Tag: 1st amendment

Jury Clears Afroman of Defamation for Mocking Cops Who Raided His House

An Ohio jury on Wednesday found the rapper Afroman not liable for defaming the sheriff’s deputies who raided his house nearly four years ago.

The verdict is a free speech victory for Joseph Foreman, a.k.a. Afroman, best known for his 2000 hit “Because I Got High.” Over the course of a three-day civil trial that captured social media attention, Afroman, who appeared in court dressed in an American flag-print suit, insisted that he had a First Amendment right to make fun of the deputies who kicked down his door and pawed through his belongings. Afroman released several music videos about the incident using surveillance footage of the raid.

“I got freedom of speech. After they run around my house with guns and kick down my door, I got the right to kick a can in my back yard, use my freedom of speech, and turn my bad times into a good time, yes I do,” Afroman told jurors on Tuesday. “And I think I’m a sport for doing so, because I don’t go to their house, kick down their doors [and] then try to play the victim and sue them.”

The sheriff’s deputies, meanwhile, were reduced in court to watching full-length music videos of Afroman mocking them and testifying about how the rapper had called them “dipshits” and made claims to sleeping with their wives.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio, which filed an amicus brief in support of Afroman, applauded the verdict.

“We’re very pleased with this outcome, and we think the jury got it right. Robust protection for free speech requires leaving room for speakers to give their opinions in strong, florid, or figurative terms without fear of criminal or civil consequences,” says David Carey, deputy legal director of the ACLU of Ohio. “All the more so with speech involving criticism of government officials and their actions. Juries exercising common sense and considering the full context and actual meaning of a speaker’s words are a critical part of that system.”

Adams County, Ohio, sheriff’s deputies executed a search warrant on Afroman’s house in 2022. According to a search warrant, Afroman was suspected of drug possession, drug trafficking, and kidnapping. The deputies were searching for evidence of outlandish claims from a confidential informant that the house contained a basement dungeon. 

Body camera footage of the raid showed the deputies—after the initial excitement of busting down the front door—ambling through Afroman’s house, rifling through his clothes and CDs, and trying to find false walls and secret rooms. But the hourslong search turned up no evidence to corroborate the claim of a basement dungeon. Part of the problem may have been that, as Afroman’s record label told Vice, the house did not have a basement.

Afroman was never charged with a crime.

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Prairieland Verdict: Texas Man Found Guilty of Transporting Constitutionally Protected Pamphlets

A federal jury in Fort Worth, Texas, convicted eight protestors on charges ranging from rioting to attempted murder after a noise demonstration turned violent outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Prairieland Detention Center last summer. Federal prosecutors claim the group was part of an “Antifa Cell” and provided “material support to terrorists.” First Amendment legal scholars have raised serious concerns about the chilling effect these prosecutions and convictions will have on future political dissent.

One man’s conviction emphasized just how far that chilling effect could go. Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada, the husband of one of the convicted protestors, wasn’t present at the time of the July 4 demonstration. After receiving a call from his wife, Maricela Rueda, from the Johnston County Jail, in which she told him to do “whatever you need to do” and “move whatever you need to move at the house,” officers began watching Sanchez-Estrada, according to the criminal complaint filed against him.

Shortly after, officers observed Sanchez-Estrada load and move a box from his home to another residence. Sanchez-Estrada was then arrested on state traffic offenses, and officers obtained a search warrant to locate and search the box. Inside, they found “numerous Antifa materials, such as insurrection planning, anti-law enforcement, anti-government, and anti-immigration enforcement documents,” according to a November indictment. Sanchez-Estrada was subsequently charged federally with corruptly concealing a document and conspiracy to conceal documents.

Sanchez-Estrada was convicted on both counts on March 13 and now faces up to 40 years in federal prison. But despite ICE proclaiming in a post on X that the contents of Sanchez-Estrada’s box contained “literal insurrectionist propaganda,” these controversial materials fall squarely under constitutionally protected speech.

“I feel like the U.S. lost here with this verdict and what it means for future defendants,” Christopher Weinbel, Sanchez-Estrada’s federal public defender and a U.S. Army veteran, told The Washington Post. “I feel like it turned its back on justice with this.”

The other eight protestors were charged and convicted of rioting, providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, and using explosives after they set off fireworks outside the Prairieland ICE facility. Rueda was also convicted of conspiracy to conceal documents along with Sanchez-Estrada. Additionally, Benjamin Song was convicted of attempted murder of a U.S. officer and discharging a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence after he allegedly shot and wounded a police officer during the demonstration.

In response to the convictions, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the guilty “verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump administration systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets.” But First Amendment lawyers are wary of conflating constitutionally protected speech after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in September categorizing the loosely defined “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization.”

Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyers Guild, a progressive legal group, told the Associated Press that the government wants to “squash” opposition, and a case like this one creates fear, “hoping that folks in other cities then will think twice over protesting.” The U.S. district judge presiding over the case, a Trump nominee, Mark Pittman, also signaled First Amendment concerns, according to The Guardian, when he asked prosecutors about the relevance of including antifa in the jury instructions. “Whether it’s antifa or the Methodist Women’s Auxiliary of Weatherford, why does it matter?” Pittman asked during the trial, reported The Guardian.

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CIA Prepares Criminal Referral of Tucker Carlson, as Israel and its Loyalists Demand His Arrest

On Friday morning, I taped an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s program to discuss the ongoing Iran War, growing Israeli influence in the U.S., and proliferating attacks on free speech in the West in the name of shielding that one foreign country from critique (I presume it will air in the next few days). Perhaps the most notable part of our conversation was what Tucker told me prior to the cameras rolling.

Tucker said he had learned from several high-placed sources — and he obviously has many within the Trump administration — that the CIA was preparing a criminal referral about him to the DOJ. The subject of the agency’s report of suspected crimes: conversations he allegedly had with Iranian officials and others in Iran prior to the start of the Trump/Netanyahu war. The clear implication was that Tucker had committed acts of subversion or even treason by speaking to Iranians in advance of the war that was about to be launched on their country.

Despite how innately shocking this claim is, I had and still have zero doubt that Tucker was telling the truth about what he heard. I have known him for many years, spent much time talking to him both in front of a camera and away from one, and never once has he lied to me or mislead me. Tucker has been in public life as a journalist and media figure since his 20s. There have been many harsh criticisms launched against him during those decades, many of which — as he will be the first to tell you — were ones that were quite valid.

Notably, many of the harshest attacks on Tucker came from me during my first decade after becoming a journalist (last year, Tucker discussed our friendship in a podcast conversation Chris Cuomo and he noted that, during the War on Terror and his ongoing war cheerleading, “nobody was meaner to me than Glenn Greenwald”; Cuomo said the same was true of him).

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School Branded 1st Grader ‘RACIST’ Over ‘Any Life Matters’ Drawing; Court Slams Principal

When a 7-year-old’s heartfelt sketch promoting equality gets twisted into “racism” by leftist school officials, it’s a chilling sign of how far indoctrination has gone—now finally overturned in a resounding First Amendment victory.

This case exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of progressive education: punishing a child for daring to change “Black Lives Matter” into a message of universal value, all while claiming to champion inclusion.

In 2021, at Viejo Elementary School in California, a first grader identified as BB created a simple drawing after her class learned about Martin Luther King Jr. and “Black Lives Matter.” The artwork showed four oval shapes in shades from orange to brown, representing friends holding hands, with the words “Black Lives Mater” above and “any life” below.

BB gifted it to a black classmate in a show of friendship. The child thanked her and showed no signs of offense. But the child’s mother complained to Principal Jesus Becerra, writing, “My husband and I will not tolerate any more messages given to our daughter because of her skin color. As the administrator we trust you know the actions that need to be taken to address this issue.”

Becerra confronted BB, telling her the drawing was “not appropriate” and “racist,” according to her account. He allegedly forced an apology, banned her from recess for two weeks, and prohibited her from giving drawings to classmates—without notifying her parents.

BB didn’t even fully understand “Black Lives Matter,” but added “any life” because she believed “all lives matter.” This innocent twist on the slogan clashed with the school’s apparent BLM doctrine, turning a gesture of friendship into a so called ‘microaggression’.

The family eventually sued the Capistrano Unified School District in 2023, but a lower court dismissed the case, with U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ruling that BB’s drawing “trampled on her classmate’s right to be left alone in school” and, remarkably, that First Amendment protections didn’t apply to such young students.

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Britain is Trying to Censor Americans – But America is Fighting Back

Ofcom has confirmed it is referring 4chan to a final enforcement decision under the Online Safety Act. The target is a Delaware company that runs an entirely anonymous imageboard from the United States, with no offices, staff, servers or assets in Britain. The demand: install age-verification systems and content filters so that British children cannot access the site or face daily fines levied from London on an American platform. This case is not an outlier. It is the clearest real-world demonstration of what the new generation of “online safety” laws requires: private companies must build automated filters that decide, in advance, which legal speech is too harmful for minors to see. The question the regulators never quite answer is simple: what exactly does the filter catch?

In the early 2020s, a political consensus formed on both sides of the Atlantic: social media is harming children and something must be done. The result in Washington was the Kids’ Online Safety Act (KOSA); in Westminster, the Online Safety Act (OSA), which received Royal Assent in October 2023 and began enforcement in 2025. The political appeal of both measures is genuine. Adolescent mental health deteriorated in the 2010s, parents are alarmed and platforms have appeared indifferent. But good intentions do not make good law, and the form these interventions took is constitutionally and morally indefensible. Both KOSA and the OSA rest on a duty-of-care model: platforms must take “reasonable measures” or implement “proportionate systems” to prevent minors from encountering content associated with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm and suicide. This is not a regulation of conduct. It is a mandate to suppress speech based on its topic and its predicted emotional effect on a reader: the very definition of content-based regulation.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stated the constitutional problem plainly in its July 2023 letter opposing KOSA: the bill “is a content-based regulation of constitutionally protected speech” that “will silence important conversations, limit minors’ access to potentially vital resources and violate the First Amendment”.  Under Reed v. Town of Gilbert, a law is content-based if it “applies to particular speech because of the topic discussed or the idea or message expressed”. Content-based regulations are “presumptively unconstitutional”.

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Florida Legislators Advance a Bill Authorizing Government Surveillance Based on ‘Views’ or ‘Opinions’

A bill that is advancing in the Florida Legislature would authorize government surveillance of people whose “views” or “opinions” are deemed “a threat” to state or national “interests.” What could possibly go wrong?

“This outrageous claim of authority would be a profound betrayal of Americans’ First Amendment rights,” Carolyn Iodice, legislative and policy director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, warns in a press release. “Imagine being arrested or having your home raided because the government has decided that your opinions are a ‘threat’ or simply don’t align with its interests. This puts everyone’s free speech rights at risk. Even if your views aren’t in the state’s crosshairs today, they could be tomorrow. Free societies do not investigate or arrest their own citizens for their opinions.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida also has “grave concerns” about the bill. It “could easily be used to silence dissenting voices under the guise of security,” ACLU of Florida strategist Abdelilah Skhir told Florida Politics last month. “The vague and overbroad language could easily be weaponized against everyday Floridians engaged in First Amendment protected activity.”

State Rep. Danny Alvarez (R–Riverview), who filed the bill on December 30, does not understand what all the fuss is about. He says he is simply trying to combat threats such as “drug cartels,” “terrorist organizations,” and foreign “intelligence entities.” Last week, the Florida Phoenix reported that “Alvarez said it’s only been in the past week that he’s become aware of First Amendment concerns.”

Alvarez’s bill, H.B. 945, would create a Statewide Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism Unit within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, consisting of “at least seven” 10-member teams. The unit would be charged with “identify[ing] threats by analyzing patterns of life, gathering actionable intelligence, and formulating effective plans of action, and by executing arrests or by revealing its intent to compel a response using all counterintelligence and counterterrorism tradecraft necessary to protect the state from adversary intelligence entities.”

What is an “adversary intelligence entity”? The bill’s definition goes far beyond spies employed by foreign governments. It says the term “includes, but is not limited to, any national, foreign, multinational, friendly, competitor, opponent, adversary, or recognized enemy government or nongovernmental organization, company, business, corporation, consortium, group, agency, cell, terrorist, insurgent, guerrilla entity, or person whose demonstrated actions, views, or opinions are a threat or are inimical to the interests of this state and the United States of America.”

On its face, the bill would empower the Statewide Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism Unit to investigate organizations and individuals based on the “views” or “opinions” they express. Alvarez insists that is not his intent. But by his own account, he did not recognize the obvious First Amendment implications of that broad mandate until a month and a half after he introduced the bill.

When some of his colleagues alerted him to those civil liberties concerns, Alvarez promised to address them. “We are very, very aware of the questions regarding [the] First Amendment,” he told Florida Politics last week. “We’re going to address that in an amendment that comes to the next committee.” He told reporters he was willing to excise the language referring to any “person whose demonstrated actions, views, or opinions are a threat or are inimical to the interests of this state and the United States of America.”

So far, however, the original version of the bill is the only one listed on the Florida Legislature’s website. And despite his avowed willingness to amend the bill, Alvarez does not seem to think it is actually necessary to do so.

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Judge Blocks Virginia’s One-Hour Social Media Limit for Minors as Unconstitutional

A federal judge has blocked Virginia’s attempt to limit minors to one hour of social media per day, ruling the law violates the First Amendment. The decision is a significant check on a growing wave of state legislation that treats time spent reading, watching, and communicating online as something the government can ration.

Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles issued the preliminary injunction Friday, finding that Virginia “does not have the legal authority to block minors’ access to constitutionally protected speech until their parents give their consent by overriding a government-imposed default limit.”

We obtained a copy of the opinion for you here.

The ruling halts enforcement of Senate Bill 854, which carried fines of $7,500 per violation and required platforms to use “commercially reasonable methods” to verify user ages.

The law’s problem wasn’t just the one-hour cap. It was how the cap worked. The state set the default, and parents could ask to change it. That structure puts the government, not families, in control of baseline access to speech. Parental consent here overrides a government restriction that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Giles found the law over-inclusive in a way that illustrates exactly how blunt these restrictions are. “A minor would be barred from watching an online church service if it exceeded an hour on YouTube,” she wrote, “yet, that same minor is allowed to watch provider-selected religious programming exceeding an hour in length on a streaming platform.”

The law doesn’t regulate harm. It regulates platforms, which means it catches protected speech indiscriminately.

NetChoice, the trade association whose members include Meta, YouTube, Snap, Reddit, and TikTok, sued to stop the law. In November, NetChoice argued that “Virginia has with one broad stroke restricted access to valuable sources for speaking and listening, learning about current events and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and knowledge.” The judge agreed they had standing to pursue a permanent block and found they were likely to succeed on the merits.

Virginia’s attorney general is defending the law alongside 29 other states from both parties. A spokesperson said: “We look forward to continuing to enforce laws that empower parents to protect their children from the proven harms that can come through social media.” The new Democratic attorney-general Jay Jones, who took office in January, had announced he intended to fully enforce the law signed by his Republican predecessor, Glenn Youngkin.

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House Report: EU Pushed Tech Giants to Police US Speech

A newly released report from the House Judiciary Committee reveals a coordinated effort by European Union regulators to pressure major technology companies into enforcing censorship standards that extend far beyond Europe’s borders.

The findings, drawn from thousands of internal documents and communications, detail a long-running strategy to influence global content moderation policies through regulatory coercion and the threat of punishment under Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA).

The Committee’s latest publication, “The EU Censorship Files, Part II,” coincides with a scheduled February 4 hearing titled “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation: Part II.”

We obtained a copy of the report for you here. 

According to the materials, European officials have been meeting privately with social media companies since at least 2015 to “adapt their terms and conditions” to align with EU political priorities, including restricting certain kinds of lawful political expression in the United States.

Internal records from TikTok, then-Twitter, and other firms show that the Commission’s so-called “voluntary” DSA election guidelines were in fact treated as mandatory conditions for doing business in Europe.

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Group Chats About ICE Whereabouts Are Protected Speech. The FBI Is Investigating Anyway.

Group chats about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents aren’t illegal. But FBI Director Kash Patel doesn’t seem to care.

On Monday, Patel told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson that the FBI was investigating a Signal group in which people had been chatting about ICE agents’ whereabouts.

The Trump administration has said that people are doxing federal agents, employing a term once reserved for the act of publishing private information about someone’s identity or address online. “Doxing” generally implies that this sharing is done with ill intent.

But there are all sorts of perfectly benign reasons why Americans—whether in the country legally or not—might want to keep tabs on where immigration authorities are going. Sharing this information allows people to protest, observe, or document ICE activity, or avoid run ins with ICE agents.

Chatting about ICE agent whereabouts is unambiguously speech that’s protected by the First Amendment. So the idea that the FBI would investigate on these grounds is worrying.

“There does not appear to be any lawful basis for this investigation,” said Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). “The First Amendment generally protects the publication of legally-obtained information, including much of what the Trump administration has labeled ‘doxxing.’ That protection extends to using an app to share information about ICE activity.”

In his interview with Johnson, Patel paid lip service to the First Amendment. Yet he also framed Signal chats pertaining to ICE whereabouts as inherently suspect and/or likely to lead to criminal actions. “You cannot create a scenario that illegally entraps and puts law enforcement in harm’s way,” he said, drawing a direct link between constitutionally protected activity and criminality.

Of course, trapping ICE agents and harming them would indeed be illegal. But the illegal part of that is the trapping, the plotting harm, and the harming, not merely the knowing where the agents are or chatting about where they are. And even if some individual ultimately uses the location information to inflict harm, it still would not make the mere sharing of that information illegal.

“The First Amendment has narrow exceptions for true threats and speech intended and likely to provoke imminent unlawful action, but the government cannot trigger those exceptions simply by claiming that speech puts officials in harm’s way,” notes Terr. “The First Amendment also does not protect criminal conspiracy, but that requires evidence of an agreement to commit a specific crime and a substantial step toward carrying it out. No such evidence appears in the Signal messages that have been made public.”

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Meta, TikTok, YouTube Face Trial Over Youth Addiction Claims

Three of the world’s biggest tech companies face a landmark trial in Los Angeles starting this week over claims that their platforms — Meta’s Instagram, ByteDance’s TikTok and Google’s YouTube — deliberately addict and harm children.

Jury selection starts this week in the Los Angeles County Superior Court. It’s the first time the companies will argue their case before a jury, and the outcome could have profound effects on their businesses and how they will handle children using their platforms.

The selection process is expected to take at least a few days, with 75 potential jurors questioned each day through at least Thursday. A fourth company named in the lawsuit, Snapchat parent company Snap Inc., settled the case last week for an undisclosed sum.

At the core of the case is a 19-year-old identified only by the initials “KGM,” whose case could determine how thousands of other, similar lawsuits against social media companies will play out.

She and two other plaintiffs have been selected for bellwether trials — essentially test cases for both sides to see how their arguments play out before a jury and what damages, if any, may be awarded, said Clay Calvert, a nonresident senior fellow of technology policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

KGM claims that her use of social media from an early age addicted her to the technology and exacerbated depression and suicidal thoughts. Importantly, the lawsuit claims that this was done through deliberate design choices made by companies that sought to make their platforms more addictive to children to boost profits.

This argument, if successful, could sidestep the companies’ First Amendment shield and Section 230, which protects tech companies from liability for material posted on their platforms.

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