“these materials, although controversial in their advocacy for insurrection, squatting, and anarchy, are all squarely constitutionally protected speech. The government cannot infringe upon one’s First Amendment right to read, possess, or write—unless the author is inciting imminent lawless action—anti-government or pro-revolution literature. And while some may see the ideas in Sanchez’s box as dangerous, anti-government zines and pamphlets are far more similar to the Revolutionary-era literature popular when the First Amendment was passed than today’s social media landscape, as Seth Stern of The Intercept points out.
However, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in September designating “antifa” as a “major terrorist organization, prosecutors, like the ones in Sanchez’s case, are attempting to use materials that “explicitly [call] for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law” as evidence of criminality, despite their constituitonal protection.”
“Oklahoma lawmakers are suggesting that a new state law aimed at “adult performances” means municipalities must predict what sorts of events might become obscene and preemptively prohibit them. It’s a clear recipe for chilling protected speech—especially drag performances, which were one of the main targets of the law.”
“”I have not seen ever before a direct infringement on the right to free speech like that,” CNN’s Jake Tapper says of the Trump administration’s actions in the Jimmy Kimmel saga.”
“now that Trump’s president, and getting lots of criticism from the media, he’s started calling speech that he doesn’t like “illegal.”
“They’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad. I think that’s really illegal, personally.”
He also threatened TV stations: “They give me only bad publicity…maybe their license should be taken away.”
“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech,” said his attorney general, Pam Bondi. “We will absolutely target you…if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
They will “target” people?
Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, joined in. When Jimmy Kimmel said nasty and incorrect things about Charlie Kirk’s murder, Carr threatened ABC’s TV licenses, saying, like a mafia boss, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Yet months earlier, he’d tweeted: “Dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights.”
And years earlier, he tweeted that the FCC does “not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.'”
He was right—then.
But power tends to corrupt.
Once Carr was in power, he no longer supported the speech he’d recently promoted.”
“In yet another clampdown on speech in the U.S., the Trump Administration announced Tuesday that it has revoked the visas of six foreign nationals over remarks they made online after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.”
Thanks to Trump and Trump supporters, the United States is not currently a strong Constitutional Democracy.
“After the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September, many on the political right set out to punish anyone making light of the tragedy, or even simply being insufficiently upset. In one of the more brazen examples, a Tennessee man was arrested, accused of threatening a school shooting, and held on a $2 million bond, for posting a somewhat uncivil meme on Facebook.
Larry Bushart, a 61-year-old former police officer, posted the offending meme last month. In response to a Facebook post about an upcoming vigil for Kirk, Bushart shared an image of President Donald Trump with the quote, “We have to get over it,” which Trump said in January 2024 after a shooting at Iowa’s Perry High School. Text added to the image said, “This seems relevant today.”
Bushart did not elaborate, but the context seems clear: Why should I care about this shooting, when the sitting president said I should “get over” this other shooting?
…
According to the Perry County Sheriff’s Office website, Bushart was arrested the following morning on a charge of Threats of Mass Violence on School Property and Activities—a class E felony punishable by between one and six years in prison and up to a $3,000 fine. Worse, Bushart’s bail is set at an astonishing $2 million.
…
In its entirety, the post consists of a direct quote of a statement by the then-former president about a newsworthy event, with text providing context, plus a four-word phrase added. Bushart didn’t even create the meme: The Tennesseean’s Angele Latham noted it had been “posted numerous times across multiple social media platforms not connected to Bushart going back to 2024.”
…
In context, it’s clear Bushart meant to suggest that since Trump previously said people should “get over” a school shooting, then they shouldn’t be expected to care about the murder of a conservative public figure. It’s quite a stretch to suggest this constituted a threat to shoot up a high school. Yes, a nearby high school happened to have a similar name, but that was clearly a coincidence, and there is nothing to suggest Bushart intended to carry out violence against the local school.
On social media, some have suggested the meme in question was part of a larger pattern indicating Bushart posed a threat. But in his statement to The Tennesseean, Weems specifically singled out the Trump meme as the offender, saying while the other posts were “hate memes,” they were “not against the law and would be recognized as free speech.”
Perhaps some teachers, parents, or students really did find Bushart’s post threatening—though since it was a reply on a Facebook page for local news, it’s not clear how many people even saw it. And even if people did see and interpret it as a threat of violence, that doesn’t mean it meets the standard for a “true threat,” in violation of the First Amendment.
…
Bushart’s arrest would be humorous if it weren’t so serious. He now faces a potential years-long prison sentence for reposting a Facebook meme that doesn’t come anywhere close to qualifying as an exception to the First Amendment. Even if the case gets thrown out, he has already spent two weeks in jail and is set to spend two more months until his first hearing.”
“Trump issued an executive order that purports to address the recent spate of political violence. But the order is remarkably one-sided, taking the apparent position that only leftists can be violent, and it treats speech clearly protected by the First Amendment as evidence of criminal behavior.
…
“These movements portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as ‘fascist’ to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution,” the order claims. “This ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties. Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
Regardless of one’s view on “anti-fascism” in its current usage, this entire paragraph is an assault on the First Amendment. Terms like extremism and hostility are amorphous and mostly exist in the eye of the beholder.
…
That leaves the order’s contention that “domestic terrorists” are characterized by “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.” One can oppose all of these traits, but they are unquestionably protected by the First Amendment. It is not illegal to criticize America, or capitalism, or Christianity—in fact, so long as it doesn’t cross over into “imminent lawless action,” it’s perfectly legal to criticize anything or anyone.
Most of all, the order is designed to target people Trump and his supporters don’t like, lumping them all together as members of an “anti-fascist” movement.”
“Young’s ruling came in response to one of the Trump administration’s signature policies, its attempts to shut down Palestinian solidarity protests by deporting Palestinian students and their supporters. The American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association sued a few days after the arrest of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, arguing that the policy violates freedom of speech, both by intimidating foreign academics in America and preventing American academics “from hearing from, and associating with, their noncitizen students and colleagues.”
Ruling that administration officials indeed “acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech,” Young promised to hold a hearing on the specific measures he will order. He wrote that “it will not do simply to order the Public Officials to cease and desist in the future,” given the current political environment.
…
The ruling itself meticulously outlined how several different activists—Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Yunseo Chung, and Badar Khan Suri—were targeted for deportation and how the administration justified it, both internally and publicly. Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly claimed in the media that the deportations were meant to target “riots” on campus, Young shows that the students were often targeted based on their opinions alone, with vague chains of association linking them to violent protests.”