Tag: free speech

Kentucky bill would make it a crime to insult or taunt police officers

A bill advancing out of a Kentucky Senate committee on Thursday would make it a crime to insult or taunt a police officer to the point where the taunts provoke a violent response.

Senate Bill 211 passed by a 7-3 vote, according to reports. The proposal was a response to riots throughout the country last summer, said the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Danny Carroll, R-Benton, a retired police officer.

Louisville saw numerous violent protests and rioting last year following the Breonna Taylor incident in March. Police had obtained a narcotics related search warrant for her apartment. After knock and notice was provided, police made entry only to be met with gunfire from Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly was shot in the leg. Officers returned fire, killing Taylor.

This week prosecutors decided to forego charges against Walker, Law Officer reported. Mattingly filed a lawsuit against Walker last October. He alleges that the shot was “outrageous, intolerable and offends all accepted standards of decency or morality.”

The lawsuit accuses Walker of battery, assault and emotional distress.

Meanwhile, Carroll noted the newly proposed legislation wasn’t about limiting lawful protest “in any way, shape, form or fashion,” according to WDRB.

“This country was built on lawful protest, and it’s something that we must maintain — our citizens’ right to do so. What this deals with are those who cross the line and commit criminal acts,” he said.

The bill kept language making a person guilty of disorderly conduct — a Class B misdemeanor — if they accost, insult, taunt, or challenge “a law enforcement officer with offensive or derisive words, or by gestures or other physical contact, that would have a direct tendency to provoke a violent response from the perspective of a reasonable and prudent person.”

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Unreleased Federal Report Concludes ‘No Evidence’ that Free Speech Online ‘Causes Hate Crimes’

Freedom of speech on the internet did not lead to a rise in “hate crimes,” according to a report sent from the U.S. Department of Commerce to Congress in January — a report that has yet to appear on any government website.

Breitbart News has obtained a copy of the report, which is published in full below. But sources close to the government say they are baffled as to why it wasn’t released publicly after being sent to Congress.

The report was prepared by the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is responsible for advising the President on all matters related to telecommunication and the internet.

It was drafted to revise the findings of a previous report from NTIA in 1993 titled The Role of Telecommunications in Hate Crimes. Although it was prepared under the Trump administration, the request to revise the report came from the 116th Congress, which was controlled by a 35-seat Democrat majority in the House and only a slim Republican majority in the Senate.

The 1993 report is still publicly available on the web. But the latest revision to its findings is not.

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Democrats’ H.R. 1 Sets ‘Unconstitutional’ Limits on 1st Amendment: Free Speech Group

“Buried in H.R. 1’s nearly 800 pages is a censor’s wish list of new burdens on speech and donor privacy. It proposes a democracy where civic engagement is punished and where fewer people have a voice in our government, our laws, and public life,” Eric Wang, the author of the study, said in a statement accompanying the release of the analysis. He is an IFS senior fellow and special counsel in the election law practice group at the Washington law firm of Wiley Rein, LLP.

Among the 14 constitutional problems identified by the IFS analysis in H.R. 1’s Title IV—including especially subtitles B, C, and D—the first are provisions that “unconstitutionally regulate speech that mentions a federal candidate or elected official at any time under a vague, subjective, and dangerously broad standard that asks whether the speech ‘promotes,’ ‘attacks,’ ‘supports,’ or ‘opposes’ (PASO) the candidate or official.”

“This standard is impossible to understand and would likely regulate any mention of an elected official who hasn’t announced their retirement.”

The proposal does that by creating a new category of regulated speech called “campaign-related disbursements” by nonprofit advocacy groups and others interested in communicating about public policy issues.

Such speech would include any public communications that mention a specific candidate for federal office and attacks or supports that candidate “without regard to whether the communication expressly advocates a vote for or against” the candidate.

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Liberty Activist Arrested, Held on $1M Bond Over Entirely Legal Facebook Posts Criticizing Gov’t

Last Wednesday Martinez posted a Facebook photo of a flag-draped coffin carried by uniformed officers with the caption, “How police officers take out their trash.” Above the photo, Martinez said, “I can’t wait to see the news and hear that Detective Kenneth Mead is in that casket.”

Showing how ridiculous the charges are, that post didn’t even violate Facebook’s terms of service and it is still up on Martinez’s Facebook page.

In another post, Martinez posted a photo of Dickerson with the statement, “This is Michael Dickerson. He is Detective Kenneth Mead’s bitch. Dickerson, I hope you and Mead die a slow and painful death… Mead, I have a message for you — Molon Labe.”

Again, though this post was distasteful, it was entirely legal. One need only scroll through Twitter or Facebook for a few seconds to find millions upon millions of similar posts about Trump, Biden, cops, judges, local politicians, and individuals whose politics draw them the ire of the political foes.

According to the criminal complaint against Martinez — which apparently justified the million dollar bond — Martinez threatened Mead with the intent that Mead be “placed in reasonable fear of death or substantial bodily harm.”

The idea that these posts placed him in “reasonable fear” is laughable. Literally every single day, TFTP gets hate mail and death threats, directed at our employees and even their families and children, and no one is ever placed in “reasonable fear” because of them.

The emails directly threaten our families, claiming they will murder, rape, etc. If you are reading this now, you can probably even scroll down to the comments and find a threat below. But we don’t even report them, as some pissed off asshole ranting on the internet does not justify reasonable fear.

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House Democrats, Targeting Right-Wing Cable Outlets, Are Assaulting Core Press Freedoms

Not even two months into their reign as the majority party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress, key Democrats have made clear that one of their top priorities is censorship of divergent voices. On Saturday, I detailed how their escalating official campaign to coerce and threaten social media companies into more aggressively censoring views that they dislike — including by summoning social media CEOs to appear before them for the third time in less than five months — is implicating, if not already violating, core First Amendment rights of free speech.

Now they are going further — much further. The same Democratic House Committee that is demanding greater online censorship from social media companies now has its sights set on the removal of conservative cable outlets, including Fox News, from the airwaves.

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Media Matters Campaign to Deplatform Fox News Off Cable and Satellite Systems Gains Ground With Democrat Hearing in Congress This Week

The current push is based on accusations by liberals that Fox, Newsmax and OANN broadcast disinformation about the COVID pandemic and the 2020 presidential election. However, Media Matters has a campaign that preceded the current controversies, launched in 2019, called “UnFoxMyCableBox” urging liberals to demand that they stop being charged for Fox News and Fox Business as part of bundled fees.

MMFA boasted their president Angelo Carusone was quoted blasting Fox in Kristof’s column published Feb. 11:

As America debates whether to hold former President Donald Trump accountable for inciting insurrection, what about his co-conspirator Fox News?

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…We can’t impeach Fox or put Carlson or Sean Hannity on trial in the Senate, but there are steps we can take — imperfect, inadequate ones, resting on slippery slopes — to create accountability not only for Trump but also for fellow travelers at Fox, OANN, Newsmax and so on.

That can mean pressure on advertisers to avoid underwriting extremists (of any political bent), but the Fox News business model depends not so much on advertising as on cable subscription fees. So a second step is to call on cable companies to drop Fox News from basic cable TV packages.

…“Given all the damage that Fox News has caused and the threat that it remains, they absolutely should unbundle Fox News,” Carusone told me. “It’s not a news channel. It’s a propaganda operation mixed with political smut. If people want that, they should be forced to pay for it the way that they pay for Cinemax.”

“During 2020, Fox News’ caldron of lies and extremism boiled over,” Carusone said. “They made us sicker and put up obstacles to the pandemic response by flooding the airwaves with over 13,150 instances of COVID misinformation. They fomented racial animus and promoted white supremacy as a response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. And, in the first two weeks after the election was called for Joe Biden, Fox News laid the groundwork for the attack on the Capitol by challenging the results on 774 individual instances with wild conspiracies and flat-out fabrications.”

House Democrats wrote a letter to cable and satellite providers in advance of this Wednesday’s hearing with this direct question:

“Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, OANN, and Newsmax on your platform both now and beyond the renewal date? If so, why?”

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Techno-Censorship: The Slippery Slope from Censoring “Disinformation” to Silencing Truth

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”― George Orwell

This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.

In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

This is how it starts.

Martin Niemöller’s warning about the widening net that ensnares us all still applies.

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

In our case, however, it started with the censors who went after extremists spouting so-called “hate speech,” and few spoke out—because they were not extremists and didn’t want to be shamed for being perceived as politically incorrect.

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Larry Flynt, ‘Hustler’ Founder and First Amendment Activist, Dead at 78

Larry Flynt, the publisher of the sexually explicit Hustler magazine whose legal battles turned him into a flamboyant crusader for free speech rights, has died at 78. Flynt’s famed legal battles — which he took to the Supreme Court — were memorialized in the 1996 film The People Versus Larry Flynt, starring Woody Harrelson. Flynt’s death was first reported by TMZ and his brother Jimmy Flynt confirmed the news to The Washington Post. A cause of death has not been revealed.

Larry Flynt was a Navy veteran who built a small empire of nude adult clubs in the late 1960s. He took those strip clubs and built them into one of the world’s most successful sex-based brands, transforming a newsletter about the clubs into Hustler magazine in 1974, publishing adult entertainment that critics frequently lambasted as obscene and degrading to women. The magazine once published a photo illustration of a nude woman being passed through a meat grinder. The feminist Gloria Steinem famously described Flynt as “a violent, sadistic pornographer.”

Always brash and opinionated, in his later years, he traveled most places in a gold-plated wheelchair. But he prided himself on being a self-made man who came from very humble beginnings. Larry Claxton Flynt Jr. was born in Lakeville, Kentucky on Nov. 1, 1942. His father was a sharecropper and he grew up in poverty; in his 2004 book Sex, Lies & Politics: The Naked Truth, Flynt cited his meager beginnings as an influence on his attitude toward sex. “I’m a hillbilly, and people like me come to sex without all the hang-ups imposed by the hypocritical, ‘you must maintain proper appearances’ morality of the middle class,” he wrote. “When good Christian folk tell me that sex is dirty, I say, ‘Yeah, when it’s done right.’ For me, sex has always been a way of saying, ‘I am outside the reach of your power.’ “

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