We have previously discussed high school administrators and teachers who engage in censorship and speech regulation, often targeting religious and conservative students. These cases cost school districts millions in court costs, but the school officials never seem to face any consequences. In California, Piner High School has joined this ignoble effort, punishing the high school football captain for expressing support for the “Cornell 7” on his own Instagram page. Other students then protested not to support free speech but to demand further punishment for the student. I wonder where they learned that repressive view of free speech?
According to media reports, the unnamed student wrote “Free the Cornell Seven” on his personal Instagram account and the school called him out. As should be obvious to any teacher or administrator, this is entirely protected speech under the First Amendment. The student was not discussing the school, calling for some school disruption or destruction of property, or encouraging violence. He was stating his view that defendants who have not been tried, let alone convicted, are innocent.
This case has divided the country with many politicians and pundits declaring the guilt of these students before any charges are actually filed against them. A prosecutor previously declined to take the case to a grand jury due to conflicting statements from the alleged victim.
Rather than acknowledge the serious free speech concerns raised by the school’s reported actions, Santa Rosa City school’s public information officer, Patrick Gannon, issued a virtue-signaling statement on how it will not tolerate students expressing such thoughts on their personal social media accounts, or presumably publicly in their private time:
“Action was taken by the school and the district, and we’re continuing to have conversations. We don’t tolerate making light of sexual assault. That’s why we have a zero-tolerance policy.”
Whatever success the school has had on basic subjects like English and Math, it has clearly taught the student body to disregard the free speech of others. The football team reportedly forfeited a game after 200 students walked out to the “Santa Rosa City Schools district offices to demand accountability and greater support for students speaking out against sexual violence.”
There was no statement from Principal Andrea Correia or the school denying the reported punishment. Instead, Gannon met with the 200 students and, instead of discussing the importance of free speech and due process, said the school “wants them to know that accountability and safety are top priorities.”
Students are demanding further punishment of the student for expressing his views on the case. Obviously, if the same students had posted “Justice for Jane Doe at Cornell” he would have been celebrated rather than punished.
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.
As we have previously discussed, 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 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.
Judge Karen Nelson Moore joined Sixth Circuit Judge John Nalbandian in a deeply flawed holding that, under the “vulgarity exception,” the action was constitutional. The Supreme Court was asked to hear the “Let’s Go Brandon” case, but recently declined to hear the case. It was a very disappointing denial from the Court for many of us in the free speech community.
In the California case, the underlying law is clear. Any punishment of this student would be a glaring violation of the First Amendment. The student can go to court to have any such actions set aside. However, it is equally clear that the administrators and teachers responsible for such actions will face no accountability.
The “zero tolerance policy” at Piner High School appears to refer to the exercise of free speech by those with unpopular or minority viewpoints. It is certainly a preview of higher education, where viewpoint intolerance and ideological orthodoxy are the norm. This chilling lesson has clearly taken hold at Piner High School.
The Left loves using determinism to excuse the rotten choices and actions of those it does like, and to unjustly punish those it doesn’t like.
9/11? Blame America.
Got $200k in student loan debt? Blame schools and corporations. And make the rest of us pay off those loans.
And now in this case: 200 students disrupt classes by protesting. The Left’s response? Blame the football player. His opinion triggered them. And punish him for their actions.
It’s quite a racket. And a grotesque injustice.
I might have been unpleasantly surprised, but if it were me who had made that post (with which, by the way, I agree) and the school threatened to “punish me”, my response would have been “Do whatever you think can successfully defend, or afford – I look at the downstream from any punishment you inflict as the beginning of my college fund, because I will sue you six ways from Sunday. Even if – IF – you win and your defense prevails, defending my lawsuit will cost you a bundle.
“He was stating his view that defendants who have not been tried, let alone convicted, are innocent.”
That is not a true statement. The defendants may be guilty, but are presumed innocent under the law until convicted. There are a large number of people who are entirely innocent who have been convicted.
The conclusion drawn from the statement is that no one can ever be taken to court because everyone is innocent and it would be an injustice to prosecute innocent people. The presumption of innocence only applies for determining lawful punishments; not their moral state of being.
inos don’t have free speech rights.
Minors!
David,
Read the TINKER Supreme Court decision.
“She said, she said.”
She did it: substance ingestion and group sex. She consented. She liked it. No complaints. She said so. She wanted to meet again in the future.
Then she saw a great big once-in-a-lifetime PAYDAY and she changed her mind.
“She said, she said.”
Boys In Idaho Inspired By Cornell
Police are investigating allegations that members of Timberline High School’s football team shared violent messages in a group chat, including threats of rape and murder directed at a female student. One of those messages reportedly referenced the Cornell case.
The allegations have sparked outrage, a student walkout and the cancellation of Timberline’s homecoming football game. And they’ve also raised some really difficult questions.
What are we teaching our boys about women, sex and respect? When does something dismissed as a joke become something much more serious? And how do we raise boys who are willing to speak up when their friends cross the line?
Edited From:
“After Timberline Allegations, Experts Discuss Preventing Sexual Violence”
Boise Public Radio, 10/12/26
So, if I understand this correctly, the student said the defendants are innocent until proven guilty and they should be supported in that aspect of this situation – is that controversial?
Much is being made, by the typical “get Turley” mob, of a school district document that guides a student-athlete’s social media behavior. Some contend, without citing any particular term of that document, that the student who posted “Free the Cornell Seven” violated an agreement that he (and his parents) signed.
Here is the only element of that “Student Athletic Clearance Packet” that possibly speaks to the student’s social media post:
A student-athlete “will only post positive things”.
So what exactly does “positive things” mean? It means precisely the nightmare at Piner High School: If you disagree with the mob (that the Cornell 7 are presumed guilty of rape), then you are guilty of posting a negative thing. And you must be punished.
And that is the essence of JT’s recurring argument: When you unleash the mob, you lose free speech.
It’s not just that, it’s the fact that his post also prompted 200 students to walk out of class in protest.
That in itself is a substantial disruption of school. Which does violate the agreement.
As a team captain the student DID violate his agreement and that was met with disciplinary action. If he was just a ‘regular’ student his post wouldn’t have been an issue. But he signed an agreement with the school agreeing to represent the school and it’s values when he chose to join the football team which is a privilege, not a right.
@X–
So the student violated some paltry “student conduct agreement.” Big, fat, hairy deal.
Perhaps that does give the pathetic, sorry, high school administrators the “right” to punish the student in some as-yet unspecified way, but so what? It only proves–in my mind at least–that the administration is small, mean and unreasonably vengeful over such a trivial “violation.” And this “violation” committed on the kid’s personal social media page.
Again, I have to ask, so what?
And the persistence with which some of the commenters on this thread have continued, ad nauseum, to argue that the student was somehow not protected by the First Amendment because he may or may not have signed some [probably] legally-unenforceable “student conduct agreement” only further persuades me that the Looney Left is also small, mean and unreasonably vengeful, quite as usual.
DrZee – X exists only to say the opposite of what Professor Turley says. X has literally no other reason for existing. Plus, every word out of X’s mouth is a lie, a made-up fact to support X’s Turley-is-wrong position. I never read anything written by X anymore, because I have learned that nothing X writes is worth reading. I don’t mind liberals making reasonable arguments, and I really wish this blog could attract some, but X is not here for that purpose.
@oldmanfromkansas–
Many thanks for the heads-up. I haven’t been following Prof. Turley all that long, so I’m not all that “up” on all of the recurrent “personalities” on this blog.
(Except, of course, for that prolific Anonymous nuisance who seems to have had a thing for attacking Estovir. Thankfully, we seem not to have heard much from that Anonymous pest in recent days.)
But what you have said about X seems to me to be very accurate. So again, thank you.
The TDS troll is paid by Media Matters to copy/paste AI content attacking everyone and anyone, but always posting agitprop for leftists. There is nothing authentic about his posts, even less than his avatar name aka sock puppets. That he attacks me is huge praise that I have mortality wounded his ego.
OldManFromKS,
Well said.
Hear the village idiot once. No need to hear the village idiot a second time.
Just scroll past.
DrZee,
So what?
It is a big deal. Because it’s the law. School administrators are following the law. Professor Turley and all of MAGA is all about following the law. Right?
Why bother having law if it’s just gonna get in the way of your way when things get …inconvenient…or…impractical against those you support…,right?
You’re practically conceding that the law IS on the school’s side. It’s just so grudgingly barely plausible that I’m…right, but you just really don’t want to admit it.
Nobody has been able to provide an argument against my position AND support it with evidence AND the law. Just long drawn out…nuh huh’s
No the school did not follow the law.
Prior restraint of free speech is unconstitutional.
Government viewpoint discrimination is unconstitutional.
While there is no law to support what you are claiming, if there were – it would be unconstitutional.
The idiotic argument you have made is that an unconstitutional contract that does not prohibit this students speach on SM somehow does.
In no sane was is that “the law”
If you agree to bake a dozen cookies for me for $3.50
is that “the law” ?
do you have ADHD or something ? You are all over the place and with no cohesion in your arguments.
“It’s not just that, it’s the fact that his post also prompted 200 students to walk out of class in protest.
That in itself is a substantial disruption of school. Which does violate the agreement.”
The students who walked out of class should be suspended.
We punish acts not speech. There are extremely few instances in which the speech of one person justifies the bad acts of others.
A protest is YOUR choice – you can do so in response to anothers words – but the school can not use the disruptive conduct of the protestors as justifcation for punishing the speech of a classmate.
In terms of constitutionality – disrupting class means blurting out unsolicited speech in the midst of a class.
In the Tinker decision SCOTUS would have allowed the suspension of students who walked out of class,
or who shouted down a fellow student.
Disrupting class does NOT mean punishing one persons otherwise protected speech because of the emotional response of others.
“As a team captain the student DID violate his agreement and that was met with disciplinary action.”
You have not demonstrated that this student violated an unconstitutional contract.
As noted before – a school can not make a brand disparagement claim – they are not in the free market, they suffer no actual harm from the criticism of students outside of school (or even inside)
The zero tolerance policy is for ILLEGAL ACTS – this student did not act.
There is a clause about posting images of illegal conduct – no such posts occured.
The final cause is just advise that social media posts are for life. There is not even an attempt to have an operative clause.
” If he was just a ‘regular’ student his post wouldn’t have been an issue.”
How stupid can you get.
No you do not lose your first amendment rights because you are skilled in music or sports.
You do not lose your first amendment rights because you qualify for public benefits.
Can Trump require that people receiving welfare or social security not disparage his administration ?
Do you think before you post ?
“But he signed an agreement with the school agreeing to represent the school and it’s values when he chose to join the football team which is a privilege, not a right.”
No, No, and No.
Thje agreement still does not say what you claim.
If the school actually “represents values” such as guilty before proven – that is a MASSIVE constitutional violation.
Public schools can not condition ANYTHING on “values” beyond the law and order.
No joining the footbal team is not a priviledge any more than getting Medicare is.
It is a public offer by government for those who can demonstrate merit in a field.
AGAIN Government can engage in viewpoint neutral constraints of limited resources.
If it offers extracuricular oportunities they must be available to all without any viewpoint related constraint.
You lose Big time.
Fire is going to eat Pine HS for breakfast lunch and dinner.
This is unconstitutional
and it is authoritarian.
And worse still – the student in questions speech did NOT violate the faux unconstitutional contract you keep pretending has merit.
The brand nonsense is just a flat out loser.
The zero tolerance clause needs no contract – I would imagine all schools have a zero tolerance policy towards illegal conduct.
Advice to students regarding the permanent nature of social media is just that – Advice.
You have further claimed that this student disrupted class because of the conduct of other students.
There is no such thing as 3rd party liability for speech.
While Morse v Fredrick was decided wrongly – even this students speech is inside morse v fredrick.
He did not advocate for illegal conduct at a school sponsored function.
You have lost this debate 10 ways from sunday.
Go read Tinker.
https://www.oyez.org/cases/1968/21
or Morse
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2006/06-278
@John Say–
Bravo!!!!
John Say,
Now you’re trying to apply the ‘hecklers veto’ argument? LOL! You’re grasping at straws man.
Your argument to apply the ‘Heckler’s Veto’ doctrine to a public high school is clearly stupid. Federal courts have repeatedly ruled that this doctrine doesn’t function the same way inside school walls. Under the Tinker standard, administrators do not have to wait for the speaker to personally halt a class; if a student’s public actions directly trigger a material, physical breakdown of school operations—like a 200-student walkout that freezes a district office—the school has clear constitutional authority to intervene to restore order.
Comparing a high school football roster to Medicare or Social Security is a hugely stupid legal false equivalence. Entitlements are non-discretionary federal benefits. High school sports are legally classified as a voluntary privilege, not a constitutional right. As the Supreme Court ruled in Vernonia, student-athletes voluntarily submit themselves to a far narrower scope of privacy and a higher degree of behavioral regulation because they choose to represent a public institution in uniform.
Finally, your reading of Supreme Court precedent stops in 2007. In the Court’s recent Mahanoy (2021) decision, Justice Breyer explicitly stated that public schools retain the legal right to regulate off-campus social media speech if it threatens team cohesion or triggers a ‘substantial disruption’ to the campus. The school didn’t enact a viewpoint-based penalty on an abstract political thought; they enforced a voluntary sportsmanship contract after an official team leader’s digital behavior sparked a substantial school disruption.
You have no argument. The fact you had to go to a “hecklers veto” argument is absolutely hilarious! You lost.
@X–
Are you sure that you read Mahanoy correctly? I confess that I didn’t read the entire opinion–I don’t have that much time to waste on your remarks–but according to Scotusblog.com:
So it seems to me that you’re the one whose “argument [may well be] absolutely hilarious.” If you care to dig further into Mahanoy and produce detailed quotes (with links) that prove your point, then by all means do so.
But as suggested by oldmanfromkansas above, it’s probably not worth my time to try to do so.
DrZee,
You didn’t read my other posts explaining exactly why Mahanoy doesn’t apply. I pointed out exactly why and I did produce exact quotes. Because I DID read the whole opinion.
There’s several posts of mine pointing out exactly what you ask.
Oldmanfromkansas, can barely muster out an argument that makes sense.
X in every single supreme court case ever the part that is absolutely binding on the country is THE HOLDING. Everything else is dicta.
The Holding in Mahoney which was a stronger case for suspension than this one is that Schools can not suspend students for social media posts – doing so violates the first amendment.
The holding in Mahoney is UNQUALIFIED.
Further even your absurd misunderstanding of disrupting class did not apply in Mahoney and does not apply here.
The students speech was NOT in a classroom. In Elonis SCOTUS found that social media posts do not have imminence
As I have noted to you before – you are not going to get SCOTUS ever saying that the reactions of 3rd parties to someones speach are DIRECT, but you are 10,000 miles from direct – when the speech and the disruption are worlds apart in time and place.
YOU are responsible for YOUR actions – not people whose speach offends you.
But you are 10,000 times more responsible when you actions are disjoint in time and place sufficient for you to have thought before you acted.
you have free will – you do not get to blame your actions on others.
X didn’t even know about the Mahoney case until it was pointed out to him. Then he misapplies it. ha ha ha
“Now you’re trying to apply the ‘hecklers veto’ argument?”
Nope. While I have used many arguments – because this nonsense is stupid and wrong in MANY ways.
The only hecklers veto argument is yours.
This student was no a Heckler.
He posted freely on social media.
To the extent there are”hecklers” in this story it is the students that walked out.
They do not get to silence him.
But fundimentally you can not silence him – because government can not engage in viewpoint discrimination.
I would note not only did this student not violate your blatantly unconstitutional contract – but even if he magically had – the School would be constrained to the supposed privildge – sports he secured as a result.
They can not suspend him from school based on an alleged agreement related to an alleged priviledge.
If you pay for a hamburger and only get fries, you can not demand McDonalds be shut down for 10 days.
“Your argument to apply the ‘Heckler’s Veto’ doctrine”
No YOU did that.
“Federal courts have repeatedly ruled that this doctrine”
Your mangling court decisions.
First, lets actually cite Tinker – the Speech itself MUST materially disrupt the school – not the offense taken by other students or the administration.
Shouting in the middle of a class is disruptive – NO MATTER WHAT YOU SAY.
Tinker does not create as you are idiotically trying to manufacure a loophole for viewpoint discrimination.
The disruption of the school or classroom must be at the moment – not days later, and it must be from the CONDUCT portion of the students speech – NOT the conduct of others in response to it.
The MOMENT any aspect of the actions of the school is based on the VIEWPOINT expressed -0 the first amendment analysis ends and the government LOSES.
You are trying to make an entirely idiotic 3rd party liability argument that NEVER applies to the first amendment, and is nearly impossible to reach even in purely civil matters.
Actors are responsible for the DIRECT consequences of their actions
Not other peoples hurt feelings, not how others respond to them.
” Under the Tinker standard, administrators do not have to wait for the speaker to personally halt a class; if a student’s public actions directly trigger a material, physical breakdown of school operations”
Logic clearly is not your forte. You say the administrators do not have to wait, and then you say they argue they can AFTER THE FACT respond to something that was an INDIRECT consequence – not only are 3rd party responses NOT Direct consequences of the speakers act – which should be obvious because the response in this case was a VIEWPOINT based response.
Humans have FREE WILL – It is the only reason that you can hold them legally accountable for their actions. It is also the reason you CAN NOT hold them accountable for the actions of others in response to their words. The students who walked out where not Pavlovs dogs responding to a bell that had programmed their behavior such that they were unable to resist. THEY chose to walk out. Not only did THEY choose out of their own FREE WILL – but they did so divorced in time and place from your so called triggering event.
The students who walked out should be suspended. That was bad CONDUCT.
There is no acceptable justification for walking out based on the content of the free speech of another.
If the Fottball Team Captan had posted Mao is great on social media and the entire Pine HS YAF chapter walked out – nothing would change – Govenrment can not punish speach based on viewpoint, and it can not engage in prior restraint based on content.
Not only are you wrong based on the clear meaning of the constitution and SCOTUS cases – but you are wrong based on the fact that your authoritarian approach will grind society to a halt. The 3rd party responsibility argument you are making has consequences. It means no one can do or say anything that someone else might take offense at.
There is nothing that you can do that SOMEONE will not take offense at.
Only left wing nuts who do not think about the consequences of the arguments they make would make such an idiotic claim.
Next – as is typical of left wing nuts – the law either never or almost never uses either the word of concept ofd triggering in the context of humans – again Humans have free will, They are not pavlovas dogs.
B is a direct consequence of A only when if A occurs B is completely unavoidable and involves absolutely no choices by other humans (or even non-humans).
An actual trigger in a gun releases a firing pin – that firing pin is typically driven by a spring and absent a broken spring will strike the cartridge – the firing pin has no choice.
When the firing pin strikes the cartridge it compresses primer in the cartridge raising its temperature causing it to ignite – the primer has NO CHOICE, The igniting primer ignites the black powered in the cartridge – again it has NO CHOICE. The black power explodes – expanding rapidly to many times its original volume – forcing the bullet out of the gun at high speed.
That is what One thing being triggered by another means – the first action will invariably result in all subsequent actions because at each step it is the laws of physics that determine what happens next – not CHOICES made by humans.
If a doctor raps on your knee with a rubber hammer and your knee swings out – the hammer triggered the swing – YOU HAD NO CHOICE.
But your responses to the words of others ALWAYS involve CHOICE – because you are a human and you have free will.
Contra the left Humans do not EVER Trigger other humans.
That whole nonsense pretends that humans have no free will and do not think about what they do. That they act without any though driven solely by stimuli they do not understand.
Are you really so stupid as to beleive that ?
Regardless without that your entire argument collapses. A direct consequence of something requires no intervening point where a human gets to make a choice.
Real Triggers start a chain of events that is driven entirely by physics not free will.
In Tinker the students wore black armbands symbolizing opposition to the vietnam war.
Their views were NOT universally shared – other students and administrators held different views of the war.
The domino effect justification for the war – like left wing logic ultimately failed. Communism is not like a chain of dominos where when one falls the next must.
In fact the opposite is mostly true. Communism fails always and everywhere.
Regardless the point is by YOUR idiot logic the armbands worn by students in Tinker “triggered” other students and therefore were the direct cause of class disruption.
But that is NOT true – students who support the war and students who opposed the war did not for the most part respond like pavlovs dogs and disrupt the class. And if some did – THEY not those wearing the armband were responsible for their choices.
Againm this is a massive common failure of left wing ideology – you pretend that everyone is a dog unable to control their own responses.
That crappy Russian social media posts that favored Sanders and Clitnon as frequently as Trump overcame the free will of voters in swing stakes and compelled them to vote for Trump. Really ? Do you think so little of people ?
Again the students who left classes should be suspended. They are competent humans with free will and they made a choice. You can claim they were engaged in protest – and I am fine with that – you are free to protest anything you want – but depending on how you do so – that comes with consequences.
When the consequences are just – hopefully protestors learn from their actions – in this case they should be suspended – because they do NOT have the right to disrupt classes – even over speech they do not like. When the consequences are unjust such as those faced by civil rights protestors 3/4 of a century ago – the hope is that society as a whole sees the injustice of the punishment and that results in changes to law. But the consequences come regardless.
“The school has clear constitutional authority to intervene to restore order.
No they do not have constitutional authority. They are just not barred by the constitution from doing so. They are however barred from punishing the innocent for the acts of the guilty. 200 hundred students leaving is the direct consequence of the choices – free will of 200 students. The school has the authority to punish them. Not someone who posted on SM on a different day and place.
“Entitlements are non-discretionary federal benefits.”
Incorrect. you have to apply for federal beneftis to get them, and you have to qualify.
Every human does not get welfare or medicare or SNAP.
“High school sports are legally classified as a voluntary privilege, not a constitutional right.“
Entitlements are not a constitutional right either. Please find SNAP anywhere in the constitution ?
” As the Supreme Court ruled in Vernonia,”
That athletes could be required to take drug tests.
Again – being sufficiently capable physically is a viewpoint neutral constriant on particpation in athletics.
Not using drugs is a viewpoint neutral constraint on participation in athletics.
Even in YOUR “agreement” – engaging in illegal activity is a viewpoint neutral constraint on participation in athletics.
I would also suggest that you look up Vernonia – it is NOT a free speech case – it is a search and seizure case. The first amendment is subject to strict scrutiny – the 4th is not. There are myriads of basis by which the courts allow restrictions on your 4th amendment rights.
The first amendment is very near absolute.
Vernonia is not even close to being on point.
“student-athletes voluntarily submit themselves to a far narrower scope of privacy and a higher degree of behavioral regulation because they choose to represent a public institution in uniform.”
That is not the holding in Vernonia. Vernonia is NOT about behavioral regulation – it is about the right to privacy – the 4th amendment – search and seizure – it is subject to a balancing test – not strict scrutiny.
“Finally, your reading of Supreme Court precedent stops in 2007. In the Court’s recent Mahanoy (2021) decision, “
Did you actually read Mahanoy ?
HELD:
“The First Amendment limits but does not entirely prohibit regulation of off-campus student speech by public school officials, and, in this case, the school district’s decision to suspend B.L. from the cheerleading team for posting to social media vulgar language and gestures critical of the school violates the First Amendment. “
The school district LOST. Again Pine HS is SCREWED
“Justice Breyer …” Not interested in your misreading of Dicta.
YOU LOST in Mahonoy in a case where the social media posts were more egregious and offensive than in this case. This was an 8-1 case – with only Thomas disenting – Thomas while often libertarian has real issues with respect to the rights of students in schools.
“You have no argument. “
It appears YOU have made an incredibly good argument for me with Mahony.
READ THE HOLDING
You wonder why no one trusts you ?
I do not even trust that there was some contract this student agreed to, or if there was that it is what you have written.
You cite Supreme court cases – You completely ignore holdings that are completely at odds with your argument and then misinterpret dicta that in you addled brain some how supports you.
The actions of 3rd parties are NOT Relevant to whether the conduct of a speaker is disruptive in school.
As often as you cite that SCOTUS has allowed restrictions to address disruption – you are completely clueless about the fact that the disruption MUST be the DIRECT consequence to the speakers conduct – Not indirect – the reaction of 3rd parties is INDIRECT – they have free will, they are INDEPENDENTLY responsible for their own actions.
Disrupt education because you do not like the speach of another – YOU are subject to being suspended. Because YOU made the choice to disrupt. You are a human with free will and responsibility for you own actions – you are not a dog or a newt.
Mahonoy is an OWN GOAL on your part – you have lost.
Fire is going to eat Pine HS foir breakfast.
John Say,
You’re just digging yourself into a worse position with the Hecklers veto nonsense. You’re grasping at straws and making yourself look stupid in the process.
None of your claims are supported by facts or evidence. None. That’s the saddest part of your argument. Making them longer doesn’t improve its legal coherence either.
You don’t know how hecklers veto works or what it is. It’s obvious.
Your argument relies on street-corner First Amendment rules that the Supreme Court has explicitly declared do not apply inside public schools. The ‘Heckler’s Veto’ doctrine protects a speaker on a public sidewalk from an angry crowd, but under Tinker and Mahanoy, public school administrators are legally required to manage campus operations. If a student leader’s public expression directly triggers a multi-hundred-student walkout that disrupts a district office, the school is required to restore order.
Furthermore, your claim that a disruption must happen ‘at the exact moment’ of the speech has no basis in constitutional law. None. You don’t support that with anything, no cited law or precedent. Tinker explicitly allows administrators to act on a ‘reasonable forecast’ of disruption. If off-campus digital speech over the weekend results in a physical administrative shutdown on a Tuesday, the school’s legal authority to protect the educational environment remains entirely intact.
Finally, your philosophical argument about ‘free will’ completely misunderstands legal proximate cause. When an official, highly visible team captain inserts himself into a sensitive local sexual assault controversy on a public forum, a severe campus reaction is entirely foreseeable. The school didn’t just suspend him from football because of a contract; they addressed a leader whose digital conduct directly sparked an operational freeze across the entire district. You cannot separate the speech from the physical crisis it directly created.
You have twisted yourself into nonsensical legal knots without any supporting evidence or law to justify your deeply flawed and legally indefensible position. You lost.
X – you are quite litterally the one arguing the hecklers veto.
This student initiated the speech – he is NOT the heckler, he is not attemting to deny an otherwise legitimate speaker a voice.
It is the 200 students that disrupted class that are the hecklers.
Your off in lala land.
You have your own arguments backwards – as you did with Mahoney.
You keep fixating on Dicta that not only does not apply – but you completely misunderstand.
The studnets who acted to disrupt class are responsible for disrupting class.
Not someone whose speech days before offended them.
The disruption must be the DIRECT consequence of the speach – there must be no intervening human actors making their own free choices.
No tinker does not create an obligation for administrators to manage campus operations.
That is their job – it is NOT a constitutional dictat any more than flipping burgers at a mcDonalds is.
Your arguments keep getting more absurd.
Yes administrators have a job – managing a school. The constitution prohibits them from doing so by engaging in prior restraint of speech and viewpoint discrimination.
Please ban “trigger” from your vocabulary it is a word you do not know how to use – particularly in a legal context.
Please stop altering supreme court opinions – Again Reasonable forecast is part of the Dicta – not the holding. Regardless, a reasonable forecast of disruption requires the school to act to deal with the disruption – that would be the students who walked out – not the speaker.
Again you keep trying to manufacture a 3rd party liability basis for restricting speech
That does not exist ANYWHERE EVER.
“Finally, your philosophical argument about ‘free will’ completely misunderstands legal proximate cause.”
Nope – quite the opposite legal proximate cause can not go through the free will of a third party.
“When an official, highly visible team captain inserts himself into a sensitive local sexual assault controversy on a public forum, a severe campus reaction is entirely foreseeable. The school didn’t just suspend him from football because of a contract; they addressed a leader whose digital conduct directly sparked an operational freeze across the entire district. You cannot separate the speech from the physical crisis it directly created.”
BTW this is not a sensitive local sexual assault controversey. Cornell is in NY, this is only controversial to left wing nuts. Regardless whether it is controversail or not can not be a basis to preclude speech – that is viewpoint discrimination – and that is always unconstitutional. There is are two allegations of sexual assault – on the other side of the country. There is no evidence for Jane Does – not even in her own statements. Regardless the accused are innocent until proven guilty. Your idiocy is trying to invert that as a matter of school policy – not going to fly.
Of course you can – because it is NOT direct. You repeatedly abuse the meaning of direct.
While proximate cause can not go through the free will of another actor – and again why that is the case should not merely be constitutionally obvious to you it should be logically obvious – you can not have a functioning society when you are responsible for anything anyone else does in response to your words that offend them.
This is not a proximate cause case – the words YOU cited in Tinker Dicta and elsewhere is DIRECT.
Direct it the disruption YOU cause when you shout or interupt others. It is not the actions taken by others who are offended by your viewpoint.
Again viewpoint discrimination is ALWAYS unconstitutional.
Everyu single time that you argue others were triggered or reference that this was speach about sexual assault – or any other ISSUE – you have ceded that the schools actions are unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.
In tinker the adminstration did argue that the black armbands were disruptive – but the basis for that disruption claim was because of the content of the speach not the non-content related aspects of speech.
That is why the school lost in tinker.
Burning flags “triggers” many people – it is still constitutional.
Free speech includes the right to offend others – if your offense causes you to be disruptive – that is on you – not the speaker.
This is ancient law.
John Say,
You continue to be as wrong as always.
You are celebrating Mahanoy as an ‘own goal,’ but you are completely misreading how Supreme Court frameworks function. Here is what you’re missing: The cheerleader won in Mahanoy precisely because her off-campus post caused zero drop in team morale and zero campus disruption. However, in that exact 8-1 ruling, Justice Breyer established the binding legal framework for all future cases, explicitly stating that public schools retain the authority to regulate off-campus social media speech if it results in a ‘substantial disruption’ to school operations. You cannot dismiss the Court’s formal legal test as mere ‘dicta.’ B.L. had no disruption; this captain sparked a physical walkout that froze the district office. His case falls directly into the exception Mahanoy carved out.
Furthermore, your philosophical argument about ‘free will’ completely falls apart under the legal standard of proximate cause. Under the Tinker standard, a student leader is legally accountable if their public actions trigger a foreseeable, material breakdown of school operations. Federal courts—including the 9th Circuit in Dariano—have repeatedly ruled that when student expression triggers an operational crisis or campus hostility, administrators have the constitutional authority to step in and restore order.
Your idiotic attempt to dismiss Vernonia because it is a 4th Amendment case misses the entire structural point. The Supreme Court used Vernonia to explicitly rule that student-athletes voluntarily subject themselves to a much narrower scope of privacy and a higher degree of behavioral regulation than the general student body because they choose to represent the school in uniform. That is why a school can condition sports participation on sportsmanship and conduct codes that they could never apply to a standard classroom or a non-discretionary federal entitlement. The school didn’t engage in viewpoint discrimination against an idea; they enforced a voluntary athletic contract to resolve a concrete operational crisis.
What is patently clear is YOU don’t know how the law works. Because you don’t support your argument with actual law. When the law directly contradicts your view your first instinct is to hand wave it away as if it were an annoying inconvenience because it shows I’m right and that is unacceptable to your libertarian ego. Bummer.
Nope, continalually reading into dicta things that are not there does not create binding precident.
Dicta is NEVER binding – Holdings are Dicta from different cases often conflict.
Regardless you also keep trying to manufacture from supreme court cases duties and powers that are far outside the courts powers.
The courts do not get to tell presidents or congress or school districts how to do their job.
They get to tell them how NOT to do their job.
They may not violate the constitution. They may not violate the law.
The orderly conduct of classes is the duty of a school – it is their job – whether they are doing that job as desired is the business of local voters – not the supreme court.
What SCOTUS gets to do is tell a school district that the way they have chosen to do their job – violates the constitution. That is what ALL of the cases that have been cited say – viewpoint discrimination and prior restraint are unconstitutional – PERIOD.
Schools can place inumerable restrictions on students using the claim they are just doing their job.
So long as they are constitutional and legal – the courts have no say in how the job is done.
As usual you completely misapprehend the function of a court.
Again Vernonia is a 4th amendment case not a 1st amendment case.
The only Structure they have in common is that both raised constitutional issues.
The standard for all first amendment cases is strict scrutiny. That is the highest standard and hardest for government conduct to meet. The standard for the 4th amendment is rational basis – that is a much lower standard.
“That is why a school can condition sports participation on sportsmanship and conduct codes that they could never apply to a standard classroom or a non-discretionary federal entitlement.”
False, Schools can impose essentially sportsmanship and conduct restrictions on classrooms – so long as those are not unconstitutional – such as by engaging in viewpoint discrimination.
A school is a government actor – the TINY leeway that scotus gives schools is because students are not adults and do not have the same rights as adults. Tinker established that Free speech is one of the rights that students have.
“What is patently clear is YOU don’t know how the law works. Because you don’t support your argument with actual law. When the law directly contradicts your view your first instinct is to hand wave it away”
ROFL – I have literally demonstrated that you are completely wrong with the holdings from YOUR CASES.
You do not understand what you read. you keep pretending Dicta is holdings and that your total misreading of the dicta supports you.
You raised proximate cause – you are wrong about how proximate cause works.
You are also wrong because even proximate cause is not relevant in free speech cases.
To restrict speech you must have a DIRECT cause Neither a direct nor proximate cause can go through the free will of another. Neither can be distant in place and time.
But direct must be connected much as the “trigger” of a gun is to the firing of a bullet
The first action must immutably cause all other events. There can be no possible fork in which the outcome changes.
You are constantly playing word games. That is fine in fiction and poetry – it is not in law.
I wish we knew how old the student is. If he is over 18 and eligible to vote and serve in the military, what right does the school have to tell him to do anything with regards to off campus activity? I hope the family sues the hell out of the school district.
He signed his right away when he chose to join the football team. They are required to sign a Social media agreement in their student conduct packet. It includes social media outside the school.
So you think it is fine that to participate in high school activities a student has to sign away his constitutional rights? What if your bank makes you sign an agreement to allow you to bank?
Dave, participating in school sports is a privilege. Not a right. To enjoy that privilege the school requires a student agree to the rules and that includes signing the agreement we are talking about. This is standard in all 50 states.
“Dave, participating in school sports is a privilege. “
Nope. It is no different from other so called entitlements – it is something open to you if you meet the qualifications.
Yes you have to follow the rules – but the rule are not permitted to be unconstitutional.
As the left tried during the Biden admin – you are trying to find a loophole that allows government to act unconstitutionally – there are none.
The government can not engage in viewpoint discrimination,
Government is not able to offer “priviledges” at the expense of constitutional rights.
X – while you are wrong with respect to ALL the cases you have cited – you keep completely ignoring Mahoney.
Which is very nearly exactly this case.
BL was a cheerleader – by YOUR arguments a privileged extra curricular activity.
She wore a uniform – you seem to think that is some how important.
She posted vulgar insults of the school and coaches and administrators on social media – directly violating codes of conduct and your faux contract that you claim is everywhere.
And the holding written by breyer in an 8-1 decision -was BL’s free speech rights were violated.
AGAIN – YOU LOSE.
All your own arguments are present in Mahoney.
Breyer even repeats the Dicta that you keep distorting.
Breyer and 7 other justices all decided in a case that was more favorable to your claims that they did not apply. Viewpoint discrimination is unconstitutional.
YOU LOSE
“This is standard in all 50 states.”
Because you say so ?
Please cite state law in the following states that requires this or some similar agreement for sports.
AR TX, AL, AZ, AK, IA
I suspect that if you had claimed this is becoming comon you would be correct.
But you have claimed it is ALWAYS true.
Lets add CA law requiring this agreement since CA is the relevant state to this case.
No such agreement existed when I was in school. When my kids were in school,
and if such an agreement existed in 2020 when the events related to Mahoney occured – SCOTUS ignored that agreement. So as little as 6 years ago such agreements either did not exist in all schools or were not considered relevant by SCOTUS.
I would note that Mahoney is a 42 US 1983 action – that is BL suing the school district for Damages for violating her rights – and the school district lost.
“He signed his right away when he chose to join the football team. They are required to sign a Social media agreement in their student conduct packet. It includes social media outside the school.”
Please find ANY instance in which govenrment has ever required someone to sign away their first amendment rights in return for a government service ?
Further please cite EXACTLY where in your faux contract this student violated any provision of that agreement ?
There is no culture clause in the agreement. The brand clause is unconstitutional and regardless even in the context of civil employment a persons posts untied to their employer regarding the the innocense of people alleged to have committed a crime will NEVER be treated as disparaging a brand – that despite the fact that public schools have no brand rights. You can not disparage something that does not exist.
Further the examples in the agreement require speech that directly disparages the school, its employees, or competing schools. Again no culture nonsense about commenting on matters of public interest thousands of miles away with no reference at all to the school.
The clause advising forethought in social media posts is good advice – but that is all it is. It is not an operative clause and it has nothing to do with this students posts.
The zero tolerance policy is specifically for illegal activity. It is not even with regard to advocating for illegal actitivity – it is specifically for engaging in illegal activity.
If you have evidence this student raped someone – prosecute him. Otherwise the zero tolerance clause is inapplicable.
In what world do you think it will ever be constitutional for governement to punish people for or engange in prior restraint of views that it does not like ?
Your contract argument is incredibly stupid – Sports are not a privilege no matter how many times you try to say that.
Access to Government services are NEVER a justification for the surrender of constitutional rights.
A school can offer extra curricular activities or not – just as it can offer german or not.
It can use viewpoint neutral means to regulate access where demand is greater than supply.
But government can not engage in viewpiont discrimination PERIOD.
John Say,
You’re not winning. You’re just making your position worse and worse.
Under the landmark Supreme Court case Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), the government can legally fire public employees for speech made pursuant to their official duties. Furthermore, federal employees under the Hatch Act must sign away their First Amendment rights to engage in active political campaigning or partisan speech while on duty.
Service members who volunteer for the U.S. Armed Forces sign enlistment contracts that strictly strip away large portions of their First Amendment rights. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) Article 88, service members can be criminally prosecuted for using “contemptuous words” against public officials.
Federal court clerks and employees must sign strict confidentiality and behavioral agreements that forbid them from speaking publicly about cases or voicing political opinions on social media.
Yes, government CAN include agreements that voluntarily sign your rights away.
Under constitutional law, varsity high school athletics are not classified as a general government service or a civil right. They are legally classified as an extracurricular privilege.
The Unconstitutional Conditions Doctrine prevents a school from forcing a student to waive their rights just to enroll in math or English class, it completely allows restrictions for voluntary, competitive activities. The Supreme Court explicitly settled this in Vernonia School District v. Acton (1995). The Court ruled that because student-athletes voluntarily choose to play sports and represent the school in a public uniform, they subject themselves to a far higher degree of behavioral regulation and a lower expectation of privacy than ordinary students.
You’ve already shown you don’t know what or how “prior restraint” is or works. I cited exactly how it works multiple times.
Students are not federal employees.
Even federal employees free spech rights are only limited DURING WORK.
The speech in question here was outside of school and outside of school events.
Absolutely the military is different – Soldiers also murder people with legal protection.
Court clerks are federal employees – students are not.
You could also include security clearances. which restrict your speech.
All of these operate under either a national security exception or agovernment as an employer exception.
“Under constitutional law, varsity high school athletics are not classified as a general government service or a civil right. They are legally classified as an extracurricular privilege.”
Please cite the article in the constitution that says that ?
Public schools do not exist anywhere in the constitution – you keep blowing smoke out your a$$
No vernonia did not settle this.
AGAIN it is a 4th amendment – rational basis case not a first amendment strict scrutiny case.
“The Unconstitutional Conditions Doctrine prevents a school from forcing a student to waive their rights just to enroll in math or English class,”
No the constitution itself precludes that.
You keep citing various doctrines as if they supercede the constitution.
What you call doctrines as just the constitutional conclusions reached in various supreme court cases.
I am not debating they are wrong – I am saying that YOU are wrong about them.
The doctrines come from constitutional decisions. Not the other way around.
You can not take a “doctrine” and distort its language – as you keep doing with Dicta, to reach a different outcome than the courts have actually reached in their holdings.
If your reading of a doctine is at odds with a supreme court holding – YOU are reading the doctrine wrong.
” Vernonia School District v. Acton (1995)“
4th ammendment – rational basis – not strict scrutiny.
1st amendment – strict scrutiny.
You can not make a rational basis argument in a strict scrutiny case – first amendment cases are strict scrutiny.
.
“The Court ruled that because student-athletes voluntarily choose“
Partly true – they also ruled as they did because drug tests are simple, not time consuming and not invasive.
Again – 4th amendment infringements must pass a rational basis test – not strict scrutiny.
This is as an exampel relevant in all your left wing nut ICE non-sense.
The constitution requires a warrant for searches and seizures – it does not require a warrant from an article III magistrate – a warrant from an article II magistrate is perfectly acceptable. Both are appointed by the president confirmed by the senate and do not serve for life.
But even beyond that – there is a very lonf list of instances where a search or seizure can take place without a warrant.
Again violations of the 5th amendment are subject to a rational basis test. Not strict scrutiny.
Veronia is just not relevant – unless you are looking to do a cavity search on the football team captan.
“to play sports and represent the school in a public uniform, they subject themselves to a far higher degree of behavioral regulation and a lower expectation of privacy than ordinary students.”
Irrelevant – this is a free speech case – it is not about privacy, it is not about behavior that is not speech.
You have neither successfully argued that was violated or that it is constitutional with respect to restrictions on speech.
“You’ve already shown you don’t know what or how “prior restraint” is or works.”
ROFL
” I cited exactly how it works multiple times.”
Nope
You do not know what prior restraint is
what viewpoint restriction is
what direct means
what proximate cause means
what strict scrutiny means.
What the differences is between a private actor and a government actor.
What the difference between government as an employer and government otherwise is.
You do not know what a priviledge is
You do not seem to grasp that equality before the law means that Government can not grant the types of priviledges you claim – conditionally or otherwise.
You do not understand the difference between pure speech, speech as conduct and pure conduct and how constitutional rights vary depending on which catagory something falls into.
There are so many more things you are completely clueless about.
I would be shocked if this case is not resolved in favor of the student at the very first court
This is a slam dunk.
Please explain to me why the BL in Mahonyh prevailed and this student will not ?
The “behavior” in mahoney was more egregious than here.
Every example of a government speech restriction you cited is NOT viewpoint discrimination.
The hatch act precludes all political speech at work.
restrictions on clerks prohibit all speech about cases.
etc.
X -= give up – you LOST. Worse stil YOU provided the best case against yourself
Mahonoy 8-1
HELD
“the school district’s decision to suspend B.L. from the cheerleading team for posting to social media vulgar language and gestures critical of the school violates the First Amendment.”
Justice Breyer.
Fini.
Reference criminal conduct? Let’s not forget BB and her idea that all lives matter.
When the last shall be 1st and when bad is good (a time period).
Penalty phase you shall turn the other cheek, walk twice as far, and give your cloak if your jacket is demanded.
AI is quite clever and chatGPT.
No John, YOU lost. You didn’t read the whole ruling.
You left out the critical distinction.
B.L. had no disruption; this school football captain sparked a physical walkout that disrupted school operations. His case falls directly into the exception Mahanoy carved out.
You proved that you don’t know how to read and make distinctions when the facts are right in front of you.
The HOLDING is the WHOLE RULING.
“B.L. had no disruption; this school football captain sparked a physical walkout that disrupted school operations. His case falls directly into the exception Mahanoy carved out.”
Again YOU make my case – YOU distinguish this case from Mahoney based on the freely chose actions of 3rd parties.
There is no such exception in Mahoney – and you are misreading the dicta – badly.
Sparked is not in there, triggered is not in there, Nothing is in there that makes it constituonal for government to act if a 3rd party does something, when they could not act if they did not.
Nor will there ever be.
The school district in Mahoney could have manufactured a disruption – if all they need is to have some third party misbehave.
By your idiot argument – the district in Mahoney could have won if
The teachers decided to walk out.
If the coach quit,
if other students rioted.
If there was a huricane the next day.
and on and on.
Nope, you’re still wrong John. You’re in full denial over the fact that you lost.
You keep making more excuses and moving the goalposts to justify a failed argument.
You want to wave off the clear exceptions Breyer pointed to as “mere dicta”.
It’s literally a set of exceptions to the “whole ruling” that you want to ignore because it clearly undermines your faulty argument.
Sorry John you’re still wrong.
White House press secretary Katie Zacharia has been fired after 5 days.
A new record, that reduces the Scaramucci record by more than 50%.
We now have a new a new term for the shortest period of time serving Trump, the Zacharia.
The term Scaramucci can now be retired.
I bet the next one will be another blonde woman.
The Mooch has been vindicated. Reports indicate that Trump let her off easy, telling her that maybe the job of Press Secretary wasn’t for her–I agree, it wasn’t. Even setting aside her incredibly poor performance and the obvious fact that she can’t think on her feet, the fact that she has held herself out to be an attorney despite failing the California Bar Exam, forever tainted her credibility–as if there could be any credibility for anyone serving as Press Secretary for Trump who uses that position as propaganda instead of accountability to the American people. She also had already decided who the 3 MAGA media representatives she would call on, and pledged that more MAGA media outlets would be taking up seats in the White House briefing room. She ignored the AP. I don’t expect much from any successor, other than, if they are female, they will be bleached, wear ultra high heels, and pledge undying support for Trump and a willingness to say whatever they are told to say.
ATS Trump has had a long list of excellent Press secretaries – all but one female. all attractive and all head and shoulders better than KJP or Circle back Psaki.
I suspect at a different time Zacharia would have been given more of a chance and probably could have gotten past a rough start.
But at this moment Trump needs a press secretary is that is NOT the news herself.
Trump let her off easy ?
She lost an extremely high profile job and a very public way. Trump terminated her politely.
What did you expect – a televised firing squad ?
As to her performance – Trump is at the tail end of Mid-Terms he needed someone stellar who could jump in immediately. I would be shocked if she would not be capable in time. There was no time.
No she was not incompetent – she certainly was not a fraction as bad as Karine Jean Pierre. She was not as bad as Circle Back Psaki – who loked good compared to KJP.
But she was not Spicer or Huckabee Sanders, or Grisham, or McEnany or Leavitt.
And Trump needed a suprestar, not someone learning the ropes.
The attorney thing is meaningless. She graduated from law school – she is a lawyer.
She is not practicing law – lots and lots of people who graduate from lawschool do not practice law.
Lets opf people who graduate from law school do not take the bar but do work as lawyers,
they just can not appear in court. Regardless neither appearing in court nor any form of practicing law is part of the job of Press secretary or anything she is likely to do in the future.
No her credibility is not tainted forever. But this will make it harder for her to land a multi-million dollar a year communications job.
All of the list of other people who were Trump press secretaries are doing very well now, and were excellent in the job. Absolutely the job of press secretary is to present the administrations position favorably.
The WH move to bring in more new media is just recognition that the MSM has for the most part failed and lost relevance to the american people. Regardless, the press secretary can run the press room as they please.
Biden’s people certainly did. Personally I do not consider WH press conferences – particularly those that do not have the president to be particularly important. Nor change anything. The press is going to learn what they need to learn regardless, and they are going to report in the same way regardless. The MSM is blatantly hostile to Trump. I honestly do not care – they are also increasingly irrelevant. All they do is harm themselves.
While I do expect the press – all the press to be confrontational with all presidents. It is their job to ferret out the news – not just what the president wants reported. But it is also their job to report the truth – not just the ideological spin of the dying left.
As to who will follow – Spicer and Huckabee Sanders were not runway models. They were excellent.
Aside from Spicer all of Trump’s press secretaries have been women – so much for Trump being some mysoginist.
And most were quite attractive and extremely good at the job. I suspect Zacharia would have been very good with sufficient time. But this is not a job that you get to grow into. Regardless, no one will fall below the bottom set by KJP – though she to was atleast attractive. She was not competent, she could not think on her feet she was repeatedly caught flat footed. KJP has left the public eye, does not seem to be able to get a communications job, has left the democratic party and is writing a tell all book about the Biden WH. I hope she has a competent ghost writer.
The Supreme Court turned down the “Let’s Go Brandon” hoodie case. Leaving the lower court’s ruling in favor of the school. It doesn’t spell confidence in the court they can litigate it any different.
The LGB case was so clear they should not have heared it they should simply have reversed and remanded citing Tinker. The case is very nearly identical to Tinker. There was no need for a hearing.
Turley: “The Supreme Court was asked to hear the “Let’s Go Brandon” case, but recently declined to hear the case. It was a very disappointing denial from the Court for many of us in the free speech community.”
I recall that with disappointment. The 1969 TINKER case which you mentioned seemed very clear on freeedom of speech not being abandoned at the schoolhouse door.
the Court passed on the opportunity to reinforce TINKER and to remind lower courts that Supreme Court decisions are actually law rather than just hints.
Let’s walk through this together, X.
Where is your evidence that the student signed such a code-of-conduct agreement?
Where is your evidence of the contents of the agreement, IF THERE WAS ONE”
Where is your evidence that the signed agreement prohibited a social media comment that merely expressed support for a potential defendant in a nationally publicized case?
X does not have to walk anywheres with you! If X says all students in all public schools have to sign codes of conduct then they have to! X knows everything! Just ask him! Construction, election law, immigration law, being a land lord, reflecting pools, what college faculty think, what Jesus thought, the media and now he even knows legal codes of conduct agreements in public schools! So there!
All it takes is a little research. You should have been able to find out for yourself.
You’re not going to see the actual agreement he signed unless you file for a FOIA in California for it. But…
This type of agreement is so common that 100% of every school in California has it in their mandatory athlete participation packets.
According to actual local media reporting from the Press Democrat and local news network KSRO, the 200 students who walked out of class to protest explicitly cited that the football captain had violated the school’s athlete social media agreement.
And…
Public high school sports are legally classified as a voluntary privilege rather than an enrollment right, every student trying out for a sports team in this district is required to sign the standard code of conduct packet before they are legally allowed to clear for practice or step onto the field. As the team captain, he could not have held that position without a fully executed athletic clearance packet on file.
sounds like a fascist state mentality another reason to leave California
It’s standard in every state.
just texed my neighbor his kids play sports in jr high and high school. they dont sign any kind of conduct agreement. he said it sounds like you are full of schiff
It’s in every school athletics packet parents and students sign. It’s more likely they didn’t read what they were signing as most parents do.
You know, like when you sign your Apple phone or Android TOS or any TOS. You just sign without reading it in its entirety. You sign away your rights every time you sign one of those and kids and parents do the same thing when they apply for school sports. I wouldn’t be surprised.
Your neighbor probably had no idea what he signed. He just…signed so his kids can play.
Because you say so ?
Do you understand how abysmal this argument is ?
I asked before for law from specific states.
Please provide me law from ANY state requiring anything like this.
You claim that “they probably just did not read it” B$.
Even 60 years ago schools usually required written parental consent and a Doctors signoff and often a physical for participation in sports.
If as you claim – “the parents probably just did not read it” – then their child would not get to participate, because that packet likely STILL requires Dr.s signoff and possibly a physical to participate.
You are now left with the poor argument that they read SOME of this packet but not other parts of it.
And still they signed it, and they do not remember it.
Do you want to add the claim that they probably were drunk at the time ?
Regretfully, we must again explain things to X that he obtains from what he describes as his friend, i.e., “Google,” and which he fails to comprehend.
NO NO NO.
“ALL” states are NOT required to enact (nor have they), nor must ‘all’ students sign, social media agreements.
X is likely confusing NIL agreements with student athlete PCA agreements.
here are related legislative documents:
https://positivecoach.org/wp-content/uploads/PCA_SocialMediAgreement_updated.pdf
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140AB1442
Please note that educational institutions’ monitoring of student social media is limited to that which “pertains directly to school safety or to pupil safety.”
Proving that “Free the Cornell Seven” constitutes a threat to school or pupil safety could be a daunting burden, or that it violated any PCA.
While I do not know whether Piner School has modified such general agreements and created its own, which could enhance student burdens, and arguendo, assuming that this student may have signed some form of agreement, I invite X, who calls Google his friend and claims that his criticism is always directed toward stimulating debate, rises to that level in response.
Thanks in advance.
Lin,
Thank you for pointing that out.
As we all know, I make it a point of not reading George as it is a waste of one’s time.
However, whenever I see your comments, I have to read George’s in order to understand the context of your epic take downs of George. Once again, we see he is making things up and or lying. I would never trust anyone who has to resort to using AI to make their points. Seems intellectually lazy. But than again, one only has to hear the village idiot once to know it is a waste of one’s time to do so again.
Upstatefarmer, Lin….was wrong. And I showed her why and how.
That was no “epic takedown”. It was an embarrassment for Lin to post such nonsense in an attempt to ‘correct’ me. She didn’t do a good job and it shows.
X lin cited actual CA law – once again YOU LOSE.
CA privacy law specific to schools explicitly limits schools social media searchs to public safety, and even then requires parental notification AND public hearings before enacting any policy that involves social media searches.
The existance of you alleged SM agreement for extra curiculars would violate that CA law.
OOPS
Lin,
Your assertions are debunked by your own citations. Do you even read the sources you post?
You are deeply misinterpreting the very sources you are linking. Let’s look at the actual laws and the text of the contract you provided.
First, your citation of California Assembly Bill 1442 (Education Code § 49073.6) is completely wrong. That law was passed to regulate proactive, automated digital surveillance programs—specifically to stop school districts from hiring third-party tech companies to systematically scrape, log, and catalog the private social media profiles of the student body onto data servers. It states that if a school sets up a program to actively harvest social media data, it must be destroyed if it doesn’t pertain to safety. It does not strip a school’s disciplinary authority when a public post is manually brought to administrators by parents or students, nor does it override a school’s power to address a physical on-campus disruption.
Second, your claim that the school faces a “daunting burden” under the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA) contract is dismantled by the very PDF you uploaded. Look at the final clause of the agreement: “I am aware that I represent my sport(s), school, team, family and community at all times, and will do so in a positive manner.” By stepping into a highly explosive, localized controversy on a public account, the team captain directly tied his digital footprint to the athletic program.
Finally, under the definitive Supreme Court standard in Tinker, the school doesn’t have to prove a “safety threat.” They only have to prove a substantial disruption to school operations. The moment that post caused a massive, 200-student walkout that physically halted regular school business and disrupted the district office, the school met that constitutional threshold. They didn’t punish him for an abstract political view; they disciplined a team leader whose public conduct brought a massive operational disruption to the campus.
You’re a lawyer, even lawyers are getting more reliant on AI and google to make arguments and do research more efficiently. Your profession is adapting to it pretty quickly. Because it’s a very, very helpful tool.
How did I know you would jump on what I said within two minutes of seeing my name. So funny!
I stand by what I said.
You failed to address the specifics or content therein ^. Even more, your reading comprehension also failed to note that I expressly stated, “While I do not know whether Piner School has modified such general agreements and created its own, which could enhance student burdens, and arguendo..”
You generally create your own arguments (e.g., as above) in order to pretend subject knowledge. I have more citations related to this, but as you know, I am limited to two.
Please educate all of us on what this student violated Don’t forget to cite the specific content of the agreement that was violated. Add all citations. thanks in advance.
Lin, being online and posting to others while you post kind of allows me to post within two minutes of your posting. Why would that be odd?
When I research links YOU post you just make it easier for me to figure out what you leave out. Reading comprehension skills are handy when you’re doing this kind of thing.
Per the specific terms of the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA) standard athletic contract provided in YOUR link—and the core constitutional principles that govern them—demonstrate exactly where the student-athlete overstepped his leadership role.
According to the PCA Student-Athlete Social Media Agreement Template you provided, signees explicitly pledge:
This explicitly designates the team captain as an official, peer-enforcement mechanism of the school’s standard behavior policies. As an appointed captain, the student’s personal page is no longer treated by the athletic program as purely anonymous off-campus speech; he holds a title that requires maintaining team cohesion.
The PCA text explicitly requires the athlete to sign off on the following statement:
By injecting himself into a deeply radioactive, localized public controversy regarding a sexual violence case while holding an active leadership role on a school-sponsored team, the student directly linked his public-facing digital footprint to the athletic program’s representation guidelines.
You asked what specific legal rule allows a school to step in here. The binding precedent is the Supreme Court’s “substantial disruption” test established in Tinker vs. Des Moines. Under Tinker, student speech loses its First Amendment protection if it causes or reasonably threatens to cause a material, substantial disruption to the school environment. The moment the captain’s digital post resulted in more than 200 students physically walking out of class, marching 2.5 miles down public roads, and staging a demonstration at the Santa Rosa City Schools District Offices, it legally crossed the line from private, protected commentary into a massive, tangible disruption of daily school operations.
I know what I read and I understand what I’m talking about when I make my arguments. Because I exercise these researches and dive into these legal issues all the time with a keen sense of curiosity and a desire to understand, I am not merely parroting what I find in my research.
Standing for due process is quite positive.
“Don’t forget to cite the specific content of the agreement that was violated.”
Good luck with that. All you’ll get is airy handwaving.
I noted, above, the only specific element of that agreement that might apply to this case. It is so arbitrary and capricious that a mob could drive a truck through it — which is precisely what the Piner High School mob is doing.
I cited exactly what Lin wanted.
Sam, you only element you cite about the agreement is the only element you WANT to use. It also talks about school disruptions and posts that lead to them. 200 students walking out of class in protest over HIS posts violated the agreement HE signed. That’s particularly important legally and for the school to justify the discipline to the student.
Hey George:
“What counts as a “substantial disruption”?
Your speech is a substantial disruption when it encourages violations of school rules, illegal activities, or it risks causing a big interference with the education of other students. For example, threats to other students or your teachers using social media will likely be considered a substantial disruption.
Can I ever be disciplined for something I say on social media off campus and outside of school hours?
SOMETIMES, depending on what you say. If you use your own device and accounts outside of school hours and your posts are not related to school, your school cannot discipline you for those posts.
The disruption was 200 students who walked out of class in protest over the football captains comments on social media.
That qualifies as a “substantial disruption”.
“Can I ever be disciplined for something I say on social media off campus and outside of school hours?”
Yes.
If you join a school sports team and sign documents like a social media agreement because the student is representing the school you are subject to the terms of that agreement. Participating in school sports is a privilege not a right.
Piner School has a student body of more than 1,400 students.
So any time that a subgroup of 200 students find an excuse to get out of class and ‘protest’ against another’s off-campus speech, this automatically constitutes a “substantial disruption?” Can you even imagine the fallout in adopting such a position across high schools in America? Just sayin,’
Even if arguendo, it does, how do you justify siding with “substantial disruption” vs. the rights attaching to actual, non-school related, speech?
Please reconcile your personal opinion about this case (since you say you are not a lawyer) with, e.g., the SCOTUS case involving the TEAM cheerleader Levy and how it may or may not affect TEAM morale to cause “substantial disruption.” (and remember, the Levy case–here, I’ll help you: Mahoney case and its progeny– related to direct criticism of the school itself and its personnel-which is not applicable here.) Please distinguish the two. I also have other cases to cite, but I’m running out of time here.
(Personally, I would prefer that the school simply hold a one-session auditorium gathering to provide platform for students to debate both sides of this. Good learning opportunity, as well as clarification by school officials of what is and what is not allowed.) thx
p.s. you are also wrong about the scope/applicability of California legislation.
Lin,
Again, you’re wrong. It’s not hard to prove.
Your argument completely misconstrues how constitutional law defines an operational crisis. A ‘substantial disruption’ under Tinker has never been a mathematical percentage of a school’s total enrollment. When 200 students walk out of class, march down public roads, and physically swarm a district office, it causes an immediate, material disruption to daily school business. Administrators are forced to halt regular operations to handle safety and logistics. That is a substantial disruption by definition, regardless of how many other students remained in class.
Furthermore, your interpretation of the Mahanoy (Brandi Levy) case is completely backward. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the cheerleader in Mahanoy precisely because her off-campus post caused zero drop in team morale and zero campus disruption. Justice Breyer’s majority opinion explicitly noted that schools retain the legal authority to regulate off-campus social media speech if it results in a ‘substantial disruption’ to the school environment. Brandi Levy’s post caused no disruption; this captain’s post caused a multi-hundred-student walkout that halted district business. This case matches the exact exception the Supreme Court carved out.
Finally, your insistence on California’s AB 1442 remains legally wrong. That statute regulates automated data-harvesting programs to protect student privacy from digital scraping; it does not strip a principal’s authority to enforce a standard athletic code of conduct when a public post triggers a physical crisis on campus. The school didn’t engage in viewpoint discrimination against an abstract idea; they enforced a voluntary sportsmanship contract after an official team leader’s digital conduct disrupted the entire school district.
Are you sure you’re a lawyer? Because you cited a law that has nothing to do with the student agreement. None at all.
X: coming back to your response.
NO, I believe you are the one who is mixed up.
Lin,
Nope. You’re still wrong. Now you included, again, YOUR own citation proving your position is still wrong.
You cite California Education Code Section 48900. Ok. Let’s dive in.
You confuse a general school suspension with an extracurricular athletic penalty. Section 48900 outlines the strict parameters required to completely suspend or expel a student from attending academic classes. It does not strip coaches or athletic directors of their authority to enforce a signed athletic contract.
A school does not need to meet the high burden of a full academic expulsion just to strip a student of his title as Football Team Captain. Extracurricular sports are a voluntary privilege, and under standard California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) bylaws, teams can remove leaders who fracture team cohesion or violate signed sportsmanship codes.
You claim the football captain didn’t cause the disruption because the 200 walking-out students chose to do so of their own free will. In constitutional law, this is incorrect. The legal standard is proximate cause and foreseeability. You’re a lawyer. You should know this.
Under Tinker v. Des Moines, if a student leader publishes an explosive, polarizing statement regarding a sensitive local sexual assault case involving his own peers on a public forum, a massive on-campus reaction is entirely foreseeable. The law does not treat the protesters as independent, disconnected actors; it views the captain’s digital conduct as the direct catalyst for the physical disruption that paralyzed the district office.
Justice Breyer’s majority opinion in Mahanoy explicitly carved out an exception, ruling that public schools retain clear authority to regulate off-campus social media speech if it crosses the threshold into a substantial material disruption on campus. Brandi Levy had no disruption; this captain sparked a substantial disruption of a school campus. That is the exception Justice Breyer allowed.
So if I can get 200 people to walk out, I can shut down someone’s speech? Good to know.
Hey George,
You made at least two fatal mistakes.
“(c) Notwithstanding Section 49062, a school district, county office of education, or charter school that adopts a program pursuant to subdivision (b) shall do all of the following:
(1) Gather or maintain only information that pertains directly to school safety or to pupil safety.
AND, btw, Piner school is a public school/state entity. Your nonsense about outsourcing tasks/responsibility really shows your lack of legal understanding.
https://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/13-14/bill/asm/ab_1401-1450/ab_1442_bill_20140106_introduced.html
Nope.
You’re citing a law quote that does not exist.
The link doesn’t show what you quote.
The language regarding ‘subdivision (b)’ and ‘school safety’ appears nowhere in that document. You are quoting a dead draft of an entirely different section of the code, and using it to defend a completely fabricated legal threshold.
If you look at the actual text of Assembly Bill 1442 that you linked, it amends the Information Practices Act (Civil Code § 1798.14) to establish data retention timelines. The text explicitly mandates that a school district must destroy a student’s records within one year of them turning 18 or leaving the district, and notify parents of that retention schedule. It regulates how long data sits in an administrative file; it has absolutely nothing to do with restricting a principal’s disciplinary authority or an athletic director’s right to enforce a sportsmanship contract.
Here’s the real deal,
California Education Code Section 48900.
X, YOU CLOWN!
You backed yourself into your own corner by pretending to prove others wrong.
DID you understand your own quote, ..”including off-campus, if they are ‘related to a school activity or school attendance.'”
Isn’t that what others, including JOhn Say and Lin, were trying to tell you?
And WTH are you talking about with, “it does not strip coaches or athletic directors of their authority to enforce a signed athletic contract.?”
“It does not strip a school’s disciplinary authority when a public post is manually brought to administrators by parents or students”
And yet it does.
” nor does it override a school’s power to address a physical on-campus disruption.“
Correct – those students that walked out should be suspended.
Contra left wing idiocy – they had free will they made a choice – you can argue that it was valid civil disobediance – I think the valid part is weak, but still it is certaintly civil disobediance and I fully support civil disobediance.
Civil disobediance literally means violating the laws or the rules and being punished for doing so, with the hope and expectation that a just society will be appalled that the law or rules required punishment for your acts hopefully resulting in the repeal of those laws.
I 100% support civil disobediance. I also 100% support punishing those who violate the laws and rules.
Then if and only if the people are appalled things will change.
Otherwise, you rot in jail because you violated a law or rule that the people do not see as egregiously unjust.
Regardless those that walked out made a free choice.
We WANT people to be free. I support individual liberty – including walking out of school when you beleive some wrong has occured. But freedom includes the freedom to make bad choices and those choices come with consequences.
The students who walked out did so freely. Left wing nonsense that they were “triggered” demeans them and their free will and convert’s humans into dogs unable to control their behavior and without free will.
What everyone really wants to know right now is will the kid be able to captain his team tonight at 7 pm? Or will Piner High lamely forfeit again like pussies? Let’s Go Brandon!
Lin – Excellent work. You cite specific CA law that DIRECTLY contradicts X’s idiotic contract claim.
Contra X – CA law does NOT – and could NOT require a SM clause to particpate in sports,
because this state law RESTRICTS schools ability to collect SM information on a student.
It not only requires parental notification and consent, and limits the content that can be collected,
but it also as I read it requires the district to conduct public hearings BEFORE it can enact any policy involving collecting Sociam Media information.
That means Contra X – all CA schools are NOT required to have an extra circular social media contract,
but are actually prohibited from doing so without taking a number of mandatory steps first.
It is POSSIBLE that Piner HS has some SM agreement for athletes – it is possible they have the one Cited,
It is not possible they have the one cited LEGALLY according to CA law.
It is also astronomically unlikely that EVERY CA HS has an SM contract for Athletes and Far less likely that it has THIS SM contract.
This also means EVERYTHING related to SM’s social media contract claim – with regard to this case is meaningless, ands the contract X cites is illegal as written according to CA law.
There is ALWAYS the possibility that CA has multiple laws that are in conflict with each other in Which case – they law you cite would act as a limit on any CA law requiring an SM agreement for athletes.
Regardless AS ALWAYS X is just blowing smoke out his a$$ and making absurd claims without any real foundation.
Several of of have spend Days discussing an absurd broad claim by X that Clearly is just made up
It’s a matter of fairness. If he wouldn’t be punished for supporting Jane Doe, he should not be punished for supporting the boys. Of the students who participated in the “protest,” how many of them participate in extracurricular activities but were NOT punished for their positions.
Jeff Mason: Your point adds good thoughtful stimulation for those who read it. It represents a good topic for classroom discussion and debate among students as well.
JM it is not just a matter of fairness, it is a matter of First amendment viewpoint neutrality required of government.
The only relevant issue here is that students have less first amendment rights than adults.
Less is not none,
SCOTUS asserted that Students have SOME rights to free speech in 1969 – Tinker.
That constraints on those rights MUST be viewpoint neutral – Tinker.
That the nondisruptive excercise of those rights in class can not be constrained.
In Morse SCOTUS allow restrictions on student speech that tacitly encourgaged violation of the law AT School Events.
In Mahoney SCOTUS confirmed that Social Media posts were outside the domain of Schools to regulate – even if they were vulgar and disparaged the school and staff.
Your post still failes to cite any actual agreement.
While I do not think the agreement is relevant – the one You cited -0 which may or may not be the one applicable, was clearly not violated – and is still unconstitutional.
But the reason you are being asked is because REPEATEDLY you make claims that are just a$$ farts.
You cited dicta in Mahonoy – ignoring the holding – which is DIRECTLY on point
The court found that suspending a cheerleader for vulgar and offensive posts criticizing the school was a violation of the first amendment
Worse still you could not even get the dicta right.
Disruption that is a DIRECT consequence of the speech does NOT include actions taken FREELY by 3rd parties – SCOTUS is never going to rule that HS students are pavlovs dogs unable to resist disruption when they hear things that hurt their feelings.
This is a stupid theme you have argued many many times.
The actions of left wing nuts in response to something that offends them is NOT directly caused by whatever they took offense to.
Forget the first amendment – you completely cripple society when nothing can be said or done because someone else might react badly.
Regardless people are demanding very specific proof from you
Because you repeatedly claim things that do not even exist.
And bend spindle fold and mutilate those that do.
I have no idea if or whether this athlete signed anything.
I do knowe that if you agreed to what you claimed – he did not violate that,
and that what you claim he signed is unconstitutional and does not say what you claim.
I do know that you completely got Tinker Wrong, and Morse, and now Mahoney.
That you did so in ways that anyone reading the actual text of the decisions – particularly the holding would be able to tell instantly.
If you want to be trusted – do not make things up or twist them to suit your scenario.
X
You are under the delusion that a Public HS is not Government.
Public schools are GOVERNMENT actors.
They are government actors when students are in class during the day.
They are government actors when students participate in extra curiculars.
They can not escape being government actors.
They are bound to comply with the first amendment – they can not escape it.
You provided a few examples of instance in which government can restrict speech.
No right is absolute. Each of your examples was Government as an employer.
All constitutional requirements are lowered in the context of govenrment as an employer – but they are STILL not reduced to that of private employers. In EACH of your examples Govenrment restrictions on speech were STILL not based on viewpoint.
You fixate on Veronia – which is a 4th amendment case and correctly note that drug tests for all students are not allowed, only those that participate in extra curriculars.
But you over burden that argument when you try to apply it to speech. Whether a student is on drugs is relevant to their participation in sports. What a student says off the athletic field is irrelevant to anything.
Again – SCOTUS did not even consider your argument in Mahoney.
Extra Curiculars are voluntary – meaning STUDENTS get to choose to particupate or not. Schools are absolutely permitted constraints that directly relate to extra curiculars. They can bar participation if you are not sufficiently skilled, or if you are on drugs and your participation would be dangers.
Just as for all so called entitledments Government can bar you for drug use, or if you are not qualified.
But government can not require you to agree to a contract that violates your rights in order to participate in sports or to receive entitlements. They can violate certain rights such as drug testing – where there is a legitimate connection between what government is asking and the entitlement.
The same is true of Govenrment as an employer.
The contract you claim students were obligated to agree to would be unconstitutional if requested of government employees or court clerks of those in the military – or atleast it would be if it meant what you and Piner HS insist it means – which is viewpoint discrimination. Government employees are NOT barred from political participation outside of working hours and outside of times in which they are openly representing government.
These are things you claim this agreement bars – it does not and if it did it would be unconstitutional.
But it does bar things that SCOTUS has already said are constitutional rights of school students even in extra curicular activities – Again seem Mahoney – BL was suspended for vulgar criticisms of her school, and her school in social media posts. The court said Nope you can not do that.
I have asked you for an example of any Government prior restraint that is not viewpoint neutral.
You have come up with nothing.
There are actually a few – very few. Child porn is restricted – but even there – advocating for child porn is not, just the production and distribution of it. Inciting violence is another – a very very very narrow exception – the court has ruled the threatened violence must be Real, it must be clear, it must be specific, and it must be immediate.
Those words – and all words in law have meaning – always NARROW meaning.
Again something you and those on the left CONSTANTLY get wrong.
Specific means specific. “fight” is not specific.
In the Breyer dicta that you cite repeatedly that goes all the way back to Tinker – the word you fixate on is Direct.
That does not mean A happened and then B happened therefore A is the DIRECT cause of B – that is probably the most common logic error in existance. No A did not directly cause B just because A happened and then B happened. While there are likely instances in which SCOTUS or other courts have made logical errors,
logical errors in legal reasoning mean the results are INVALID. Please point out a single consequential SCOTUS ruling with a clear logic error that remains as precident ?
Liability for 3rd party actions is one of the most difficult cases to make in law. Both criminal and civil.
The ONLY example of 3rd party liability with respect to speech that I am aware of is incitement to violence – and as noted above the requirements for that are very high.
Throughout this you are doing what left wing nuts always do – and construing words broadly rather than narrowly in order to restrict a persons constitutional rights.
X
You make a long list of suspect claims and we are all required to beleive them.
Nothing is mandatory in all schools in the state absent state law requiring it – please Cite the CA state law requiring this.
Regardless Piner HS can provide a copy if they wish. There is no privacy right in a govenrment contract – particularly on that is as you claim 100% required. There is also no privacy right in a mandatory boilerplate contract as if the parties can not modify it – the only thing that is “private” is the signature.
Which brings up your next problem.
Presuming this contract or ANY such signed contract actually exists – it is a contract of adhesion.
That is a legal term for a contract written by only one party that was not or can not be modified by the other.
Long ago on a lawyers advice I signed a multimillion dollar services contract that was incredibly bad.
The lawyer specifically advised me NOT to try to negotiate the most egregious (or any terms) because if there ever was a problem it would be far easier to toss the whole contract or the offensive parts of it so long as I did NOT modify the contract. The standards are even more narrow when you CAN NOT modify the contract.
Contracts of adhesion are common – most of the contracts that most of us agree to all the time are contracts of adhesion. Pretty much all Terms of service contracts are contracts of adhesion.
The courts are required to interpret a contract of adhession with ALL ambiguity going AGAINST whoever wrote the contract – in this case the school district.
Presuming YOUR proposed contract is the actual contract – which requires a suspension of disbelief with regard to your honesty, This student did not violate the contract as written even it is was NOT a contract of adhesion. He certainly did not if it was.
Brand disparagement is not a thing with respect to government entities. But even if it was – you will never get from a social media post that does not mention the school to brand disparagement – you would not get that even in a private contract. You also will not get that where the topic of the post has nothing at all to do with Piner HS or even High Schools generally. You also will not get there if the posts actually disparaged a 3rd party.
A private employer likely could terminate an employee over social media posts they did not like – but only in states with at will employment. They probably could not – even in an at-will state if there was an employment contract.
Because employment contracts take precidence over at will employment.
This is not a Government as an employer case. It is far more like an entitlements case where government offers a benefit that anyone who is qualified for is entitled to. There have been two supreme court cases on drug testing govenrment employees, there are no supreme court cases on drug testing entitlement recipients. But there is much federal and state law requiring it that has not todate been challenged.
People receiving government provided benefits – whether that is TANF or extrra curricular sports can be required to meet specific qualifications – without any need for a contract, and they can be drug tested.
But they can not have their first amendment rights constrained.
Vernoia is just plain completely irrelevant to this instance. The standard for 4th amendment infringements is rational basis, for the first amendment it is strict scrutiny.
That is something anyone frequenting this blog should know.
Nothing about Veronia applies to a free speech case.
The most on point case is Mahoney – where the speech did directly disparage the school and school personel and was vulgar – while it is waning, there have been carve-outs for limiting vulgarity in first amendment cases in the past.
Why does zero tolerance always turn out to be zero thinking? The school should have just stayed out of this one.
School officials normally enjoy qualified immunity for their official acts.
I think that under 42 USC Sec 1983 they could lose that immunity and be sued personally for trampling on basic rights.
Before you take away qualified immunity, an official can already lose with the right circumstances.
I suspect if this student sues, he will win. Schools do not have the right to punish over these types of postings. They are opened up to plenty of lawsuits they keep losing for no other reason they put their thumb on the scale for the speech they like.
I take no stand on the Cornell incident except to note that there are no arrests and there was already an investigation. Whether that investigation was done well remains to be seen.
Punishing a student for speech out of his personal space and at home with nothing about of involving the school is just wrong. I am not saying one has to agree, disagree or even care. All anyone has to do is understand it is his right to his opinion.
Quietman,
True. But I have seen officials sit up and pay closer attention when they learn they may be risking their own wallets rather than those of the taxpayers.
It is going to be hard to hold school officials PERSONALLY responsible due to qualified immunity.
But the District itself does NOT have that immunity.
This student is going to win -0 easily – likely even in CA – because as nuts as the 9th circuit is they are generally MORE supportive of free speech than SCOTUS.
the 9th circuit found FOR Morse in Morse v. fredrick SCOTUS reversed.
John,
Generally true but ‘immunity’ means you can’t be sued and ‘qualified’ means sometimes you can.
42 USC Sec 1983 sets the parameters for stripping qualified immunity. One reason for suing a school district rather than a school official is that schools have more money and it is easier to settle a case with taxpayers money.
Young, you are correct.
However Qualified immunity ONLY applies to govenrment officials – not to government itself.
School administrators, police officers, Individuals acting as govenrment agents have qualified immunity.
Schools and agencies do not.
The concept of qualified immunity is valid and important – but the courts extremely broad reach to qualified immunity is NOT.
To hold a government individually accountable you must establish a shocks the conscious violation of their rights. You must cite a prior case IN the same Federal District in which the courts found that an IDENTICAL rights violation Would result in individual liability but for qualified immunity.
That means that before anyone can ever successfully sue an individual government actor the exact same bad act – not a similar one, must have occured and gone to court TWICE in that federal district.
That is a virtually impossible bar to get past.
And that is why rights violations suits against individuals never succeed while those against agencies almost always result in favorable settlements.
The truth regarding Cornell will come out in all good time, in the meantime everyone can have their own opinion and express it without penalty. I wasn’t there so I’ll wait for all the evidence as should we all. The thing that bothers me is the lack of consistency from woman seeking “woman’s rights”. They support the woman in the Cornell affair without proof of any kind, support Clancy even after she admitted to the killing, but sit back for the most part and say nothing on bio-men in women’s sports. Put your pink C-caps on and get out there and protect your sisters for common sense.
Excellent.
I strongly suspect that we already have most everything regarding the Cornell 7. The conduct of all these students including Jane Doe is reprehensible, and probably they should all be expelled. There are drug and alcohol crimes that either do not involve the 7 students or involve only a few tangentially.
Regaredless, they were virtually all voluntarily drunk and high in in NY and most states you can not claim rape due to incapacity when YOU made yourself incapacitated.
Regardless., significant portions of Jane Doe’s statement to the police are out, Texts are out.
There does not seem to be a sex crime beyond students behaving badly.
Jane Doe says she was harmed. The Cornell 7 haven’t made that claim. While all participated Jane Doe suffered harm, she says. There must be harm.
The claim Salazar v. Paramount fails to identify actual harm.
O)ne of the Cornell 7 has claimed that JD felated him while he was nearly passed out without his consent.
A very long time ago my wife was brutally raped for 3 hours in an abandoned building. While there are sex crimes that are less violent, and there are far too many cases of non-consensual sex. Cases like this discredit and disrepect all those who were victims of actual sexual violence. We saw this with the #metoo movement – myriads of significant people – public figures were exposed for real sexual misconduct. Whether it is actual violence or threats of violence or those in power leveraging that power over others for sex – these are real crimes and should be punished proportionate to the offense.
But we have also seen myriads of bogus claims or claims of rape driven by regret, or consensual sex portrayed as rape. This leads to a distrust of those making valid claims.
I am not sure that Jane Doe has not crossed the line into false reporting.
To Piner HS students – there are far too many instances of actual sexual violence or sexual abuse or coercive sex – and these need to be prosecuted. Drawing national attention to the freely made bad choices of teens is harmful to the cause of reducing sexual violence.
Here’s some suggestions.
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A. Shutter the ‘schools of education’. Certainly all the state schools.
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B. Replace them with hands-on apprenticeship programs. To enter any program, you have to pass a general examination testing your mastery of English grammar, arithmetic, and elementary algebra. To enter a program for side subjects teachers, you have to have in addition 42 credits (excluding D credits) in the apposite subject (music, studio art, or physical education) and, as the case may be, pass a blind audition, submit a portfolio for blind examination, or pass a physical fitness strength and endurance course. To enter the program for academic secondary teachers, you’d have to have 42 credits of English, comparative literature, mathematics, computer science, biology, geology, physics, chemistry, history, geography, or a foreign language in which the state holds regents examinations; you might be able to forego the tertiary schooling in favor of a proficiency examination in re some subjects. To enter a program for voTech teachers, you’d have to have 42 credits in a trade at a technical college or to have obtained an alternative certification from an apprenticeship program.
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C. To enter the applicant pool for positions as dean, vice principal, or principal, you’d have to have a run of years as a working teacher and then complete a 48 credit degree in school psychology and (for principals) a 48 credit course in public administration.
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D. Limit superintendent’s offices support functions and recruit superintendents from the general civil service, the military, or the business world. The superintendent’s book would include budget, facilities planning, the motor pool, the comptroller corps, the grievance officers, legal counsel, itinerant employees, and liaison with outside agencies. They wouldn’t have anything to do with curriculum or with the discipline of students, or with employee discipline beyond those working for the superintendent’s offices. The principals would be selected by the school board and the assent of the board would be required to dismiss a principal, his direct reports, and the reports to his reports.
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E. Recruit and promote district employees outside of the faculties via timely civil service examinations.
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F. End collective bargaining for public employees, school employees especially. Unions enrolling public employees should be voluntary mutual aid societies which run credit unions, insurance agencies, and pension funds and have labor lawyers on retainer.
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G. In schools, as elsewhere, allow for employees to be removed via the signature of three persons in a chain of command on a letter of dismissal (or fewer if the chain of command is flatter). Provide for post termination reviews in front of ombudsmen employed by the state government where a terminated employee can make the case he was removed for one of a half-dozen impermissible reasons. If he receives a favorable ruling, he’d receive an indemnity and be free to apply for other positions in the public sector. The matter might then be referred to a different ombudsman to consider charges in front of a hearing examiner contra those who dismissed him. (The penalty for an adverse finding in such a case would be dismissal and blacklisting). It is important that hiring supervisors in the public sectors not control the composition of the applicant pool. It is not important to provide tenure for public employees.
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H. Subject all students to annual regents examinations administered by proctors employed by the state board. Each student would have a particular portfolio of examinations to take each year (which would vary from student to student). The examination series in which a student could enroll would be regulated by his performance on examinations he’s taken to date. It would be the passage of such examinations, not the discretion of teachers or administrators) which would determine what credentials are awarded a student. He reaches age 18, he is awarded a book of certificates which indicate his highest level of accomplishment in each course of study he followed.
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I. Limit common-and-garden schools to students who (1) do not have insuperable behavior issues, (2) are not addled by severe perceptual or cognitive deficits, and (3) are proficient in spoken English. Maintain consortial programs in English immersion for those in category 3 and make use of placement examinations as soon as is feasible to locate the best place for them in a common-and-garden school. Place those in category 2 in high-overhead programs adapted to their specific issues and do the best you can with them. Place those in category 1 in harsh day detention centers run by local sheriff’s departments.
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J. Track students assiduously. The students suitable for common and garden schooling would start out at age five on a uniform level, then separate into two tracks consequent to examinations, then into four tracks. Students near the performance margin might jump between one track and another, as might students who started out in English-immersion programs. Track one might consist of students at or above the 88th percentile, track two of the 53d to the 87th percentile, track three of the 29th to the 52d percentile, and track four of the 9th to the 28th percentile.
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K. Devote the first five years of common-and-garden schooling to the same content, but different paces of instruction. Have several years of the 3Rs, then add the fundamentals of American history, geography, and civics as an additional subject around age 8 or 9.
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L. Differentiate the tracks by content in middle school (10-14). Have tracks three and four continue to work on basic skills for the four years in question. Have track two study basic skills for two years, then sign up for a set of academic courses for two years. Have track one study a men of five academic courses.
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M. For high school students (14-18), there would be a modal (not exclusive) destination for each track. Track four would study basic skills supplement with life skills classes for an indeterminate period, perhaps transferring to voTech programs when mastery is demonstrated. Track three would devote itself to voTech programs seekng perhaps two certificates. Track two might follow a voTech program, an academic program or a mixed program and registered for four examination series. Track one would continue to study five academic subjects supplemented with exit courses in music and art appreciation.
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N. Hold classes for 240 days a year. Allow youths to leave school at age 14 and calibrate high school regents examinations such that the assumed pace of instruction dovetails with the assumed work schedule of the students in question. (I.e. assume high school students are all working part time).
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O. Provide in law for voucher programs and partial refunds of property taxes to allow parents to voluntarily opt out of their local district schools with a more circumscribed financial penalty. Students enrolled at voucher-funded private schools (which would be debarred from charging tuition), enrolled at tuition-financed private schools, or enrolled in homeschooling would be required to sit for regents examinations with all other students and the schools in question would appear on league tables published by the board of regents. All parents would have a rebuttable presumption of suitability to homeschool, to be withdrawn only in the case of poor examination performance by their charge.
Send to the school.
Impressive to say the least. Now find a community whose tax base will support the budget necessary to justify the remuneration due a professional with that degree of preparation. School budgets are funded by tax revenues, and the severity of the bite depends upon the construct of the jurisdiction that is served.
One of the problems with nearly all efforts to remake systems – whether left or right is that we must make the world work with the people we have, not the ones we wish we had.
We can get better teachers – by pillaging other professions.
Do we destroy medicine, science, engineering to improve teaching ?
You’re not getting your money’s worth out of the extant teacher corps due to poor screening, poor training, and poor working conditions. You can work on those items.
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Engineers, physicians and surgeons, allied medical treating professions, lawyers, veterinarians, clinical psychologists, and post-secondary teachers account in sum for about 3.5% of the working population. If one third of the primary and secondary teacher/ administrator corps consists of people who have no business being there due to deficits of g, a program to replace the clots would involve reshuffling about 1.7% of the total working population or 5% of the top 1/3. You can accomplish that without ‘pillaging’ and ‘destroying’ anything else. The bloat in tertiary schooling might be a good source for smarter teachers. Again, this is a question you might address after addressing other issues.
Shifting 5% of the top third would be HUGE. Even if it evenly distributed – and it would not by that would be very disruptive.
US total workforce is 170M people, total teachers is 3.5M – with administrators that is probably 4M. You say total professionals is 3.5% – you would need half of ALL of them to replace teachers.
This issue is a problem universally – there are many reasons why Government stimulus programs do not work – but ONE of those is that it screws up whatever domain it focuses on.
Obama claimed there was 800B in shovel ready programs in 2009 for ARRA.
One of the consequences of ARRA was stalling all other construction in the US for years.
The big problem was not construction workers – though the FACT is that Highway construction is NOT labor intense compared to building construction and as a result increased highway construction did not come close to absorbing the out of work construction workers. The fact that the skill sets are not truly the same was a problem too. But the really big deal was these projects were NOT “shovel ready” ARRA consumed the vast majority of Civil engineers for several years.
While Civil engineers are only a small part of all other construction – they are NOT optional.
If all available civil engineers are tied up on infrastructe – then commercial construction projects stall for want of civil engineers – that means MORE people out of work not less.
Obama had the worst 8 year growth of any president since the great depression.
ARRA was a major factor in that. There was no hope of a housing recovery while civil engineers were tied up on highways.
While there was not a need for New Home construction – that was not recovering until home prices rose. All housing is not new homes. People MUST live somewhere. If they do not buy homes, they live in apartments. Rents went through the roof during the Obama years
There was SOME new apartment construction – which would have brought rents down – but that was slowed by the shortage of civil engineers. Unlike Highways and bridges – many of those involved in home construction have the skills to build apartments.
But while the demand for apartments was there – the ability to match demand with supply was thwarted by lack of civil engineers.
Commercial construction was similarly impacted. The housing bubble had almost no impact on commercial construction – But ARRA consuming most civil engineers radically slowed down commercial construction. Again releasing labor into unemployment. Home construction workers can generally move to apartments. Some can move to commercial construction – there are enough shared skills for movement between many forms of building construction. But road and bridge construction only use small amounts of labor and those skills have small overlap with building construction.
This is just one example.
Separately – say by some miracle you find available replacements for teachers – what are you going to do with 4M unemployed people whose skills really are not transferable elsewhere ?
Use them for farm workers ?
If you want large bodies of skilled professionals – your best source is immigrants. And politically that will go over like a lead balloon – but even ignoring politically – bring in 1M skilled people you can move to teaching per year and you need to teach them english and move them from the skills of their profession to teaching.
I am not a huge fan of modern teachers – they are far to extremely on the left and that is harmful. Worse they are not that highly skilled – as we see with declining education quality. But that does not change the fact that teaching is a unique skill – you can not just wave a magic wand and abracadaba good engineers become good teachers.
Further this – well we will just pay them more and get better people issue is not unique to teachers. Beyond the idiocy of “defund the police” – atleast some on the left actually sought to replace police with social workers and others. Replacing them is a $hitty idea. Suplimenting them is not inherently. Many on the left misrepresented studies in alternatives to incarceration (and supliments to traditional policing) – many of these Work – depending on how you define work. we have programs that reduce recidivism, or in many other ways improve the criminal justice system. But with tiny exceptions these are not REPLACEMENTS for what we have been doing but supliments too – they are also expensive, they are a luxury that arguably an affluent society like ours can afford and they can be implimented to benefit us. But they are not magic. I forget which city ir was – but one major US city replaced significant portions of pretrial incarceration with house arrest and ankle monitors.
Not inherently a bad idea. But they allowed 2 8hrs days a week for each person under home arrest to leave the home – and guess what they committed more crimes when they were out of the house. Then they found the cost of monitoring the ankle monitors was too high – so they reduced monitoring – did not take long before those under house arrest figured that out and just left the house committing more crimes. Prior to the policy change – if someone violated ankle monitoring – a warrant was issued in less than 2 days they were picked up and jailed. When house arrest large scale replaced jail – it suddenlly took 2 months to track down and re-incarcerate someone who violated the conditions of house arrest.
House arrest as a substitute for jail for a large percent of offenders is a very good idea – but only if implimented well. Even good ideas can have horrible consequences if people do not take care with details. The most broken systems we have that are centuries old quite often still work better than excellent new ideas. Not because the new ideas are poor – but because even a bad approach we have been using for a century probably has the major kinks worked out. While a new good idea is with certainty going to have a very rough start as we learn how to do it right.
Getting change right within government is incredibly hard – honestly it takes decades to make something work moderately well – possibly even longer.
Even in the free market change is usually disruptive painful and fails many times before getting it right. But in the free market the cycle time between attempts is short and learning is near automatic – do not do whatever failed last.
We can get better teachers by paying them better. If we had teacher salaries starting at $100,000 a year and more with experience and tenure it would make a world of difference.
No, you cannot, you’ll just get more expensive teachers. You screen them poorly, you train them poorly, you supervise and evaluate them poorly, and you generate needlessly poor working conditions, you get the teacher corps you have.
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NB, teachers are generously compensated, but that compensation is manifest in their retirement benefits.
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This is the common solution of the left.
First the ONLY correct price for anything is what a willing buy and a willing sellor agree to.
There is absolutely nothing in the market place that you can know what the correct price will be. Prices are discovered by the free market.
Thi sis a simplification of what is called the socialistg calculation problem – which is an economic debate from the 40’s and 50s that socialism LOST badly. It is why the USSR collapsed. It is why socialism is incredibly inefficient – because it has no price discovery mechanism. This is also one of the reasons that price controls always fail.
Get rid of public schools and teachers pay will be set by the market – Correctly. It will be what parents are willing to pay to educate their children. Teachers will have to deliver the value that parents want for the price parents can afford. But it will go beyond teachers on to schools.
In South Korea education is massive. After traditional public school All students spend most of the rest of their day with private tutoring. the best of the best are running online courses with incredibly high demand and making over a million a year as teachers. They only make that much because they are worth that much. They have figured out how to effectively teach large numbers of students, That is not a common skill – few teachers have it.
Bujt I have no problem with those who do making a million dollars a year.
But you do not get that without free markets. You will never get that with public teachers unions. You also will not get that from idiots with a socialist mind set.
Lioke it or not the reality is people are NOT equal. No matter how badly I want to be – I am not a musician. I have tried, it is not a skill I have. My son was better on the piano in one lesson that I was in 2 years – the same with the guitar. It is easy for him. It is tediously hard for me. But just because I am significantly below average in one talent does not mean I am not stellar in others. Some things that come very hard for my son come trivially for me. Even today – I learn new skills in many fields very quickly. I have been a software developer for over 40 years. I went from business software to defense software to linux kernel software to embedded software to electronics design to PC Boards to FPGAs to designing silicon chips and future memory and CPU architectures. And that is just a cursory overview.
Regardless we are not all equal. One of the many miracles of free markets is that they are very good if allocating resources – again touching on the socialist calculation problem.
Free markets do an excellent job of allocating the entire workforce with pretty good optimization of each persons skills to the wants and needs of consumers.
Not perfectly – just far better than anything else.
One of the reasons that socialism always fails is that the resource allocation method of free markets is essentially free – or more accurately it is massively distributed. It is not top down. No one plans it and still it produces better resource allocation than any bureacrat or any computer. There was a mistaken beleif in the 50’s and 60’s that computers were going to make the perfect allocation of resources possible – and therefore make socialism work.
Did not happen. The problem is way too large. The resource allocations that the free market perform in 1 day are several orders of magnitude beyond all computational power that ever existed.
There are likely some that beleive AI will suddenly be able to replace the free markets – not happening. While AI is near certain to be a more massive improvement in the human condition that the industrial revolution contrary to the name AI is not intelligence – it is valuable – very valuable, it is billions of times more capable than humans AT SOME THINGS but not everything.
Returning to your claim and the failure of the socialist calculation problem
One of the most difficult things form most people to understand about economics is what actually is zero sum and what is not.
First – contra a bunch of elites – there is no limit to growth – maybe there is a limit to the rate of growth, but we can raise human standard of living infinitely.
At the same time in each individual instant of time the economy IS zero sum.
If you move people into teaching – you take them from somewhere else.
If you pay teachers more – something else gets less funding.
But I said zero sum in this instant – between today and tomorow – the economy will have likely grown – a little, and we can allocate the benefits of that growth to improve and grow something else. If we put that into education – and the result is even more growth – that is great. But if it does NOT significantly improve things – we have squandered growth and we will be less batter off than we would have been.
Just to be clear – I am NOT saying Teachers should not be paid more.
I am saying that what teachers are paid is NOT for you or me to decide – not societally.
Very very few things are properly decided either by people democratically, or by people though the allegedly intelligent experts we elect or the purportedly more intelligent experts they employ.
While free markets will not only get those things right – they will get them right in relation to every single other thing in the world – they will get the price of teachers right as compared to that or engineers or coffee, or nails.
The free market is in actuality a massively parrallel super computer that uses all the human brains in the world to calculate and recalculate dynamically and instantly the value of everything in proportion to the agregate sum of each and every persons individual wants and needs and the value they contribute to producing everything we want and need.
It is “democracy” at a scale far broader but far smaller than anything else.
We vote constantly every day – we vote by the value we produce – and our choices in producing that value – because we can not for long consume more value than we produce.
We also vote in every single consumption choice we make.
Do I fill the tank at todays prices or wait a week ?
Do I pay $6 for the McDonald meal deal or $12 for the bacon delux burger meal ? Or do I take my wife out to dinner ? Do I go to the Italian restaurant or the gourmet steakhouse ?
Every one of us makes thousands of choices like this every single day – and they are all VOTES based on our personal values and based on how much value we have produced and therefore how much we can consume.
No one has ever conceived of anything that works a tiny fraction as well.
The free market not only knows the correct price of everything – but it adjusts every price dynamically all the time.
And though we call it “the free market” – it is just us – people, individuals, voting our preferences.
Most of us on the right get a huge kick out of the massive hypocracy of the DSA types – the Hassan Pikers etc. Who talk about the wonders of socialism and communism as they live like robber barrons
Or of the left wing nut DSA college student engaged in minority studies and social justice that goes to starbucks and orders . Double decaf non-fat latte, medium foam, dusted with just the faintest whisper of cinnamon.
Every single one of them – and YOU are a capitalist right down to your bones – your conscious minds just has not caught on. How you live and your ideolgoy are completely out of touch with each other.
Almost no one in the world today could live the life they live absent free markets.
The global standard of living is the highest it has ever been That is because of the value that we produce, and we produce that value because we are free to produce that value.
In SOME places past or present poor decisions by and about govenrmnent limit us
In others like the US a long history of economy freedom massively advantages each and every one of us.
Economic freedom and the creativity and productivity of humans is the engine of the world.
And that is what the free market is – human freedom in action.
And even in the most socialsist and communist regimes enough of a vestige of economic freedom exists to support a standard of living far higher than without that freedom.
The compensation program would have to be generous enough to attract people with the requisite skills, not the requisite credentials. Credentials are of use only as indicators of skills. The trouble with the education industry is one identified by Thos Sowell a generation ago: the credentialling program actually reduces the quality of the potential applicant pool, because intelligent people cannot be bothered with all the nonsense.
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One should also note that much time is wasted in higher education for everyone enrolled, not merely those in teacher training programs. Two years of apprenticeship incorporating some classroom instruction (for elementary teachers) and two years conjoined to three semesters of subject training (for other teachers) would actually take less time than a BEd does today, much less a course of study complete with an MEd.
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Please note that teacher compensation is generous as we speak, but that it’s peculiarity is expressed in indexed defined-benefit retirement programs (which are generous enough that the median retirement age for teachers is 59.0 years) and in a work year 25% shorter than a normal f/t worker. The flip side of that is the unwillingness of administrators to remove incorrigibles from ordinary classrooms, the witless insistence on placing severely handicapped persons in ordinary classrooms (I had a friend who was hired by the Rochester (NY) City school district in 1990 to act as a notetaker for a single deaf student), and the insistence of teachers and administrators on squandering time on distractions rather than acquisition of basic skills.
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While we’re at it, if you were to increase cash salaries for primary and secondary teachers by 1/3, the bill would amount to about $102.6 bn, or about 0.185% of the market value of non-exempt property in this country.
What happened to P-Q-R-S-T-W-X-Y-Z ha ha ha
TOO many suggestions ALREADY!!!
“can’t depend on Turley to accurately give us the facts. His record speaks for itself.” Maybe its high time you started thinking for yourself. Its not his responsibility to educate anyone on current issues, he’s simply expressing his thoughts in 500 words, not making a legal case.
ANON loves to attack Turley. Get your own blog.
They are hyper-credentialed, ideologically rigid underachievers: products of Sigmund the Fraud school of deceivers, where indoctrination replaces education.
I doubt they’ve had any instruction in psychoanalysis. The rap on schools of education a generation ago was that they traded in filler courses and in courses retailing ill-considered pedagogic fads. The issue today is that the course content largely consists at some schools of pushing obnoxious and ill-considered social ideology. (This is called ‘social justice education’). Again, state legislatures need to get off their duffs, shut down these cesspools, and blacklist their faculty.
You have it right. I just want to make sure that Sigmund the Fraud (a grammar book with blank pages) isn’t confused with Sigmund Freud, a psychoanalyst.
Nearly everyone today seems to think they are competent to psychoanalize whoever they are at odds with – given that actual trained psychologists are absolutely abysmal at that – anyone that thinks they know what is going on in the minds of thers should take more of a look at their own mind.
Prison psychologists whop KNOW that 1/3 of prisoners are psychopaths and KNOW that psychopaths are incredibly skilled at manipulating people – even experts, and KNOW that specific prisoners were diagnosed – often by tham as psychopaths, and KNOW that psychopaths CAN NOT BE REFORMED, still tell parole boards that psychopaths have been re-abilitated and are ready to return to society. The group most likely to get paroled from prison – psychopaths are the ones most likely to re-offend, and the ones that can not be reformed.
I would be happy to learn there was an effective treatment for posychopathy or any mental disorder, but in truth a century of “advances” in psychology have resulted in almost no gains in our ability to treat mental health problems. While we do have pretty good treatments for anxiety and depression particularly less severe cases,
For most everything else we drug people into oblivion. I would be highly critical of that – except we have pretty much nothing else.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries we put those with mental health issues into sanatariums. In most cases treatment was abysmal and abusive. Starting in the 60’s we released them, which increased homelessness and drug use. More and more we are sending them to prison.
We do not have answers to most mental health problems.
Suggest each parole decision be make by a jury composed of prison system field employees selected at random. Six jurors, ruling by majority vote. Send each of them them a dossier with the convict’s disciplinary record but with the convict’s name and employees’ names replaced by code numbers. They meet at an assigned location and deliberate for a while. You tell them that the decision should be made on the basis of the convict’s respect for prison rules and the authority of the guards; they may bring other factors into the discussion, but you cannot control that.
I have two concerns:
“The student was not discussing the school, calling for some school disruption or destruction of property, or encouraging violence.” He may have discussed none of those things, but some people may consider supporting rape, encouraging violence on women. There may well have been a violation of the student’s first amendment rights here, but I can’t depend on Turley to accurately give us the facts. His record speaks for itself.
“can’t depend on Turley to accurately give us the facts. His record speaks for itself.” Maybe its high time you started thinking for yourself. Its not his responsibility to educate anyone on current issues, he’s simply expressing his thoughts in 500 words , not making a legal case.
Enigma, Turley left out one particularly important fact. It changes the whole narrative.
The student in question is the football team captain is bound by an athlete social media agreement. Public school districts generally have broader legal leeway to regulate the conduct and off-campus speech of students participating in voluntary, privileged extracurricular activities (like sports teams or student council) if that speech reflects poorly on the program or violates a signed code of conduct.
An athlete social media agreement (often structured as a “social media contract” or “code of conduct addendum”) is a formal, signed document required by many high school athletic departments. It serves as a condition of participation for students wishing to play on voluntary, extracurricular sports teams.
A further important point is
playing high school sports is considered a privilege rather than a constitutional right, school districts use these agreements to establish behavioral expectations that go beyond what a school can legally enforce on the general, non-athlete student body.
He didn’t rape a hooker, he expressed an opinion on a social media account.
He violated an agreement he signed. All high school athletes, especially a team captain sign such agreements. It’s a common practice these days. Playing in a high school sports team is a privilege, not a constitutional right.
No he didn’t.
Yes, he did. All high school athletic students sign some type of this agreement. It’s standard in all 50 states. Some have zero-tolerance policies. Some don’t.
Thanks for the issue of your imagination.
Yes, what was on the student’s mind was that they are innocent and should be “Free”. Prof. Turley should’ve punctuated as follows: He was stating his view that the Cornell 7 — defendants who have not been tried, let alone convicted — are innocent.”
They’re being subject to a process-is-punishment investigation and threatened with a jury trial in a blue jurisdiction (i.e. one chock-a-block with people of unjust disposition). From what information fragments have emerged, two of the seven did nothing and a third did very little and retreated when slapped by the plaintiff. She initially sought out one of the seven and (it appears) agreed explicitly to a tryst with another.
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BTW, Cornell expelled two of the seven and shut down the frat chapter some time ago. The incident occurred in the fall of 2024.
EB
A school districts role in the life of Students ENDS outside the school or school events.
How the school became aware is irrelevant – it was not there business.
Further according to Tinker – which Turley cites – even at school the student could have worn a “free the cornel 7”
tshirt and the school could not do anything about it.
The school here is FAR FAR FAR over the line. I strongly suspect FIRE is already contacting the student.
No Turley was not mind reading.
I find it offensive that those of you on the left constantly rant about mind reading and misframing issues – when that is YOUR CRIME.
YOU raise the hypothetical that the student was making other posts advocating from violence against women.
Do YOU have evidence ? That is just a product of your fevered brain.
Further it would still be IRRELEVANT – social media posts on your own time are NOT a schools business except MAYBE if they relate to the school and even then – schools may not preclude students from discussing and criticising their schools.
I am certain that someone soimewhere has engaged in the offensive speech you assume this student has engaged in.
The Cornel 7 and Jane Doe all did exactly that – I do nto think ANYONE is claiming their conduct is moral.
But it was not illegal – aside from some drug and alcohol crimes.
When and If you find this student actually posted the things you hypothesize – you can verbally excoriate him.
NOTHING MORE. And the School can do NOTHING.
What some people think is the hidden agenda – or even the open agenda of someone else’s speech does not EVER justify government sanctions or supression of speech PERIOD.
This was decided long ago. The Nazi’s were allowed to march through Skokie.
Govenrment – and public schools are Government, may not supress the speech of others – not even bad speech, offensive speech, and hate speech.
And we especially do not supress hypothetical speech.
John Say, the school can indeed do something outside the school because the student, who is a football team captain, signed a contract with the school an Athlete social media agreement with the school. Those agreements include any social media posting outside school.
Turley doesn’t seem to be aware or he omitted that fact about how student athletes are different than ‘regular’ students.
If you don’t believe me here are the facts regarding these agreements.
Under standard First Amendment protections, public schools have limited authority to punish students for what they say off-campus on private accounts. However, when a student signs an athletic contract, they voluntarily agree to stricter rules in exchange for the privilege of representing the school in uniform.
By securing signatures from both the student and a parent/guardian, the school establishes a clear paper trail. If an athlete posts something that disrupts the team or violates school culture, the administration has clear documentation to justify suspension or removal from the team without violating the student’s core constitutional rights as an enrollment entity.
Zero tolerance is indeed in that agreement.
X =- even if what you claim is true – which I doubt – you make things up all the time – it would still be irrelevant.
The contract you claim exists is facially unconstitutional.
Public Schools are GOVERNMENT. You can not condition anything regarding public education on a surrender of your rights.
Can Trump demand that government employees sign a contract that bars them from criticising him on social media in return for keeping their jobs ?
That is closer to constitutional than your idiotic claims.
A government job is not a right. The hypothetical I offered above IS legitimate for presidentially appointed positions, but not for normal government jobs.
The left has made public education into a civil right – you can not condition that right on surrendering constitutional rights.
Your hypothetical “Athelete social media agreement” is not worth the toilet paper it is written on.
You constantly make these stupid arguments.
You constantly wish to pretend that fundimental rights can be waived away with the right magic words.
I have no idea if Turley is aware of this alleged contract.
But honestly it just makes this schools conduct MORE egregious.
We are now talking PRIOR RESTRAINT. I am hard pressed to think of ANY instance in which govenrment PRIOR RESTRAINT of free speech is constitutional.
Your alleged contract makes things WORSE not better
Read your own argument. Substitute say Press for Athletes and set this out as a contract that Reporters must agree to to be part of the WH press corp.
How long do you think that will fly ?
What I do not understand is how you are so stupid – and how the idiots at this school are so stupid as to not understand this. Tinker is 55+ years old. EVERY SINGLE TEACHER, and EVERY SINGLE SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER should already KNOW you can not bar non-disruptive free speech even in the classroom
Every claim you have made would be perfectly legitimate in a PRIVATE SCHOOL.
Public schools MAY NOT infringe on free speech. And you can not attempt to contract that away by conditioning ONE Right on the surrender of another.
John say, you’re wrong, usual.
Student Athlete social media agreements are common in every state.
These contracts are real, completely legal, and used nationwide. For instance, the Santa Rosa City Schools District (where Piner High School is located) explicitly utilizes a mandatory Athletic Coaches Handbook Packet. To step onto the field, every athlete and parent must physically or digitally sign the Athletic Code of Conduct, which contains specific rules governing social media use, representation of the school brand, and sportsmanship.
Courts draw a sharp legal distinction between the right to a basic public education and the privilege of participating in extracurricular activities. While a public school cannot force a student to sign away their free speech just to enroll in math or English class, federal and state courts have consistently ruled that schools can condition participation in voluntary, privileged activities (like sports, cheerleading, or student council) on a student agreeing to elevated behavioral and code-of-conduct standards.
Then you make nonsense claims about “prior restraint”. You showed how you don’t understand what “prior restraint” means.
Prior restraint is a severe constitutional violation where the government uses an injunction or court order to physically stop someone from speaking or publishing before it happens.
An athletic social media agreement does not physically block a student from typing a post, nor does it delete their text beforehand. The student remains entirely physically capable of posting. The contract merely outlines subsequent disciplinary consequences (such as suspension from a voluntary game) if the post violates a signed code of conduct. Punishing a violation after the fact is not prior restraint.
“Substitute say Press for Athletes and set this out as a contract that Reporters must agree to to be part of the WH press corp. How long do you think that will fly?”
LOL! You and your wild false equivalencies.
White House reporters are credentialed professionals representing independent, private news organizations protected by explicit, institutional Freedom of the Press clauses
High school athletes are minors voluntarily choosing to put on a government-owned uniform to represent a public institution in an extracurricular capacity. They are not independent journalists. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that public schools stand in loco parentis (in place of the parent) during school activities and have a valid interest in regulating how their official representatives behave when wearing the school’s name.
For the h311 of it lets look at your contract.
Brand disparagement even in a private contexts is limited to the actual brand.
Public Schools have no brand to protect.
They are publicly funded. Should someone affiliated with the school do something that ACTUALLY reflect badly on the school – the school will not lose funding.
Contra YOUR claim and apparently Piner HS’s “agreement” activities outside of school that do not mention Piner HS can not be restricted by your Brand clause.
Further even private employers can not extend Brand disparagement contract claims to include political commentary on issues of the day having nothing to do with “the brand” where “the brand is never raised.
Whether involving a public school or a private business – that would be unconstitutionally vague and unconstitutionally broad – and this particular case demonstrates that.
In what world do you think anyone can get you to contract away your rights ?
“Turley doesn’t seem to be aware or he omitted that fact about how student athletes are different than ‘regular’ students.”
Because they are not. Extra curicular activities are a part of the publicly funding education open to all.
They can SOMETIMES be limited in a viewpoint neutral way, but governmetn can not engage in viewpoint discrimination.
“If you don’t believe me here are the facts regarding these agreements.”
This is a bizzare phrasing – which lead me to strongly suspect you are not citing an ACTUAL agreement.
Those of you on the left do this CONSTANTLY – instead of providing primary sources you provide opinions about primary sources. As an example beat reporters are supposed to report what was said and done – not what they think of what was said and done, not their version of what was said and done, not spin edited versions of what was said and done. If you can sense the reporters views in a NEWS story – the reporter should be fired.
WE have news analysis and oppinion peices and editorials to address viewpoints on the news – and in those viewpoints are usually open and explicit.
Regardless anything “brand” related is a non starter for a public school and even in a private context it must DIRECTLY relate to the “brand” – not function as a justification for broad opinion related censorship on issues entirely unrelated to “the brand”
“Prohibition of demeaning content” – there is a reason thatr is followed by a list.
Otherwise it is unconstitutional for vagueness and overbreadth – it probably is anyway.
Regardless, nothing this student has said is cyberbullying, racist, sexist, or degrading teammates coaches, officials or opposing schools.
Even the cyberbullying, racist and sexist provisions MUST be read narrowly to have any hope of being constitutional
AQ good way to understand this is saying
“My coach is a moron” would be barred by this clause.
Saying “My coach made a poor decision going for it on 4th down in last nights game” would not.
Degrading and criticisng are NOT the same thing.
Regardless this clause would not hold up to constitutional scrutiny in a PRIVATE contract, it is toilet paper in a contract with a public school.
Regardless, this clause is specifically for illegal acts – not comments about allegedly illegal acts.
You are 3 levels remocved from its being applicable.
The conduct in Cornell is NOT clearly illegal – outside drug and alcohol delivery
Commenting on conduct on the other side of the country is not itself illegal conduct.
Illegal conduct almost never includes speech.
This is the one clause that might not be unconstitutional.
“Digital Footprint Awareness: Explicit warnings that a student’s public posts are permanent and can negatively impact college recruitment, athletic scholarships, and future employment.”
This is NOT an agreement or prohibition – it is advice. It is good advice. But it is just advice.
“Under standard First Amendment protections, public schools have limited authority to punish students for what they say off-campus on private accounts. “
Correct – LIMITED – While I think Morse v Fredrick was decided WRONG – you will be happy to note that I am completely at odds with Thomas on this.
Still Morse V. Fredrick affirmed a schools right to punish speech advocating for criminal conduct in loosely school sponsored outside events.
“However, when a student signs an athletic contract, they voluntarily agree to stricter rules in exchange for the privilege of representing the school in uniform.”
Nope. This is a public school – it can not ask students to voluntarialy waive their right to free speech.
You can not get arround unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination by conditioning the RIGHT to participate in a publicly funded school activity on limiting your first amendment rights.
Even in the private context – this “agreement” is way way too broad to be constitutional.
There is not a chance anything like this holds up.
Fire will use this as PROOF of viewpoint discrimination and unconstitutional conduct on the part of the school district.
“By securing signatures from both the student and a parent/guardian, the school establishes a clear paper trail. “
That they are violating their constitutional rights.
Can the government require you to contract yourself into slavery ?
You seem to think that all contracts are automatically valid.
That is more extreme than even anarcho capitalists.
“If an athlete posts something that disrupts the team or violates school culture”
Not even true by YOUR agreement – Culture is no where mentioned in this contract.
Brand BTW is not culture, Zero tolerance for illicit activities is not culture.
Bans of posting images of illegal conduct are not culture.
And suggestions that SM posts are for life is not a term that creates an obligation on the part of the student or a power on the part of the government.
Your jump to “culture” exposes the flaws in your stupid argument.
Laws must be clear to be binding.
Contracts must be clear to be binding.
If you can trivially jump from one form of overly broad characterization to another – then you do not have a binding contract.
Nothing in the agreement you cite precludes ANY STUDENT from posting commentary on matters of public interest. Not inside school, not outside.
The student did not post images of rape. He did not advocate for illegal conduct.
Asserting that someone accused of a crime – even convicted of a crime is innocen is NOT advocacy of criminal conduct.
So you are arguing that an unconstitutional contract that the student did not violate somehow justifies further unconstitutional conduct by a state actor.
You are so screwed here.
Fire is going to have Pine HS for breakfast lunch and dinner.
This is likely a loser even in the 9th circuit.
“the administration has clear documentation to justify suspension or removal from the team without violating the student’s core constitutional rights as an enrollment entity.”
How ? As noted – your agreeement is unconstitutional – it is unconstitutional for a state actor, it is so badly written it would be unconstitutional for a private actor.
Worse still – you can not even demonstrate that it was violated.
No a school can not protect its “culture” or “brand” (which is something different) outside the school doors.
The fact that YOU and the school are offended that a student might post to support the innocence of people alleged to have committed a crime, does not in anyway violate this agreement that is not constitutional.
YOUR post proves not only that you are stupid, but that you are deliberately repressive and authoritarian.
You seem to beleive that there is some magical way arround the first amendment.
There is not. There are a few – VERY FEW specific instances in which govenrment can restrict speech.
There is a VERY SLIGHT broadening of that for schools – that broadening is limited to advocating illegal acts, and actively disrupting classes. None of which are at issue here.
The student in question was not advocating for illegal acts at a school event.
He was not actively disrupting classes,
he was not inciting violence.
He was not distributing child porn.
He was not doing anything that your unconstitutional contract actually prohibits.
“Zero tolerance is indeed in that agreement.”
Yes – of Students engaging in illegal conduct. Not of opinions that offend you.
John Say, you continue to demonstrate your complete lack of understanding on how things work.
You say public schools have no “brand” to protect. That’s not true and I can prove it.
The law treats the general classroom and voluntary sports teams entirely differently. Under the Unconstitutional Conditions Doctrine, a state actor cannot force you to give up a right to receive a basic public benefit (like enrolling in high school). However, participating in sports is legally classified as a privilege, not a right. Courts have routinely ruled that because a student-athlete voluntarily chooses to represent the school body in uniform, the school has a legitimate interest in regulating their conduct to preserve team cohesion and school reputation (brand).
You say this contract is too broad to be constitutional even in private context. Private employers and private entities are not bound by the First Amendment. The First Amendment strictly restricts government actors. A private employer can absolutely fire an employee for posting political commentary that harms the company’s reputation or violates a code of conduct. Framing this as unconstitutional for a private actor shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the “state action” requirement in constitutional law.
Enforcing an athletic contract is not viewpoint discrimination; it is conduct regulation. The school did not punish the student because they hate the abstract concept of the “presumption of innocence.” They stepped in because the captain’s public commentary regarding a highly sensitive sexual assault case triggered a real-world disruption (a 200-student walkout). Under Tinker v. Des Moines, schools have explicit constitutional authority to regulate speech when it causes or reasonably threatens a substantial disruption to the educational environment. How did you miss that?
You say nothing in the agreement precludes any student from commenting on public issues. But, that’s not entirely true. He was team captain, not just any student who didn’t sign a social media agreement.
Standard athletic contracts across the country explicitly forbid posting content that brings “discredit, dishonor, or disruption” to the team. By choosing to wade into a highly explosive, localized controversy on a public forum while holding a leadership position (Team Captain), the student directly tied his digital footprint to the school’s athletic program, triggering a concrete operational disruption.
You’re wrong. Because you don’t understand how the law works and apparently the idea of voluntary agreements signed by both parents and student athletes agreeing to the conditions for the privilege of participating in student sports.
EB you claim you can not trust Turley – because he reads minds and misframes things.
Yet he did NOT read any minds and framed this as the available evidence supports.
Your argument against Turley then relies entirely on hypotheticals resting on remote possibilities for which there is no evidence.
And worse still that even if true would merely change this from a the left is trying to supress non-offensive and reasonable speech to the left is trying to unconstitutionally supress offensive speech.
There is ZERO evidence this student engaged in any of the speech you hypothesize. But if he did it would not change anything except the “ew factor”.
You are litterally making the same error that those demanding prosecution of the cornell 7 are.
You are conflating the disgusting behavior of ALL the students with criminal conduct.
Interestingly I would note that according to Johanthon Haidts decade old work on moral foundations and political orientation – Disgust is a CONSERVATIVE moral value. It is Conservatives that tend to think everything that is disgusting should be criminal.
Just more evidence of the political shifts in this country.
While it is generally not mentioned that large numbers of democrats were involved in HUAC and 50’s and 60’s blacklisting and authoritarian conduct – democrats like the Kennedy’s. Still the effort to blacklist and supress communism is associated with Joe McCarthy and Republicans, while the free speech movement is assocated with liberal democrats like Mario Savio at Berkeley.
Today we find the Right imperfectly defending individual liberty and free speech and the left behaving authoritarian at every oportunity.
Trump says “that ought to be banned” far too often – but he does nothing.
It is the left that constantly seeks to crush people – using the power of government if needed to supress speech they do not like.
And here with the Cornel 7 we have the left equating conduct that disgusts them with conduct that is criminal.
@ John Say,
You argue that Turley isn’t reading minds and frames the case purely on available evidence, but that completely ignores the fact that his central premise was factually wrong. Turley claimed the football team forfeited out of ideological compliance or pressure. The actual, documented evidence from the head coach proved they forfeited because they literally did not have enough healthy linemen to safely play the game due to physical injuries. Defending an argument as “evidence-based” when it relies on a completely fabricated narrative about a high school football schedule is the first major irony here.
Furthermore, there is a massive double standard in how you evaluate motives. You scold others for using “hypotheticals resting on remote possibilities,” but then you immediately turn around and attribute deep psychological, authoritarian motivations to an entire political spectrum based on the actions of a few high schoolers. You use Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory to claim “the Left” is now acting out of a conservative sense of “disgust” to criminalize speech, which is a massive exercise in political mind-reading.
Finally, the contrast you draw with Donald Trump is incredibly ironic. You dismiss a conservative leader explicitly saying things “ought to be banned far too often” because “he does nothing,” giving him a complete pass for using authoritarian rhetoric. Yet, when a local school district enforces a standard, routine social media policy that every high school athlete signs, you elevate it to a systemic crisis of the Left “using the power of government to crush people.” You cannot demand strict adherence to facts and charity for one side while inventing systemic political conspiracies to explain the other.
It is neither standard nor routine.
I am not arguing – I am pointing out facts WITHOUT mind reading.
Turley wrote that the school forfeited because students – presumably including players walked out.
While that sounds like ideological compliance – Turley did not SAY ideological compliance.
He said students waked out, and he said why they walked out. And he qualified that with “as reported”.
If you wish to malign reporters for reporting their spin rather than fact – I am all in.
Regardless, there is nothing wrong with what Turely wrote, and it is not mind reading.
“Furthermore, there is a massive double standard in how you evaluate motives.”
How so ?
” You scold others for using “hypotheticals resting on remote possibilities,” “
That is not an accurate rephrasing of what I said. regardless, it is often true, and it is massively problematic.
“But then you immediately turn around and attribute deep psychological, authoritarian motivations to an entire political spectrum based on the actions of a few high schoolers.”
Totally off the wall and unrelated to anything I posted.
Authoritarian acts are by definition authoritarian – regardless of motives.
Though it is not unreasonable to presume that authoritarian acts are motivated by authoritarian motives or stupidity. Regardless authoritarian ACTS are nearly always wrong – immoral and nearly always illegal and unconstitutional. While the left tries to make the scope of what is authoritiarian elastic – everything Trump does and nothing they do even when the acts are the same, What is an is not authoritiarian is mostly a FACT.
“You use Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory to claim “the Left” is now acting out of a conservative sense of “disgust” to criminalize speech, which is a massive exercise in political mind-reading.”
Nope – I made an obnservation that as is self evident in many many other ways the left and the right are flipping with respect to values and moral foundations.
Yes Haidt posits a theory of political identity – based on surveys of hundreds of thousands of people and correlations between the weights they give each of 6 moral foundations and their political identity.
All that is FACT – it is NOT a fact that every conservative holds exactly the same set of weights for the 6 moral foundational values. But it is absolutely true that the vast majority of conservatives have disgust as a strong moral foundation. Haidt BTW notes that there is a STRONG evolutionary basis for that value – for 900,000 years that was necescary for human survival.
Regardless, you appear to be arguing that anytime anyone not of your political view discusses patterns of behavior or Self described values they are engaged in mind reading.
I did not decide that prior to 2013 Conservatives ranked Disgust high among their moral foundations.
Conservatives did that themselves based on how they answered questions on their moral foundations and values.
Does every progressive and every conservative EXACTLY match a specific set of weights for the 6 moral foundations ? Of course not ? Is it mind reading to assert the existance of clear patterns in large groups that self identify as conservative or progressive ? Absolutely not – is is SCIENCE.
Is it ,mind reading to note the FACT that the moral values of conservatives and progressives are switching ?
Nope.
Forget completely your own ideology.
In the 60’s without any doubt it would have been the left that would have defended this student against censorship by his school. Mario Savio, the ACLU Alan Dershowitz, and Turley would have been protesting outside the HS – and likely most students would be joining in.
It would have been mostly conservatives defending the schools – defending this absurdly unconstitutional and fraudulent contract that X is asserting.
If you were alive then you KNOW this. If you have the slightest knowledge of history you KNOW this.
Even past progressives – like Margret Sanger – as racist as she was, was still central to the fight FOR free speech against institutional repression by conservatives.
If you are ignorant of the history of free speech in the US and its relationship to political identity
I would recomend
Girls Lean Back Everywhere
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girls_Lean_Back_Everywhere
It is available on the internet archive for free.
https://archive.org/details/girlsleanbackeve00degr_0/page/n8/mode/1up
This is primarily about the evolution of the law on free speech in the late 19th through 20th century specific to obscenity – understanding that obscenity was so broad as to include information on birth control.
Regardless of whether the issue is obscentiy or free speech in other forms – There were RELATIVELY clear political battle lines.
My arguement – based on FACTS not mind reading as evidenced by the conduct and the openly esposed values of those on the left and the right is that starting slightly before 2013 – most of Haidts work on Moral foundations was done Before 2013, and 2013 is a milestone as it is the unexpected emergence of a tidal wave of wokeness as the first significant generation of woke students hit the workplace.
None of this is mind reading or opinion – we not only have data on it, but most on the left are outspoken on their absurd and self contradictory values.
When those of you on the left claim some values – it is absurd for you to later argue that others are mindreading when we attribute to you what you have said and even more importantly what you have done in the past.
If I am to judge our current president bases on what he has SAID he has a contradictory record regarding free speech. But he has not actually DONE anything to actual restrict free speech.
While those of you on the left both constantly Rant that “hate speech” or other speech that you do not like should be banned, and when you have the slightest amount of power – you DO exactly what you said.
It is not an opinion that you are authoritiarian – everything is not an opinion.
Would you say it si an opinion that Mao or Stalin or Hitler or Musolini were authoritarian ?
I doubt even you can say that is just an opinion with a straight face.
When you use what power you have to act to infringe on ACTUAL rights – that is authoritian by definition.
That is not an opinion. it is Not mind reading.
Taking you at your word is not mind reading.
Judging you by your acts is not mind reading.
Seeing real patterns in groups – is not mind reading or opinion.
“Finally, the contrast you draw with Donald Trump is incredibly ironic. You dismiss a conservative leader explicitly saying things “ought to be banned far too often” because “he does nothing,” giving him a complete pass for using authoritarian rhetoric.”
Correct –
Mathew 25:
Then the King will tell those on his right hand, ‘Come, blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me.’
Even God judges us on our individual ACTS not our words.
” Yet, when a local school district enforces a standard, routine social media policy that every high school athlete signs, you elevate it to a systemic crisis of the Left “using the power of government to crush people.” “
I would say eliminate the spin EXCEPT that the spin actually makes it worse.
Your very claim this is standard, routine, makes it FAR MORE EGREGIOUS.
It was standard and routine to ban the distribution of information on Birth control in the early 20th century.
It was also unconstitutional an authoritarian.
I would also recomend reading my post in response to X’s faux contract.
T%he student in question DID NOT VIOLATE that contract
And the contract is FACIALLY unconstitutional and authoritiarian.
In what world is it not authoritarian to restrict the speach of others on social media ?
Even in the context of a private business this “agreement” would be unconstitutional.
The ONLY school related SCOTUS case on this is witrh regard to speach advocating for illegal conduct at a school sponsored event.
This is not even a close call.
And if you can not see that this is not even close to anything Trump has even said – you are a total moron.
“You cannot demand strict adherence to facts and charity for one side while inventing systemic political conspiracies to explain the other.”
Correct – unconstituitional ACTS are ACTUAL constitutional violations. Saying someone’s speach should be restricted without doing anything about it is not.
Even Trump’s barring some outlets from access to the WH was not even close to this egregious.
Government CAN make viewpoint neutral choices regarding access to a limited resource.
In the instance of Pine HS – the school can limit participation in SOME extra curiculars to those who demonstrate skills in that. It absolutely positively CAN NOT limit anything it does on the basis of VIEWPOINT.
And you can not try to contract your way arround that.
And that ignores the fact that this faux contract does NOT cover this students conduct.
He defended people accused of a crime. He did not advocate for rape or criminal activity.
@ John Say,
First, thank you your response.
You claim Turley didn’t imply ideological compliance, but his own text contradicts you. He explicitly wrote that the school “has clearly taught the student body to disregard the free speech of others,” and immediately followed it with, “The football team reportedly forfeited a game after 200 students walked out.” He structurally tied the forfeit to his narrative about a free speech breakdown, completely omitting the actual, reported fact that the coach canceled the game due to an acute shortage of healthy linemen. That isn’t neutral reporting; it’s narrative manipulation.
Secondly, you claim it is “totally off the wall” to say you attributed authoritarian motivations to the entire left. Yet, in your previous comment, you literally wrote: “the left behaving authoritarian at every opportunity” and “It is the left that constantly seeks to crush people.” To deny you generalized an entire political spectrum when those exact absolute statements are sitting in your previous paragraph is an incredibly dishonest claim.
Finally, you are completely misapplying Jonathan Haidt’s work. Haidt’s research shows that when left-leaning individuals protest against sexual violence, they are operating out of the Care/Harm and Fairness foundations—protecting victims from harm and demanding justice. They aren’t acting out of a conservative “Sanctity/Disgust” foundation. You are looking at a classic progressive Care/Harm protest, arbitrarily re-labeling it as a “Disgust” reflex, and then claiming your own psychological diagnosis of these teenagers is an objective “FACT.” You are doing the exact mind-reading you claim to despise and deny.
I will address the rest of your lengthy post with a separate response.
Your claim that this athletic agreement would be “unconstitutional even in the context of a private business” reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of constitutional law. The First Amendment only applies to government actors. X is correct in this assertion. Private businesses fire employees for controversial social media posts every single day; it is entirely legal and happens under standard branding and conduct clauses.
Your assertion that the only school-related Supreme Court case deals with illegal drug advocacy is factually incorrect. You are ignoring Tinker, Fraser, Hazelwood, and the recent Mahanoy ruling. In Mahanoy in 21’, the Supreme Court explicitly stated that schools retain the authority to regulate off-campus social media speech if it breaches team cohesion or triggers a “substantial disruption” to the educational environment. The moment that post caused 200 students to stage a physical walkout it became a significant disruption, the Tinker substantial disruption standard was legally met.
Finally, your historical and biblical defense creates an absurd double standard. You use Matthew 25 to give a pass to a former President who explicitly calls for challenging broadcast licenses and banning speech because he’s just using “words,” but then you compare a local high school administrator enforcing a routine sports contract to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Enforcing a signed athletic sportsmanship pledge after a disruption on campus occurred isn’t authoritarianism—it’s standard administrative conduct supported by decades of Supreme Court precedent.
@ John Say,
One more point to address before I go.
“I would also recomend reading my post in response to X’s faux contract.
T%he student in question DID NOT VIOLATE that contract
And the contract is FACIALLY unconstitutional and authoritiarian.
In what world is it not authoritarian to restrict the speach of others on social media ?”
The student’s speech was not restricted. He posted his view social media. What he is being disciplined for is for violating the contracts terms about causing significant disruptions on a school function. He violated it by what he posted and which resulted in 200 hundred students waking out. It’s the disruption his post caused that triggered the violation.
The contract, more precisely, the agreement he signed included the disruption element. Which is perfectly constitutional according to the Supreme Court. This is not about a point of view or speech. But conduct. The posting of his view which triggered the students reaction is conduct.
The law is clear about what is and isn’t protected speech in a school setting and the Supreme Court made clear exceptions included in the agreement that are legally justifiable and give the school the authority to discipline the student. ‘X’ made an important distinction. Participation in school sports is a voluntary activity and a privilege, it is not a right. Participation requires agreeing with the rules set by the school. Those rules are completely constitutional and legally justified by decades of Supreme Court precedent. It should be comforting to know the law can be changed if a strong majority decides it is necessary.
Esq
This is not even a close call.
You keep trying to equate speech you do not like with illegal or unconstitutional acts.
Trump is free to say all the stupid things he wishes. You get to speak out against that, protest, and vote.
He is NOT free to use the power of the federal govenrment to engage in viewpoint discrimination.
Calling stupid people stupid – is NOT Government viewpoint discrimination.
Calling smart people stupid is not government viewpoint discrimination.
Government punishing a person for expressing a view on a public issue is viewpoint discrimination.
It is absolutely unconstitutional.
While I have very legitimately argued based on Evidence that modern progressives are massively authoritarian and this is PART of the evidence. it would not matter if this was a left wing nut public school or a right wing nut public school. This is on its face unconstitutional.
The FACt that you can not see the giant GULF between the a vague wishful threat to the free speech of others without any action by someone with the power to act, and absolutely egregious ACTION by Government based on VIEWPOINT is the proof you are authoritarian.
Again this is not a close call.
This is not about charitable interpratation.
it is not about opinion.
It is about the difference between an actually unconstitutional excercise of power and speech that annoys you.
You keep repeating the phrase “viewpoint discrimination,” but you are completely ignoring the legal trigger for the school’s action. The school didn’t discipline the student because they hate the “presumption of innocence.” They stepped in because a designated team leader’s public conduct directly caused 200 students to walk out of class, march down public roads, and protest at the district office.
Under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Tinker, public schools have explicit authority to regulate speech when it crosses the line into a “substantial material disruption” of the educational environment. Halting classes and forcing an administrative shutdown is a text-book substantial disruption. The school didn’t ban an abstract opinion; they addressed an operational issue caused by an official team representative, the team captain’s post.
Your defense of a U.S. President pulling White House press credentials as a “viewpoint-neutral choice” is a serious contradiction. Federal courts clearly ruled against the administration in those cases, noting that the executive branch cannot pull credentials based on a reporter’s point of view. Giving a complete pass to a federal executive targeting professional journalists while comparing a local high school principal resolving a campus walkout to an authoritarian regime is a silly distortion of legal reality.
Esq – you and X seem to be trying to use this agreement as a fig leaf.
Can the President require that reporters agree to not disparage the administration or administration positions in order to get a WH press pass ?
That would be LESS egregious than this.
I am a huge advocate of free market agreements. But Government is NOT part of the free market.
And frankly even int he free market – there are limits to being able to contract away constitutional rights.
Your employer can not punish your speech on issues entirely unrelated to the workplace and unconnected to their company.
You can not contract yourself into slavery.
That those of you on the left actually beleive you can use a GOVERNMENT coercive contract of adhesion to contract away the other parties constitutional rights is the evidence that you are totalitarian.
Would it be OK with you if Hitler asked Jews headed for the gas chamber to contract their daughters into 18months of prostitution before they two were gassed ?
Your claim that a private employer cannot fire someone for off-duty speech unrelated to the workplace is completely false. Under standard American at-will employment law, private employers fire people for controversial, personal social media posts every single day. The First Amendment strictly protects you from the government, not from the disciplinary codes of a private company. ‘X’ is indeed correct on this. At-will employment also means an employer can fire you for making statements they don’t agree with.
Furthermore, calling a high school sports contract a ‘coercive contract of adhesion’ is a complete legal misnomer. Playing high school football is a voluntary privilege, not an absolute necessity like housing or water. No one forced the student to be the team captain; he chose to take a leadership role representing the school, and in doing so, voluntarily agreed to a standard sportsmanship code. A high school football team is an optional, privileged extracurricular activity. The state is not forcing the student to play football; the student is choosing to play, and in doing so, voluntarily accepting the team’s rules by signing the agreement.
Comparing a high school sports sportsmanship pledge to slavery and the Holocaust is a completely absurd distortion of scale. As ‘X’ has correctly pointed out using actual law, the Supreme Court has ruled for decades (from Tinker to Mahanoy) that schools have a valid constitutional right to regulate student conduct when it causes a ‘substantial material disruption’ to the campus. The moment that post caused a walkout of 200 students that disrupted school operations, the school had every legal right to enforce the contract the student signed.
I don’t have time to continue this discussion, as much as I’d like to, but it’s clear your view is in the wrong. Have a good day.
“If the post was on a student’s personal Instagram page, how did the school become aware of it and does the school routinely monitor students to that degree? If someone brought it to the attention of the school, it’s less of an issue.”
As Lin noted above CA actually has pretty strict SM privacy and search laws specifically regarding Schools.
Contra X – there is no law requiring specific SM behave contracts, and if there were it would be limited by the CA law bopth narrowing the scope of SM searchs to public safety, and limit it by requiring parental notifications and public hearings before enacting such a policy.
You accuse Turley of mind reading – your engaging in speculating about facts without evidence.
If you wish to claim there was more egregious content – then establish that with facts.
Unlike X Turley does not have a reputation for making up facts or law from a$$ farts
“but some people”
Are entitled to their views.,
Government is not allowed to engage in viewpoint discrimination.
“His record speaks for itself.”
Correct – when has Turley manufactured a law from whole cloth ?
When has Turley manufactured facts ?
Your the one engaged in hypotheticals – and you do not even acknowledge that.