Amerika-in-Exile (the Tulio Baars Homepage)

Tommy Robinson is in jail for civil disobedience. He acted in defiance of a media blackout against reporting the gangs that were grooming and prostituting young girls, and the taboo against mentioning that the people doing this were not ethnically indigenous Britons; they were "Asians," or people from places like Pakistan who tended to be of the Muslim faith. He knew they were going to arrest him. The courts reacted predictably and jailed Robinson, but he knew that was coming; he realized that his only way to keep the English courts from making this issue slide out of public view was to legally martyr himself: English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson has been jailed for 13 months after being arrested outside Leeds Crown Court last week, court officials have confirmed. He was arrested on Friday for contempt of court after using social media to broadcast details of an ongoing trial which is subject to blanket reporting restrictions. Reporting restrictions were ...

Tonight many keyboards are firing away at full speed about how a court's ruling that Donald Trump's Twitter messages are First Amendment protected means that Twitter will have to finally be an open and free speech zone. While this sounds like a nice idea, in fact the opposite is true. The court found that Trump's tweets are special because they are a communication from government . This is what gives us First Amendment protections in our replies to them. U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan ruled that comments on the president’s account, and those of other government officials, were public forums, and that blocking Twitter users for their views violated their right to free speech under the First Amendment of Constitution. Eugene Volokh, a University of California Los Angeles School of Law professor who specializes in First Amendment issues, said the decision’s effect would reach beyond Trump. “It would end up applying to a wide range of governmen...