Muda69 Posted January 27, 2021 Share Posted January 27, 2021 Tennessee Cops Arrest Man For Posting Photoshopped Picture of Men Urinating on Dead Officer's Grave https://reason.com/2021/01/25/tennessee-cops-arrest-man-for-posting-photoshopped-picture-of-men-urinating-on-dead-officers-grave/ Quote Tennessee law enforcement arrested a man last week for posting a photoshopped picture of two men urinating on a dead police officer's grave. The Dickson County Sheriff's Office, following an investigation by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI), arrested and charged Joshua Garton with harassment after Garton posted a picture to Facebook that appeared to show two men desecrating the tombstone of Sgt. Daniel Baker, who was shot and killed on duty in 2018. Garton was held on a $76,000 bond. "Agents subsequently visited Baker's gravesite this morning and determined the photograph was digitally manufactured," a TBI press release says. The agency launched the investigation at the request of 23rd District Attorney General Ray Crouch. While the picture was in poor taste, constitutional experts say law enforcement violated Garton's First Amendment rights by arresting him for the image. "The First Amendment clearly and unmistakably protects this man's right to post an offensive photo about a police officer," says Daniel Horwitz, a Nashville civil rights attorney. "The only people who broke the law here were the police officers and TBI agents who participated in this flagrantly unconstitutional arrest." The picture Garton posted is in fact a doctored photo of the cover of "Pissing on Your Grave," a single by The Rites, which originally depicted two people urinating on the tombstone of punk legend GG Allin. This is the photo that our constitutionally illiterate law enforcement officers think is a crime to share. pic.twitter.com/jOBJZBaeGF — Daniel A. Horwitz (@Scot_Blog) January 23, 2021 It's unclear how a dead person can be criminally harassed under Tennessee law, which requires that the subject be "frightened, intimidated or emotionally distressed." Rather, Garton committed the unwritten crime of hurting a police officer's feelings, also known as "contempt of cop." For example, in 2019 an Iowa man won a lawsuit after he was charged with third-degree harassment for saying online that a sheriff's deputy was a "stupid sum bitch" and "butthurt." (In hindsight, the latter seems undeniably true.) Then there's the San Diego Police Department, which issued more than 80 tickets over the last decade for "seditious language" under an unconstitutional World War I–era law. The Voice of San Diego reported that the majority of the tickets were issued to minorities for allegedly using vulgarities. Another Tennessee resident was arrested in 2017 after he wrote "Erin's police chief is a bitch" in white paint on the back of his car. There's a wide body of case law upholding the right to flip off police officers, but despite this, arrests and tickets are still meted out to people who hurt cops' feelings by giving them the finger. Just this month, the Eight Circuit Court of Appeals denied qualified immunity to a Minnesota police officer who pulled over and arrested a man for flipping her off. A spokesperson for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation directed a request for comment to Crouch's office. Agreed. In very poor taste, but not a crime. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DanteEstonia Posted January 27, 2021 Share Posted January 27, 2021 2 hours ago, Muda69 said: Tennessee Cops Arrest Man For Posting Photoshopped Picture of Men Urinating on Dead Officer's Grave https://reason.com/2021/01/25/tennessee-cops-arrest-man-for-posting-photoshopped-picture-of-men-urinating-on-dead-officers-grave/ Agreed. In very poor taste, but not a crime. This says a lot about LEOs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Goose Liver Posted January 27, 2021 Share Posted January 27, 2021 Do you know how many times I have said I would piss on some ones grave, but changed my mind when I realized how long the line would be ? 2 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DanteEstonia Posted January 27, 2021 Share Posted January 27, 2021 22 minutes ago, Goose Liver said: Do you know how many times I have said I would piss on some ones grave, but changed my mind when I realized how long the line would be ? It's not worth the potential arrest for public exposure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bobref Posted January 27, 2021 Share Posted January 27, 2021 This is outrageous. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DanteEstonia Posted January 28, 2021 Share Posted January 28, 2021 2 hours ago, Bobref said: This is outrageous. Could you be more specific? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bobref Posted January 28, 2021 Share Posted January 28, 2021 3 hours ago, DanteEstonia said: Could you be more specific? It seems so obviously unconstitutional. We’ll all be in trouble if simply being a jackass becomes a crime. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DanteEstonia Posted January 28, 2021 Share Posted January 28, 2021 (edited) 6 hours ago, Bobref said: It seems so obviously unconstitutional. We’ll all be in trouble if simply being a jackass becomes a crime. Snowflake LEOs care only about their own. Edited January 28, 2021 by DanteEstonia I added an adjective Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Goose Liver Posted January 28, 2021 Share Posted January 28, 2021 16 hours ago, DanteEstonia said: It's not worth the potential arrest for public exposure. If you knew how much this individual pissed everyone off you might reconsider ! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muda69 Posted January 29, 2021 Author Share Posted January 29, 2021 May public schools punish students for off-campus social media posts? https://reason.com/2021/01/28/the-supreme-courts-next-big-free-speech-showdown/ Quote In Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), the U.S. Supreme Court forbade public school officials from punishing students for exercising their First Amendment rights on school grounds unless the speech at issue "would materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline and in the operation of the school." In the coming months, the Court will hear arguments in a new case that asks whether that rule should be interpreted to allow school officials to punish students for certain off-campus social media posts. The case of Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. originated in 2017 when a then-high school freshman and junior varsity cheerleading team member took to the social media site Snapchat in order to complain about her failure to make the varsity cheerleading squad. The student—known by the initials B.L. in court filings because she is a minor—posted a picture of herself and one of her friends with their middle fingers raised. The post went up on a Saturday. Its accompanying text read "fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer fuck everything." That post soon came to the attention of a cheerleading coach, which led to B.L.'s suspension from the team. The question before the Supreme Court is whether the school may discipline her for such speech without running afoul of the First Amendment. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit ruled that the school was prohibited from dishing out such punishment for such constitutionally protected speech. "Tinker does not apply to off-campus speech—that is, speech that is outside school-owned, -operated, or -supervised channels and that is not reasonably interpreted as bearing the school's imprimatur," the appeals court held. The Mahanoy Area School District wants SCOTUS to reverse that ruling. Social media and related new technology act "as a megaphone for off-campus speech, ensuring that it reverberates throughout the classroom and commands the school's attention," the school and its lawyers told the justices. But thanks to the 3rd Circuit, school officials have been left with no authority "to discipline students for off-campus speech, no matter how obvious it is that the speech is directed at the school and will significantly disrupt the school environment." B.L. and her lawyers counter that the case is a matter-and-shut application of the First Amendment. "In a weekend comment in an evanescent Snapchat message," they told the justices, "B.L. swore in expressing her disappointment at not making the varsity team to her friends. The notion that a school can discipline a student for that kind of spontaneous, non-threatening, non-harassing expression is contrary to our First Amendment tradition, and finds no support in this Court's student speech cases." Oral arguments in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. have not yet been scheduled. Seems like an open and shut case to me. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muda69 Posted February 23, 2021 Author Share Posted February 23, 2021 Lawmakers to Cable Providers: Why Are You Letting News Channels Say These Things? https://reason.com/2021/02/22/eshoo-mcnerney-letter-fox-news-newsmax-oann-comcast-misinformation/ Quote Today two Democratic members of Congress sent letters to the presidents of Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Cox, Dish, and other cable and satellite companies implying that they should either stop carrying Fox News, One America News Network, and Newsmax or pressure them to change their coverage. According to the lawmakers, these conservative channels are responsible for promoting misinformation and political violence. "To our knowledge, the cable, satellite, and over-the-top companies that disseminate these media outlets to American viewers have done nothing in response to the misinformation aired by these outlets," wrote Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, both of California. Released in advance of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce's Wednesday hearing on "Disinformation and Extremism in the Media," the letter makes clear that some lawmakers do not want television providers to let their customers watch conservative news channels. (Disclaimer: I am interviewed regularly on Fox News and Newsmax.) Eshoo and McNerney ask the companies to explain the "moral and ethical principles" that undergird their decisionmaking with respect to which channels are carried, how many viewers tuned in to these channels during the four weeks before the the Capitol riots on January 6, 2020, and what steps were taken to "monitor, respond to, and reduce the spread of disinformation." "The committee members also sent the letter to Roku, Amazon, Apple, Google and Hulu, digital companies that distribute cable programming," reports The New York Times. False claims do appear with some frequency on conservative news channels, streaming services, and social media. But they also appear in The New York Times, on CNN, and in other mainstream information outlets. The traditional remedy to misinformation is to file a defamation lawsuit. The federal government does not need to involve itself. On the contrary, the First Amendment prohibits Congress from infringing on free speech—and that includes the freedom of provide companies to decide what kind of speech appears on their platforms. Politicians are not in charge of setting the parameters for acceptable speech on the internet and television. That responsibility devolves to individual companies and individual viewers. Make no mistake: The letter to television providers was an act of intimidation. This behavior is equally unacceptable when Republicans do it: Calls to regulate tech companies because Facebook, Twitter, and Google make moderation decisions that irritate conservatives are also threats to free speech. Members of both political parties are intent on wielding their power to curb the speech of their adversaries, which is precisely why the government does not—and should not—have the power to compel or censor speech. "As the most watched cable news channel throughout 2020, Fox News Media provided millions of Americans with in-depth reporting, breaking news coverage and clear opinion," said a spokesperson for Fox News in a statement.* "For individual members of Congress to highlight political speech they do not like and demand cable distributors engage in viewpoint discrimination sets a terrible precedent." Comcast, not Congress, gets to decide whether to carry Newsmax. Mark Zuckerberg, not Congress, gets to decide whether Facebook will deplatform a COVID-19 denialist. Jack Dorsey, not Congress, gets to decide whether Twitter will ban Alex Jones. That's the plain meaning of the First Amendment. As the words "misinformation" and "disinformation" come to refer not to just clear falsehoods but to information that is contentious, disputed, or highly partisan but nevertheless true, it is important to reject the idea that there is a "fake news" exception to the First Amendment. If a statement is libelous, then an outlet can be sued for printing it. If it contains a call to violence, platforms may have some legal responsibility to take action against it. But the First Amendment's protections are extremely robust, and the government may not criminalize the dissemination of information that is merely wrong or uninformed. Such a move would imperil not just right-wing news channels, but all speech that criticizes the government. Uni-party. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muda69 Posted March 8, 2021 Author Share Posted March 8, 2021 Kentucky Bill Would Make Insulting a Cop a Crime https://reason.com/2021/03/05/kentucky-bill-would-make-insulting-a-cop-a-crime/ Quote Kentucky lawmakers advanced a bill Thursday that would make insulting or provoking a police officer a crime. The legislation, Senate Bill 211, passed out of a Senate committee by a 7-3 vote, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. The bill would make it a misdemeanor offense for someone to taunt "a law enforcement officer with offensive or derisive words, or by gestures or other physical contact, that would have a direct tendency to provoke a violent response from the perspective of a reasonable and prudent person." The Kentucky bill is one of several introduced by state legislatures around the country aiming to crack down on anti-police protests following the national unrest over the police killing of George Floyd last year. In Florida, for example, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis introduced legislation last September to enhance criminal penalties for protest-related crimes and block state funding to cities that cut their police budgets. "In these riots, you see people getting up in officers' faces, yelling in their ears, doing everything they can to provoke a violent response," the Kentucky bill's sponsor, state Sen. Danny Carroll (R–Benton), told The Courier-Journal. "This is not about lawful protest in any way, shape, form or fashion," Carroll continued. "This country was built on lawful protest, and it's something that we must maintain—our citizens' right to do so. What this deals with are those who cross the line and commit criminal acts." The American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky called the legislation "an extreme bill to stifle dissent." The law, if enacted, would no doubt be challenged on First Amendment grounds. There's in fact a significant body of First Amendment and Fourth Amendment case law generated by cops retaliating against people who hurt their feelings—most of it firmly upholding the right to hurl choice words or gestures at public officials. In 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled in favor of a New York man who sued after he was arrested for disorderly conduct after flipping off a cop. The court held that the "ancient gesture of insult is not the basis for a reasonable suspicion of a traffic violation or impending criminal activity." (However, the 2nd Circuit would later dismiss a lawsuit by a man who was arrested after writing "fuck your shitty town bitches" on a mail-in traffic ticket.) In 2013, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, which covers Kentucky, ruled in favor of a woman who was pulled over and ticketed for flipping off an officer. The 6th Circuit first upheld the free speech right to shout "fuck you" and flip off a police officer from a moving vehicle in 1997, drawing on the Supreme Court's famous 1971 decision in Cohen v. California, which upheld the right of a man to wear a jacket that said "fuck the draft" into a courthouse. Despite this, similar cases keep popping up. In 2019, an Iowa man won a lawsuit after he was charged with third-degree harassment for posting on Facebook that a sheriff's deputy was a "stupid sum bitch" and "butthurt." Just last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit denied qualified immunity to a Minnesota police officer who pulled over and arrested a man for flipping her off. The Kentucky legislation is ill-conceived, probably unconstitutional, and would simply give police another tool, in addition to old standbys such as obstruction of justice and disorderly conduct, to ticket people for what's known as "contempt of cop." This has already played out in other states, such as Pennsylvania, where The Appeal reported in 2018 that police were using hate crime laws to charge people with "ethnic intimidation" for insulting them. Such prosecutions have no place in a country of citizens, rather than subjects. As Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote in 1987, in a ruling striking down a Houston ordinance that made it unlawful to oppose or interrupt a police officer, "The freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muda69 Posted March 9, 2021 Author Share Posted March 9, 2021 Biden Justice Department Sides Against Free Speech Advocates in Big First Amendment Case https://reason.com/2021/03/08/biden-justice-department-sides-against-free-speech-advocates-in-big-first-amendment-case/#comments Quote The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments later this term in a case that pits free speech advocates against public school officials who seek to punish students for certain off-campus social media posts. Last week, the Biden Justice Department entered the fray with an amicus brief that opposes the free speech side. The case is Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. In 2017, a high school freshman and junior varsity cheerleading team member took to the social media site Snapchat in order to complain about her failure to make the varsity cheerleading squad. The student—known by the initials B.L. in court filings because she is a minor—posted a picture of herself and one of her friends with their middle fingers raised accompanied by the text "fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer fuck everything." She was suspended from the team as a result of that post. B.L. and her parents, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, are now battling the school in court. They argue that the First Amendment flatly prevents school officials from punishing students for such entirely off-campus speech. "In a weekend comment in an evanescent Snapchat message," B.L.'s legal team argued in a court filing, "B.L. swore in expressing her disappointment at not making the varsity team to her friends. The notion that a school can discipline a student for that kind of spontaneous, non-threatening, non-harassing expression is contrary to our First Amendment tradition, and finds no support in [the Supreme Court's] student speech cases." In Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1968), the Supreme Court forbade public school officials from punishing students for exercising their First Amendment rights on school grounds unless the speech at issue "would materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline and in the operation of the school." In 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit invoked that precedent while ruling in B.L.'s favor. "Tinker does not apply to off-campus speech—that is, speech that is outside school-owned, -operated, or -supervised channels and that is not reasonably interpreted as bearing the school's imprimatur," the appeals court held. The Biden Justice Department is now asking the Supreme Court to undo B.L.'s sweeping First Amendment victory at the 3rd Circuit. "The court of appeals incorrectly held that off-campus student speech is categorically immune from discipline by public-school officials," the government argued in a friend of the court brief filed in support of the Mahanoy Area School District. According to the Biden Justice Department, while some off-campus speech deserves constitutional protection, the 3rd Circuit went too far, unfairly hamstringing school officials, who, the government maintained, require significant leeway when it comes to regulating and punishing student speech. "When the student's off-campus speech targets an extracurricular athletic program in which the student participates," the brief argued, "such speech might properly be regarded as school speech that is potentially subject to discipline by school officials if, for instance, it intentionally targets a feature that is essential to or inherent in the athletic program itself." Oral arguments in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. have not yet been scheduled. As one of the comments to this story posits: "The basic premise of the Biden administration is that students in government schools have no freedom to speak in any way that reflects poorly on government schools, which is really just a necessary precursor for it to argue in the future that nobody has the right to criticize the government at all. Authoritarian incrementalism. Nobody that has been paying attention should be surprised by any of these positions." I'm not surprised at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muda69 Posted March 16, 2021 Author Share Posted March 16, 2021 The War on Free Speech Is About To Get a Lot Uglier https://reason.com/2021/03/16/the-war-on-free-speech-is-about-to-get-a-lot-uglier/ Quote One week after being trapped inside the United States Capitol as thousands of pro–Donald Trump marauders attempted to forcibly "stop the steal" of the presidential election, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) suggested one possible federal government response: convening a national commission on media literacy. "We're going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can't just spew disinformation and misinformation," Ocasio-Cortez told her followers in a video message. "It's one thing to have differing opinions, but it's another thing entirely to just say things that are false." The road to speech restrictionism is paved with political rhetoric about protecting the proletariat from falsehoods. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán last year cited the potentially deadly dangers of "fake news" while ramming through a law punishing coronavirus misinformation with up to five years in prison. Holocaust denial is illegal in more than a dozen European countries, in the name of safeguarding Jewish minorities. Donald Trump, before he was elected president, vowed to "open up our libel laws" as a remedy for "negative and horrible and false articles." Thankfully, Trump's implausible threat—there are no federal laws governing libel, for starters—foundered on the same rocks that will thwart any Ocasio-Cortez attempt to have the feds arbitrate falsehoods and "rein in" free expression. America's legal and cultural speech traditions are the strongest on the planet, and the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has been vigorous in defending the First Amendment. Add to that legal roadblock a more temporal impediment to Ocasio-Cortez's policy agenda: Legislation in the 117th Congress will be shaped much more by the most conservative Democrats in the 50–50 Senate than it will by the loudest socialists in the House. But that doesn't mean AOC-style censorship will be cauterized in the post-Trump era. To the contrary. The awful events of January 6 accelerated trends in left-of-center circles, particularly within media and technology companies. Shocked at the sight of a violent mob lending street muscle to a lame-duck president's conspiracy theory, journalists, academics, and social media companies seemed at once to agree on a two-pronged strategy: using the most maximally negative adjectives to describe the country's still sizable Trump rump and banishing that bloc's most deplorable figures from every platform within reach. First it was the sitting president who was sent to social-media Siberia. Soon, the Twitter-for-right-wingers site Parler found itself without web hosting services after Amazon, Apple, and Google severed all business ties within a 48-hour span. The day after the House impeached Trump for a second time, the journalistic chattering classes redirected their outrage toward Politico inviting conservative commentator Ben Shapiro to be a single-day guest editor of its flagship email newsletter. The deplatforming mania was almost awesome to behold. "You need to be shut down!" MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski ranted in the general direction of Facebook. "Nobody needs what you have to offer. You've destroyed this country." Neoconservative NeverTrumper and Washington Post columnist Max Boot thundered that President Joe Biden "needs to reinvigorate the [Federal Communications Commission] to slow the lies and sedition from Fox and other right-wing broadcasters." Otherwise, Boot warned, "the terrorism we saw on Jan. 6 may be only the beginning, rather than the end, of the plot against America." The Associated Press sent out this scare headline to its 1,300-plus media-industry subscribers: "Extremists exploit a loophole in social moderation: Podcasts." Among the trial balloons taking flight in this fraught moment was a national commission. Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch suggested a South African–style Truth and Reconciliation process "to address the lies and the anti-democratic policies of the Trump years." It would be "a chance for finding a common national story, for amnesty and a new beginning," Bunch argued, adding ominously, "I'd be shocked if this happened, but I don't know any other peaceful path forward." This is not the first time the nation's intellectual and political gatekeepers have found themselves mobilized to collective action after a traumatic outburst of right-wing violence. In 1995, when Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people with a fertilizer bomb at a federal building in Oklahoma City, President Bill Clinton affixed partial blame to "loud and angry voices" who "spread hate" on conservative talk radio, plus anyone else who believes that the greatest threat to their liberty comes from the U.S. government. "There have been lawbreakers among those who espouse your philosophy," he scolded the latter group. But a more interesting antecedent to 2021's journalistic consensus began in 1944, when, as part of elite soul searching over America's initially sluggish response to the worldwide threat of fascism, Time Publisher Henry Luce tabbed University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins to convene a blue-ribbon Commission on Freedom of the Press. The Hutchins Commission, featuring more than a dozen academics and revolving-door government employees including Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Schlesinger, and Archibald MacLeish, produced in 1947 one of the most enduringly influential documents in the history of modern media theory, titled A Free and Responsible Press. Vibrating with revulsion at the lurid, corrupting excesses of tabloid newspaper journalism, the report denounced sensationalism, warned against "'hate' speech" (hilariously, the word bureaucratic was cited as an example), and called for the creation of a national news council to establish and enforce professional standards. As the media scholar Stephen Bates dryly noted in a 2018 paper, "Although it might seem difficult to take the new out of news, the commission tried." At the heart of the project was a paternalistic disgust that consumers were choosing media wrong, that press barons were building fortunes by pandering to base tastes, and that, as a result, the American experiment of self-government was being undermined from within. The media "can spread lies faster and farther than our forefathers dreamed when they enshrined the freedom of the press in the First Amendment to our Constitution," the report's authors lamented. "The press can be inflammatory, sensational, and irresponsible. If it is, it and its freedom will go down in the universal catastrophe." Unsurprisingly, that elitist message landed like a stink bomb in smoke-filled 1940s newsrooms. "'A Free Press' (Hitler Style) Sought for U.S.," ran the unsubtle headline in Col. Robert McCormack's Chicago Tribune. But then a funny thing happened. As radio and television killed off afternoon papers and newspaper wars reduced the options in most big cities to a single broadsheet monopoly, owners found the Hutchins professionalization model useful for attracting readership from all political persuasions and for building up their own personal prestige. Newsrooms fattened to a historic degree. Until technology enabled their captive audiences to flee. It turns out people, now as then, still want to read about local crime, absorb different political viewpoints, and otherwise consume media in ways that journalistic elites find skeevy. And unlike in 1947, those attempting to shape the discourse in 2021 are not bothering to try to shove a national polity into a common public square. Instead, like bouncers working the velvet rope, they're policing who gets to be in the club and how they should behave once inside. This development, in our era of extreme and sporadically violent polarization, threatens to make both journalism and politics worse, assuming that's possible. Consumers of political delusion have nobody but themselves to blame for their behavior on January 6. But by expelling rather than interacting with them, elite journalism threatens to make itself more susceptible to confirmation bias and hyperbolic error. Who shall first be virtuous enough to break this vicious cycle? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muda69 Posted March 29, 2021 Author Share Posted March 29, 2021 Journalists Attack the Powerless, Then Self-Victimize to Bar Criticisms of Themselves https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-attack-the-powerless?r=9pu2t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=copy Quote The daily newspaper USA Today is the second-most circulated print newspaper in the United States — more than The New York Times and more than double The Washington Post. Only The Wall Street Journal has higher circulation numbers. On Sunday, the paper published and heavily promoted a repellent article complaining that “defendants accused in the Capitol riot Jan. 6 crowdfund their legal fees online, using popular payment processors and an expanding network of fundraising platforms, despite a crackdown by tech companies.” It provided a road map for snitching on how these private citizens — who are charged with serious felonies by the U.S. Justice Department but as of yet convicted of nothing — are engaged in “a game of cat-and-mouse as they spring from one fundraising tool to another” in order to avoid bans on their ability to raise desperately needed funds to pay their criminal lawyers to mount a vigorous defense. In other words, the only purpose of the article — headlined: “Insurrection fundraiser: Capitol riot extremists, Trump supporters raise money for lawyer bills online” — was to pressure and shame tech companies to do more to block these criminal defendants from being able to raise funds for their legal fees, and to tattle to tech companies by showing them what techniques these indigent defendants are using to raise money online. The USA Today reporters went far beyond merely reporting how this fundraising was being conducted. They went so far as to tattle to PayPal and other funding sites on two of those defendants, Joe Biggs and Dominic Pezzola, and then boasted of their success in having their accounts terminated: As of Wednesday afternoon, the Biggs fundraiser was listed as having received $52,201. Pezzola had received $730. Biggs' campaign disappeared from the site shortly after USA TODAY inquired about it…. Friday, a USA TODAY reporter donated to Pezzola's fundraiser using Stripe. Stripe told USA TODAY it does not comment on individual users. A USA TODAY reporter was able to make a $1 donation to Pezzola's fundraiser using Venmo, a payment app owned by PayPal. After being alerted by USA TODAY, Venmo removed the account. Soon a PayPal account took its place. PayPal caught that and removed it, too. Wow, what brave and intrepid journalistic work: speaking truth to power and standing up to major power centers by . . . working as little police officers for tech giants to prevent private citizens from being able to afford criminal lawyers. Clear the shelves for the imminent Pulitzer. Whatever you think about the Capitol riot, everyone has the right to a legal defense and to do what they can to ensure they have the best legal defense possible — especially when the full weight of the Justice Department is crashing down on your head even for non-violent offenses, which is what many of these defendants are charged with due to the politically charged nature of the investigation. The right to a vigorous defense has always been a central cause of mine as a lawyer and a journalist (it also used to be a central cause of left-wing groups like the ACLU, years ago; it was that same principle that caused then-candidate Kamala Harris to solicit donations last summer that went to protesters charged with violent rioting). A federal prosecutor was recently referred for disciplinary procedures for publicly threatening to charge some of these Capitol protesters with sedition, one of the gravest crimes in the U.S. Code. That is how grave the legal jeopardy is faced by these people trying to raise money for lawyers. What makes all of this extra grotesque is that, as The Washington Post reported, most of those charged with various crimes in connection with the January 6 Capitol riot, including many whose charges stem just from their presence inside the Capitol, not the use of any violence, are people with serious financial difficulties: not surprising for a country in the middle of a major economic and joblessness crisis, where neoliberalism and global trade deals have destroyed entire industries and communities for decades: Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories. . . . The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public, The Post found. A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings. This USA Today article is thus yet another example of journalists at major media outlets abusing their platforms to attack and expose anything other than the real power centers which compose the ruling class and govern the U.S.: the CIA, the FBI, security state agencies, Wall Street, Silicon Valley oligarchs. To the extent these journalists pay attention to those entities at all — and they barely ever do — it is to venerate them and mindlessly disseminate their messaging like stenographers, not investigate them. Investigating people who actually wield real power is hard. The Washington Post, Feb. 10, 2021 Instead, the primary target of the Trump-era media has become private citizens and people who wield no power, yet who these media outlets believe must have their lives ruined because they have adopted the wrong political ideology. So many corporate journalists now use their huge megaphones to humiliate and wreck the lives of ordinary private citizens who they judge to have bad political opinions (meaning: opinions that deviate from establishment liberalism orthodoxies which these media outlets exist to enforce). We have seen this over and over. CNN confronted an old woman on the front lawn of her Florida home for the crime of having used her little Facebook page to promote a pro-Trump event they claimed was engineered by Russians. The same network threatened to expose the identity of another private citizen who created an anti-CNN meme unless he begged and promised not to do it again. HuffPost doxed the real-life name of an anonymous critic of Islam (whose spouted views I find repellent) and ruined her business. CNN @CNN A Florida woman who ran a Trump supporters page that unwittingly promoted a Russian-coordinated event on Facebook says she doesn’t believe that she was influenced by Kremlin-linked trolls cnn.it/2EHVPpE February 21st 2018 8,231 Retweets14,695 Likes Just last week, The Daily Beast decided to expose the identity of a private citizen at Spring Break in Miami and detail his marital and legal problems because a video of him went viral due to his being dressed as the Joker and uttering “COVID truther” phrases. The same outlet congratulated itself for unearthing and exposing the real name of an African-American Facebook user whose crime was posting videos mocking Nancy Pelosi. My principal critique of the contemporary media posture — and my governing view of the real purpose of journalism — is summarized by this: Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald If you think the real power centers in the US are the Proud Boys, 4Chan & Boogaloos rather than the CIA, FBI, NSA, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and spend most of your time battling the former while serving the latter as stenographers, your journalism is definitionally shit. March 16th 2021 5,288 Retweets15,925 Likes But increasingly, the largest corporate media platforms are used to punish ideological dissent and thought crimes by powerless, private citizens. They do not criticize or investigate real power centers, but serve them. And what makes it worse — so, so much worse — is that, as they assault, dox and harass private citizens, these journalistic bullies depict themselves as the real marginalized people, as those who are so fragile, voiceless, powerless, and vulnerable that criticizing them is tantamount to bullying, harassment, and violence. This new journalistic tactic of weaponizing and misappropriating the language of marginalization, abuse, harassment and oppression and applying it to themselves — all to render any criticism of their work a form of assault and abuse — is one I have written about several times before. The last time was when a major front-page reporter at the most influential paper in the country, The New York Times’ Taylor Lorenz, got caught lying twice in six weeks, and those (such as myself) who criticized her for it — who criticized her journalism for the Paper of Record — were branded toxic, misogynistic bullies who were inciting dangerous hate mobs against her. And thus was criticism of this powerful journalist somehow manipulatively converted into an act of morally reprehensible harassment. What these journalists are doing is as transparent as it is tawdry. They insist that you not treat them as what they are: people who wield extreme power and influence to shape political discourse, widely disseminate disinformation, wreck people’s reputations, expose the identity of private citizens, and propagandize the public. No, increasingly they are demanding that you treat them as exactly the opposite: the most marginalized, vulnerable, endangered and fragile members of society whose standing is so tenuous that publicly criticizing them should be barred as an act of violence, and those expressing critiques of their work must be consequently shunned as harassers and abusers. This is the demented framework that allowed CNN’s coddled, blow-dried, manicured and pedicured millionaire TV personality Jim Acosta, with a straight face, to write an entire book casting himself on the cover as someone in danger. What enabled Jim Acosta of all people to cast himself as a victim, to the point where so many liberals bought this book that it ended up on The New York Times bestseller list? He was criticized by the President and his supporters for his journalism. That’s it. And just like that, the real victims in America are not the jobless or the homeless or residents of addiction-ravaged communities or victims of violent crime but, instead, the rich, famous TV personalities for CNN. This is the fictitious melodrama — with themselves cast as the stars — that they are demanding you ingest to treat them with deference and respect. As I’ve noted before, I’ve been harshly criticized for my journalism for years. I was publicly attacked in deeply personal ways by the President of Brazil many times, and endlessly slandered by his movement. That’s not fun, but it is also not persecution. What is real persecution is being prosecuted or imprisoned or threatened with prison for your reporting. Real persecution is what is being done to Julian Assange. Criticism, even harsh criticism, comes with the territory: the cost of the immense privilege of having a public platform to shape debate. If you do not want to be criticized or called names, don’t become a journalist or seek out public platforms. Sunday’s USA Today article which tried to destroy the ability of these criminal defendants to raise donations for their legal fees contained the names of three journalists in its byline. The lead reporter — the one who the paper’s editors put first, Brenna Smith — took to Twitter to boast of this monumental journalistic exposé. After I saw several commenters criticizing the story, I added my own critiques of this story: Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald Congratulations on using your new journalistic platform to try to pressure tech companies to terminate the ability of impoverished criminal defendants to raise money for their legal defense from online donations. You're well on your way upward in this industry for sure: Brenna T. Smith @brenna__smith My *first* story with USA Today: Defendants in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot continue to crowdfund their legal fees online using popular payment processors despite a growing crackdown from tech companies. https://t.co/KpegKiOmzL March 28th 2021 1,677 Retweets7,891 Likes Note that the critique I voiced is about the reporting she had just published in one of the largest and most influential newspapers in the country. I also engaged the journalist whose name was listed last — a person named Will Carless — in a lengthy discussion expressing similar criticisms. My criticism of Carless, a white straight male listed last on the byline, attracted no criticism for some reason. But my criticism of Smith, the lead reporter, caused such an explosion of indignation and rage from the corporate media class that it caused my name to trend on Twitter (yet again) as a dastardly online villain: that’s how grave my moral transgression was. What was my moral offense here? According to these media mavens and the self-serving, manipulative framework they are trying to implant, I did not voice criticisms of a piece of journalism in one of the most influential newspapers in the country. Instead — in their hands — they converted it, just as they did with criticisms of Lorenz, into a narrative in which I bullied a poor, fragile, young lady who is too weak and too vulnerable to handle public critique. They emphasized that she is just an intern: in their eyes the equivalent of a high school junior — even though she has a long history of writing deranged articles for the U.S.-Government-funded Bellingcat and was, at least in the view of her editors, competent and professional enough to be the lead reporter on what they treated as a major news story designed to harm the lives of numerous private citizens. If she is “merely an intern,” then why is she listed as the lead reporter on a major news story? And if her editors determine that she is capable of fulfilling that role, then you can’t simultaneously demand she be treated like a young debutante off-limits from critique. Do you see what they are doing here? They are working to create a moral framework where it is always impermissible to criticize their journalism, no matter how shoddy, deceitful and amoral it is. They constantly concoct reasons why the journalist in question is too marginalized and too vulnerable to legitimately criticize. They are all apparently competent and sophisticated enough to be trusted to byline news reporting in major corporate outlets — and we must treat them as tough, talented professionals when it comes time to deference due — but we are then simultaneously instructed that they are not mature or strong enough to endure criticisms of that work. If she had not been an intern, they still would have decreed criticisms of her off limits on the ground that any criticism will stoke misogynistic abuse: after all, Lorenz is a borderline-middle-aged reporter, not an intern, but that is how criticisms of her are delegitimized. What is even more remarkable is how these liberal media figures invoke the most long-standing sexist, racist and homophobic tropes to erect this shield of immunity around themselves that they demand you honor. Look at how they transformed this journalist from what I see her as and what she is — an adult professional reporter who has sufficiently risen in the profession to byline a major story in a national newspaper — into an offensive sexist caricature straight out of the 1950s. In their manipulative hands, she — like Taylor Lorenz of The New York Times — becomes not a professional adult journalist but just a fragile little china doll who cannot withstand any critiques. A senior USA Today editor actually emailed me to chide me for my inappropriate behavior — i.e., critiquing the journalism of the reporter they placed first on the byline. And here is how USA Today’s former “diversity and inclusion editor” Hemal Jhaveri — who just got fired for posting a series of racist decrees about how white people are the root of all evil — decided to interpret this event: Hemal Jhaveri @hemjhaveri Two USA TODAY reporters getting targeted in the span of days isn't by chance. What is happening to Brenna Smith is not a coincidence. Top editors showed they would cave at the slightest provocation. Now, female journalists through the org will be more susceptible to harassment. March 29th 2021 6 Retweets40 Likes Journalists with these outlets wield immense power and influence. These are not the voiceless, marginalized, powerless people in society. They’re the ones who attack, expose and ruin marginalized people if they dare express political views of which these journalists disapprove. It is not just morally repugnant but quite dangerous for them to try to place themselves off limits from criticism this way. The whole point of journalism — the reason why a free press is vital — is because it is the only way to hold accountable powerful institutions and powerful actors. Corporate media outlets and those they employ as reporters are among the most powerful and influential actors in society and, as such, are completely fair game for criticisms, protests, and denunciations. What they are trying to do by exploiting the language of oppression and marginalization to cast themselves as vulnerable victims who cannot be criticized is despicable. It deserves nothing but contempt. That is precisely why I intend to heap scorn on it every time they try it, precisely because these in-group, swarming corporate journalists are the real bullies, trying to stigmatize and destroy the reputations of ordinary citizens who commit the crime of criticizing their journalism or expressing political opinions they want banished. They know that the public — for very good reasons — has lost faith and trust in their work at unprecedented levels. They know that their industry is failing. When journalism turns its guns not on the powerful but on the powerless — descending as low as trying to prevent them from raising needed money for a legal defense — the contempt is well deserved. The demographic characteristics of the journalists doing this disgraceful, cowardly journalism is irrelevant. The only reason they even mention it is because they think they can weaponize it against their critics. This lowly tactic will succeed only if people are cowed and intimidated by it. It will fail, as it should, if people ignore it and treat them like any other power centers by freely expressing the criticisms you think their journalism merits regardless of what names they call you as a result. Another fantastic piece by Mr. Greenwald. And goes to show again the complete fall of mainstream media "journalism". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muda69 Posted April 6, 2021 Author Share Posted April 6, 2021 A Professor Pushed Back Against 'White Fragility' Training. The College Investigated Her for 9 Months. https://reason.com/2021/04/05/a-professor-pushed-back-against-white-fragility-training-the-college-investigated-her-for-9-months/?itm_source=parsely-api Quote Elisa Parrett, a newly tenured 38-year-old professor of English at Lake Washington Institute of Technology, the only public technical institute in Washington state, realized last June that she had some qualms about the approach her university—which is located in suburban Seattle and has about 6,000 students—had taken to diversity and inclusion. Her concerns about the campus climate had been mounting for a while. "I wasn't exactly open about my political positions at work, but I didn't exactly keep them a secret either," says Parrett, whose heterodox politics led her to vote for Green Party nominee Jill Stein in 2016 and for Donald Trump last year. "I simply avoided bringing politics up and avoided mentioning my views unless they seemed relevant to things other people had already said." She didn't like the rise of the concept of "safe spaces," or certain aspects of what she calls "capital-A anti-racist pedagogy," which she views as being distinct from mere opposition to racism. But what most concerned her was an upcoming diversity training in which faculty and staff would be divided into white and nonwhite "caucuses." In the wake of George Floyd's death and the protests that then erupted all over the country, LWTech had, like so many other educational institutions, embarked on a large, highly visible attempt to make itself a more inclusive, less racist place. The session was a part of that. It was called Courageous Conversations, and it was scheduled for June 19. The stated goal of such events is to allow people to talk about race and racism more openly, but the decision to have the races meet separately made Parrett uncomfortable. "Racial segregation of that kind seems like a throwback to the pre-1960s and not a good way to create any kind of cooperation or collaboration," she says. She wasn't the only one disturbed by the idea of a racially segregated anti-racism training. Her friend Phil Snider, another English professor at LWTech, said in an email to senior administrators that a "conference based on segregation by skin color does nothing to build a community of belonging." Nonetheless, a June 18 all-college email noted that the school's president, Amy Morrison, had "made clear the expectation that all full-time employees attend Friday's Courageous Conversations" unless they had conflicting teaching responsibilities. Parrett decided to express her qualms about the training during the training itself. What happened over the next nine months was both bizarre and oppressive. Because of a brief disruption that easily could have been brushed aside or handled with a warning not to do it again, LWTech went to war against a tenured faculty member, launching a cartoonishly over-the-top disciplinary process that included the hiring of a private investigator, dozens of interviews, and claims of widespread trauma. Parrett is far from a perfect victim. While she was under investigation, she became convinced that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump. She and her husband eventually attended the infamous "Stop the Steal" rally on January 6, 2021. (The two insist that they protested peacefully and did not enter the U.S. Capitol or participate in the riot.) Some people will likely discount her story because of her participation in an understandably reviled political demonstration, but that would be a mistake. What happened to Parrett, while not common, is part of a trend toward an intolerant approach to political differences—one in which disagreement on mainstream political issues is reframed as a form of harm. ... Some people are likely, again, to write these examples off as meaningless anecdotes. But many intellectuals have been noting this tendency toward inflated claims of harm on the left for a while now. In 2016, the Australian psychologist Nick Haslam wrote a key paper, "Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology," that critiqued several examples from his own (overwhelmingly liberal) field. That in turn was picked up by Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic, whose article "How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm" included plenty of non-ivory-tower examples. Other thinkers, on very different parts of the left, have noticed similar developments: That same year, Sarah Schulman wrote a book called Conflict Is Not Abuse that critiqued overstated harm claims in leftist communities. When an Australian psychologist, a heterodox American liberal, and a lesbian feminist activist are all criticizing the same phenomenon from different angles, perhaps it would be premature to write that phenomenon off as the fears of a bunch of old crusty white guys with outmoded views. In this worldview, everything is a harm. There is no such thing as legitimate political disagreement, because we (the progressive in-group) already know the correct answer to every question (even if the answer can sometimes change overnight), and anyone who disagrees clearly—clearly—does so not because of some well-founded political or philosophical difference but because that person wants to harm the innocent people we are righteously hellbent on protecting. There is literally no other explanation for such a difference of opinion, and it doesn't matter whether the opinion being denounced is held by the majority of Americans. It is simply toxic to treat mainstream disagreement about political issues as harmful and worthy of discipline. Yet in some circles, this style of zealotry is not just present but escalating. "Dr. Morrison is ideologically committed to defeating systemic racism," says Phil Snider. "Heaven knows there's nothing wrong in the world with defeating racism wherever you find it. The problem is she has only one perception of how that's to be pursued, and anybody who suggests—Hey, there might be another way; can we talk about this?—is going to catch what Elisa has caught." It would be nice to imagine that what's going on at LWTech is restricted to one cartoonishly out-of-control college administration. But that's just not true. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muda69 Posted April 8, 2021 Author Share Posted April 8, 2021 A Medical Student Questioned Microaggressions. UVA Branded Him a Threat and Banished Him from Campus. https://reason.com/2021/04/07/microaggressions-uva-student-kieran-bhattacharya-threat/ Quote Kieran Bhattacharya is a student at the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine. On October 25, 2018, he attended a panel discussion on the subject of microaggressions. Dissatisfied with the definition of a microaggression offered by the presenter—Beverly Cowell Adams, an assistant dean—Bhattacharya raised his hand. Within a few weeks, as a result of the fallout from Bhattacharya's question about microagressions, the administration had branded him a threat to the university and banned him from campus. He is now suing UVA for violating his First Amendment rights, and a judge recently ruled that his suit should proceed. Here was what the student said. "Thank you for your presentation," said Bhattacharya, according to an audio recording of the event. "I had a few questions, just to clarify your definition of microaggressions. Is it a requirement, to be a victim of microaggression, that you are a member of a marginalized group?" Adams replied that it wasn't a requirement. Bhattacharya suggested that this was contradictory, since a slide in her presentation had defined microaggressions as negative interactions with members of marginalized groups. Adams and Bhattacharya then clashed for a few minutes about how to define the term. It was a polite disagreement. Adams generally maintained that microaggression theory was a broad and important topic and that the slights caused real harm. Bhattacharya expressed a scientific skepticism that a microaggression could be distinguished from an unintentionally rude statement. His doubts were wellfounded given that microaggression theory is not a particularly rigorous concept. But Nora Kern*, an assistant professor who helped to organize the event, thought Bhattacharya's questions were a bit too pointed. Immediately following the panel, she filed a "professionalism concern card"—a kind of record of a student's violations of university policy. "This student asked a series of questions that were quite antagonistic toward the panel," wrote Kern. "He pressed on and stated one faculty member was being contradictory. His level of frustration/anger seemed to escalate until another faculty member defused the situation by calling on another student for questions. I am shocked that a med student would show so little respect toward faculty members. It worries me how he will do on wards." According to Bhattacharya's lawsuit, the concern card generated interest from an assistant dean in the medical school, who emailed him and offered to meet. The assistant dean assured him that "I simply want to help you understand and be able to cope with unintended consequences of conversations." Bhattacharya responded that contrary to anyone's assertions, he had not lost his temper or become frustrated with the panel: Your observed discomfort of me from wherever you sat was not at all how I felt. I was quite happy that the panel gave me so much time to engage with them about the semantics regarding the comparison of microaggressions and barbs. I have no problems with anyone on the panel; I simply wanted to give them some basic challenges regarding the topic. And I understand that there is a wide range of acceptable interpretations on this. I would be happy to meet with you at your convenience to discuss this further. Then a dean of student affairs asked to meet as well. Meanwhile, the Academic Standards and Achievement Committee met to to discuss the concern card. This committee voted to send Bhattacharya a written reminder to "show mutual respect" to faculty members and "express yourself appropriately." The committee also suggested that he get counseling. On November 26, this suggestion became a mandate: The student was informed that he must be evaluated by psychological services before returning to classes. Bhattacharya repeatedly asked university officials to clarify what exactly he was accused of, under whose authority his counseling had been mandated, and why his enrollment status was suddenly in doubt, according to the lawsuit. These queries only appear to have made UVA officials more determined to punish him: Bhattacharya's mounting frustration with these baseless accusations of unspecified wrongdoings was essentially treated as evidence that he was guilty. At his hearing, he was accused of being "extremely defensive" and ordered to change his "aggressive, threatening behavior." He was ultimately suspended for "aggressive and inappropriate interactions in multiple situations." On December 30, UVA police ordered him to leave campus. UVA's administration engaged in behavior that can be described as "gaslighting." Administrators asserted that Bhattacharya had behaved aggressively when he hadn't, and then cited his increasing confusion, frustration, and hostility toward the disciplinary process as evidence that he was aggressive. And all of this because Bhattacharya asked an entirely fair question about microaggressions, a fraught subject. His lawsuit contends that UVA violated his First Amendment rights by retaliating against him for speaking his mind. UVA filed a motion to dismiss the case, but a district court judge ruled that the suit could proceed. "Bhattacharya sufficiently alleges that Defendants retaliated against him," wrote the court. "Indeed, they issued a Professionalism Concern Card against him, suspended him from UVA Medical School, required him to undergo counseling and obtain 'medical clearance' as a prerequisite for remaining enrolled, and prevented him from appealing his suspension or applying for readmission." It is vital that UVA lose this case, and lose badly. Students must have the right to question administrators about poorly formed concepts from social psychology without fearing that they will be branded as threats to public order. That's the difference between a public university and an asylum. Update: This post initially identified Sara Rasmussen as the professor who filed the complaint, but it was Nora Kern, a co-organizer of the event. Both are defendants in the lawsuit. Agreed. This case should be a slam dunk victory for Mr. Bhattacharya and free speech. And the UVA administrators who foisted this ridiculousness on him should be the ones ordered to leave the UVA campus. 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Muda69 Posted April 14, 2021 Author Share Posted April 14, 2021 University of Oklahoma Diversity Training Forces Students and Faculty To Affirm the School's Political Views https://reason.com/2021/04/13/university-of-oklahoma-diversity-training-forces-students-and-faculty-to-affirm-the-schools-political-views/ Quote After a summer of racial reckoning, the University of Oklahoma instituted mandatory diversity training for students and faculty last fall. According to the OU website, the program addresses power, privilege, and identity as "one element of OU's efforts to promote systemic change." In the announcement, President Joseph Harroz Jr. said, "We simply cannot reach our full potential unless we become a true place of belonging where every member of the OU family feels seen, heard, and valued." But, for graduate student and staff member Elizabeth Owen, the training had quite the opposite effect. In order to participate in the 2020–2021 school year, Owen was required to complete three interactive video-based training programs depicting scenarios that a community member might encounter on campus. Participants were presented with several choices of how to respond, and their selections drove the video's storyline. While many schools require diversity training, OU's rendition clearly violates First Amendment rights. The problem is that each module restarted until participants selected the "right" answer, forcing an expression of agreement with university-approved viewpoints in order to complete the mandatory training. The videos depicted politically contentious situations. In one, a fictional co-worker Michael complains, "I'm so tired of all this transgender stuff." Participants then chose from three responses: "Wow, that's incredibly intolerant of you," "I agree. Political correctness can be so tiring," or "You seem upset. What's the matter?" Owen selected the second option, which resonated most with her. The video continued and Michael said, "Right. Like who appointed the language police around here?" Then it restarted, forcing her to select the university-approved response of "You seem upset. What's the matter?" to continue. Forced by OU to act against her conscience on this question and others, Owen contacted the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which looked into the matter as a potential First Amendment violation. In an interview, FIRE attorney Adam Steinbaugh told me: "The First Amendment deals not just with the right to speak. It also prevents the government from compelling you to voice opinions that you don't agree with." In November, FIRE sent OU a letter on Owen's behalf, demanding the university make affirmations optional: "By requiring students and faculty to affirm that their personal views align with those of the university, without providing avenues for expressing dissenting viewpoints, OU violates the freedom of conscience of its community members and, by compelling certain speech, violates the university's obligations under the First Amendment." FIRE also requested that OU provide all training materials for review as required by the Oklahoma Open Records Act. The letter concludes, "FIRE calls on OU to commit to protecting the freedom of conscience of its students and faculty members." In March, months later, an open records manager from OU responded, indicating that the videos are provided by a third party service, Everfi, that holds the copyright to all training materials: "OU will allow you to view the Module, for public purposes only, on the Norman Campus during regular business hours." Because FIRE is located in Philadelphia, this would require an attorney to fly across the country. Ultimately, though, Owen was able to retrieve the materials herself. According to FIRE Program Analyst Sabrina Conza, the precedent for compelled speech stretches back to a 1943 decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, when the court deemed it unconstitutional to compel schoolchildren to salute the American flag, maintaining that true patriotism is born of free thought, not coercion. In the decision, Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote, "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion." Similar instances of public universities compelling speech are popping up across the country. At Shawnee State University in Ohio, philosophy professor Nicholas Meriwether filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the university after he was disciplined for refusing to use a student's preferred pronouns, which Meriwether said would have been in conflict with his own Christian beliefs. Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit court ruled the case can go forward. While the impositions of left-leaning university administrators on free speech seem to get the most attention, threats to free speech come from both sides of the aisle. As Steinbaugh put it, "The threat to free speech on institutions comes from all ideological corners. There is consistent pressure on institutions to censor students and faculty whose speech others find offensive." A recent controversy at East Tennessee State University demonstrates just that. At a February game, the men's basketball team kneeled during the national anthem in protest of racial inequality. In response, every Tennessee Republican state senator signed a letter calling on university presidents and chancellors "to adopt policies within [their] respective athletic departments to prohibit any such actions moving forward," with blatant disregard for the student-athletes' rights to free speech and the Barnette precedent. Amid widespread threats to the First Amendment, Steinbaugh warns, "People will stand up for the free speech rights of their allies, but they won't do it for the rights of people they disagree with. It's easy to say I respect free speech, and I love free speech in the abstract, but it can become a lot harder for many people to defend those rights when it's someone else's ox that's being gored." The mounting crackdown on free speech in academia demands general outrage, yet most stay silent until they see their own principles under attack. But true free speech advocacy is not reactionary. Rather, it requires that one put aside his own convictions in defense of universal intellectual autonomy. That a government university as large of the U. of Oklahoma would do this is chilling. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muda69 Posted May 5, 2021 Author Share Posted May 5, 2021 College Soccer Player Suing Coach Who Benched Her After She Refused to Kneel During Protest https://reason.com/2021/05/04/college-soccer-player-suing-coach-who-benched-her-after-she-refused-to-kneel-during-protest/ Quote Kiersten Hening was a star midfielder on the Virginia Tech women's soccer team—until she refused to kneel in protest with her teammates. Now Hening is suing her coach for pressuring her off of the team and violating her First Amendment rights. As a public university, Virginia Tech is responsible for upholding constitutional rights just like any other government entity. Tensions began rising in early September 2020 when a Virginia Tech student athlete advisory committee decided that players would wear Black Lives Matter (BLM) shirts, face masks, wristbands, and armbands during warmups. The initiative was endorsed by most of Hening's teammates. Her coach, Charlie Adair, even proposed replacing the team name on their uniforms with names of victims of police violence. Hening dissented. While she "supports social justice and believes that black lives matter," according to her lawsuit, "she disagrees with [BLM's] tactics and core tenets of its mission statement, including defunding the police and eliminating the nuclear family." She voiced those concerns in a text message to her teammates, some of whom sent screenshots to Adair demanding that the coach address "the fact that some of his players were 'racist' and did not support BLM." The conflict escalated at a September 12 game against the University of Virginia, when Hening's teammates knelt during the reading of a unity pledge developed by the Atlantic Coast Conference's committee for racial and social justice. Hening remained standing, an act she claims sparked a "campaign of abuse." According to Hening, she was "verbally attacked" by her coach at halftime. Adair "singled her out and directly attacked her, pointing a finger in her face," the lawsuit reads. "He denounced Hening for 'bitching and moaning,' for being selfish and individualistic, and for 'doing her own thing.'" Adair then benched Hening. Before the incident, she acted as a media spokesperson for the team and had played the most minutes of any athlete on the team. At the September 12 game, however, she played a total of five minutes. Hening alleges she was continuously targeted by Adair and received considerably fewer minutes of playing time in ensuing games. By September 20, she had reached her breaking point: "Coach Adair's campaign of abuse and retaliation made conditions for Hening so intolerable that she felt compelled to resign," her lawsuit states. "Hening did not want to leave." In March, Hening filed the federal lawsuit against Adair, claiming his treatment violated her right to expressive conduct protected by the First and 14th Amendments. "Hening's stance was costly—too costly," the suit reads, "Her coach dislikes Hening's political views. Because she refused to kneel, he benched her, subjected her to repeated verbal abuse, and forced her off the team." Hening is suing Adair for undisclosed compensatory, punitive, and nominal damages. She also is seeking reinstatement on the soccer team and requesting that Adair receives training on the First Amendment. "There would be a clearer and easier case if the coach said, 'You're off the team because you did the following,' but that's not always how things work in reality," says Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. "The question is whether there's retaliation and consequences, and, in this case, the result was her being harassed by the coach." A similar incident occurred in 2017 when five cheerleaders at Kennesaw State University in Georgia knelt during the national anthem. They were subsequently prohibited from appearing on the field at home games. In 2019, one of the cheerleaders received a $145,000 settlement for the violation of her right to expressive conduct. The right to protest and the right to abstain when protesting is the popular choice are both equally safeguarded by the First Amendment. "No matter what your views are on kneeling during the national anthem," says Steinbaugh, "when we violate the rights of one person, we jeopardize the rights of everyone." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bobref Posted May 5, 2021 Share Posted May 5, 2021 On 1/28/2021 at 9:04 PM, Muda69 said: May public schools punish students for off-campus social media posts? https://reason.com/2021/01/28/the-supreme-courts-next-big-free-speech-showdown/ The Court heard oral argument in this case on April 28. Here’s one synopsis of the argument. B.L.’s attorney described the school’s proposed approach of extending Tinker to certain online conduct outside of school as using a “blunt instrument” that would effectively become a rule (rather than an exception) limiting First Amendment rights of public school students throughout the country. In contrast, the school district’s attorney characterized B.L.’s proposed approach as “Frankenstein’s monster of First Amendment doctrine” as lower courts would be forced to determine whether Tinkerapplied to a particular speech and, if not, apply traditional strict First Amendment doctrine to students with additional considerations in light of each student’s “youth and context.” What This Means to You As the National School Boards Association noted in a friend of the court brief, the Mahanoy question is especially important for school districts across the country because of students’ frequent use of social media. This becomes even more critical when assessing a school districts ability to respond to bullying that takes place online while away from school grounds. The Justices were carefully considering this possibility, with hypotheticals presented by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan speculating that, without applying Tinker to such online speech, a school district’s desire to respond to many occasions of student bullying likely would not reach the level of an ordinary First Amendment exception. The Supreme Court’s decision, expected later this year, will provide some guidance for public school administrators on how free speech affects their ability to respond to online student speech. The oral arguments last week suggested, however, that the Justices may settle on a narrow ruling in this difficult case in order to avoid “writing a treatise” with broad implications for other situations. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muda69 Posted May 7, 2021 Author Share Posted May 7, 2021 In the Name of Equity, California Will Discourage Students Who Are Gifted at Math https://reason.com/2021/05/04/california-math-framework-woke-equity-calculus/?itm_source=parsely-api Quote California's Department of Education is working on a new framework for K-12 mathematics that discourages gifted students from enrolling in accelerated classes that study advanced concepts like calculus. The draft of the framework is hundreds of pages long and covers a wide range of topics. But its overriding concern is inequity. The department is worried that too many students are sorted into different math tracks based on their natural abilities, which leads some to take calculus by their senior year of high school while others don't make it past basic algebra. The department's solution is to prohibit any sorting until high school, keeping gifted kids in the same classrooms as their less mathematically inclined peers until at least grade nine. "The inequity of mathematics tracking in California can be undone through a coordinated approach in grades 6–12," reads a January 2021 draft of the framework. "In summary, middle-school students are best served in heterogeneous classes." In fact, the framework concludes that calculus is overvalued, even for gifted students. "The push to calculus in grade twelve is itself misguided," says the framework. As evidence for this claim, the framework cites the fact that many students who take calculus end up having to retake it in college anyway. Of course, de-prioritizing instruction in high school calculus would not really solve this problem—and in fact would likely make it worse—but the department does not seem overly worried. The framework's overriding perspective is that teaching the tough stuff is college's problem: The K-12 system should concern itself with making every kid fall in love with math. Broadly speaking, this entails making math as easy and un-math-like as possible. Math is really about language and culture and social justice, and no one is naturally better at it than anyone else, according to the framework. "All students deserve powerful mathematics; we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents," reads a bulletpoint in chapter one of the framework. "The belief that 'I treat everyone the same' is insufficient: Active efforts in mathematics teaching are required in order to counter the cultural forces that have led to and continue to perpetuate current inequities." The entire second chapter of the framework is about connecting math to social justice concepts like bias and racism: "Teachers can support discussions that center mathematical reasoning rather than issues of status and bias by intentionally defining what it means to do and learn mathematics together in ways that include and highlight the languages, identities, and practices of historically marginalized communities." Teachers should also think creatively about what math even entails: "To encourage truly equitable and engaging mathematics classrooms we need to broaden perceptions of mathematics beyond methods and answers so that students come to view mathematics as a connected, multi-dimensional subject that is about sense making and reasoning, to which they can contribute and belong." This approach is very bad. Contrary to what this guidance seems to suggest, math is not the end-all and be-all—and it's certainly not something that all kids are equally capable of learning and enjoying. Some young people clearly excel at math, even at very early ages. Many schools offer advanced mathematics to a select group of students well before the high school level so that they can take calculus by their junior or senior year. It's done this way for a reason: The students who like math (usually a minority) should have the opportunity to move on as rapidly as possible. For everyone else… well, advanced math just isn't that important. It would be preferable for schools to offer students more choices, and offer them as early as possible. Teens who are eager readers should be able to study literature instead of math; young people who aren't particularly adept at any academic discipline might pick up art, music, computers, or even trade skills. (Coding doesn't need to be mandatory, but it could be an option.) The essence of good schooling is choice. Individual kids benefit from a wide range of possible educational options. Permitting them to diversify, specialize, and chart their own paths—with helpful input from the adults in their lives—is the course of action that recognizes vast differences in interest and ability. Holding back kids who are gifted at math isn't equitable: On the contrary, it's extremely unfair to everyone. Yet the framework seems to reject the notion that some kids are more gifted than others. "An important goal of this framework is to replace ideas of innate mathematics 'talent' and 'giftedness' with the recognition that every student is on a growth pathway," it states. "There is no cutoff determining when one child is 'gifted' and another is not." But cutoffs are exactly what testing and grading systems produce, and it's absurdly naive to think there's nothing innate about such outcomes, given that intelligence is at least partly an inherited trait. If California adopts this framework, which is currently under public review, the state will end up sabotaging its brightest students. The government should let kids opt out of math if it's not for them. Don't let the false idea that there's no such thing as a gifted student herald the end of advanced math entirely. Agreed. This is a bunch of horseshit. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muda69 Posted June 1, 2021 Author Share Posted June 1, 2021 The Case of Joe Rogan: Vaccine Policy and Freedom of Speech https://mises.org/wire/case-joe-rogan-vaccine-policy-and-freedom-speech Quote Recently, Joe Rogan, one of the largest podcast hosts in the United States (10.6 million YouTube subscribers), expressed the following opinion about the vaccination of young adults: If you are 21 and ask me if you should get the vaccine, I would say "no". If you are a healthy person and exercise all the time, and are young and eat well, I don't think you have to worry about this. This comment created a furor in the United States, where the government's target is vaccination of the entire adult population. For these few sentences he received a sharp reprimand from the White House and Dr. Fauci, who accused Rogan of being selfish and endangering vulnerable members of society. Given the very low covid risk for this age group, Rogan’s comments seem to make some sense. Wouldn't it be more altruistic, rather than selfish, to let a vaccine dose first go to someone who needs it more? Either way, such criticism is ludicrous when it comes from a government that so often acts contrary to the interests of society. Additionally, considering the way in which the covid vaccines were launched, some skepticism on the part of Joe Rogan, and the general population, seems warranted. Indeed, these vaccines have become available so quickly that their Phase II and the Phase III development has been conducted in parallel and is not yet completed. In the US, the covid vaccines are currently approved only as emergency measures by the FDA, though nearly 260 million Americans have already been vaccinated. In the case of AstraZeneca, the pressure to get a vaccine out as quickly as possible caused an issue in the dosage during the first distributions. In many European countries this vaccine has not been recommended to young people because of a perceived risk of blood clots. In Russia, an antibody test is recommended before vaccination to ensure that the patient is not already immune, in order to avoid wasting doses and to avoid overloading the body with antibodies. In this context, it does not certainly seem shocking to suggest, like Joe Rogan, that healthy young adults may not really need to get vaccinated. Government Agents Attacking the Opinions of Private Citizens In reality, the real question is not whether Joe Rogan was right or wrong in saying what he said. Criticism of a citizen by the US government is disturbing regardless of the comments that were made. What about freedom of speech when the state criticizes an individual's speech? The protection of freedom of speech and of the press in the USA is among the strongest that exists. The First Amendment to the Constitution in theory offers extremely robust protection with its famous words: "Congress will not make any law curtailing freedom of speech, or of the press." But this implies that it is not unconstitutional for the authorities to publicly judge the speech of its citizens, such as Rogan. As reported by Glenn Greenwald, this represents in practice a government control of speech. He quotes a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner who notes that: Politicians have realized that they can silence the speech of those with different political viewpoints by public bullying. For politically "sensitive" subjects, authorities do not accept deviations from their official story. This deleterious situation has existed since long before the pandemic. Today, it is about vaccine policy, but yesterday, about the war on terrorism, about Russiagate, about the corruption of Joe Biden, and many other topics. Greenwald explains: When it comes to censorship of politically adverse content, sometimes explicit censorship demands are unnecessary. Where a climate of censorship prevails, companies anticipate what those in power want them to do by anticipatorily self-censoring to avoid official retaliation. Speech is chilled without direct censorship orders being required. Concretely, this means that when Joe Rogan is publicly criticized by the authorities, countless other content is never published. This process of media self-censorship, without open and direct coercion from the state, is of course part of the propaganda system that Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky famously called "manufacturing consent." For intrepid journalists who still take the risk of publicly challenging the official consensus, the lucrative and prestigious positions in mainstream media are no longer accessible. As shown by Greenwald, the risk to their reputation that they incur is real, because they are also then systematically victims of unscrupulous practices, such as being accused of being a conspiracy theorist or of inciting terrorism. These accusations, usually completely unfounded, can destroy careers in the toxic politically correct environment that exists in the United States. Unfortunately, it doesn't end there. The authorities go much further than these mafia methods of intimidation. The main social networks in the US are now filled with reliable servants of the state, who filter and censor persons or publications at the request of various state institutions, the same way that mainstream media has behaved for ages. With respect to covid vaccine policy, for example, Facebook and YouTube today systematically censor comments and videos that are not in line with the official version of governments, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the World Health Organization (WHO). The fact that these institutions have often changed their opinion about which health policy to recommend does not seem to be a problem. A Constitution Is Not Sufficient Protection This situation with Joe Rogan should remind everyone that the fight for individual freedoms, including freedom of speech and of the press, is a permanent struggle. No document, be it the US Constitution or the Declaration of Human Rights, gives an absolute guarantee against the violations of these freedoms by the state, as shown by many historical examples. The authoritarian tendencies of nominally democratic governments are nothing new. Indeed, these governments have a natural interest in trying to influence—not to say shape—public opinion. Recent history shows that in collaboration with traditional mainstream media and now social networks, the government is willing to do almost anything to prevent the electorate from understanding its real behavior. The fame of Joe Rogan will at least have contributed a little to exposing this truth. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muda69 Posted June 2, 2021 Author Share Posted June 2, 2021 Public University Threatens To Monitor and Punish Off-Campus Student Behavior https://reason.com/2021/06/01/public-university-threatens-to-monitor-and-punish-off-campus-student-behavior/ Quote In May, the University of Oregon's Board of Trustees approved a policy change to expand the school's jurisdiction to punish students for off-campus actions. This revision to the student conduct code redefines the scope of disciplinary authority over the private lives of students. The amended policy now reads, "The University may apply the Student Conduct Code to Student behavior which occurs off-campus in which the University can demonstrate a clear and distinct interest as an academic institution regardless of where the conduct occurs." According to the student newspaper, possible consequences for off-campus code violations include suspension, disciplinary probation, or educational sanctions. The decision follows unruly parties at private residences near campus earlier this month that drew ire from the surrounding community amid ongoing COVID-19 concerns. One event shut down by police went viral on social media after a crowd of over 500 partygoers were reportedly hostile to officers as they dispersed. In a tweet, the university responded: "UO is limited in the actions it can take with individuals who live in private homes. However, the office of student conduct and community standards is investigating complaints involving this photo [of an off-campus party] and will take any necessary appropriate actions." As such, the Board of Trustees met in the following weeks to "[clarify] the University's nexus," according to meeting notes. Though the policy change was never proposed to the university's senate, there was no opposition from the Student Conduct Advisory Committee. The meeting notes even go as far as to assert that "this language has been consistently upheld in court." This, however, is plainly untrue. Presently, a similar case concerning a violation of student freedoms is being considered in the Supreme Court. In Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., a Pennsylvania high school cheerleader who was suspended for complaining she did not make the varsity squad in a profane Snapchat post is now suing the school district for violating her off-campus speech rights. Though the Supreme Court's infamous 1969 decision in Tinker v. Des Moines asserted that teachers and students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gates," the Mahanoy case and the University of Oregon policy call into question whether public schools wield additional authority to monitor and punish off-campus activity. Such policies, expanded due to the pandemic, could have lasting implications in defining the delineation between campus life and private life. And as a public university, UO is held to a higher standard than private universities in its obligation to uphold the constitutional rights of its students. Last week, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) asserted that the university "must disavow this unsound policy and implement a lawful one instead." UO's jurisdictional bloat sets an alarming precedent for student privacy and freedom. Agreed. Good luck with enforcing this new policy and not being sued, UO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muda69 Posted June 23, 2021 Author Share Posted June 23, 2021 OU Anti-Racist Seminar: 'In the Classroom, Free Speech Does Not Apply' https://reason.com/2021/06/22/university-of-oklahoma-anti-racist-seminar-free-speech/ Quote During an online training seminar for graduate students at the University of Oklahoma (OU), two presenters urged English instructors to purge all problematic speech from their classrooms. They even asserted—incorrectly—that the Supreme Court had empowered university employees to prohibit students from engaging in hate speech. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) obtained a recording of the seminar, which was titled "Anti-Racist Rhetoric and Pedagogies." The hour-long video is worth watching in full, and contains a variety of unbelievable statements from presenters Kelli Pyron Alvarez and Kasey Woody. During her remarks, Alvarez asserted that students in the English 1213 course—Principles of English Composition—sometimes come to class "emboldened to be racist, like overtly racist." The way to deal with this is to explicitly prevent them from making statements that might offend others. If any graduate students are worried about getting in trouble for silencing wrong-thinking students, never fear: Teachers have all the power they need to do so, according to Alvarez. "If it continues to happen, report them for violating the student code of conduct," said Alvarez. "In the classroom, free speech does not apply." She later clarified that she believes the Supreme Court "has actually upheld that hate speech, derogatory speech, any of the -isms, do not apply in the classroom because they do not foster a productive learning environment." "As instructors, we can tell our students no, you don't have the right to say that, stop talking right now," she said. This proclamation is stunningly wrong. The Supreme Court has never issued a ruling that prohibits "hate speech" on college campuses or anywhere else. Hate speech, in fact, is a subjective term: What someone finds hateful might nevertheless be objectively true, and more importantly, fully protected by the First Amendment. Indeed, the Supreme Court explicitly defended hateful expression in the 2017 case Matal v. Tam. "Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express 'the thought that we hate,'" wrote Justice Samuel Alito for the majority, quoting from a 1929 dissent by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. OU is a public university, and thus is bound to comply with the First Amendment. Instructors who deliberately squelch certain political opinions in a manner that is not viewpoint-neutral certainly risk running afoul of the Constitution. "Professors cannot abuse their power to require students to personally adhere to a particular viewpoint or ideology," wrote FIRE's Daniel Burnett and Sabrina Conza. "As the AAUP has written, instructors have academic freedom of 'instruction, not indoctrination.' It can be hard to define precisely where this line falls, but there's no question that a significant amount of this workshop teaches participants how to indoctrinate instead of how to instruct." Setting aside the legal issues, it's just plain wrong as a matter of educational policy to always and automatically forbid the discussion of any subject that might offend anyone for any reason. And a significant problem here is that the presenters never defined their terms, leaving listeners with the impression that they would suppress an extremely broad range of viewpoints. Hilariously, Woody gave the example of asking students to share something about which they have a strong opinion. "One of my black students said, 'Black Lives Matter,'" Woody recalled. "I said that is not an issue that I would take up. That's not an argument. It's a fact. Black lives matter. You are not obligated to listen to or entertain an argument that is trying to tell you your real experiences are not real because the person making that argument has never experienced them." The presenter did not seem to grasp that her anti-racist pedagogy had actually prompted her to delegitimize the perspective of a student who was black. "I usually look for my students who might be entertaining the idea of listening to a problematic argument," said Woody. "I say, 'We don't have to listen to that. That's not an argument we have to listen to.'" This is a very bad approach to teaching. Specifically, it's a bad approach to teaching English composition, which is about how to write coherent essays and construct arguments. Instructors don't need to allow abject racial discrimination or harassment in the classroom, but proactively shutting down any potentially problematic discussion runs directly counter to the educational mission of the university. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muda69 Posted June 24, 2021 Author Share Posted June 24, 2021 High School Cheerleader's Profane Social Media Rant Is Protected Free Speech, Says SCOTUS https://reason.com/2021/06/23/high-school-cheerleaders-profane-social-media-rant-is-protected-free-speech-says-scotus/ Quote The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 today that a Pennsylvania public school district violated the First Amendment when it punished a high school freshman for posting a profane, off-campus rant on the social media site Snapchat about her failure to make the varsity cheerleading squad. "It might be tempting to dismiss [the cheerleader's] words as unworthy of…robust First Amendment protections," Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the majority. "But sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary." The matter of Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. originated with these words: "Fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer fuck everything." They were posted to Snapchat on a Saturday night and were accompanied by a picture of B.L. (known by her initials in court filings because she was a minor at the time) and a friend with their middle fingers raised. To say the least, B.L.'s cheerleading coaches did not like that post when it was later brought to their attention. As punishment for it, B.L. was suspended from the junior varsity cheerleading team for a full year. The question before the Supreme Court was whether school officials may punish her for this off-campus speech. The Supreme Court ruled today that the school may not. At the same time, however, the Court made it clear that its decision was not a sweeping one. In fact, the majority stressed that under certain circumstances, schools may punish students for speech that occurs off-campus. "Thus, we do not now set forth a broad, highly general First Amendment rule stating just what counts as 'off campus' speech and whether or how ordinary First Amendment standards must give way off campus," Breyer wrote for the majority. Instead, Breyer made three more general points. First, "geographically speaking, off-campus speech will normally fall within the zone of parental, rather than school-related, responsibility." Second, "when it comes to political or religious speech that occurs outside school or a school program or activity, the school will have a heavy burden to justify intervention." And third, "the school itself has an interest in protecting a student's unpopular expression, especially when the expression takes place off campus." To that he added: "America's public schools are the nurseries of democracy. Our representative democracy only works if we protect the 'marketplace of ideas.'" "Taken together," the opinion concluded, "these three features of much off-campus speech mean that the leeway the First Amendment grants to schools in light of their special characteristics is diminished. We leave for future cases to decide where, when, and how these features mean the speaker's off-campus location will make the critical difference." The cheerleader won this time around, in other words, but future off-campus student speakers might well meet a different legal fate. The free speech side prevailed but it was a limited victory. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined the majority opinion in full but wrote separately to emphasize a few points. Among them was this: there is a category of speech that is almost always beyond the regulatory authority of a public school. This is student speech that is not expressly and specifically directed at the school, school administrators, teachers, or fellow students and that addresses matters of public concern, including sensitive subjects like politics, religion, and social relations. Speech on such matters lies at the heart of the First Amendment's protection. "Even if such speech is deeply offensive to members of the school community and may cause a disruption," Alito wrote, "the school cannot punish the student who spoke out; 'that would be a heckler's veto.'" The sole dissenter today was Justice Clarence Thomas. In his view, "a more searching review reveals that schools historically could discipline students in circumstances like those presented here." In fact, Thomas faulted the majority for failing "to consider whether schools often will have more authority, not less, to discipline students who transmit speech through social media." As he put, "because off-campus speech made through social media can be received on campus (and can spread rapidly to countless people), it often will have a greater proximate tendency to harm the school environment than will an off-campus in-person conversation." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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