The mother of a first grader punished for handing an “innocent” drawing with the phrases “black lives matter” and “any life” to a classmate of color is appealing to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals after a lower court ruling declared first-grade students are too young to be protected by the First Amendment.
After afirst gradelesson on Martin Luther King Jr. and Black Lives Matter, a student who feltbadfor her classmate of color drew a picturefor that classmateto allegedlyhelp the classmate feel more included.The picture had the phrase “Black LivesMater” (sic) above “any life,” with a picture below of four circles of different colors — which the author says represented her and three classmates holding hands. The student thanked the author for the drawing and took it home, after which the recipient’s mother reportedthe drawingto the school’s principal “to express concern that her daughter wasbeing singled outfor her race.”
The school’s principal, Jesus Becerra, allegedly concluded that writing “any life” was “inconsistent with values taught in the school but acknowledged that [author’s] motives were ‘innocent.’”The recipient’s parents agreed the author innocently drew the picture andthat theydid not want the author punished, but Beccara allegedly declared the drawing “racist” and “inappropriate,”and submitted the first-grade author to punishment.
Becerra forced the author to apologize to the recipient for the drawing — to which the recipient allegedly expressed confusion uponreceiving, leading to more confusion from the author. He also banned the author, a student “who loved to draw,” from drawing and giving pictures to classmates, and teachers banned the author from recess for two weeks without telling her why.
According to Transparent California, Becerra receivedtotalpay and benefits of $207,678.20 in 2022 as elementary school principal at Capistrano Unified School District.
After the author’s mother found out about the punishment a year later, she requested an explanation and an apology from the school,escalating until filinga suit in federal court. The school district claimed Beccara was operating under qualified immunity against the author’s First Amendment and retaliation claims. A federal district court ruled on behalf of Beccara, finding thatfirst gradestudents are not protected by the First Amendment.
“Giving great weight to the fact that the students involved were in first grade, the Court concludes that the Drawing is not protected by the First Amendment,” wrote the court, citing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling finding “schools may restrict speech that ‘might reasonably lead school authorities to forecast substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities’ or that collides ‘with the rights of other students to be secure and let alone.”
The court also said the phrase “any life” was close to thephrase“All Lives Matter,” which it said is “an inclusive denotation but one thatis widely perceivedas racially insensitive and belittling when directed at people of color” in its justification for Beccerra’s actions.
The case’s appeal claims Beccarra’s punishment of the author counts as retaliation for actions protected under the First Amendment, and that says first grader’s speechis protectedunder Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. Sch. Dist, a United States Supreme Court rulingthat says“First Amendment rights … are available to teachers andstudents,” who do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
The appeal from the Pacific Legal Foundation says the lower court incorrectly found the author’s speech fell under Tinker’s First Amendment exemptions for speech at school thatinfringeson another student’s right to be left alonewith regards tobullying,or causes “substantial disruption.”
The case now awaits a hearing and ruling from the Ninth Circuit, which should occur within a year.
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On August 27, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement confirming what the Twitter Files, Murthy vs. Missouri, and many others had long claimed – that the Biden administration aggressively pushed to censor First Amendment-protected speech on social media, in particular relating to Covid-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop.
In the case of Covid, Zuckerberg writes that the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including “humor and satire.”
Zuckerberg also notes that the “FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma,” a Ukrainian energy company that Hunter Biden sat on the board of. The laptop was not “disinformation”, it was real and Twitter and Facebook wrongly suppressed the New York Poststory that exposed it.
But Zuckerberg’s statement missed a key detail – at least three Facebook staff members participated in the Aspen Institute’s Hunter Biden table-top exercise that game-planned how to suppress the story two months in advance of the New York Post story.
The Aspen Institute “table-top” brought together a host of media and Big Tech including Facebook, the New York Times, Twitter, the Washington Post, and “anti-disinformation” NGO First Draft, to create their very own disinformation operation, literally planning day-by-day how they would respond to the leak.
Zuckerberg, however, writes, “That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply.”
You can almost see the fall maple leaves feathering their way innocently to the forest floor.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have demoted the story.”
But there was no surprise, as Facebook had participated in the Aspen exercise two months before the story broke.
Even for Aspen’s Garret Graff, who coordinated the exercise, things went even better than planned:
Regarding Covid-19, Zuckerberg says the government “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to “censor.” Regarding the Hunter Biden laptop, he only mentions they were “warned” “about a potential Russian disinformation operation.” There is no mention of pressure to censor. Did the federal government push Facebook to attend the Aspen Institute exercise? It seems they attended of their own volition.
Attending the Aspen suppression planning for Facebook was Nathaniel Gleicher, “head security policy at Meta,” who continues in his position to this day. The Twitter Files show Gleicher also met regularly with the Department of Defense (DoD) and FBI, and participated in a Harvard-led pre-election tabletop with the DoD whilst the Hunter Biden story was being suppressed on Facebook.
Surely someone as senior as Gleicher, tasked as he was with such sensitive and high-level contacts, would have told his boss about his attendance? After all, the laptop story could have a real impact on the outcome of a presidential election.
If Zuckerberg believes suppressing the story was wrong, why has he kept Gleicher in such a senior role? If he knew of Gleicher’s participation in the Aspen exercise, why didn’t he blow the whistle at the time? Instead, he places all the blame at the foot of the federal government. No doubt they exerted pressure, but that does not appear to be the whole story.
Is Zuckerberg attempting to absolve himself of responsibility?
Andrew Lowenthal is a Brownstone Institute fellow, journalist, and the founder and CEO of liber-net, a digital civil liberties initiative. He was co-founder and Executive Director of the Asia-Pacific digital rights non-profit EngageMedia for almost eighteen years, and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab.
We had lived through and were living through the most significant far-reaching attacks on our rights and liberties in our lifetimes, or, arguably, on the history record in terms of scale and reach, and it was not part of any serious public debate. Zuckerberg played an enormous role in this.
Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s revelation and its implications for our understanding of the last four years, and what it means for the future.
On many subjects important to public life today, vast numbers of people know the truth, and yet the official channels of information sharing are reluctant to admit it. The Fed admits no fault in inflation and neither do most members of Congress. The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet. The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury. Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes.
And yet everyone else does know, already and more and more so.
This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it. We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies. It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be.
In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now.
In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree….I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.
A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier. We all experienced it, almost immediately following lockdowns.
After a few weeks, using that platform to get the word out proved impossible. Facebook once made a mistake and let my piece on Woodstock and the 1969 flu go through but they would never make that mistake again. For the most part, every single opponent of the terrible policies was deplatformed at all levels.
The implications are far more significant than the bloodless letter of Zuckerberg suggests. People consistently underestimate the power that Facebook has over the public mind. This was especially true in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.
The difference in having an article unthrottled much less amplified by Facebook in these years was in the millionfold. When my article went through, I experienced a level of traffic that I had never seen in my career. It was mind-boggling. When the article was shut down some two weeks later – after focused troll accounts alerted Facebook that the algorithms had made a mistake – traffic fell to the usual trickle.
Again, in my entire career of closely following internet traffic patterns, I had never seen anything like this.
Facebook as an information source offers power like we’ve never seen before, especially because so many people, especially among the voting public, believe that the information they are seeing is from their friends and family and sources they trust. The experience of Facebook and other platforms framed the reality that people believed existed outside of themselves.
Every dissident, and every normal person who had some sense that something odd was going on, was made to feel like some sort of crazy cretin who held nutty and probably dangerous views that were completely out of touch with the mainstream.
What does it mean that Zuckerberg now openly admits that he excluded from view anything that contradicted government wishes? It means that any opinions on lockdowns, masks, or vaccine mandates – and all that is associated with that including church and school closures plus vaccine harms – were not part of the public debate.
We had lived through and were living through the most significant far-reaching attacks on our rights and liberties in our lifetimes, or, arguably, on the history record in terms of scale and reach, and it was not part of any serious public debate. Zuckerberg played an enormous role in this.
People like me had come to believe that average people were simply cowards or stupid not to object. Now we know that this might not have been true at all! The people who objected were simply silenced!
During two election cycles, the Covid response was not really in play as a public controversy. This helps account for why. It also means that any candidate who attempted to make this an issue was automatically downgraded in terms of reach.
How many candidates are we talking about here? Considering all the US elections at the federal, state, and local levels, we are talking about several thousand at least. In every case, the candidate who was speaking out about the most egregious attacks on liberty came to be effectively silenced.
A good example is the Minnesota governor’s race in 2022 that was won by Tim Walz, now running as VP with Kamala Harris. The election pitted Walz against a knowledgeable and highly credentialed medical expert, Dr. Scott Jensen, who made the Covid response a campaign issue. Here is how the vote totals lined up.
Of course, Dr. Jensen could get no traction at all on Facebook, which was enormously influential in this election and which just admitted that it was following government guidelines in censoring posts. In fact, Facebook banned him from advertising completely. It reduced his reach by 90% and likely lost him the election.
You can listen to Jensen’s account here:
Consider how many other elections were affected. It’s astonishing to think of the implications of this. It means that quite possibly an entire generation of elected leaders in this country was not legitimately elected, if by legitimate we mean a well-informed public that is given a choice concerning the issues that affect their lives.
Zuckerberg’s censorship – and this pertains to Google, Instagram, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, and Twitter 1.0 – denied the public a choice on the central matter of lockdowns, masking, and shot mandates, the very issues that have fundamentally roiled the whole of civilization and set the path of history on a dark course.
And it is not just the US. These are all global companies, meaning that elections in every other country, all over the globe, were similarly affected. It was a global shutdown of all opposition to radical, egregious, unworkable, and deeply damaging policies.
When you think about it this way, this is not just some minor error in judgment. This was an earth-shattering decision that goes way beyond managerial cowardice. It goes beyond even election manipulation. It is an outright coup that overthrew an entire generation of leaders who stood up for freedom and replaced them with a generation of leaders who acquiesced to power exactly at the time it mattered the most.
Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play? He was obviously unnerved by the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, as he said.
Then also you have the French arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, an event which surely rattles any major CEO of a communication platform. You have the arrest and incarceration of other dissidents like Steve Bannon and many others.
You also have the litigation over free speech back in play now that RFK, Jr has been cleared as having standing, kicking the case of Missouri v. Biden back to the Supreme Court, which wrongly decided last time to deny standing to other plaintiffs.
Zuckerberg of all people knows the stakes. He understands the implications and the scale of the problem, as well as the depths of the corruption and deception at play in the US, EU, UK, and all over the world. He may figure that everything is going to come out at some point, so he might as well get ahead of the curve.
Of all the companies in the world that would have a real handle on the state of public opinion right now, it would be Facebook. They see the scale of the support for Trump. And Trump has said on multiple occasions, including in a new book coming out in early September, that he believes Zuckerberg should be prosecuted for his role in manipulating election outcomes. What if, for example, his own internal data is showing 10 to 1 support for Trump over Kamala, completely contradicting the polls which are not credible anyway? That alone could account for his change of heart.
It becomes especially pressing since the person who did the censoring at the Biden White House, Rob Flaherty, now serves as Digital Communications Strategist for the Harris/Walz campaign. There can be no question that the DNC intends to deploy all the same tools, many times over and far more powerful, should they take back the White House.
“Under Rob’s leadership,” said Biden upon Flaherty’s resignation, “we’ve built the largest Office of Digital Strategy in history and, with it, a digital strategy and culture that brought people together instead of dividing them.”
At this point, it’s safe to assume that even the most well-informed outsider knows about 0.5% of the whole of the manipulation, deception, and backroom machinations that have taken place over the past five or so years. Investigators on the case have said that there are hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence that are not classified but have yet to be revealed to the public. Maybe all of this will pour forth starting in the new year.
Therefore, the Zuckerberg admission has much larger implications than anyone has yet admitted. It provides a first official and confirmed peek into the greatest scandal of our times, the global silencing of critics at all levels of society, resulting in manipulating election outcomes, a distorted public culture, the marginalization of dissent, the overriding of all free speech protections, and gaslighting as a way of life of government in our times.
Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
