Category: First Amendment rights

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crime and punishment education and schooling First Amendment rights

College Censors Squelched

college, censorship, academia, woke, wokeism

If you attend Oklahoma State University, you are, I hope, now free to speak.

OSU will shut down a “bias response team” instituted to harass speech on campus. We can thank a group called Speech First, which sued the school.

“We are excited to announce that OSU will be eliminating their insidious bias reporting system that told students to anonymously report on one another for ‘bias’ and that they will have to rewrite their harassment policy to include important speech protections so that students can no longer be punished for merely expressing their views,” says Cherise Trump, executive director of the organization.

“We have also secured a change to their computer policy so that it no longer targets the protected political speech of students.”

The settlement also requires the school to pay Speech First $18,000 for legal expenses.

OSU had tried to get the lawsuit dismissed because Speech First protected the names of its plaintiffs, OSU students.

Speech First’s reason for using pseudonyms is pretty commonsensical: to protect plaintiffs from retaliation. That a university with a policy of punishing students for renegade speech might also punish them for participating in a lawsuit to end this policy doesn’t seem like a farfetched concern.

The resolution of the case hardly means that the fight for freedom of speech on campus is over. But it may help other universities realize that, as Cherise Trump puts it, “there is a high cost to violating students’ constitutional rights.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights ideological culture

A Celebrity’s Defiance

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter, censorship, Scotland, freedom

Can J. K. Rowling destroy Scotland’s new anti-free-speech law with a strategic wave of a single wand?

The author of the Harry Potter and Cormoran Strike series has gotten into trouble. She defied the State by saying that men are men and women are women even when a member of one of these sexes declares otherwise.

To some, the author’s statements are “hate” speech. Speech now prosecutable in Scotland, where Rowling lives.

On April 1, 2024, legislation went into effect there making it a criminal offense to “stir up hate” against members of a protected group, including transgender individuals. This is a “crime” that can be punished by up to seven years in prison. 

The law’s terms are encompassing and vague.

So far, Rowling has escaped arrest, though offering herself as the subject of a test case. After the law went into effect, she penned a series of posts declaring that various men who say they’re not men are in fact men: blatant “misgendering.”

“If what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested,” she wrote.

When the Scottish police declined, she added: “I trust that all women — irrespective of profile or financial means — will be treated equally under the law.

This trust is, I fear, misplaced. As long as the law exists, Rowling’s very visible defiance cannot protect everybody else who might be targeted under it. 

Scotland needs more Harry Potters, er, heroes … to stand up to this terrible law.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies political challengers

The RFK Challenge

Joe Biden, censorship, surveillance

Yes, but . . .

When contemplating a candidate for office we may like, we do a lot of “Yes, but” thinking. It’s impossible not to.

Yesterday I considered the candidacy of Bobby Kennedy, Jr., in the context of the Republican/Democrat Duopoly™. Many of my readers may like his stances on COVID or war, but worry about other positions, like the Second Amendment and “climate change.”

Yes, but . . . there is another Yes, But context: the candidate forces mainstream voters and media manipulators to Yes, But their cherished positions.

Yes, Trump was “a threat to democracy” for trying to “overturn an election.” RFK, Jr. grants that Democrat talking point. 

But when pressed by Erin Burnett of CNN, his response was a challenge: “I can make the argument that President Biden is the much worse threat to democracy, and the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history — the first president in history — that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent.”

Now your and my response might be, No, but . . .

As in, he was certainly not the first president in American history to directly censor political speech.

But the presidents who did that are all heroes to the CNN crowd, so they’ll have to say, “Yes, but . . .”

But what? What’s the response? 

The CNN article, linked above, was lame: “‘With a straight face Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that Joe Biden is a bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump because he was barred from pushing conspiracy theories online,’ DNC senior adviser Mary Beth Cahill said in a statement. ‘There is no comparison to summoning a mob to the Capitol and promising to be a dictator on day one. . . .’”

What CNN and the DNC and the whole establishment ignore is the vast suppression of thousands, millions of voices online, organized by the government and ex-government and close-to-government operatives.

Yes, but . . . they like censoring their competition!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Richly Revealing

Donald Trump, gag order, censorship, courts, indictment

There is something rich in the latest gag order placed on Mr. Trump.

“Former President Donald Trump on March 27 criticized the New York judge overseeing his ‘hush money’ case and criticized the judge’s daughter,” explains Jack Phillips of The Epoch Times, “just hours after the judge handed down a gag order against him.”

Richly . . . ironic? 

Apt? 

Idiotic?

“This Judge,” the former president wrote on his own social media site, “by issuing a vicious ‘Gag Order,’ is wrongfully attempting to deprive me of my First Amendment Right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement, including the fact that Crooked Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and their Hacks and Thugs are tracking and following me all across the Country, obsessively trying to persecute me, while everyone knows I have done nothing wrong!”

To them, Orange Man’s very existence is “wrong,” and the thing they most want is Trump to shut up. So, in the course of a trial upon a subject combining campaign finance regulations with more prurient interests, a judge gagging the defendant from speaking in public about his prosecutors is . . . well, convenient. For them. 

The prosecution is arguably an attempt to silence Trump; gag orders remove doubt. And allow the Empire State to exact the punishment before the trial concludes.

The prosecutors and politicians and major media propagandists who are aghast at Trump’s charges aren’t exactly saying that what Trump says about the judge’s daughter (that she “represents Crooked Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, and other Radical Liberals”) is false. 

They object . . . because . . . what he says makes them look bad.

And what they are trying to do is make Trump look bad.

Just rich. 

With meaning. 

More philosophically minded folks say we have a crisis of meaning these days. I don’t know. I see meaning everywhere!

But it’s not always meaning we like.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights judiciary

Most Important Time Periods

First Amendment, US Constitution, free speech, censorship

The attorneys general of a few states, a few activist groups, and a few congressmen have acted to bring to light a mass of eyewitness and documentary evidence that the federal government has been working hard, behind the scenes, to censor our speech.

The guilty parties have been caught red-handed.

Now that the matter is before the U.S. Supreme Court, reports on oral arguments suggest that not every justice is as acquainted with the point of the Bill of Rights as we’d like.

Its function is to stop government from doing various rights-violating things at will. But Justice Ketanji says: “Your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in most important time periods.”

Justice Kagan, chiming in: “I’m really worried about that.”

Tyrants worry about having too little flexibility to stomp our speech “in most important time periods,” prevention of which stomping is the very purpose of the First Amendment.

We, for our part, worry about having our speech stomped.

Some of the justices also seem not to grasp that when government officials contact you and ask you to do this and that, no overt threats are necessary for officials to rely on the threat of governmental power.

The bossing is not always subtle, though. Perusing the evidence, Justice Alito says he couldn’t imagine officials “taking that approach to the print media.” The federal speech police treat “Facebook and these other platforms like they’re subordinates.”

Are they?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs national politics & policies

TikTok Smoke But No Gun?

China, Tik Tok, social media, brainwashing, PSYOP, spying

I’d like to ban the Communist Party — in China. But TikTok — here?

The app’s possible use as spyware and worse by Chinese Communist Party operatives should be investigated thoroughly.

“Lawmakers and regulators in the West have increasingly expressed concern that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, may put sensitive user data, like location information, into the hands of the Chinese government,” explains The New York Times. “They have pointed to laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence-gathering operations.”

This concerns me enough to not be on TikTok, but while we smell smoke, I see no smoking gun.

And banning Tik Tok has every appearance of doing what the CCP would do — and did with Facebook and YouTube and X (formerly known as Prince — er, Twitter). Not to mention being unconstitutional.

The TikTok ban that passed the House last week — with only 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans voting No — if passed by the Senate and signed by the President, would set up another level of surveillance and Internet control that would be used against American citizens beyond users of this social media video-sharing platform.

It comes down to good ends not justifying evil means, in this case an all-out government attack upon freedom of speech and press.

There are things the federal government could do — and already has done — to limit TikTok’s influence. Last year, the U.S. (along with Canada) banned it from all government devices. 

This didn’t even require an act of Congress. Arguably, Trump could have done this with Facebook and Twitter on federal government devices when it became clear that these platforms were being used to orchestrate partisan speech control.

And, of course, a general social cause against TikTok could be engaged without threat of force. Political leaders owe it to the people to speak out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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