Topic: The First Amendment
“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
I’m curious how words merely existing are depriving Americans of their First Amendment Rights, and how deleting those words from government regulations/legislation is going to restore those rights. If anything, removing those words arbitrarily is a violation of 1A – it’s literally censorship by the government. Again, lots of cognitive dissonance here, and he’s unclear on what removing these words actually hopes to accomplish, other than effectively legalizing discrimination against anyone who fits into any of those phrases. Seriously? The phrase “reproductive health” is woke? Insanity.
Full contextual analysis of foreword here.
“Today, in addition to the problem of Big Tech censorship, we see speakers at universities shouted down, parents investigated and arrested for attempting to speak at school board meetings, and donors to conservative causes harassed and intimidated. The next conservative President must defend our First Amendment rights.”
He appears to be referring to Scott Smith (Loudoun County, Virginia), who was arrested at a schoolboard meeting for obstruction of justice and disorderly conduct, not for “speaking.” (He threatened a woman.)
p>Full contextual analysis of the foreword here.
“(Whether it be) mask and vaccine mandates, school and business closures, efforts to keep Americans from driving gas cars or using gas stoves, or efforts to defund the police, indoctrinate schoolchildren, alter beloved books, abridge free speech, undermine the colorblind ideal, or deny the biological reality that there are only two sexes, the Left’s steady stream of insanity appears to be never-ending.”
That’s a lot to unpack.
Full contextual analysis of Section 1: Taking the Reins of Government here.
“The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is a DHS component that the Left has weaponized to censor speech and affect elections at the expense of securing the cyber domain and critical infrastructure, which are threatened daily. A conservative Administration should return CISA to its statutory and important but narrow mission.”
There’s the woke boogeyman again! Cuccinelli doesn’t cite any specific examples of CISA being weaponized either. He’s suggesting that CISA has been involved in activities that go beyond its intended role, such as monitoring or influencing only speech, possibly through partnerships with social media companies or other platforms to address misinformation or disinformation. It’s telling that he thinks that combating disinformation harms the Right – it indicates that they’re reliant on lies to keep their messaging intact. Again, I’m taking a stab at what Cuccinelli is talking about here – he doesn’t specify how CISA is being “weaponized” against the “non-woke.”
Full contextual analysis of Section 2.2: Department of Homeland Security here.
“Make public diplomacy and international broadcasting serve American interests.”
This is the headline for one of her additional recommendations. She goes on to say “The United States must reassert its public diplomacy obligations by restoring its international broadcasting infrastructure as part of the broader U.S. foreign policy framework, consolidating broadcasting resources and recommitting to people-focused and pro-freedom messaging and content.”
This is explicitly an argument to restrict/destroy the free press, and is a violation of the First Amendment.
Full contextual analysis of Section 2.3: Department of State here.
“The DOJ engaged in conduct to chill the free speech rights of parents across the United States in response to supposed “threats” against school boards, yet it failed to engage in any concerted campaign to protect the rights of Americans who actually were terrorized by acts of violence like those perpetrated against pregnancy care centers.”
This is a false equivalency wrapped in an overstatement. The term “chilling effect” suggests that the DOJ’s actions made parents afraid to speak out for fear of legal or governmental consequences. He gives no examples of this happening, nor could I find any.
Hamilton could be talking about local schoolboards having people arrested for disruptive behavior, of which there is more than one example, but also would be local law enforcement’s purview, not the Department of Justice. It’s laughable for him to claim that local schoolboard meetings are somehow under the purview of the Department of Justice.
The idea that if the DOJ hadn’t been so focused on squashing free speech at schoolboard meetings, they could have prevented pro-life health care clinics from being vandalized by pro-choice advocates, is ludicrous. (And yes, he’s talking about that, not the FAR more common incidents of pregnant women seeking care who are terrorized by pro-life advocates.)
Full contextual analysis of Section 3.8: Department of Justice here.
“During oral argument, the United States took the remarkable position that government can compel a Christian website designer to imagine, create, and publish a custom website celebrating same-sex marriage but cannot compel an LGBT person to design a similar website celebrating opposite-sex marriage.”
He’s referring here to 303 Creative vs. Elenis, which was rife with so many shenanigans that I wrote a brief informal piece on it when it happened (written June 30, 2023). You can read this in the analysis linked below. It’s unclear why Hamilton is mischaracterizing the ruling so badly.
Full contextual analysis of Section 3.8: Department of Justice here.
“The Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements.”
This one is insidiously awful. Out of context, he appears to be combating discrimination, which is something we can all get behind. IN context, however, he has argued that DEI and anti-discrimination policies are actually discriminatory to “non-woke” people, and he’s promising to weaponize the DOJ against states who actually have real anti-discrimination laws in place. He does not detail what those prosecutions would look like. His vague language is intentional.
Full contextual analysis of Section 3.8: Department of Justice here.
“Support free speech and hold big tech accountable. Immediately conduct a thorough review of federal policy regarding free speech online and provide policy solutions to address big tech’s censorship of speech.”
Despite conservatives believing that Facebook censored information about COVID-19 (which was actually dangerous disinformation), Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that while they were “pressured” by the Biden administration to remove disinformation, he never suggests that they actually did so. Anecdotally, I can attest that as a Facebook user, disinformation about COVID was rampant.
In June 2024, the Supreme Court threw out a lawsuit that would have restricted the government communicating with internet giants over what it saw a “misinformation”, because the majority opinion (written by Amy Coney Barrett) found that the two Republican-led states and social media users who filed the lawsuit against dozens of executive branch officials and agencies did not have legal right to do so, because they could not prove that government pressure had suppressed their free-speech rights.
Furthermore, if corporations are effectively people with regard to rights, social media companies are privately owned and allowed to platform (or not platform) whatever they want. In fact, most have a long history of not platforming hate speech. Not all speech qualifies as “free”, and it can be argued that harmful disinformation that could get people killed is NOT protected.
“For example, former president Trump filed a class action lawsuit against Twitter and the United States, alleging that the government coerced Twitter into suppressing speech in violation of the First Amendment; the complaint was dismissed on the grounds that Twitter was a private actor.” [Source]
This is particularly hypocritical, since Twitter kept an entire DATABASE of requests to censor content that came from Republicans.
“When the White House called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down.”
So what are we holding Big Tech accountable FOR, in this case? Gilman doesn’t say.
Full contextual analysis of Section 4.1: Department of Commerce here.
“Today, initiatives aimed at “inclusivity” are in fact creating exclusivity and stringent selectivity in deciding what types of small businesses and entities can use SBA programs. For example, even though the SBA under President Donald Trump proposed a rule to remove all of the unconstitutional religious exclusions from its regulations to conform with Supreme Court decisions that have made their unconstitutionality clear, the SBA has not acted on the proposed rule and still uses religious exclusions in determining eligibility for business loans.”
In context, Kerrigan is arguing that the rules that prevent certain religious organizations or businesses with religious affiliations from benefiting from SBA programs, are exclusionary and unconstitutional. I’d argue that since the SBA is a government program and we have separation of church and state, such restrictions are precisely Constitutional.
The Supreme Court ruling she’s likely referring to here is Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer (2017), where the SCOTUS ruled that denying public benefits to an organization solely because of its religious character was unconstitutional. More about the ruling and why it was wrong in the analysis below.
Full contextual analysis of Section 4.5: Small Business Administration here.