One of Minnesota’s fastest-growing high school sports is in danger of becoming too expensive for its athletes if a bill circulating in the state House and Senate comes to pass.
Shooting league calls DFL bill an ‘attack on a school-approved activity they don’t like
Sen. Jen McEwen, DFL-Duluth, says SF3792 is focused on keeping youth shooting athletes and the environment safe from lead-based ammunition. One of Minnesota’s fastest growing high school sports is in danger of becoming too expensive for its athletes if a bill circulating in the state House and Senate comes to pass. That’s according to organizers for the USA Clay Target League who say a proposal sponsored by a handful of DFL legislators that would ban lead-based ammunition would “more than double” the costs of ammunition for trap shooting athletes and result in many no longer being able to afford the sport. READ MORE
It is now abundantly clear that the Democrats and Biden are using lawfare to remove their political opposition, mainly Trump and his supporters. All the indictments are from hardcore leftists within the justice system.
LAWFARE: Trump Posts $91.6 Million Bond to Appeal E. Jean Carroll Defamation Judgment
By Cristina Laila – March , 2024
President Trump on Friday posted a $91.6 million bond as he appeals the E. Jean Carroll judgment. The money will be returned to Trump if he wins his appeal. Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee on Thursday denied Trump’s second request to delay paying Carroll.
In January, a 9-person jury ordered Trump to pay a total of $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for statements he made defending himself against false rape accusations. The Trump team argued that the evidence Carroll deleted proves that she was receiving threats before President Trump ever commented on her allegations. Judge Kaplan defended Carroll and said Trump offered no evidence that he ever attempted to recover the deleted messages. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Thirty years ago, the incendiary columnist Sam Francis coined the term “anarcho-tyranny” to describe a state of affairs in which the government cannot or will not enforce laws against serious criminals and instead exerts excessive and often arbitrary force on ordinary citizens.
Francis’s coinage, conceived against the backdrop of the crack epidemic and attendant crime wave of the late ’80s and early ’90s, was provoked by a series of feckless gun laws ostensibly designed to curb armed crime. But in practice, they were used to harass ordinary gun owners. The original column appeared in December 1992, a few months after an off-the-grid Vietnam vet was entrapped by an undercover ATF agent for the illegal sale of a shotgun, leading to a raid on his cabin in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the murder of his dog, son, and wife by federal agents.
Anarcho-tyranny is not an intentional conspiracy to subvert the rule of law. There are no smoke-filled rooms where the anarcho-tyranny white paper is passed around among policymakers. It is simply the natural devolution of a government undergoing a crisis of authority: As power slackens in one direction, it must tighten in another.
After a two-decade respite, the days of anarcho-tyranny have returned, perhaps more explicitly than ever. Since at least 2016, leftist DAs around the country have made it their explicit aim to decriminalize every offense short of murder (and sometimes that, too) and empty the prisons of even the most dangerous felons. Violent crime is once again a mainstay of big-city life. Drug addicts and psychopaths haunt the subways. Flagrant theft is forcing businesses to shutter and lock away their goods behind walls of plexiglass. In San Francisco alone, roughly 2,000 car break-ins are committed per month — with a less than 1 percent arrest rate. The George Floyd riots of 2020 amassed upward of $2 billion in damage, while its perpetrators were rewarded with tens of millions in exculpatory payouts.
The state, which is currently controlled by a party whose political clients are the agents of this disorder, has responded by cracking down on anyone who tries to intervene (murder charges brought against Kyle Rittenhouse, Jacob Gardner, and Daniel Penny demonstrate the point) and has mercilessly prosecuted red Americans who have responded in kind (compare the millions in payouts for Black Lives Matter rioters to the excessive sentencing of Jan. 6 defendants for example). Even more insidiously, the state, in the absence of neutral enforcement of the laws as they exist, is employing an expansive reading of civil rights law to punish their political enemies and flex their tyrannical authority.
Currently, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is investigating conservative activist Christ Rufo for refusing to play the pronoun game with his colleagues at the New College in Florida. Elon Musk, whose purchase of Twitter and subsequent release of a trove of internal documents exposed the hand-in-glove relationship between the federal government and (former) Twitter executives to suppress conservative speech, now faces a civil rights lawsuit for the crime of not hiring refugees to work at SpaceX.
These targeted prosecutions are scandals in their own right, but they pale in comparison to the treatment of Douglass Mackey, whose recent conviction is the canary in the coal mine for what’s coming down the pike.
Douglass Mackey’s Memes
Mackey, the man behind the now-defunct Twitter persona Ricky Vaughn, was convicted on March 31 of this year of “conspiracy against rights” in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 241, a Reconstruction Era law designed to counteract the violent voter suppression tactics of the Ku Klux Klan. In October, Mackey was sentenced to seven months in federal prison.
Mackey’s alleged conspiracy? Posting a joke meme on Twitter.
The offending tweet features an image of a mock political flier, which, according to federal prosecutors, was aimed at deceiving Hillary Clinton voters with the text, “Avoid the line. Vote from home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925.” Another tweet, also named in the suit, instructs readers to cast their vote by posting the word “Hillary” to Facebook and Twitter alongside the hashtag #PresidentialElection.
It’s a mildly provocative troll, a wry jab at the absurdity of get-out-the-vote efforts, which target the most civically illiterate members of the public. But never mind whether the joke is good or bad, it is obviously a joke, obvious enough that posters far less clever than Mackey have made it before. Kristina Wong, a semi-prominent Twitter Democrat, posted a nearly identical tweet during the same election cycle encouraging her fellow “Chinese Americans for Trump and people of color for Trump” to vote on “Super Wednesday,” adding, “TEXT in your vote! Text votes are legit.”
Fair play, in other words. Jokes, trolls, accusations, deceptions, outright lies of the most salacious, malicious, and truly deplorable nature are all part of the daily maelstrom of political informational warfare. You may find this kind of partisan mud-slinging degrading, even regrettable, but the grand spectacle of American democracy has always been this way. We take the good with the bad, the funny with the cringe. If you want something different, a system of laws and norms that promises a little more dignity, well… that’s another conversation for another time. For now, this is the game we’re all playing, and the rules, enshrined by the First Amendment, are the rules.
Or so we thought. If you are a Trump supporter like Mackey, rather than an obedient party apparatchik like Wong, the rules no longer apply. When, as Mackey’s case demonstrates, the state can expand the purview of a law meant to thwart acts of Klan violence to include online “disinformation,” it can render almost any action illegal. Every utterance, to the extent it has a political valence, is a potential crime. Everything is against the law, but the law only applies to the state’s political enemies.
If this is an exaggeration, it is so only barely.
Here are some more facts that provide a fuller picture of the circumstances of Mackey’s alleged crime and their implications. Mackey’s meme first appeared on Twitter on Nov. 1, 2016. It wasn’t until January 2021, two days after the inauguration of Joe Biden, that charges were filed. Despite Mackey living in Florida, the DOJ used a dubious legal reading to have the case tried in the hostile Eastern District of New York, under the auspices of newly appointed U.S. Attorney Breon Peace, in front of a Democrat activist judge who in 2017 issued an emergency stay to block Trump’s executive order on refugee resettlements, and in front of a Brooklyn jury pool that voted 4 to 1 in favor of Joe Biden.
The most astonishing fact is that the case was brought in the absence of any victim. According to the Justice Department, 4,900 people texted the fake number in the tweet. Out of these, the Justice Department found not a single person who claimed to have been deceived by the meme or who thought that texting “Hillary” to 59925 constituted a valid vote.
Mackey’s real crime, his real sin, was being an effective right-wing provocateur. According to an analysis from MIT Media Labs, Mackey’s Twitter account, @TheRickyVaughn, with a little over 50,000 followers at the time of the election, was one of the most influential social media accounts in the country, ranking higher than NBC News and prominent Democrat mouthpieces like Stephen Colbert.
Mackey’s prolific output and acerbic wit, his unique ability to proselytize the ideological foundations of Trumpism with native digital fluency, is what made him a target. It is also true that Mackey could be blatantly offensive, but the need to protect offensive speech only underscores the principles of free expression at stake. Ultimately, he represented the breakup of the informational monopoly held by the state’s preferred opinion makers, and that is why he was prosecuted. The candidacy of Donald Trump, a sui generis figure in a hundred different ways, and whose own subsequent legal entanglements operate from the same logic of excessive prosecutorial zeal, was animated, at least in part, by the unconstrained energy of online troublemakers like Mackey.
And like Trump, Mackey had to be held to account for exposing these vulnerabilities in the system. Again, where power slackens in one direction (losing control of the electorate), it must tighten in another (stringing up meme makers). The likeness here isn’t merely symbolic. Remember 18 U.S.C. § 241? This same law, which according to legal scholar Eugene Volokh has never been used to prosecute a speech act, is precisely the law federal prosecutor Jack Smith is relying on to indict Trump. Douglass Mackey’s case isn’t a standalone act of prosecutorial aggression; it is the foundation for a new legal regime that intends to cast a net over the entire ocean of online speech.
Broadening the Law’s Scope
The precedent set in the Mackey case eschews any limiting principle on how the law can be applied. Any “disinformation” — that is, any untrue statement, even crude jokes, like jesting that Michelle Obama is a man, or that [insert politician] is really an alien lizard in a human skinsuit — so long as it might deter someone from voting, is a potential crime. Even the mild suggestion that voting is irrational, a belief long held by many mainstream political scientists, could count as a criminal act under this reading of Section 241. This broadening of scope is precisely the point.
In his 1964 book The Morality of Law, legal theorist Lon L. Fuller tells the parable of King Rex, an ambitious though naive ruler who attempts to reform his kingdom’s legal system from the ground up. First, his legal code is too narrow, then too broad, too abstruse, then too plain. His subjects’ dissatisfaction mounts, until the king realizes that by making his laws impossible to obey, he can bring his enemies to heel whenever he chooses.
“It was made a crime, punishable by 10 years’ imprisonment, to cough, sneeze, hiccough, faint or fall down in the presence of the king,” Fuller writes. In other words, there was no law, only the king’s discretion concerning who deserved punishment or mercy.
The 17th-century polemicist Leveler “Free Born” John Lilburne called such a state of affairs a “lawless unlimited power.” It eventually led to a revolution. We’re not there yet, but when one of our fellow citizens faces federal prison time for a joke, we are forgiven for being reminded of dear King Rex.
In the coming year, we will be treated to a warmed-over buffet of sermons by our intellectual betters on the sanctity of Our Democracy™. We will be relentlessly hounded to check under our beds and in our closets for purveyors of “disinformation.” While the streets are overrun with another round of election year “mostly peaceful protests,” the border is swamped by a deluge of illegal immigrants, and our major metros are ravaged by wanton criminality, we will do well to consider what we stand for, and where we will draw the line.
Brian Murphy, a former FBI agent who once led the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, reflected last summer on the failures of the Disinformation Governance Board — the panel formed to actively police misinformation. The board, which was proposed in April 2022 after he left DHS, was quickly shelved by the Biden administration in a few short months in the face of criticism that it would be an Orwellian state-sponsored “Ministry of Truth.”
In a July podcast, Murphy said the threat of state-sponsored disinformation meant the executive branch has an “ethical responsibility” to rein in the social media companies. American citizens, he said, must give up “some of your freedoms that you need and deserve so that you get security back.”
The legal problems and public backlash to the Disinformation Governance Board also demonstrated to him that “the government has a major role to play, but they cannot be out in front.”
Murphy, who made headlines late in the Trump administration for improperly building dossiers on journalists, has spent the last few years trying to help the government find ways to suppress and censor speech it doesn’t like without being so “out in front” that it runs afoul of the Constitution. He has proposed that law enforcement and intelligence agencies formalize the process of sharing tips with private sector actors — a “hybrid constellation” including the press, academia, researchers, nonpartisan organizations, and social media companies — to dismantle “misinformation” campaigns before they take hold.
More recently, Murphy has worked to make his vision of countering misinformation a reality by joining a United Kingdom-based tech firm, Logically.AI, whose eponymous product identifies and removes content from social media. Since joining the firm, Murphy has met with military and other government officials in the U.S., many of whom have gone on to contract or pilot Logically’s platform.
Logically says it uses artificial intelligence to keep tabs on over 1 million conversations. It also maintains a public-facing editorial team that produces viral content and liaisons with the traditional news media. It differs from other players in this industry by actively deploying what they call “countermeasures” to dispute or remove problematic content from social media platforms.
The business is even experimenting with natural language models, according to one corporate disclosure, “to generate effective counter speech outputs that can be leveraged to deliver novel solutions for content moderation and fact-checking.” In other words, artificial intelligence-powered bots that produce, in real-time, original arguments to dispute content labeled as misinformation.
In many respects, Logically is fulfilling the role Murphy has articulated for a vast public-private partnership to shape social media content decisions. Its technology has already become a key player in a much larger movement that seeks to clamp down on what the government and others deem misinformation or disinformation. A raft of developing evidence — including the “Twitter Files,” the Moderna Reports, the proposed Government Disinformation Panel, and other reports — has shown how governments and industry are determined to monitor, delegitimize, and sometimes censor protected speech. The story of Logically.AI illustrates how sophisticated this effort has become and its global reach. The use of its technology in Britain and Canada raises red flags as it seeks a stronger foothold in the United States.
Logically was founded in 2017 by a then-22-year-old British entrepreneur named Lyric Jain, who was inspired to form the company to combat what he believed were the lies that pushed the U.K. into voting in favor of Brexit, or leaving the European Union. The once-minor startup now has broad contracts across Europe and India, and has worked closely with Microsoft, Google, PwC, TikTok, and other major firms. Meta contracts with Logically to help the company fact-check content on all of its platforms: WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.
The close ties to Silicon Valley provide unusual reach. “When Logically rates a piece of content as false, Facebook will significantly reduce its distribution so that fewer people see it, apply a warning label to let people know that the content has been rated false, and notify people who try to share it,” Meta and Logically announced in a 2021 press release on the partnership.
Meta and Logically did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
During the 2021 local elections in the U.K., Logically monitored up to “one million pieces of harmful content,” some of which they relayed to government officials, according to a document reviewed by RealClearInvestigations. The firm claimed to spot coordinated activity to manipulate narratives around the election, information they reported to tech giants for takedowns.
The following year, the state of Oregon negotiated with Logically for a wide-ranging effort to monitor campaign-related content during the 2022 midterm elections. In a redacted proposal for the project, Logically noted that it would check claims against its “single source of truth database,” which relied on government data, and would also crack down on “malinformation” — a term of art that refers to accurate information that fuels dangerous narratives. The firm similarly sold Oregon on its ability to pressure social media platforms for content removal.
Oregon state Rep. Ed Diehl has a led push against the state from renewing its work with Logically for the election this year. The company, he said in an interview, violates “our constitutional rights to free speech and privacy” by “flagging true information as false, claiming legitimate dissent is a threat, and then promoting “counter-narratives” against valid forms of public debate.
In response, the Oregon secretary of state’s office, which initiated the contract with Logically, claimed “no authority, ability, or desire to censor speech.” Diehl disputes this. He pointed out that the original proposal with Logically clearly states that its service “enables the opportunity for unlimited takedown attempts” of alleged misinformation content and the ability for the Oregon secretary of state’s office to “flag for removal” any “problematic narratives and content.” The contract document touts Logically as a “trusted entity within the social media community” that gives it “preferred status that enables us to support our client’s needs at a moment’s notice.”
Diehl, who shared a copy of the Logically contract with RCI, called the issue a vital “civil rights” fight, and noted that in an ironic twist, the state’s anti-misinformation speech suppression work further inflames distrust in “election systems and government institutions in general.”
Logically’s reach into the U.S. market is quickly growing. The company has piloted programs for the Chicago Police Department to use artificial intelligence to analyze local rap music and deploy predictions on violence in the community, according to a confidential proposal obtained by RCI. Pentagon records show that the firm is a subcontractor to a program run by the U.S. Army’s elite Special Operations Command for work conducted in 2022 and 2023. Via funding from DHS, Logically also conducts research on gamer culture and radicalization.
The company has claimed in its ethics statements that it will not employ any person who holds “a salaried or prominent position” in government. But records show closely entrenched state influence. For instance, Kevin Gross, a director of the U.S. Navy NAVAIR division, was previously embedded within Logically’s team during a 2022 fellowship program. The exchange program supported Logically’s efforts to assist NATO on the analysis of Russian social media.
Other contracts in the U.S. may be shrouded in secrecy. Logically partners with ThunderCat Technologies, a contracting firm that assists tech companies when competing for government work. Such arrangements have helped tech giants conceal secretive work in the past. Google previously attempted to hide its artificial intelligence drone-targeting contracts with the Defense Department through a similar third-party contracting vendor.
But questions swirl over the methods and reach of the firm as it entrenches itself into American life, especially as Logically angles to play a prominent role in the 2024 presidential election.
Pandemic Policing
In March 2020, as Britain confronted the spread of Covid-19, the government convened a new task force, the Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU). The secretive task force was created with little fanfare but was advertised as a public health measure to protect against dangerous misinformation. Caroline Dinenage, the member of Parliament overseeing media issues, later explained that the unit’s purpose was to provide authoritative sources of information and to “take action to remove misinformation” relating to “misleading narratives related to COVID-19.”
The CDU, it later emerged, had largely outsourced its work to private contractors such as Logically. In January 2021, the company received its first contract from the agency overseeing the CDU, for £400,000, to monitor “potentially harmful disinformation online.” The contracts later swelled, with the U.K. agency that pertains to media issues eventually providing contracts with a combined value of £1.2 million and the Department of Health providing another £1.3 million, for a total of roughly $3.2 million.
That money went into far-reaching surveillance that monitored journalists, activists, and lawmakers who criticized pandemic policies. Logically, according to an investigation last year in the Telegraph, recorded comments from activist Silkie Carlo criticizing vaccine passports in its “Mis/Disinformation” reports.
Logically’s reports similarly collected information on Dr. Alexandre de Figueiredo, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Figueiredo had published reports on the negative ways in which vaccine passports could undermine vaccine confidence and had publicly criticized policies aimed at the mass vaccination of children. Despite his expertise, Logically filed his tweet in a disinformation report to the government. While some of the reports were categorized as evidence of terms of service violations, many were, in fact, routine forms of dissent aired by prominent voices in the U.K. on policies hotly contested by expert opinion.
The documents showing Logically’s role were later uncovered by Carlo’s watchdog group, Big Brother Watch, which produced a detailed report on the surveillance effort. The CDU reports targeted a former judge who argued against coercive lockdowns as a violation of civil liberties and journalists criticizing government corruption. Some of the surveillance documents suggest a mission creep for the unit, as media monitoring emails show that the agency targeted anti-war groups that were vocal against NATO’s policies.
Carlo was surprised to even find her name on posts closely monitored and flagged by Logically. “We found that the company exploits millions of online posts to monitor, record and flag online political dissent to the central government under the banner of countering ‘disinformation,’” she noted in a statement to RCI.
Marketing materials published by Logically suggest its view of Covid-19 went well beyond fact-checking and veered into suppressing dissenting opinions. A case study published by the firm claimed that the #KBF hashtag, referring to Keep Britain Free, an activist group against school and business shutdowns, was a dangerous “anti-vax” narrative. The case study also claimed the suggestion that “the virus was created in a Chinese laboratory” was one of the “conspiracy theories’’ that “have received government support” in the U.S. — despite the fact that a preponderance of evidence now points to a likely lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the origin of the pandemic.
Logically was also involved in pandemic work that blurred the line with traditional fact-checking operations. In India, the firm helped actively persuade patients to take the vaccine. In 2021, Jain, the founder and CEO of the company, said in an interview with an Indian news outlet that his company worked “closely with communities that are today vaccine hesitant.” The company, he said, recruited “advocates and evangelists” to shape local opinion.
Questionable Fact-Checking
In 2022, Logically used its technology on behalf of Canadian law enforcement to target the trucker-led “Freedom Convoy” against Covid-19 mandates, according to government records. Logically’s team floated theories that the truckers were “likely influenced by foreign adversaries,” a widely repeated claim used to denigrate the protests as inauthentic.
The push to discredit the Canadian protests showed the overlapping power of Logically’s multiple arms. While its social media surveillance wing fed reports to the Canadian government, its editorial team worked to influence opinion through the news media. When the Financial Times reported on the protest phenomenon, the outlet quoted Murphy, the former FBI man who now works for Logically, who asserted that the truckers were influenced by coordinated “conspiracy theorist groups” in the U.S. and Canada. Vicesimilarly quoted Joe Ondrak, Logically’s head of investigations, to report that the “Freedom Convoy” had generated excitement among global conspiracy theorists. Neither outlet disclosed Logically’s work for Canadian law enforcement at the time.
Other targets of Logically are quick to point out that the firm has taken liberties with what it classifies as misinformation.
Will Jones, the editor of the Daily Sceptic, a British news outlet with a libertarian bent, has detailed an unusual fact-check from Logically Facts, the company’s editorial site. Jones said the site targeted him for pointing out that data in 2022 showed 71 percent of patients hospitalized for Covid-19 were vaccinated. Logically’s fact-check acknowledged Jones had accurately used statistics from the U.K. Health Security Agency, but tried to undermine him by asserting that he was still misleading by suggesting that “vaccines are ineffective.”
But Jones, in a reply, noted that he never made that argument and that Logically was batting away at a straw man. In fact, his original piece plainly took issue with a Guardian article that incorrectly claimed that “COVID-19 has largely become a disease of the unvaccinated.”
Other Logically fact-checks have bizarrely targeted the Daily Sceptic for reporting on news in January 2022 that vaccine mandates might soon be lifted. The site dinged the Daily Sceptic for challenging the evidence behind the vaccine policy and declared, “COVID-19 vaccines have been proven effective in fighting the pandemic.” And yet, at the end of that month, the mandate was lifted for health care workers, and the following month, all other pandemic restrictions were revoked, just as the Daily Sceptic had reported.
“As far as I can work out, it’s a grift,” said Daily Sceptic founder Toby Young, of Logically. “A group of shysters offer to help the government censor any criticism of its policies under the pretense that they’re not silencing dissent — God forbid! — but merely ‘cleansing’ social media of misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.”
Jones was similarly dismissive of the company, which he said disputes anything that runs contrary to popular consensus. “The consensus of course is that set by the people who pay Logically for their services,” Jones added. “The company claims to protect democratic debate by providing access to ‘reliable information,’ but in reality, it is paid to bark and savage on command whenever genuine free speech makes an inconvenient appearance.”
In some cases, Logically has piled on to news stories to help discredit voices of dissent. Last September, the anti-misinformation site leaped into action after British news outlets published reports about sexual misconduct allegations surrounding comedian and online broadcaster Russell Brand — one of the outspoken critics of government policy in Britain, who has been compared to Joe Rogan for his heterodox views and large audience.
Brand, a vocal opponent of pandemic policies, had been targeted by Logically in the past for airing opinions critical of the U.S. and U.K. response to the virus outbreak, and in other moments for criticizing new laws in the European Union that compel social media platforms to take down content.
But the site took dramatic action when the sexual allegations, none of which have been proved in court, were published in the media. Ondrak, Logically’s investigations head, provided different quotes to nearly half a dozen news outlets — including Vice, Wired, the BBC, and two separate articles in The Times — that depicted Brand as a dangerous purveyor of misinformation who had finally been held to account.
“He follows a lot of the ostensibly health yoga retreat, kind of left-leaning, anti-capitalist figures, who got really suckered into Covid skepticism, Covid denialism, and anti-vax, and then spat out of the Great Reset at the other end,” Ondrak told Wired. In one of the articles published by The Times, Ondrak aired frustration on the obstacles of demonetizing Brand from the Rumble streaming network. In an interview with the BBC, Ondrak gave a curious condemnation, noting Brand stops short of airing any actual conspiracy theories or falsehoods but is guilty of giving audiences “the ingredients to make the disinformation themselves.”
Dinenage, the member of Parliament who spearheaded the CDU anti-misinformation push with Logically during the pandemic, also leapt into action. In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, she sent nearly identical letters to Rumble, TikTok, and Meta to demand that the platforms follow YouTube’s lead in demonetizing Brand. Dinenage couched her official request to censor Brand as a part of a public interest inquiry, to protect the “welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behaviour.”
Logically’s editorial team went a step further. In its report on the Brand allegations published on Logically Facts, it claimed that social media accounts “trotting out the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ refrain” for the comedian were among those perpetuating “common myths about sexual assault.” The site published a follow-up video reiterating the claim that those seeking the presumption of innocence for Brand, a principle dating back to the Magna Carta, were spreading a dangerous “myth.”
The unusual advocacy campaign against Brand represented a typical approach for a company that has long touted itself as a hammer against spreaders of misinformation. The opportunity to remove Brand from the media ecosystem meant throwing as much at him as possible, despite any clear misinformation or disinformation angle in the sexual assault allegations. Rather, he was a leading critic of government censorship and pandemic policy, so the scandal represented a weakness to be exploited.
Such heavy-handed tactics may be on the horizon for American voters. The firm is now a member of the U.S. Election Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center, the group managed by the Center for Internet Security that helps facilitate misinformation reports on behalf of election officials across the country. Logically has been in talks with Oregon and other states, as well as DHS, to expand its social media surveillance role for the presidential election later this year.
Previous targets of the company, though, are issuing a warning.
“It appears that Logically’s lucrative and frankly sinister business effectively produced multi-million pound misinformation for the government that may have played a role in the censorship of citizens’ lawful speech,” said Carlo of Big Brother Watch.
“Politicians and senior officials happily pay these grifters millions of pounds to wield the red pen, telling themselves that they’re ‘protecting’ democracy rather than undermining it,” said Young of the Daily Sceptic. “It’s a boondoggle and it should be against the law.”
The theme of my career over the past year has been the transition of departing military service and reintegrating among the civilian populace. As I approached this season, I have heard one particular phrase frequently circulated among much of corporate communication: “Bring your authentic self to work.”
But more recently I have heard cautions for those of us in uniform to be anything but open as we return to the society from which we were drawn. I find this deeply concerning. The nation should beware of prioritizing deception as social currency.
Last summer I began attending the transition briefings required prior to separation from the service. At one particular event, a retired military man — now working for a large national company — warned us that it’s very important to keep a low social media profile because of perceptual risk from hiring managers. He told of unfriending his sister on Facebook because he didn’t want anyone from his workplace to associate them with each other. That moment got my attention.
If the sister posts deviant content, I would probably keep some distance in online spaces for the sake of my sanity. But what if the sister is merely someone who expresses facts that just happen to be inconvenient to the current sociopolitical moment? We have seen time and again that facts disputed by corporate media, social media companies, and government officials frequently turn out to be true.
The call to sacrificially appease the human resources syndicate renewed itself in another employment seminar I attended this year. Again, I encountered the caution through a LinkedIn discussion. I was warned that employers fear that an employee who expresses a thought on his or her own time might also express a thought in the workplace. Such thinking from clearly well-intentioned people seems backward to me, as if we should not encounter ideas and ways of thinking that might challenge our own.
People of faith-directed moral principles routinely encounter rhetoric that is contrary to their own beliefs and sometimes condescending. The reality is that many companies, corporations, and government institutions tolerate “politically correct” expressions in the workplace while shaming voices aligned with a traditional worldview. My time in the U.S. Army contains such instances, and I’m not alone.
This is in spite of protections offered by the U.S. Constitution, civil law, and military regulation. Culture and political sway always trump the rules. When you look at where people are being pressured, disciplined, or fired for sharing their beliefs at work, it is usually an incident of discrimination against speaking the truth by military commanders or civilian managers who have adopted a form of leftist social orthodoxy.
Part of the argument for why we should present as neutral in online spaces revolves around a belief that people cannot be taught how to engage productively on tough issues. Society has lost the ability to think, reason, and respectfully debate. Shall we then remove anything related to thinking skills from educational curriculum? The point of identifying a deficiency is so that it can be addressed. We should not accept a lack of skills in dialogue and thought as normal and then strike them from the list of disciplines to be pursued. Because one generation has not been taught something important does not mean people should abandon it entirely.
Rather than calling for an end to societal discourse, we should work to recapture the skill. I am not advocating that we bring cable news-style fights to the job site or that everyone abandons all expressive caution, manner, and restraint. But we must end the fear and spirals of silence that have become too frequent across workplaces, especially for workers who hold to a morality that was understood to be normal until 15 minutes ago.
By overusing a mantra that demands we avoid talking about religion or politics at the dinner table, we have robbed entire generations of the chance to develop the intellectual discipline that is foundational to reasoning and thought. These skills were expected of all citizens in the early republic. The nation’s current deficit in the tools of discourse paved the way for a cultural capture of the West at the hands of confessional Marxists. In their own words, such people aim to deconstruct and dismantle rather than defend and preserve.
Deliberately or unwittingly, those who argue in favor of self-neutrality demonstrate a worldview that places all power and personal allegiance in the hands of employers. Of course, there is wisdom in avoiding individuals who demonstrate a lack of restraint or courtesy in their manner of expression. But telling people that their employment is purchased with a lifestyle of silence is an elevation of employer to magistrate and priest. It turns employees into quieted servants and enables a soft social credit system that reduces human beings to machines. Such thinking is among the reasons my transition is focused on finding a mission rather than a corporate role.
The Greek general and politician Pericles is quoted as saying, “We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own affairs; we say that he has no business here at all.” The problem is not so much that managers have an aversion to politics. It is that secularists generally have an aversion to ideas that contradict the prevailing winds of culture. They live convinced that policy advocacy on matters in alignment with their belief is not a matter of politics but of principle. The two, however, are inseparable. When one tells you to keep your principles to yourself, that itself is an ideological competitor’s political act of silencing you.
Beliefs turn into expressed ideas, which beget social doctrines. The First Amendment is of little meaning if we make it inferior to social demands of the moment. As a nation, we should beware of allowing momentary fears to become anchored going forward, and we should refuse to cede moral principles to satisfy the increasingly leftist human resources syndicate.
Chase Spears is a retiring U.S. Army officer, concluding a 20-year career in military public affairs. His opinions are his own and should not be construed to be those of the U.S. Army, Department of Defense, U.S. Government, or any other affiliated agencies.
“Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.”
— First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
Here is a pop quiz: If the states ratified an amendment to the Constitution repealing the First Amendment, would we still enjoy the freedom of speech?
That depends on which value prevails: Are our rights only what lawmakers have written down, or are they personal attributes immune from government reach?
When James Madison was crafting the First Amendment, he insisted that the word “the” precede “freedom of speech” in order to manifest the Framers’ belief that the freedom of speech pre-existed the government. The First Amendment is a negative right.
It doesn’t grant the freedom of speech.
Rather, it restrains Congress from abridging a right that preexisted Congress.
So, what is a right, and where does it come from?
A right is an indefeasible personal claim against the whole world.
It does not require a government permission slip or any precondition or community consensus — only the ability to reason.
It belongs to every human by virtue of our existence.
Privileges — like voting or driving an automobile — come from the government. Rights come from our humanity. Madison included the word “the” before “freedom of speech” in order to underscore its natural — not governmental — origins.
If you accept the existence of the natural law — a body of unchanging moral principles universally knowable by the exercise of reason — you accept that natural rights are ours to exercise whether the government is expressly prohibited from interfering with them or not.
So, under the natural law, murder would still be wrong and unlawful, even if the government were to permit itself and others to kill, as, of course, governments have done and continue to do.
Under the natural law, the answer to our pop quiz is that because the freedom of speech is a natural human right, it exists and is free from government interference whether the prohibition on interference is written down or not.
Is natural law in the Constitution?
Yes.
The Ninth Amendment — Madison’s crown jewel — recognizes the existence of personal human rights too numerous to articulate, and it prohibits the government from denying or disparaging them.
The opposite of natural law is positivism.
It teaches that law is only that which has been written down and ratified by the law giver.
Under positivism, there is no natural law restraint upon the government; right and wrong are only and always whatever the government says they are.
Under positivism, the answer to our pop quiz is that the freedom of speech would be fair game for the government to abridge.
The freedom of speech — to think as you wish, to say what you think, to offer what you say — is so normal, so human, so integral to the very existence of each of us, who cares what the government thinks of it?
Yet, today, the government thinks very little of the freedom of speech, even though all in government —from the president on down to a part-time government janitor — have sworn allegiance to the Constitution.
Today, even though the First Amendment only verbally addresses Congress, the freedom of speech is protected from all government infringement —whether local, state or federal; whether legislative, executive or judicial.
President Woodrow Wilson, who infamously had Princeton University students arrested for reading the Declaration of Independence aloud outside draft offices in Trenton, New Jersey, claiming they might deter men from registering for the draft, argued that the First Amendment only restrained Congress, not the president.
Today, such an argument is hogwash.
I offer this brief philosophical and historical discourse on the freedom of speech as background in order to address how this basic freedom is under attack by the government today.
Today, the attacks on free speech are often silent and unseen, as the government attempts to do indirectly what the First Amendment unambiguously prohibits it from doing directly.
In a case involving Facebook now making its way through the federal courts in Texas, we have learned that the Biden administration pressured Facebook executives to suppress free speech about COVID-19 vaccines.
The suppressed speech offered an alternative view to that which the government preferred. Rather than competing in the marketplace of ideas, the government chose to use its bully power to suppress the speech that it hated or feared or with which it disagreed.
This is government interference with speech because of its content.
The U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that, except for a state interest of the highest order — protecting the secrecy of troop movements in wartime, for example — the government is absolutely prohibited from interfering with speech because of its content.
The government claims it was just pointing out errors in scientific materials to Facebook. But that is not government’s job.
The government does not enjoy the freedom of speech; only individuals do.
The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to keep the government out of the business of speech so that individuals can decide for themselves what to say and hear.
Facebook is not the government.
It’s free to censor all it wants. But when it does so to get the government off its back, it thereby acquires an attribute of the government, and a court can impose First Amendment restrictions upon it.
Stated differently, if Facebook and the feds are in a mutually beneficial relationship, they will both lose.
The feds will be restrained by a court — as the Biden administration was — for interfering with the content of speech, and Facebook will lose its ability to censor the content of its own bulletin boards.
Why do we elect persons to protect the Constitution who end up cutting holes in it?
What value is the Constitution if the government can negate it?
Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame Law School, was the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of New Jersey. He is the author of five books on the U.S. Constitution. Read Judge Andrew P. Napolitano’s Reports — More Here.
The First Amendment’s mandate that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech” is a guarantee that, no matter how inconvenient to those temporarily holding high office, the people have an absolute right to express their thoughts and opinions. Despite this constitutional requirement, over 200 years ago, President John Adams and the Federalists in Congress used the threat of war with France as a pretext to enact into law the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime for Americans to “print, utter, or publish . . . any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government.
The debate surrounding the Sedition Act was about the nature of freedom of speech. One supporter of the law, Alexander Addison, believed that some opinions were so dangerous that it was in the public interest to suppress them, stating, “Truth has but one side: and listening to error and falsehood is indeed a strange way to discover truth.”
An opponent, Thomas Cooper, presciently argued that the purpose of the Sedition Act was to empower one party to “suppress the opinions of those who differ from them.” Unsurprisingly, all the defendants prosecuted under the Sedition Act would be Republicans.
Sound familiar?
On Independence Day this year, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction restricting the Biden Administration from collaborating with social media companies to censor and suppress constitutionally protected speech. In his opinion, Judge Terry Doughty stated that the Biden Administration’s efforts to suppress opinions it opposes “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in the United States’ history.” It is difficult to disagree with Judge Doughty’s description.
For years, the Biden Administration demanded social media suppress and censor conservatives who dared question the origins of Covid, the effectiveness of masks and lockdowns, and election integrity, among other issues. The Biden Administration was so zealous in its enforcement of censorship, even parody content did not escape its anti-free speech campaign.
And the Biden administration didn’t ask nicely. When then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki publicly called on social media companies to censor speech relating to Covid, she mentioned Biden’s support for a “robust anti-trust program,” all but threatening to break up tech giants if they failed to adopt the administration’s censorship policies. Later, the White House announced that it was reviewing policies relating to whether social media should be held legally liable for spreading so-called misinformation. In other words, the Biden administration effectively told social media “Do our bidding, or else.”
The White House was so aggressive that a Twitter representative stated the site was “bombarded” with censorship requests from the executive branch. But that bombardment was not really directed at Twitter — it was a monstrous attack on the free speech rights guaranteed to every American by the First Amendment.
In addition to countless numbers of Americans, I was targeted by the censorship regime. When I posted a video on YouTube to educate the public on the potentially harmful consequences of relying on ineffective cloth masks to prevent transmission of Covid, YouTube took my video down and suspended me for a week.
Americans are a free people and we do not take infringements upon our liberties lightly. The time has come for resistance and to reclaim our God-given right to free expression. Permit me, as a member of the resistance, to present a solution that that restores and protects the First Amendment.
I introduced legislation called the Free Speech Protection Act, which will prohibit federal employees and contractors from using their positions to censor and otherwise attack speech protected by the First Amendment. My legislation will impose penalties for those that violate this rule, as well as empower private citizens to sue the government and executive branch officials for violating their First Amendment rights. Additionally, the bill will mandate frequent publicly accessible reports detailing the communications between an executive branch agency and media organizations, ensure that federal grant money is not used to label media organizations as sources of misinformation or disinformation, and terminates authorities that threaten free speech.
Under my Free Speech Protection Act, the government will no longer be able to cloak itself in secrecy to undermine the First Amendment rights of conservatives, libertarians, liberals, socialists, and all others who wish to exercise their right to free speech and engage in public discourse.
My legislation will make it difficult to hide efforts to censor constitutionally protected speech. Those officials who censor Americans are on notice: if you infringe upon First Amendment rights, under my bill, you will face severe penalties, such as potential debarment from employment by the United States, a civil penalty of no less than $10,000, and revocation of a security clearance. Any administration employee who prizes his livelihood would not dare threaten free speech after my bill becomes law.
Looking back upon his defeat of John Adams for the presidency, Thomas Jefferson wrote, the “revolution of 1800 . . . was a real revolution in the principles of our government as that of [17]76.” Jefferson’s victory was a vindication of the First Amendment as he allowed the Sedition Act to expire and pardoned those convicted for expressing their views.
Once again, the American people are called upon to defend the founding principles over which our forebears fought a revolution. To protect free speech, Congress must prohibit the government’s collusion with Big Tech and other media organizations. Congress must pass the Free Speech Protection Act.
The Censorship Complex — whereby Big Tech censorship is induced by the government, media, and media-rating businesses — threatens the future of free speech in this country. To understand how and why, Americans need to talk about speech — and the government’s motive to deceive the public.
To frame this discussion, consider these hypotheticals:
Two American soldiers training Ukraine soldiers in Poland cross into the war zone, ambushing and killing five Russian soldiers. Unbeknownst to the American soldiers, a Ukrainian soldier filmed the incident and provides the footage to an independent journalist who authors an article on Substack, providing a link to the video.
Russia uses its intelligence service and “bots” to flood social media with claims that the Ukrainians are misusing 90 percent of American tax dollars. In truth, “only” 40 percent of American tax dollars are being wasted or corruptly usurped — a fact that an independent journalist learns when a government source leaks a Department of Defense report detailing the misappropriation of the funds sent to Ukraine.
A third of Americans disagree with the continued funding of the war in Ukraine and organically prompt #NoMoreMoola to trend. After this organic hashtag trend begins, Russian operatives amplify the hashtag while the Russian-run state media outlet, Russia Today, reports on the hashtag trend.
Following the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank, the communist Chinese government uses social media to create the false narrative that 10 specifically named financial institutions are bordering on collapsing. In reality, only Bank A1 is financially troubled, but a bank run on any of the 10 banks would cause those banks to collapse too.
In each of these scenarios — and countless others — the government has an incentive to deceive the country. Americans need to recognize this reality to understand the danger posed by the voluntary censorship of speech.
Our government will always seek to quash certain true stories and seed certain false stories: sometimes to protect human life, sometimes to protect our national defense or the economy or public health, sometimes to obtain the upper hand against a foreign adversary, and sometimes to protect the self-interests of its leaders, preferred policy perspectives, and political and personal friends.
Since the founding, America’s free press provided a check on a government seeking to bury the truth, peddle a lie, or promote its leaders’ self-interest. At times, the legacy press may have buried a story or delayed its reporting to protect national security interests, but historically those examples were few and far between.
Even after the left-leaning slant of legacy media outlets took hold and “journalists” became more open to burying (or spinning) stories to protect their favored politicians or policies, new media provided a stronger check and a way for Americans to learn the truth. The rise of social media, citizen journalists, Substack, and blogs added further roadblocks to both government abuse and biased and false reporting.
Donald Trump’s rise, his successful use of social media, and new media’s refusal to join the crusade against Trump caused a fatal case of Stockholm Syndrome, with Big Tech and legacy media outlets welcoming government requests for censorship. With support from both for-profit and nonprofit organizations and academic institutions, a Censorship Complex emerged, embracing the government’s definition of “truth” and seeking to silence any who challenged it, whether it be new media or individual Americans — even experts.
The search for truth suffered as a result, and Americans were deprived of valuable information necessary for self-governance.
We know this because notwithstanding the massive efforts to silence speech, a ragtag group of muckrakers persisted and exposed several official dictates as lies: The Hunter Biden laptop was not Russian disinformation, Covid very well may have escaped from a Wuhan lab, and Trump did not collude with Putin.
But if the Censorship Complex succeeds and silences the few journalists and outlets still willing to challenge the government, Americans will no longer have the means to learn the truth.
Consider again the above hypotheticals. In each of those scenarios, the government — or at least some in the government — has an incentive to bury the truth. In each, it could frame the truth as a foreign disinformation campaign and offer Americans a countervailing lie as the truth.
A populace voluntarily acquiescing in the censorship of speech because it is purportedly foreign misinformation or disinformation will soon face a government that lies, protected by complicit media outlets that repeat those lies as truth, social media websites that ban or censor reporting that challenges the official government narrative, hosting services that deplatform dissenting media outlets, advertisers that starve journalists of compensation, and search engines that hide the results of disfavored viewpoints.
The window is quickly closing on free speech in America, so before it is locked and the curtain thrown shut, we must talk about speech. We need to discuss the circumstances, if any, in which the government should alert reporters and media outlets to supposed foreign disinformation and how. We need to discuss the circumstances, if any, under which Big Tech should censor speech.
Americans need to have this discussion now — before the Censorship Complex makes it impossible to do so.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Last fall, a high school senior in Iowa was suspended for wearing a pro-Second Amendment shirt to her government class, and now her mother is suing the teacher, the principal, and the district. On Monday, Janet Bristow of Johnston, Iowa, a northwest suburb of Des Moines, filed a lawsuit in a U.S. district court alleging that the suspension violated her daughter’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
In late August 2022, Tom Griffin taught his government students at Johnston High School that their rights were “extremely limited” once they entered the classroom, despite the 1969 landmark SCOTUS ruling, Tinker, which affirmed that students and teachers do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Griffin insisted that he would forbid students from wearing any clothing which depicts “guns, alcohol, or any other ‘inappropriate material,'” the lawsuit states.
Bristow’s daughter, identified in the lawsuit only as “A.B.,” was in that class and determined that Griffin had erred in his assessment. Two days later, on September 1, she went to school wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a rifle and the phrase “What part of ‘shall not be infringed’ do you not understand?” emblazoned on the front. Bristow alleged in the lawsuit that A.B. had worn that shirt before without incident and that the girl’s older brother, who graduated from Johnston High School in 2019, also wore the shirt without a problem during his time at the school.
A.B.’s shirtScreenshot of the lawsuit
But Griffin had a problem with the shirt, and he dismissed her from class and sent her to the administration. Bristow soon afterward arrived and discussed the issue with Nate Zittergruen and Randy Klein, both associate principals, and Ryan Woods, the school’s principal. Zittergruen told Bristow that the shirt could be perceived as threatening or offensive, and the administrative team gave A.B. the choice either to change her shirt or face suspension.
Chris Billings, the district’s executive director of school leadership, supported the administration and claimed that the shirt violated school dress code. So, after A.B. refused to change her shirt, she was issued an out-of-school suspension.
Later that evening, Bristow said she received an apology from Superintendent Laura Kacer as well as Billings, who said he had come to realize that the shirt is, in fact, “political speech.”
While Bristow was grateful for the apologies, she does not believe that the issue has been resolved. For one thing, Griffin has neither apologized nor clarified the issue with his class, leaving the impression that “A.B. was wrong and that her opinions were not welcome in the classroom,” the document stated. A.B. also still has the suspension listed on her school record.
In the suit, Bristow is seeking the following forms of relief:
affirmation that clothing featuring firearms “in a non-threatening, non-violent manner” is protected under the First Amendment;
a permanent injunction which will prevent the defendants listed in the lawsuit from ever restricting such clothing again in the future; and
compensation for damages, the costs associated with the legal process, and any other “relief” the court deems “appropriate.”
Sports reporter Jason Whitlock appears on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Feb. 15, 2022. | Screenshot: YouTube/Awesome Cookies
A prominent political commentator suggested that government opposition to the “Freedom Convoy” of truckers protesting the Canadian government’s ongoing coronavirus mandates stems from a “demonization” of “freedom, opportunity and self-determination” that goes hand-in-hand with Christianity.
On Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Tuesday, the eponymous host devoted his opening monologue to addressing the crackdown imposed by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the truckers who have formed a “freedom convoy” in the nation’s capital of Ottawa. The truckers have gathered in Ottawa to protest the requirement that truck drivers who travel over the United States-Canada border as part of their job have to either get the coronavirus vaccine or quarantine upon re-entry into the country.
Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act on Monday in response to the protest, which has gone on for multiple weeks. The never-before-used law gives the Canadian government the authority to implement “special temporary measures to ensure safety and security” in a “critical situation of a temporary nature” that “seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it.”
I want to be very clear about what we are – and are not – doing by invoking the Emergencies Act, and how taking this step will help get the situation under control. In case you missed our announcement earlier today, watch this: pic.twitter.com/htGmZH09Jd
The Emergency Act also allows the Canadian government to implement “special temporary measures to ensure safety and security” in a situation that “seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada.” Trudeau elaborated on what the invocation of the Emergencies Act will mean in a press conference on Monday.
“The police will be given more tools to restore order in places where public assemblies … constitute illegal and dangerous activities such as blockades and occupations,” he said. “These tools include strengthening their ability to impose fines or imprisonment.”
Trudeau further stated his intention to direct financial institutions to begin “regulating and prohibiting the use of property to fund or support illegal blockades.” He then insisted: “We’re not suspending the fundamental rights or overriding the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We are not limiting people’s freedom of speech. We are not limiting freedom of peaceful assembly. We are not preventing people from exercising their right to protest legally.”
After Carlson contended that Trudeau had “canceled democracy” by invoking the Emergencies Act against peaceful protesters, he brought on sports reporter and host of the “Fearless” podcast Jason Whitlock to react to the Canadian government’s treatment of the truckers.
“The things going on in Canada are foreshadowing or working in parallel, in concert with the events happening here in this country,” Whitlock said.
Whitlock classified both the Freedom Convoy and Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot as demonstrations of “opposition to the Left and their secularization of American society,” and described the governments’ responses to those events as examples of “demonizing freedom.” He maintained that the U.S. government’s response to peaceful protesters on Jan. 6 was very similar to Trudeau’s response to the Freedom Convoy: “They’ve thrown people in dungeons, in dungeons, for trespassing in the Capitol.”
“America has been built upon freedom, opportunity and self-determination,” he added. “That’s what made us the envy of the world.”
Whitlock also contrasted the qualities that built the U.S. with what he views as the new objective of the government, namely, to ensure “equity, inclusion and diversity.” Whitlock explained that while “freedom, opportunity and self-determination” are on “you and me as individuals to go get,” equity, inclusion and diversity are “controlled by elites and governments.” He maintained that “freedom, opportunity and self-determination” go “hand-in-hand with Christianity.”
Whitlock suggested that the continued secularization of Canada has played a role in the government’s apparent hostility toward “freedom, opportunity and self-determination.”
“And if you go look at Canada and in the ’50s and ’60s, that country, like 65% of them, went to church regularly on Sundays. They dropped that down to about 10% now. And we don’t even value freedom right now because we don’t understand its importance and they’ve handed us equity, diversity and inclusion.”
Whitlock also condemned the push to label those who value freedom as “racists” and “sellouts.” He warned that “We need to pay attention to what’s going on in Canada and pay attention to what’s going on in this country, we are being bulldozed right now, those of us that love freedom, opportunity and self-determination and Jesus Christ.”
“Secular societies have a very tough time preserving human rights,” Carlson concluded. “They talk about human rights constantly, but they are always the most repressive societies.”
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
It seems that long have the days passed where students were able to freely voice their opinions. The educational system is so liberal that a conservative perspective is almost considered taboo. That’s what happened to High School student Christian Breault. He didn’t follow the Liberal Anti-Gun narrative and was attacked because he had an opposing opinion.
The school, Middleburgh Junior/Senior High School in New York, had it’s students watch the Parkland students Anti Gun speech where Emma Gonzalez gave the “We Call BS Speech.” The speech was played during an assembly held on the day of The National Walkout. The school also had local authorities come in and talk about safety and what to do if a shooting happened at their school. Breault did not agree with the Anti-gun message and talked to some fellow students, but he was overheard by a student who was wholeheartedly drinking the Liberal Koolaid. His father, Brian Breault, posted about the incident on Facebook.
“Today the school my son, Christian, attends participated in the National School Walkout for Gun Control and School Safety. The school held an assembly after the walkout bringing in community leaders and law enforcement to speak. Toward the end of the assembly, they showed an Anti-NRA video vilifying the gun organization and its members (American citizens).
Following the dismissal of the assembly Christian engaged in a conversation with other students who felt the assembly was not handled well. Christian expressed he felt the Anti-NRA video was over the top and he found it offensive. Another student not involved in the conversation threatened him for his view on the video going as far as telling the school nurse that he would punch Christian in the face if he didn’t stop defending the NRA. The nurse told the student he could not say that and no further action was taken.”
But this was not the end of the incident as the anti-NRA student was clearly could not going to allow someone to have an opposing view. So later in the day, according to Christian Breault, the close-minded student attacked Breault. But just as he was strong in his convictions he was equally able to stand his ground in a fight.
“Christian defended himself, punching the kid in the jaw, causing him to fall to the floor,” he told PJ Media. “The kid got up and threw an object at Christian, which he deflected.”
Watch The Sum Up Below.
The school suspended both students administering a one day to Christian and a 3-day to the aggressor. But Christian is concerned as he is an early enlistee in the Navy and doesn’t want a bad record to affect his chances. But his father is upset as he feels it is wrong that his son is being penalized for defending himself. His father is also angry that they pushed a political video at school that slandered the NRA and gun rights.
The superintendent has at least agreed that the video was over the top.
On Wednesday, March 14th, the Jr./Sr. High School held a school safety assembly for students. The purpose of the assembly was to give administrators and law enforcement the chance to speak with students regarding how the district handles school safety and answer any questions students may have had. During the assembly, a video was shown that changed the focus of the conversation from school safety to politics. This was not our desired outcome for the event, and we regret and sincerely apologize for that result.
Conversations are happening across America about how we can keep students safe in school. No matter where you stand on this issue, we can all agree that student safety should be our top priority.”
While it is a step in the right direction that the Superintendent apologized for the politically motivated video, the damage is already done. If the school wanted to make it right they should have a pro NRA video played explaining gun rights and why they should not be infringed upon. They should give students a full education on topics as opposed to simply following the Liberal approved agenda. But was Christian Breault in the wrong for defending himself? The school seems to blame him. Why should he be given any punishment for simply defending himself?
There is a legitimate concern among constitutional observers that our nation’s freedom of speech is under attack by the radical left.
This has been an ongoing issue for years, with an escalation of worry coming in recent months. Groups such as the ironically named “Antifa” and the racists of Black Lives Matterhave been attempting to subvert free speech in the age of President Trump, hoping to add a disclaimer to the First Amendment that negates any words or thoughts that could possibly cause emotional stress to others.
Of course, this is the complete and utter antithesis of free speech, but that hasn’t stopped these liberal extremists from using every trick in the book in order to censor and shame those that oppose them. This neo-fascism is on the rise, thanks in no small part to the mainstream media’s incessant leftward leaning diatribes and the airtime that they so willingly cede to so-called “social justice” warriors.
No where has this pervasive ideology been allowed to fester more than it has on college campuses – a place once reserved for the possibility of uncomfortable realities and challenging thoughts.
“Lawmakers in Ohio are planning to introduce a campus free speech bill to guarantee broad First Amendment protections at public colleges and universities.
“Republican State Representatives Andy Brenner and Wes Goodman announced their plans to introduce the ‘Ohio Campus Free Speech Act’ Tuesday, just days after a decision by Ohio State University banning all window decorations from dorms.
“‘Speech is not violence…violence is violence.’ Tweet This
“The legislation will aim to prohibit ‘universities and administrators from taking action, including communicating in an official capacity, that limits or chills the expression of any member of the campus community or their invited guests based on the content of the expression,’ Brenner explained in a press release Tuesday.
“Another portion of the bill would eliminate the ‘free speech zones’ confining speech to specific parts of college campuses, decreeing that administrators may not limit free expression on any part of campus that is ‘generally accessible.’”
While running the risk of sounding like an elderly man trying to run the whippersnappers off of his lawn, many Americans remember a time in which free speech literally meant free speech.
Now, however, leftist cowards have commandeered the concept, continually inventing new buzzwords and pronoun rules in an attempt to constantly be on top of the shame heap that they’ve created for themselves. Their throne is nothing more than a stack of burned books and redacted ideas, the likes of which would have made even the most cognizant Nazi blush in shame.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have to fight back. We cannot abide the assault on religious freedom by the left, because the victims of our losses will be our children. While many of us have enjoyed lives lived under the cloak of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, ideals that for most of our lives the Republicans AND the Democrats have defended. If we don’t fight back now, our children will not know the freedoms that we have known.
What should we fight against? We should fight against people like this…
The Daily Caller has a new story about a teacher from Hillsborough County, Florida who has an interesting and cruel way of teaching her Christian students.
High School math teacher Lora Jane Riedas has found herself in some hot water after her treatment of her students became known. The lawyers for some of the students are from the constitutional defenders at the Liberty Counsel, and they recently sent a letter to the district Superintendent explaining the situation.
We write on behalf of parents of children in the classroom of teacher Lora Jane Riedas, a math teacher at Riverview High School, who report that Ms. Riedas has prohibited at least three children from wearing Christian cross necklaces in her classroom, claiming on occasion that they are “gang symbols.” They are not gang symbols, but are symbols of personal faith. A picture of one of the crosses, less than an inch tall, is attached. Subsequent to her cross ban, Ms. Riedas singled out at least one of the students for a number of false “misbehavior” allegations. One of our student clients reports that she had just sat down in class, and placed her books on her desk, when Ms. Riedas approached her. Referencing the tiny cross necklace which was around the student’s neck, Ms. Riedas said, “I need you to take your necklace off.”Our client asked “Why?” and Ms. Riedas refused to explain, stating “That’s disrespectful; you have to take it off.”Our client did not want to be disrespectful, so she took it off, but she felt bad because she felt she was being forced to deny her faith. All of our clients are afraid to openly wear their cross necklaces in class any more.
Ms. Riedas has further engaged in impermissible LGBT political activism in the classroom, and has indicated her intent to further do so during instructional time. Ms. Riedas is planning to promote GLSEN’s 2 “Day of Silence” coercive political activities during instructional time in her classroom on Friday, April 21, 2017. In addition to being opposed to student religious expression, we understand that Ms. Riedas is the sponsor for the R.G.S.A Gay-Straight Alliance (“GSA”) at Riverview High School, and that her classroom is permanently decorated with LGBT political themes, including a large display on her wall stating “ALLY,” a “Safe Space” poster and door sticker, and assorted other LGBT promotional material, including buttons prominently displayed on her desk, facing students, stating “I Love My LGBT Students” and “PROUD Public Employee.” These buttons make other students feel marginalized and excluded, and not full members of the classroom community. Moreover, at the beginning of the semester, Ms. Riedas placed LGBT rainbow stickers on students’ classroom folders without their consent, which were there one day when the students arrived. One of our clients reports that after she removed the LGBT sticker, Ms. Riedas’ behavior toward her changed markedly for the worse…
The totality of Ms. Riedas’ behavior is very concerning: banning cross necklaces on the one hand, while promoting wholesale LGBT political activism on the other. By retweeting GLSEN’s“guide” for classroom activism, Ms. Riedas is encouraging other teachers to engage in what she herself appears to be preparing to do on Friday, April 21: classroom activism during instructional time, requiring students who do not agree with “Day of Silence” to participate in various forced activities entirely unrelated to math class, and rewarding students who participate in the political activity she herself favors.
In banning cross necklaces from three different students in her classroom, Ms. Riedas has “intentionally violate[d] or den[ied] a student’s legal rights.” The right to wear a cross necklace is clearly established. There is no question that students have the right to wear religious jewelry, despite any specious claim of “gang affiliation” by Ms. Riedas. Subsequent to her cross ban, Ms. Reidas has subjected at least one of the students “to unnecessary embarrassment or disparagement,”in singling the student out for false allegations of student behavior violations. In her numerous promotions of homosexuality in the classroom, including GLSEN’s “guide” she has indicated an intent to “intentionally . . . distort subject matter” which is beyond the scope of classroom instruction.In the cross ban and subsequent harassment, Ms. Riedas has violated the prohibition on harassment or discrimination “against any student on the basis of …religion . . . political beliefs . . . or social and family background.”The same holds true for any of the activities from GLSEN’s“guide” which she plans to foist upon the students, as well as the final prohibition on “exploit[ing] a relationship with a student for personal gain or advantage,” in that she holds a position of power over students, and is using that to push her own politically activist LGBTbeliefs upon them…
Parents have the fundamental right to determine the jewelry as well as the associations and activities of their minor children. School officials have no business in intentionally interfering with parent-approved religious jewelry, or in promoting their pet political ideologies during instructional time to a captive audience. The Hillsborough County School District is hereby on notice that any further violations of student rights in this fashion will be viewed by Liberty Counsel as sufficient to support a federal lawsuit for civil rights violations…
Reidas’ behavior is grotesque and unacceptable, but it is also becoming more and more common at our nations public schools. There are thousands of good teachers toiling in anonymity, working hard to educate our children and to mold young minds into a creative and intelligent generation. Sadly, those teachers have been overshadowed by the hundreds (upon hundreds) of teachers, who just like Reidas care more about their own agenda’s than they do the true education of our children. We cannot allow it to continue.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Onan Coca
Onan is the Editor-in-Chief at Liberty Alliance media group. He’s also the managing editor at Eaglerising.com, Constitution.com and the managing partner at iPatriot.com. Onan is a graduate of Liberty University (2003) and earned his M.Ed. at Western Governors University in 2012. Onan lives in Atlanta with his wife and their three wonderful children. You can find his writing all over the web.
A permit is required before students can talk about Jesus at North Carolina State University, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court. Grace Christian Life, a registered student group at NC State, filed suit over a policy requiring a permit for any kind of student speech or communication anywhere on campus – including religious speech.
In September 2015, the student group was told that without a permit, they must stop approaching other students inside the student union to engage in religious discussions or invite them to attend group events.
“It’s an amazingly broad speech restriction”,Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Tyson Langhofer told me. “Public universities are supposed to be the marketplace of ideas, not places where students need a permit just to exercise their constitutionally protected freedoms.”
Alliance Defending Freedom is a law firm that specializes in religious liberty cases. They allege the Christian group has been singled out by the university.
“The University has not restricted the ability of other students and student groups to engage in expressive activity,”the lawsuit states. “Grace has witnessed other students, student groups and off-campus groups handing out literature either without a permit or outside of the area reserved by their table permit.”
A university spokesperson did not return my calls seeking comment.
NC State’s rules were so draconian that the Christians were not even allowed to step from behind their table in the student union.
“Colleges are supposed to be places where ideas are freely shared – not gagged,”Grace Christian Life President Hannalee Alrutz told me. “The only permit a student needs to speak on campus is the First Amendment.”
It’s true that the university does regulate student speech – written, oral or graphic.
ADF points to Regulation 07.25.12 that “requires a permit for any form of commercial or non-commercial speech, which the policy broadly defines as ‘any distribution of leaflets, brochures, or other written material, or oral speech to a passersby (sic)…’”
“The policy specifics that any person ‘wishing to conduct any form of solicitation on University premises must have the written permission of the Student Involvement (Office) in advance,”ADF noted.
According to the lawsuit, a university official sent an email to another official concerned about the Christian club.
“There is an individual named Tommy who works for Grace who is essentially soliciting throughout the building,” the email reads. “He walks up to a single person or duo of persons, starts with a hello and then starts the conversation into religion, ending with giving them a card.”
The email goes on to explain how they’ve stopped other groups from engaging in similar behavior in order to “create that inclusive, welcoming environment.”
In other words, the only way to be truly inclusive and welcoming is to shut down the Christians and shove them into a closet.
The lawsuit also provides some context on the university’s attitude towards Christian ministry during the time that Grace came under attack. Grace was a member of Chaplain’s Cooperative Ministry, an independent, interfaith organization that supported individual campus ministries and planned jointly sponsored interfaith programs. In October 2015, a university official met with the CCM to advise the group “on the speech restrictions imposed by the Speech Permit Policy.”
“Solicitation is not allowed when conversation is initiated under one pretense different from the intended purpose…inviting involvement in a certain ministry,”the university official said in written minutes of the meeting.
In November 2015, the university dissolved its relationship with CCM because “the current environment of diversity and faith traditions within the university is not shown or mirrored well within CCM as it currently exists.”
The lawsuit did not elaborate on the problematic “faith traditions” — but typically that means “Evangelical Christians.” ADF tried unsuccessfully to convince NC State to drop its unconstitutional speech policies – but they refused – hence the lawsuit.
“The courts have well established that a public university can’t require permits in this manner for this kind of speech – and certainly can’t enforce such rules selectively,”ADF Senior Counsel David Hacker said. “Unconstitutional censorship is bad enough, but giving university officials complete discretion to decide when and where to engage in silence students makes the violation even worse.”
Kudos to Grace Christian Life for standing up to a bunch of academic bullies who want to silence Christian voices. And thank goodness for bold believers like Miss Alrutz.
“I think this is an attack on my liberty as a citizen of the United States,” she told me – warning that every freedom-loving American should be concerned.
“If they could do it to us – they could do it to anybody,” she said.
Today in America if you dare speak out concerning the evils of homosexuality, same- sex marriage, gender dysphoria and transgenderism you run the very risk of becoming a victim of Gay Jihad. That’s right: Gay Jihad. This particular brand of “holy war” is designed to instill fear and apprehension in all those who oppose the above mentioned abnormalities. The goal is to silence all vocal opposition by way of character assassination, litigation and legislation driven by such groups and organizations as LGBT, the Human Rights Campaign and the Democrat Party. In other words: President Obama–unquestionably–is a key ally of the Gay Jihad movement. His use of the bully pulpit to push for the legalization of same-sex marriage (while at the same time demonizing those who opposed it) was nothing short of stunning. Obama did this knowing full well that it would not only create a backlash against Christians–but also against one of the most cherished and sacrosanct rights in all of Western Civilization–free speech. And just how cherished is this right? Well, it compelled George Washington to state the following: “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” Washington–unlike the childish, thin-skinned misfits of Gay Jihad–understood that all speech must be protected. Yes, even speech which includes expressions and opinions that gays deem “offensive” and “intolerant.” And, yes–that includes Christians bakers who refuse to provide services for a gay wedding, or a Jewish school teacher who is of the opinion that homosexuality is deviant. Again, the First Amendment is not a bulwark to protect gays (and their hyper-sensitive minions) from speech that might damage their fragile feelings. Quite the opposite. It was designed to protect the very speech they disdain and detest. (It’s time for gays to grow-up, get over themselves, stop hiding behind judicial tyranny and grow thicker skin.) In the final analysis–the only way to confront the enemies of free speech–is with more free speech. And that’s why I urge all patriotic Americans to speak out on the issues–regardless of whom it offends. Because–if we don’t–we will suffer the death of free speech. God save the Republic from Gay Jihad (and its ally in the White House).
The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, listed non-negotiable constitutionally guaranteed freedoms in specific order, unchanged since 1791. James Madison, its chief architect, listed freedom of religion first; then speech, press, assembly, petition, right to keep and bear arms, and freedom from forced quartering of military members in one’s home.
Freedom from civil government overreach and interferencewas essential to establishing sustainable civil order and a just rule of law; the first ten amendments — only 468 words — were added to protect what the founders considered “preexisting rights” from federal government “encroachment.”
Freedom of religion was un-mistakenly listed as the first freedom of the Bill of Rights. And the term “religion” was well understood from its original context derived from the State of Virginia’s Bill of Rights. In Article 1, Section 16, Virginia’s Bill of Rights defines “religion” as “the duty which we owe to our Creator… the manner of discharging… [of which] can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.”
(Many significant words and phrases used to write the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution were selected from preexisting documents and individual state constitutions’ declaration of rights, which provided more detailed definitions.)
Virginia’s Bill of Rights legally defined “religion” as a means to secure freedom from government coercion, which enabled a foundational protection for other freedoms. The Bill of Rights, by defining religion, allows people to believe and act by “reason or conviction” without fear of being coerced to violate their “dictates of conscience.”In this way, religion is jurisdictional– the Bill of Rights ensures that the government cannot force a citizen to violate his/her conscience.
James Madison articulated in Memorial and Remonstrance:
“The Religion … of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as they may indicate. This right in its nature is an unalienable right. It is unalienable; because the opinions of men … cannot follow the dictates of other men: It is unalienable also; because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator. … This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.”
Madison believed that citizens were first “subject[s] of the Great Governor of the Universe,”who must first make his/her “allegiance to the Universal Sovereign”before they could consider being a “member of Civil Society.”
He considered religion first and foremost “immune” from any and all civil authorities. The wording used for the First Amendment’s two religion clauses were specifically straightforward: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” All matters of religion were exempted from civil authority.
Madison asserted:
“In matters of Religion, no man’s right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society, and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance.”
As a legal and jurisdictional matter, Madison asserted that all men are first subject to God as an immutable fact based on the Christian worldview (Mark 12:17, Psalm 24:1). It was imperative to specify that no government could ever have authority over one’s relationship with God. Understanding that even governmental authority itself originates from God (Romans 13:1) — moral standards could not be mutually exclusive from rule of law.
Furthermore, freedom of conscience, under the jurisdiction of freedom of religion, established the next four freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. They include freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to peacefully assemble, and freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances. These four freedoms granted constitutional security for “residual sovereignty” of the people, not the government. The Bill of Rights ensured freedom of religion as the foundation for all other liberties. No other amendments were possible if freedom of religion had not first been guaranteed as an unalienable right.
Bethany Blankley is a political analyst for Fox News Radio and has appeared on television and radio programs nationwide. She writes about political, cultural, and religious issues in America. She worked on Capitol Hill for four U.S. Senators and one U.S. Congressman, for a former New York governor, and for several non-profits. She earned her masters degree in theology from The University of Edinburgh, Scotland and her bachelors degree in politics from the University of Maryland. Follow her @bethanyblankley & BethanyBlankley.com.
U.S. Supreme Court (Photo: Jonathan Larsen/Getty Images)
Today is a significant setback for all Americans who believe in the Constitution, the rule of law, democratic self-government, and marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The U.S. Supreme Court got it wrong: It should not have mandated all 50 states to redefine marriage. This is judicial activism: nothing in the Constitution requires the redefinition of marriage, and the court imposed its judgment about a policy matter that should be decided by the American people and their elected representatives. The court got marriage and the Constitution wrong today just like they got abortion and the Constitution wrong 42 years ago with Roe v. Wade. Five unelected judges do not have the power to change the truth about marriage or the truth about the Constitution.
The court summarized its ruling in this way—which highlights that they have redefined marriage, substituting their own opinion for that of the citizens:
The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest.
Manifest to five unelected judges that is. Not to the majority of American citizens who voted to define marriage correctly. As Chief Justice Roberts pointed out in dissent:
If you are among the many Americans—of whatever sexual orientation—who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision. Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.
That’s exactly right. When it comes to the majority opinion, the Constitution “had nothing to do with it.”
We must work to restore the constitutional authority of citizens and their elected officials to make marriage policy that reflects the truth about marriage. We the people must explain what marriage is, why marriage matters, and why redefining marriage is bad for society. For marriage policy to serve the common good it must reflect the truth that marriage unites a man and a woman as husband and wife so that children will have both a mother and a father. Marriage is based on the anthropological truth that men and woman are distinct and complementary, the biological fact that reproduction depends on a man and a woman, and the social reality that children deserve a mother and a father.
The government is not in the marriage business because it’s a sucker for adult romance. No, marriage isn’t just a private affair; marriage is a matter of public policy because marriage is society’s best way to ensure the well-being of children. State recognition of marriage acts as a powerful social norm that encourages men and women to commit to each other so they will take responsibility for any children that follow.
At the federal level, the First Amendment Defense Act is a good place to start. It says that the federal government cannot discriminate against people and institutions that speak and act according to their belief that marriage is a union of one man and one woman. States need similar policies.
Recognizing the truth about marriage is good public policy. Today’s decision is a significant setback to achieving that goal. We must work to reverse it and recommit ourselves to building a strong marriage culture because so much of our future depends upon it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., researches and writes about marriage and religious liberty as the William E. Simon senior research fellow in American Principles and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation. He also focuses on justice and moral principles in economic thought, health care and education, and has expertise in bioethics and natural law theory. He’s the author of the forthcoming book, “The Future of Marriage and Religious Liberty.” Read his research.
The Freedom from Religion Foundation certainly doesn’t mince any words concerning what they’re about. Recently they went on the offensive against a Florida sheriff who was invited to speak at a local Baptist church. Apparently, they wanted him to change out of his uniform first:
[Polk County Sheriff Grady] Judd spoke from the pulpit of First Baptist Church at the Mall in Lakeland two months ago.
“Wouldn’t the world be better if everyone behaved like a Christian?” Judd said as part of his speech.
The Freedom from Religion Foundation sent Judd a letter accusing him of “excluding other religions and making non-believers feel like outsiders in their own community.”
Judd says he was invited to the church and that his message was “clear and uplifting.”
However, the Freedom from Religion Foundation says if the sheriff continues to speak about religion while wearing his uniform, it will consider filing a lawsuit.
So. Here I am again. In the unenviable position of having to explain the First Amendment to people who claim to be experts of the law. Let’s revisit the actual text, shall we?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Great. So far, so good. Let’s look very carefully at this text:
Congress . . .
Okay, let me interrupt you right there. “Congress shall make no law…” Congress. Not the state government. Not county governments. Certainly not sheriffs. Congress. Why is this so hard to understand?
The First Amendment, like the entire Bill of Rights, is about defining and limiting the powers of the national government. It doesn’t refer to any other level of government because, according to the Tenth Amendment, state and local governments, or the people, reserve any powers not exclusively delegated to the national government or prohibited by the Constitution. The First Amendment has nothing to do with local law enforcement. In other words, local authorities are technically permitted to make laws establishing a particular religion, though none of them probably want to.
Furthermore, Grady Judd was not making or enforcing any law by “preaching” at a Baptist church. He was speaking his mind. While in uniform. In a church. Oddly enough, all of those self-expressions are protected by the First Amendment. Yes, the very same First Amendment that the Freedom from Religion Foundation is attempting to use to forbid such self-expressions.
It’s odd how some people can get things so absolutely backwards. But, what do you expect from people who have no religion? In the immortal words of Sheriff Grady Judd, “Wouldn’t the world be better if everyone behaved like a Christian?”
The human rights advocacy group the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) has announced a new billboard campaign to defend freedom of speech and stand up to violent intimidation. AFDI President Pamela Geller said in a statement: “Because the media and the cultural and political elites continue to self-enforce the Sharia without the consent of the American people by refusing to show any depictions of Muhammad or showing what it was in Texas that had jihadists opening fire, we are running a billboard ad featuring the winning cartoon by former Muslim Bosch Fawstin from our Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest in Garland, Texas.”
The new free speech campaign went up on 100 billboards today in St. Louis.
Geller explained: “Drawing Muhammad is not illegal under American law, but only under Islamic law. Violence that arises over the cartoons is solely the responsibility of the Islamic jihadists who perpetrate it. Either America will stand now against attempts to suppress the freedom of speech by violence, or will submit and give the violent the signal that we can be silenced by threats and murder.”
“Speech that is offensive to some must not be curtailed, but protected (i.e., the Mohammed cartoons). Freedom of speech is the foundation of a free society. Without it, a tyrant can wreak havoc unopposed, while his opponents are silenced. If speech that offends a group is outlawed, that group has absolute power, and a free society is destroyed. A group that cannot be criticized cannot be opposed. It can work its will no matter what it is, and no one will be able to say anything to stop it.”
Geller added: “There is nothing about this cartoon that incites violence. It is within the established American tradition of satire. If America surrenders on this point, the freedom of speech is a relic of history.”
AFDI Vice President Robert Spencer stated: “Many people on both the Left and the Right are saying that we should do nothing to provoke Islamic fundamentalism. The immediate answer would seem to be that we should do nothing to provoke violent jihadis, that the prudent thing to do would be to avoid doing things that anger them. But if we did that, they would not they stop coming at us. Last September, an Islamic State spokesman boasted: ‘We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah, the Exalted. This is His promise to us; He is glorified and He does not fail in His promise. If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.’
“In light of that, what is the point of asking whether or not we should provoke them? They’re already provoked. A more useful question now is whether it is really productive and helpful to signal to them that we will acquiesce to their threats of violence and change our behavior accordingly, or whether we will instead signal to them that their violent threats are not going to frighten us into submission.”
The ads have been submitted to run on billboards in the St. Louis area. The next city will be going up tomorrow.
AFDI stands for:
The freedom of speech – as opposed to Islamic prohibitions of “blasphemy” and “slander,” which are used effectively to quash honest discussion of jihad and Islamic supremacism;
The freedom of conscience – as opposed to the Islamic death penalty for apostasy;
The equality of rights of all people before the law – as opposed to Sharia’s institutionalized discrimination against women and non-Muslims.
Following the cowardly policy change for the New York MTA, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, or WMATA, has now suspended all issue-oriented ads through the end of year after we submitted our free-speech ad.
Because freedom of speech is under violent assault, my human-rights advocacy group, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, or AFDI, had announced a new ad campaign to defend freedom of speech and stand up to violent intimidation, kicking off in the nation’s capital.
Because the media and the cultural and political elites continue to self-enforce the Shariah without the consent of the American people by refusing to show any depictions of Muhammad or showing what it was in Texas that had jihadists opening fire, we had intended to run an ad featuring the winning cartoon by former Muslim Bosch Fawstin from our Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest in Garland, Texas.
We wanted to allow the American people to see what the cowardly press is censoring in accordance with the blasphemy laws under the Shariah (Islamic law). We submitted the ad campaign to WMATA to run on buses and train dioramas in the Foggy Bottom, Capitol South, Bethesda, L’Enfant Plaza and Shady Grove stations. But instead of doing what was necessary to protect the public and defending the freedom of speech, WMATA changed its rules, submitting to the assassin’s veto and sending the signal that violent intimidation works.
Oh, the irony.
This is an end run around the First Amendment. This is clearly a 21st-century tactic being used to impose Islamic law, and we cannot submit. The latest development is the media, the cultural and political elites, continue to self-enforce the Shariah without the consent of the American people. They’re doing so by refusing to show any depictions of Muhammad or showing how innocuous the cartoon was in Texas that jihadists opened fire over, trying to slaughter all of us.
These cowards may claim that they are making people safer, but I submit to you the opposite. They are making it far more dangerous for Americans everywhere. Rewarding terror with submission is defeat. Absolute and complete defeat.
More demands, more violence will certainly follow. The message is that terror works.
This is Shariah in America. The only upside is the anti-Semitic groups will not be able to run their blood libels.
Drawing Muhammad is not illegal under American law, but only under Islamic law. Violence that arises over the cartoons is solely the responsibility of the Islamic jihadists who perpetrate it. Either America will stand now against attempts to suppress the freedom of speech by violence, or will submit and give the violent the signal that we can be silenced by threats and murder.
WMATA has already done so, but as a society we cannot submit to the assassin’s veto.
It was the jihadis, not I, who made the cartoons a flashpoint. If we surrender on that point and stop drawing Muhammad, we’ve established a precedent of surrendering to violent Shariah enforcement, and once established, we will be made to reinforce it again and again. Shariah is a unique threat to free speech and liberty.
Freedom of speech is the foundation of a free society. Without it, a tyrant can wreak havoc unopposed, while his opponents are silenced.
Putting up with being offended is essential in a pluralistic society in which people differ on basic truths. If a group will not bear being offended without resorting to violence, that group will rule unopposed while everyone else lives in fear and while other groups curtail their activities to appease the violent group. This results in the violent group being able to tyrannize the others.
There is nothing about this cartoon that incites violence. It is within the established American tradition of satire. AFDI Vice President Robert Spencer stated: “Many people on both the left and the right are saying that we should do nothing to provoke Islamic fundamentalism. The immediate answer would seem to be that we should do nothing to provoke violent jihadis, that the prudent thing to do would be to avoid doing things that anger them. But if we did that, they would not stop coming at us. Last September, an Islamic State spokesman boasted: ‘We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah, the Exalted. This is His promise to us; He is glorified and He does not fail in His promise. If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.’”
Spencer continued, “In light of that, what is the point of asking whether or not we should provoke them? They’re already provoked. A more useful question now is whether it is really productive and helpful to signal to them that we will acquiesce to their threats of violence and change our behavior accordingly, or whether we will instead signal to them that their violent threats are not going to frighten us into submission.”
If America surrenders on this point, the freedom of speech is a relic of history.
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Freedom of expression. It’s not a difficult concept. Basically, every human being has the right to speak his mind without fear of government punishment or penalty. Accepted, reasonable restrictions on speech are generally very loose, like no yelling “fire” in a crowded auditorium and no speech that is genuinely disruptive like standing up and reciting the Communist Manifesto while the teacher is trying to conduct class.
Yet somehow, school officials across this land often seem to forget that the right to freedom of speech, particularly religious speech, does not end at the classroom door. The latest example comes from Somerset Academy near Las Vegas, Nevada, where sixth-grader Mackenzie Fraiser was given an “All About Me” report assignment that was supposed to include an inspirational quote. When Mackenzie wanted to use John 3:16, however, her teacher said that biblical quotations and quotes from the Book of Mormon were forbidden by the school.
The incident might not have even come to light except that some months later, the same teacher made an assignment about self-esteem, and Mackenzie’s parents suggested using a Bible quote, reasoning that the reason Mackenzie has strong self-esteem is that she is made in God’s image. At that point, the sixth-grader spilled the beans about her teacher’s prohibition of things scriptural.
Mackenzie’s father, Tim Fraizer, the pastor of Grace Point Church, fired off an email to his girl’s teacher, certain that there must have been a miscommunication. The reply he received, however, was an email from an assistant principal, Jenyan Martinez, confirming that Mackenzie recalled the incident correctly and that the teacher was, in fact, enforcing school policy. In her response, Martinez suggested that the reason for banning the biblical quote from the original assignment was because, as an oral report, the assignment would give Mackenzie a, quote-unquote, captive audience for her religious beliefs.
Liberty Institute attorney Jeremy Dys told The Blaze, “When students go to school they do not lose their First Amendment rights. It chilled her speech and, as such, what the school is teaching these kids right now is that it is wrong to reference their faith at school. If they don’t apologize for this mistake … then the lesson that these students will take away is that it is wrong to reference their faith in school.”
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that the academy said in a statement that it values students’ rights and the incident was under review.
The Mackenzies are asking for the school to apologize and allow their daughter to submit her original assignment with the quote for a grade, which seems very reasonable. Had the situation been inverted, and an atheist student found herself banned by a Christian academy from using, say, a Richard Dawkins quote, the fireworks would be seen far and wide.
So why is it considered acceptable by so many government officials to impose on Christians’ rights while asserting a position of de facto atheism? The right to freedom of speech should preclude any policy of selective “diversity.”
I’ve always admired people who stick up for their principles even under threat of violence or death. Thomas More, the “Man for All Seasons,” is a hero of mine.
After this week, I’ve got a couple of other heroes on my list. There’s Pamela Geller, who now has a fatwah, a death threat, on her head because she stood up for free speech against the world’s Islamo-fascists. And there’s Bosch Fawstin, the cartoonist who won both the judges prize and the People’s Choice prize at last weekend’s contest in Garland, Texas.
Fawstin is also under threat of death by the backward forces of Islam, simply for drawing an image of Mohammed. It’s interesting that in all the talk about the failed terrorist attack in Garland, few if any news outlets have actually runFawstin’s winning illustration. It’s pretty nifty line art, and I especially like theHitlerian mustache.The image shows Mohammed threatening the artist, saying, “You can’t draw me!” and the artist responding, “That’s why I draw you.”
It’s clever, and I don’t think there’s anything offensive about it, unless you’re a Muslim who’s embarrassed to have his Prophet’s and fellow Muslims’ attitudes summed up in a sentence.
Many of the entries were offensive on various levels, from the naughty-but-funny to the truly cringe-inducing, but I don’t think any of them were necessarily inaccurate. Speaking as a fellow entrant, I think Fawstin’s piece was the right choice. (Mine was more a study for a painting, rather than a cartoon, but I thought it was important to represent for the First Amendment. I would post a link to all the contest entries, but the page seems to have been removed from Photobucket.)
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart, Fawstin explained that he was raised as a Muslim in the Bronx but left the religion. When 9/11 occurred, he researched his former faith extensively and decided that he had to use his artistic talents to stand up against jihad. From the Breitbart interview:
“I did receive some flack for leaving Islam, but I didn’t feel like I left anything important behind. I wanted to get the hell out. Islam had no hold on me whatsoever. It wasn’t a heartbreak, I just left.
“Right after I left Islam, 9/11 happened. I revisited everything. I reread the Koran. I read countless books on jihad, Islam, and Muhammad. I knew as a cartoonist, as an artist, I had a tool to respond to the atrocities. I made sure I knew Islam very well before making any move.
“I became a follower of Ayn Rand’s philosophy and remain so to this day. Ironically, I went from the most misogynistic philosophy on earth, to that created by a woman. Without her work, I don’t know where the hell I’d be today.”
Fawstin’s discussion about growing up in a Muslim household underscores some of the things we’ve discussed about Islam here at Godfather Politics, including the sympathy for Nazism and the Left’s myth of the “moderate Muslim.”
“Almost all of the women in my generation were beaten by their husbands. There was strong admiration for Hitler in the household, because he killed more Jews than anyone. That’s why I refer to Hitler as Islam’s favorite infidel. They forgive him because he killed more Jews than anyone. we were ‘moderate Muslims,’ but there was still hardcore misogyny and Jew-hatred in my community.”
As might be expected from that champion of liberals-only speech, Facebook, Fawstin’s Facebook page has been removed, and Fawstin has been requesting that people share his winning cartoon with friends and associates.
The Left is abominable when it comes to protecting the free speech rights of anyone who is not in their PC club. Not only that, but Homeland Security has not even bothered contacting Geller about the Islamic death threat made against her on social media. (For that matter, I don’t think the threat has been taken down as of yet.)
But the Left — and I’m including here the RINO crowd and “moderate” Right — doesn’t get it. If we conservatives lose free speech to Islamic terror, it undercuts all our rights.
While the Left may be fine with that, the rest of us who know the cost must stand up with Geller and Fawstin for free speech against the forces of jihad and totalitarianism.
“The mere fact they argue Ms. Geller should have known better means they know that Islam is not in fact a religion of peace”
– Bryan Fischer
Let me stipulate up front that drawing caricatures of Muhammad as a form of social commentary is not my style. It’s not something I would do. And it’s not something the American Family Association would be a part of.
That being said, the reaction to Pamela Geller’s “Draw Muhammad” event in Garland, Texas is worrisome and is lurching the U.S. in the direction of becoming an abject, fearful Shariah-compliant nation rather than a proud, bold Christian one. The issue is simple. Regardless of whether we would enter a contest like the one Ms. Geller sponsored, or even approve of it, the question is this: should somebody be murdered in cold blood for publishing a political cartoon?
The First Amendment prohibits the federal government and all of its branches from interfering with “the freedom of speech.” By this plank, the Founders intended to protect robust political speech.
We as a nation had just emerged from an era in which the Crown sought to suppress and punish any political commentary it didn’t like, and the Founders made a point of ensuring that kind of oppression would not be acceptable in America.
(By the way, the Founders were protecting political speech. They were not protecting pornography, obscenity, vulgarity or even profanity. They would be scandalized at the way in which the First Amendment has been perverted to protect things that would have horrified them.)
The Texas state constitution is equally clear: Every person shall be at liberty to speak, write or publish his opinions on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of that privilege; and no law shall ever be passed curtailing the liberty of speech or of the press.
This means that, in America, we must all be prepared to listen to political speech that agitates us and offends us. Trust me, this happens to conservatives every day when we read the New York Times and other members of the low-information media.
Constitutional provisions regarding free speech mean public debate over the nature of Islam is fully protected. The government must protect freedom of robust political debate, and is prohibited from restricting it in any way. The merits of Islam, the truth about Islam, the truth about Muhammad, the question of Muslim immigration, etc. are all proper topics for public discussion. Such debate includes, as it has since the dawn of the Republic, political cartoons, which were often used to make salient points on a matter of public concern.
Many voices, on both the left and the right, have condemned Pamela Geller in this circumstance rather than the Muslim shooters. She has been blamed for getting shot at by figures on the right such as Donald Trump and Bill O’Reilly. She has been faulted for going ahead with her event knowing it could possibly trigger Islamic violence.
Such critics do not realize, by the way, what they are saying about the religion of Islam. The mere fact they argue Ms. Geller should have known better means they know that Islam is not in fact a religion of peace no matter how hard they try to convince themselves (and us) otherwise.
Worse, arguing that no criticism of the prophet should be allowed in America because it might incite violence would in a functional sense place our entire nation under the rule of Shariah law. Christ, the Prophet of Christianity, could freely be criticized, lampooned and cartoon-ized but not Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. America would be turned upside down.
As James Taranto observed in the Wall Street Journal, “In the case at hand, it would effectively make Shariah’s prohibition on images of Muhammad the law of the land. The terrorists really would have won.”
That’s not the America the Founders bequeathed to us. And it’s not the America we should accept today.
“The freedom of worship” has become another mindless and meaningless mantra of the Left. By this, they mean to banish faith to our hearts, homes and houses of worship. Aside from the glaring flaws associated with such a limited understanding of our First Amendment religious protections, a recent incident has revealed that even this dangerously narrow view is under assault.
Michael Beck, City Manager in Pasadena, California, announced Thursday that Public Health Director Dr. Eric Walshhad been placed indefinitely on paid administrative leavefollowing the discovery of online videos of sermons that Walsh had preached, whichwere consideredto be critical of homosexuality, Islam and evolution.
An associate pastor at a local Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Altadena, Dr. Eric Walsh became Pasadena’s Public Health Director in 2010. The City Manager has stated that the city officials need time to assess the impact of these newly disclosed statements:
Dr. Eric Walsh has been placed on temporary paid administrative leave to provide the city of Pasadena the opportunity to complete an inquiry into statements made by him in his private capacity and to assess the impact those statements might have on his ability to effectively lead the city’s Public Health Department. The Public Health Department remains a strong and vital part of the city of Pasadena organization and remains dedicated to protecting the health and wellness of our entire community.Also at issue is the fact that politicians and other public servants are not required to adhere to a religious test as a requirement for holding office. Article VI, Paragraph 3 of the U.S. Constitution states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States,” and the Supreme Court has held that many such provisions also apply to the states. However, the secular Left and the homofascist movement have currently become the greatest risk to liberty in this country. And if a person can be punished for what they say or preach in church, then what about the Left’s so-called “freedom of worship?”Evidently, even this erroneously restrictive understanding of the First Amendment is no longer safe from the attacks of the extreme Left. So, it will be quite interesting to see how this situation ultimately plays out.
In one sermon, Walsh preached on the subject of moral relativism, calling it a “doctrine from the pit of hell” which has led to society’s approval of homosexuality. In addition to his views on homosexuality, Walsh also referred to the theory of evolution a “satanic religion” and the prophet Muhammad as a “satanist.”
”Watch Dr. Eric Walsh’s sermon Culture, Sex and the Fight for Purity:
Members of the Pasadena community were shocked by the discovery of these sermons. Dr. Walsh previously spoke at the All Saints Church, where Pasadena’s first sodomy-based “marriage” occurred, and at the 2012 Pasadena Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast. On both of those occasions, Walsh praised Pasadena’s multicultural community, which some consider to be in direct conflict with the content of his sermons. However, it could also be argued that people were so surprised by this recent revelation because Dr. Walsh has been able to successfully separate his religious beliefs from his responsibilities as public health director. In other words, his pastoral duties have had no noticeable, negative impact on the execution of his public office, and Dr. Walsh should not be punished for the expression of his faith within the confines of his church.The reactions from the homosexual community have been mixed. There are those who would like to see Walsh punished. AIDS Healthcare Foundation President Michael Weinstein has said that Dr. Walsh’s statements are cause to exclude him from public office.“Public health is an extremely sensitive matter,” Weinstein explained, “and it really relies on the trust of the population served and because Pasadena is particularly impacted by diseases that affect the LGBT community. I think he’s not qualified to be public health director with those views.”However, Aaron Saenz, President of San Gabriel Valley Pride, disagrees. Saenz has stated that although he disagree with the views of Dr. Walsh, he has not seen any evidence that it has negatively affected his job performance.Saenz said, “I feel from the research I know I don’t think it affected his work. I think those are just his personal views however he chose to share them and that’s on him.”Other City Council members have openly defended Walsh, citing his help in setting up the Michael Antonovich Dental Clinic for HIV positive patients. Councilman Terry Tornek has expressed his feelings regarding the situation, “I’m distraught, is the truth. I think very highly of Dr. Walsh. I think he has been doing as near as I can tell a terrific job. Nothing has changed in terms of my personal observation or my assessment of Dr. Walsh’s performance, and I think the Health Department has been headed in the right direction, and we are proud of it and he has worked wonders.”The decision to suspend Walsh came only days after he voluntarily withdrew himself as the commencement speaker for Pasadena City College.
Let’s hope that political correctness doesn’t destroy yet another good man.
An American evangelist said he was arrested and interrogated about his Christian faith after he was caught on a London sidewalk preaching that homosexuality is a sin.
Tony Miano, a retired deputy sheriff and former chaplain with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept., was charged with “using homophobic speech that could cause people anxiety, distress, alarm or insult.”
Miano had been preaching on a London street corner during the Wimbledon Tennis Championships with a ministry group called Sports Fan Outreach International.
British police prepare to arrest American Evangelist Tony Miano.
He was preaching about immoral living – and cited homosexuality as an example of lifestyle choices that are contrary to biblical teaching.
“I never used any gay slurs,” he said. “You would never hear me using slang or discriminatory language against homosexuals or any other group. That would be contrary to my faith.”
At some point, the evangelist quoted I Thessalonians 4:1-2 – a passage of scripture that mentions sexual immorality.
“I talked about women addicted to romance novels, men addicted to pornography, people with lustful thoughts, heterosexual fornication and homosexuality,” Miano told Fox News. “When I mentioned that the Bible was clear that homosexuality is a sin, a lady walked by and she glared at me and hurled the f-bomb.”
Miano said the woman came back a short time later and began to videotape his sidewalk sermon. Then, she called the police.
“They were concerned about homophobic speech,” he said. “But I told them I don’t fear homosexuals. The language I used was not homophobic, as I was not promoting fear or hatred of homosexuals.”
Miano said he did not limit his remarks to homosexual acts.
“I did not speak solely about homosexuality as a form of sexual immorality but also about any kind of sex outside marriage between one man and one woman, as well as lustful thoughts,” he said. “All of these are considered mainstream Christian positions and have been taught and believed by Christians for thousands of years.”
Police took the retired deputy sheriff to a nearby jail where he was fingerprinted. Officers also took a sample of his DNA and then he was interrogated.
“It was very distressing to be arrested and interrogated for openly expressing my deeply held Christian beliefs,” he said.
According to a transcript of the interrogation provided to Fox News, the officers asked if he really believed homosexuality is a sin. He was also asked whether he would help a homosexual who requested a favor.
“I was made to feel that my thoughts could be held against me,” he said. “The detective also asked me if I thought I was 100 percent right in what I had done. I said yes.”
Miano said he would gladly offer assistance to a homosexual.
“The Christian faith is dictated by the two greatest commandments – to love the Lord your God and to love your neighbor,” he said. “As such, I am compelled to love all people. Had a gay come up and asked me for something to eat, I would have fed him.”
But what troubled Miano is the idea that a hypothetical situation could have been used against him in court.
“I was actually going to be tried for how I thought,” he said.
In an ironic twist, the officers made arrangements to provide the evangelist with a Bible to read in jail – the same book that led to his arrest.
“The same book I read from in public which resulted in my arrest, was now the same book the police were giving to provide me comfort,” he said.
Miano, who is a member of the Evangelical Free Church, has been open-air preaching for eight years. He said this is the first time he’s been arrested.
“It was a rather surreal experience,” the retired deputy sheriff said. “I’ve conducted many interrogations but I’ve never been the subject of one.”
Miano spent about seven hours in jail before he was released without explanation and without an apology.
Now back home in Southern California, Miano said he fears that what happened in Great Britain could soon happen in the United States.
“I believe that’s what our government is going to eventually do here,” he said. “I believe homosexuals or others who are sensitive to their point of view will be visiting churches to listen to what preachers say from the pulpit. And I believe that pastors will be arrested in their pulpits for teaching what the Bible says about homosexuality and other sins.”
Andrea Williams, the chief executive of the British Christian Legal Centre echoed those concerns.
“It’s clear that there is already a clamp down on freedom of speech where people publicly express mainstream Christian views on sexual ethics,” he said.
The unidentified soldier was investigated, reprimanded, threatened with judicial action and given a bad efficiency report, according to the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty.
“They say he is no longer a team player and was not performing up to standards,” Chaplain Alliance Executive Director Ron Crews told Fox News. “This is just one little example of a case of a soldier just wanting to express his views and now he’s been jumped on by the military.”
The soldier’s story was included in a letter to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights documenting concerns about attacks on religious liberty within the Armed Services.
The Pentagon did not return calls seeking comment.
Last summer the soldier had received his promotion to master sergeant. The promotion coincided with a national controversy surrounding Chick-fil-A’s support of traditional marriage. Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy told a newspaper that he was “guilty as charged” when it came to supporting the biblical definition of marriage. Gay rights advocates were infuriated and some Democratic leaders – most notably the mayor of Boston – attempted to stop the popular restaurant chain from opening restaurants in their cities.
Crews said the soldier decided to hold a party to celebrate his new position. The invitations read, “In honor of my promotion and in honor of the Defense of Marriage Act, I’m serving Chick-fil-A sandwiches at my promotion party.”
After the party, the solider received a letter of reprimand. Crews said at issue was the combination of the sandwiches and the soldier’s support of DOMA (which happens to be the law of the land).
“There was initially some talk of bringing judicial punishment against him,” Crews said. “He had a letter put in his file and an investigation was initiated to see if he had violated any policy.”
The solider reached out to the Chaplain Alliance for help and they put him in touch with an attorney. Crews said nearly one year later – the soldier is still embroiled in a legal battle.
“He was at the pinnacle of his career,” Crews said. “To make that rank means you’ve done very well throughout your career. He wants to finish serving his time honorably.”
Crews said stories like this are becoming commonplace in the military post-repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
“These stories are the ones that have not been told – about some of the more subtle ramifications of the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy,” he said.
One service member received a severe reprimand for expressing his faith’s religious position about homosexuality in a personal religious blog.
A chaplain was relieved of his command over a military chapel because he could not allow same-sex weddings to take place in the chapel.
And a chaplain who asked senior military officers whether religious liberty would be protected in the wake of the repeal of the law against open homosexual behavior in the military was told to “get in line” or resign.
Crews said they are sharing these stories to let other service members know there is a place to get help. He said Chaplain Alliancepublishes a religious liberty palm card – explaining constitutionally protected liberties to service members.
“If you believe your religious liberties have been violated, here’s what you can do,” he said. “We will see that you get the help that you need.”
As for the soldier who served the Chick-fil-A sandwiches?
“We’re going to stand with this soldier who did nothing wrong,” “There is nothing wrong in saying he wants to celebrate DOMA – which happens to be federal law.
US Attorney Bill Killian: Posting Something Mean About Muslims on Social Media Might Be a Criminal Action Under Federal Civil Rights Laws
The First Amendment served us well for a time, but now it’s outdated.
Remember reading that England had arrested a guy for anti-Muslim Twitter postings in the aftermath of the Woolrich slaughter? And remember thinking, “Well, this is America, that can’t happen here”? Oh yes it can. Obama’s Attorney for the Eastern district of Tennessee wants you to know that if you say something untoward about Muslims, the Federal government may imprison you.
Killian and Moore will provide input on how civil rights can be violated by those who post inflammatory documents targeted at Muslims on social media. “This is an educational effort with civil rights laws as they play into freedom of religion and exercising freedom of religion,” Killian told The News Monday. “This is also to inform the public what federal laws are in effect and what the consequences are.” … Killian said Internet postings that violate civil rights are subject to federal jurisdiction.
The posting he offers as a “for instance” is an egregious one. And yet this country has long protected, absolutely, egregious speech, such as hardcore pornography, for a simple reason: Either you are at liberty to say what you will or you are not. If you are constantly double-thinking every word you might say, for fear of being prosecuted, you are self-censoring, in anticipation of a possible prosecution by the government.
Rather than having a system in which people were constantly worried about imprisonment for speech, our country has evolved a simple bright-line code: Speech of all kinds, with a few exceptions that can be counted on three fingers, is absolutely protected.
Remember, the importance of this bright-line, no-exceptions rule of free speech was preached to us, even when some of us might not have liked it so much, as when hardcore pornography was afforded absolute protection under the First Amendment. In the case of hardcore pornography, it was argued — successfully — that having each artist weigh the possibility of an obscenity prosecution was too much of a burden on his free speech rights, and would have, unavoidably, a chilling effect on speech.
That was the rule then, and that was the rationale.
But now comes the Obama Administration to tell you that Yes, you just might be imprisoned for something you say online, so you’d better Watch What You Say.
Remember when Ari Fleischer said that, without suggesting any kind of legal penalties? Remember how the media freaked out?
But now comes the US Attorney for the Eastern district of Tennessee explicitly telling you that you may be imprisoned if a political appointee decides your political speech has crossed a line.
Somehow, I don’t think Tim Robbins will be portentously howling us that a “chill wind” is blowing across our rights of free expression this week.
Awhile back “progressive” Bill Maher released an anti-Christian and mocking “documentary” entitled “Religious.” Did Maher ever fear for his life? Did anyone tell him he shouldn’t be “held accountable for producing such a film because of the possibility of violent blowback?Yesterday, we learned that Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other diplomats were killed when a violent Muslim mob raided the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi and burned it down. They were enraged, we are told, by some horrible YouTube video made by an Israeli-American that lampooned “the prophet” Muhammad.
Shouldn’t people who knowingly incite violence against the United States – as a crude, thinly-veiled publicity stunt – also be held accountable? I can’t think of a time when the reckless actions of a few private citizens have cost us so much – in American lives, tax dollars and credibility around the world. Just because we have the freedom to say what we want doesn’t mean saying whatever we want is just or prudent.
No, it wasn’t prudent. But censorship is illegal in the United States. It is a fundamental law of the land. People have the right to speak, write, and publish opinions even when it is imprudent to do so.
There is no question that this editorial is calling for government censorship when it speaks of being “held accountable.” Despite saying that, “Americans rightly pride ourselves for our freedom of speech,” Stockman holds up Europe as an example of holding people accountable:
It is worth noting that a movie similarly insulting the Jewish faith would likely be considered illegal hate speech in much of Europe, which has seen the kind of death and destruction that hate speech can unleash. Even in the United States, speech deliberately inciting violence against a religion or ethnic group can be considered a crime.
Notice how perverse Stockman’s reasoning really is: Her argument that the violence and blowback were “foreseeable” is due to the fact that Muslims tend to be much more violent and intolerant of unbelievers than do Evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and other Christians. Notice the word, “tend,” here. I know there are tolerant Muslims and intolerant Christians. But I think my generalization is obviously true based on Stockman’s own claims, and on the fact that we are talking about a murderous, rioting mob of Muslims. When was the last time a mob of angry Christians killed someone?
So we are supposed to reward Muslims for their behavior by keeping quiet and by holding anyone who speaks up “accountable.”
I am not condoning the offensive video (I haven’t seen it to have an opinion good or bad), but I’ve been tolerating Bill Maher for years and plan to keep doing it. I would appreciate it if Maher’s progressive fellow travelers would stop trying to punish my tolerance by opposing the First Amendment. Punishing free speech for the sake of preventing violence is nothing more than ending free speech for the sake of appeasement. Find another way to deal with the problem.
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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