social system,” the justices added.

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Enes Kanter Freedom Files Federal Lawsuit Against Chicago Sky and City of Chicago After Ejection Over “Woman” T-Shirt — Demands Jury Trial

Former NBA star and human-rights activist Enes Kanter Freedom has filed a federal lawsuit after he was ejected from a Chicago Sky game for daring to wear a shirt stating a basic biological fact.

The 15-page complaint was filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

Freedom named Chicago Women’s Basketball Operations, LLC, the company operating the Chicago Sky, the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, and the City of Chicago as defendants.

The lawsuit seeks injunctive relief and damages and demands a jury trial.

Freedom announced the legal action on X:

“Just filed a federal complaint.

“I’m taking legal action over my ejection from the @chicagosky game while peacefully exercising my First Amendment rights.

“My T-shirt did what the whole @WNBA apparently couldn’t: define a woman.

“No threats. No violence. Just biology. And somehow, that required a security escort.

“You don’t have to agree with my speech, but you don’t get to silence me for it.

“I will not be intimidated. I will not be silenced. I will continue to stand for women and defend free speech.”

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Federal court rules teachers’ Pride flag messages to children are not protected by 1st Amendment

A federal appeals court has ruled that teachers’ Pride flags, the pro-LGBT messaging they demanded to use on their public school students, are not protected by the First Amendment.

“Plaintiffs-Appellants Christopher Dolce, Sarah Ecke, and Shinaide McAleavey-Polley allege that the Connetquot Central School District and its officials violated their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights and Title VII when it ordered them to remove the pride flags and stickers that decorated the walls of their public high school classrooms,” said the opinion from the 2nd U.S Circuit Court of Appeals.

“The United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York (Gonzalez, J.) dismissed their complaint for failure to state a claim, and the teachers appealed. Applying Garcetti v. Ceballos, 547 U.S. 410 (2006), we conclude that the teachers’ classroom wall decorations constituted speech pursuant to their official duties as Government employees. As a result, the District did not violate their First Amendment rights when it ordered the teachers to remove them.

“We also conclude that the teachers have not plausibly pled that the District selectively enforced its policies against them because of an impermissible motivation, or that they suffered any adverse employment actions.”

Then a commentary at Twitchy revealed the surprise: The ruling was from “a Biden appointee who is a lesbian. That’s refreshing common sense.”

This surprise comes in an age when judges appointed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden routinely rule against President Donald Trump no matter the issue, the question or the legal dispute. One Washington-based leftist judge even has defied the U.S. Supreme Court in ruling politically against Trump.

The decision said, “Under Garcetti v. Ceballos … and its progeny, when public employees’ speech ‘owes its existence’ to their ‘professional responsibilities,’ the government – their employer – can control the content of that speech without implicating their Frist Amendment rights. The question in his case is whether that same principle applies to displays hung on the walls of a public high school teacher’s match classroom. We hold that it does.”

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Judge Tosses Lawsuit Over State Investigations into Texas Teachers’ Posts About Charlie Kirk

Following the murder of conservative icon Charlie Kirk in 2025, The Gateway Pundit reported that more than 100 educators across the state of Texas faced investigations for their vile, hateful, and violent content celebrating his assassination.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) announced that the Texas Education Agency (TEA) began the investigations into teachers who cheered Kirk’s murder and potentially incited additional violence online.

In a strongly worded letter to superintendents, TEA Commissioner Mike Morath condemned the educators’ despicable behavior, noting that such conduct may constitute violations of the Educators’ Code of Ethics.

Not wanting to be held accountable for their behavior, in January 2026,  the Texas American Federation of Teachers (Texas AFT) filed a First Amendment lawsuit in federal court against the Texas Education Agency and Commissioner Morath, asking a judge to stop the state investigations so they can be as grotesque on social media as they want.

Texas AFT, along with the national AFT president, the far-left radical Randi Weingarten,  and Texas president Zeph Capo, claimed Morath’s letter created a “vague, overbroad crackdown on off-duty political speech, chilled teachers, and led to leave, reprimands, doxxing, a temporary ‘do not hire’ flag,” and at least one firing.

The state, however, argued the letter was not a new policy and pointed to existing ethics rules. Districts, not TEA, made most employment decisions.

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DOJ Admits Anti-Christian Bias

The Justice Department’s own announcement describes a report — variously cited at 200, 210, and 565 pages across different DOJ statements, with roughly 1,200 footnotes — compiling findings from seventeen federal agencies on how “prosecutions, policies, and practices demonstrated anti-Christian bias throughout the federal government” during the Biden years. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the conclusion in blunter terms, describing a “systematic culture” of bias that ran through law enforcement, tax policy, education, and healthcare. Senior DOJ counsel Camille Verone laid out fourteen specific findings in interviews accompanying the release, including Catholic schools losing federal school-lunch funding for declining to endorse gender-identity policy, HHS pressuring Christian medical providers on gender-affirming care under threat of losing federal funds, and the EEOC declining to protect religious objections to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

The report also alleges the DOJ enforced the FACE Act — the federal law protecting access to reproductive health clinics — unevenly, with pro-life protesters drawing harsher sentences than people who vandalized pregnancy centers, and it claims the IRS scrutinized churches for hosting political candidates while overlooking comparable conduct by Democratic officials. These are specific, agency-by-agency allegations, not a single anecdote, and they form the bulk of the task force’s case that bias was structural rather than incidental.

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Colorado college drops charges against student journalists, but speech restrictions remain uncertain

The Community College of Aurora closed its conduct case against student journalists this month, finding them “not responsible” due to unclear rules, after restricting the reporters from interviewing and publishing without prior approval and charging them for continuing those activities.

The student newspaper, FoxTalk, is led by CCA student Andrew Green, who told The College Fix via email that the decision, “is a big step forward.” 

He added that he still doesn’t “know whether the restrictions on interviews, reporting and publishing have actually been lifted.”

“I want the earlier warning reconsidered, and a clear answer about whether we are free to interview students, report and publish. I would much rather spend my time building the newsroom than fighting the college,” he said.

He added that he believes the school and newspaper can have a “good relationship” moving forward, “while FoxTalk still does independent journalism.” 

Green also said he is “working with the Student Press Law Center’s New Voices team to explore legislation around protections for college student journalists in Colorado,” he said. 

“Even if FoxTalk and CCA resolve everything, I would like the next student journalist to have clearer rules than I did,” Green told The Fix. 

A free speech group called the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression continues to press the college. 

Program Manager for FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative Marie McMullan said the group is “assessing next steps” and that “until the ban on publication and student disciplinary measures are rescinded, our concerns remain.”

She also said that this “kind of blanket ban on student journalism can’t remain in place, and we continue pushing CCA to change its course.” 

FIRE had sent a demand letter this month to CCA Vice President Reyna Anaya, calling on the school to “drop the charges against any student who chooses not to comply with such unconstitutional demands, and forego further censorial practices.” 

The group alleges that CCA’s directives violated the First Amendment through prior restraint, prior review, compelled speech, and restrictions on associational freedom.

Reached for comment, CCA Executive Director of Communications and Special Initiatives Courtney Butler told The College Fix that the school is still reviewing the matter and is unable to provide additional comment.

FoxTalk was registered under the college on March 13th. In April, Green asked CCA administrators “to confirm whether FoxTalk could seek comment from CCA faculty and staff in their personal capacities without going through Butler’s office,” according to FIRE’s demand letter. 

Dean of Student Success Julie LaRock then informed Green that the newspaper would need to “receive staff approval before identifying themselves as FoxTalk staff, accessing non-public spaces, beginning work on each month’s stories, and publishing any content whatsoever.”

LaRock further advised Green to hold off on additional work until structural coordination with the administration and faculty was established.

On June 3, Green questioned the order to stop FoxTalk from publishing, saying the group still planned to cover the June 30 primary election, including a debate at the University of Denver. 

After an administrator said FoxTalk only had to follow regular student-organization rules, Green assumed they could publish again and wrote to confirm. The administrator replied that the ban was still in place until FoxTalk’s structure was fixed, and also criticized the activities of three members.

On July 14, Green was charged with interviewing students, posting on the FoxTalk website, contacting employees, and ignoring earlier orders. On July 23 he was charged again for not following a college official’s directives. 

McMullan told The Fix that CCA’s rationale for restricting the students is not very common compared to what the group has seen in the past. However, several other schools have similarly tried to restrict student journalists. 

“Repeatedly … universities and colleges subjecting student journalists to investigations, hearings, and punishments for basic newsgathering and publishing, or attempting to wholesale stop students from publishing,” she said.

Morgan State University, for example, implemented a policy that restricts student journalists’ ability to gather news directly, requiring media inquiries to go through the Office of Public Relations and Strategic Communications, The College Fix previously reported. 

McMullan previously told The Fix this policy is a “blatantly” illegal “gag order.”

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Federal Appellate Court Rules In Favor Of AI Child Porn

While proponents of artificial intelligence (”AI”) paint an idyllic picture of how the groundbreaking technology is poised to eliminate the ills plaguing society, their unbridled optimism continues to be met with skepticism by their opponents. From fears over the economic repercussions of the rapid loss of jobs that advancements in AI may not be able to outpace to the technology’s applications as the framework for the apparatus of a panopticon surveillance state, concerns over the impact of AI mar the utopian vision its advocates have with an even more dystopian outlook of the future it will usher in. A look inside of the Pandora’s Box being opened by AI was glimpsed following a decision by a federal appeals court ruling in favor of protecting AI-generated child pornography.

On August 25th, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled thatthe First Amendment protects an individual’s right to privately possess images and videos of child sexual abuse created using AI, so long as the child sex abuse material (”CSAM”) does not depict a real child and remains in the privacy of the possessor’s home. The federal appellate court issued the unanimous ruling from a panel of three U.S. circuit judges: Judge John Z. Lee, Judge Doris L. Pryor, and Judge Joshua P. Kolar. The case came to the court in the matter of U.S. v. Anderegg, a title that now stands poised to challenge longstanding Supreme Court precedent governing how the law addresses CSAM.

The pivotal case centers on Steven Anderegg, 42, of Holmen, Wisconsin. Anderegg was arrested in May 2024 on suspicion of mass production of AI-generated CSAM. Prosecutors alleged that he used an AI image generator called Stable Diffusion to create over 13,000 images depicting child sex abuse by entering prompts into the platform, including thousands of realistic images of prepubescent minors. In a press release announcing his arrest, the U.S. Department of Justice revealed Anderegg described how he created the AI CSAM through the text-to-image generative AI model in a chat with a 15-year-old boy on the social media platform Instagram. The DOJ press release chronicled how Anderegg not only described how he generated the images to the minor, but that he sent the boy several AI-generated images of minors displaying their genitals. Following their exchange, Instagram reported Anderegg’s account to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (”NCMEC”) through its CyberTipline. The NCMEC followed suit by alerting federal authorities.

On May 15th, 2024, a federal grand jury in the Western District of Wisconsin returned an indictment against Anderegg, charging him with producing, distributing, and possessing obscene visual depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and transferring obscene materials to a minor under the age of 16. Under those charges, Anderegg faces a maximum penalty of 70 years in prison and a mandatory minimum of five years.

Ahead of his trial originally scheduled to begin on February 18th, 2025, Anderegg’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the four counts brought against him on September 23rd, 2024. His defense counsel cited a myriad of federal cases in support of their argument that the statutes Anderegg was charged under were unconstitutional because the AI CSAM he created, possessed, and shared did not depict any actual children, thus the charges violated his rights under the First Amendment.

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Paxton “Child Safety” Plan Puts Legal Speech at Criminal Risk

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is currently running for the US Senate, and pushing online digital ID age verification checks in the name of “online safety,” has announced a data center plan that, among other things, vows to “protect children” by making data center companies criminally liable if the centers they operate “empower AI chatbots that undermine children’s safety.”

Paxton is effectively promising to author legislation that would introduce a novel form of liability, aimed at data centers – the physical and hardware part of the internet’s infrastructure – for the content that is generated by software running on their servers.

This is a clear departure from the principle, enshrined in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), that internet infrastructure is not liable for third-party, user-generated content.

And, while Paxton’s plan speaks of chatbots that “undermine children’s safety” – a broad and vague term that can easily be abused to censor speech – the actual target could be any chatbot, and any speech.

And the liability would be criminal.

Paxton is quoted as saying in a post on X: “My Texas First Data Center Plan will protect our grid, our communities, and our children while ensuring America beats Communist China in the AI race,” he wrote.

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IT’S OFFICIAL: California Governor Gavin Newsom Signs “Stop Nick Shirley Act” into Law – Journalists Can Now Be FINED and JAILED for Uncovering Democrat Fraud

The formerly great state of California took a giant step toward becoming a complete leftist dictatorship with a new law that completely destroys the 1st Amendment.

As The New York Post reported, Governor Gavin Newsom officially signed the “Stop Nick Shirley Act” into law on Saturday. This comes just days after a leftist operative interrupted an interview the independent journalist was conducting at the State Capitol and launched a disgusting and bizarre personal attack against him.

The legislation, which officially takes effect on October 1, 2027, passed the Senate on Tuesday and cleared the state Assembly on Wednesday.

The “Stop Nick Shirley Act” was introduced by Assemblywoman Mia Bonta, who is married to California’s far-left Attorney General, Rob Bonta. AB 2624 claims to expand California’s “Safe at Home” confidentiality program to safeguard “immigration support service providers” from harassment.

But in reality, this is a disgusting Democrat power grab designed to silence brave conservative citizen journalists like Shirley who expose the rampant fraud bleeding American taxpayers dry in government-funded immigrant service centers.

For example, Shirley has exposed over $110 million in alleged Somali-run daycare fraud in Minnesota — empty “learning centers” billing taxpayers while no children were present.

He then followed up with a shocking exposé on California daycare and hospice fraud schemes. This included ghost operations in Los Angeles tied to massive looting of Medi-Cal and Medicare.

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