The government’s sustained pressure on social media platforms to censor and report purported COVID-19 misinformation amounts to “state action” that violates the First Amendment, according to a lawsuit filed Friday on behalf of three Twitter users.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a frequent litigant against COVID-related administrative action, is representing theoretical cognitive scientist Mark Changizi, lawyer Michael Senger and stay-at-home father Daniel Kotzin.
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Catholic Charities West Michigan will remain open after state officials agreed under court order to pay the nonprofit’s attorney’s fees and acknowledged that taking actions against the charity for its beliefs would violate the First Amendment.
Catholic Charities prioritizes placing children up for adoption or in foster care with a married mother and father. The group filed a lawsuit with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) after Michigan officials gave the nonprofit the ultimatum to either close its adoption and foster care ministry or change its policy prioritizing a married mother and father to receive a child.
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Public university officials can be held personally liable for dumping an adjunct professor based on his anonymous criticism of the concept of microaggressions, a federal court has concluded.
University of North Texas officials should have known that math professor Nathaniel Hiers’ speech “touched on a matter of public concern and that discontinuing his employment because of his speech violated the First Amendment,” U.S. District Judge Sean Jordan wrote in a 69-page memorandum and order Friday.
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The Georgia State Senate Wednesday passed a bill that would protect parents’ right to protest their local school boards.
SB 588 “provide[s] that all meetings of local boards of education shall be open to the public except as otherwise provided by law…” and “provide[s] that members of the public shall not be removed from such public meetings except for actual disruption and in accordance with rules adopted and published by the local board of education.”
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A mother who was told to “zip it” and then thrown out of a school board meeting while addressing the board’s members has filed a lawsuit against the district, claiming that the board’s rules for public speakers are unconstitutional.
Plaintiff Ashley Ryder is seeking injunctive relief to stop the Big Walnut Local Schools (BWLS) from enforcing its rules at school board meetings.
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It was an allegation that dogged Donald Trump for three years: a claim the Republican nominee-turned-president had a secret backdoor communications channel with the Kremlin. Repeated endlessly by the liberal media, the allegation was never true.
Now, Special Counsel John Durham is raising the tantalizing specter the FBI might never have investigated the claim during the height of the 2016 presidential election if the man who brought it to the bureau — Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann — had told the truth about its origins.
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Pennsylvania state Rep. Mike Puskaric (R-Jefferson Hills) indicated Wednesday he will urge state agencies to ditch social-media platforms he says engage in censorship.
In a memorandum asking fellow representatives to cosponsor his upcoming resolution, the Pittsburgh-area legislator argued that especially large information-technology companies violate the state and federal constitutions when they make politicized publishing decisions. He insisted government institutions and officials should respond by cancelling their accounts on such sites and signing onto more permissive online venues instead.
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In the election of 2016, Donald Trump appealed to citizenship, sovereignty, and borders. This was a direct entreaty to the people as the ultimate source of sovereign authority, bypassing the ruling-class elites that dominate the media and the universities; his appeal also ignored political experts, pollsters, and government bureaucracy. In the postmodern world, the nation-state is under attack everywhere as the source of all evil, the cause of war, selfishness, racism, white privilege, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and all the other irrational phobias that make up the universe of political correctness. The idea of the nation-state itself is said to be irrational and arbitrary.
All of this overwrought criticism of nationalism and the nation-state overlooks a very significant point developed in my new book, The United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation State: the nation-state is the only form of political organization that can sustain constitutional government and the rule of law.
No empire has ever been a constitutional democracy or republic, nor will constitutional government exist in global government. If, as is widely alleged, the dialectic of History is inevitably tending toward global governance and universal citizenship, then it is also tending toward tyranny.
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Chaos. Disruption. Uncertainty.
The Chicago Teachers Union provides a real-world example of what happens when a government union has too much power.
CTU has gone on strike three times in three school years. In the latest work stoppage, over 330,000 schoolchildren missed five days of school. Parents were notified of the walkout after 11 p.m. on a school night, leaving them just hours to develop a back-up plan after the union decided not to show up.
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The committee advocating for a right-to-work constitutional amendment said a recent poll shows 64% of Tennesseans will vote “yes” to add the amendment to the state constitution.
The Vote Yes on 1 poll, conducted by Cygnal between Jan. 24-26, surveyed 500 likely general election voters. The poll had a margin of error of 4.34%.
Eighteen percent of those polled said they would vote against the amendment.
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The U.S. Capitol Police is running background checks and examining the social media histories of people meeting with lawmakers, Politico reported Monday.
Following the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, the Capitol Police adopted a new policy to dig into the social media feeds of individuals meeting members of Congress, Politico reported, citing three people familiar with the matter as well as internal Capitol Police documents and communications. Targets of the surveillance included congressional staffers as well as lawmakers’ constituents, donors and associates.
Julie Farnam, acting director of intelligence for the Capitol Police and former Department of Homeland Security official, directed analysts to run “background checks” on donors and associates of lawmakers, including instructions to “list and search all political opponents to see if they or their followers intend to attend or disrupt the event,” according to documents reviewed by Politico.
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A United States appellate court has overturned a lower court’s ruling in the case of. a Georgia sheriff.
Butts County Sheriff Gary Long in 2018 hung signs in the yards of the county’s 57 registered sex offenders before Halloween, warning parents not to allow their children to trick-or-treat at those homes.
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Tuesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed official guest host Grant Henry in studio for another edition of Grant’s Rants where he discusses the censorship of Twitter.
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It’s no secret that there is an obsession with race among our nation’s colleges.
On every campus, there seems to be another multicultural center for BIPOC students, or a class on how to be woke, or a bias response team.
And while the country is finally waking up to just how far left American society has drifted recently, such politics have been the norm on college campuses for years.
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Wisconsin’s governor can continue to exclude certain news organizations from specific news conferences.
The United States Supreme Court on Friday declined to take a case entered by John J. MacIver Institute that challenged the governor’s invite-only press briefings.
MacIver sued in 2019, saying Evers violated the First Amendment by excluding its reporters from the annual budget briefing.
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Stephen K. Bannon welcomed Conservative attorney, legal scholar, and professor of law John Eastman on Monday’s War Room: Pandemic to explain his attorney’s letter to Congress citing the illegitimacy of his subpoena regarding the January 6 committee hearings. Bannon: I’m going to start with John Eastman. God do I love this guy. John Eastman, Raheem Kassam, and the great team over at the National pulse have a story. Because I never talk about this stuff because I’m focused on destroying brick by brick this radical regime that is the Biden administration and proud of it. So suck on that Democrats. Embrace the suck. But there is a huge story up here about your lawyer and something destroying the January 6 subpoenas. Can you walk us through here what’s gone on here sir? I’m going to put it up on the screen in Denver and all of our platforms so people can see it in our live chat. John Eastman, the floor is all yours. Eastman: I love that headline. John Eastman’s Lawyers Just Destroyed the January 6 Committee and its Subpoenas. Look, what we discovered looking into this, and I should say that I like you were subpoenaed to…
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down Monday, only to be replaced by a new chief who immediately found himself in hot water for, of all things, an inflammatory tweet.
“‘If they are not gonna make a distinction between muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people and racists,'” Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agrawal said in 2010 tweet.
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Monday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed VP of Marketing and Global Engagement for GETTR, Kaelen Dorr to the newsmaker line to discuss his background, GETTR, and working with Trump.
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The Illinois Association of School Boards voted Thursday to end its membership with the National School Boards Association after the national group sent a letter to President Joe Biden asking for federal intervention to investigate unruly parents who protest at local meetings.
“The decision follows previous attempts by IASB to initiate changes to the governance structure, transparency, and financial oversight of the national association,” a news release from IASB says. “IASB suspended payment of dues to NSBA for 2021-2022 but continued to work to try to bring about needed changes.”
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Joe Biden is systematically eliminating the religious freedom protections that Donald Trump established. The latest example of Biden’s secularist program comes from his Labor Department, which is planning to undo Trump’s policy of defending the religious freedom of federal contractors.
Trump’s Labor Department protected federal contractors who “hold themselves out to the public as carrying out a religious purpose.”
“Religious organizations should not have to fear that acceptance of a federal contract or subcontract will require them to abandon their religious character or identity,” said Trump’s Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia.
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The Florida Police Benevolent Association (PBA), the largest police union in the state, announced they are endorsing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for his 2022 gubernatorial reelection bid. The PBA represents more than 30,000 law enforcement and corrections officers.
PBA President John Kazanjian offered the organization’s support through a formal statement.
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Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday faced a litany of hard-edged Senate questions about agreeing to allow federal law enforcement to investigate alleged incidents of outspoken parents at school board meetings.
Garland, in a memo, agreed to responded to a Sept. 29 letter from the National School Board Association to President Biden asking that the FBI, Justice Department and other federal agencies to investigate potential acts of domestic terrorism at the meetings. Parents across the nation have been voicing their concerns about the curricula being taught to their children, in addition to instances like the one currently playing out in northern Virginia, in which there was an apparent coverup of the sexual assault of a female student in a bathroom.
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Many of our once revered and most hallowed institutions are failing us. To mention only the most significant ones: our top-ranking military echelon, the leadership of our federal investigatory and intelligence agencies, the government medical establishment—and of course the universities.
For too long American higher education’s reputation of global academic superiority has rested mostly on the sciences, mathematics, physics, technology, medicine, and engineering—in other words, not because of the humanities and social sciences, but despite them. The humanities have become too often anti-humanistic. And the social sciences are deductively anti-scientific. Both quasi-religious woke disciplines have eroded confidence in colleges and universities, infected even the STEM disciplines and professional schools, and torn apart the civic unity of the United States. Indeed, much of the current Jacobin revolution was birthed and fueled by American universities, despite their manifest hypocrisies and derelictions.
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A Massachusetts school district is racially segregating students and threatening to punish them for subjectively “offensive” statements they make, violating their civil and constitutional rights at both the state and federal level, according to a new lawsuit seeking permanent injunctions.
Parents Defending Education is challenging the “affinity groups” and associated spaces created by Wellesley Public Schools’ diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) plan for 2020-2025.
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Twenty-five House members have introduced a resolution to support the free-speech rights of concerned parents speaking at school board meetings nationwide.
The chief proponent of the resolution is Rep. Pete Stauber of Minnesota. Its stated purpose is to “express the sense of the House of Representatives that the First Amendment rights of parents at school board meetings shall not be infringed.”
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The far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a lawsuit against the state of Oklahoma over a recently-signed law that forbids the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in schools, according to CNN.
The lawsuit represents a group of teachers and students who support CRT, and is supported by the ACLU, the Oklahoma NAACP, the American Indian Movement (AIM), and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The suit claims that the law infringes on the rights of freedom of speech guaranteed under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
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A national, parent-led organization filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging policies at Wellesley Public Schools, which includes segregated “affinity groups” and a “bias reporting” program.
Parents Defending Education (PDE) filed the complaint against Wellesley Public Schools (WPS) in a Massachusetts federal court “alleging that the district has systemically and repeatedly violated students’ First and Fourteenth Amendment rights, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Massachusetts Students’ Freedom of Expression Law through the use of segregated ‘affinity groups’ and an onerous speech code featuring a ‘bias reporting’ program,” according to the press release.
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Wednesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Kalev Leetaru of the Real Clear Foundation to the newsmakers line to discuss Section 230 transparency and the First Amendment.
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Sixteen minutes after learning that a University of Minnesota student group booked conservative commentator Ben Shapiro to speak at its main campus in Minneapolis, then-president Eric Kaler declared, “I do not want this in the middle of campus.”
All he knew at that point, four months before the February 2018 event, was that Shapiro was “a right wing speaker and he made some appearances on other campuses.”
Citing security needs, the university ended up putting Shapiro in a venue on its St. Paul campus, far from student housing. Demand far exceeded capacity, and a regent accused the university of passing over a larger venue on the main campus that was easier to secure.
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A student at Central Michigan University boasted on social media about defacing his conservative classmates’ chalk drawings.
Anthony James — operating under the username “brownskinqueer” on Twitter — declared on September 29 that he spent forty-five minutes erasing “copaganda, racist, and pro-life bullshit” from a sidewalk at Central Michigan University.
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The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld Federal District Court Judge Paul L. Maloney’s preliminary injunction, which allows 16 Western Michigan University (WMU) athletes to continue playing intercollegiate sports despite refusing a Covid-19 vaccine shot.
Appellate Judges Ralph B. Guy, Jr., David W. McKeague, and Chad A. Readler issued their opinion confirming WMU violated the athletes’ First Amendment rights by denying their requests for a religious exemption from the mandate. This decision is now binding precedent in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.
“The University put plaintiffs to the choice: get vaccinated or stop fully participating in intercollegiate sports,” the opinion says. “The University did not dispute that taking the vaccine would violate plaintiffs’ ‘sincerely held Christian beliefs.’ Yet refusing the vaccine prevents plaintiffs from participating in college sports, as they are otherwise qualified (and likely were recruited) to do. By conditioning the privilege of playing sports on plaintiffs’ willingness to abandon their sincere religious beliefs, the University burdened their free exercise rights.”
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A Leon County circuit judge could make a ruling on the lawsuit against Florida’s vaccine passport ban as soon as late next week. The lawsuit was filed by Bead Abode Inc., a Sarasota-based craft store where attorneys for the company have argued it violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
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President Joe Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland’s memo directing the FBI to investigate parents who speak out at school board meetings has shocked the nation.
The Biden administration has gone into full attack mode against the First Amendment right to petition the government as Attorney General Merrick Garland has declared that parents opposing Critical Race Theory before their local school boards should be treated as terrorists under the Patriot Act.
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Parents who protest public school policies on race, gender and COVID-19 are crying foul after Attorney General Merrick Garland promised to “discourage” and prosecute “harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against school boards, administrators, teachers and staff.
His “mobilization of [the] FBI against parents is consistent with the complete weaponization of the federal government against ideological opponents,” Rhode Island mother Nicole Solas, who is waging a public records battle with her school district over race-related curriculum, told Just the News.
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More than 180 Minnesota health care workers spanning statewide hospital systems filed a federal lawsuit over the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, seeking an injunction to block the upcoming rule.
The lawsuit follows weeks after President Joe Biden announced a vaccine mandate for employers with more than 100 employees and facilities that receive Medicaid or Medicare. Defendants named include St. Mary’s Duluth, University Of Minnesota Physicians; Mayo Clinic; North Memorial Health Care; Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital; St. Luke’s Hospital Of Duluth; and Minneapolis Radiation Oncology.
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Religious, athletic and medical professionals in North America are facing increasing pressure to not only get vaccinated against COVID-19, but also censor their concerns to keep getting paid.
The U.S. Coast Guard developed an accusatory script for chaplains to use when quizzing service members on their requests for religious exemptions from vaccines.
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A Colorado web designer asked the Supreme Court to take up her case challenging a state law forcing her to publish websites with messages counter to her religious beliefs.
Lorie Smith filed the petition with the Supreme Court on Friday, arguing a lower court ruling that upheld the Colorado law was wrongly decided, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the firm representing her, announced. The law compelled Smith’s speech in violation of her First Amendment rights by forcing her business 303 Creative to produce content against her beliefs, she said.
“The government shouldn’t weaponize the law to force a web designer to speak messages that violate her belief,” ADF General Counsel Kristen Waggoner said during a press call before filing the petition. “This case involves quintessential free speech and artistic freedom, which the 10th circuit astonishingly and dangerously cast aside here.”
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A school board in Oregon is receiving backlash following its recent ban on educators displaying Black Lives Matter signs and gay pride symbols.
Newberg, which is situated just outside of Portland, now finds itself the site of the latest skirmish in a pitched struggle between traditional and woke approaches to education being waged in school systems across the country.
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The Michigan GOP and Chair Ron Weiser are suing Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, challenging $3.4 million of campaign donations to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer that they say is illegal.
A lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan aims to force Benson to apply Michigan election law, compliant with the First and Fourteenth Amendments, to equally enforce contribution limits on all candidates. Whitmer raised funds over Michigan’s $7,150 contribution limit under the loophole of the recall exception, despite no apparent active recall efforts.
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The Loudoun County school board voted on a revised professional conduct policy to specifically mention “Protected Speech” and the First Amendment rights of employees.
The new policy is a response to Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) teacher Tanner Cross who went viral for his comments at a school board meeting in May, where he spoke out against the district’s gender policy and was put on administrative leave shortly afterward. On Aug. 30 the Virginia Supreme Court ruled to reinstate him, calling his removal “likely unconstitutional.”
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The student Supreme Court at Florida State University has reinstated Jack Denton to his position as president of the Student Senate after he was removed for his Catholic beliefs. During Denton’s lawsuit against FSU, the student Supreme Court at the school ruled that the other senators were not tolerant of Denton’s religious beliefs.
Denton was removed from his position as senate president in June due to his Catholic beliefs about BLM and other leftist organizations, as Campus Reform previously reported.
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Thursday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Southeastern Legal’s Braden Boucek to the newsmakers line to explain the CRT lawsuit against the Springfield, Missouri public school board requiring equity training of its teachers.
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Social media companies would not be allowed to censor Ohioans from expressing their views without notifying the user and offering an appeal process or risk being sued under a proposed bill.
Rep. Al Cutrona, R-Canfield, said he plans to introduce legislation that prohibits social media platforms from censoring users unless statements violate state or federal law.
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The Biden Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) issued an order last week demanding that immigration judges no longer use the term “alien” when referring to illegal aliens in court or in their written opinions, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
The order, first issued on July 23rd, came from a DOJ official named Jean King. King’s order applies to all 539 immigration judges in the country, and orders them to instead use more politically correct terms, such as “respondent, applicant, petitioner, beneficiary, migrant, noncitizen, or non-U.S. citizen.” “Alien” has been the correct terminology for anyone who enters the United States illegally ever since the Immigration and Nationality Act, which defines an alien as “any person not a citizen or national of the United States.”
In the order, King admitted that the DOJ decision was influenced in part by the mainstream media, citing the fact that the Associated Press first decided back in 2013 to drop the use of the term “illegal immigrant,” which led to a left-wing trend to replace the word “illegal” with “undocumented.” Since taking office in January, Biden has taken steps to remove the use of the phrases “alien” and “illegal immigrant” through several executive orders. Some radical Democrats, including Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), have advocated for passing a law to ban the use of such phrases. And in New York City, a recent law was passed to make it a crime to use the phrases “illegal” and “illegal alien.”
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Wednesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Big Tech and First Amendment New York Attorney Akiva Cohen to the newsmakers line to explain the mechanics of Former President Trump’s lawsuit.
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Mesa Public Schools (MPS) updated their dress code policy to make it more equitable and prohibit “hate speech.” Nowhere in their current policies does MPS define “hate speech.”
As reported by The Arizona Sun Times last month, MPS General Counsel Kacey Gregson said that students would have a right to express their political beliefs unless it could be perceived as “hate speech,” promoting violence, or immediately or potentially causing substantial interference with the learning environment.
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For Big Tech billionaires, these are the best of times, and the worst of times.
Why the best? Because the long arm of social media and online commerce has never reached further and deeper into Americans’ culture, spending habits, lifestyles, and worldview. Likewise, the net worth of these billionaires has risen to undreamed-of heights. COVID was, for tech barons, a blessing in disguise: it trapped Americans indoors, where they could do little else but browse the web, consume digital entertainment, and spend their stimulus dollars on imported Chinese doohickeys. Even as the dreaded virus has retreated, Big Tech has successfully locked in its gains.
Why the worst of times, though? The very rise of Big Tech has portended greater scrutiny. The debasement of Big Tech’s competitors and natural enemies—from brick-and-mortar stores to Trump supporters—has ensured that the drumbeat of criticism of social media companies and online retailers has never been more stridently percussive.
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A federal judge appointed by former President Bill Clinton issued a temporary injunction stopping the state of Tennessee from enforcing its new bathrooms signage law.
HB 1182 requires businesses that allow both biological sexes to use the same bathroom, locker room, or other typically-single sex area, to post signage reading “this facility maintains a policy of allowing the use of restrooms by either biological sex regardless of the designation of the restroom.”
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CloutHub, a major social networking alternative to Big Tech giants like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, announced its full autonomy from Silicon Valley.
Along with new features, CloutHub founder and CEO Jeff Brain said the company now hosts its product on its own servers, making it completely independent from Big Tech. Many social media companies rely on Big Tech for hosting services. Amazon is one of the largest hosting services in the world, and has caused trouble for alternative social media sites that used its servers.
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The founder of CloutHub, a free speech social media network, has responded to former President Donald J. Trump’s class action lawsuit against several Silicon Valley titans, which the forty-fifth president announced Wednesday.
“I am pleased that President Trump is fighting back against Big Tech corporations after enduring months of blatant injustices,” Jeff Brain said in press release. “His lawsuit is based on the infringement of his fundamental free speech rights that powerful companies such as Facebook and Twitter imposed based on their own political bias; a bias that has no place with such important keepers of our national public square online.”
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