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Supreme Court unanimously rules that public officials can be sued for blocking critics on social media

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7 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett Justice noted that the personal social media accounts of public officials often present an ‘ambiguous’ status because they mix official announcements with personal content.

The United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Friday that government officials who post about work-related topics on their personal social media accounts can be held liable for violating the First Amendment rights of constituents by blocking their access or deleting their critical comments.  

In a 15-page opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted that the personal social media accounts of public officials often present an “ambiguous” status because they mix official announcements with personal content.

The court ruled in two cases where people were blocked after leaving critical comments on social media accounts of public officials.   

The first case involved two elected members of a California school board — the Poway Unified School District Board of Trustees — who blocked concerned parents from their Facebook and Twitter accounts after leaving critical comments.  

The court upheld the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that said the board members had violated the parents’ free speech rights.    

The second case before the court concerned James Freed, Port Huron, Michigan’s city manager who had blocked constituent Kevin Lindke from commenting on his Facebook page after deleting his remarks about the city’s COVID-19 pandemic policies.  

Lindke believed that Freed had violated the First Amendment by doing so and sued Freed.  

Freed maintained that he launched his Facebook page long before becoming a public official, arguing that most of the content on his account concerned family-related matters.  

Justice Barrett explained: 

Like millions of Americans, James Freed maintained a Facebook account on which he posted about a wide range of  topics, including his family and his job. Like most of those Americans, Freed occasionally received unwelcome comments on his posts. In response, Freed took a step familiar to Facebook users: He deleted the comments and blocked those who made them.     

For most people with a Facebook account, that would  have been the end of it. But Kevin Lindke, one of the unwelcome commenters, sued Freed for violating his right to free speech. Because the First Amendment binds only the government, this claim is a nonstarter if Freed posted as a private citizen. Freed, however, is not only a private citizen but also the city manager of Port Huron, Michigan — and while Freed insists that his Facebook account was strictly personal, Lindke argues that Freed acted in his official capacity when he silenced Lindke’s speech.

When a government official posts about job-related topics on social media, it can be difficult to tell whether the speech is official or private. We hold that such speech is attributable to the State only if the official (1) possessed actual authority to speak on the State’s behalf, and (2) purported to exercise that authority when he spoke on social media. 

In the end, the high court sent Lindke’s case back to the Sixth Circuit Federal Appeals Court for a second look.  

Perhaps reflecting continued ambiguity following the court’s ruling, both defendant Freed and plaintiff Lindke declared victory. 

“I am very pleased with the outcome the justices came to,” Freed told ABC News in a statement. “The Court rejected the plaintiff’s appearance test and further refined a test for review by the Sixth Circuit. We are extremely confident we will prevail there once more.”  

Lindke was more effusive and told ABC News that he was “ecstatic” with the court’s decision.   

“A 9-0 decision is very decisive and is a clear indicator that public officials cannot hide behind personal social media accounts when discussing official business,” said Lindke.  

Legal experts called attention to the persistence of gray area in the law regarding social media due to the narrowness of the court’s decision. 

“This case doesn’t tell us much new about how to understand the liability of the 20 million people who work in local, state, administrative or federal government in the U.S. … just that the question is complicated,” Kate Klonick, an expert on online-platform regulation who teaches at St. John’s Law School, told The Washington Post 

Katie Fallow, senior counsel for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University,  told the Post that the court’s ruling does not sufficiently address public officials’ widespread use of personal “shadow accounts,” which constituents often perceive as official.  

Fallow said the court was “right to hold that public officials can’t immunize themselves from First Amendment liability merely by using their personal accounts to conduct official business.”  

We are disappointed, though, that the Court did not adopt the more practical test used by the majority of the courts of appeals, which appropriately balanced the free speech interests of public officials with those of the people who want to speak to them on their social media accounts. 

According to The Hill, the Biden administration and a bipartisan group of 17 states and National Republican Senatorial Committee sided with officials, arguing in favor of their blocks, while the ACLU backed the cons 

Friday’s ruling is only the first of several this term that deal with the relationship between government and social media.

“On Feb. 26, the justices heard argument[s] in a pair of challenges to controversial laws in Florida and Texas that seek to regulate large social-media companies,” explained Amy Howe on Scotusblog.com.  “And on Monday the justices will hear oral arguments in a dispute alleging that the federal government violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to remove false or misleading content. Decisions in those cases are expected by summer.” 

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Automotive

Red States Sue California and the Biden Administration to Halt Electric Truck Mandates

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From Heartland Daily News

By Nick Pope

“California and an unaccountable EPA are trying to transform our national trucking industry and supply chain infrastructure. This effort—coming at a time of heightened inflation and with an already-strained electrical grid—will devastate the trucking and logistics industry, raise prices for customers, and impact untold number of jobs across Nebraska and the country”

Large coalitions of red states are suing regulators in Washington, D.C., and California over rules designed to effectively require increases in electric vehicle (EV) adoption.

Nebraska is leading a 24-state coalition in a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recently-finalized emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and a 17-state coalition suing the state of California in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California over its Advanced Clean Fleet rules. Both regulations would increase the number of heavy-duty EVs on the road, a development that could cause serious disruptions and cost increases across the U.S. economy, as supply chain and trucking sector experts have previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“California and an unaccountable EPA are trying to transform our national trucking industry and supply chain infrastructure. This effort—coming at a time of heightened inflation and with an already-strained electrical grid—will devastate the trucking and logistics industry, raise prices for customers, and impact untold number of jobs across Nebraska and the country,” Republican Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers said in a statement. “Neither California nor the EPA has the constitutional power to dictate these nationwide rules to Americans. I am proud to lead our efforts to stop these unconstitutional attempts to remake our economy and am grateful to our sister states for joining our coalitions.”

(RELATED: New Analysis Shows Just How Bad Electric Trucks Are For Business)

While specifics vary depending on the type of heavy-duty vehicle, EPA’s emissions standards will effectively mandate that EVs make up 60% of new urban delivery trucks and 25% of long-haul tractors sold by 2032, according to The Wall Street Journal. The agency has also pushed aggressive emissions standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles that will similarly force an increase in EVs’ share of new car sales over the next decade.

California’s Advanced Clean Fleet rules, meanwhile, will require that 100% of trucks sold in the state will be zero-emissions models starting in 2036, according to the California Air Resources Board (CARB). While not federal, the California rules are of importance to other states because there are numerous other states who follow California’s emissions standards, which can be tighter than those required by the EPA and other federal agencies.

Critics fear that this dynamic will effectively enable California to set national policies and nudge manufacturers in the direction of EVs at a greater rate and scale than the Biden administration is pursuing.

Trucking industry and supply chain experts have previously told the DCNF that both regulations threaten to cause serious problems for the country’s supply chains and wider economy given that the technology for electric and zero-emissions trucks is simply not yet ready to be mandated at scale, among other issues.

Neither CARB nor the EPA responded immediately to requests for comment.

Nick Pope is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Service.

Originally published by The Daily Caller. Republished with permission.

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COVID-19

Japan’s most senior cancer doctor: COVID shots are ‘essentially murder’

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Dr. Masanori Fukushima

From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

The most senior medical oncologist in Japan recently slammed the COVID-19 mRNA shots as “the work of evil” that has caused “essentially murder.”

In an interview published April 19, Dr. Masanori Fukushima, who spearheaded the first cancer outpatient clinic at Kyoto University and launched the first course in pharmacoepidemiology there, listed a slew of problems with the COVID mRNA jabs, evidencing what he called an evil “abuse of science.”

He pointed out that “turbo cancers,” a kind “previously unseen by doctors” that progress extremely quickly and are typically in stage four by the time they are diagnosed, have started to appear after the jab rollouts. These “turbo cancers” are emerging along with excess mortality due to cancer in general, which Dr. Fukushima says cannot be explained only by lost opportunities for screenings or treatment during the COVID outbreak.

As a tragic example of the fatal danger of the COVID shots, the oncologist shared the story of a 28-year-old man who was found dead by his wife when she tried to wake him in the morning, five days after he received his second Pfizer shot.

“The doctor who did the autopsy said that when he tried to remove the heart, it was soft and had disintegrated,” Dr. Fukushima said. “And even just one case like this shows how dangerous this vaccine can be.”

He pointed out that these severe harms, including death, have been afflicting people — post-jab — who have a history of good health.

“It’s serious. It’s essentially murder. In the end, I want to state clearly that this is my view,” the doctor said.

He lamented that the media, including newspapers, generally have not reported on these harms, and that in fact those who question the safety of the COVID shots — just as with the flu shots — have been characterized as anti-science “heretics.” He described the attitude of those who shut down the voices COVID “vaccine” critics, however, as far from scientific, and “more akin to faith, hysteria or even cult behavior.”

He highlighted the fact that countries that most aggressively pushed the COVID shot, such as Israel, saw the highest rates of death and infection, as shown by studies comparing Middle Eastern countries, including Jordan, Syria and Egypt.

“Israel led in early and widespread vaccination but also had the highest death and infection rates. The less aggressively vaccinated areas saw less harm,” said Dr. Fukushima, noting that “Israel was quick to halt the vaccine.”

There were problems, moreover, with the very technology used to administer the mRNA — the lipid nanoparticles — that the doctor said result in “off-target effects” on various organs, including the ovaries, brain, liver, and bone marrow.

Worse, the spike proteins produced by the mRNA have been detected in the human body more than a year after the administration of the COVID shot, noted the oncologist, indicating “a severe problem.”

The doctor took aim at the World Health Organization (WHO) for “hastily” pushing the COVID shots without proper investigation, and moreover for trying to enforce a one-size-fits-all approach in countries with widely varying “medical circumstances, habits, and systems,” calling it “somewhat absurd.”

He argued that it is “crucial” that the WHO take responsibility for the harms of the COVID shots, which he called “an abuse, a misuse of science and an evil practice of science, to be frank.”

Dr. Fukushima pointed out that the WHO is “aware” of harms from the so-called vaccines because they are compensating for these damages in certain countries, and yet they are not properly addressing the COVID shot-induced death and injury through an investigation and report.

“Imagine finding your spouse dead in the morning. It’s no joke. A vaccine that causes such outcomes, even a single death, is unacceptable,” said Dr. Fukushima, adding that in Japan alone, the government has documented 2,134 deaths reported due to the COVID shot, which is likely a low estimate.

“There are tens of thousands of people who must see a doctor because of vaccine-related issues,” he continued, asserting that a big chunk of them — 30% — are “suffering from ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis) or chronic fatigue syndrome.”

This is just the beginning, according to Dr. Fukushima, because the rates of all sorts of diseases have been spiking since the COVID shot rollout, including “autoimmune disease, neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, and infections.”

“It’s as if we’ve opened Pandora’s box … We must take these damages seriously and address them earnestly. Any efforts to dismiss these damages as if they didn’t happen are frankly the work of evil. This is a quintessential example of the evil practice of science,” Dr. Fukushima said.

He called on scientific and medical institutions, led by the WHO, to directly confront these outcomes through research efforts in order to “shine the light of science” on the shots.

“We should never again use such vaccines,” he said. “This is a shame for humanity. It’s a disgrace that we did this.”

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