Tag: lawsuits

Holding Politicians Accountable: Using Civil Litigation To Combat Incitement To Violence

In an era of heightened political polarization, inflammatory rhetoric from public figures has increasingly been linked to real-world acts of violence.  While freedom of speech is a cornerstone of democracy, there are legal boundaries where words cross into incitement.  This article explores how civil lawsuits can serve as a mechanism to hold politicians accountable for fomenting violence, regardless of party affiliation.  By examining the legal framework, historical precedents, and potential impacts, we can understand how the courts might act as a bulwark against dangerous discourse—focusing on truth-seeking principles rather than partisan blame.  The horrendous assassination of Youth Leader and Turning Point Founder Charlie Kirk brings this discussion to the forefront of our world culture.

The Legal Foundation for Civil Suits Against Politicians

Under U.S. law, politicians are not immune from accountability for their words if they directly contribute to harm.  The primary vehicle for such claims is 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a federal statute that allows individuals to sue state officials (including governors, mayors, and lawmakers) for violations of constitutional rights while acting “under color of state law.” If a politician’s statements or actions are alleged to incite violence that results in death, injury, or deprivation of rights—such as the right to life or due process—victims or their families could pursue damages.

However, the bar is high.  The First Amendment protects speech unless it meets the strict criteria established in *Brandenburg v. Ohio* (1969): it must be directed at producing “imminent lawless action” and be likely to produce such action.  Mere hyperbolic or critical language, even if divisive, typically doesn’t qualify.  Additionally, officials often benefit from qualified immunity, which shields them unless their conduct violates a “clearly established” right.  Sovereign immunity may also apply to actions taken in an official capacity, although personal-capacity suits can bypass this immunity.

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Chicago police officer says he received racist image from fellow officers in lawsuit against city

A Chicago police officer is suing the city and several of his fellow officers, accusing them of racism and intimidation.

On March 17, Chicago police Officer Anthony Banks was allegedly cornered by a group of fellow officers inside the Chicago Police Department’s 11th District on the city’s West Side.

The alleged incident sent Banks on medical leave due to emotional distress, trauma and fear for his own safety.

“They encircled him in such a fashion that he did not feel free to leave,” Attorney Blake Horwitz said. “They all surrounded my client and start making racial comments, using [a racial slur] and also telling him to go back from where he came from, which has a double meaning.”

Banks’ attorney said the alleged incident happened after a disagreement during an investigation.

The police officers were carrying out their duties inside someone’s home, when Banks allegedly stepped in to deescalate a heated exchange between a visibly pregnant woman and another officer.

“He intervened, and said, ‘why don’t you distance yourself and give her some room?'” Horwitz said.

According to the lawsuit, two Chicago police sergeants who witnessed the confrontation intervened.

Banks was sent home and asked to fill out a report documenting the incident.

The next day, Banks “received a graphic and threatening email containing a racist image on his department-issued phone,” his attorney said.

“The image is the most racially perverse photograph of how an African American can kill himself,” Horwitz said. “It is a 1950s Mississippi-type of representation.”

The attorney said Banks went on medical leave shortly after the incident.

The officer returned to duty on July 1. He was transferred to CPD’s 6th District.

He chose to file a lawsuit to shed light on the issue of racism within the department

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Google ordered to pay over $425 million in damages for smartphone privacy violations

Tech giant Google has been ordered to pay over $425 million for improperly snooping on the data of smartphone users and invading users’ privacy from 2016-2024.

It’s a violation of public trust,” said attorney & political analyst Madeline Summerville.

The class action lawsuit, initially filed in 2020, accused the company of collecting data from 98 million devices that had turned off a tracking feature in their Google account.

Even though I’ve shutoff all the different apparatuses that would keep Google from monitoring me, they’re still doing it because they were doing it through third party apps,” Summerville said.

The jury found Google spied on users and was in violation of California privacy laws. But Google denied it was improperly accessing devices. A Google spokesperson told Reuters, this decision misunderstands how its products work and it plans to file an appeal. “Our privacy tools give people control over their data, and when they turn off personalization, we honor that choice.”

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She Couldn’t Read Her Own Diploma: Why Public Schools Pass Students but Fail Society

A nineteen-year-old college student is suing her former high school for negligence because she graduated despite being unable to read or write.

The student, Aleysha Ortiz, graduated from Hartford Public Schools in the spring of 2024 with honors.

She earned a scholarship to attend the University of Connecticut, where she’s studying public policy. But while she was in high school, she had to use speech-to-text apps to help her read and write essays, and despite years of advocating for support for her literacy struggles, her school never addressed them.

Her story is shocking, but unfortunately, it isn’t isolated. At 24 Illinois public schools, not a single student can read at grade level. Nationwide, 54 percent of the American adult population reads at or below a sixth grade level. Put a different way: only 46 percent of American adults gained even a middle-school level mastery of literacy—let alone high school or collegiate levels.

In a first-world country where we spend nearly $16,000 per student per year to educate our children, that’s a horrifying statistic.

Literacy is supposed to be the bedrock of a free and liberally educated society. As the Washington Post’s motto so aptly reminds us, “democracy dies in darkness.”

Illiteracy is a form of darkness, and an illiterate populace is not one equipped to handle the demands of a world filled with forms and papers and words, let alone be the voting citizens of a democratic society.

What Do Literacy Stats Actually Mean?

Officially, the United States reports a basic literacy rate of 99 percent (which should perhaps be called into question, if students like Aleysha Ortiz can graduate with honors and still be illiterate).

But “basic literacy” is a bit of a sales pitch. It sounds impressive, but in practice, “basic literacy skills” means a K-3 grade level of reading—things like Hop on Pop and Amelia Bedelia.

“Functional literacy” is what actually matters: the ability to read and understand things like forms, instructions, job applications, and other forms of text you’ll encounter in your day-to-day life. It measures both technical reading skill and comprehension—your ability to decipher the words, and your ability to discern their meaning.

An estimated 21 percent of American adults (~43 million Americans) are functionally illiterate, meaning they have difficulty reading and comprehending instructions and filling out forms. A functionally illiterate American adult is unable to complete tasks like reading job descriptions or filling out paperwork for Social Security and Medicaid.

Perhaps worse still is the statistic that 54 percent of the American adult population reads at or below a sixth-grade level. Most of us don’t think about reading in terms of grade level, so this statistic feels intuitively bad but practically meaningless. What is a sixth-grade level?

Books written at the sixth-grade level are intended (in both literacy and comprehension skills) for eleven- and twelve-year-olds. Think of books like A Wrinkle in Time, Percy Jackson and The Olympians, and The Giver.

They’re good stories, but they don’t require the same vocabulary and mental acuity as making sense of a tax form. This is an excerpt from The Giver:

Garbriel’s breathing was even and deep. Jonas liked having him there, though he felt guilty about the secret. Each night he gave memories to Gabriel: memories of boat rides and picnics in the sun; memories of soft rainfall against windowpanes; memories of dancing barefoot on a damp lawn.

More complex than Dick and Jane or Hop on Pop, obviously. But this isn’t an adult level of comprehension. If your reading abilities cap out here, you’re going to encounter a lot of text in your day-to-day life that’s difficult to decipher—often things that are important for you to be able to comprehend, like the terms of a lease agreement or the instructions on a medication.

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First Amendment Claim Rejected in Case Over Tennessee Lawmaker’s Facebook Page

Tennessee lawmaker Jeremy Faison, a prominent Republican figure and chairman of the state House GOP Caucus, has emerged at the center of a court case with broader implications for how public officials use social media and what rights their constituents have when they engage online.

Faison operates a Facebook page that blends political messaging with personal content.

That blend became a legal flashpoint when a man named Fox, who doesn’t live in Faison’s district, posted comments that were subsequently deleted.

After being blocked from the page, Fox filed a lawsuit, arguing that Faison had violated his constitutional rights.

The court didn’t see it that way.

Citing the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Lindke v. Freed, the judge determined that Faison was not acting in an official state capacity even when using the page to perform functions associated with his role as a legislator.

We obtained the opinion for you here.

Because individual lawmakers cannot, by law, speak on behalf of the state, the court said Faison’s moderation of comments wasn’t subject to First Amendment constraints.

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Federal Judge Orders Oakland Schools to Allow After-School Christian ‘Good News Clubs’ Equal Access

A federal judge has ordered the Oakland Unified School District to grant Good News Clubs equal access to school facilities as other after-school programs.

U.S. District Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. issued a preliminary injunction, prompted by a lawsuit from Liberty Counsel representing Child Evangelism Fellowship’s (CEF) NorCal East Bay, requiring the district to allow Good News Clubs to meet on the same terms as nonreligious groups.

The suit, filed in December 2024, followed the district’s rejection of club applications at four campuses. Judge Gilliam ruled that the district’s actions violated free speech protections, rejecting claims that allowing the clubs would breach the Establishment Clause.

Decision Magazine reports:

Liberty Counsel, a religious liberty law firm, had filed a brief on behalf of CEF against the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) and Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell. Liberty Counsel says it will now seek a permanent injunction to guarantee Good News Clubs continue to receive the same access afforded other similar clubs.

According to the lawsuit, CEF applied for access on four different campuses over a two-year period but was denied on “religious grounds, pretextual schemes, and even by silence,” according to a Liberty Counsel news release. The district judge’s written opinion noted that one elementary school principal defended his opposition to CEF by stating, “[As] a public school, we are not in support of evangelism on our campus.”

In his ruling, Judge Gilliam cited a 2001 Supreme Court decision Good News Club v. Milford Central School affirming that schools cannot exclude religious clubs if secular groups have access. The ruling ensures Good News Clubs can hold weekly meetings like other programs.

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White DEI staffer settles discrimination suit against UW-Eau Claire for $265,000

University of Wisconsin leaders recently resolved a lawsuit brought on by a white diversity, equity and inclusion staffer who alleged she was discriminated against because of her race.

Rochelle Hoffman, former assistant director of the Multicultural Student Services at the UW-Eau Claire, and the UW Board of Regents ended the three-year-old dispute by settling the complaint, Wisconsin Public Radio reported.

“Under the terms of agreement, both Hoffman and regents stipulate that the $265,000 payment ‘is not to be construed as an admission of liability’ or wrongdoing and is intended only to ‘avoid litigation and buy their peace,’” WPR reported earlier this month.

Hoffman said in a statement: “Despite facing unlawful discrimination in that DEI role as a white woman, I remain steadfast in my belief that high-quality, accessible education — grounded in data and responsive to a changing workforce — is essential for all learners.”

Hoffman is now listed as an employee at Western Technical College, and spokespersons for UW-Eau Claire and the UW Board of Regents declined to comment to WPR.

Hoffman had claimed the public university became a “hostile environment” and there are “blatant actions of racial discrimination against white folks” like herself, The College Fix previously reported in January 2024 shortly after she filed her lawsuit.

“On a regular basis there are great educators that are told they shouldn’t occupy multicultural space, to check their white privilege, passed over for jobs for an outside candidate of color, and reminded they are ‘inherently racist’ because they are white,” Hoffman had alleged.

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The Case of the Damning FDA Memos

On July 21, 2025, the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) announced that it had secured the release of over 600,000 pages of Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) data used by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to authorize and approve Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine (BNT162b2), following a successful lawsuit, culminating in a late 2024 court ruling.

These documents, now publicly available on ICAN’s website, are part of a broader release of over 1.6 million pages, including data from the vaccine’s licensure in August 2021 and the earlier EUA in December 2020.

This report builds on my prior investigative work analyzing thousands of FDA documents released following the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT) lawsuit, which focused on the biological product file submitted by Pfizer for the full approval of its COVID-19 vaccine in August 2021.

I was one of the initial researchers to uncover and analyse the damning data hidden within Pfizer’s Pregnancy & Lactation Cumulative Review, Interim-Narrative-Sensitive document (3000+ pages), and Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports document, among others.

Both ICAN and PHMPT’s lawsuits sought to make public the FDA’s data on the Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 shot, asserting that transparency is critical for public trust and independent analysis, given the global administration of billions of doses of this experimental gene-based product that was mandated in several countries.

My preliminary review of ICAN’s EUA data reveals several irregularities, outlined below with references to key documents and downloadable sources. This report focuses on four critical issues: manufacturing oversight gaps, missing Bell’s palsy data, clinical trial site deficiencies, and the exclusion of unconfirmed COVID-19 cases.

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“They Stole $550 Million Dollars From Me” – Trump Celebrates Overturned Penalty in Letitia James’s “Fake” Civil Fraud Case

As The Gateway Pundit reported, a New York Appeals Court threw out the massive civil fraud penalty against President Trump on Thursday in New York Attorney General Letitia James’s case.

Trump: We’re having a lot of victories. I had a victory today, you know. They stole $550 million from me with a fake case, and it was overturned. They said this was a fake case. It’s a terrible thing, but that’s a nice victory, you know? I mean, it’s not bad, you know, we all have our limits, but this was a terrible thing they’ve done. It was a witch hunt. And I’ve had more witch hunts than any human being, I think, in history. And here we are, we’re the President of the United States. So, it didn’t work out too well for them, but maybe now it’s turned a little bit.

These are very dishonest people. We have to fight, and we have to win because we have to win. And you people are winners. And I just think it’s really it’s such an honor to be with you. And we’re going to make Washington DC great again. We’re making our country great again. The country is very close to being great. When they say it’s the hottest country in the world, they mean it, and this capital is right now, after four days, five days, it’s at a level that you haven’t seen in a long time, and it’s all because of you. So, I want to thank you all very much. It’s an honor to be with you, and we’ll always be with you. We’re going to be with you for as long as I’m around. You’re going to be treated like there’s nobody more important. And thank you all very much for being here.

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“Breeding Ground For Sex Predators”: Louisiana Sues Roblox Months After Hindenburg Alleged “Pedophile Hellscape”

Roblox, the $27 billion online gaming platform pitched as a safe creative playground for kids, is now facing serious legal firepower from Louisiana’s top law enforcement officer. On Thursday, Attorney General Liz Murrill sued Roblox Corp. in state court, accusing the California-based company of enabling predators to target children and “facilitate the distribution of child sexual abuse material” on its platform.

“Today I’m suing Roblox — the #1 gaming site for children and teens – and a breeding ground for sex predators,” Murrill said in a statement announcing the suit. “Due to Roblox’s lack of safety protocols, it endangers the safety of the children of Louisiana. Roblox is overrun with harmful content and child predators because it prioritizes user growth, revenue, and profits over child safety. Every parent should be aware of the clear and present danger poised to their children by Roblox so they can prevent the unthinkable from ever happening in their own home.”

The lawsuit alleges Roblox “knowingly and intentionally fails to implement basic safety controls to protect child users from predators” and fails to adequately warn parents about the dangers on its platform. It cites years of alleged failures, pointing to games that have appeared on Roblox such as Escape to Epstein Island, Diddy Party, and Public Bathroom Simulator Vibe, which the AG’s office says have included simulated sexual activity, including “child gang rape.”

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