June 10, 2024

The Courts

Bloomberg Law: ‘Two Genders’ Shirt Merits School Censorship, Appeals Court Says

By Allie Reed

.....The First Amendment doesn’t override a public school’s obligation to protect LGBTQ+ students from discrimination, the First Circuit said in a case about a Massachusetts 12-year-old who showed up to school in a T-shirt reading, “THERE ARE ONLY TWO GENDERS.”

“In many realms of public life one must bear the risk of being subjected to messages that are demeaning of race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation, even when those messages are highly disparaging of those characteristics,” the Sunday opinion from the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit said. While US Supreme Court precedent holds that schools must permit debate over “even the most contentious and controversial topics,” that doesn’t mean “that our public schools must be a similar unregulated place.”

Bloomberg Law: Judicial Panel Approves Amicus Disclosure, Mass Tort Changes

By Jacqueline Thomsen

.....Attorneys will now be able to weigh in on a proposed federal rule meant to disclose funding of amicus briefs.

The Judicial Conference’s Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, often called the Standing Committee, on Tuesday sent the proposal to be published for public comment...

Under the disclosure proposal, organizations that file an amicus brief would be required to disclose if any of the parties or their counsel in the case were involved in the brief, including by helping to write it or providing funds for the filings. It would include scenarios when a party or the attorney had contributed or pledged more than a quarter of the amicus organization’s revenue in the prior year.

Any non-parties to the case who contributed or pledged $100 toward the brief would also be made public, with the exception of organizations formed in the past year.

Those seeking to file amicus briefs at district and circuit courts would need to request permission to do so, in order to avoid a situation where an amicus brief is submitted with the goal of disqualifying a judge who may have a conflict with an organization involved with the filing.

Bloomberg Law: NetChoice Sues Mississippi to Block Youth Social Media Law

By Tonya Riley

.....Tech industry group NetChoice sued the state of Mississippi in an effort to block a state law curbing minors’ access to social media.

Congress

The Hill: Manhattan DA agrees to testify before House GOP over Trump hush money trial

By Filip Timotija

.....Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has agreed to testify before a House Judiciary Committee panel over former President Trump’s recent hush-money trial which resulted in the first conviction of a former president.

Free Expression

Just the News: Three men fought public schools in court for their free speech. They didn't survive.

By Greg Piper

.....Mike Adams. Richard Bilkszto. Shawn McBreairty.

Three men in their prime, ages 53 to 60, died by their own hands in the past four years amid high-profile litigation to protect their speech critical of progressive education practices, showing the potential human toll of prolonged uphill battles against publicly funded institutions.

The most recent victim is McBreairty, a Maine parental rights activist, husband and father of two, whose latest lawsuit alleges First Amendment retaliation by the Brewer School Department for threatening to sue him for criticizing its alleged suppression of student speech against a transgender restroom policy...

McBreairty's lawyer, Marc Randazza, who told Just the News he's represented the activist in four cases in three years, believes a "bogus" legal threat letter from a party's lawyer two days before McBreairty's death played a role in pushing the 53-year-old over the edge...

"Why do they get to lie and cheat and we have to play by the rules?" was one of the last things McBreairty told his lawyer, according to Randazza, who worried the stress was getting to his client but not that he would take his life.

"It is hard to explain to a layperson that they can't really do anything to you" when fighting the government, Randazza said.

New York Times: The 19th-Century Club You’ve Never Heard of That Changed the World

By Jon Grinspan

.....In the presidential campaign of 1860, hundreds of thousands of diverse young Americans joined companies of Wide Awakes, marching in militaristic uniforms, escorting Republican speakers, fighting in defense of antislavery speech. Their grass-roots rising helped elect Abraham Lincoln as president but also began the spiral into war.

“Slavery,” Frederick Douglass warned as the conflict loomed, “cannot tolerate free speech.” In the decades before the Civil War, many Americans obliged, keeping quiet on the subject. Over the years, that took mounting coercion. States banned public criticism, regular “mobbings” persecuted abolitionists. In Congress, antislavery leaders were bullied and beaten.

Reason Podcast: Jay Bhattacharya: 'I Sued the Biden Administration for COVID Censorship'

By Nick Gillespie

.....Today's guest is Jay Bhattacharya, a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration and one of the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court case charging that the Biden administration and other parts of the federal government illegally colluded "with social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content." A decision in that case is imminent, and a victory for Bhattacharya's side would make it impossible for the government to pressure X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and other platforms to ban or squelch legal speech. A professor of medicine at Stanford University and a Ph.D. economist, Bhattacharya talks about his experience being blacklisted online because of his criticisms of lockdowns and other COVID policies, the ways in which both Donald Trump and Joe Biden fumbled their responses to the pandemic, and what the public health establishment must do to regain the trust and confidence of the American public.

Wall Street Journal: Stanford Finally Wakes Up to the Anti-Israel Vandals

By The Editorial Board

.....Are university leaders finally waking up to the moral and intellectual rot around them? One hopeful sign came last week at Stanford University, where anti-Israel protesters who seized and defaced the university president’s office were charged with felonies and held on $20,000 bail.

Online Speech Platforms

Politico: WhatsApp Channels, used by millions, has no clear election rules

By Rebecca Kern

.....A new platform launched by tech giant Meta and used by half a billion people has been running for more than eight months worldwide without any explicit election-disinformation policies — a lapse that lawmakers, disinformation experts and former Meta employees warn could pose grave risks in a year when nearly half the globe is casting major votes.

The platform, called WhatsApp Channels, transforms WhatsApp from a private messaging and group chat service into a broadcast platform as well, with users able to follow posts from public accounts...

“Meta’s continued failure to implement explicit election misinformation policies on its public WhatsApp Channels threatens the integrity of democratic processes in the United States and across the globe,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, adding, “It is absolutely imperative that Meta extends the same policies from its other platforms to WhatsApp Channels to prevent the spread of election-related falsehoods.”

Wired: Google and Microsoft’s AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election

By David Gilbert

.....When asked “Who won the 2020 US presidential election?” Microsoft’s chatbot Copilot, which is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model, responds by saying: “Looks like I can’t respond to this topic.” It then tells users to search on Bing instead.

When the same question is asked of Google’s Gemini chatbot, which is based on Google’s own large language model, also called Gemini, it responds: “I’m still learning how to answer this question.”

Changing the question to “Did Joe Biden win the 2020 US presidential election?” didn’t make a difference, either: Both chatbots would not answer.

The chatbots would not share the results of any election held around the world. They also refused to give the results of any historical US elections, including a question about the winner of the first US presidential election.

The States

NC Newsline: Surprise GOP campaign finance law proposal prompts walkout by Democratic senators

By Rob Schofield and Ahmed Jallow

.....In a surprise move that caught most Legislative Building watchers off-guard, Republican lawmakers unveiled legislation on Thursday that would make significant changes to state campaign finance law. The sudden move prompted all 20 Senate Democrats to walk out of the chamber in protest when the bill was quickly brought to a vote. It was approved 28-0 by the Republicans who remained on the Senate floor. The House is expected to take up the measure next week.

The proposed law changes, which were appended to a conference committee report on a controversial and much-debated bill dealing with punishment for unlawful protests and the wearing of masks (see the box below), would make it easier for big dollar donors to funnel large sums of cash in relative anonymity to support North Carolina political candidates.

Republicans said the proposal was merely designed to “level the playing field” with Democrats in response to a 2020 advisory opinion from the State Board of Elections that they said benefited the Democratic Governors Association, but Democratic legislators and good government groups decried both the substance of the proposal and the process used to bring it forward.

Daily Montanan: Knudsen calls Montana’s campaign laws ‘silly’ and says comments were proof of ‘transparency’

By Darrell Ehrlick

.....Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen appears to have doubled down on his comments from a meeting in Dillon last month in which he told an audience that he had recruited a fellow Republican to run against him for attorney general so that he could raise more money.

Those comments triggered a still ongoing investigation with the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices for violating state campaign and election laws, which Knudsen also described during that Dillon meeting as “ridiculous.”

In a radio interview with KGEZ in Kalispell, Knudsen said that he wasn’t trying to hide anything and meant to disclose his efforts to recruit an opponent as a demonstration of the state’s “quite silly” laws. Furthermore, he said he told the audience gathered to hear conservative candidates in Dillon about recruiting Daniels County Attorney Logan Olson so that he could be transparent.