First Amendment
October 4, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Among the corporate media “fact-checks” of the great debate between Senator Vance and our overmatched Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, I have yet to find one that homes in on the fundamental question of free speech. When Vance brought it up, Walz vomited up his ignorant take on the law of free speech: “You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme court test.” That’s what
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September 3, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Nat Hentoff wrote the book Free Speech For Me — But Not For Thee (1992). The situation has deteriorated considerably since then. Here we have the incumbent Vice President of the United States and Democratic presidential nominee advocating for government regulation and censorship of speech on social media (video below in what must be a vintage 2019 clip). Glenn Reynolds collects comments here. This is of course the regime that
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August 27, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Yesterday Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. The letter relates to the committee’s investigation of the Biden administration’s war on free speech. This is the most significant language: In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with
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June 26, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Today the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals decided Cajune v. Independent School District 194. That school district is immediately adjacent to the one where my kids went to school, and plaintiffs were represented by the Upper Midwest Law Center, on whose board I serve and which has often (albeit wrongly) been described as an “arm” of the policy organization that I run. Briefly, plaintiffs claimed that the school district engaged
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June 26, 2024 — Scott Johnson
The man from Wikileaks — i.e., Julian Assange — worked out a plea deal with the Biden Department of Justice. I’m not sure what the Biden Department of Justice had in mind with the deal. If you think Assange is some kind of a hero, it should raise your opinion of Merrick Garland. I don’t think Assange is a hero and I still think Garland is a hack. Assange is
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April 8, 2024 — Scott Johnson
I found the oral argument of the case now styled Murthy v. Missouri last month to be utterly demoralizing. As soon as the oral argument concluded I rashly hazarded my assessment that it portends a victory for the massive censorship-industrial complex represented by the Biden administration, probably on procedural grounds (i.e., standing). My assessment was a hot take based on the tenor of the argument. The argument seemed to me
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March 25, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Professor Jonathan Turley has concerns about the fate of the First Amendment based in part on the oral argument in Murthy v. Missouri. He writes: In Murthy v. Missouri, the court is considering a massive censorship system coordinated by federal agencies and social media companies. This effort was ramped up under President Joe Biden, who is arguably the most anti-free speech president since John Adams. Biden has accused companies of
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March 20, 2024 — Scott Johnson
I found the oral argument of the case now styled Murthy v. Missouri this past Monday to be utterly demoralizing. As soon as the oral argument concluded I rashly hazarded my assessment that it portends a victory for the massive censorship-industrial complex represented by the Biden administration. My assessment was a hot take based on the tenor of the argument. The argument seemed to me to reflect a fantasy world.
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March 18, 2024 — Scott Johnson
This morning the Supreme Court held oral argument in the case that is now styled Murthy v. Missouri. C-SPAN has posted audio of the oral argument here. The case arises from the government’s “encouragement” of censorship by the social media platforms, as documented in the Twitter Files. We have followed the case as it has wended its way through the district court to the Fifth Circuit and then to the
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March 7, 2024 — Scott Johnson
RealClearFoundation president David DesRosiers has announced the inaugural winners of of its Samizdat Prize. Tonight’s the night. The Samizdat Prize is intended to honor the most important users of the First Amendment in the United States. The prize aspires to confer the honor that various of the Pulitzer Prizes bestow and should replace them in the mind of right-thinking men and women. In the words of DesRosiers, the award that
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December 21, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Reflecting the Democrat mania to control free speech, Minnesota Democrats enacted a law conflicting with the proposition that corporations have a constitutional right to speak independently about politics. I learned about the law from the December 18 Wall Street Journal column “Minnesota’s Xenophobic Restrictions on Speech” by Brad Smith and Eric Wang. The “xenophobia” flagged in the Journal headline is entirely pretextual. The subhead homes in on the problem: “[The]
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December 10, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi appeared as a witness to testify at the recent congressional hearing in which Rep. Dan Goldman made a fool of himself again. Taibbi chronicled the doings in his Racket News column “Dan Goldman, Democrats, Make a Clown Show of Censorship Hearing,” behind the Racket News paywall. However, Taibbi has posted a narrated version of the column in the video below. I thought some readers would find this of
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December 1, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Lately Democrats have fallen into the habit of labeling all facts they would rather not talk about as “conspiracy theories.” They must think it works. Yesterday, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before Jim Jordan’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Matt recorded the experience, which he describes as “surreal,” at Racket News. Representative Dan Goldman is the Democrats’ attack dog on the subcommittee. Goldman hasn’t given
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October 16, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Matt Taibbi was the principal reporter who broke the Twitter Files story, one of the major news events not just of the past year, but of the past decade. The fact that federal agencies leaned on, and collaborated with, tech companies to suppress Americans’ freedom of speech and dictate the limits of public debate on several critical issues, is the most important scandal of our time. And the fact that
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September 29, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Democrats like to label Donald Trump an authoritarian. This is why he supposedly is a threat to “our democracy.” The charge is generally groundless. Trump was president for four years, so he has a track record as the least authoritarian president of recent years. But Trump, being Trump, can’t get out of his own way. So earlier this week, on Truth Social, he handed the Democrats all the ammunition they
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September 9, 2023 — Scott Johnson
A month ago the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals heard the Biden administration’s plea to set aside Judge Terry Doughty’s preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden. Judge Doughty’s 155-page memorandum ruling in support of the injunction is posted online here. Judge Doughty’s injunction is separately posted here. I anticipated the appellate proceedings in “Walk away, Joe.” Having listened to the oral argument before the Fifth Circuit, I threw caution to
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August 18, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Zach Weissmueller takes a deep dive into Missouri v. Biden with (plaintiff) the great Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and attorney John Vecchione in the Reason podcast (video below). Reason provides background for the podcast here. We have covered the lawsuit and the underlying issues of the epidemic and social media censorship repeatedly on this site. The historical review captured in the video is enraging and the related clips included light it
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