Below is my column in The Hill on the recent significant victory for free speech out of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. It is a story of how this little first-grade girl schooled her principal and a federal judge on the essence of free speech.
Here is the column:
In March 2021, California principal Jesus Becerra was confronted by a clear and present threat to his school.
Standing before him was the culprit — a student apparently so dangerous that Becerra had to act without delay to protect the entire Viejo Elementary School in the Capistrano Unified School District.
The little girl is known only as B.B. in federal filings, but her actions were so heinous that a parent alerted Becerra to take whatever action was necessary.
Beccera showed B.B. the incriminating evidence: a picture of children with the words “any life” written under “Black Lives Matter.”
Confronting the little girl, Becerra allegedly called the paper “racist.” He told her that she would need to apologize for the outrageous statement. (Becerra denies using the word “racist.”). Her family alleges that she was also suspended from recess for two weeks, apparently to consider her failures as a human being.
B.B. had just sat through a book reading about Martin Luther King. It ended with “Black Lives Matter,” an expression that she had never previously heard. She felt bad that black people in the book were shown as being treated differently and unfairly. She decided to draw a picture of her friends holding hands under those words with the addition of “any life.” She gave the picture to one of those friends, a girl known in the litigation as M.C.
Throughout history, friends have given each other such notes and pictures without incident. But in these times, an array of adults felt the need to intervene, to make sure the girls understood that this innocent act was actually a despicable act of latent racism.
When M.C. brought the picture home, her mother was upset. M.C. is the only black student in the class and B.B. is white. She wrote to Becerra to object that “while we can appreciate the sentiment of Black Lives Matter, my husband and I do not trust the place ‘any life’ is coming from.” She did not want this to become a “larger issue” but asked Becerra to take the “actions that need to be taken to address the issue.”
Becerra allegedly demanded that B.B apologize and then suspended her from recess. B.B. did not tell her mother, Chelsea Boyle, about the incident or the alleged punishment for eleven months. But then the family moved to address the matter. They faced an array of administrators and lawyers who fought them at every stage. The school denied that the punishment had even happened, asserting that “the weight of evidence” did not support the claim that the little girl had been punished in any way.
Ultimately, the case made its way before federal District Court Judge David Carter, a Bill Clinton appointee. The school demanded summary judgment. Even though a court at that stage must assume all disputed facts in the most favorable way for the nonmoving party (B.B. in this case), Carter held that she could indeed be punished for writing those two words, “any life.”
Judge Carter declared that B.B.’s drawing was “not protected under the First Amendment” and that teachers like Becerra “are far better equipped than federal courts at identifying when speech crosses the line from harmless banter to impermissible harassment.” Besides, Carter added, “the downsides of regulating speech there is not as significant as it is in high schools, where students are approaching voting age and controversial speech could spark conducive conversation.”
In Judge Carter’s world, there is little danger that elementary students are likely to develop a taste for free speech, let alone contemplate its use. (Judge Carter had shown equally dismissive views of free speech in a controversial ruling related to the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.)
And so B.B. apparently got what she deserved as a little harasser, roaming the halls of Viejo Elementary School with her hateful box of crayons.
Fortunately, however, with the help of the Pacific Legal Foundation, the parents appealed Judge Carter’s chilling opinion. Last week, they won a major free speech victory before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
In 1969, the Supreme Court famously declared that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” However, since that iconic case, federal courts have often given short shrift to the free speech rights of students.
Teachers around the country have become notorious as speech commissars who bar expressions deemed divisive or intolerant. That often includes any conservative or religious speech.
An elementary school in Kansas came under fire recently after Arbor Creek Elementary Principal Melissa Snell stopped the wearing of shirts reading “Freedom,” which became popular after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
In another case, U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Boyko ruled in Ohio that students could be barred from wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” shirts — a coded political expression criticizing the media and former President Joe Biden. Other courts have also upheld such censorship by teachers, who claim that the expression is a substitute for a vulgar expression chanted by crowds (“F— Joe Biden”). But these shirts do not contain vulgarity. Rather, the expression is used as a defiant reference to the media bias that led to the original substitution of the words, allegedly to protect Biden — it is a “Yankee Doodling” of the political and media establishment.
In these cases, judges also wrote opinions upholding the arbitrary censorship of words by school administrators, who often show greater tolerance for progressive political expression.
In this case, however, the Ninth Circuit broke from these ranks in defending this little girl.
The panel (composed of Judges Consuelo Callahan, a George W. Bush appointee, and Roopali Desai and Ana de Alba, Biden appointees) ruled that just being in elementary school does not mean that B.B. has no meaningful free speech rights. A school, they found, “may restrict students’ speech only when the restriction is reasonably necessary to protect the safety and well-being of its students.”
B.B. will now have the opportunity denied by Judge Carter: to prove that giving a friend a picture celebrating all lives is not a threat to “the safety and well-being” of the entire Viejo Elementary School. Ironically, the school has taught its students an invaluable lesson: They have the right to speak and should never allow others to silence them arbitrarily. This first-grader prevailed over administrators, teachers, lawyers, and a federal judge who saw little “downside” in censoring her.
I doubt it is a lesson that will take. Perhaps the girl, by now probably a middle schooler, should draw a picture of Principal Becerra, Judge Carter, and others holding hands with the expression, “We all can speak.”
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
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Sometimes it is just better to look the other way and let it go. It was a drawing by a child. BFD. Now look how much it cost the school district because they couldn’t ignore it. Monumental idiots.
People like this should never be given any responsibility.
The school could ignore it. They could not ignore the other family getting this little demeaning page and complaining about it.
Why is only one figure neatly colored in and the brown crayon/marker just scribbled over the other faces? It looks like the parents did that one figure and added the “any lives” and asked B. B. to color the rest.
Maybe someone can read to trump.
“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will wrote. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”
Becerra is a reprehensible child abuser with no immunity for these harmful acts against an innocent child.
Severe criminal and civil punishment is appropriate under our system. Should eat prison food for the rest of their life.
Child abuser? Are you talking about trump again. He is accused of raping a 13 year old girl. Yep, mister GrabEmByThePussy.
I hear they’re having some great success with Prozac in treating TDS 🙄
“TDS” is the go to response when unable to cope with the truth.
Accused by whom? No one credible. I can accuse YOU of the same thing. And also Schumer. I accuse him and you of it, and the fact that I’m a pseudonymous commenter on a blog with no access to any actual facts shouldn’t make any difference, according to you.
Also violated her right to stand trail before punishment.
Nope. There is no such right. This was not a criminal case, and she was not deprived of life, liberty, or property. She may have had a right to natural justice, but not to due process, let alone a trial (or a trail!).
The first fault is M.C.’s parents.
Roberts is unhappy with criticism of his rogue judges and says it has to stop.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/us-supreme-courts-roberts-says-195129854.html
It’ll stop when Roberts gets his own house in order.
Judges have to stop pretending they were elected emperors.
Roberts is a windbag, fulminating failure. Perhaps he should try criticizing and controlling his lunatic district court judges.
Everyone brush up on totalitarian political systems and where they are. It’ll require thought.
Human will and reason govern free people as a political system. Where are those nations.
Immigration requires reform otherwise there’s mismatch. There shouldn’t be immigration from totalitarian nations such as Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia. The focus is totalitarian and not Islam. There shouldn’t be third world immigrants as they are burdens on tax payers.
Americans are a free people and do not mix God and State nor are Americans communists and Americans are a frugal people. Temporary asylum only unless it’s an unusual circumstance.
Americans freely utilize free will and reason in ethics and morality. There’s quite a mess here now isn’t there. Immigrants should not be a mismatch.
Mismatch caused the deformity of the nation. Wake up. The totalitarian Mamdami, Omar, Tlaib hold offices and many others. You must know the difference between religion and political system and you don’t.
She should have quoted that Monumental President, who was the Grand Mufti of the local BLM chapter.
“If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution [of slavery]. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land. [This plan’s] sudden execution is impossible. [Should freed blacks be made] politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this, and [even] if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not … We can not, then, make them equals.”
– Abraham Lincoln, Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854
Meanwhile Turls painfully ignores the clear anti first ammendment measures taken by the trump administration against media outlets.
Who’s the better Actor? (Pam Bondi vs. Gwyneth Paltrow)
Pam Bondi
https://i.iheart.com/v3/re/new_assets/6991de2dc933373ae0807665?ops=max(1060,0),quality(80)
VS
Gwyneth Paltrow
https://style.news.am/static/NewFolder%201/%D0%B3%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%82.png
Too hot to tell the difference!
In the Movie: -TRUMP-
I can see Gwyneth Paltrow playing the part of Pam Bondi
(Oh Yeah – There will be a Movie, something along the lines of PATTON (George C. Scott) … )
The degree to which racist whites get triggered by the idea that black lives matter is always a fascination to me.
To watch Turls reach into the elementary school realm to whip up this rage is hilarious.
And the Israelite slaves were out of Egypt before the ink was dry on their release papers, but then they had the capacity and acumen sufficient for the task.
There were no Israelite slaves in Egypt.
Is it Turley who was triggered by an innocent comment or the little black girl’s mother and the school personnel?
the response in this girl’s instance is the non-racist version.
imagine being triggered by the fact that all lives matter.
When the baby delivery room at the hospital is overflowing, we do not just discard the extra babies. We make room for them in our world because love all of them. When did these babies turn ‘bad’ to you?
YOU MATTER – unless you multiply yourself by the speed of light squared, then you energy!
Voila! Einstein!
YOU… got me there.
Unless you are Darth Vader then according to the equation you are Dark Energy!
You really couldn’t make this up if you tried !!!
A Department of Housing and Urban Development staffer tasked with sourcing affordable home solutions is asking for help buying his home.
Benjamin Hobbs, the assistant secretary for public and Indian housing, has listed a donations pot for a down payment on a house as part of his Zola wedding registry. While not an out-there request, with many people specifically asking for cash towards a house down payment in a wedding registry, an ethics board believes Hobbs’ request could be a breach.
Because Hobbs is a government employee, ethics experts believe the request could be a chance for those wanting to curry favor with the department to get closer to him.
Those experts warned that Hobbs’ request could contradict his role overseeing affordable housing programs for the disabled, seniors, low-income families, and Native Americans.
Congress has no power to tax for, fund, or regulate any aspect, facet, or degree of housing, Article 1, Section 8.
Speaking of being {Wrong}, Tolstoy wrote: ‘Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it’.
Ah, the dictatorship of the majority of one-man, one-vote democrazy.
The dictatorship of the “poor” majority.
Of course, democracy can only exist in its severely restricted-vote form.
What was the harm in BB’s drawing and words? She was punished for harm?
What exactly did the parents think was harmful in BB’S drawing that a meeting with a principal was in order?
I don’t get it.
There was no harm just a little girl loving her friends. ALL.HER FRIENDS
The girl was expressing kind togetherness and they dashed that innocent hope with their ridiculous racism narrative. Rude and callous awakening to the ugliest side of the leftys for someone so young. They love to diminish the human spirit as they shamelessly attempted here. America is the LEAST racist country in the entire world. Many thousands died to enshrine that principle.
You would need to be and see everything as racist and then you would see how it and literally everthing in the entire world is racist to these divisive morons. AND how life is soooo unfair!!! Wahhh! i deserve more free stuff!!! < that's them.
You obviously don’t understand the mind of the radical left.
What a strange idea about “the harm in BB’s drawing and words.”
The majority of America has acted as if Black lives certainly don’t matter at all. The harm is saying that there isn’t any harm because the no one else has the same problems imposed on them by the majority. Try this: go to a synagogue and yell that “All religions matter.” Try at a cancer ward with “Healthy people matter.”
Almost all the adults I know and I’ve met would not behave the way the victimhood-clinging, neurotic black mother and school principal acted in this made-for-TV-drama.
Yet, reading the comments, the rarity and abnormality of this aberrant behavior seems to not register at all. Rather, very many commenters come away assuming this
way of behaving has become the norm. People comment as if they think of themselves as still normal and non-neurotic, but fear hey are being outnumbered by crazies.
One simple explanation why is that media consumers believe what they are reading is representative of the world beyond that which they can directly see with their own eyes and ears. It couldn’t be further from the truth.
A few commenters suggest how the situation could have been handled better, e.g., getting the parents to meet at school and talk it out. Or, how about one parent phoning the other to discuss how their 1st grade girls are getting along? Or how about the black parent recognizing the goodwill and camaraderie expressed in B.B’s drawing?
These are normal behaviors, by well-adjusted parents, black and white. And my claim is that that’s how almost all Americans are behaving. The case that makes the news is not the normal case. News doesn’t reflect back on Americans how good, normal and understanding we are. That’s considered boring among journalists. Who wants to pay attention to that?
Prof. Turley is attracted to cases and controversies, the more bizarre the better.
But, please, try to think quantitatively about how news stories are selected. They are the farthest thing from representative of American society. They are based on a news format called sensationalist alarmism. Turley has adopted that format for his daily column.
It doesn’t begin to imply anything about how typical Americans are behaving or viewing things. That information is simply not covered, so you and I are smart to imagine what is NOT being covered…what is NOT being written about…and how that reality dwarfs that which media chooses to put in our faces.
Yes, it would be great if NO parent reacted as did the mentally-unstable one in this sage. But, realistically, what are the odds of that in a nation of 340 million?
pbinca, I do not dispute that this kind of case is rare in a statistical sense. What concerns me is what “normal” people now take to be normal. The media do not pluck cases out of a vacuum. They highlight stories that their audience has already been conditioned to see as plausible or at least within the bounds of the thinkable. It takes an extreme case like this to get anyone’s attention, but the deeper problem is all the smaller, quieter signals that never make the radar: the trainings, the policies, the offhand “you cannot say that here” that would have been unthinkable 50 or 100 or 200 years ago. That is the Overton Window at work. Each new “aberration” gets processed, argued over, and partly absorbed, and the baseline of what we tolerate from institutions, especially toward children, moves a little further. My concern is not that every principal behaves like this one. It is that we are steadily teaching a rising generation to live comfortably under levels of managerial control over their speech and moral judgment that earlier generations, across very different eras, would have found foreign.
Olly – good points all around. Even back in the 1990s – while I was working for a large tech corporation before I switched careers to law – everyone in the company had to sit through trainings that were left-wing propaganda and quite Orwellian. For example, they would make some bizarre left-wing statement, and then nobody was allowed to leave the class for lunch until everyone agreed with it. This was mainstreamed at the corporate level 30 years ago, can you guess why corporate culture is now totally left-wing?
The bizarre statements in question usually had to do with normalizing the most abberant, obscene sexual conduct, and agreeing that your grandmother did that (not sure how that had anything to do with the technical mission of the corporation).
Then one time they were promoting the “diversity is our strength” canard. They had someone from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) come in to lecture us about it. Recognize that name? Probably not, since DEC was going bankrupt at the time and ceased to exist shortly thereafter. So they paid some HR mindless drone from a failing company to tell us what corporate strength consisted of. I had to laugh.
“The bizarre statements in question usually had to do with normalizing the most abberant, obscene sexual conduct, and agreeing that your grandmother did that ”
Something that never happened, except your grandmother was a loose woman who would do anything.
Oldman, that’s it exactly. I had a very similar experience in the Navy. What you describe is a textbook example of modern formation. No statute changed, but your continued employment and even your ability to walk out for lunch were made contingent on performing agreement with a particular political line. Do that across corporate America for thirty years and you do not just “influence” culture; you produce a generation of managers and professionals who have been trained to equate safety and professionalism with ideological conformity. That is why I keep pressing the citizen formation point. People who learn early that the prudent way to live is to say whatever the facilitator wants to hear will carry that reflex into HR, into school administration and, eventually, into how they exercise public power.
It’s setting a new normative. Go far out on the left and a new normative is set to the left claiming a bit new territory. It’s incremental.
You are not the only one who has changed focus, but you may be one of the few who can name it. Once you see citizen formation as the key variable, everything else on this blog really does become downstream: court decisions, elections, bureaucratic overreach, even these comment fights are all symptoms of how earlier generations were, or were not, formed to live as self‑governing citizens rather than managed subjects.
Allah Allah in free…not IT!
What if wokedom starts losing its oomph? Do you think Ibrahim X. Kendi is selling as many books as he was in 2021? That’s when this case began.
Will you be able to see change happening in the direction you are hoping for? Or will you cling to your past grievance?
I’m seeing change. In a good direction. That doesn’t mean blowing the “all clear” horn. But it does mean our country is not standing still, and those wanting to go backwards to affirmative action, low-consequence black and brown crime, and “people of” color vs. whites categorization — they are fewer and more isolated than a couple of years ago.
So, something that happened 5 years ago might not be an indicator of how things are now. That said, reams of school board trustees from that woke era need to be voted out this fall.
“A few commenters suggest how the situation could have been handled better,.
Easy: The principal could have been the adult in the room, told the upset mother “she’s in first grade, she meant no harm” end of story.
And then not also subject her to child emotional abuse. They instead chose to abuse. FOR their insane narrative. that’s who we’re dealing with here. Trump calls them sick. Believe it, here’s proof.
The principal is the true doofus in this story.
Here’s a story which seems similar, but with adults, about the Palo Alto school board and an ongoing controversy over ethnic studies. A woke faction wants CRT and an anti-woke faction wants otherwise. https://padailypost.com/2026/03/16/school-district-investigated-one-of-its-own-board-members-few-knew-of-investigation/
An AAPI trustee was elected on an anti-woke platform and within weeks got into a back-and-forth with a BIPOC administrator over who felt “safe”. Trustee doesn’t feel safe with crowd jeering; administrator doesn’t feel safe because spouse could be assassinated for DWB. If you understand CRT, BIPOC trumps AAPI, so administrator complains trustee is racist and an investigation is launched. Before it concludes, a 2nd BIPOC administrator tells the board their fellow member must be denounced, held accountable, and re-educated.
CRT is a college graduate level study of the way laws and government policies were and are used as weapons against various racial segments. It looks at how carefully crafted laws target those segments in ways that are carefully concealed. An example law is to make it illegal to sleep under an overpass and claim it applies to everyone, both wealthy and impoverished; this is true but only the impoverished will be arrested for violating it. Recall the poll tests used to exclude Black voters.
Norm schmorm, the point being s a parent, a teacher, a principal, admin people AND A DISTRICT COURT JUDGE had this idea. You can pooh pooh it if you want, but it is an issue.
I beg to differ. For the actions of the state, upon an innocent child’s Constitutional right to speak (an act of unbiased love) has evolved, as with other matters Mr. Turley brings to our attention, into caselaw and now precedent for those other state tyrannical oppressors who may think twice ( doubt it) before oppressing another citizen, especially over such innocent and legal exercising of one’s rights. Na Nu, Na Nu.
Professor Turley: Here’s another case involving basic freedoms, albeit on foreign soil. It’s about parents with two daughers who were taken away from them by the state over abuse claims the state knew were false. The state sees the parents as religious extremists because they actually attend church regularly, rather than just walking by churches. The parents completed parenting courses and were deemed by social services to be fit parents, but that counted for little in their favor. The Supreme Court of Sweden refused to hear their case in 2025, but the European Court of Human Rights “deemed the case inadmissible on the grounds of failure to exhaust legal remedies in Sweden” (I wasn’t aware that there is a super-Supreme Court in Sweden that they could have appealed to).
https://www.foxnews.com/media/christian-parents-lose-final-appeal-after-swedish-state-took-daughters-following-false-abuse-claim
*Sweden’s state religion for 500 years was Christianinty, until 2000 when the official Church of Sweden became an independent Evangelical Lutheran faith community. About 55% of Swedes are still affiliated with it. Apparently they like to be affiliated but not to attend it, as regular church attendance is now considered “extreme” in Sweden.
oldman
When you say that about 55% of Swedes are “still affiliated” with the Lutheran church you do not quite grasp the reality. Up until 1996 there was automatic registration in the church at birth if one of the parents was also registered.
Since 1996, the number of people affiliated with the church has steadily dropped down to about 50%, and drops every year. The only reason that the official affiliation rate is still so high at 50% is because older people who were automatically registered are still on the books so to speak, and younger people simply choose not to join.
The reality is that less than 5% of Swedes attend church on a regular basis. This is the pattern in most of the world where religiosity is on the decline due to the triumph of reason and science over absurd religious belief.
Throughout history mankind has worshipped over 1,000 gods of one form or another. But reason and science has dismissed the existence of the vast majority of these gods. It is just a matter of time before the last handful of “gods” can be dismissed as fantasies of the human mind.
Look at New Zealand for example where hundreds of churches are for sale. Religiosity is almost non-existent in New Zealand, and churches are being abandoned because of poor attendance and lack of funds. Sometimes churches are simply abandoned and left derelict. However there is a thriving market to buy older churches to be converted into substantial residences or restaurants. Google this phrase: churches for sale in new Zealand.
Hopefully, in the not too distant future, all forms of religiosity will be considered to be extremism, and the religious indoctrination of children will be correctly criminalized as child abuse.
Hopefully, in the not too distant future, all forms of religiosity will be considered to be extremism, and the religious indoctrination of children will be correctly criminalized as child abuse.
Hail to you, Communist dictator.
So a vacuum exists re religion. Not to worry, Islam migrated to fill the void.
This “america” is NOTHING like the United States of America. Nothing…
The world of immigrants, minorities, sexual pervs, communists and socialists, everything except Americans.
God bless
Prof Turley writes, “… this little first-grade girl schooled her principal and a federal judge on the essence of free speech.” It is one thing to be “schooled” and yet quite a different thing to learn. This clearly should never have become a Federal case – do schools not have any common sense? The school is supposed to be a learning institution. It was a missed opportunity to “school” M.C. and M.C.’s parents as well as the rest of the school. It would be interesting to know if the principal and school learned their lesson or as I suspect just shrugged this off as just another event in a “win some and lose some” game.
Losing freedom. Losing the country.
“It Wasn’t Worth It!”