Tag: 1st amendment

Docs Offer Glimpse Inside Censorship Industrial Complex

Welcome to the Censorship Industrial Complex. It’s rather like the old “military industrial complex,” which was shorthand for the military, private companies, and academia working together to achieve U.S. battlefield dominance, with the R&D funded by the government that buys the final product.

But the censorship industrial complex builds algorithms, not bombers. The players aren’t Raytheon and Boeing, but social media companies, tech startups, and universities and their institutes. The foes to be dominated are American citizens whose opinions diverge from government narratives on issues ranging from COVID-19 responses to electoral fraud to transgenderism.

When first exposed a few months ago, many of the actors and their media defenders perversely claimed that they, as private entities, were acting out of concern for “democracy” and exercising their own First Amendment rights.

However, the records and correspondence of an advisory committee to an obscure government agency tell a different story. The Functional Government Initiative (FGI) has obtained through a public records request documents of the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The committee was composed of academics and tech company officials working with government personnel in a much closer relationship than either they or the media want to admit. Several advisory committee members who appear throughout the documents as quasi-federal actors are among those loudly protesting that they were private actors when censoring lawful American speech (e.g., Kate Starbird, Vijaya Gadde, Alex Stamos).

But the advisory committee members met often and worked so closely with their government handlers that the federal liaison to the committee regularly offered members his personal cell phone and even reminded them to use the committee’s Slack channel. Your average concerned citizen doesn’t have a Homeland Security bureaucrat on speed dial.

What were they working on? CISA’s “Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-information” (MDM) subcommittee discussed Orwellian “social listening” and “monitoring,” and considered the government’s best censorship “success metrics.” Who was to be censored? CISA was formed in response to misinformation campaigns from foreign actors, but it evolved toward domestic “threats.” Meeting notes record that Suzanne Spaulding of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said they shouldn’t “solely focus on addressing foreign threats … [but] to emphasize that domestic threats remain and while attribution is sometimes unclear, CISA should be sensitive to domestic distinctions, but cannot focus too heavily on such limitations.” So CISA should combat “high-volume disinformation purveyors before the purveyor is attributed to a domestic or foreign threat” and not worry so much about First Amendment niceties.

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Louisiana Man Arrested By SWAT Team For Facebook Joke About COVID-19 Wins Case

In a pivotal defense of free speech and online expression, the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals has rendered a verdict upholding Waylon Bailey’s right to jest about COVID-19 and zombies on social media. The Louisiana resident, previously arrested under the cloud of an anti-terrorism law for his humorous Facebook post, now sees the tide of justice turn in his favor.

We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.

Waylon Bailey’s playful jab at the pandemic combined with a cinematic reference to the Brad Pitt-led movie “World War Z,” whimsically warning that the local sheriff’s office was tasked with shooting the “infected.”

Instead of discerning the evident satire, the local sheriff’s deputies responded with a disproportionate use of force. Without obtaining a warrant, the authorities dispatched a SWAT team to Bailey’s residence, arresting him with guns drawn in his own garage.

While the ludicrous charge against Bailey was soon dismissed upon a prosecutor’s intervention, the subsequent civil-rights lawsuit encountered unexpected setbacks. Astonishingly, the district court not only granted the arresting deputy qualified immunity but also dismissed Bailey’s First Amendment right to jest.

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Student Refuses School’s Order to Remove American Flags from Truck, Switches to Homeschooling

A Virginia teen said his First Amendment rights are being violated after school officials told him to remove the two American flags mounted on his red Toyota Tacoma truck.

Staunton River High School officials told senior Christopher Hartless that the patriotic display was a distraction to other drivers and a safety concern, WSET reported.

“I don’t understand how it’s a distraction if they have one on the flagpole that every other student can see,” Hartless told the news outlet.

His parking pass was revoked. His stepmother, Christina Kingery, said she didn’t want him to take the bus, so his family took him out of the high school and is homeschooling him.

Officials from the high school’s Bedford County school district in  released a statement noting that flying flags on vehicles is against “the student parking contract” that Hartless apparently signed, “which has been used by all 3 of our high schools for many years.”

The school district released a statement regarding the incident to parents regarding the school district’s code of conduct rules:

The BCPS Code of Student Conduct prohibits “Attire that has language or images that are offensive, profane, vulgar, discriminatory, or racially/culturally divisive. This would include confederate flags, swastikas, KKK references, or any other images that might reasonably be considered hurtful or intimidating to others.” It does not include wearing clothing with American flag logos or prints on attire. This attire is allowed.

The statement also noted to parents that the Pledge of Allegiance is recited every morning.

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Dash cam footage shows Delaware cops conspiring to drum up bogus charge against motorist who flipped them off

A Delaware man is suing the state police, saying they destroyed a sign he made to warn people about their speed trap and they created a bogus reason to charge him with an infraction because he gave them the finger, Delaware Online reported.

Jonathan Guessford had launched a mini-protest by holding a hand-made sign that read, “Radar ahead.” Body cam footage shows Cpl. Stephen Douglas and Officer Nicholas Gallo approach Guessford and incorrectly tell him he could not stand on the side of the road with the sign. Gallo eventually pulled the sign from Guessford’s grasp and ripped it up.

As he was leaving, Guessford gave the officers the finger, prompting them to follow him. When they pulled him over, Master Cpl. Raiford Box arrived on the scene and told Guessford that he was going to be locked up for disorderly conduct and have his child taken away. The officers issued him a citation “under a law that governs hand signals for non-motorized vehicles like bicycles,” Delaware Online’s report stated.

New dash cam footage that was recently released shows officers conspiring to drum up a bogus charge against Guessford. Douglas was warned by Box that the hand-gesture charge was bogus, but that didn’t stop him of issuing it.

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Why Kamala Harris Won’t Be Asked About the Suicide of a Newspaperman She Persecuted

The sitting vice president, shortly before moving to Washington, D.C., successfully scapegoated through heavily publicized if legally unsuccessful pimping prosecutions a career newspaperman who last week shot himself to death at age 74 rather than sit through yet another prostitution-facilitation trial that he insisted to his dying days was an attack on free speech.

Yet the chances of Kamala Harris being asked this week—or any week—about the late James Larkin, or her starring role in the demonization of his and Michael Lacey’s online classified advertising company Backpage as “the world’s top online brothel,” are vanishingly small. That’s because people have a natural revulsion toward anything associated—however falsely—with child prostitution or sex trafficking, true. But it also stems from something far less excusable: When it comes to conflicts between the feds and those from the professionally unpopular corners of the free speech industry, journalists have been increasingly taking the side of The Man.

You could see this dynamic in stark relief last month in the elite-media response to U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty’s Independence Day injunction against the federal government from pressuring social media companies to censor individuals for allegedly spreading “misinformation.” As catalogued at Reason by Robby Soave, J.D. Tuccille, Jacob Sullum, and Robert Corn-Revere, and as I experienced during a bizarre panel discussion on CNN, the default journalistic reaction was anxiety that the ruling (in the words of the New York Times news department) “could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives about the coronavirus pandemic and other issues.” Sure, there may be First Amendment implications, but, well, have you seen that dangerous whackaloon Alex Berenson?

Far too often, journalists reserve their free speech defenses for people they actually like. And man, did they not like Jim Larkin and Mike Lacey.

This antipathy for Larkin/Lacey and the New Times alt-weekly chain the duo launched in Phoenix was obvious long before politicians began moving on from Craigslist to Backpage in their morally panicked crusade against technology companies that allegedly promote “sex trafficking.” (I use quotation marks here not to intimate that sex trafficking does not exist, but rather that, as Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown has documented better than any living reporter, the term is overwhelmingly deployed by politicians and law enforcement to describe and punish conduct that has nothing whatsoever to do with forcing unwitting adults, let alone minors, into the sex business.)

The New Times honchos—especially Lacey, who was always the more public and pugilistic face of the franchise—were resented because they threw sharp elbows at both the graybeard alternative weeklies to their left and at the big-city dailies that were originally to their right but then tacked over time to the kind of bloodless lefty respectability space inhabited by NPR. The New Times papers hurled buckets of snark onto anyone perceived as Establishment, which pissed off boomer lefty journalists almost as much as elected Republican officials such as Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Arizona Sen. John McCain.

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Backpage Founder, Alt-Weekly Entrepreneur, and Free Speech Warrior James Larkin Has Died

Entrepreneur, journalist, and First Amendment warrior James Larkin has died, just a little over a week before he was slated to stand trial for his role in running the web-classifieds platform Backpage. Larkin, 74, took his own life on Monday.

A native of Maricopa County, Arizona, he leaves behind a wife and six children, as well as a string of newspapers and a legacy of fighting for free speech.

With journalist Michael Lacey, Larkin built the Phoenix New Times from an anti-war student newspaper into a broad—and still-thriving—record of Maricopa County culture and politics. New Times didn’t shy away from honest reporting on local law enforcement and power figures—including Sen. John McCain and his wife Cindy—or on controversial issues like abortion, immigrant rights, or the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles.

“I had just come back from school in Mexico City and had been exposed to the Mexican student movement in the late 60’s and early 70’s and they were really serious radicals, serious revolutionaries, and a lot of them were killed in the ensuing years, murdered by the Mexican government. I realized that politics were serious,” Larkin told Reason in 2018. “I felt that the paper…really had an opportunity to be politically powerful.”

San Francisco Bay Guardian publisher Bruce B. Brugmann described Larkin and Lacey’s aesthetic as “desert libertarianism on the rocks.” They expanded their alt-weekly empire nationwide, eventually running 17 free papers, including the Miami New Times, Westword, the Dallas Observer, and The Village Voice.

The company stood out for being both highly profitable and a hard-hitting journalistic enterprise—a perfect blend of Larkin’s business acumen, Lacey’s brash indie-press M.O, and the pair’s shared commitment to exposing and standing up to government malfeasance. Collectively, the papers and their staffers were nominated for more than 1,400 national writing awards, won one Pulitzer, and were finalists for the Pulitzer six other times.

“We weren’t trying to curry favor,” Larkin told Reason in 2018. And they took a “stubborn approach to bureaucrats telling us ‘you can’t do that’ or ‘we’re not going to allow you to do that.’ We knew what our rights were.”

“Law enforcement, politicians, bureaucrats, regulatory types. They don’t really understand the First Amendment,” he added.

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University to undergo free speech training, pay $80,000 in settlement for allegedly issuing ‘no-contact orders’ against student, instructing peers to report her ‘harmful’ Christian, political views

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville will pay $80,000 in a recent settlement agreement with a graduate student who accused the school of wrongfully issuing “no-contact orders” against her and instructing her peers to report her “harmful rhetoric.”

Maggie DeJong and Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit against the school after the student claimed she was discriminated against for sharing her Christian and conservative political views.

Three of the school’s professors have been ordered to undergo First Amendment training as part of the settlement agreement. Additionally, the university has been required to revise its policies and student handbook to protect students’ political, religious, and ideological views.

In February 2022, school officials issued “no-contact orders” against DeJong after some of her peers reported her comments about religion, politics, critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, Marxism, censorship, COVID-related regulations, and the criminal justice system.

Students accused DeJong of “harassment” and “discrimination,” claiming her rhetoric had “harmed and offended” them, according to the ADF’s lawsuit.

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Idaho Christians Are Compensated $300,000 for Rights Violations

Just how untethered to the rule of law did the United States come during the Covid response?

Before March 2020, most Americans would think that monitoring church attendance, banning Easter services, and arresting hymn singers were practices reserved for Eastern-style totalitarianism. The Soviet Union persecuted Christians and the Chinese have Muslim concentration camps, but Americans’ freedom of worship is enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

The free exercise of religion precedes all other liberties in the First Amendment. It was born of a core conviction that the New World could do it better than the Old World of religious wars and persecution. Freedom, the Founders believed, would not diminish religious experience but rather bolster it through toleration and peace. This was a radical conviction at the time, a dramatic departure from centuries and millennia of costly struggle.

Government guaranteed everyone’s religious liberty. And the system worked. Religious conviction did not diminish but rather intensified throughout the 19th century. Most governments in the world followed similar guarantees never to interfere with religious practice. Even in the 21st century, when the country in general had become increasingly secular, few could imagine that political leaders would launch a crusade against organized religion.

Yet that’s exactly what happened. As the Covid creed emerged as the national faith, the American tradition of religious pluralism withered away. Freedom of worship was replaced by widespread demands for conformity.

This wasn’t limited to the devoutly godless shores of Marin County or East Hampton. Christians in Idaho recently reached a $300,000 settlement with a local city after they were arrested for attending outdoor church services in September 2020. Christ Church Pastor Ben Zornes organized the worship. “We were just singing songs,” he explained at the time.

The local police chief had no patience for the violation of corona law. “At some point in time you have to enforce,” he told the press after arresting attendees at the “psalm sing.”

But did they have to enforce the orders? Was arresting Christians legally required, or was it an explicit violation of the First Amendment?

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New Docs Reveal Fed’s Attempt to Control Your Thoughts, Speech, and Life

 Keeping up with the corruption of the Covid regime feels like drinking from a firehose. The volume of the fraud, the pace of new discoveries, and the breadth of the operations are overwhelming. This makes it imperative for groups like Brownstone Institute to digest the onslaught of information and communicate salient themes and dispositive facts, particularly given the dereliction of mainstream media.

On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee released a report on how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “colluded with Big Tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans,” adding to the informational firehose we work to imbibe.

The 36-page report raises three familiar issues: first, government actors worked with third parties to overturn the First Amendment; second, censors prioritized political narratives over truthfulness; and third, an unaccountable bureaucracy hijacked American society.

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Michigan Democrats’ ‘Hate Speech’ Law Could Imprison People For Saying ‘Frightening’ Words

In an unprecedented move, Michigan Democrats have passed a new law, House Bill 4474, which seeks to enforce prison sentences for those found guilty of uttering words deemed to be ‘frightening’ or ‘intimidating’.

The bill expands the definition of hate crimes to include intimidation or harassment based on a wide range of individual characteristics, including race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, physical or mental disability, age, ethnicity, and national origin.

Under the terms of the proposed law, a person can be found guilty of a hate crime if they are found to have intentionally intimidated or harassed another person based on any of the above-listed characteristics. Intimidation and harassment under this law can take many forms, including causing physical contact, damaging property, or making threats that could cause another individual to feel frightened, threatened, or harassed.

According to critics, the bill’s broad definition of hate crimes, including the use of ‘frightening’ words, raises concerns about potential infringement on free speech. The law could have far-reaching implications, potentially criminalizing harsh words or expressions of opinion if they are perceived as intimidating or harassing, particularly if they are based on the characteristics listed in the bill.

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