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First Amendment rights general freedom social media

Must Known Musk

Enthusiasts for prohibiting political dissent must know that the First Amendment protects the right to utter controversial speech.

They must know that there’s no constitutional loophole for speech that they disagree with. 

Another “must know”? That calling the public statements of political opponents “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “hate speech,” etc. is no substitute for open discussion.

They just don’t care. 

They just know that if they keep plugging away, struggling to muzzle the badspeech, they’re more likely to get their way than playing by the rules of free speech and open debate.

Their determination is well shown in a new California law, AB587, passed about a year ago. The law compels social media companies to institute moderation policies to squelch “hate speech,” “extremism,” “disinformation,” “misinformation,” “radicalization,” etc.

Although AB587 is anti-transparently called a “transparency measure,” main author Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel admits the point: to force social media companies to “moderate or remove hateful or incendiary content on their platforms,” like “hate speech and disinformation.”

Since Elon Musk’s Twitter is affected by the new law, Musk is suing to block it.

According to his lawsuit, AB587 “compels companies like X Corp. [Twitter] to engage in speech against their will, impermissibly interferes with [their] constitutionally protected editorial judgments” and “has both the purpose and likely effect of pressuring companies . . . to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally protected speech that the State deems undesirable or harmful.”

Politically, Mr. Musk has emerged as one of the country’s most frustratingly contradictory figures, often doing great things, sometimes very bad ones. With this lawsuit, even his enemies must know he is in the right.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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First Amendment rights general freedom local leaders

De- and Re-certified

“Around the country, a slew of doctors had board certifications removed and licensure threatened for sharing their COVID-related opinions,” explains The Epoch Times, in an article devoted to one of those persecuted, Dr. John Littell of Florida.

Early in the pandemic, “Dr. Littell, a longtime family physician in Ocala and a medical school professor, began posting videos sharing his thoughts about COVID-19 testing, treatments, and vaccines early in the pandemic,” Natasha Holt’s Epoch Times article narrates. “He was frustrated to find his content often was pulled down from his YouTube channel.” 

But the establishment’s efforts didn’t stop there. “[I]n January 2022 and again five months later, he received warning letters from the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM), the organization that issued his certification for his medical specialty.”

His videos on YouTube and then the safe, free-speech haven Rumble, spread “medical misinformation,” the board charged, warning that he could lose certification. But these were warnings. The board got a bit more serious and physical when they removed Littell from a public meeting, giving him the bum’s rush.

And then the board de-certified him.

It’s a long story, but appears to have a happy ending, with Littell re-certified and organizing a support group for medical professionals’ free speech rights, and the basic need to practice independent, patient-centered medicine, and to disagree with the gimcrack “consensus” policies that establishment organizations impose.

While there are multiple medical certification boards in America, these are not free-market concerns competing for customers. The government is heavily involved at every level. And the policies and “science” that Dr. Littell and others ran up against were not only political, but wrong — medically and morally. 

As we are increasingly discovering.

Which makes medical freedom more important than ever.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability First Amendment rights government transparency

Overly Broad Stonewalling

How specific do requests for records of unconstitutional activity have to be?

In February, the Federal Bureau of Investigation pretended an inability to fulfill America First Legal Foundation’s freedom-of-information request for documents about the FBI’s pre-election efforts to censor Twitter users. The agency declared the request to be “overly broad.”

What’s been “overly broad” is the policy of censorship, disinformation, and more by the Deep State using private partners. Meaning their real problem is doubtless that the requested documents are “overly incriminating,” too unmistakably what AFL wanted.

So the FBI stonewalled. 

And AFL has sued, in its complaint concluding that the agency’s “blanket denial of AFL’s FOIA request is contrary to law and should not stand.”

Thanks to evidence brought to light by other litigation and by Matt Taibbi’s reporting on Twitter’s internal records, none of us is just guessing that the FBI has acted to censor constitutionally protected discourse. We know that the FBI’s National Election Command Post flagged at least 25 Twitter accounts for “misinformation.”

But the only party to the censorship revealing relevant information voluntarily is Twitter itself, thanks to decisions by Twitter’s new management under Elon Musk.

With respect to everybody else colluding to censor social media — the FBI, the DOJ, the White House, Google, Facebook, etc. — looks like it’ll have to be lawsuits every step of the way.

The First Amendment’s stricture upon Congress to “make no law” abridging our “freedom of speech, or of the press,” does not allow the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and other agencies to simply subcontract. Nor are they free to mold public opinion. 

A government-controlled “press” is not a free press.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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First Amendment rights too much government

Publish and Not Perish

James Jenkins and Ryan Cagle didn’t know that they risked destruction by publishing and selling previously out-of-print books.

Their low-overhead, low-profit-margin Richmond company, Valancourt Books, founded in 2005, prints long unavailable volumes one at a time, as customers request them. To operate, the publishers must first carefully retype the books, often formerly available only in rare editions or even microfiches.

It’s two guys working out of their home doing everything. They profit only by keeping costs low.

By 2018, the Valancourt catalog listed over 400 books. That’s when the federal government came down upon the company like a ton of bricks. Invoking a 1790 copyright law, the U.S. Copyright Office demanded that Valancourt send it one copy each of hundreds of different books. Otherwise, they’d be fined up to $250 per book and further fines for “willfully or repeatedly” failing to comply.

The publishers’ choice was either spend thousands of dollars and lots of time printing and shipping the books — or be penalized out of existence. Instead of giving up, they turned to the Institute for Justice and went to court.

IJ argued that government “cannot simply force you to turn over personal property on pain of ruinous fines, and they cannot punish you for publishing a book without letting them know.”

Now, years later, IJ and Valancourt have won their case. 

It’s a win for all small publishers who might otherwise have been ruined by the whims of bureaucrats at the Copyright Office. That it had to be litigated, however, is more evidence that freedom requires constant vigilance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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First Amendment rights U.S. Constitution

Chalk One Up for Equal Treatment

“The government may not enforce the laws in a manner that picks winners and losers in public debates,” ruled Judge Neomi Rao. 

This, in response to a case where anti-abortion protesters were arrested for chalking the words “Black Pre-born Lives Matter” on a Washington, D.C., street back in 2020.

Emma Camp makes clear, in her Reason coverage of the ruling, that the case is not as simple as it may sound in the headlines. “While writing chalk messages on public streets and sidewalks is considered vandalism in D.C., protest leaders had an earlier conversation with a police officer in which he ‘explained that he believed Mayor Bowser had effectively opened up the District’s streets for political markings.’”

Nevertheless, during the protest, “police told demonstrators that they would be arrested if they painted or chalked any messages.” Two individuals in the pro-life protest defied police order and scribbled their message in chalk.

It’s actually a bigger issue than just an altercation during a protest. The police in D.C. had not merely looked the other way, allowing helter-skelter displays of “Black Lives Matter” graffiti, but the city government had actually gotten in on the act and messaged “Black Lives Matter” on the streets itself — in bold paint.

This obviously sends a message to disagreeing citizens: we are on this side, not that.

As Judge Rao insists, “The government may not play favorites in a public forum — permitting some messages and prohibiting others.”

She interprets this injunction as pertaining to the First Amendment, but it goes much deeper than that, reaching to the core idea of a rule of law, and equality of treatment under it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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education and schooling First Amendment rights general freedom

Students Strike Back

In November 2021, at taxpayer-funded Clovis Community College, the group Young Americans for Freedom requested permission to post flyers. College officials assented.

The flyers attacked socialism. Uh oh. This was a grave violation of the alleged inalienable right of socialist students on the campus to never be exposed to disagreement with their views.

Some of the aggrieved students complained. We are offended, they told the school.

Administrators furrowed their brows and quickly determined that the school could not permit such offensive speech.

Suddenly censored, the YAF students who had posted the flyers went to court, represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). They quickly won a district court victory that has now been affirmed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

According to the court’s ruling, “The district court did not abuse its discretion when it concluded that [the students] were likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the ‘inappropriate or offens[ive] language or themes’ provision was facially overbroad.”

This means that the case can continue.

Clovis YAF Chair Juliette Colunga hopes that in response to the ruling, Clovis will finally decide “to explicitly protect the constitutional rights of its students to speak freely.”

The school has tried to forestall further litigation to require it to set forth an unambiguous policy protecting freedom of speech by conceding that the students may post the anti-socialist flyers.

That’s not enough for FIRE, though, which is proceeding with the litigation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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