#free-speech

#free-speech

Everyone's a critic, and that should be fine. Unless you happen to have said something about Taylor Swift. It might seem obvious, but it's OK not to like things. It's fine not to like a presidential candidate or the last Mission Impossible movie (bit slow to kick off, I felt). What is not OK is the way people nowadays reach for their digital pitchforks and torches if you don't like what they like.

I spent more than 20 years leading U.S. government-sponsored justice projects in countries with weak to nonexistent democracies, including Albania, Mongolia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Republic of Georgia, and Armenia. Those of us who have worked in nations like these don't have to imagine what it looks like when a place's leaders demonstrate no regard for the rule of law. What we've seen overseas looks a lot like what we've started to watch unfold in this country over the course of the past 10 months.

This is not what America's about. We have a president that is proclaiming executive orders trying to erase trans people from existence, and you say that the American flag includes everyone. For over 100 years, the American flag stood for slavery, and we had a war to fix that. For 90 years after that, it stood for segregation, and people took to the streets to get rid of that.

On Wednesday, Larry Bushart was released from Perry County Jail, where he had spent weeks unable to make bail, which a judge set at $2 million. Prosecutors have not explained why the charges against him were dropped, according to The Intercept, which has been tracking the case closely. However, officials faced mounting pressure following media coverage and a social media campaign called "Free Larry Bushart," which stoked widespread concern over suspected police censorship of a US citizen over his political views.

On October 29, Larry Bushart was released from Perry County Jail, where he had spent weeks unable to make bail, which a judge set at $2 million. Prosecutors have not explained why the charges against him were dropped, according to The Intercept, which has been tracking the case closely. However, officials faced mounting pressure following media coverage and a social media campaign called "Free Larry Bushart," which stoked widespread concern over suspected police censorship of a US citizen over his political views.

That being said, I want to be clear. The victims of this Administration are not the comedians. We are a visible manifestation of certain things, but the victims are the victims-they're the people who are struggling to have any voice and are being forcibly removed from streets by hooded agents. Those are the victims of this Administration. I'm not sure Hitler cared about satirists, but I think this guy does. I don't think he likes being made fun of.

Christians can critique the State of Israel without being anti-Semitic, and of course, anti-Semitism should be condemned, said Roberts in a video after the Heritage Foundation received calls from some social media users to cut ties with Carlson: My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always. When it serves the interests of the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should do so with partnerships on security, intelligence, and technology.

Wolff, who has penned four best-selling books about President Trump, accuses Melania Trump of launching a campaign of threats to intimidate him from digging deeper into the first couple's friendship with Epstein, according to legal papers obtained by The News. These threatened legal actions are designed to create a climate of fear in the nation so that people cannot freely or confidently exercise their First Amendment rights, Wolff's 17-page claim reads. The threats are also intended to shut down legitimate inquiry into the Epstein matter.

Harrison Grant Randall, 40, was charged in March with six felony counts of defacing property. He was accused of tagging the Teslas with stickers of Elon Musk, the automaker's billionaire CEO who worked closely with President Donald Trump earlier this year. He was arrested by Brookline police after several Tesla drivers reported acts of vandalism, including one driver who sent in a video of them confronting Randall.

This is more than a legal win, it's a cultural stand. Public schools cannot bully employees into silence because they dare to express their faith or conservative values.

Over the weekend, thousands of people across the country participated in "No Kings" rallies, protesting what they perceive to be President Donald Trump's abuse of executive power. That included many Towson University students, who had originally planned to hold the protest on the Maryland campus. But when university administrators began asking for the names and addresses of speakers, organizers moved the rally off campus to avoid "[putting] them in harm's way," one organizer told the Banner.

Maryland will not be able to enforce part of a 2021 law that allowed it to obscure the costs of a digital ad tax from consumers who were paying it. The order - which will not be appealed by the state - strikes down one portion of the first-of-its-kind tax on digital advertising within the state. That provision prohibited online companies from alerting consumers to the tax, by passing it on to them as a surcharge, fee or line item on their bills.

So many thoughts ... For obvious reasons, I've been reflecting a lot lately on my old constitutional law coursework. As long as the Supreme Court holds that money is speech-and the Supreme Court retains enough legitimacy to be taken seriously-I foresee major free speech issues around restricting advertising. If I were a betting man, I'd bet that the court's legitimacy will have a shorter shelf life than its view on the "marketplace of ideas," given how aggressively it's shedding any pretense of respect for precedent.

A reasonable listener would conclude that rapper Kendrick Lamar was "rapping hyperbolic vituperations" when he called rapper and singer Drake a "certified pedophile" in his 2024 song "Not Like Us," a federal judge said last week in an order tossing Drake's defamation lawsuit over the statement. In an Oct. 9 order, U.S. District Judge Jeannette A. Vargas of the Southern District of New York called Lamar's lyrics "nonactionable opinion," written amid "a heated rap battle, with incendiary language and offensive accusations hurled by both participants."

In a joint statement between the AI company and the King Estate, the parties wrote that they "have worked together to address how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s likeness is represented in Sora generations. Some users generated disrespectful depictions of Dr. King's image. So at King, Inc.'s request, OpenAI has paused generations depicting Dr. King as it strengthens guardrails for historical figures."

In a press release published in September after filing the lawsuit, FIRE's attorneys blasted the Campus Protection Act as a shocking prohibition of protected speech at public universities, that granted unconstitutionally broad powers to Texas universities, giving them the power to discipline students at nighttime for wearing a hat with a political message, playing music, writing an op-ed, attending candlelight vigils even just chatting with friends.

Call [Kamoustsas] and tell him to go to hell and take DeSantis who appointed him on the trip,

The Trump administration has revoked the visas of six foreigners deemed by U.S. officials to have made derisive comments or made light of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last month. The State Department said Tuesday it had determined they should lose their visas after reviewing their online social media posts and clips about Kirk, who was killed while speaking at a Utah college campus on Sept. 10.

The ceasefire between Hamas and Israel has been met with joy and relief across the Middle East and beyond. Over the past two years, outrage at Israel's war in Gaza has erupted across Europe and the US, manifesting itself in university campus protests, massive marches through countless capitals and the disruption of major sporting events. Even as hopes rise of an end to the war, international anger over Israel's actions in Gaza, which have been deemed a genocide by a UN commission of inquiry, remains raw, as evidenced by last weekend's huge rallies in Spain and Italy.

What is anti-Americanism? What are those "ideologies or activities," exactly? And without any meaningful guidance, how is anyone on either side of the immigration process supposed to identify it? Maybe the imprecision is the point. Three weeks on, practitioners tell The Verge that it is almost impossible to figure out how to advise clients on this standard or properly prepare for it.

I am no stranger to cancel culture. I was cancelled after 9/11 simply for being Middle Eastern, as Arab terrorists were behind the attacks on the twin towers. This is despite the fact that I am not Arab, nor am I, contrary to popular opinion, a terrorist. In certain circles there have been calls to boycott my UK tour Namaste, a show in which I try to explore the nuances of the complex geopolitical landscape of the Middle East.

We can still stand for truth, while viewing those who believe in falsehoods not as our enemies who must be vanquished, but instead as our fellow citizens who have lost their way and must be shown the light,

In 2018, Bari Weiss, then an opinion columnist at the Times, wrote about the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, a loose "alliance of heretics" who were "making an end run around the mainstream conversation." Adherents were photographed for the article in literally dark settings: glowering out from under an umbrella, perched amid mossy branches, standing half-obscured by bushes. Though they came from different ideological backgrounds, Weiss wrote, these figures-including Eric Weinstein, the managing director of Peter Thiel's venture-capital fund, who had "half-jokingly" coined the movement's name;