Tag: free speech

Ninth Circuit rebukes lawmakers, grants injunction against California law targeting gun marketing

A California law ostensibly aimed at restricting the marketing of firearms to minors infringes on the free speech rights of adults, according to a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. In its ruling handed down on Thursday morning, the panel vacated a lower court decision denying an injunction against the law’s enforcement and delivered a resounding win for both First and Second Amendment advocates.

Writing for the majority, Judge Kenneth Lee ruled that the law forbidding marketing and advertising firearms that “reasonably appear to be attractive to minors” is likely to infringe on the First Amendment, given that the statute is so broadly written that advertisements aimed at adults who can lawfully purchase a firearm would be swept up in its provisions.

While California has a substantial interest in reducing gun violence and unlawful use of firearms by minors, its law does not “directly” and “materially” further either goal. California cannot straitjacket the First Amendment by, on the one hand, allowing minors to possess and use firearms and then, on the other hand, banning truthful advertisements about that lawful use of firearms. There is no evidence in the record that a minor in California has ever unlawfully bought a gun, let alone because of an ad. Nor has the state produced any evidence that truthful ads about lawful uses of guns—like an ad about hunting rifles in Junior Sports Magazines’ Junior Shooters—encourage illegal or violent gun use among minors. Simply put, California cannot lean on gossamers of speculation to weave an evidence-free narrative that its law curbing the First Amendment “significantly” decreases unlawful gun use among minors. The First Amendment demands more than good intentions and wishful thinking to warrant the government’s muzzling of speech.

California’s law is also more extensive than necessary, as it sweeps in truthful ads about lawful use of firearms for adults and minors alike. For instance, an advertisement directed at adults featuring a camouflage skin on a firearm might be illegal because minors may be attracted to it.

While the state of California had argued that the statute didn’t violate the First Amendment given the broader latitude given to regulations on commercial speech, the panel was unswayed, with Lee writing that even under a lowered standard of intermediate scrutiny the law fails to pass constitutional muster in light of the fact that the “state has made no showing that broadly prohibiting certain truthful firearm-related advertising is sufficiently tailored to significantly advance the state’s goals of preventing gun violence and unlawful firearm possession among minors.”

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Police Tore Up His Protest Sign. Now They Owe Him $50,000

Last year, Delaware police prevented 54-year-old Jonathan Guessford from holding a sign warning drivers about a speed trap and wrongfully cited him for “improper hand signal” after he flipped off the officers who seized and tore up his sign. Police have now agreed to pay Guessford $50,000 as part of a settlement reached in a lawsuit alleging that police violated his civil rights.

Following several run-ins with the police, Guessford decided to “stage protests whenever he saw police officers stopping unsuspected vehicles using a radar gun,” according to legal documents. On March 11, 2022, his protest consisted of standing by the side of the road, holding a homemade sign reading, “Radar Ahead!” Guessford was soon confronted by several Delaware State Police officers, who took his sign and tore it up.

As Guessford drove away after the encounter, he flipped off the officers, leading them to eventually cite him for “improper hand signal” under a statute governing hand signals for nonmotorized vehicles like bicycles. However, body camera footage showed that officers knew that the citation was incongruous and would likely be dropped.

“Yeah, you can’t do that. That’ll get dropped,” Officer Christopher Popp said during a phone call to another officer, who replied, referring to a third officer, “I told him that’s going to get thrown out….Eventually, [Guessford is] going to do something really stupid, and then we are going to be able to really lock him up.”

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GoFundMe freezes donations for The Grayzone, sparking free speech debate

GoFundMe froze a fundraising campaign for the far-left news outlet The Grayzone due to “external concerns”, in the latest case to highlight the contentious role of tech companies in regulating controversial speech.

The Grayzone says it was unable to access more than $90,000 that about 1,100 contributors donated to support the work of three reporters.

Max Blumenthal, the founder and editor of The Grayzone, said the California-based crowdfunding company informed him in mid-August that he would not be allowed to transfer the donations pending a review of the fundraiser related to unspecified “external concerns”.

The donations were ultimately refunded to the donors after The Grayzone moved the fundraising campaign to a rival crowding funding platform.

Blumenthal said he believes the review was undertaken for “political reasons” related to the website’s coverage of the war in Ukraine.

“They only told me due to some external concerns, and I assume that someone would have to be fairly powerful to get GoFundMe to overlook the profit motive that usually governs companies like this to cancel a fundraiser that is extremely successful,” Blumenthal told Al Jazeera on Friday.

Blumenthal added that The Grayzone’s managing editor Wyatt Reed had similar problems with payment platforms Paypal and Venmo following his reporting on the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.

GoFundMe said that every fundraiser on its platform is subject to review and that The Grayzone was able to continue to solicit donations until it cancelled the fundraiser.

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SCOTUS’ Ruling in Gay Wedding Website Case Was a Defeat for Compelled Speech

The government may not compel someone to “create speech she does not believe,” the Supreme Court ruled in June. In a 6–3 opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Court sided with a graphic designer, Lorie Smith, who wanted to expand into the wedding website business without being forced by Colorado law to create products celebrating same-sex marriages.

Back in 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit found that the planned websites would each constitute “an original, customized creation,” designed by Smith with a goal of celebrating the couple’s “unique love story.” As such, it said, they “qualify as ‘pure speech’ protected by the First Amendment.” The appeals court admitted that Smith was willing to provide her services to anyone as long as the substance of the project did not contradict her values. It also recognized that “Colorado’s ‘very purpose’ in seeking to apply its law to Ms. Smith” was to stamp out dissenting ideas about marriage.

Despite all of that, the 10th Circuit held that the state government was within its authority to compel her to create such websites. Lamenting “an unfortunate tendency by some to defend First Amendment values only when they find the speaker’s message sympathetic,” Gorsuch et al. concluded otherwise.

The ruling in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis is neither as narrow nor as broad as it (theoretically) could have been. The Court did not do away with public accommodations laws or allow businesses to discriminate against customers on the basis of characteristics such as skin color or national origin. But it did note that “public accommodations statutes can sweep too broadly when deployed to compel speech.”

The high court also did not establish a right for any and every business owner to decline to provide services for same-sex weddings—only those whose services involve expressive activity. Whether a particular service (say, cake baking) is expressive will have to be litigated case by case.

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That School Is Still Treading on Jaiden Rodriguez’s Free Speech Rights

The case of 12-year-old Jaiden Rodriguez is not quite closed. While the Vanguard School’s board of directors has declared that he may sport a “don’t tread on me” patch on his backpack, a closer look at the school district’s policies suggests that administrators are still inclined to tread all over Rodriguez’s free speech rights.

That’s according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment advocacy organization. FIRE spoke with Jaiden’s mother, who said that contrary to the board’s public statement, a district official—Mike Claudio, assistant superintendent of Harrison School District Two in Colorado Springs, Colorado—told her that her son would only be allowed to display the Gadsden flag patch as long as no one else complained about it.

Moreover, Rodriguez is still prohibited from displaying a secondary patch that references the Firearms Policy Coalition and expresses support for the Second Amendment. The justification for this restriction is the district’s categorical ban on content having to do with alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and weapons.

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Elite Crackdown On Free Speech Worldwide Intensifies

The leaders of nations, representatives of international organizations, and philanthropists say they are committed to creating free and open societies. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook has independent fact-checkers, is open to all perspectives, and doesn’t interfere in elections. And, in response to questions from a colleague at Public, a representative from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations insisted the philanthropy supported free speech.

“In response to your effort to conflate any attempt to address hate speech as a frontal assault on free speech itself,” the Soros spokesperson said, “perhaps the words of the UN Secretary-General will help in illuminating a crucial distinction: ‘Addressing hate speech does not mean limiting or prohibiting freedom of speech.’”

But these words are a thin veil covering an aggressive attack on freedom of speech around the world, from Australia to North America to Europe, where the Digital Services Act, which demands Internet companies “Address any risk they pose on society, including public health, physical and mental well-being,” goes into effect today.

A blockbuster new investigation by Australia’s Sky News discovered that Meta-Facebook has been paying activists to serve as neutral fact-checkers while, in reality, using their power to censor their political enemies.

The context is that this fall, Australians will vote in a special national election, the Australian Indigenous Voice referendum, on whether to give special political powers to native peoples. Facebook is funding those in favor of the referendum to censor its opponents. “An audit of RMIT Voice fact checks showed the 17 Voice checks between May 3 and June 23 this year were all targeting anti-Voice opinions or views,” Sky News Found.

Meta allowed the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) to censor disfavored views even while “knowing it was a breach of the rules Zuckerberg established to distance himself from fact-checking responsibilities,” reported SkyNews.

The RMIT, which is a respected technical university like America’s MIT, “used the powers Facebook has given it to throttle Sky News Australia’s Facebook page with false fact checks multiple times this year, breaching the Meta-endorsed IFCN Code of Principles and preventing millions of Australians from reading or watching Sky News Australia’s journalism.”

How did the fact-checkers abuse their powers? By smearing their political enemies as racists. “Fact-checkers employed by RMIT have led to numerous code breaches,” reports Sky News, “including one fact-checker using her social media account to label Opposition Leader Peter Dutton a fear-mongering racist for his views on the Voice.”

As for Soros’ Open Society Foundations, its spokesperson cleverly tucked a call for expanded censorship into her response to our queries.

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Denmark set to ban Quran burning, citing increased terror threat

Amid growing pressure and threats of terrorist retaliation, officials in Denmark have caved and called for burning the Quran to be made a crime after such acts sparked protests domestically and around the Muslim world.

Danish citizens may soon no longer be able to desecrate the book, which is seen by many believers as the literal word of god and thus among the holiest objects on earth, nor any other religious objects deemed significant by any faith group.

The proposal, announced Friday, has not yet been presented to the Danish parliament, which did away with its archaic blasphemy laws in 2017. Free speech is enshirined in the constitution, thus it will be difficult to institute restrictions.

According to Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard, the new law would be written into existing legislation banning the desecration of other nations’ flags, and would “prohibit the inappropriate treatment of objects of significant religious importance to a religious community.”

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Writer C.J. Hopkins Is Ordered To Jail or Pay a Fine For Using Nazi Imagery on Anti-Authoritarianism Book

In a fresh blow to free speech, American satirist and playwright C.J. Hopkins is facing a legal punishment in Germany that could send him to jail for 60 days or slap him with a 3,600 euro fine. The start of this legal tangle is rooted in Hopkins’ critique of the German health minister and using an almost invisible image of a swastika on a mask in a book, all in an attempt to lampoon the worldwide response to the global pandemic crisis.

Hopkins was charged with disseminating propaganda contents intended to further the objectives of an erstwhile National Socialist organization.

The judge, who had already rejected Hopkins’ free speech argument, delivered the punishment order, given the case’s non-jury misdemeanor status. As reported by Racket, Hopkins will, however, have the opportunity to argue for mitigation, though judgment has already been passed.

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Dash cam footage shows Delaware cops conspiring to drum up bogus charge against motorist who flipped them off

A Delaware man is suing the state police, saying they destroyed a sign he made to warn people about their speed trap and they created a bogus reason to charge him with an infraction because he gave them the finger, Delaware Online reported.

Jonathan Guessford had launched a mini-protest by holding a hand-made sign that read, “Radar ahead.” Body cam footage shows Cpl. Stephen Douglas and Officer Nicholas Gallo approach Guessford and incorrectly tell him he could not stand on the side of the road with the sign. Gallo eventually pulled the sign from Guessford’s grasp and ripped it up.

As he was leaving, Guessford gave the officers the finger, prompting them to follow him. When they pulled him over, Master Cpl. Raiford Box arrived on the scene and told Guessford that he was going to be locked up for disorderly conduct and have his child taken away. The officers issued him a citation “under a law that governs hand signals for non-motorized vehicles like bicycles,” Delaware Online’s report stated.

New dash cam footage that was recently released shows officers conspiring to drum up a bogus charge against Guessford. Douglas was warned by Box that the hand-gesture charge was bogus, but that didn’t stop him of issuing it.

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Why Kamala Harris Won’t Be Asked About the Suicide of a Newspaperman She Persecuted

The sitting vice president, shortly before moving to Washington, D.C., successfully scapegoated through heavily publicized if legally unsuccessful pimping prosecutions a career newspaperman who last week shot himself to death at age 74 rather than sit through yet another prostitution-facilitation trial that he insisted to his dying days was an attack on free speech.

Yet the chances of Kamala Harris being asked this week—or any week—about the late James Larkin, or her starring role in the demonization of his and Michael Lacey’s online classified advertising company Backpage as “the world’s top online brothel,” are vanishingly small. That’s because people have a natural revulsion toward anything associated—however falsely—with child prostitution or sex trafficking, true. But it also stems from something far less excusable: When it comes to conflicts between the feds and those from the professionally unpopular corners of the free speech industry, journalists have been increasingly taking the side of The Man.

You could see this dynamic in stark relief last month in the elite-media response to U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty’s Independence Day injunction against the federal government from pressuring social media companies to censor individuals for allegedly spreading “misinformation.” As catalogued at Reason by Robby Soave, J.D. Tuccille, Jacob Sullum, and Robert Corn-Revere, and as I experienced during a bizarre panel discussion on CNN, the default journalistic reaction was anxiety that the ruling (in the words of the New York Times news department) “could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives about the coronavirus pandemic and other issues.” Sure, there may be First Amendment implications, but, well, have you seen that dangerous whackaloon Alex Berenson?

Far too often, journalists reserve their free speech defenses for people they actually like. And man, did they not like Jim Larkin and Mike Lacey.

This antipathy for Larkin/Lacey and the New Times alt-weekly chain the duo launched in Phoenix was obvious long before politicians began moving on from Craigslist to Backpage in their morally panicked crusade against technology companies that allegedly promote “sex trafficking.” (I use quotation marks here not to intimate that sex trafficking does not exist, but rather that, as Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown has documented better than any living reporter, the term is overwhelmingly deployed by politicians and law enforcement to describe and punish conduct that has nothing whatsoever to do with forcing unwitting adults, let alone minors, into the sex business.)

The New Times honchos—especially Lacey, who was always the more public and pugilistic face of the franchise—were resented because they threw sharp elbows at both the graybeard alternative weeklies to their left and at the big-city dailies that were originally to their right but then tacked over time to the kind of bloodless lefty respectability space inhabited by NPR. The New Times papers hurled buckets of snark onto anyone perceived as Establishment, which pissed off boomer lefty journalists almost as much as elected Republican officials such as Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Arizona Sen. John McCain.

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