#First Amendment (US Constitution)

[mikeluciraphgabe]

Opened TikTok, saw the message, closed TikTok, opened TikTok again so I could react with people about, crumbled in realization that we are unable to group together anymore

[political-us]

Jewish protesters at Trump Tower demand Mahmoud Kahlil’s release - March 13, 2025

[writing-with-olive]

Bummed you couldn't make it to No Kings? Made it and wanna go again? Just wanna ruin Trump's day?

JULY 17 IS GOOD TROUBLE LIVES ON!!!

Yup, another chance to take to the streets, exercise our first amendment rights to peaceful assembly, and tell Trump and his enablers that he needs to sit his ass down.

Here's the website with the map of planned protests. This was only announced June 17, so if there aren't any near you, come back later, and see what new options have populated. And remember: try to avoid actually rsvp-ing, and if you must, put in fake information.

Please boost!!

[fightthefirenow]

An Illinois congresswoman's ignorant comment about a Sikh prayer in the House is pure MAGA.

[sophieinwonderland]

burning a flag is not the same as flying one, and forgive me if I have a little more love for our country's flag than any other flag anyway because it's supposed to stand for everyone here not just one group over another.

I am defending freedom of speech, enshrined by the 1st Amendment!

The American Flag stands for nothing if not the sacred right to light it ablaze and let it burn in a glorious inferno in protest of the government!

This is what American freedom of speech looks like!

I believe in the American flag as a symbol of freedom. I believe in the values it represents!

One of those values just so happens to be that everyone has the right to light that sucker on fire to express their grievances with the state of the country.

I think you need to ask yourself what is more important to you. Is it the piece of cloth or is it the values it represents and the freedoms it stands for? Would you rather burn our liberty to protect a cloth, or allow people the right to protect our liberty by burning a cloth?

[reasonsforhope]

"Two years ago, the biggest battles in state legislatures were over voting rights. Democrats loudly — and sometimes literally — protested as Republicans passed new voting restrictions in states like Georgia, Florida and Texas. This year, attention has shifted to other hot-button issues, but the fight over the franchise has continued. Republicans have enacted dozens of laws this year that will make it harder for some people to vote in future elections. 

But this year, voting-rights advocates got some significant wins too: States — controlled by Democrats and Republicans — have enacted more than twice as many laws expanding voting rights as restricting them, although the most comprehensive voter-protection laws passed in blue states. In all, 39 states and Washington, D.C., have changed their election laws in some way this year...

Where voting rights were expanded in 2023 (so far)

Unlike two years ago, though, we’d argue that the bigger story of this year’s legislative sessions was all the ways states made it easier to vote. As of July 21, according to the Voting Rights Lab, [which runs an excellent and completely comprehensive tracker of election-related bills], 834 bills had been introduced so far this year expanding voting rights, and 64 had been enacted. What’s more, these laws are passing in states of all hues.

Democratic-controlled jurisdictions (Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island and Washington) enacted 33 of these new laws containing voting-rights expansions, but Republican-controlled states (Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming) were responsible for 23 of them. The remaining eight became law in states where the two parties share power (Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia).

That said, not all election laws are created equal, and the most comprehensive expansive laws passed in blue states. For example: 

New Mexico adopted a major voting-rights package that will automatically register New Mexicans to vote when they interact with the state’s Motor Vehicle Division, allow voters to request absentee ballots for all future elections without the need to reapply each time and restore the right to vote to felons who are on probation or parole. The law also allows Native Americans to register to vote and receive ballots at official tribal buildings and makes it easier for Native American officials to get polling places set up in pueblos and on tribal land.

Minnesota followed suit with a law also establishing automatic voter registration and a permanent absentee-voting list. The act allows 16- and 17-year-olds to preregister to vote too. Meanwhile, a separate new law also reenfranchises felons on probation or parole.

Michigan enacted eight laws implementing a constitutional amendment expanding voting rights that voters approved last year. Most notably, the laws guarantee at least nine days of in-person early voting and allow counties to offer as many as 29. The bills also allow voters to fix mistakes on their absentee-ballot envelopes so that their ballot can still count, track the status of their ballot online, and use student, military and tribal IDs as proof of identification. 

Connecticut became the sixth state to enact a state-level voting-rights act, which bars municipalities from discriminating against minority groups in voting, requires them to provide language assistance to certain language minority groups and requires municipalities with a record of voter discrimination to get preclearance before changing their election laws. The Nutmeg State also approved 14 days of early voting and put a constitutional amendment on the 2024 ballot that would legalize no-excuse absentee voting.

No matter its specific provisions, each of these election-law changes could impact how voters cast their ballots in future elections, including next year’s closely watched presidential race. There’s a good chance your state amended its election laws in some way this year, so make sure you double-check the latest rules in your state before the next time you vote."

-via FiveThirtyEight (via FutureCrunch), July 24, 2023

[viqwxcs]

so apparently we can't practice the first fucking amendment anymore

[alyfoxxxen]

Mahmoud Khalil Is the First Activist to Be Disappeared by Trump | The Nation

[erebusvincent]

[soldierporn]

LA Protests against Gestapo ICE Raids.

Fascinating shots of vehicles set on fire, explicitly modified with chimney/flue structures and likely stocked inside the vehicle to prolong the dark smoke and burn time.

There's three of them in total in this immediate stretch of road, driven into place on the street before being lit.

In press conference around 1700 local time, LA City Mayor clarified that federally activated National Guard troops were limited to explicitly protecting federal buildings in downtown LA, and were not present elsewhere in the city or on the streets. Crowd control was strictly within the jurisdiction of LAPD personnel and remained there. CHP also assisted law enforcement in clearing protestors from Route 101, where they had at one point blocked traffic in both directions.

Hegseth still has USMC forces at Twenty-Nine Palms on standby for rapid deployment.

City Mayor reiterated that she supports LA residents exercising their rights to protest *peacefully* and once again reminded everyone that escalation of the situation would only serve the goals and intentions of the administration without actually accomplishing anything else.

[political-us]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Brad Polumbo

Published: Jun 25, 2024

Republicans are very concerned about left-wing indoctrination in the public school system, and often for good reasons. Yet, it seems that some Republican leaders feel differently about ideological indoctrination in the classroom when they’re the ones doing it. 

In Louisiana, a recent law mandates the display of the Ten Commandments across all public educational institutions, from elementary schools to universities. The bill, championed by Republican Governor Jeff Landry, was signed into law at a private Catholic school. During the ceremony, Governor Landry declared, “If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.”

This makes Louisiana the only state in the nation with such a mandate. Other red states haven’t ventured into this territory in recent years, perhaps because they know it’s blatantly unconstitutional. Nonetheless, Governor Landry appears undeterred, openly stating that “can’t wait to be sued.”

He may not have to wait very long.

A coalition of groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), has already announced its intention to file suit, condemning the mandate as “unconstitutional religious coercion of students, who are legally required to attend school and are thus a captive audience for school-spons.ored religious messages.” The ACLU also added that the mandate “send[s] a chilling message to students and families who do not follow the state’s preferred version of the Ten Commandments that they do not belong, and are not welcome, in our public schools.”

This is not uncharted territory. The ACLU cited the 1980 Supreme Court case Stone v. Graham, where the court explicitly ruled that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which prohibits the establishment of a formal state religion, prevents public schools from displaying the Ten Commandments. 

“If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments,” the Supreme Court ruled in that case. “However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.”

Governor Landry is surely aware of this precedent and simply does not care that this legislation will almost certainly be blocked in the courts. Nonetheless, it represents an opportunity for him to signal his cultural war bona fides—a move that, in any other context, Republicans might rightly describe as empty “virtue signaling.”

Regrettably, this isn’t just an isolated incident among Republicans in one conservative state. Louisiana’s initiative has garnered support from many of the most prominent figures in the modern GOP. One such figure is Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who praised the legislation in an interview with Real America’s Voice. “This is something we need all throughout our nation,” she said. “I’m so proud of Governor Landry…. We need morals back in our nation, back in our schools, and if there’s anything we’re going to present in front of our children, it should be the word of God.”

This stance appears to be a mainstream view within the Republican Party, as the party’s leader, Donald Trump, also threw his support behind Louisiana’s efforts in a post on Truth Social: 

The Republicans’ embrace of this religious mandate in public schools is deeply hypocritical, contravening many principles they have previously claimed to stand for, and incredibly short-sighted. 

Firstly, they are proving to be fair-weather fans of the First Amendment. These same types regularly champion free speech when it comes to opposing government censorship or progressive attempts to crack down on “hate speech” (which now includes uttering basic biological truths), and they are absolutely right to do so. However, you cannot selectively support the First Amendment, endorsing free speech and freedom of religion clauses while actively violating the Establishment Clause. After all, if Republicans can disregard the parts they don’t like when it’s inconvenient, then progressives can too!

Secondly, Republicans are compromising their stated beliefs about the importance of parents’ rights and opposing “indoctrination” in schools. Now, they suddenly advocate for the government’s role in teaching children morality, instead of leaving this responsibility to parents or families.

Which is it? Consistent supporters of parents’ rights believe that it should be up to parents to teach their kids about morality, whether it concerns pronouns or prayer. 

There’s also the issue of misplaced priorities. Louisiana ranks 40th out of all 50 states in education. Meanwhile, 40 percent of 3rd graders cannot read at grade level, according to The Advocate. Yet, the governor prioritizes mandating posters of the Ten Commandments—and allocating tax dollars to defending it in court—that many students probably can’t even read.

Even many conservative Christians can see the issue here. As radio host Erick Erickson put it:

When the 3rd grade reading level is only 49 percent, I don’t see why the state wants to spend money on lawyers for a probably unconstitutional law making the Ten Commandments mandatory just to virtue signal a side in a culture war. Actually use conservative reforms to fix the schools instead of putting up posters half the 3rd grade cannot even read.

Perhaps the most common Republican rejoinder is that displaying the Ten Commandments is an educational initiative focused on historical context rather than a promotion of religion. But while there’s no disputing its historical significance, it’s not being presented as part of a broader course on religion that features a variety of religious and secular perspectives, which would be fine. Instead, beliefs from a particular religious tradition, the Judeo-Christian one, are being elevated and mandated to the deliberate exclusion of others. This selective approach is hardly subtle: Governor Landry purposefully signed the bill at a Catholic school and even referenced Moses! 

There’s no denying that the Ten Commandments are inherently religious, as they proscribe not only murder and adultery but also idolatry, taking the Lord’s name in vain, and working on the Sabbath. So, conservatives making this “history, not religion” argument are straining credulity. 

What’s more, further empowering government schools to promote a specific ideology to students will not end well for conservatives. It’s not exactly breaking news that the public education system is overwhelmingly staffed and run by people with increasingly left-leaning political and cultural views. Conservatives should be fighting to restore viewpoint neutrality in the public square—not further undermining it and thereby making it easier for woke ideologues to propagandize to everyone’s kids. 

It’s sad, but ultimately not surprising, to see so many Republicans proving to be inconsistent allies to true liberal values. At least those few genuine, principled defenders of the First Amendment now know who our allies are—and who they are not. 

--

About the Author

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.

==

Moral consistency requires opposing both.

... Secularism means that no particular ideology is being forwarded and getting special treatment. Go have your belief. Believe what you want. Privately. You don’t get special treatment because you believe this with tons of conviction. Secularism means that your belief in your faith covers none of the distance to proving that it’s true. Conviction is not evidence of much of anything. Except conviction. -- James Lindsay

--

“If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.”

Leviticus 25:44-46

Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.

Who's going to tell him?

[prescott-az]

The Supreme Court said: bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia home.

The administration said: no.

That’s a constitutional crisis.

So we wrote the Court a letter.

Download it. Add your address. Sign it. Send it.

The Supreme Court must enforce its own ruling.

→ Download the letter: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bh0ZjhpZi3DhjQgsae1bHmqB9_aoFWqPWtg582PGfIk

→ Full Action Steps post with details: https://open.substack.com/pub/lfitzhugh/p/supreme-court-abrego-letter

Please share this.

[mayapapaya33]

Watching the first amendment crisis that is pro Palestine protestors being threatened with arrest and deportation is so fucking surreal. I mean, it was always blatantly obvious that the ultra-right-wing loons in power never cared about actual Freedom of Speech. But it's so deeply strange to see politicians that I know for a fact could not give less of a shit about Jewish people, and in fact would probably love to join a tiki torch march for shits and giggles, have the unmitigated gall to pretend that they're cracking down on "antisemitism" because they just care so much about Jewish people all of a sudden. This does NOTHING to help Jewish people, literally nothing, it's just an excuse to stifle dissent against Israel. This is madness.

And btw, even if the protesters WERE pro terrorist, that's never been illegal, Nazis are allowed to exist in this country as long as they don't physically start shit. If being a piece of scum NAZI isn't illegal, then sure as shit none of this is. Unbelievable.

You're allowed to believe and say whatever you want in this country, barring a few VERY SPECIFIC and PURPOSEFULLY LIMITED THINGS LIKE PUBLICALLY CALLING FOR SOMEONE'S ASSASSINATION, and if you're peaceful, the government can't legally touch you, that's the deal, this is a disgrace.

I don't care what you think of the Israel/Palestine situation, if you give a flying fuck about democracy or the constitution or free speech or the freedom of peaceful assembly you need to be opposed to the government's current actions.

[a-passing-storm]

I have just discovered the Constitution Party. I am so fascinated.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 5, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 6, 2023

Yesterday the official account of the Republican National Committee tweeted Independence Day greetings with a graphic of the Liberian flag, which has one star, rather than that of the United States, which has fifty.

Even more troubling was the tweet from Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) attributing to founder Patrick Henry a false quotation saying that “this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” Historian Seth Cotlar noted that the quotation actually came from the April 1956 issue of a virulently antisemitic white nationalist magazine, The Virginian.

Also yesterday, Trump-appointed judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction saying the First Amendment prevents the government from trying to stop the spread of disinformation. 

Doughty has become the judge Republican attorneys general seek out in their challenges to the Biden administration, and in this case, that judge shopping appears to have paid off. In a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, Doughty temporarily prevented employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Health and Human Services from talking to social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.” 

At stake is the belief among right-wing figures that government officials and social media companies have teamed up to silence them, although in fact, studies show that social media algorithms actually amplify right-wing political content and that social media companies are reluctant to remove it out of fear of backlash from extremists. Right-wing complaints stem from the removal of disinformation during the pandemic, and of accounts linked to the violence of January 6, 2021. 

For years, the government has worked with social media companies to try to address terrorism, images of child sexual abuse, and disinformation about the pandemic and elections. But disinformation has become a key political tool for the Republicans, and going into the 2024 election season, they have doubled down on the disinformation that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent and flooded the media with that lie. 

Fittingly, as Philip Bump pointed out in the Washington Post today, Doughty’s injunction accepts right-wing allegations at face value, meaning he cites as a mark against the administration something that, in fact, didn’t happen. 

Foreign accounts have amplified right-wing lies, and the injunction specifically targets the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which leads the push to identify and stop malign foreign influence in our social media. 

But there is a new twist there: Russia’s Yevgeny Prigozhin—the man who recently led his Wagner Group soldiers toward Moscow to demand changes in Russian military leadership—was key to the 2016 Russian disinformation campaign, and Reuters reported on Sunday that he announced on Saturday that his media company, including a troll factory that sought to influence public opinion in the U.S., is shutting down. 

That the injunction claims to protect free speech by forcing people to stop communication was not lost on observers. Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe called the injunction “blatantly unconstitutional” and noted: “Censoring a broad swath of vital communications between government and social media platforms in the name of combating censorship makes a mockery of the first amendment.” Tribe joined law professor Leah Litman to eviscerate the “breathtaking scope” of the order. 

The Department of Justice appealed the order today. It will go to the right-wing Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Disinformation is also behind the attempt of far-right House members to undermine the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, both of which maintain the rule of law in the United States. The FBI was key to investigating Russia’s attempt to help former president Trump win the 2016 presidential election and the efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, while the DOJ has been central to making sure that those who have broken the law are held accountable.

Right-wing Republicans, many of whom are implicated in the events surrounding the 2020 election, insist that the FBI—overseen by Trump appointee Christopher Wray—and the DOJ are improperly targeting them. They are calling for Wray to be fired and Attorney General Merrick Garland, who heads the DOJ, to be impeached. Barring that, they want to starve the department and the bureau by slashing their budgets. 

Trump attacked the FBI and the DOJ from the beginning of his presidency, and today the House investigation into the FBI and DOJ includes the Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees. It is currently centered on right-wing insistence that President Biden’s 53-year-old son, Hunter, received a lenient deal from the DOJ and that the DOJ retaliated against an IRS whistleblower about the case. Legal analysts say that, in fact, the younger Biden got a harsher deal than others and point out that David Weiss, the U.S. attorney overseeing the case, was appointed by Trump. 

On June 7, Weiss told Jordan in a letter that Garland had given Weiss full authority over the case; on June 30, Weiss wrote to deny that the DOJ had retaliated against a whistleblower, reiterating that he had “been granted ultimate authority over this matter.” Wray is scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), on July 12. Jordan is a key critic of what he claims is FBI focus on Republicans.

Disinformation was a key factor in the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin to the authoritarian power he now holds. The importance of insisting on the rule of law was the point of a BBC report today on a brutal attack on Russian investigative journalist Elena Milashina and lawyer Alexander Nemov in Chechnya, while they were on their way to court for the sentencing of the wife of a federal judge who was kidnapped by security forces in retaliation for the activism of her son. The two were abducted, beaten, stabbed, and tortured. 

“This story,” the BBC said, translating from the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, “is a test of whether society and the state can protect the law, in other words, itself. The law is the foundation of any state. Take it away and everything falls apart. And instead of civilization you get chaos and destruction. The law must always function and apply to everyone. In recent times, we have seen how certain people have been above the law. In place of the judge with his gavel—thugs with sledgehammers. And this is the result.” 

Also yesterday, Guardian journalist Luke Harding reported that Kyiv says Russians have placed explosives on top of two nuclear reactors at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. This station is in an area occupied by Russian forces. Nonetheless, Russian social media accounts are spreading the accusation that Ukraine is about to attack and damage the station. 

U.S. nuclear expert Cheryl Rofer notes that the situation in Zaporizhzhia is different from the conditions that led to other nuclear crises. The Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, that melted down in 1986 had a different kind of reactor, and the Fukushima reactor in Japan was fully operational right up until the moment the 2011 earthquake hit, making it much hotter than the Zaporizhzhia reactor is currently. 

Regardless of the relative danger, though, Rofer reinforces the dangers of authoritarian government when she concludes: “The danger to the plant is wholly Russia’s responsibility for starting the war and occupying the plant.” 

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON