All posts tagged "First Amendment"

Charlie Kirk never graduated college. He also wrote a book called The College Scam: How America's Universities are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America's Youth.

Nonetheless, after the right-wing activist was killed last month, shot dead aged 31, administrators at the Illinois community college where he enrolled for five semesters fielded calls to both honor Kirk and discipline an employee who criticized his views, records obtained by Raw Story show.

Kirk attended Harper College in Palatine, Illinois, a northwest Chicago suburb, from 2013 to 2014, before dropping out to co-found Turning Point USA, a national student group. ...

UNC Chapel is immediately reinstating a professor suspended in response to a dubious link to celebrations of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

The university said in an email Friday morning that following a “threat assessment,” the university found there was no basis to conclude that Dwayne Dixon, a teaching associate professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, “poses a threat to university students, staff and faculty or has engaged in conduct that violates university policy.”

Dixon had received notification on Monday from Interim Provost James W. Dean Jr. that he was being placed on indefinite administrative leave with pay due to “recent reports and expressions of concerns regarding your alleged advocacy of politically motivated violence.”...

Veteran journalist Tina Brown claimed in a new Substack article that "old crocodile" Rupert Murdoch was very much looking forward to taking on Donald Trump over The Wall Street Journal's report on the president's relationship with sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump filed a $10 billion libel suit against Murdoch, Dow Jones, News Corp, and its CEO, Robert Thomson, plus two Journal reporters for causing "overwhelming" damage to the president's finances and reputation. The suit came shortly after the Journal published a report suggesting that Trump and Epstein were closer friends than the president has admitted to. The proof included a bawdy birthday card of a naked woman that Trump allegedly drew on while wishing Epstein that "every day be another wonderful secret."

Brown called it a "rich irony" that Murdoch, whose Fox News has faced criticism for helping boost Trump into power, was now the object of Trump's slings and arrows....

An appeals court judge got into a "heated exchange" with a lawyer for the federal government who couldn't answer whether two detained students with pro-Palestinian views had the right to free speech in the United States, according to NBC News.

Tufts University student Rumeysa Öztürk was plucked off the streets of a Boston suburb and detained by ICE after co-authoring an op-ed criticizing the university for its stance on the war in Gaza, while student Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested during his citizenship naturalization interview because he had organized pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.

Öztürk remains in detention in Louisiana, while Mahdawi was released on bail last week....

Elon Musk, who called himself a "free speech warrior" when he first bought Twitter and renamed it X, is getting blowback from his own fans after calling 60 Minutes journalists "the biggest liars in the world" who "deserve a long prison sentence."

Musk was upset with a piece the news program produced about USAID, one of the agencies slashed by Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

CNN's John Berman introduced chief media analyst Brian Stelter Tuesday, saying, "It's interesting because he's saying this at the same time that Vice President [J.D.] Vance is giving speeches overseas about free speech." ...

Two new court cases will test the limits of the First Amendment as the Supreme Court decides just how far religion can permeate public schools.

At issue are two cases the court recently agreed to hear: in the first, the six Republican appointees and three Democratic appointees will consider whether to permit the country’s first publicly funded religious charter school in Oklahoma; and in the second, the court will hear an appeal from parents in Maryland who want the right to keep their children from reading books having to do with LGBTQ subjects.

The American Civil Liberties Union condemned the court's decision to take the Oklahoma case, saying in a statement: “The law is clear: Charter schools are public schools and must be secular and open to all students." The statement continued, "Oklahoma taxpayers...should not be forced to fund a religious public school that plans to discriminate against students and staff and indoctrinate students into one religion. Converting public schools into Sunday schools would be a dangerous sea change for our democracy.”...