Tag: free speech

Man Who Was Arrested for Flipping Off Cop Settles for $175,000

A man who was arrested and charged for flipping off a Vermont State Police (VSP) officer settled his case last month for $175,000.

“Far too often, police abuse their authority to retaliate against and suppress speech they personally find offensive or insulting,” Lia Ernst, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Vermont, tells Reason about the case. “This settlement demonstrates that violating these rights does not come without a cost.”

Through the settlement, Gregory Bombard will receive $100,000 in damages. The ACLU of Vermont and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which both represented Bombard in his suit, will receive the remaining $75,000.

All told, Bombard spent “about a year fighting the criminal charges and more than three years seeking declaratory relief,” a spokesperson for FIRE tells Reason.

Jay Riggen, the officer who arrested Bombard, “retired from VSP effective May 31, 2024,” a spokesperson for the Vermont State Police tells Reason. “We have no additional comment on this case.”

In February 2018, Bombard was stopped by Vermont State Trooper Riggen, who believed Bombard had given him the finger while driving—an allegation Bombard denies. However, after Riggen walked away from the car, Bombard flipped Riggen off and swore at the officer in frustration for having been pulled over.

In response, Riggen pulled Bombard over again and arrested him for disorderly conduct. “The first one may have been an error,” said Riggen during the arrest, referring to the reason for the initial stop, but “the second one certainly was not.”

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California teachers were right to severely punish girl, 7, for writing these words under Black Lives Matter drawing she gave to friend, judge rules

A California judge has ruled that teachers were right to punish a seven-year-old girl over a Black Lives Matter drawing because ‘she’s too young to have First Amendment rights.’

The first grader was banned from recess and drawing pictures at Viejo Elementary in Orange County after she added the words ‘any life’ below Black Lives Matter on a picture she drew and and gave to a black friend.

The picture showed the words ‘Black Lives Matter’ with four round shapes in various different tones of brown, beige and yellow, which was intended to ‘represent her friends’ who were ‘racially-mixed’. 

The girl’s family filed a lawsuit last year against the Capistrano Unified School District, claiming her First Amendment Rights were violated during the 2021 incident.

But US Central District Court Judge David Card ruled that ‘Students have the right to be free from speech that denigrates their race while at school’. Card added that the drawing was not protected by the First Amendment because of the age of the girl, named B.B. in the suit, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Judge Card wrote: ‘An elementary school … is not a marketplace of ideas… Thus, the downsides of regulating speech there is not as significant as it is in high schools, where students are approaching voting age and controversial speech could spark conducive conversation.’

Moreover, Judge Card wrote, ‘a parent might second-guess (the principal’s) conclusion, but his decision to discipline B.B. belongs to him, not the federal courts.’

Card added that ‘Undoubtedly, B.B.’s intentions were innocent… B.B. testified that she gifted the Drawing to M.C. to make her feel comfortable after her class learned about Martin Luther King Jr.’

B.B. was punished by her school after her friend, known as M.C. in the suit, took the picture home, where a parent saw it and found it offensive, emailing the school and demanding they take action.

This prompted principal Jesus Becerra to tell B.B. the drawing was inappropriate and racist. He then punished B.B. by making her publicly apologize on the playground to her classmates and teachers. B.B. was also banned from recess and from drawing pictures for two weeks.

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Tennessee Woman’s ‘Fuck Em’ Both 2024′ Sign Is Protected Speech, Rules District Court

A federal judge has ruled a Tennessee woman can’t be fined for saying what we’re all thinking, even if it’s in the form of a yard sign.

This past week, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee ruled that the town of Lakeland, Tennessee, violated resident Julie Pereira’s First Amendment rights when it fined her for placing a “Fuck Em’ [sic] Both 2024″ sign in her yard.

According to her First Amendment lawsuit filed last month, Pereira’s sign “simply and cogently” expressed her own opinion that neither major party candidate was an acceptable choice for president. A Lakeland code enforcement official disagreed, slapping Pereira with daily fines of $50 for violating the city’s prohibition on “obscene” signs.

The city only stopped fining Pereira after she covered the u on her sign with tape. By that point, she’d wracked up $688 in fines and other fees because of her sign.

But, unwilling to either pay those fees or dilute the “potency” of her message, Pereira sued the city of Lakeland for violating her First Amendment rights.

“In the interest of protecting not only my rights, but all citizens in the state of Tennessee this case has been taken to the next level because of its constitutional impacts,” she wrote on Facebook, per the New York Post‘s reporting.

In a brief, three-page ruling, the U.S. district court agreed with Pereira. The court barred the city from taking any further enforcement action over her sign and instructed the city to reimburse Pereira for the fines she’d paid, plus $31,000 in attorneys fees, and $1 in nominal damages for having her constitutional rights violated.

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House Report Reveals GARM’s Role in Stifling Online Discourse

A new report from the House Judiciary Committee released on Wednesday, and confirming our previous reporting, casts the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) under scrutiny, suggesting potential violations of federal antitrust laws due to its outsized influence in the advertising sector.

We obtained a copy of the report for you here.

Established in 2019 by Rob Rakowitz and the World Federation of Advertisers, GARM has been accused of leveraging this influence to systematically restrict certain viewpoints online and sideline platforms advocating divergent views.

The organization, initially conceived to manage the surge of free speech online, is reported to coordinate with major industry players including Proctor & Gamble, Mars, Unilever, Diageo, GroupM, and others. The collaboration appears to stretch across the largest ad agency holding companies worldwide, known collectively as the Big Six. Such collaboration raises concerns about a concerted effort to police content, especially content that challenges mainstream narratives.

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Former Biden Advisor Claims “The First Amendment Is Out of Control,” Hinders Government Action

Even the New York Times looks like it’s treading somewhat lightly while publishing articles aimed at dismantling the very concept of the First Amendment.

An opinion piece penned by an Obama and Biden administration adviser, Tim Wu, is therefore labeled as a “guest essay.” But was it the author, or the newspaper, who decided on the title? Because it is quite scandalous.

“The First Amendment is Out of Control” – that’s the title.

Meanwhile, many believe that attacks on this speech-protecting constitutional amendment are what’s actually out of control these days.

Wu takes a somewhat innovative route to argue against free speech: he painstakingly frames it as concern that the universally mistrusted Big Tech might be abusing it, with the latest Supreme Court ruling regarding Texas and Florida laws, (ab)used as an example.

When the government colludes with mighty entities like major social platforms – the First Amendment becomes the primary recourse to defend speech now expressed in public square forums forged through the pervasiveness of the internet.

So despite Wu’s effort to make his message seem unbiased, the actual takeaways are astonishing: one is that the First Amendment is an obstacle for the government to protect citizens (for being invoked as a tool restraining censorship?)

But this means that the First Amendment, designed to protect citizens from government censorship, is doing its job.

In the same vein, contrary to the sentiment of this “essay,” the amendment is there not to protect “national security” – nor does free speech undermine that, in a democracy.

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Anthony Blinken Reveals Government’s AI Plan To Censor Free Speech

U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken admitted last week that the State Department is preparing to use artificial intelligence to “combat disinformation,” amidst a massive government-wide AI rollout that will involved the cooperation of Big Tech and other private-sector partners.

At a speaking engagement streamed last week with the State Department’s chief data and AI officer, Matthew Graviss, Blinken gushed about the “extraordinary potential” and “extraordinary benefit” AI has on our society, and “how AI could be used to accelerate the Sustainable Development Goals which are, for the most part, stalled.”

He was referring to the United Nations Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development goals, which represent a globalist blueprint for a one-world totalitarian system. These goals include the gai-worshipping climate agenda, along with new restrictions on free speech, the freedom of movement, wealth transfers from rich to poor countries, and the digitization of humanity. Now Blinken is saying these goals could be jumpstarted by employing advanced artificial intelligence technologies.

Listen to Blinken, in the video below, openly describe how the government will use AI to clamp down on the free speech of citizens. (Fast-forward to the 3-minute mark and watch through the 7:07 mark.)

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A Law Professor’s Beef With a First Amendment ‘Spinning Out of Control’: Too Much Speech of the Wrong Sort

“The First Amendment is spinning out of control,” Columbia law professor Tim Wu warns in a New York Times essay. While Wu ostensibly objects to Supreme Court decisions that he thinks have interpreted freedom of speech too broadly, his complaint amounts to a rejection of the premise that the principle should be applied consistently, especially when it benefits speakers and messages he does not like.

The immediate provocation for Wu’s diatribe is yesterday’s Supreme Court decisions in two cases challenging Florida and Texas laws that aimed to restrict content moderation on social media. Although the justices remanded both cases for further consideration by the lower courts, Justice Elena Kagan’s majority opinion in Moody v. NetChoice made it clear that the “editorial discretion” protected by the First Amendment extends to the choices that social media platforms make in deciding which content to host and how to present it, even when those decisions are inconsistent, biased, or arguably unfair. And that discretion, she said, includes the use of algorithms that reflect such value judgments.

Although Wu has reservations about “the wisdom and questionable constitutionality of the Florida and Texas laws,” he thinks “the breadth of the court’s reasoning should serve as a wake-up call.” He faults the justices for “blithely assuming” that “algorithmic decisions are equivalent to the expressive decisions made by human editors at newspapers.” The ruling, Wu says, reflects a broader trend in which “liberal as well as conservative judges and justices have extended the First Amendment to protect nearly anything that can be called ‘speech,’ regardless of its value or whether the speaker is a human or a corporation.”

As Wu sees it, freedom of speech should hinge on the “value” of the ideas that people express. It is hard to imagine a broader license for government censorship.

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Free Speech Legislation Gains Attention Following Supreme Court Siding with Biden in Social Media Censorship Case

US House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan has reacted to Wednesday’s ruling by the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) in the Murthy v. Missouri case, to call for new legislation that would, going forward, reinforce the rules, already contained in the First Amendment, meant to protect citizens from government-orchestrated censorship.

Jordan, whose Committee is probing alleged government-Big Tech collusion in violation of the First Amendment through the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, noted that the US Constitution’s First Amendment is “first for a reason.”

According to the Republican congressman, free speech that this amendment protects (from government intervention) should extend to any government infringement – be it in Congress, or online.

Jordan said that while respectfully disagreeing with the SCOTUS ruling the Committee’s own oversight “has shown the need for legislative reforms.”

“While we respectfully disagree with the Court’s decision, our investigation has shown the need for legislative reforms, such as the Censorship Accountability Act, to better protect Americans harmed by the unconstitutional censorship-industrial complex,” Jordan wrote in a statement.

In other words, the increasingly pressing issue of how the government “interacts” with social platforms (because of their massive reach and therefore influence among the electorate) should be put into the hands of courts and their interpretations based on new and clear legislation to guide those decisions.

The Judiciary Committee chairman mentioned the Censorship Accountability Act – a bill that would let citizens launch legal action against federal employees suspected of colluding to suppress free speech.

Regardless of the SCOTUS decision, Jordan pledged that the Committee’s “important work will continue” – stating that the Subcommittee’s thus far “uncovered how and the extent to which the Biden Administration engaged in a censorship campaign in violation of the First Amendment.”

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The Court Green-Lights Censorship

In 1919, the Supreme Court used the pretext of crisis to overhaul the First Amendment as it jailed critics of the Great War. Over a century later, the Court has again fallen victim to the Beltway’s prevailing zeitgeist in today’s regrettable decision in Murthy v. Missouri. 

The Court’s opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, rejects the lower court’s injunction against many government agencies to stop leaning on social media companies to curate content, and does so on grounds that the plaintiffs lack standing. 

The opinion rests on omitted facts, skewed perceptions, and absurd conclusory statements. The dissent, issued by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, masterfully recounts the facts of the case and the inconsistency of the majority. 

Justice Barrett’s opinion completely ignored the Court’s decision last week in National Rifle Association v. Vullo. In that case, the Court held that New York officials violated the NRA’s First Amendment rights by launching a campaign to coerce private actors to “punish or suppress the NRA’s gun-promotion activities.” 

Justice Sotomayor issued the opinion for a unanimous Court, writing, “Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.” 

In Murthy, the majority did not even attempt to differentiate the case from its clear precedent in Vullo. Justice Alito, however, explained the ominous message the Court sent through the two opinions.

What the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional in Vullo, but it was no less coercive. And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even more dangerous. It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so. Officials who read today’s decision together with Vullo will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by.

Further, the majority opinion is bereft of references to the perpetrators, their “high positions,” or their statements of coercion. Justice Barrett does not mention Rob Flaherty or Andy Slavitt – the two main henchmen behind the Biden Administration’s censorship efforts – a single time in her holding. The dissent, however, devotes pages to recounting the White House’s ongoing censorship campaign.

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Attacks On ‘Cheap Fakes’ Extend Biden Administration’s War On Free Speech

There were two astonishing developments this week in the Biden administration’s continuing attack on free speech. First, just days ahead of the Supreme Court’s decision on whether to uphold the Fifth Circuit’s injunction against the administration’s extensive censorship enterprise, a second White House press secretary strongly encouraged the media to chill political debate. Second, Karine Jean-Pierre was masterful in her delivery of the new Biden attack line on “cheap fakes.”

To set the stage: last year, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a federal district court’s finding that the evidence likely established that the Biden Administration, including then spokesperson Jen Psaki, had engaged in a broad attack on free speech in violation of the First Amendment. It issued an injunction prohibiting the White House and other federal agencies from taking “actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce… social-media content containing protected free speech.”

The government appealed to the Supreme Court, which stayed enforcement of the injunction, pending its review. The Court heard oral argument in March. The administration might prevail, despite browbeating social media into blocking core political speech, including criticism of Biden, humor, and discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop. Yes, that same laptop the Justice Department and FBI just admitted were legitimate and tamper-free. A decision is expected within 10 days.

Now, KJP and the administration are doubling down. Attacking a new category of “cheap fake” videos, KJP blasted the media for publishing unaltered video of the president’s frailties. Her objection appears to be that by presenting information about the president out of the context preferred by the administration, this video is, in effect, fake. See here.

While the administration was unclear about the missing context, I infer that it prefers a focus on the presumed majority of the president’s 10 AM to 4 pm, Monday-to-Friday workday during which he is not frozen, wandering aimlessly, mumbling incoherently, or blanking out. I understand that preference, but it is unseemly, and depending on next steps, may be unconstitutional, for a government official, speaking from the White House, to seek to chill free speech.

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