Category: First Amendment rights

Categories
crime and punishment First Amendment rights international affairs

Don’t Be China

Xi, China, censorship, Winnie the Pooh

China is one of the world’s top censors.

The Chinazi regime bans all kinds of communication, even images of Winnie the Pooh (because of its use as a symbol of chubby Dictator Xi). It has imposed all manner of censorship on the Internet, often with the help of western technology companies. And it has imprisoned many of its critics.

China would like the whole world to be the same way. It would be easier to shut critics up if they had no place to escape to, no place where they could continue publicly rebuking the Chinese government.

And China has a new weapon with which to expand its censorship regime, the globally popular excuse for outlawing disagreement with official doctrines that consists of characterizing all contrary opinion as “misinformation” or “disinformation.”

The Chinese government wants nations to go much further than merely urging social media companies to ban posts or suspend users, the approach that U.S. officials have been following in recent years. At a recent United Nations meeting on cybercrime and in a related document (p. 18), China has urged that disseminating “false information that could result in serious social disorder” be everywhere established as “criminal offenses.”

Reclaim the Net observes that this proposal “is likely to be contested by Western countries, even though many of them have been copying parts of China’s playbook.”

Certainly, the governments of other countries would be in a better position to oppose China’s global censorship agenda if they relinquished their own censorship agendas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney and DALL-E2

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

It’s His Party

censorship, First Amendment, free speech

If you’re a fan of freedom of speech, you’re probably also a fan of the First Amendment of the United States’ Constitution.

Unfortunately, governments keep trying to evade it.

When their censorship can’t itself be evaded, often the only thing to do is go to court. 

Merely showing a copy of the Constitution to the offending officials rarely suffices.

That’s why Kells Hetherington teamed up with the Institute for Free Speech to overturn a Florida statute requiring that “a candidate running for nonpartisan office may not state the candidate’s political party affiliation.” In a 2018 campaign for Escambia County School Board, Kells had been fined for calling himself a “lifelong Republican” as part of his candidate statement on the county’s website. In a later campaign, he kept silent to avoid another fine.

The Institute points out that in violating the First Amendment rights of candidates, Florida’s don’t-say-party law has especially hurt challengers. It has deprived them of a valuable shorthand way of indicating the tenor of their political views, a shorthand that incumbents have many more ways of communicating to voters outside the context of campaign statements.

Kells and IFS have won. Late last year, a district judge in Florida ruled that the First Amendment does indeed protect his right, as a candidate, to mention his political party.

Kells says that “hopefully, this will never happen again to any other candidates.” 

In any case, it’s clear that the Institute for Free Speech will never be out of a job. That First Amendment won’t enforce itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Commission by Omission?

censorship, free speech, First Amendment

Debra Paul, publisher of the weekly Londonderry Times, should not be facing jail time for publishing political ads.

In a land where a First Amendment explicitly if imperfectly protects freedom of speech, does anyone believe she should be?

Well, the New Hampshire attorney general, for one. 

For two, whoever called his attention to the trivial oversight that led to Ms. Paul’s arrest last August. 

Her venial sin, if it’s even that, was to publish political ads that failed to include the legend “Political Advertisement” as required by New Hampshire law. 

The violation is punishable by up to a year of incarceration and a fine up to $2,000.

As Paul noted in August, “This is clearly a case of a small business needing to defend itself against overreaching government. To threaten a small business owner with jail time over something this insignificant is very heavy-handed.”

Insignificant, why? 

Not labeling a political message “Political Advertisement” is only controversial in the slightest when the message imitates normal editorial or news content. The arrest warrant reports that the ads in question were on the order of “VOTE YES ARTICLE 2.” 

Obvious political advertising.

Months later, Paul still awaits her fate. An arraignment is scheduled for later this month. On the advice of her lawyer, she had little to say when we asked her for an update about the case. But she hinted that a political adversary may have filed the complaint against her.

The net of multitudinous picayune laws that snagged Paul can snag anybody who does anything more culturally and socially ambitious than sitting at home staring at the wall all day. Such regulations can be exploited by anyone eager to harass someone for reasons quite apart from an alleged infraction.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights free trade & free markets judiciary

The Wrong Kind of Speech

California, AB5, exemptions, freelance, contract work

In 2019, California imposed a law to force many independent contractors to become standard employees if they wanted to keep working for erstwhile clients.

AB5 threw many gig workers out of work. Many lost all of their clients, who typically could not afford to simply convert contractors from whom they had been buying stuff once in a while into regular employees.

Even in the original legislation, exemptions from AB5 were granted for certain contractors. In response to angry controversy, many more categories of contractors were added to the exemption list. Then passage of Proposition 22 allowed Uber and Lyft drivers to continue as contractors.

But guess who still may not hire independent contractors in California? People running political campaigns and petition drives, who often can’t afford to hire many or any employees. The Wall Street Journal notes that today in California, “people who sell ‘consumer products’ count as ‘direct salespersons,’ while those who work on political campaigns or ballot petitions must be counted as employees.”

Thus, under the state’s current anti-contractor law, political speech is impaired in a way that sundry commercial speech is not.

A group called Moving Oxnard Forward has taken their First Amendment-based complaint about this injustice to court, with the help of the Institute for Free Speech. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 against the group. But the case can proceed now to the full Ninth Circuit or on to the U.S. Supreme Court.

At the High Court, I think we petitioners and speakers of political speech would probably win.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with DALL-E2 and Midjourney

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights free trade & free markets too much government

The California-Canada Connection

Canada, California, Medical License, consensus, censorship

What do California and Canada have in common, aside from bone-chilling temperatures?

Well, the fact that they’re trying to chill the discourse of doctors.

In California, a new law empowers medical boards to punish doctors who spread “misinformation” about COVID-19. The misinformative nature of a stated view about the pandemic is allegedly proved by the mere fact that it contradicts a putative scientific “consensus.”

Such laws rely on misinformation for their very existence. 

When coping with complex, incomplete, sometimes murky evidence, do scientists and others ever simply disagree, even fundamentally, on the road to scientific “consensus”? Can a consensus ever be wrong? Does anybody ever hew to an asserted consensus out of fearful desire to conform rather than honest intellectual agreement?

To ask these questions is to answer them. But let’s move on.

To Canada — and the case of Dr. Jordan Peterson, whose professional status in the country is being jeopardized because of medical and/or political views, like opinions criticizing “climate change models,” “surgery on gender dysphoric minors,” and Canadian officials who threatened “to apprehend the children of the Trucker Convoy protesters.”

Stated on social media, these opinions are apparently incendiary enough — i.e., candid enough — to vex Canada’s powerful medical censors.

According to Peterson, the Ontario College of Psychologists demands that he submit to “mandatory social-media communication retraining” because of his views. If he doesn’t comply, he may lose his license.

Such repressive impulses, he says, are “way more widespread than you might think.”

It’s cold outside.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with DALL-E2

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights free trade & free markets too much government

X Information

big government, big tech, big business surveillance, censorship

For well over a century, politicians have pushed Big Government/Big Business partnerships. The policy, indeed, is as old as politics. While we who like free markets often like [some of] the products of today’s biggest businesses, we must recognize that much of what these corporations sell us comes with strings attached — as we’ve found out to our dismay in the corruption of major social media outfits; as proven by the attacks on our speech and to the undermining of free elections.

Before the #TwitterFiles revelations, Michael Rectenwald, author of The Google Archipelago and other books, wrote a commentary that appeared in the pre-Christmas edition of The Epoch Times: “Who Really Owns Digital Tech?” In less than a thousand words, Rectenwald makes clear how deep governments have been involved in the tech space — particularly the Internet Space.

“Given the evidence of government start-up funding,” Rectenwald reasons, “we may have to concede the argument that the internet might have developed differently, more slowly, or not at all if the Defense Department hadn’t been involved at the outset. Likely, what we know as the internet would have become a system of private networks” — and in this dispersed-power system, free speech would not become a major issue, because not as easy a target.

As it is, however, “Twitter has operated as an instrument of the uniparty-run state, squelching whatever the regime deems ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’” Rectenwald writes, giving us an ominous list of the topics of xinformation:

  • warfare
  • economics
  • pandemics
  • elections
  • climate change catastrophism
  • the Great Reset

There are big gains for . . . some. Big Biz/Big Gov partnerships imply gains for both partners: business people gain access to governmental power and favors, and politicians and functionaries gain leverage to mold the citizenry. 

And that is where we have seen the partnership’s worst.

So far.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with DALL-E2

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts