Tag: 1st amendment

LIAR IN CHIEF: Biden Repeats False ‘You Can’t Yell Fire In A Crowded Theater’ Claim

During Wednesday night’s national address, President Joe Biden repeated his oft-debunked claim that that “no amendment to the Constitution is absolute” while making an argument against gun rights, and went to lie about the Supreme Court’s stance on free speech, claiming “you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.”

“No amendment to the constitution is absolute,” Biden said after making an appeal to restrict gun rights. “You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. From the very beginning, there were certain guns, weapons, that could not be owned by Americans.”

Biden is not only incorrect about firearms restrictions, which did not exist even for military cannon and warships at the country’s founding, but the “fire in a crowded theater” metaphor he invokes so often is also completely false.

The saying comes from remarks made over a hundred years ago in 1919 by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the case Schenk v. United States, during which the court incorrectly ruled that advocating against the draft was not free speech.

The Court’s ruling is widely interpreted as one of the worst ever in U.S. history, and was effectively overturned in the landmark 1969 case Brandenburg v. Ohio.

Yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater has been ruled protected speech for over half a century, but that has not prevented Biden from repeating the false claim on many occasions.

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Ironic: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki receives Free Expression Award from pro-First Amendment group

After an unprecedented year of YouTube censorship, the Freedom Forum Institute, a group which states that its mission is “to foster First Amendment freedoms for all,” has given YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki a Free Expression Award.

The homepage for the 2021 Free Expression Awards and Festival states that it recognizes individuals “for their courageous acts of free and fearless expression” and lists YouTube as a “signature sponsor” of the event.

In a video promoting the award, Wojcicki proposed that removing content only becomes censorship when you go “too far”:

“We’re removing content that violates our policies. You can go too far and that can become censorship, and so we have been working really hard to figure out what’s the right way to balance responsibility with freedom of speech.”

During an interview, she then discussed how censorship impacted her personally when her grandfather stayed in Poland after World War Two and was behind the Iron Curtain – a political boundary that divided Europe for more than 45 years and was infamous for the way open contact with those inside the Iron Curtain was heavily censored.

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The Forgotten Legacy of Free Speech on the ‘Left’

Aside from Bill Maher’s audience – who, as the late Christopher Hitchens once noted before giving them the finger, will “clap at apparently anything” – the “liberals” (heavy on the quotes) in Huffington Post’s social media comments sections represent the single dumbest group of people ever assembled.

In a giant corporate circle jerk, The Huffington Post (HuffPo), previously owned by multinational corporation Verizon Media, is now owned by a combination of Verizon Media and “news” conglomerate Buzzfeed which shamelessly markets itself as “independent media.” The HuffPo/Verizon/Buzzfeed Empire donates heavily to DC Swamp politicians on both sides of the aisle.

It is, in short, Ivy League incest — a very Brooklyn, very upper-middle-class-cosmopolitan white, very woke affair. None of these people’s parents farm corn in Nebraska.

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It’s Not Okay For Corporations To Take Away Our Freedom Just Because They’re Not Government

If you want to take over the world, build an American corporate empire to monopolize the public square and ban dissent. Then, form a corporate coalition of like-minded peers who graduated from the same elite universities where wokeism is indoctrinated as a secular religion to strategize on circumventing republican governance. Over the weekend, more than 100 corporate executives met to do just that.

“More than 100 of the nation’s top corporate leaders met virtually on Saturday to discuss ways for companies to continue responding to the passage of more restrictive voting laws across the country,” CBS News reported, in “a signal that the nation’s premier businesses are preparing a far more robust, organized response to the ongoing debate.”

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‘Shock and Awe’: Feds Admit They are Prosecuting Jan. 6 Capitol Protesters to Create Chilling Effect on 1st Amendment

Federal prosecutor Michael Sherwin appeared on CBS News’ 60 Minutes on Sunday where he admitted that he charged as many people as quickly as possible regardless of the evidence to put a chilling effect on the 1st Amendment rights of Trump supporters.

“After the 6th, we had an inauguration on the 20th. So I wanted to ensure, and our office wanted to ensure that there was shock and awe that we could charge as many people as possible before the 20th,” Sherwin told CBS News. 

He added: “And it worked because we saw through media posts that people were afraid to come back to D.C. because they’re like, “If we go there, we’re gonna get charged.”’

Sherwin made it clear that the feds went after people who had gone viral regardless of whether they perpetrated any violence or committed any actual crime.

“So the first people we went after, I’m gonna call the internet stars, right? The low-hanging fruit. The ‘zip-tie guy,’ the ‘rebel flag guy,’ the ‘Camp Auschwitz guy.’ We wanted to take out those individuals that essentially were thumbing their noses at the public for what they did,” Sherwin said.

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Kentucky Republicans pass bill making insulting a police officer a crime

In recent times, there have been increasing incidences of police arresting people for criticizing them online, particularly through memes. Due to the First Amendment protections, these cases have been dropped.

But a new bill out of Kentucky aims to try again.

The Senate of the State of Kentucky passed a bill that criminalizes insulting the police. Critics of the bill claimed the legislation would have a chilling effect on free speech and is actually a violation of the First Amendment.

The Senate Bill 211 was brought by Sen Danny Carroll (R-Benton), who is a retired police officer. According to Carroll, the bill will serve as a statement to protesters who “tried to destroy the city of Louisville” during the Breonna Taylor protests and riots last year.

The bill increases penalties on crimes related to rioting and prevents the early release of people found guilty of such crimes. But the controversial part of the bill is the criminalizing of verbally provoking police officers to the extent they feel a violent response is necessary. It passed by a 22 to 11 vote, with six Republicans joining Democrats in voting against it.

Carroll insisted that “insulting an officer is not going to cause anyone to go to jail.” However, according to the Courier Journal, the bill “states a person is guilty of disorderly conduct — a Class B misdemeanor with a penalty of up to 90 days’ imprisonment — if he or she ‘accosts, insults, taunts, or challenges a law enforcement officer with offensive or derisive words, or by gestures or other physical contact, that would have a direct tendency to provoke a violent response from the perspective of a reasonable and prudent person.’”

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Kentucky bill would make it a crime to insult or taunt police officers

A bill advancing out of a Kentucky Senate committee on Thursday would make it a crime to insult or taunt a police officer to the point where the taunts provoke a violent response.

Senate Bill 211 passed by a 7-3 vote, according to reports. The proposal was a response to riots throughout the country last summer, said the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Danny Carroll, R-Benton, a retired police officer.

Louisville saw numerous violent protests and rioting last year following the Breonna Taylor incident in March. Police had obtained a narcotics related search warrant for her apartment. After knock and notice was provided, police made entry only to be met with gunfire from Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly was shot in the leg. Officers returned fire, killing Taylor.

This week prosecutors decided to forego charges against Walker, Law Officer reported. Mattingly filed a lawsuit against Walker last October. He alleges that the shot was “outrageous, intolerable and offends all accepted standards of decency or morality.”

The lawsuit accuses Walker of battery, assault and emotional distress.

Meanwhile, Carroll noted the newly proposed legislation wasn’t about limiting lawful protest “in any way, shape, form or fashion,” according to WDRB.

“This country was built on lawful protest, and it’s something that we must maintain — our citizens’ right to do so. What this deals with are those who cross the line and commit criminal acts,” he said.

The bill kept language making a person guilty of disorderly conduct — a Class B misdemeanor — if they accost, insult, taunt, or challenge “a law enforcement officer with offensive or derisive words, or by gestures or other physical contact, that would have a direct tendency to provoke a violent response from the perspective of a reasonable and prudent person.”

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Democrats’ H.R. 1 Sets ‘Unconstitutional’ Limits on 1st Amendment: Free Speech Group

“Buried in H.R. 1’s nearly 800 pages is a censor’s wish list of new burdens on speech and donor privacy. It proposes a democracy where civic engagement is punished and where fewer people have a voice in our government, our laws, and public life,” Eric Wang, the author of the study, said in a statement accompanying the release of the analysis. He is an IFS senior fellow and special counsel in the election law practice group at the Washington law firm of Wiley Rein, LLP.

Among the 14 constitutional problems identified by the IFS analysis in H.R. 1’s Title IV—including especially subtitles B, C, and D—the first are provisions that “unconstitutionally regulate speech that mentions a federal candidate or elected official at any time under a vague, subjective, and dangerously broad standard that asks whether the speech ‘promotes,’ ‘attacks,’ ‘supports,’ or ‘opposes’ (PASO) the candidate or official.”

“This standard is impossible to understand and would likely regulate any mention of an elected official who hasn’t announced their retirement.”

The proposal does that by creating a new category of regulated speech called “campaign-related disbursements” by nonprofit advocacy groups and others interested in communicating about public policy issues.

Such speech would include any public communications that mention a specific candidate for federal office and attacks or supports that candidate “without regard to whether the communication expressly advocates a vote for or against” the candidate.

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