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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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COVID-19

Kenyan doctor: WHO pandemic treaty aims to ‘maim and kill’ and ‘establish a one-world government’

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From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

Dr. Wahome Ngare pointed out that there is a history of population reduction efforts in Africa despite the fact that the country is not overpopulated, saying, ‘The problem is greedy global corporate owners who are interested in appropriating our natural resources.’

A Kenyan doctor declared last week that the globalist World Health Organization (WHO)’s proposed “Pandemic Accord” treaty aims to pave the way for a new lethal man-made virus and vaccine, as well as establish a global government by undermining national sovereignty.

Dr. Wahome Ngare explained before the Second African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values & Sovereignty that the real purpose of the pending treaty, which would achieve unprecedented medical control of the WHO over all of its member nations, is depopulation.

He pointed out that there is a substantial history of population reduction efforts in Africa despite the fact that it is demonstrably not overpopulated. To drive this home, he explained that the land mass of Africa can fit that of the U.S., China, India, and Japan but contains only about a fourth of the population of all of those countries combined.

“The problem with Africa is not its growing population, (which) is actually an asset. The problem is greedy global corporate owners who are interested in appropriating our natural resources,” Dr. Ngare said.

The doctor maintains that there are ongoing efforts to reduce the population on the continent through war, famine, disease, and even genetically modified organisms (GMOs), explaining, “The biggest problem with GMO is that the seed is patented — it is owned by someone. And once you use it long enough and your natural seed has disappeared, they can withdraw their seed and kill you through hunger.” In fact, Bill Gates-backed initiatives in Africa have pushed GMO crops for years, under the pretext that it will “end starvation in Africa.”

Dr. Ngare went on to make the case that the COVID-19 outbreak was deliberately used to depopulate the world, including Africa, and that this was only a prelude to what is planned to follow this next WHO Pandemic Accord.

During COVID-19, he noted, people were told that a “frightening” number would die from the virus, and that the disease was untreatable, and that “natural immunity cannot protect us and save us.”

“We were told not to shake hands, we were told not to social distance, we were told to stay at home … If you were given this psychological torture for six months and then you were told there was a vaccine, what would you do? You would run for the vaccine!” Dr. Ngare said.

Vaccination then “became mandatory through coercion,” because evidence of vaccination was needed in order to access goods and services, said Dr. Ngare, suggesting that this showed that “The end game of the whole covid fiasco was to vaccinate everybody … That is what COVID was about.”

For one, only the manufacturers knew what exactly was in the vaccines, and only the laboratories involved in creating them were permitted to test and examine these vaccines.

The supposed basis of their usefulness was also based on an erroneous foundation, Dr. Ngare declared, because the spike protein created by the vaccine was modeled after the very same protein that caused disease in COVID-19.

The shot was also pushed along with the assertion that natural immunity is not protective — and yet, the very vaccine was based on the body’s ability to “mount an immune response to the pathogen!”

Worse, data from the jab trials released by a court order in the U.S. revealed a disturbing amount of death and injury caused at least by the Pfizer shot. According to Dr. Ngare, 61 people died from strokes and five people died from liver damage during the trials, while 80% of pregnant mothers lost their babies during the first three months of pregnancy after being injected with the COVID shots. Moreover, harm was inflicted on both men and women’s reproductive systems by the shots, which harmed sperm count and motility, ovaries, menstrual cycles and placentas.

“This was known during the time of registration of the vaccines, but was not known by doctors,” Dr. Ngare said.

He went on to tell how in Africa there has long been a precedent of imposing unnecessary vaccines, as well as even pushing vaccines that harmed fertility, particularly through the tetanus shot.

According to Dr. Ngare, during the campaign to eradicate tetanus in Africa, females from age 14 to 49 were vaccinated every six months for tetanus, with shots that were in fact contraceptives, unbeknown to the women. This shot was intentionally designed and developed by the U.N, W.H.O., and World Bank to reduce fertility, he added.

The doctor asserted that a paper has been published demonstrating the contraceptive nature of these tetanus vaccines, which has been read over 300,000 times.

Dr. Ngare suggested that these efforts to depopulate Africa and the world through vaccines are precedents for an upcoming depopulation campaign to be initiated through the Pandemic Accord treaty.

The amendments to the international health regulations (IHR) that are part and parcel of the treaty will determine how the WHO would manage pandemics, or diseases that cross country borders, according to Dr. Ngare.

“The WHO is seeking to increase its powers so that the Director General can unilaterally declare that there is a pandemic, whether real or imagined,” Dr. Ngare said. “The minute he pronounces that, the new regulations would allow him to take charge of pandemic management in every country that is a signatory to WHO.”

“It is director Tedros who will say when you will lock down, whether you can ever go to work, which vaccines you’ll be given,” he explained.

“If the WHO causes so much damage with its current power, can you imagine what it would do if you actually gave it more power?” he continued.

“My conclusion is (that) the WHO is no longer a health-promoting body. It has become an imperialism arm of global corporate interests,” he said, adding that the proposed pandemic treaty and IHRs “aim to give the WHO the legal mandate to facilitate the creation of new pandemic … using new man-made viruses, and (the) use of vaccinations as a counter-measure, both designed to reduce the world population through reducing fertility, maiming and killing.”

“It will also give the WHO the mandate to use the pandemics to establish a one-world government by totally obliterating the sovereignty of member states and countries and eroding the citizens’ individual liberties,” he warned.

He urged African nations to avoid this immense harm by first writing “formally to the WHO” to reject the amendments and IHRs, and then to “consider exiting the WHO by 2024, which is when the pandemic treaty is supposed to come into force.”

The doctor also called on African countries to “collectively call for an end to gain-of-function research,” which described as both absurd and extremely dangerous.

“African countries should take a step and say, it is criminal for anybody to train viruses and bacteria to attack human beings as a way of creating a vaccine just in case that virus escapes,” he said. “That is witchcraft. It is not medicine.”

He also advised African countries to “collectively treat all vaccination programs as a national security risk,” stating, “If you cannot determine what is in the vaccine that is being given to your people, you may be opening a door to destroy the African population.”

Finally, Dr. Ngare urged African nations to “reject any linking of individual health records, including vaccination records, to the digital ID that is now being forced” on them.

“Honorable members, do not allow the government to access private health information as a means to determine who will get health services or not. It is medically unethical and it is against basic human rights,” he said.

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Energy

U.S. EPA Unveils Carbon Dioxide Regulations That Could End Coal and Natural Gas Power Generation

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From Heartland Daily News

By Tim Benson Tim Benson

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced new regulations on April 25 that would force coal-fired power plants to reduce or capture 90 percent of their carbon dioxide emissions by 2039, one year earlier than in the rule originally proposed in May 2023.

Other newly announced coal regulations include a final rule “strengthening and updating the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) for coal-fired power plants, tightening the emissions standard for toxic metals by 67 percent, finalizing a 70 percent reduction in the emissions standard for mercury from existing lignite-fired sources,” and another rule to “reduce pollutants discharged through wastewater from coal-fired power plants by more than 660 million pounds per year.” The EPA also issued an additional rule to require the safe management of coal ash in locations not previously covered by federal regulations.

“Today, EPA is proud to make good on the Biden-Harris administration’s vision to tackle climate change and to protect all communities from pollution in our air, water, and in our neighborhoods,” said EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan. “By developing these standards in a clear, transparent, inclusive manner, EPA is cutting pollution while ensuring that power companies can make smart investments and continue to deliver reliable electricity for all Americans.”

EPA estimates its new regulations will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 1.38 billion metric tons by 2047 and create $370 billion in “climate and public health net benefits” over the next twenty years.

Coal in a Regulatory Decline

Partially due to increasingly stringent regulations, electricity generation from coal has fallen from 52 percent of the nation’s total output in the 1990s to just 16.2 percent in 2023. Critics of the new regulations, including Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, argue that EPA’s new rules would make it impossible to open new coal plants and will effectively force those already online to shut down operations.

“These rules are a direct attack on an important and necessary source of American energy—one of our most affordable, reliable resources, and one that is essential here and growing in use around the world,” said Isaac. “The ignorance of this administration is negligent at best, criminal at worst, relegating the least among us to more expensive energy, or even none at all, as millions of Americans are finding out by having their electricity disconnected.

“On one hand they push to electrify everything and then with the other leave us with unreliable electricity,” Isaac said. “The Biden administration is hell bent on destroying coal and reaching new levels of recklessness.”

‘De Facto Ban’ on Coal

The new regulations almost assuredly will face legal challenges from the coal industry and others, says Steve Milloy, founder of JunkScience.com.

“Another unconstitutional EPA rule from the Biden regime that will be DOA at [the Supreme Court] but not until much harm has been caused,” said Milloy. “Congress has not authorized EPA to issue regulations that operate as a de facto ban on coal plants, yet that’s what this regulation amounts to because it mandates emissions control technology (i.e., carbon capture and sequestration) which does not, and will never, exist for coal plants.”

EPA, by contrast, says carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is the “best system of emission reduction for the longest-running existing coal units” and a “cost-reasonable emission control technology that can be applied directly to power plants and can reduce 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions from the plants.”

“The requirement for imaginary technology violates Clean Air Act notions of only requiring the best available and adequately tested technology,” Milloy said. “The de facto ban violates the 2022 [Supreme Court] decision in West Virginia v. EPA, which established the major questions doctrine, under which agencies cannot undertake significant new actions, like banning coal plants, without authorization from Congress.”

Natural Gas Targeted, Too

Coal plants were not the only target of new EPA regulations, as natural gas power plants are also now required to eliminate or capture 90 percent of their carbon dioxide emissions by 2032, three years earlier than called for when the draft rule was originally proposed in 2023.

The EPA is acting as if it has absolute power unconstrained by the law and prior court rulings, Darren Bakst, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center on Energy & Environment, says in a press release.

“The [EPA] absurdly thinks its authority to regulate means it has the authority to shut down businesses,” said Bakst. “Establishing new regulations for power plants does not mean the agency can effectively force them out of business.

“This is Clean Power Plan Part II, but like with many sequels, it is worse,” Bakst said.

Tim Benson ([email protected]) is a senior policy analyst with Heartland Impact.

For more on the Biden administrations power regulations, click here.

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