Tag: freedom of expression

Hungary passes constitutional amendment to ban LGBTQ+ public events, seen as a major blow to rights

Hungary’s parliament on Monday passed an amendment to the constitution that allows the government to ban public events by LGBTQ+ communities, a decision that legal scholars and critics call another step toward authoritarianism by the populist government.

The amendment, which required a two-thirds vote, passed along party lines with 140 votes for and 21 against. It was proposed by the ruling Fidesz-KDNP coalition led by populist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Ahead of the vote — the final step for the amendment — opposition politicians and other protesters attempted to blockade the entrance to a parliament parking garage. Police physically removed demonstrators, who had used zip ties to bind themselves together.

The amendment declares that children’s rights to moral, physical and spiritual development supersede any right other than the right to life, including that to peacefully assemble. Hungary’s contentious “child protection” legislation prohibits the “depiction or promotion” of homosexuality to minors aged under 18.

The amendment codifies a law fast-tracked through parliament in March that bans public events held by LGBTQ+ communities, including the popular Pride event in Budapest that draws thousands annually.

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More Age Verification Fallout: Artist Blogs Blocked, Porn Data Leaked, Traffic Boosts for Noncompliant Sites

As more places around the world—including U.S. states—pass laws requiring age checks around the internet, we’re continuing to see a slew of unintended (but entirely predictable) consequences. The latest round includes some U.S. residents being blocked from a blogging platform, French folks in dangers of their porn viewing habits being leaked, and porn websites that violate the law in the U.K. being rewarded with big boosts in web traffic.

Let’s start closest to home.

Another website is blocking access to Mississippi residents in response to the state’s age verification and online harm prevention law taking effect.

We’ve already seen some fallout from this law, including the social media platform Bluesky beginning to block Mississippi residents.

Now, Dreamwidth Studios—a blogging platform meant for artists (and one of the parties represented by tech trade group NetChoice in a challenge to the Mississippi law)—is also blocking access for people in Mississippi, as well as preventing minors in Tennessee from opening new accounts.

“People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we’ll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential,” Dreamwidth says on its website.

The company announced its new Mississippi policy on August 26, saying, “Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don’t want to do this.” But “the Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who’s under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users’ parents to allow them to finish creating an account.””

Dreamwidth goes on:

[The Mississippi law] also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn’t like it — which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn’t like, you’re absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don’t want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can’t: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity.”

Mississippi users of Dreamwidth aren’t the only ones with restricted access. The platform will also “prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk,” it said. “The judge in our challenge to Tennessee’s social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds,” Dreamwidth posted. “The Tennessee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it’s still a risk to us.”

Dreamwidth’s moves further highlight how age verification laws like the ones enacted by Mississippi and Tennessee will come down harder on small and niche platforms than on big tech companies.

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DOJ Charges Man Who Burned American Flag in Protest of Executive Order

A man who burned the American flag outside the White House earlier this week is facing charges from federal prosecutors in accordance with President Donald Trump’s recent executive order.

That order, signed on Aug. 25, specifically directed the attorney general to prosecute those caught burning the American flag or desecrating it in other ways.

“You will see flag burning stopping immediately,” Trump said. “The people in our country don’t want to see our flag burned and spit on.”

North Carolina resident Jan Carey, 54, is the first to face that prosecution after he decided to burn the American flag as a form of protest to the executive order. In an interview with local media, he explained he “immediately thought I need to go burn a flag in front of the White House and let’s put this to the test.” He also said he was a military veteran.

Carey faces two misdemeanor criminal counts in Washington, D.C., in federal court. However, neither charge focuses on the fact that he burned the flag.

The first count was for lighting a “fire in an undesignated area,” and the second was for “lighting a fire in a manner that causes damage to real property or park resources.”

“On or about August 25, 2025, within the District of Columbia, Jan Careylit, tended, and used a fire in a manner that threatened, caused damage to, and resulted in the burning of property, real property, and park resources, and created a public safety hazard,” U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro wrote in her complaint.A Supreme Court ruling in 1989, Texas v. Johnson, declared the act of flag desecration was protected as symbolic speech under the First Amendment, and Trump directed the attorney general to pursue charges in line with the First Amendment.

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President Trump Signs Executive Order to Prosecute People Who Burn American Flags – “It Incites Riots… You Burn a Flag, You Get One Year in Jail”

President Trump on Monday signed the “Prosecuting Burning of the American Flag” Executive Order into law, prioritizing the prosecution of crimes that involve the burning of the American flag and potentially opening challenges to the interpretation of the First Amendment protections for flag burning. 

It does not appear to make burning the American flag a crime, but crimes that involve burning a flag will be prioritized.

“Our great American Flag is the most sacred and cherished symbol of the United States of America, and of American freedom, identity, and strength,” the order reads.

“Desecrating it is uniquely offensive and provocative. It is a statement of contempt, hostility, and violence against our Nation — the clearest possible expression of opposition to the political union that preserves our rights, liberty, and security. Burning this representation of America may incite violence and riot.”

The order also describes the act as “a calculated act to intimidate and threaten violence against Americans because of their nationality and place of birth,” used by foreign nationals, and it directs the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security to “deny, prohibit, terminate, or revoke visas, residence permits, naturalization proceedings, and other immigration benefits, or seek removal from the United States, pursuant to Federal law, including 8 U.S.C. 1182(a), 8 U.S.C. 1424, 8 U.S.C. 1427, 8 U.S.C. 1451(c), and 8 U.S.C. 1227(a).”

It further argues that flag burning, “conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action or that is an action amounting to ‘fighting words,’” is not constitutionally protected under the First Amendment.

The order directs the Department of Justice and the Attorney General to “prioritize the enforcement to the fullest extent possible of our Nation’s criminal and civil laws against acts of American Flag desecration that violate applicable, content-neutral laws, while causing harm unrelated to expression, consistent with the First Amendment,” including “violent crimes; hate crimes, illegal discrimination against American citizens, or other violations of Americans’ civil rights; and crimes against property and the peace, as well as conspiracies and attempts to violate, and aiding and abetting others to violate, such laws.”

The Attorney General is also permitted to “pursue litigation to clarify the scope of the First Amendment exceptions in this area.”

White House Staff Secretary Will Scharff told the President, the order “charges your department of justice with investigating instances of flag burning, and then where there’s evidence of criminal activity, where prosecution wouldn’t fall foul of the First Amendment, it instructs the Department of Justice to prosecute those who are engaged in these instances of flag burning.”

While signing the order into law, President Trump reasoned that the action causes people to go “crazy” and that “what it does is incite to riot.”

“And what the penalty is going to be if you burn a flag, you get one year in jail. No early exits, no nothing,” he said. “you will see flag burning stopping immediately, just like when I signed the Statue and Monument Act— 10 years in jail if you hurt any of our beautiful monuments. Everybody left town. They were gone. Never had a problem after that, it’s pretty amazing.”

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Senator Amy Klobuchar Can’t Take A Joke, Demands Censorship Law

Senator Amy Klobuchar has acknowledged what opponents of her legislation have been warning all along.

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, she confirmed that her proposed NO FAKES Act would be used to censor AI-generated parody.

Her target is a meme video that pokes fun at her reaction to an American Eagle jeans advertisement featuring actress Sydney Sweeney.

Rather than brush off the obvious satire, Klobuchar doubled down on the need to suppress it. “As anyone would, I wanted the video taken down or at least labeled ‘digitally altered content,’” she wrote.

She applauded TikTok for removing the clip, praised Meta for tagging it, and expressed frustration that X would not help her attach a Community Note.

This public complaint confirms that the NO FAKES Act, Senate Bill 1367, is not just about preventing identity theft or stopping fraud. Klobuchar is one of the bill’s lead authors, and she is openly calling for legal tools to remove content that ridicules her.

The bill gives individuals the right to sue over the creation or distribution of “unauthorized digital replicas.”

It also places heavy compliance burdens on platforms, which would face steep fines for failing to remove flagged content quickly or for not implementing policies to suspend repeat offenders.

While the bill claims to allow space for parody, satire, and documentaries, Klobuchar’s statements make it clear that those exemptions offer little practical protection.

The parody video in question shows an AI-generated version of Klobuchar speaking at a fake Senate hearing, ranting about Democrats needing more visibility in advertising. The fictional version of the senator says, “If Republicans are going to have beautiful girls with perfect titties…we want ugly, fat bitches wearing pink wigs and long-ass fake nails being loud and twerking on top of a cop car at a Waffle House ‘cause they didn’t get extra ketchup.”

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Democrats Can’t Take A Joke, So They’re Trying To Outlaw Free Speech

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., wants to make one thing perfectly clear: She has never said Sydney Sweeney has “perfect [breasts].” Nor has she accused her fellow Democrats of being “too fat to wear jeans or too ugly to go outside.”

The Minnesota leftist attempted to clear the air earlier this week in a New York Times opinion piece headlined, “Amy Klobuchar: What I Didn’t Say About Sydney Sweeney.” 

Klobuchar wrote that she is the victim of a hoax, a “realistic deepfake.” Some trickster apparently put together and pushed out an AI-generated video in which Klobuchar appears to make (hilariously) outrageous comments about Sweeney’s American Eagle jeans ad — after liberals charged that the commercial is racist and an endorsement of eugenics. 

‘Party of Ugly People’

The doctored Klobuchar appears to be speaking at a Senate committee hearing, She demands Democrats receive “representation.” Of course, the satirical video has gone viral. 

“If Republicans are going to have beautiful girls with perfect ti**ies” in their ads, we want ads for Democrats, too, you know?” the fake Klobuchar asserts in the vid. “We want ugly, fat bitches wearing pink wigs and long-ass fake nails being loud and twerking on top of a cop car at a Waffle House ‘cause they didn’t get extra ketchup.”

“Just because we’re the party of ugly people doesn’t mean we can’t be featured in ads, okay?” the AI Amy implores. “And I know most of us are too fat to wear jeans or too ugly to go outside, but we want representation.” 

She appears — and sounds — so sincere.  But Klobuchar wants you to know it certainly was not her saying such “vulgar and absurd” things. That’s why she’s urging Congress to pass laws to ban such AI videos, which would be as absurd as social justice warriors calling American Eagle white supremacists for paying a blue jeans-clad, beautiful actress to say she has great jeans. 

Any such law would certainly and rightly be challenged in court. 

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Millions of immigrants could now be scrutinized for ‘anti-Americanism’ and ‘antisemitism’

The Trump administration is making a drastic change to how it decides which immigrants can receive certain benefits.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, is changing its policies so its employees are required to consider “circumstances where an alien has endorsed, promoted, supported, or otherwise espoused the views of an anti-American or terrorist organization or group,” according to the document.

The document said those circumstances could include “antisemitic terrorism, antisemitic terrorist organizations, and antisemitic ideologies,” with no further specifics.

The change could impact millions of immigrants who are not citizens and deal with the agency, for issues including changing their immigration status or applying for a change of status. Consequences for expressing anti-Americanism or antisemitism could include a denial of whatever benefit the individual applied for, like a change of status, or a visa renewal.

“They’re saying that they can broadly use their discretion to deny people who have been involved in any kind of anti-American activity,” said Matt Cameron, a local immigration attorney.

“There’s no definition of antisemitism in the law,” he added. “We’ve seen with Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, that the definition of ‘antisemitic’ has been expanded to really anyone who opposes what Israel is doing in Gaza.”

Attorney Mahsa Khanbabai represents Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Tufts doctoral student who was detained by ICE agents for co-authoring an op-ed urging her university to stop funding Israeli companies supporting the war in Gaza. She has since been released as she continues deportation proceedings.

“We’re waiting to see what further guidance the administration is going to be providing to its immigration officers as they try to decide what is anti-American or antisemitic in terms of adjudicating a person’s benefits application,” said Khanbabai, who is based in Massachusetts.

The limitations the Trump administration is imposing on immigrants’ First Amendment rights is playing out in court, but attorneys say this policy change is a new way to limit immigrants’ freedom of expression.

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The Israeli flag just became the only national flag illegal to burn in the United States. Yeah. I’m dead serious.

The Flag America Protects

This week in Washington, D.C., a federal judge made a ruling so shocking, so unprecedented, that it flips the First Amendment on its head. Judge Trevor N. McFadden declared that the Israeli flag — with the Star of David at its center — is not a political symbol at all, but a racial one.

He ruled that tearing it, grabbing it, desecrating it, even in the heat of protest, is not free expression but racial discrimination.

Think about that. In the United States, you can burn the American flag — the Supreme Court has said so for decades. But now, according to this ruling, burning or tearing the Israeli flag could make you guilty of racial hatred. The one national flag protected in American law today isn’t our own. It’s Israel’s.

You can burn the flags of all 50 states. You can torch the American flag all you want. You can burn the flags of the UK or France or Brazil or China.

But not Israel.

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Man Kicked Out Of Major League Soccer Game For Wearing Trump MAGA Hat

In a video going viral online, a Trump supporter filmed the moment he was kicked out of a St. Louis City Soccer Club match this week for wearing a Make America Great Again hat.

One of the security guards kicking the man out of the stadium even said he was also a Trump supporter but that the team didn’t allow “political” paraphernalia.

The MAGA hat-wearing individual pointed out there were several fans waving gay pride and trans flags, which he argued were political statements.

Security threatened to take the Trump supporter out “in handcuffs” if he did not voluntarily exit the facility as police officers arrived on the scene.

“Trump is no welcome in St. Louis City SC Club,” the man said as he was escorted from the premises.

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Welcome To The Land Of The Free… Until You Express An Opinion

Britain’s cancel culture is a purposely designed social credit system.

Say the wrong thing, and you’re done for. One ‘offensive’ tweet? Straight to prison.

Say a silent prayer? You’re nicked.

Point out that men don’t have wombs, or that climate change hysteria is exaggerated? You’re sacked and shunned.

Post a meme that contradicts a government orthodoxy or expresses concerns about illegal immigration? Congrats, you’re now persona non grata and at risk of being given a holiday at His Majesty’s pleasure.

Welcome to the land of the free… until you express an opinion…

Great Britain, 2025, where the air is thick with sanctimonious twaddle, and our inalienable rights are under attack from the self-proclaimed elite. Those pompous, hypocritical overlords of ‘correct’ thinking have decided our words, thoughts, and even our chickens need their approval. Free speech? In the U.K., members of the public are in prison for sending a single tweet. And just wait until they roll out digital ID (the so called BritCard) and the Stasi levels of censorship which will follow.

The Establishment has closed its grip harder than Keir Starmer on free Arsenal tickets. Wielding censorship like a sledgehammer and telling us what constitutes ‘approved truth’ as though we’re living in Orwell’s 1984.

But fear not, because there’s a growing rebellion. Increasing numbers of Brits simply aren’t having it anymore. They see through this dystopian farce, preferring instead to give it the middle finger. Our great nation isn’t China or North Korea (though they’d like it to be). Britain is the crucible of free speech and has long championed open expression across literature, the arts and politics.

Amidst the madness, we salute a titan of liberty: John Milton, whose Areopagitica in 1644 stands as a blazing beacon for free speech. With a poet’s fire and a rebel’s heart, Milton faced down Parliament’s suffocating book licensing laws, daring to proclaim that truth thrives only when it wrestles openly with falsehood. “Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” he thundered, crafting a vision of Britain as a place for ideas, where no censor’s pen could silence the quest for truth. His words, a clarion call against tyranny, sowed the seeds for our nation’s proud claim as a bastion of free expression.

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