#free-speech

#free-speech

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.

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;

He wasn't this national hero or politician, Alana, who is using an alias, said. He was just a white man with a loud opinion. The sentiment on the historically Black university's campus, she said, is that Kirk's rhetoric about marginalized communities was hateful and that they are being unfairly blamed for his death. In the days and weeks following Kirk's death, several HBCUs and Black students have been targeted with racist threats.

Following his death, hundreds of people who criticized Kirk's ideology have been fired, disciplined or doxxed had their private information posted online to stoke harassment. Other states have seen far more teachers fired or disciplined for Kirk-related comments. In California, state laws protecting free speech and strong union contracts have so far kept the numbers relatively low. Texas, for example, is investigating at least 280 teachers for criticizing Kirk.

Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed vengeance on a Democratic Party he regularly called "the radical left" (or, on occasion, "communists") and accused of a treasonous conspiracy to turn over the country to criminal immigrants and America-hating globalist elites. Even as he has relentlessly pressed to expand his own powers to unprecedented levels, the 47th president has begun acting on his threats by deploying the machinery of justice against people, institutions, and ideas he dislikes.

The Trump administration declared war on the " terrorist organization " of "antifa" and the supposed "networks" associated with it last week. Antifa is not so much a vast national conspiracy as it is simply an abbreviation for anti-fascism - but don't point out that anti-anti-fascism looks a lot like fascism. That would make you antifa, too. The plain intent of the memo is to make Americans afraid to call fascism what it is - or worse, to say fascism is bad.

A Reagan-appointed judge has issued a scathing ruling rebuking the Trump administration's targeting of pro-Palestine students. Judge William G. Young called the case AAUP v. Rubio "perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court" and ruled that contrary to the State Department's claims, "non-citizens lawfully present here in [the] United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us."

Jimmy Kimmel The Hollywood late night host, blasted by President Trump and suspended from ABC for his comments after the Charlie Kirk shooting, returns to TV, drawing record ratings and free speech accolades.