Chris Crowley, a conservative attorney in Florida, filed an appeal with the Florida Supreme Court last month contesting a 60-day suspension of his law license for exercising free speech during his political campaign for the state attorney’s office in Florida’s 20th Judicial Circuit.
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Some of the most prominent elite universities in the nation have been ranked lowest for freedom of speech, according to a report released Thursday.
Harvard, Columbia, New York University (NYU), the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and Barnard College make up the bottom five in a free speech ranking of 251 universities, according to a report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and College Pulse. The report cited several incidents of “suppression of free expression” at the schools, including disruption of events and sanctions on students and staff for expressing their views as the reasoning behind the schools’ low rankings.
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A month after Matthew Garrett secured a $2.4 million settlement from the Kern Community College District over termination proceedings for the “dishonesty” of disagreeing with colleagues on diversity issues and “unprofessional conduct” of questioning the data used to create a “racial climate task force,” the former Bakersfield College tenured history professor isn’t done yet.
He has started a campaign to pressure the KCCD Board of Trustees to rescind a contract extension and pay boost for the human resources official who oversaw his proceedings, citing newly obtained sworn testimony of the colleague who he says sicced students on Garrett with racially charged complaints that were “ultimately found to be baseless” – and used class time to do it.
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Two campaign staffers for Vice President Kamala Harris were previously involved in efforts to censor Americans for spreading purported “disinformation” about COVID-19 while working in the Biden-Harris White House.
Then-administration officials Rob Flaherty and Aisha Shah are named as having been involved in the government’s efforts to censor Americans in legal filings related to the Murthy v. Missouri lawsuit, which alleged that the federal government violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to censor content related to the pandemic and other hot-button topics. On the Harris campaign team, Flaherty is now a deputy campaign manager and Shah is the director of digital partnerships, according to their respective LinkedIn profiles.
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Free speech suppression on college campuses and social media censorship often spur debates over how far the First Amendment should go to protect Americans’ rights to express their opinions – and who should be entrusted with those decisions.
About 53% of Americans believe the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it protects, according to a new poll by the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE.
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The U.K.-based Economist speculates that Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer could save her party from defeat in November if she replaces “doddering” President Biden on the ticket, by nationalizing her Great Lakes State strategy of “relentless targeting of suburban swing voters with simple messages: abortion rights, jobs and infrastructure.”
Voters might ask this scion of a political family, who acted out her motto “get sh*t done” by shutting down in-store gardening sections and in-state travel to second homes to defeat COVID-19, why she’s allegedly forcing counselors to help mentally fragile children “undergo permanent, life-altering medical procedures that many will come to regret.”
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The Founding Fathers recognized that an educated citizenry was vital to the survival of our republic. Thomas Jefferson, for example, saw education as essential to giving every citizen the opportunity to participate meaningfully in a free society.
Writing in 1818, our third president described public education as “the means to give every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business … to express and preserve his own ideas … to improve his morals and faculties … to understand his duties, and to exercise his rights.”
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Last week, in Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court hammered home the distressing conclusion that, under the court’s doctrines, the First Amendment is, for all practical purposes, unenforceable against large-scale government censorship. The decision is a strong contender to be the worst speech decision in the court’s history.
(I must confess a personal interest in all of this: My civil rights organization, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, represented individual plaintiffs in Murthy.)
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Democratic Manhattan District Alvin Bragg’s office defended on Wednesday keeping former President Donald Trump under his gag order, requesting that it stay in place at least through Trump’s sentencing hearing in late July and any post-trial motions.
Trump attorney’s asked Judge Juan Merchan on Tuesday to lift the order, writing in a letter that the “concerns articulated by the government and the Court do not justify restrictions on the First Amendment rights of President Trump” now that the trial has concluded. Prosecutors disagreed, responding that the order was intended to protect more than just the trial proceedings.
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Indiana University is violating students’ First and 14th Amendment rights through its “far-reaching” bias reporting policy, a civil rights organization alleges.
Speech First filed a federal lawsuit against Indiana University on Wednesday arguing that the school is violating the rights of students by enacting a speech policy that “is designed solely to deter, discourage, and otherwise ‘prevent’ students from expressing disfavored views about the political and social issues of the day.” Under the policy, students can report others for “any conduct, speech, or expression, motivated in whole or in part by bias or prejudice meant to intimidate, demean, mock, degrade, marginalize, or threaten individuals or groups” on some aspect of their identity, like race or gender identity, according to Indiana University’s website.
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