Tag: free speech

This Tennessee Man Spent 37 Days in Jail for Sharing an Anti-Trump Meme. He Says the Cops Should Pay for That.

In the aftermath of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s murder on September 10, his admirers were offended by online messages that denigrated him, condemned his views, and in some cases even celebrated his death. The people outraged by that commentary evidently included Nick Weems, sheriff of Perry County, Tennessee, who used the powers of his office to strike back at Kirk’s detractors.

As Reason‘s Joe Lancaster reported in October, Weems arranged the arrest of a Kirk critic, Henderson County resident Larry Bushart, on a flagrantly frivolous criminal charge. Because Bushart was unable to cover the staggering $2 million bond demanded for his release (which would have required him to “pay a bondsman at least $210,000,” Lancaster noted), he spent 37 days in jail before the district attorney for Perry County dropped the charge against him after the case drew widespread criticism.

Bushart’s arrest for constitutionally protected speech violated the First Amendment, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) argues in a federal lawsuit against Perry County, Weems, and Jason Morrow, an investigator in the sheriff’s office. The complaint, which was filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee, says the defendants also violated the Fourth Amendment by arresting Bushart without probable cause. And because they pursued a malicious prosecution, FIRE argues, they should be liable for punitive as well as compensatory damages.

“I spent over three decades in law enforcement, and have the utmost respect for the law,” says Bushart, whose career included 19 years at the Jackson Police Department, five years at the Haywood County Sheriff’s Office, and nine years at the Tennessee Department of Correction. “But I also know my rights, and I was arrested for nothing more than refusing to be bullied into censorship.”

Weems was irked by Bushart’s response to a candlelight vigil for Kirk that was scheduled for the evening of September 20 on the lawn of the Perry County Courthouse—an event that the sheriff himself had promoted on Facebook. That day, Bushart saw a post about the vigil on the “What’s Happening, Perry County?” Facebook page. Commenting on that message, Bushart shared eight anti-Kirk memes, including one highlighting a comment that Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, made the day after the January 2024 mass shooting at Perry High School in Iowa.

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Australian PM vows hate speech crackdown after Bondi Beach attack

PM Albanese announces strict measures against hate, extremism, and antisemitism after mass shooting at Bondi Beach Jewish festival

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised a sweeping crackdown on hate, division and radicalisation on Thursday after a mass shooting killed 15 people at a Jewish festival on Bondi Beach.

“Australians are shocked and angry. I am angry. It is clear we need to do more to combat this evil scourge, much more,” Albanese told a news conference.

The prime minister outlined a suite of measures to target extremist preachers, impose stiffer punishments, and refuse or cancel visas for people who spread “hate and division”.

As he spoke, mourners gathered for the funeral of a 10-year-old girl among those gunned down while celebrating Hanukkah on Sunday at Sydney’s iconic beach.

Critics in the Jewish Australian community and beyond have assailed the prime minister for not doing more to protect them from rising antisemitism.

New “aggravated hate speech” laws will punish preachers and leaders stoking hatred and violence, Albanese said.

He vowed harsher penalties, too.

Australia would develop a regime for listing organisations with leaders who engage in hate speech, he said.

“Serious vilification” based on race or advocating racial supremacy is to become a federal offence.

The government will also boost the home affairs minister’s powers to cancel or reject visas for people who spread “hate and division”, he said.

Albanese said a task force is being set up with a 12-month mission to ensure the education system “properly responds” to antisemitism.

“Every Jewish Australian has the right to be proud of who they are and what they believe,” he said.

“And every Jewish Australian has the right to feel safe, valued and respected for the contribution that they make to our great nation.”

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Faith on Trial in Canada as Parliament Moves to Rewrite the Rules of Speech

A Canadian parliamentary committee has set in motion a change that could recast the balance between expression and state control over “hate speech.”

Members of the House of Commons Justice and Human Rights Committee voted on December 9 to delete a longstanding clause in the Criminal Code that shields religious discussion made in good faith from prosecution.

The decision forms part of the government’s Combating Hate Act (Bill C-9), legislation that introduces new offences tied to “hate” and the public display of certain symbols.

The focus is on Section 319(3)(b), which currently ensures that “no person shall be convicted of an offence under subsection (2)…if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text.”

That safeguard would vanish if the Bloc Québécois amendment approved this month survives the remaining stages of debate.

Liberal MPs backed the Bloc’s proposal, which Bloc MP Rhéal Éloi Fortin introduced after his party leader, Yves-François Blanchet, made its passage a precondition for Bloc support of the bill.

Fortin argued that the religious exemption could permit “someone could commit actions or say things that would otherwise be forbidden under the Criminal Code.”

The amendment was adopted during a marathon session that came only after the committee chair, Liberal MP James Maloney, abruptly ended an earlier meeting and canceled the next one to allow MPs time to “regroup.”

On December 9, the committee returned for an eight-hour clause-by-clause review, with government members determined to complete key sections of the bill before the winter recess.

The broader legislation targets intimidation around religious institutions and bans the display of defined “hate” and “terrorism” symbols.

Yet most debate now centers on whether the change to Section 319(3)(b) opens the door to criminal proceedings against clergy or believers discussing moral or scriptural teachings.

As reported by The Catholic Register, Justice Minister and Attorney General Sean Fraser alleged that the measure poses no threat to religious freedom. “The amendment that the Bloc is proposing will … in no way, shape or form prevents a religious leader from reading their religious texts,” Fraser said. “It will not criminalize faith.”

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Minnesota High School Threatens to Suspend Students Who Talk Positively About ICE

A Minnesota high school has threatneed to suspend students who talk positively about Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) agents.

Paul Paetzel, the principal at Edina High School in Minnesota, has warned that making reference to the work of ICE agents and President Trump’s policy of mass deportations goes against the “culture” that his school is trying to foster.

He wrote in a letter parents:

I want to speak directly and proactively about the culture we are committed to creating at Edina High School.

As we continue to grow as a community, it is essential that we are clear about the expectations we hold for language and behavior that honor the dignity of every student.

Making light of immigration threats or referencing ICE in ways that cause fear or humiliation is a serious offense and not representative of our core values.

Behavior of this nature fundamentally violates our commitment to providing a safe and equitable learning environment free from harassment.

Such language and behaviors directly contradict Edina Public Schools’ vision and mission, and what we expect of our students.

If this type of behavior occurs, we will honor the discipline policy and move forward with consequences up to and including suspension.

Our responsibility is to protect every student’s right to feel safe, respected, and valued at school.

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Portland jury clears black man of assault because white man he stabbed had said the n-word

A black man was acquitted of stabbing a white man in Oregon after he claimed the attack was self-defense because the victim called him a racial slur. 

Gary Edwards, 43, was charged with second-degree assault for stabbing a man in Portland near a light rail stop on July 8, KPTV reported.

However, he was found not guilty of the crime on October 31 after the jury learned the victim was using racial slurs in the aftermath of the altercation.

Edwards, who is homeless and has a previous assault conviction, admitted to knifing the victim, Gregory Howard Jr., but claimed it was in self-defense because the other man called him the n-word, according to Oregon Live.

Security cameras, with no audio, captured Edwards, with a fixed-blade knife in hand, approaching Howard as he sat on a beach.

Howard immediately jumped up and pushed Edwards, then the two scuffled until Edwards stabbed Howard in the shoulder.

Edwards defense attorney Daniel Small reportedly told the jury that his client was approaching Howard to see if he would trade his knife for cigarettes. 

‘What other than racism could explain why Mr. Howard perceived hatred, animosity and aggression from a complete stranger,’ Small said.

Moments later, body camera footage from security officers captured Howard shouting a racist slur at Edwards after he had been stabbed.

It is unclear if there is any evidence to suggest that Howard used the slur before he was stabbed.

Prosecutor Katherine Williams told the jury it did not matter what the victim said after he was stabbed.

‘The defendant is not scared for his life. He didn’t retreat, he sauntered up – and he sauntered away after he stabbed someone. The defendant created the situation,’ Williams said.

Despite the prosecutors pleas, the jury found Edwards not guilty.

Edwards lawyer insisted the case never should have gone to trial.

‘I laid my cards out on the table and told the state how the trial would go, but it didn’t matter,’ he told Oregon Live.

Edwards, who is homeless, spent about three months in custody before the trail after prosecutors argued he was a threat to the public due to his lengthy criminal record, according to the outlet.

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US Under Secretary Warns Britain That the First Amendment Isn’t Negotiable

This week, Sarah Rogers, the US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, touched down in the UK not to sip tea or admire the Crown Jewels, but to deliver a message as subtle as a boot in the face: stop trying to censor Americans in America.

Yes, really.

According to Rogers, the UK’s speech regulator, Ofcom, the bureaucratic enforcer behind Britain’s censorship law, the Online Safety Act (OSA), has been getting ideas. Dangerous ones. Like attempting to extend its censorship regime outside the United Kingdom and onto American soil. You know, that country across the ocean where the First Amendment exists and people can still say controversial things without a court summons landing on their doormat.

To GB News, Rogers called this attempt at international thought-policing “a deal-breaker,” “a non-starter,” and “a red line.”

In State Department speak, that is basically the equivalent of someone slamming the brakes, looking Britain in the eye, and saying, “You try that again, and there will be consequences.”

To understand how Britain got itself into this mess, you have to understand the Online Safety Act. It is a law that reads like it was drafted by a committee of alarmed Victorian schoolteachers who just discovered the internet.

The OSA is supposedly designed to “protect children online,” which sounds noble until you realize it means criminalizing large swaths of adult speech, forcing platforms to delete legal content, and requiring identity and age checks that would make a KGB officer blush.

It even threatens prosecution over “psychological harm.” And now, apparently, it wants to enforce all of that in other countries too.

Rogers was not impressed, saying Ofcom has tried to impose the OSA extraterritorially and attempted to censor Americans in America. That, she made clear, is outrageous.

It’s more than a diplomatic spat. Rogers made it painfully clear the US isn’t going to just write a sternly worded letter and move on. There is legislative retaliation on the table.

The GRANITE Act, Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny & Extortion, is more than a clever acronym. It is the legislative middle finger Washington can consider if the UK keeps pretending it can veto American free speech from 3,500 miles away.

The bill, already circulating in the Wyoming state legislature, would strip foreign governments of their usual protections from lawsuits in the US if they try to censor American citizens or companies.

In other words, if Ofcom wants to slap US platforms with foreign censorship rules, they had better be ready to defend themselves in an American courtroom where “freedom of expression” isn’t a slogan, it is a constitutional right.

Rogers confirmed that the US legislature will likely consider that and will certainly consider other options if the British government doesn’t back down.

Of course, the GRANITE Act didn’t come out of nowhere. Rogers’s warning didn’t either. It is a response to the increasingly unhinged state of free speech in the UK, where adults can be arrested for memes, priests investigated for praying silently, and grandmothers interrogated for criticizing gender ideology.

“When you don’t rigorously defend that right, even when it’s inconvenient, even when the speech is offensive,” Rogers said, “you end up in these absurd scenarios where you have comedians arrested for tweets.”

This is the modern UK, where “hate speech” has been stretched to include everything from telling jokes to sharing news stories about immigration. And now, under the OSA, that censorious spirit has gone global.

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Democrats Would Like To Suppress Free Speech The Way Britain Does

It’s easy to look at a collapsing civil society in a foreign country and comfort ourselves that, despite all our problems, we’re not as bad off as those people. Americans are especially apt to do this with our cousins in Great Britain, whose country is now in a state of precipitous and probably irreversible decline, and whose political leadership is openly hostile to the native population.

But it’s a mistake to comfort ourselves this way, partly because the corruption of a place like Britain — the online censorship, the criminalization of disfavored opinions, the two-tiered system of justice — doesn’t stay confined to their shores but eventually makes its way to ours. Indeed, many Democrats here in America don’t see the tyranny of modern Britain as a cautionary tale but as a template to follow.

A startling case in point is a recent story from Drop Site News by Paul Holden, who chronicles how a secret campaign to elevate Kier Starmer to prime minister included a scheme to demonetize news outlets deemed unfriendly to the Starmer wing of the Labour Party. One of those news outlets was The Federalist.

In the middle of the 2020 presidential campaign, a shadowy UK-based group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) worked with NBC News and Google insiders to attempt to blacklist and demonetize The Federalist under false pretexts — an effort that was ultimately unsuccessful. The Orwellian-named NBC News Verification Unit reported in June 2020 that Google had banned the website ZeroHedge from its advertising platform and had warned The Federalist that it too might be banned.

But this wasn’t just “reporting,” it was part of a larger political op. According to the NBC News report itself, Google’s actions came only after the company had been “notified of research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a British nonprofit that combats online hate and misinformation. They found that 10 U.S-based websites have published what they say are racist articles about the protests, and projected that the websites would make millions of dollars through Google Ads.”

And who notified Google about this CCDH report? NBC News did. This was a transparent effort by left-wing activists at NBC News, together with left-wing activists at the CCDH, to demonetize and silence The Federalist for the crime of noticing the hypocrisy surrounding BLM protests and strict Covid lockdowns.

But who or what was the CCDH, and why did it target The Federalist? At the time, the CCDH’s connection to the Starmer political machine and the Labour Party was unclear. But as Holden’s reporting reveals, the CCDH was part of a larger partisan political project that targeted The Federalist, Breitbart, ZeroHedge, and others. “As Keir Starmer rose to power in Britain, the political machine responsible for his rise ran a behind-the-scenes campaign to demonetize the U.S. news outlet Breitbart,” writes Holden. “The attacks on Breitbart were part of a targeted campaign against media outlets on both the left and right considered hostile to the centrist faction of the Labour Party, according to a trove of documents that expose the operation.”

At the center of this campaign was a man named Morgan McSweeney, who is now Prime Minster Starmer’s chief of staff. Between 2018 and 2020, McSweeney served as the company secretary and managing director for an organization called Labour Together that funded a think tank called Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). At the time, SFFN claimed to be a grassroots effort organized and run by a group of anonymous concerned citizens inspired by the demonetizing campaigns run by Sleeping Giants, which had targeted Breitbart in the U.S. during the 2016 election.

In fact, SFFN was an astroturfing operation created and run by people in positions of real power inside the Labour Party, including not just McSweeney but Steve Reed, now a senior member of Starmer’s cabinet. The original purpose of SFFN, as Holden reports, was “to defeat the left-wing of the Labour Party and the media ecosystem that supported it.” The operations of SFFN, however, expanded to include right-wing outlets like Breitbart and The Federalist, which it saw as impediments to Starmer’s rise.

Eventually, SFFN was absorbed into a new entity, CCDH, whose CEO is a man named Imran Ahmed. Ahmed worked with McSweeney in the London office of Labour Together, which first launched the SFFN project. Ahmed has said that McSweeney gave him a “shell company” called Brixton Endeavors that later became CCDH and in early 2020 absorbed the entire SFFN project. McSweeney has tried to distance himself from all this but as Holden notes, McSweeney was the sole director of Brixton Endeavors between 2018 and September 2019, and remained a director of CCDH until April 2020.

During this time, a plan was developed to target disfavored news outlets by going after their advertisers. As Ahmed himself said in an October 2020 U.S. State Department conference on antisemitism, the CCDH “put together a program called stop funding fake news” designed to undermine ad revenue of certain news sites. He boasted that the weak points of news websites is that they’re expensive to run, so eliminating their ad revenue meant that “within a couple of months, you can completely eviscerate the economic base of a website.”

What Ahmed and his underlings at CCDH needed was a willing news outlet to “report” on its targeting of certain websites for being “hateful” or “racist.” This they found in the NBC News Verification Unit, which tried to goad Google into demonetizing The Federalist and others, and then “reported” it as news.

Take a step back and realize that this is the equivalent of people like Ron Klain or Jeff Zients, who served as chiefs of staff during the Biden administration, running secretive demonetization ops against conservative news outlets in America.

But even that isn’t very far-fetched. After all, the Biden administration’s State Department used its now-defunct Global Engagement Center to fund censorship operations by groups like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, which targeted The Federalist and The Daily Wire, among others. We here at The Federalist joined with The Daily Wire in a lawsuit against the State Department in 2023, claiming these groups, supported by the federal government, sought to defund and suppress our reporting and commentary in violation of our First Amendment rights.

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Congress Goes Parental on Social Media and Your Privacy

Washington has finally found a monster big enough for bipartisan unity: the attention economy. In a moment of rare cross-aisle cooperation, lawmakers have introduced two censorship-heavy bills and a tax scheme under the banner of the UnAnxious Generation package.

The name, borrowed from Jonathan Haidt’s pop-psychology hit The Anxious Generation, reveals the obvious pitch: Congress will save America’s children from Silicon Valley through online regulation and speech controls.

Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, who has built a career out of publicly scolding tech companies, says he’s going “directly at their jugular.”

The plan: tie legal immunity to content “moderation,” tax the ad money, and make sure kids can’t get near an app without producing an “Age Signal.” If that sounds like a euphemism for surveillance, that’s because it is.

The first bill, the Deepfake Liability Act, revises Section 230, the sacred shield that lets platforms host your political rants, memes, and conspiracy reels without getting sued for them.

Under the new proposal, that immunity becomes conditional on a vague “duty of care” to prevent deepfake porn, cyberstalking, and “digital forgeries.”

TIME’s report doesn’t define that last term, which could be a problem since it sounds like anything from fake celebrity videos to an unflattering AI meme of your senator. If “digital forgery” turns out to include parody or satire, every political cartoonist might suddenly need a lawyer on speed dial.

Auchincloss insists the goal is accountability, not censorship. “If a company knows it’ll be liable for deepfake porn, cyberstalking, or AI-created content, that becomes a board-level problem,” he says. In other words, a law designed to make executives sweat.

But with AI-generated content specifically excluded from Section 230 protections, the bill effectively redefines the internet’s liability protections.

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Why Banning Hate Speech Is Evil

We often hear demands to ban so-called “hate speech.” Negative remarks about various groups, including women, black people, homosexuals, Jews, Muslims, can it is alleged, have a negative effect on members of the group who hear or see the speech. It encourages people to hate them and cements negative stereotypes about them in people’s minds. In addition, hearing or seeing “hate speech” offends the members of the group. Free speech may have some value, but whatever value it has it outweighed by the evil of “hate speech.” Almost any group can claim to be victimized by “hate speech,” except for white heterosexual males and Christians, but “hate speech” applies primarily to members of so-called “protected classes.”

From a libertarian standpoint, the question of banning so-called “hate speech” is a no-brainer. Banning any kind of speech, whether it is good or bad, is incompatible with a free society. As the great Murray Rothbard has taught us, all rights are property rights. Everyone can set the rules for speech on his own property, and no one has the right to control what anyone says on someone else’s property. This includes speech which counts as “offensive.” Of course, we don’t live in a libertarian society, but we should come as close as we can in practice to it. This means following the strictest possible interpretation of the First Amendment. “Congress shall make no law. . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” “No law” means “no law” and that includes laws against so-called “hate speech.”

Some states have “hate speech” laws on the books. New York is considering a law, already passed in California that requires social media companies to report “hate speech.” This is the “Stop Hiding Hate Act” and has been passed by the State’s Assembly. Here is an account of the measure from Vince Chang, who favors it:

“Under pressure from the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] and other groups, internet platforms have voluntarily adopted measures to regulate hate speech. The ADL described some of the measures that have been taken: Facebook prohibited Holocaust denial content, hired a vice president of civil rights, changed parts of its advertising platform to prohibit various forms of discrimination; expanded policies against content that undermined the legitimacy of the election; and built a team to study and eliminate bias in artificial intelligence. Due to pressure from ADL and other civil rights organizations, Twitter banned linked content, URL links to content outside the platform that promotes violence and hateful conduct. Reddit added its first global hate policy, providing for the removal of subreddits and users that “promote hate based on identity or vulnerability.”

We can see how such laws have a chilling effect on speech if we look at bans on so-called “hate speech” in foreign countries where they are already in operation. I want to focus especially on the Scottish Hate Speech Act.

Let’s first look at an official summary of the Scottish act, from the Scottish parliament site:

“Hate crime is the phrase used to describe behaviour which is both criminal and based on prejudice.

There are already laws in place to protect certain groups from hate crime.

This Bill aims to do three things. It updates these existing laws and pulls most of these laws into one Bill. It also adds to the groups currently specifically protected by hate crime laws.

Criminal courts can generally take into account any prejudice when sentencing a person. Also, people are protected from hate crime through specific laws that apply.

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An Unexpected Con To End Free Speech

Rooting out terrorism and antisemitism was the supposed reason that plainclothed ICE agents arrested doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, after she coauthored an op-ed calling on Tufts University to divest from companies with ties to Israel due to the killing and starvation of Palestinian civilians. There is an international movement to boycott, sanction, and divest from Israel, but in the United States, President Donald Trump is imperiling the freedom even to publicly discuss such ideas, which should, in effect, be considered a test case for his larger attack on free speech. So far, the test is going well for Trump.

In what seems a long time ago, in 2024, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, released a blueprint for what it called “a national strategy to combat antisemitism” by addressing what it described as “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement.’” In essence, and in what’s amounted to an extraordinarily effective work of political theater that has been sold to my own state, Massachusetts, among other places, that foundation dubbed its political opponents “supporters of terrorism.” It also labeled organizations working in opposition to its agenda a “terrorist support network,” and claimed for itself the noble mantle of “combating antisemitism” — even as it deftly redefined antisemitism from hatred of Jewish people to criticism of the U.S.-Israel alliance. President Trump has put the Heritage Foundation strategy into action and gone even further.

It may be his most original idea. As political scientist Barnett Rubin put it in September, “President Trump always says he’s very creative and accomplishes things no one has ever done before. And now he is building a fascist regime which is legitimized by the fight against antisemitism. Nobody ever thought of doing that before.”

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