Tag: 1st amendment

MAGA Florida Homeowner Fined $60K for Massive Trump Banners Beats County in Lawsuit

A MAGA-loving Florida homeowner won a lawsuit against Walton County this month after racking up more than $60,000 in unpaid fines for hanging massive pro-Trump banners for several years on the side of his house on County Road 30A.

Walton County code compliance officials told homeowner Marvin Peavy that his various Trump banners violate the scenic corridor code after someone filed a complaint, WJHG reported. Peavy refused to take his banners down, and the county began fining him $50 daily for his displays. Peavy argued the county code violated his First Amendment rights. 

“Their laws cannot supersede my First Amendment right, so they came after my constitutional rights which they cannot do. It woke me up as a patriot,” Peavy told NewsChannel 7 in November. “I’m very happy that they came after me and I woke up, I’ve got great lawyers. We feel very good about what’s going on. The U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that you can have signs on your home. They cannot do anything about it.”

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Georgia Antidoxing Bill Could Criminalize Everyday Criticism

Will publishing someone’s name or workplace online soon be illegal in Georgia? Last week, the state Senate overwhelmingly voted to pass an antidoxing bill that would punish a wide range of common online speech by up to a year in jail. While the bill aims to protect individuals from having sensitive information—like their Social Security numbers or addresses—published without their consent, it goes far beyond such private information.

The bill is a “law against criticism of any kind,” Andrew Fleishman, a criminal defense attorney who testified against the bill, told Reason. “It means that if I act with reckless disregard for the possibility that it might cause you mental anguish or economic harm of $500 or more, I am criminally liable, up to a year in jail. And that’s for using not just your name, not your Social Security number, not your address, but anything that could lead someone to that.”

The bill passed on March 6 in a 52–1 vote. The bill defines doxing as a crime that occurs when a “person intentionally posts another person’s personally identifying information without their consent and does so with reckless disregard for whether the information would be reasonably likely to be used by another party to cause the person whose information is posted to be placed in reasonable fear of stalking, serious bodily injury or death to oneself or a close relation, or to suffer a significant economic injury or mental anguish as a result therefrom.”

According to the bill, prohibited personal information includes anything from posting a person’s name, birthday, workplace, “religious practices of affiliation,” and “life activities” to their biometric data or a “sexually intimate or explicit visual depiction.” As a result, the bill is incredibly overbroad in terms of what speech it prohibits. 

“So if I said ‘Emma Camp is a crappy journalist,’ yes, that makes me liable under law. But if I just said ‘there’s a lady at Reason I don’t like,’ that could also do. That’s crazy,” said Fleischman. “This is a law that has a million bad applications and maybe one good one.”

Fleishman isn’t the only one concerned that the bill violates the First Amendment.

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When Dissent Becomes a Crime: The War on Political Speech Begins

“Once the principle is established that the government can arrest and jail protesters… officials will use it to silence opposition broadly.”
~ Heather Cox Richardson, historian

You can’t have it both ways.

You can’t live in a constitutional republic if you allow the government to act like a police state.

You can’t claim to value freedom if you allow the government to operate like a dictatorship.

You can’t expect to have your rights respected if you allow the government to treat whomever it pleases with disrespect and an utter disregard for the rule of law.

There’s always a boomerang effect.

Whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting America’s borders or making America great again – rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

Arresting political activists engaged in lawful, nonviolent protest activities is merely the shot across the bow.

The chilling of political speech and suppression of dissident voices are usually among the first signs that you’re in the midst of a hostile takeover by forces that are not friendly to freedom.

This is how it begins.

Consider that Khalil Mahmoud, an anti-war protester and recent graduate of Columbia University, was arrested on a Saturday night by ICE agents who appeared ignorant of his status as a legal U.S. resident and his rights thereof. That these very same ICE agents also threatened to arrest Mahmoud’s eight-months-pregnant wife, an American citizen, is also telling.

This does not seem to be a regime that respects the rights of the people.

Indeed, these ICE agents, who were “just following orders” from on high, showed no concern that the orders they had been given were trumped up, politically motivated and unconstitutional.

If this is indeed the first of many arrests to come, what’s next? Or more to the point, who’s next?

We are all at risk.

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No Other Land Won an Oscar. Miami Beach’s Mayor Is Trying To Evict a Movie Theater for Screening It

The mayor of Miami Beach, Florida, is trying to terminate the lease of a movie theater for screening No Other Land, an Oscar-winning documentary about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The Miami Herald reported that Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner introduced a resolution to terminate the lease of O Cinema, an independent film theater that rents space from the city, and discontinue more than $60,000 in promised grant funding. The legislation comes after Meiner tried to pressure the theater to cancel the screening.

Florida civil rights groups and First Amendment experts say such government retaliation against the theater for the content of the films it chooses to screen would be unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

“Simply put, the First Amendment does not allow the government to discriminate based on viewpoint or to retaliate against anyone for their speech,” says Daniel Tilley, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida. “Pulling funding from an independent, community-based cinema under these circumstances is patently unconstitutional. The government does not get to pick and choose which viewpoints the public is allowed to hear, however controversial some might find them.”

The Miami Beach mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

However, in a newsletter to Miami Beach residents earlier this week, Meiner wrote: “I am a staunch believer in free speech. But normalizing hate and then disseminating antisemitism in a facility owned by the taxpayers of Miami Beach, after O Cinema conceded the ‘concerns of antisemitic rhetoric,’ is unjust to the values of our city and residents and should not be tolerated.”

On March 5, Meiner sent O Cinema a letter on official city letterhead expressing outrage at the cinema’s decision to screen the film, which documents the destruction of Palestinian homes in the West Bank.

“Here in Miami Beach, our City has adopted a strong policy of support for the State of Israel in its struggle to defend itself and its residents against attacks by the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah,” the letter read. “Airing performances of the one-sided, inaccurate film ‘No Other Land’ at a movie theater facility owned by the City and operated by O Cinema is disappointing.”

This is flagrant government jawboning—an attempt to use the mayor’s bully pulpit and the implicit threat of government action to cow the theater into self-censorship.

O Cinema initially complied.

“Due to the concerns of antisemitic rhetoric, we have decided to withdraw the film from our programming,” Vivian Marthell, CEO of O Cinema, wrote to Meiner the following day. “This film has exposed a rift which makes us unable to do the thing we’ve always sought out to do which is to foster thoughtful conversations about cinematic works.”

However, the theater then reversed course and told the Miami Herald it would continue the screenings after all.

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Yes, The Trump Administration Has The Power To Deport Mahmoud Khalil

Federal authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil, one of the leaders of the pro-Hamas coalition at Columbia University, last weekend on the charge that he “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” and posed a threat to national security and foreign policy.

Since that time, politicians and pundits, particularly on the left, have tried to lionize this anti-West terror-supporting radical as some kind of liberal icon and have questioned whether the government has the right to deport someone of his ilk. For the record, of course it does.

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) codified at 8 U.S. Code § 1182 applies to all aliens, meaning “any person not a citizen or national of the United States.” This term includes both visa holders and green card holders like Khalil. 

The INA contains a number of activities for which a person can be deemed ineligible based on security and related grounds. The relevant subsection contains nine grounds related to terrorism, the majority of which are not controversial at all: members of terrorist organizations, people engaging in terrorism, etc. 

The current debate concerns § 212(a)(3)(b)(i)(vii), which allows for the deportation of any alien who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.” Some have claimed that deporting someone for these reasons violates the First Amendment. That is incorrect.

The premise of the question rests on the assumption that an alien (even a legal alien) has First Amendment rights that are exactly the same in every situation as the rights of a U.S. national or citizen. That is not the case. As the Supreme Court has made clear, sometimes the government may impose distinctions and conditions.

See, for example, Citizens United v. FEC (2010):

The Government routinely places special restrictions on the speech rights of students, prisoners, members of the Armed Forces, foreigners, and its own employees. When such restrictions are justified by a legitimate governmental interest, they do not necessarily raise constitutional problems. … [T]he constitutional rights of certain categories of speakers, in certain contexts, ‘are not automatically coextensive with the rights’ that are normally accorded to members of our society. (Emphasis added.)

The question then becomes, how might speech rights be applied differently to foreigners? For example, could such a condition involve not advocating for certain groups that the government, for good reason, considers dangerous and a threat to national security? 

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Green Card-Holding Palestinian Trump’s Deporting Gets Even Worse News as Justice Finds Him

Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and former Columbia University graduate student detained by immigration authorities over the weekend, appears to have violated explicit federal immigration laws.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Khalil, a permanent resident with a green card, on Saturday.

The agents originally told Khalil his student visa was being revoked, according to The Associated Press, which quoted Khalil’s attorney, Amy Greer.

Greer told the AP she spoke on the phone with the agents during the arrest and said her client had a green card. The agent then told her the green card was being revoked instead, Greer said, according to the AP.

On Sunday, in a post on the social media platform X, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the federal government will be “revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said Khalil was arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism” because he “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” according to the AP.

On Monday, however, a federal judge in New York blocked Khalil’s deportation. Judge Jesse M. Furman said that Khalil must remain in the United States “to preserve the court’s jurisdiction” as the court considers his case, according to NBC News.

A hearing for the case is scheduled in federal court for Wednesday.

Other protesters have assembled in New York City to demand the release of Khalil.

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The Take It Down Act: A Censorship Weapon Disguised As Protection

President Trump has thrown his support behind the Take It Down Act, a bill designed to combat the spread of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), including AI-generated deepfakes. The legislation has gained momentum, particularly with First Lady Melania Trump backing the effort, and Trump himself endorsing it during his March 4 address to Congress.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

“The Senate just passed the Take It Down Act…. Once it passes the House, I look forward to signing that bill into law. And I’m going to use that bill for myself too if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.”

While this comment was likely tongue-in-cheek, it highlights an important question: how will this law be enforced, and who will benefit the most from it?

A Necessary Law with Potential Pitfalls

The rise of AI-generated explicit content and the increasing problem of revenge porn are serious concerns. Victims of NCII have long struggled to get harmful content removed, often facing bureaucratic roadblocks while the damage continues to spread. The Take It Down Act aims to give individuals more power to protect themselves online.

However, as with many internet regulations, the challenge is in the details. Laws designed to curb harmful content often run the risk of being too broad, potentially leading to overreach. Critics warn that, without clear safeguards, the legislation could be used beyond its intended purpose.

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Why Is the Left Conflating Religious Liberty and ‘Christian Nationalism’?

With the recent inauguration of President Donald Trump, many within the religious liberty movement are now breathing a sigh of relief that robust religious liberty protections for all believers seems to be a priority of the new administration.

In recent decades, many of the fights for one of the most fundamental American freedoms have involved litigation to ensure robust religious exercise protections under the First Amendment or legislative fights to enact religious liberty protections via statute (such as Religious Freedom Restoration Acts). While it is true that many of the religious liberty advocates are Christians (which makes sense—about two-thirds of Americans identify as Christians), the fight for religious liberty is clearly a fight for religious exercise of all religions against the coercive power of the state. From George Washington’s 1790 Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport to the Mahmoud v. Taylor case currently pending before the Supreme Court, the religious liberty movement in America has consistently involved and defended the rights of diverse religions. 

In recent years, critics of the Trump administration in particular and the religious liberty movement in general have curiously claimed that the whole religious liberty movement has been misused as a vehicle to install “Christian Nationalism” in America. The claim is strange because, as we will explain, all the major religious liberty initiatives in America—including our work at the Napa Legal Institute—are even-handedly advocating for religious exercise rights that apply equally to all non-Christian religions as well as to Christians.

Napa Legal’s Faith and Freedom Index strives to be an objective, even-handed analysis of religious liberty at the state level, analyzing whether state laws allow faith-based nonprofit organizations of every creed to be given the freedom to operate without unnecessary government interference.

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It Didn’t Take Long for Free Speech to Prevail in Mississippi

Last week, we brought you the story of a city council in Mississippi that was so thin-skinned that it couldn’t handle a critical editorial in the local paper. The City of Clarksdale took the Clarksdale Press Register to court over an op-ed in which the editors questioned why the city lobbied the state government for a “sin tax” without notifying the citizens or local media.

“The editorial highlighted how the mayor has touted his ‘open’ and ‘transparent’ governance, yet he and the city council didn’t notify the press about its intentions despite promising to ‘give appropriate notice thereof to the media,’” I wrote last week. “The editors admitted that they support the tax, yet they questioned why the city left everyone in the dark about the lobbying efforts.”

In the court filing, the city clerk admitted that she forgot to notify the media of the city’s efforts, which turned out to be a violation of state law. Nevertheless, Judge Crystal Wise Martin issued an order demanding that the paper take the editorial off its website — without a hearing that would give the paper a chance to tell its side of the story.

“For over a hundred years, the Press Register has served the people of Clarksdale by speaking the truth and printing the facts,” said Wyatt Emmerich, president of Emmerich Newspapers, the Press Register’s publisher. “We didn’t earn the community’s trust by backing down to politicians, and we didn’t plan on starting now.”

The order set off a First Amendment firestorm, and the paper enlisted the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) to help defend itself against this unconstitutional onslaught. By the end of last week, FIRE had agreed to help the Press Register work to lift the judge’s order.

“The implications of this case go beyond one Mississippi town censoring its paper of record,” said FIRE attorney David Rubin. “If the government can get a court order silencing mere questions about its decisions, the First Amendment rights of all Americans are in jeopardy.”

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Did Facebook Conspire With the Government to Censor Speech in Violation of the First Amendment? Case Could Redefine Social Media Censorship

The Rutherford Institute is calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to hold Facebook accountable for conspiring with the government to censor and suppress speech and address Facebook censorship issues.

Weighing in before the U.S. Supreme Court with an amicus brief in Children’s Health Defense v. Meta, The Rutherford Institute argues that Meta Platforms should be held accountable as a government actor for violating the First Amendment by partnering with the government in order to restrict the Facebook posts, fundraising, and advertising of Children’s Health Defense (“CHD”). Although the Trump Administration has ordered federal officials to cease the government’s censorship efforts, The Rutherford Institute warned that political stances can change quickly and social media companies are likely to censor speech again at the government’s direction unless they are held accountable as government actors for violating the First Amendment rights of the people. Facebook censorship leads to the suppression of diverse ideas.

“We should all be alarmed when prominent social media voices are censored, silenced, and made to disappear from Facebook, X, YouTube, and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, extremist, or conspiratorial,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “At some point, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes ‘extremism,’ we might all be considered guilty of some thought-crime and subjected to technocensorship like Facebook censorship.”

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