Tag: 1st amendment

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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Supreme Court Refuses To Expand the ‘True Threats’ Exception for Free Speech

SCOTUS ruling in Facebook threats case “neither the most speech-protective nor the most sensitive to the dangers of true threats.” For statements to be considered true threats, unprotected by the First Amendment, the person making them must have some understanding the statements could be construed as threatening, the Supreme Court held yesterday. The case—Counterman v. Colorado—involves a defendant convicted of stalking after sending a bevy of Facebook messages to someone identified as C.W.

In a 7-2 ruling issued yesterday, the Court vacated the conviction and remanded the case back to the lower court. The court’s three liberal justices were joined by Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito.

“True threats of violence are outside the bounds of First Amendment protection and punishable as crimes,” noted Justice Elena Kagan in the majority’s opinion:

Today we consider a criminal conviction for communications falling within that historically unprotected category. The question presented is whether the First Amendment still requires proof that the defendant had some subjective understanding of the threatening nature of his statements. We hold that it does, but that a mental state of recklessness is sufficient. The State must show that the defendant consciously disregarded a substantial risk that his communications would be viewed as threatening violence. The State need not prove any more demanding form of subjective intent to threaten another.

In this case, Billy Counterman sent C.W.—a singer and musician who lived in his community—hundreds of Facebook messages between 2014 and 2016. “Some of his messages were utterly prosaic (‘Good morning sweetheart’; ‘I am going to the store would you like anything?’)—except that they were coming from a total stranger,” notes Kagan. “Others suggested that Counterman might be surveilling C. W.,” and some expressed anger at her.

“Fuck off permanently,” said one message. Another read: “You’re not being good for
human relations. Die.”

Understandably, the messages frightened C.W., who worried that Counterman was following her and might hurt her. She contacted local police, who charged him under a Colorado stalking statute that prohibits “repeatedly . . . make[ing] any form of communication with another person” in “a manner that would cause a reasonable person to suffer serious emotional distress.”

Counterman argued that his messages were not true threats and thus were protected by the First Amendment.

The trial court weighed whether Counterman’s messages were true threats using a “reasonable person” standard: would some hypothetical, objective “reasonable person” find them threatening? It found that they would, meaning the messages were not protected speech. The case was put before a jury, which found Counterman guilty under the stalking statute.

The Colorado Court of Appeals then affirmed this decision, holding that “a speaker’s subjective intent to threaten” is not necessary to convict the speaker for threatening communications. The Colorado Supreme Court declined to review the case.

“Courts are divided about (1) whether the First Amendment requires proof of a defendant’s subjective mindset in true-threats cases, and (2) if so, what mens rea”—that is, level of intent or knowledge—”standard is sufficient,” noted Kagan. Thus, the Supreme Court decided to hear Counterman’s case.

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Proposed ‘Hate Speech’ Law in Michigan Threatens First Amendment Rights, Conservatives Warn

A bill moving through the Democrat-controlled Michigan State Legislature would make it easier for prosecutors to bring felonious “hate crime” charges against dissident speech.

The possible implications for preachers, school administrators, teachers, parents, politicians, and citizen activists have alarmed conservatives concerned about the effect the bill may have on free speech.

The proposed legislation, HB 4474, would amend the state’s Ethnic Intimidation Act of 1988 in order to consider it a hate crime if a person is accused of causing “severe mental anguish” to another individual by means of perceived verbal intimidation or harassment.

The amendment defines the words intimidate or harass as a “willful course of conduct, involving repeated or continuing harassment of another individual that would cause a reasonable individual to feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, harassed, or molested…”

“Words are malleable,” Attorney David Kallman of the Great Lakes Justice Center (GLJC), a non-profit legal organization dedicated to preserving liberty in America, told The Epoch Times. “They can be redefined by whoever is in power.

“Under the proposed statute, ‘intimidate and harass’ can mean whatever the victim, or the authorities, want them to mean. The focus is on how the victim feels rather than on a clearly defined criminal act. This is a ridiculously vague and subjective standard,” he said.

“The absence of intent makes no difference under this law. You are still guilty of the crime because the victim felt uncomfortable.

“The bill will lead to the prosecution of conservatives, pastors, and parents attending a school board meeting for simply expressing their opposition to the liberal agenda,” Kallman said.

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Wearing Shirt Saying ‘There Are Only Two Genders’ Not Protected Speech, Rules Obama-Appointed Judge

School administrators were not infringing on a student’s constitutional rights when they ordered him to remove a shirt that said, “there are only two genders,” a district judge ruled on June 17.

Massachusetts middle-schooler Liam Morrison’s lawyers said the order violated his First Amendment rights to free speech and his Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process, but U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said the violations have not been proven.

The school “permissibly concluded that the Shirt invades the rights of others,” Talwani, an Obama appointee, said.

Schools can bar speech that is in “collision with the rights of others to be secure and be let alone,” Talwani said, quoting from the 1969 ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. School Dist.

That means the administrators appropriately exercised their discretion when concluding the statement “may communicate that only two gender identities–male and female are valid, and any others are invalid or nonexistent, and to conclude that students who identify differently, whether they do so openly or not, have a right to attend school without being confronted by messages attacking their identities,” she added.

Talwani’s ruling rejected a request from the boy for a temporary restraining order that would have stopped administrators from prohibiting the student from wearing the shirt at John T. Nicholas Middle School.

The case has not been thrown out and Talwani could ultimately rule in the boy’s favor.

Tyson Langhofer, senior counsel and director of the Center for Academic Freedom at Alliance Defending Freedom who is helping defend the plaintiff, said that the ruling was disappointing.

“Public school officials cannot censor a 7th grader’s free speech by forcing him to remove a shirt that states a scientific fact,” Langhofer told The Epoch Times via email. “Doing so is a gross violation of the First Amendment and we will be appealing this ruling to the First Circuit Court of Appeals.”

Lawyers for the defendants, which include acting principal Heather Tucker and Middleborough Public Schools Superintendent Carolyn Lyons, did not return an inquiry.

First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh said the ruling does not appear to be consistent with the Tinker ruling, which held that school officials in Iowa illegally ordered students to remove armbands amid protests against the Vietnam war. Lawyer Hans Bader, who is not involved in the case, said the ruling was wrong, noting that previous cases have upheld students’ rights to convey messages “as long as they weren’t vulgar or likely to cause a disruption,” including a ruling in favor of wearing a shirt that said “Be Happy, Not Gay.”

“The judge suggested that the T-shirt interfered with other students’ ‘right to attend school without being confronted by messages attacking their identities,’” Bader said. “But other courts have refused to recognize a right to attend school without being confronted by messages attacking one’s identity, when the messages don’t disrupt school, and don’t involve ‘independently tortious speech like libel, slander or intentional infliction of emotional distress.’”

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