Tag: 1st amendment

Three charged for shouting slurs at praying Muslim students while waving bacon in Florida

Three men stormed a University of South Florida parking garage and harassed Muslim students during dawn prayer on Tuesday — an incident captured in videos that showed the group shouting slurs, waving bacon and crowding worshipers as they bowed, reports said.

Police identified the men as Christopher Svochak of Waco, Texas; Richard Penskoski of Canyon, Okla., and Ricardo Yepez of Tampa, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

All three face a felony count of disturbing schools and religious assemblies under Florida’s hate-crime enhancement statute, along with misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and disrupting a school or lawful assembly.

None have ties to the university, police said.

The charges followed a multi-day investigation sparked by footage showing the men approaching students during fajr prayer on the roof of the Collins Boulevard Parking Garage.

One man carried a cardboard box reading “Kaaba 2.0 Jesus is Lord,” while another wore a thobe emblazoned with “Jesus is God.”

Students said the group stood inches away as they prayed, shouted insults including “Bow down to lord Jesus Christ” and “Your prophet married a 6 year old,” and taunted them with bacon immediately after the prayer ended, according to a Reddit post.

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Anti-Christian Judge Prevents Mother from Taking Daughter to Church or Even Reading the Bible

Child custody cases are often fraught with trying and unusual behaviors and demands, but the recent custody order from a judge in Maine has taken bigotry against Christians to a new level.

Emily Bickford had a daughter, Ava who turns 13 in January, with Matt Bradeen. The two were not married, and Emily has retained primary custody while the father has visitation rights.

Emily is Christian and has worked to provide a foundation of faith for her daughter, something her non-custodial father opposes.  He has been described as ‘hating’ Christianity.

Bradeen took the issue to court, found a former ACLU president who had become a judge, and the war on religion commenced.

The judge issued a custody order that can only be viewed as hostile to Christianity. The order forbids Ava from associating with any of her church friends, attending church or Christian events, and even prevents Ava from studying the Bible, “religious philosophy,” or discussing her faith with her own mother.  Ava is also not allowed to participate in Christian holiday events such as Christmas.

According to Liberty Council, the mother and daughter had been attending Calvary Chapel, an evangelical Christian church in Portland, ME, for 3½ years. Ava shared her excitement with her father over her upcoming baptism and that is when the trouble began.

Instead of sharing his daughter’s excitement, even if his views differ, he engaged the leftist judge and then brought in a Marxist former sociology professor from California as a “witness.” The witness testified that Calvary Chapel (and any church that believes the Bible) is a “cult” that causes psychological harm to children.

“The judge found that Emily is a fit parent EXCEPT for the fact that she is a Christian,” Liberty Council’s Founder and Chairman Mat Staver notes.

“The judge mocked Ava and Emily’s faith by purposefully refusing to capitalize the word ‘God’ — something I have never seen.”

The judge even chastised Emily for allowing the church pastor to pray for Ava. And the judge ruled that Emily could not take Ava to ANY church unless Matt approves. And Matt has steadfastly refused to approve ANY church,” he continued.

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Hood County Sheriff Arrests Man for Social Media Posts

The Hood County Sheriff’s Office arrested Kolton Krottinger, a Navy veteran and local Granbury activist, for a social media post.

According to a criminal complaint, Krottinger had posted on social media under the guise of someone else. Residents have suggested that the October 2 post—showing another local activist appearing to support then-Granbury school board candidate Monica Brown—is the one in question.

Hood County Constable John Shirley said he thought the post was a joke, and that the individual the post impersonated would never have supported Brown “because she very openly, loudly, and publicly hates her.”

Krottinger was charged on November 5 with “online impersonation” in the third degree. His lawyer, Rob Christian, said he had been arrested for “posting a meme.” In his 25 years as a district attorney and criminal defense attorney, Christian told the Dallas Express he had “never seen anyone get arrested for engaging in political speech.”

Nate Criswell, former Hood County GOP chair, believes the arrest is politically motivated. “This charge is based on a satirical post where he humorously photoshopped a political rival’s image, making it appear as though she supported Monica Brown for school board,” he wrote in a petition he started for law enforcement to drop the charges. “Importantly, no actual account was created, making the charge baseless and unfair. Additionally, other elements of the statute were not met.”

Constable Shirley, who serves criminal and civil papers in the county’s 2nd precinct, agreed that something about the arrest seems wrong. “This kind of stuff really smells of authoritarianism.”

Texas Scorecard obtained a copy of the conditions of Krottinger’s $10,000 bond. He cannot access social media, nor can he have any contact with the other activist. Criswell said social media is where Kolton makes his livelihood and called the social media ban “egregious.”

Brandon Hall, who represents Granbury and others in District 11 on the State Board of Education, expressed alarm.

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‘All they did was wear wristbands!’ Judges question school district’s ban on ‘XX’ at girls’ games

Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island risk becoming hotbeds of censorship by school districts if the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals construes perceived offense as harassment. School districts risk massive liability for harassment if it does not.

Lawyers for censored parents and New Hampshire’s Bow School District laid out alternate visions of legal calamity to a three-judge panel of the Boston-based court at a hearing Wednesday on the constitutionality of Bow banning “XX” wristbands, a silent form of advocacy for female-only sports, from school athletic events.

Parents and a grandparent sued the district more than a year ago, after it threatened to arrest them at a Sept. 17, 2024, girls’ soccer game featuring a male player for not removing their wristbands, which refer to the female chromosome pair, and issued no-trespass orders. Bow set up a “protest zone” for critics of male inclusion soon after the suit was filed. 

Their passive protest shortly followed a federal judge blocking The Free State’s law that “prohibits biological males from participating in female athletics,” an injunction that applied only to the male athletes who sued, not every male who identifies as a girl.

A district judge nominated by President George H.W. Bush rejected a preliminary injunction against Bow this spring, claiming the wristbands send a “demeaning and harassing” message to males who identify as girls and participate in girls’ sports.

Wednesday’s oral argument suggested the panel might buck the 1st Circuit’s reputation as a rubber stamp for schools on gender identity, frequently leaving Bow School District lawyer Jonathan Shirley seeming to stumble for answers that would satisfy their questions.

Another panel upheld a school district’s ban on a student wearing an “Only Two Genders” shirt because it “assertedly demeans characteristics of personal identity” even if done “passively, silently, and without mentioning any specific students.” Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas blasted their colleagues for not accepting that case.

One of Wednesday’s panel members, Judge Julie Rikelman, served on another that upheld a school district’s practice of hiding students’ identification as the opposite sex from their parents. President Biden nominated Rikelman, who argued to preserve federal abortion rights in Dobbs, a month after SCOTUS ruled against her abortion-clinic client.

The 1st Circuit was the only federal appeals court until recently without any active GOP-nominated judges, which Reuters reported has made its lower courts “magnets for lawsuits challenging Trump’s agenda by Democratic state attorneys general and advocacy groups.” The Senate confirmed President Trump nominee Joshua Dunlap on Tuesday.

Wednesday’s panel included two judges with senior status, meaning they are allowed to handle a reduced caseload compared to active judges: Jeffrey Howard, nominated by President George W. Bush, and Sandra Lynch, by President Clinton.

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Wyoming Parent Wins Free Speech Lawsuits Against Sweetwater County School Officials

It’s one thing to bake cupcakes for the school fundraiser. It’s another to find yourself explaining your Facebook posts to a judge. Yet that’s precisely where Kari Cochran, a Wyoming mother with a stubborn streak and a social media account, ended up. Twice.

For the uninitiated, Kari isn’t your run-of-the-mill parent who just grumbles in the car line. She once sat on the Sweetwater County School Board, where she learned that speaking your mind can make you the most talked-about person in the faculty lounge.

Her habit of asking uncomfortable questions about district leadership might have made her unpopular, but it also made her the kind of parent who doesn’t disappear quietly when things get messy.

Cochran’s online posts, sharp enough to make a superintendent wince, were her way of keeping the school district accountable. “Publicly accused [the] petitioner of unprofessional and unethical conduct,” one court filing complained.

In other words, she said things out loud that people in small towns usually only whisper over coffee at the diner.

Her criticism didn’t sit well with everyone. Two people connected to the district, Assistant Superintendent Nicole Bolton and Laura Libby Vinger, the wife of Superintendent Josh Libby, decided the comments had crossed into stalking. They filed civil petitions to try to stop her from speaking.

It didn’t work. Both cases were tossed out this year. Circuit Court Judge Michael Greer dismissed Bolton’s petition in August, reminding everyone that public officials are “subjected to public scrutiny.” (If you’re paid by taxpayers, you don’t get to hide from them.) A magistrate later dismissed Vinger’s case, too.

Cochran was, understandably, relieved. “Parents, students, or staff members should never feel that they should be silenced or punished for standing up for what’s right,” she said to The Center Square.

Her lawyer, Parker Jackson of the Goldwater Institute, had a less sentimental view.

If Cochran had lost, he explained, she might have been banned from attending district events or even school board meetings. “It essentially would’ve turned these school officials into roaming censors where, wherever they didn’t want Kari to be, they could show up and force her to leave,” Jackson said.

Cochran’s battle didn’t begin with Facebook posts. It began with heartbreak. Her son Joran, a graduate of Rock Springs High School, died by suicide in 2023 after being bullied.

It’s the kind of loss that rearranges your life completely. She resigned from the school board afterward, but she didn’t stop pushing for better mental health support and accountability in the district.

When she asked to see her son’s school records, the district refused. Then, as if to make her point for her, the board introduced a rule restricting what topics citizens could address during public comment. So Cochran did what most parents do when the microphone is taken away: she turned to Facebook.

Her posts gained traction. They also drew ire. The day a sheriff showed up with not one but two stalking petitions, Cochran said she felt “complete fear,” unsure what she’d done wrong.

“Complete fear” seems like an understatement for having your free speech hauled into court by the very people you’re criticizing.

The rulings didn’t erase the months of stress. Cochran said the ordeal drained her and took away time she wanted to spend with her daughter before high school began.

But her victory sends a message: criticizing your school district may make you unpopular, but it isn’t a crime.

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Huge win for Wisconsin mom who was sued for calling a teacher woke

A Wisconsin mom who was sued for defamation after calling an English teacher woke has won her free speech case.

Mother-of-five Scarlett Johnson took to social media in October 2022 to criticize Mary MacCudden for serving as Mequon-Thiensville School District’s social justice coordinator.

‘Why the hell am I paying for a “Social Justice Coordinator” in my school district?’ Johnson tweeted alongside a screenshot of MacCudden’s LinkedIn profile.

‘This is just what @mtschools needs; more woke, White women w/ a god complex. Thank you, White savior.’ 

Johnson, who is affiliated with education lobby group Moms for Liberty, in other social media posts, also referred to DEI specialists as ‘woke lunatics’ who ‘bully’ parents ‘into silence and compliance’.

MacCudden, who had resigned from her position at Homestead High School in January 2022, filed a defamation suit against Johnson in response.

She won her case against Johnson in lower court, but the Moms for Liberty activist’s legal team appealed the ruling.

The Wisconsin appeals court on Tuesday ruled to reverse the circuit courts ruling after determining that her statements ‘do not constitute defamation’.

MacCudden resigned from the school district in January 2022 but did not update her LinkedIn profile, according to a press release from Johnson’s lawyers.

Roughly 10 months later, Johnson discovered the profile, which listed MacCudden as the district’s ‘Social Justice Coordinator’, and started criticizing the district online.

MacCudden responded with a defamation suit, which went to trial.  

An appeals court has now ruled Johnson did not defame the former teacher because her statements ‘cannot be proven true or false.’

‘Free speech belongs to every mom, dad, and citizen who demands answers and accountability from their government,’ Johnson said in a statement by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL).

‘I am grateful that WILL stood alongside me in this legal battle. Parents across the country are speaking out against radical ideology in our schools, and our fight does not stop today.’

Johnson’s lawyers argued that while Johnson’s social media posts were ‘pervasive’, her words were ‘more restrained than a lot of online speech’.

Her legal counsel added that her posts could not be defamatory because they were ‘statements of opinion that are not provably false’.

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Jailed in America for Free Speech

In the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, many folks who dared to express views of him and his work outside the mainstream lost their jobs, professional standing and State Department visas as they were fired or otherwise disciplined by employers or bureaucrats who concluded that anti-Kirk views could harm the employers’ businesses or were inconsistent with institutional values.

All discipline based on speech needs to be scrutinized strictly. Yet, even in states with strong public accommodations laws — laws that generally protect free speech in the workplace and in public places — at will employees can generally be disciplined for expressive activities that their bosses reasonably fear may impair the product or services they were hired to produce or deliver, or undermine the values or message of the institution with which they are affiliated.

Thus, reasonable fears of the loss of business or charitable donations due to the anti-Kirk public sentiments may lawfully result in silencing or firing those employees.

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Prosecutors Drop Charges Against Tennessee Man Over Facebook Meme

Last month, Tennessee authorities arrested a man for posting a Facebook meme, a clear violation of his First Amendment rights, and held him on a $2 million bond. This week, prosecutors dropped the case, but that doesn’t negate the weeks he spent in jail on a bogus charge.

As Reason previously reported, police arrested 61-year-old Larry Bushart for posting a meme on Facebook. In a thread about the murder of Charlie Kirk, Bushart posted a meme with a picture of President Donald Trump and the quote “We have to get over it,” which Trump said after a January 2024 shooting at Perry High School in Perry, Iowa.

Sheriff Nick Weems of nearby Perry County said Bushart intentionally posted the meme to make people think he was referring to Perry County High School. “Investigators believe Bushart was fully aware of the fear his post would cause and intentionally sought to create hysteria within the community,” Weems told The Tennesseean.

On September 21, deputies arrested Bushart at his house and booked him on a charge of Threats of Mass Violence on School Property and Activities, a felony that carries at least a year in prison. In body camera footage posted online by Liliana Segura of The Intercept, Bushart is incredulous when presented with the charge. “I don’t think I committed a crime,” he tells the officer, jokingly admitting that “I may have been an asshole.”

“That’s not illegal,” the officer replies as he leads Bushart into a cell.

Unfortunately, it was no laughing matter: A judge imposed a $2 million bond. Getting out on bail would require Bushart to come up with at least $210,000. According to the Perry County Circuit Court website, Bushart had a hearing scheduled for October 9, where he could file a motion for a reduced bond, but a court clerk told Reason that the hearing was “reset” for December 4. As a result, Bushart sat in jail for weeks.

Right away, it should have been clear how flimsy the case was. But the sheriff doubled down.

As Segura reported at The Intercept, Weems personally responded to people on Facebook suggesting Bushart was arrested because authorities misread a picture that briefly referenced a prior news event on the other side of the country. “We were very much aware of the meme being from an Iowa shooting,” Weems wrote. But it “created mass hysteria to parents and teachers…that led the normal person to conclude that he was talking about our Perry County High School.”

“Yet there were no public signs of this hysteria,” Segura notes. “Nor was there much evidence of an investigation—or any efforts to warn county schools.”

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Leftists Are Pushing for Global Speech Censorship

The Democratic Party, and the global Left in general, spent the last five years crying about “mis/disinformation” and the need for more oversight of social media platforms and the Internet in general. It is anathema to the people who think they are our moral and intellectual superiors that we might say, write, or think things with which they disagree.

In moves that would make George Orwell turn over in his grave, the Biden administration tried to force the “Disinformation Governance Board” on America. Turns out that board was born after a 2022 speech given by former President Barack Obama at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center — a speech that pushed for broad censorship of the Internet.

Michael Shellenberger is now sounding the alarm that global censorship is coming unless we stop it.

The entire post is long, but we’ll highlight the most salient (and alarming) points:

But now, foreign governments, including Europe, the UK, Brazil, Australia, and others are demanding censorship, including of the American people. The risk is that US tech companies will find it significantly less expensive to have a single global censorship regime and just go along with foreign censorship requests. Facebook complied with Biden administration demands to censor because it needed Biden’s help in dealing with European censorship officials. And the Brazilian government forced Elon Musk to continue censoring the Brazilian people after it froze Starlink’s assets.

And Public has discovered that the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, which is led by Obama’s former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, is at the heart of a new, secretive, and possibly illegal censorship initiative that appears even more ambitious than the one Obama proposed in 2022.

On September 24, the Cyber Policy Center hosted a secret dinner between its leaders and top censorship officials from Europe, UK, Brazil, California and Australia. The meeting was titled “Compliance and Enforcement in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape.” Frank McCourt, the same person behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, financed the gathering through his “Project Liberty Institute,” (PLI), toward which he gave $500 million to “strengthen democracy” and “foster responsible technology.”

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A D.C. Man Was Arrested for Mocking National Guard Troops with Star Wars’ ‘Imperial March.’ Now He’s Suing.

A Washington, D.C., resident who was handcuffed and detained in September for mocking National Guard soldiers by playing “The Imperial March” from Star Wars on his cellphone is suing the soldiers and police officers for their stormtrooper-like behavior.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of D.C. filed a federal lawsuit today on behalf of Sam O’Hara, arguing that his detention violated his First and Fourth Amendment rights by cutting off his peaceful protest.

“The law might have tolerated government conduct of this sort a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” O’Hara’s lawsuit states. “But in the here and now, the First Amendment bars government officials from shutting down peaceful protests, and the Fourth Amendment (along with the District’s prohibition on false arrest) bars groundless seizures.”

After President Donald Trump deployed National Guard troops to D.C., O’Hara began following National Guard soldiers around playing “The Imperial March” on his cell phone as a form of protest. His lawsuit says O’Hara wanted “to encourage the public to view the deployment as a waste of tax dollars, a needless display of force, and a surreal danger.”

According to his lawsuit, on September 11, O’Hara was tailing four Ohio National Guard soldiers and doing his usual bit. 

“Less than two minutes after the protest began,” the lawsuit says, “Sgt. [Devon] Beck turned around and said, ‘Hey man, if you’re going to keep following us, we can contact Metro PD and they can come handle you if that’s what you want to do. Is that what you want to do?'”

O’Hara allegedly did not respond but continued to follow, at which point the Empire decided to strike back. 

Beck called the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) of Washington, D.C. The lawsuit claims that shortly after several MPD cars arrived. The MPD officers allegedly accused O’Hara of harassing the soldiers, and they detained and handcuffed him.

When O’Hara argued that he was engaged in protest, one of the MPD officers allegedly responded, “That’s not a protest. You better define protest. This isn’t a protest. You are not protesting.”

However, recording and mocking law enforcement are both firmly protected by the First Amendment, as long as one doesn’t interfere with their duties.

Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote in 1987, in a ruling striking down a Houston ordinance that made it unlawful to oppose or interrupt a police officer, that “the freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.”

To put it another way, if you act like an autocratic villain when someone compares you to an autocratic villain, you just might be an autocratic villain.

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