The entire case is built on ludicrous contortions of logic and law. The Colorado Court of Appeals, for instance, ruled in favor of Scardina, contending that the colors pink and blue aren’t really speech because, in and of themselves, they aren’t expressive of anything. The message, says the court, is “generated by the observer.”

Yes. Because Phillips isn’t a complete idiot, he understands that context matters. The color white has no inherent meaning, either. If a known Klansman asks a tailor to fit him for some white sheets, it definitely does.

Then again, if you believe Scardina just happened to approach the most famous Christian baker in the country to create a “transition” cake the day after the Supreme Court’s Masterpiece ruling was dropped in 2017, you’re certainly an idiot. The entire Scardina episode, including the configuration of the cake — using colors but no words — was calibrated to set Phillips up. //

Scardina claims the lawsuit was intended to “challenge the veracity” of Phillips’ claim that he would serve “LGBTQ” customers. This is the central lie of the case. Phillips never once refused to sell a gay couple or a transgender person or anyone else anything in his store. But Phillips isn’t Autumn Scardina’s servant, and the government has no right to compel him to endorse or participate in any lifestyle. //

the media keeps contending that Phillips is looking for a religious “carve out” in anti-discrimination law — or something along those lines. No such thing exists. It is unclear if the people who write those words are unfamiliar with the First Amendment or just instinctively dismiss it, but religious liberty and free expression are explicitly protected by law. Anything that infringes on those rights is the “carve out,” not the other way around. If “anti-discrimination” laws dictate that the government can compel Americans to express ideas they disagree with, as Colorado does, then anti-discrimination laws need to be overturned, tout de suite.

Eric Abbenante
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Elon Musk with Bill Maher tonight:

"You have talked about this Woke mind virus. In really apocalyptic terms. You should explain why you don't think it's hyperbole to say it's pushing civilization towards suicide. First of all what is the woke mind virus?"

10:27 PM · Apr 28, 2023

“I think we need to be very cautious about anything which is anti-meritocratic,” Musk said. “And anything that results in the suppression of free speech.” Those are the things that are dangerous about the woke mind virus, and the fact that “you can’t question things, even the questioning is bad.”

Maher agreed and said he thought that wokeness wasn’t building on liberalism (classical liberalism), that it was the “opposite” of that, including when it comes to free speech.

Eric Abbenante
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Elon Musk on Bill Maher:

"Free speech is extremely important. It's bizarre that we've come to the point where: Free speech used to be a left or liberal value. We've seen from the 'left' a desire to actually censor. That seems crazy."

10:46 PM · Apr 28, 2023 //

But he had a warning for anyone pushing censorship who wants to so damage society, “The thing about censorship is that – for those who would advocate it – Just remember: at some point, that will be turned on you”

Simon Ateba
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BREAKING: After years of discrimination and targeting, I just filed my First Amendment Rights lawsuit against @whitehouse and the @PressSec Karine Jean-Pierre. //

Without freedom of the press, there cannot be freedom. Without freedom of the press, there cannot be a free and fair election.

The Court recognizes both the vital importance of a free press and the critical role that confidential sources play in the work of investigative journalists like Herridge. But applying the binding case law of this Circuit, the Court concludes that Chen’s need for the requested evidence overcomes Herridge’s qualified First Amendment privilege in this case.

Really now.

Regardless of how one feels about the press, its ability to work freely cannot be hindered by the government in any manner, including the allowance of legal action designed to silence media information sources. It bears mention that in a 2020 ruling in the matter, in the course of denying a Department of Justice request to dismiss the matter the court neither affirmed nor denied that the Privacy Act, under which Chen’ makes her claims, covers said claims.. //

While Herridge has made no public announcement regarding whether she will comply with the order instead of appealing the decision, one hopes she will not. This is important not only to her personally and professionally but to all genuine newsgathering efforts and national security itself. Without immunity from court-ordered harassment of such journalistic efforts, the Washington Post’s joke of the slogan “democracy dies in darkness” becomes chillingly real.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to start — I want to put aside my written statement, for a moment, and address one of the points that was brought up — I think an important point by the Ranking Member — that this body ought to be concerning itself with issues that impact directly the American people: the rising price of groceries, 76 percent over the past two years for basic food stuff, the war in Ukraine, inflation issues, the border issues, many other issues that concern us all as a nation. We can’t do that without the First Amendment, without debate.

When I gave my speech — my announcement speech — in Boston two months ago…I talked about all those issues. I focused on groceries. I focused on the fact that working class people can no longer afford to live in this country. I talked about inflation — all the issues that deeply concern you, and that you’ve devoted your career to alleviating those issues. Five minutes into my speech, when I was talking about Paul Revere, YouTube deplatformed me. I didn’t talk about vaccines in that speech. I didn’t talk about anything that was a verboten subject. I just was talking about my campaign and things — the conversation that we ought to be having with each other as Americans.

But I was shut down. And that is why the First Amendment’s important. Debate — congenial, respectful debate — is the fertilizer, it’s the water, it’s the sunlight for our Democracy. We need to be talking to each other.

Now, this is a letter that many of you signed — many of my fellow Democrats. I’ve spent my life in this party. I’ve devoted my life to the values of this party. This — 102 people signed this. This itself is evidence of the problem that this hearing was convened to address. This is an attempt to censor a censorship hearing.

The charges in this — and by the way, censorship is antithetical to our party. It was appalling to my father, to my uncle, to FDR, to Harry Truman, to Thomas Jefferson, as the Chairman referred to. It is the basis for democracy — it sets us apart from all of the previous forms of government. We need to be able to talk. And the First Amendment was not written for easy speech. It was written for the speech that nobody likes you for.

And I was censored — not just by the Democratic administration — I was censored by the Trump administration. I was the first person censored by the — as the Chairman pointed out — by the Biden administration, two days after it came into office…And by the way, they had to invent a new word, called “malinformation,” to censor people like me. There was no misinformation on my Instagram account. Everything I put on that account was cited and sourced with peer reviewed publications or government databases. Nobody has ever pointed to a single piece of misinformation that I published. I was removed for something they called “malinformation.” Malinformation is information that is true, but is inconvenient to the government, that they don’t want people to hear. And it’s antithetical to the values of our country. //

Now I want to say something, I think, that’s more important, and it goes directly to what you talked about, Ranking Member, which is the need, this toxic polarization, that is destroying our country today. And how do we deal with that? We are more — this kind of division — is more dangerous for our country than anytime since the American Civil War. And how do we deal with that? How are we gonna — every Democrat on this committee believes that we need to end that polarization. Do you think you can do that by censoring people? I’m telling you, you cannot. That only aggravates and amplifies the problem.

We need to start being kind to each other. We need to start being respectful to each other. We need to start restoring the comity — to this chamber and to the rest of America. But it has to start here. //

This is how we need to start treating each other in this country. We have to stop trying to destroy each other, to marginalize, to villify, to gaslight each other. We have to find that place inside of ourselves of light, of empathy, of compassion. And above all, we need to elevate the Constitution of the United States, which was written for hard times. And that has to be the premier compass for all of our activities. Thank you very much.

The preliminary injunction prohibits nearly all of the federal government, including DHS, DOJ, and HHS, from coercing and colluding with social media companies to censor free speech, amongst other things: pic.twitter.com/CixBjbT8LN

— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) July 4, 2023

Just as the judge hinted at in our first hearing in May, there is nothing stopping the feds from continuing to censor political speech without this injunction.

— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) July 4, 2023

The Biden administration is reportedly gearing up to challenge a federal court ruling that found government collusion with social media companies to censor speech likely violated the First Amendment. The Justice Department filed a notice of appeal on Wednesday in the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the administration disagrees with the judge’s decision but would not elaborate further on the scathing ruling against censorship aimed at conservatives.

On Tuesday, Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Donald Trump appointee, issued a 155-page injunction in response to the lawsuit by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri. The lawsuit alleged that the White House had coerced or “significantly encouraged” tech companies to suppress free speech during the COVID pandemic.

The ruling held that “the censorship alleged in this case almost exclusively targeted conservative speech” but emphasized that the issues raised by the case transcend “beyond party lines.” The Biden administration argued that it took “necessary and responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security.”

Judge Doughty wrote:

… evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’ //

Astonishingly, the administration attempted to absolve itself of responsibility with the claim that social media companies should determine what qualifies as misinformation and how they should combat it without consideration for its role in pressure campaigns. In an ironic argument, they claimed that the lawsuit was an attempt to “suppress the speech of federal government officials under the guise of protecting the speech rights of others.” //

Elon Musk revealed many government communications and requests for censorship in public releases known as the Twitter Files. The government’s backdoor requests for censorship of speech were uncovered after he purchased the Twitter platform in 2022. https://redstate.com/tags/twitter-files

federal judge has overturned an Oregon law that criminalizes the recording of someone without their consent on the grounds that it violates the First Amendment.

In a 2-1 ruling by a Ninth Circuit panel, Judge Sandra Ikuta declared Oregon law 165.540 unconstitutional because the state does not have an obligation to protect people’s privacy in public places.

First passed in 1955, the law was later expanded to include the secret recording of conversations. It does, however, contain exceptions for law enforcement and other specific interest groups.

There’s a big difference between having to comply with the laws versus the censorship that existed under Twitter 1.0, suppressing the political positions that liberals didn’t like. Yglesias can keep spinning and getting ratioed, but he can’t argue away what happened before and what Musk has done for free speech.

The facts of Shurtleff were simple enough: Boston city officials barred the display of a flag bearing a Christian message in a square that for decades had welcomed the flags of a wide spectrum of causes, movements, and organizations. They did so because the application submitted by the sponsoring group referred to it as a “Christian flag.”

But it was not just the justices affirming that the First Amendment protects religious expression that makes Shurtleff a landmark decision of immense significance. The justices also laid the groundwork for reversing the “Lemon Test” the Court had established way back in 1971 in Lemon v. Kurtzman.

As Anne Howe on Scotus Blog explained following the Court’s Kennedy v. Bremerton School District decision, the Lemon test was used for decades by the Court “to decide that a law or practice will pass constitutional muster if it has a secular purpose, its principal effect does not advance or inhibit religion, and it does not create an ‘excessive entanglement with religion.’”

The Bremerton decision affirmed that high school football coach Joseph Kennedy had the right to pray in public at the 50-yard line after games in which his players competed, representing a public school.

In a statement earlier this week, Liberty Counsel described the significance of Bremerton and the connection to Shurtleff:

In addition, the High Court also finally buried the “Lemon Test,” citing Liberty Counsel’s 9-0 decision in Shurtleff v. City of Boston involving the Christian flag. The Justices wrote: “In fact, just this term, the Court unanimously rejected a city’s attempt to censor religious speech based on Lemon and the endorsement test (See Shurtleff, 596 U. S.).”

There are multiple positive consequences of these developments that ought to put huge smiles on the faces of First Amendment/civil liberties/religious freedom advocates across the political spectrum. Here are four, as described by Liberty Counsel:

• Government shall not discriminate against religious viewpoints whether expressed in speech, symbols, displays, or performances.
• Public schools must permit after school religious student clubs the same access they allow similar secular clubs.
• Churches can rent public schools for worship services.
• Since the “Lemon Test” is dead and the Establishment Clause must be interpreted according to its historical intent, all the cases that relied on the Lemon test are no longer good law, including cases that struck down prayer, Ten Commandments, Nativity displays or other religious symbols, religious performances, religious speech and expression, rental of public school facilities for church services when other secular use is permitted, student aid programs, and much more.

But meme-ing shouldn’t be a crime. It’s sad and often stupid, but not illegal, to be a loudmouth.

I don’t know what evidence the government has but one would think it would have to produce at least one person who was stupid enough to take the MAGA hat-wear Ricky Vaughn avatar seriously, was registered to vote in New York, planned to vote, actually saw that tweet, and “voted-by-text,” and then failed to actually vote. Notwithstanding my personal opinion that anyone dumb enough to buy into a pro-Clinton meme by a MAGA hat-wearing “Ricky Vaughn” avatar being actual election advice from Hillary Clinton maybe shouldn’t be voting — but that’s just my opinion.

Either way, this seems like a whole lot of dollars spent and effort expended to bury Mackey. Maybe the government found one person who fit the criteria. And if they found that one New Yorker stupid enough to “vote-by-text,” Mackey might go to prison. By the way, Mackey didn’t influence the election in New York. Trump lost his home state by almost two million votes.

Mackey is being tried in New York and there is no doubt why the government picked that venue. His chances of conviction? The deck is stacked against him, and the government needs to send a message. Watch what you meme. Big Brother is watching — and he isn’t laughing.

Eric Adams: ‘When We Took Prayers Out of Schools, Guns Came Into Schools’
“Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state. State is the body, church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies.” //

New York City Mayor Eric Adams made a stunning admission at an interfaith breakfast:

At an interfaith breakfast Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams seemed to regret the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that banned school-sponsored prayer in 1962. //

GWB | March 1, 2023 at 2:24 pm
No, dingleberry, there were plenty of guns in school when we had prayer in them.
It was not that “guns came into schools” but that the moral restraints on the people with those guns were removed. One of Progressivism’s greatest wins. //

GWB | March 1, 2023 at 3:52 pm
State is the body, church is the heart.
No. The community – perhaps the nation – is the body. But not The State. This is the tell of his Progressivism.

All his proposal would do is expand state interference in speech.

Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is the newest candidate running for the Republican presidential nomination. You can read about his agenda in The Wall Street Journal. It’s heavy on trendy populism, but his embrace of meritocracy and economic growth is an improvement over the dour dead-end statism of the “post-liberal” right.

But his most unique proposal, one that will probably sound enticing to many people, is a terrible one — and one that would expand state interference in speech and end up boomeranging on those it claims to protect: //

Why should any business owner be forced to hire a person who holds views they find ethically abhorrent? Political expression is already protected by the First Amendment. What Ramaswamy proposes is transforming the negative liberty of free speech into a positive “right,” which is to say, a “right” that compels others to accept, endorse, and sometimes fund political viewpoints they disagree with.

The spurious case against an Alaska lawmaker’s eligibility to hold elected office represents a threat to free speech and free elections.

I've been banging this drum a while now. Prognosis still negative..

The First Amendment isn’t dying because state actors and a political party colluded with giant tech platforms and media outlets to censor speech and sabotage elections. All of that is just a byproduct of a corrosive trend. It’s clear to me that many Americans have stopped idealizing free expression. They don’t view it as a neutral value or societal good. Not even a platitude. They definitely don’t believe in counterspeech doctrine. Some people, in fact, are fine with compelling their fellow citizens to say things. //

The First Amendment doesn’t work because guys in powdered wigs wrote down words — as Scalia once said, every “banana republic in the world has a bill of rights” — but because society embraces its underlying values, as they did due process or property rights. The spirit of the thing matters. //

The illiberal ideologues being churned out by j-schools these days aren’t nervous about consumer blowback. I suspect reporters and producers at ABC, CBS, and NBC are not refusing to cover the “Twitter Files” because they’re trying to hide the truth, but because they can’t comprehend why social media colluding with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the White House to quash stories in the preservation of “democracy” is newsworthy to begin with. //

Throughout history, authoritarians have claimed that liberty must be subdued because of some perilous historical moment. That moment is now every time Democrats don’t get their way. If these people have no problem with the state and corporations that control the public square working together to dictate appropriate speech, how long is it before the idea of curbing “dangerous” “disinformation” through legislation is normalized?

The slippery slope is how the left imprints their agenda into our culture. They know many on the right have little stomach for a fight about the ridiculousness of separate marriage beds. They know once they get momentum you’ll one day have to explain to your six-year-old what “dominatrix” means.

The federal income tax was established in 1913. (The government has not always stolen a cut of your paycheck before you get it.) There were warnings then about where that kind of sticky-fingers governing would end. The rates were 1 percent. Today the rates are almost 40 percent. In the 1930s, President Roosevelt was pushing for Social Security and folks on the right were warning of socialism. Social Security was then intended to be a temporary relief program. Today it’s a permanent retirement program for many and it’s also 14 percent of our $21,000,000,000,000 debt. Yesterday conservatives were warning about the left’s takeover of public schools and where it would lead. Today students are taught the evil of Trump’s immigration policies and football coaches lose their jobs if they pray on the field with their teams.

Many on the left and the right gave a loud cheer last week when Alex Jones was banished from Facebook. Twitter later suspended him. While it is not surprising to see the jackals on the left cheer at the burning of books, one would hope folks on the right would look in the mirror and realize their time is coming soon. The leftists will not stop (and did not stop) at nutty Alex Jones, because they do not think you are much different from him. You rightly think your belief in immigration enforcement is much different than his disgusting conspiracy theory about Sandy Hook. But you must understand the left thinks you are both equally vile. They just knew Jones was the weak member of the herd. They could pick him off as a test run. Next they’re coming for you. //

“It’s only Alex Jones” is a comforting blanket. It’s the child who closes his eyes and covers his ears in the naïve hope that the monster disappears if you can’t see or hear him. But the monster does NOT disappear. And it is most definitely NOT just Jones. Yesterday it was Jones. Today, YouTube censored human vanilla Dennis Prager. Tomorrow, there may be a knock on YOUR door.

Freedom is not something you acquire by practicing it. You don’t one day wake up and decide you are free. Freedom is something tangible and it requires the cooperation of others. If others will not give you that cooperation, you have to take it from them. We need to stop whistling past the graveyard and realize the left is seeking total victory. They do not want to compete in a marketplace of ideas. Their goal is to silence dissenting voices.

If spreading lies is a punishable act, President Donald Trump has more than met the factual threshold necessary to hold everyone who pimped the Russia Hoax financially liable for their actions. Well, not quite, because the Jones lawsuit has never been about punishing reckless and obviously false speech. It is about punishing someone who is outside the mainstream.

Using the Jones case as a model, all the plaintiff needs to prove to prevail is a) the person making the statement is unpopular, 2) the statement made is not within the conventional wisdom, and 3) the plaintiff’s feelings were hurt.

Jones may be an unsavory character, he might even deserve punishment, but the principle established by the success of this lawsuit and the damages awarded is profoundly dangerous. The lawsuit should have been summarily dismissed as a blatant violation of the First Amendment.

“The Government presenting a person asserting their Fifth Amendment privilege in order to imply to the public that the person is ‘guilty’ of some crime is a McCarthy-esque tactic that offends the Constitution and is unworthy of the United States Congress,” 1st Amendment Praetorian’s lawyer wrote. Given the Committee’s past actions, McAdoo Gordon noted in her Thursday letter that she is “forced to anticipate that the Committee will use the same totalitarian tactic to improperly smear 1AP.” //

Quoting from the Supreme Court, McAdoo Gordon then reminded the committee that the high court has described the Fifth Amendment privilege thusly:

[W]e have emphasized that one of the Fifth Amendment’s “basic functions . . . is to protect innocent men . . . `who otherwise might be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances.'”

The letter continued:

“The circumstances in which an innocent citizen finds himself faced with an out-of-control prosecutor, or a mistaken theory of criminality, or an overzealous legislative inquiry — which is the situation 1AP finds itself in — is precisely when the citizen most needs the protection of the Fifth Amendment. For the Congress to attempt to turn that protection into a weapon against a citizen, or a group of citizens, is repellant. I urge the Committee not to engage in such un-American behaviors. Unfortunately, I have little faith that the Committee will heed my appeal. This leaves me with no choice but to pre-emptively speak publicly about these issues before the Committee engages in wholesale defamation of 1AP from its powerful national platform.” //

“And now Congressman Raskin is telling the Times he plans to ‘explore the connection between those groups and the people in Mr. Trump’s orbit.’”

That is precisely what the First Amendment protects Americans from: being investigated because of the individuals with whom they associate. But not only does the Jan. 6 Committee not care, neither does the legacy media. The question remains whether Americans will, or whether they have lost their sense of decency.

Even though Gorsuch refuses to say it, Lemon is effectively overruled. The Supreme Court has ordered lower courts to stop using it as the standard for deciding Establishment Clause cases. If you read the dissent by Sotomayor, had the Court followed Lemon and subsequent cases based on Lemon, this would have been a slam-dunk for the Bremerton School District. The rules have changed, and the nation should be grateful that the Supreme Court has put aside official hostility to religion and replaced it with a policy of neutrality.

In a win for religious freedom and education choice, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that a Maine government program that only granted tuition aid to parents who sent their children to a pre-approved private school without any religious affiliation is unconstitutional.

In a 6-3 decision that reversed a lower court ruling, the Supreme Court found that the Maine Department of Education’s decision to exclude religious schools from the government’s tuition assistance program violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.