Tag: 1st amendment

Destroying Liberty Through State Protection: The First Amendment

For a state to continue existing in any meaningful way, it must constantly seek to centralize power. Regardless of the original intentions of a state’s founders or the heritage that a state claims, if those running the state simply maintain their existing powers rather than growing them, they will find themselves circumvented. Subdivisions and organic local communities nominally under the state will develop independently from the state’s center of power, and the state’s power will, over a period lacking in centralization, be rendered negligible at best. This necessitates that the state centralize in response to any diverging localities to continue existing.

To sustain its centralization, the state relies on narratives and justifications propagated by its apologists. One of the most popular justifications for the increasing scope of power since the early modern era has been the safeguarding of rights and liberties of the people subjected to the state. Contrary to the promise, the safeguarding of rights and liberties only serves to expand the power of the state, further centralizing its domains and in time inevitably regulating the rights and liberties, eroding the cause itself. This is demonstrated no clearer than in the history of the United States, specifically in the First Amendment.

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California Quietly Repeals Restrictions on Doctors’ COVID-19 Advice

California legislators last month quietly repealed a 2022 law that authorized disciplinary action against doctors, including loss of their medical licenses, when they share COVID-19 “misinformation” with their patients. The law, A.B. 2098, defined that ambiguous and highly contested category of speech as “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.”

Not sure what that means? Neither were the California physicians who challenged the law on First Amendment grounds in two separate lawsuits. They argued that the state’s amorphous definition of prohibited medical advice was bound to have a chilling impact on constitutionally protected speech.

In McDonald v. Lawson, which the Liberty Justice Center (LJC) filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on October 4, 2022, Judge Fred Slaughter declined to issue a preliminary injunction, concluding in a December 28 order that A.B. 2098 was probably constitutional. Four weeks later in Høeg v. Newsom, which the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California on November 2, Judge William B. Shubb reached the opposite conclusion.

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An Iowa Man Published Body Camera Footage From His Arrest. The Cops Are Suing Him for Defamation.

An Iowa man published body camera footage of his arrest at the hands of two Newton, Iowa, police officers last year. Now, he’s being sued for defamation. 

In August 2022, 19-year-old Tayvin Galanakis was driving in Newton just after midnight when he was pulled over by police officers Nathan Winters and Christopher Wing. 

“How much have you had to drink tonight?” Winters asks Galanakis in body camera footage from the incident.

“None,” Galanakis responds. Winters incredulously asks, “What do you mean none?” Galanakis said, “Great, let’s do a test then.”

The footage then shows Galanakis undergoing a series of field sobriety tests. After Winters claims Galanakis failed them, he administered a Breathalyzer test, which showed that Galanakis had a blood-alcohol level of 0.00. Almost immediately after proving his sobriety, body camera footage shows Winters asking Galanakis about how much marijuana he had consumed.

“Despite previously claiming he could smell alcohol on Tayvin, Officer Winters now claimed he believed Tayvin was intoxicated due to his use of marijuana,” reads a legal complaint later filed by Galanakis. “Tayvin continuously told the officers that he did not use marijuana and that his placement on the William Penn [University] football team renders him unable to use marijuana because of his weekly drug tests.”

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Pennsylvania Police Charge Metaphysical Shop Owner With Practicing Witchcraft and No, We Aren’t Kidding

We have become accustomed in modern times to the term “witch-hunt” being metaphorical but a practicing witch with a retail shop has become an actual target of the police for “suspicions of witchcraft” charges, despite the fact that this is the year 2023. Her crime? Fortune-telling, in the form of tarot readings. The state has a history of persecuting witches though, back to the very founder William Penn who participated in hearings against two women accused of bewitching livestock to not produce and appearing in spectral form. Basically, in the years between 1683 and right now nobody has bothered to ask if this law is useful, so it remains there to be enforced whenever the police feel like some good ol’ fashioned religious persecution.

The shop owner, @thestitchingwitch, received an email from the Borough Manager alerting her that a recent article about her business had alerted the Chief of Police himself to her allegedly illegal activities. Social media became instantly outraged on her behalf because Americans expect to have religious freedom to practice whatever they choose. It’s also very specifically targeted from the perspective of those at all familiar with the Keystone State, famous for having a groundhog predict the future weather every February 2nd. 

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Fifth Circuit Expands Injunction Against Government Online Censorship To Include CISA

A ruling on Tuesday by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit marks a leap for the safeguarding of free speech within the social media arena. This decision sees the addition of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to a preliminary injunction in the ongoing legal contest of Missouri v. Biden.

Initially, a host of prominent agencies, including the White House, US Surgeon General’s office, CDC, and the FBI were barred from manipulating social media platforms in a manner that obstructs constitutional freedoms of speech.

The fight against censorship is far from novel, with the tale of Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Aaron Kheriaty, and Ms. Jill Hines circulating in the public domain for several years. Their experiences of being censored and throttled on social media platforms form an integral part of a broader governmental agenda to curb free speech for independent thinkers and intellectuals.

This latest ruling by the Fifth Circuit punctuates a series of preceding actions, including its September 8 ruling upholding an earlier order by District Judge Terry Doughty. Doughty’s order on Independence Day caused shockwaves by banning government officials from using their offices to manipulate social media companies into surrendering the First Amendment rights of citizens.

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Defenders of the Florida and Texas Social Media Laws Contradict Themselves

Social media companies argue that their content moderation decisions are a form of editorial discretion protected by the First Amendment. Conservative critics of those companies reject that argument, even as they complain that the platforms’ decisions reflect a progressive agenda.

That contradiction is at the heart of two cases that the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear, which involve constitutional challenges to state laws that aim to correct the bias that Republicans perceive. Although supporters of those laws claim they are defending freedom of speech, that argument hinges on a dangerous conflation of state and private action.

The 2021 Florida law at issue in Moody v. NetChoice requires social media platforms to host speech by any “candidate for office,” even when it violates their content rules. The law also says platforms may not limit the visibility of material “by or about” a political candidate and may not “censor, deplatform, or shadow ban a journalistic enterprise based on the content of its publication or broadcast.”

The law does not cover relatively small, right-leaning platforms such as Gab, Parler, Rumble, and Truth Social. It applies only to the largest platforms, such as Twitter (now X), Facebook, and YouTube, which Republicans have long accused of discriminating against conservative speech.

Florida politicians made it clear that they were trying to address that perceived imbalance. The bill’s legislative findings, which complain that Facebook et al. have “unfairly censored, shadow banned, deplatformed, and applied post-prioritization algorithms,” assert that the state has a “substantial interest in protecting its residents from inconsistent and unfair actions” by those platforms.

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Biden Criticizes Online “Misinformation,” Compares The Internet To The Unregulated Printing Press

In an interview with ProPublica, released on Sunday, President Joe Biden touched upon the technological advancements and their pivotal role in shaping societal discourse and information sharing. While discussing Elon Musk’s influence over X and its policies, President Biden seemed to delve into concerns about “misinformation” and its prevalence on online platforms.

When asked by John Harwood about Elon Musk’s impact on X and its potential contribution to misinformation, President Biden responded by exploring the notion of technological evolution and what he sees as its consequences on society.

He said, “Yeah, it does. Look, one of the things that I said to you when I thought I wasn’t going to run, I was going to write a book about the changes taking place. And most of this directed over the years were these fundamental changes in society by changing technology, Gutenberg, printing and the printing press changed the way Europeans could talk to one another, all the way to today.”

Biden’s mention of the Gutenberg printing press highlights its revolutionary impact on communication among Europeans. Drawing parallels between the advent of the printing press and the current digital age, the President seemed to imply that just as the printing press had long-lasting effects on communication and information dissemination, the internet and online platforms have a similar transformative effect on contemporary society.

While the President (this time at least) stopped short of explicitly calling for censorship, his comments could be interpreted as subtly highlighting concerns around the unregulated nature of online information, potentially opening a gateway to discussions on tighter control and regulation of internet content.

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Kansas Police Chief Who Led Raid on Small Kansas Newspaper Owner’s Home and Caused Her Death Has Been Suspended

The Kansas Police Chief who led a raid on a small Kansas newspaper has been suspended from his post. Dave Mayfield, the mayor of Marion, suspended Chief Gideon Cody on Thursday. He did not go into detail or discuss whether or not he is being paid.

The searches occurred on August 11th, and has brought Marion into the spotlight regarding freedom of the press and First Amendment rights.

ABC News:

The police chief who led a highly criticized raid of a small Kansas newspaper has been suspended, the mayor confirmed to The Associated Press on Saturday.

Marion Mayor Dave Mayfield in a text said he suspended Chief Gideon Cody on Thursday. He declined to discuss his decision further and did not say whether Cody was still being paid.

Voice messages and emails from the AP seeking comment from Cody’s lawyers were not immediately returned Saturday.

The Aug. 11 searches of the Marion County Record’s office and the homes of its publisher and a City Council member have been sharply criticized, putting Marion at the center of a debate over the press protections offered by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The mayor was originally going to wait for the state police investigation to conclude but changed his mind and suspended him prior to the results.

Earlier in September The Gateway Pundit reported that a Federal lawsuit was filed by a reporter on the police chief who conducted the raid.

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The White House’s ‘Misinformation’ Pressure Campaign Was Unconstitutional

I am one of five private plaintiffs in the landmark free speech case Missouri v. Biden. Earlier this month, the Fifth Circuit Court found that the government “engaged in a years-long pressure campaign designed to ensure that the censorship [on social media] aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints” and that “the platforms, in capitulation to state-sponsored pressure, changed their moderation policies.” This resulted in the censoring of constitutionally protected speech of hundreds of thousands of Americans, tens of millions of times. Based on this finding, the Fifth Circuit in part upheld an injunction on certain public officials put in place by a district court.

Even when the government appealed the injunction to the Fifth Circuit, its lawyers hardly disputed a single factual finding from the court’s ruling. A unanimous three-judge panel upheld the core findings that “several officials—namely the White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC, and the FBI—likely coerced or significantly encouraged social-media platforms to moderate content, rendering those decisions state actions. In doing so, the officials likely violated the First Amendment.” The government again appealed the injunction to the Supreme Court, where we expect a ruling this week.

The government’s claim that the injunction limits public officials’ own speech is absurd misdirection. The government can say whatever it wants publicly; it just cannot stop other Americans from saying something else. Free speech matters not to ensure that every pariah can say whatever odious thing he or she chooses. Rather, free speech prevents the government from identifying every critic as a pariah whose speech must be shut down.

We are all harmed when our rulers silence criticism. Our government’s self-inflicted deafness prevented officials and their constituents from hearing viewpoints that should have had a meaningful impact on our policy decisions. Instead, government censorship resulted time and again in the silencing of scientifically informed criticisms of, for example, harmful COVID policies. This allowed misguided and divisive policies to persist far too long.

The scope of the current government censorship regime is historically unprecedented. “The present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” the district court judge explained in his ruling. He went on, “The evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario… The United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’.” The Fifth Circuit panel concurred: “The Supreme Court has rarely been faced with a coordinated campaign of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life.”

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Cop City Indictments Threaten Press Freedom Too

THE DISTURBING INDICTMENT of 61 people who protested the Georgia police training facility commonly referred to as “Cop City” lays bare everything that is wrong with RICO laws and the prosecutors who abuse them. Even the author of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law, on which the Georgia law is based, agrees that it’s meant to fight organized crime, not stifle dissent.

The implications of the indictment for press freedom may seem like an afterthought considering everything else that is terrible about it. Its working theory is essentially that whenever some members of a protest movement commit crimes, everyone involved in the movement is responsible for the “conspiracy,” no matter how tenuous their connection to the alleged offense. It seeks to criminalize a centuries-old political theory — anarchism — and to frame the activism following George Floyd’s murder as a plot by domestic terrorists (the indictment says the quiet part out loud by listing the date Floyd was killed as the start of the “conspiracy”). Perhaps most importantly, it has upended the lives of all those baselessly indicted.

That said, the threat to press freedom is real and shouldn’t be ignored. Any source considering talking to a journalist about a protest or controversial cause couldn’t be blamed for thinking twice after reading the indictment.

“Defend the Atlanta Forest uses websites, social media, and statements to traditional media to sow disinformation and propaganda to promote its extremist political agenda, legitimize its behavior, and recruit new members,” prosecutors allege. “[I]n an effort to de-legitimize the facts as relayed by law enforcement … members of Defend the Atlanta Forest often contact news media and flood social media with claims that their unlawful actions are protected by the First Amendment.” 

The indictment also alleges that Defend the Atlanta Forest has “worked with external entities to produce videos and podcast interviews” where they discuss “anti-authority movements”; that the group holds “media-attended press conferences to control the story and promote their own narrative”; and that it posts “press releases, misleading information, propaganda, and disinformation” on its website.

The message is clear: Try to spread opinions cops don’t like through the media, and you might find your name listed after “State v.”

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