“Public employees have robust protections against being fired for such speech, unless it proves exceptionally unpopular.
This feature of First Amendment jurisprudence, and the bad incentives it creates for cancel culture campaigns, is on full display following the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk last week…
In a country where some 22 million civilians are employed by the government, the pool of people who’ve made nasty comments about Kirk naturally includes some public sector workers…
At first blush, this would suggest that even government employees who explicitly praised Kirk’s assassination have First Amendment protections against being fired for that speech, however distasteful.
Whether or not they can, in fact, be fired turns on how much their comments disrupt government operations.
Consequently, the more outrage that can be directed at a particular public worker’s employer, and the more of a headache retaining that worker becomes as a result, the less the First Amendment will protect them from losing their job.
That creates a powerful, toxic incentive to gin up anger at individual government workers as a means of erasing First Amendment protections they have for off-the-job speech…
Kirk was undoubtedly a polarizing figure. The strong feelings, both negative and positive, that he elicited in people are one reason his murder has become such a huge public conversation.
It’s inevitable in that context that some people will say intemperate, mean-spirited things about the man.
It’s foolish to trust online snitch-taggers to be judicious in determining who they’re going to try to get fired, particularly when the more outrage they can generate serves to route around First Amendment protections for government workers’ speech.”
Long term bond yields rose after the Fed cut. This is the bond market signaling to the Fed that the interest rate cut was not needed and that they have less confidence that the U.S. will remain solvent in the long term. We should watch and see if this signal maintains over the weeks to come.
“Whether he is waging the drug war, imposing tariffs, deporting alleged gang members, or fighting crime, the president thinks he can do “anything I want to do.””
“rather than straightforwardly listing the facts of the case, the complaint spends dozens of pages histrionically detailing how great Trump is and how terrible The New York Times is. It reads less like a formal legal document than one of Trump’s social media posts, calling the Times a “full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party” engaging in “wrong and partisan criticism.”
“This lawsuit has no merit,” the Times said in a statement. “It lacks any legitimate legal claims and instead is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting.”
In its very first statements of fact, the lawsuit brags that Trump “won the 2024 Presidential Election over Vice President Kamala Harris in historic fashion, emerging victorious in both the Electoral College and the popular vote, and securing a resounding mandate from the American people,” which it calls “the greatest personal and political achievement in American history.” It even includes a screenshot of the election results. (During his first term, Trump often passed out copies of the 2016 election map to visitors.)”
This guy obviously has serious personality issues; personality issues that don’t make a good president!
“Hungary was once wealthier than Poland—it had a per capita GDP of $21,400 in 1990, when it also emerged from under the thumb of the Soviet Union—but it now lags considerably and seems to be falling farther behind. A share of the blame goes to Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, who embarked on an economic and ideological project during the 2010s that caught the attention of conservatives and nationalists across the globe, particularly in the United States. Along with a crackdown on immigration, Orbán is a ferocious economic interventionist. In 2021, for example, he responded with aggressive price controls on food, fuel, and other essentials to combat inflation.
That shift toward statism brought predictable shortages and, as Balcerowicz warned, stagnation. Hungary’s economy sank into a recession after posting negative growth in the last two quarters of 2024.
Hungary’s brash strongman is skilled at drawing attention to himself. But Poland’s stability and growth ought to show the way forward—not just for central Europe, but for any place that throws off the shackles of authoritarian ideology and the central planning that comes with it.”
“The constitution doesn’t guarantee Kimmel a talk show, but it does guarantee that the government won’t quash his speech because of what he chooses to say.
…
The basic facts of Kimmel’s suspension are straightforward. The late-night host has been accused of mischaracterizing the motives of the alleged assassin of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, suggesting he may have hailed from the political right. On Wednesday, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, appeared on Benny Johnson’s podcast and described Kimmel’s remarks as part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people.” The FCC, he said, has “remedies that we can look at.” He added: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way …. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
After Carr’s threat, Nexstar, an owner of many ABC affiliate stations, said that it wouldn’t run Kimmel’s program “for the foreseeable future” because of his Kirk comments. (Notably, Nexstar is planning to acquire a rival company, Tegna, in a $6.2 billion deal that will require FCC approval.)
Mere hours later, ABC had removed Kimmel from the air.
When the Supreme Court dismissed the Covid-social media suit against the Biden administration, it held that the plaintiffs lacked a legal right to sue — called standing — because they could not link anything the federal government did to the suppression of their speech. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett put it, the flaw in the case was a “lack of specific causation findings with respect to any discrete instance of content moderation.”
Here, by contrast, the evidence of “specific causation” is plain to see: Carr threatens ABC unless it sanctions Kimmel. ABC does as Carr asks. The FCC, to be sure, does not have authority to police the alleged truth of statements made on television. But that doesn’t mean that the agency can’t use its investigative powers to raise costs for targeted media outlets and it can clearly exert its influence on any potential acquisitions. And for all his recent talk about supporting free speech, this isn’t Carr’s first pressure campaign against a perceived antagonist of President Donald Trump. In July, he issued threats against Comcast, demanding more favorable coverage of Republicans from its NBC affiliates.
The Trump administration also has a clear model when it comes to leaning on media firms to silence speech it dislikes: The president’s executive orders punishing law firms for their association with disfavored clients and advocacy of out-of-season causes likewise deployed regulatory tools to try to achieve plainly impermissible censorship. Like Carr’s action this week, those executive orders in part worked through the economic pressure firms experienced, even as their First Amendment rights were being violated.
Although the Supreme Court did not ultimately decide the merits in the social media case, no justice doubted the clear-as-day First Amendment principle that, as Alito explained, “government officials may not coerce private entities to suppress speech.” Indeed, less than a month beforehand, the unanimous court held in a different case that the First Amendment “prohibits government officials from relying on the ‘threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion . . . to achieve the suppression’ of disfavored speech.”
In a separate opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch explained what a plaintiff needed to show to get into court: Could the government’s conduct, when “viewed in context,” be “reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action in order to punish or suppress the plaintiff ’s speech?”
This principle is both simple and sound: The government can’t do indirectly, through shadowy threats and mafia-like intimidation, what it is barred from doing directly. Indeed, this is a principle that even Trump apparently believes in: In July 2021, he filed civil actions against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube alleging that unconstitutional government jaw-boning of those firms led to the take-down and shadow banning of his and others’ speech.
Kimmel may have contractual remedies against ABC. But he also has a powerful constitutional claim for prospective relief and damages against the federal government much like the one that Trump sought to vindicate in 2021. A principled consistency would require those who objected to the Biden administration’s engagement with social media firms to support Kimmel. (To be clear, I am not holding my breath.)”
“Inflation, as measured by the Fed’s preferred price index, remained at 2.6 percent in July, the most recent month in which data are available. The Fed’s target is 2 percent. Moreover, in August, the consumer price index, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses to measure inflation, increased by 0.4 percent—the greatest monthly increase in inflation since January…
The FOMC acknowledged in its own announcement that “inflation has moved up and remains somewhat elevated” while the unemployment rate “remains low.” Increasing the fed funds rate is one of the Fed’s primary tools to combat inflationary pressures; lowering it is the opposite of what the Fed should do if it’s seriously concerned about inflation. Apparently, it’s not.”
“The RICO Act allows prosecutors to define more or less anything they want as a mafia organization, and the charges are nearly impossible to defend against, partly because the government can seize the defendant’s assets before trial, making it impossible to pay a defense lawyer.”