Tag: 1st amendment

Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Arrested Christian Street Preacher

A Mississippi street preacher who sued a community over a law that banned him from preaching near an amphitheater has won his battle to challenge the law.

Gabriel Olivier claimed his arrest under a law passed by Brandon, Mississippi, violated his First Amendment rights, according to the Associated Press.

The city said he had shouted insults, and invoked the law to fine Olivier and slap him with a year of probation. Olivier paid the fine and completed his probation.

The decision allowed Olivier to move forward but does not ensure he will win the suit.

“This is not only a win for the right to share your faith in public, but also a win for every American’s right to have their day in court when their First Amendment rights are violated,” Kelly Shackelford, president, CEO, and chief counsel for First Liberty Institute, said in a news release on First Liberty’s website.

“We’re delighted that the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed Gabe’s right to his day in court. It’s just common sense that a citizen who is arrested under an unconstitutional law should be able to challenge that law. As people of faith, we look to the judiciary to protect our constitutional right to spread the gospel,” Allyson Ho, co-chair of First Liberty’s nationwide Appellate and Constitutional Law Practice Group, added.

“No American should be criminally charged for sharing their faith in public,” Nate Kellum, senior counsel at First Liberty, remarked. “This is a wonderful day for Gabe and for the First Amendment.”

Olivier himself said that “my goal from the beginning was to be granted my rights as an American citizen under our great Constitution.”

“Now all people with deeply held Christian religious beliefs who are called to share the good news can do so in the public arena.”

As noted by SCOTUSBlog, Olivier was battling an argument from the city that a 1994 ruling, Heck v. Humphrey, should be used to block his lawsuit. The ruling limits challenges convicted criminals can bring against a law under which they were convicted.

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UK Regulator Ofcom Has Fined 4chan £520,000 Under a Law That Doesn’t Apply in the US

Ofcom has now fined 4chan £520,000 ($691,572) under the Online Safety Act. The platform hasn’t paid a penny and isn’t intending to. Its lawyer replied to the latest demand with a picture of a hamster.

That’s the state of UK online speech regulation in 2026: a regulator issuing fines to American websites, receiving rodent-themed correspondence in return, and collecting almost nothing.

The breakdown: £450,000 for failing to put age verification in place, £50,000 for failing to assess the risk of illegal material being published, and £20,000 for failing to set out in its terms of service how it protects users from criminal content. Ofcom says 4chan must comply by April 2 or face daily penalties on top.

But this confrontation and push for 4chan to start checking IDs didn’t start with a £520,000 fine. It started with an email sent across the Atlantic to a company that owes the UK government nothing.

4chan is an American platform. Its registered in Delaware. Its servers are in the United States. It has no employees in Britain, no offices in Britain, no legal registration in Britain, and no business presence of any kind in Britain. It is, in every meaningful sense, none of Ofcom’s business.

And what good would the First Amendment be if it could be overridden by foreign demands?

When the Online Safety Act came into full force, Ofcom declared that any site with “links to the UK” had duties to protect UK users, regardless of where in the world it was based.

That phrase, “links to the UK,” is intentionally vague, allowing British authorities to demand compliance from virtually any website. Under that logic, any American platform that a British person can visit is subject to UK speech law. No presence required. No UK operations required. Ofcom thinks it has jurisdiction over planet Earth.

Beginning in April 2025, Ofcom sent a “legally binding information notice” to 4chan’s corporate services company, by email, demanding compliance with the Online Safety Act and threatening that failure could “constitute a criminal offence” resulting in a fine of £18 million or 10% of 4chan’s worldwide turnover, arrest, and imprisonment for up to two years.

The notice was sent to a company not authorized to accept service on 4chan’s behalf. No UK court had issued it. No treaty process had been followed. It was, legally speaking, a strongly worded email.

Preston Byrne, the attorney representing 4chan, described the regulator’s actions as “an illegal campaign of harassment” directed at American tech firms, and made clear his client would not comply: “4chan has broken no laws in the United States, my client will not pay any penalty.”

By June 2025, Ofcom had opened a formal investigation.

Byrne’s reply was characteristically direct: “Increasing the size of a censorship fine does not cure its legal invalidity in the United States.” He continued: “After an entire year of your agency’s spectacular failure to get the memo, my only suggestion is that you take a first-year course on U.S. constitutional law.”

In August 2025, 4chan and Kiwi Farms took the fight to the US federal courts. The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, argues that the Online Safety Act is not only an unlawful extraterritorial power grab but a direct attack on foundational American liberties. The complaint states: “Where Americans are concerned, the Online Safety Act purports to legislate the Constitution out of existence.”

The platforms argue that Ofcom’s demands, including written “risk assessments,” content moderation systems, removal of speech deemed “illegal” by UK standards, and user identity verification, would require violating the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Byrne told reporters: “American citizens do not surrender our constitutional rights just because Ofcom sends us an email.”

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Court Backs First-Grader in Suit Over School Reaction to ‘Any Life’ Matters Drawing

Can a “schoolyard dispute” warrant federal court intervention? Do first-graders have First Amendment rights? The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit just gave a resounding yes to both questions.

The case centers on a first-grader identified in court documents as B.B. After her teacher read a story about Martin Luther King Jr., B.B. drew a picture of her and her multiracial friend group. “Black Lives Mater [sic] any life,” it said. Sweet, right?

Apparently not to the administrators at Viejo Elementary School in California’s Capistrano Unified School District. The school’s principal, Jesus Becerra, spoke with B.B. about her drawing, allegedly telling her that it was inappropriate. According to B.B., she was also barred from recess for two weeks.

B.B.’s mother, Chelsea Boyle, sued, alleging that her daughter’s First Amendment rights had been violated.

A federal district court sided with the school and Becerra, holding that B.B.’s drawing was not protected by the First Amendment. “This schoolyard dispute—like most—does not warrant federal court intervention,” wrote U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in the court’s 2024 opinion.

Now, the 9th Circuit has weighed in and reversed course. “We hold that elementary students’ speech is protected by the First Amendment,” the appeals court ruled, vacating the lower court’s decision and sending the case back for reconsideration.

“Schools may restrict students’ speech only when the restriction is reasonably necessary to protect the safety and well-being of its students,” the 9th Circuit judges wrote.

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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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