The importance of the battle against New York’s extreme speech legislation intensifies.
Let’s hear it for satire: An important amicus brief has been filed on behalf of funny fake-news outlet the Babylon Bee in a crucial First Amendment case working its way through New York’s courts, with free-speech legend and UCLA prof Eugene Volokh, social video platform Rumble and creators app Locals among those filing briefs in support.
To recap: Last year, New York state passed a nakedly unconstitutional law aimed at restricting certain kinds of online speech.
Namely, that which tries to “vilify, humiliate, or incite violence against a group” over “race, color, religion, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.”
All of which is (with narrow exceptions for incitement) 100% protected constitutionally.
For sites that allow comments, the law threatens crushing fines that accrue by the day if they fail to post a public plan for a response if someone does a speech no-no.
The statute also demands site owners create some kind of snitch hotline for outraged readers.
It’s a clear threat to site owners: Keep ugly speech off your platform, or the hammer comes down.
Worse still, this law was passed in response to the Buffalo supermarket massacre.
Albany progs are using that unthinkable horror — which was not caused by speech, but by the demented evil of its perpetrator — as a lever to achieve their long-held goal of undermining First Amendment rights.
The ways such a law can be abused are literally endless.
Especially in a state where public employees, like
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