Tag: First Amendment

Commentary: Stanford, Silicon Valley, and the Rise of the Censorship Industrial Complex

RealClearWire

This summer the Supreme Court will rule on a case involving what a district court called perhaps “the most massive attack against free speech” ever inflicted on the American people. In Murthy v. Missouri, plaintiffs ranging from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to epidemiologists from Harvard and Stanford allege that the federal government violated the First Amendment by working with outside groups and social media platforms to surveil, flag, and quash dissenting speech – characterizing it as mis-, dis- and mal-information – on issues ranging from COVID-19 to election integrity.

The case has helped shine a light on a sprawling network of government agencies and connected NGOs that critics describe as a censorship industrial complex. That the U.S. government might aggressively clamp down on protected speech, and, certainly at the scale of millions of social media posts, may constitute a recent development. Reporting by RCI and other outlets – including Racket News’ new “Censorship Files” series, and continuing installments of the “Twitter Files” series to which it, Public, and others have contributed – and congressional probes continue to reveal the substantial breadth and depth of contemporary efforts to quell speech that authorities deem dangerous. But the roots of what some have dubbed the censorship industrial complex stretch back decades, born of an alliance between government, business, and academia that Democrat Sen. William Fulbright termed the “military-industrial-academic-complex” – building on President Eisenhower’s formulation – in a 1967 speech.

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Supreme Court Unanimously Sides with NRA in First Amendment Case Against New York Official

South Carolina Sun Staff
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor

The Supreme Court unanimously held Thursday that the National Rifle Association (NRA) “plausibly alleged” that a New York official violated its First Amendment rights, finding that government officials cannot “use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.”

The justices allowed the NRA to pursue its First Amendment claim against former superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) Maria Vullo, vacating a lower court ruling that found the NRA failed to show Vullo “crossed the line between attempts to convince and attempts to coerce.” They held that the gun rights group has a plausible case that Vullo “violated the First Amendment by coercing regulated entities to terminate their business relationships with the NRA in order to punish or suppress gun-promotion advocacy.”

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Commentary: States Lead a Happy Title IX Revolt

South Carolina Sun Staff
Our Bodies Our Sports rally

American federalism is alive and well after all. On April 19, the Biden Education Department announced its disastrous new Title IX rule that guts due process and imposes gender ideology in educational institutions. Within days, however, officials from eight states publicly instructed their schools to ignore it. Then, within a week, 16 states sued the administration alongside nonprofit groups such as Parents Defending Education and several Louisiana school districts. Since then, the number of states suing has climbed to 26—more than half the states in the nation. Their court filings say the rule violates not only the United States Constitution and the federal Administrative Procedures Act but also Title IX itself. Game on!

While feminists weaponized Title IX to their hearts’ content in the Obama years, alleging a phony campus rape crisis to rationalize their kangaroo courts and to silence those questioning their power, the world is a different place under Biden. Feminists have met their match in American parents and and in red states—especially their education officials.

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TikTok Sues U.S. Government over New Law Banning App

South Carolina Sun Staff
TikTok User

On Tuesday, the Chinese social media app TikTok and its parent company filed a lawsuit against the federal government of the United States over a new law threatening to ban the app if it is not sold to another company by next year.

ABC News reports that the lawsuit, filed by TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance, claims the new law is a violation of the First Amendment rights of TikTok’s users. The bill was signed into law by Joe Biden last month, with the TikTok ban being one provision of a larger $95 billion foreign aid package. The law requires ByteDance to sell TikTok within 9 months, or else the app will be banned from use in the United States.

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Commentary: VDARE’s Fight Against Letitia James Is Our Fight, Too

South Carolina Sun Staff
New York AG

For all its gesticulations about “free speech,” the conservative mainstream often plays a supporting role in America’s censorship regime. It’s a two-step dance: The Right styles itself as the sworn defender of free speech and the mortal enemy of censorship while simultaneously downplaying or outright ignoring brazen censorship of speech that ventures a bit too far outside the Overton window. By claiming to defend all free speech in principle but only defending some in practice, the Right concedes, by omission, that certain ideas fall outside the bounds of free expression — and that it’s perfectly appropriate (or, at least, not particularly objectionable) to bring the full force of regime power to bear against any individual so unwise as to express them.

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Commentary: Supreme Court Takes on California’s Uber-Disclosure Laws Aiming to Crack Down on ‘Dark Money’ Ads

South Carolina Sun Staff
San Francisco City Hall

When you watch a political ad, often you’ll see a disclaimer of who the ad was paid for by, usually a political action committee, but what about the donors to the committee? Or the donor’s donors?

That’s the bridge that a San Francisco campaign finance law seeks to cross — now being challenged at the U.S. Supreme Court in No on E v. Chiu — and to prohibit an incredibly common practice in campaign finance, which are donations from anonymous sources.

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Washington State Violated Court Order by Forcing Foster Parents to ‘Affirm’ Gender ID: Lawsuit

Just the News
Jennifer and Shane DeGross

The Pacific Northwest has a message for foster and adoptive parents: Agree to affirm a child’s self-determined “sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression,” including using their preferred pronouns and taking them to Pride parades, or leave the program.

Washington state adopted new Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity/Expression (SOGIE) regulations after accepting a permanent injunction against the “nearly identical” Policy 6900 to settle a First Amendment lawsuit by would-be foster parents in July 2021, non-renewed foster parents claim in a new lawsuit.

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Commentary: Elon Musk is Right, We Are in a Fight to the Death for Free Speech

South Carolina Sun Staff
Elon Musk

Elon Musk on March 21 in a post on the X platform outlined what he called “centrist” positions on issues like securing the border, protecting American cities, reducing federal spending, ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) reverse discrimination policies, ending youth transgender surgeries and protecting freedom of speech under the First Amendment to the Constitution, saying these are not “right-wing” positions.

Musk wrote, “This is a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke mind virus. My positions are centrist: … Secure borders … Safe & clean cities … Don’t bankrupt America with spending … Racism against any race is wrong … No sterilization below age of consent … Is this right-wing?” In a second post in the thread, he added, “And, although it shouldn’t need to said, I believe in the Constitution and freedom of speech.”

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