tennessee – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Tennessee’s New Quasi-Book Ban Law Results In School Shutting Down Library Right Before Classes Resume

from the hope-you're-happy,-censors dept

Like far too many legislators in far too many states, Tennessee’s lawmakers have jumped on the book banning bandwagon. For years, public libraries and school libraries were stocked at the discretion of librarians and largely operated without a lot of interference from state governments. While attempts to ban certain books happened now and then, there was never a concerted effort to remove wide swaths of literature from public library shelves.

Now, it’s just the sort of thing that happens multiple times on a daily basis. And the number of book challenges and book ban attempts continue to increase exponentially as idiots push their personal agendas using the government’s power to control what content the public has access to.

The law passed by the state legislature doesn’t actually ban books from school libraries. But no matter what the text says, that’s obviously the end goal. (h/t BookRiot)

Passed earlier this year, the bill amended the state’s “Age-Appropriate Materials Act,” signed into law by Republican Gov. Bill Lee in 2022, which, according to the ACLU of Tennessee, requires schools to maintain and post lists of the materials in their libraries and to evaluate challenged materials to determine whether or not they are “age-appropriate.”

So, now every Tom, Dick, and Karen can simply challenge a book and force librarians to review the content to see whether or not it’s “age-appropriate.” The initial bill didn’t even bother to define the few terms it bothered to use to describe the age-appropriateness of content, much less provide librarians with guidelines for handling challenges and/or eventual book removals.

The “fixed” version isn’t much better. While it does provide a list of things legislators think are inappropriate for all students (including those in their senior year of high school, where they’re often treated legally as adults when charged with crimes), the laundry list of inappropriate things is still far too vague.

H.B. 843 clarifies that books containing “nudity, or descriptions or depictions of sexual excitement, sexual conduct, excess violence, or sadomasochistic abuse” are not appropriate for K–12 students, regardless of the context in which those descriptions or depictions appear in the material.

How much violence is “excessive?” Will health textbooks depicting nudity, sexual conduct, and “sexual excitement” be removed from classrooms? Will no one under the age of 18 be able to access content they’re legally allowed to access anywhere else but in a public library?

Perhaps more importantly, what of the Bible?

During debate on the Tennessee Senate floor, state Sen. Jeff Yarbro (D) noted that the bill’s definition of what is “inappropriate” applies to the Bible. “You cannot read the book of Samuel or Kings or Chronicles, much less much of the first five books of the Bible, without significant discussions of rape, sexual excitement, multiple wives, bestiality — numerous things. That’s before you get in just to, you know, very express and explicit descriptions of violence,” Yarbro argued, according to WKRN News 2.

If this point gets pressed, you can rest assured a carve-out will be created for “religious texts,” but… you know… only applied to one specific religion and its main text.

The terms are vague and overly broad. The guidelines for compliance are still mostly nonexistent. And so, at least one school is reopening for the school year with its library closed.

A Wilson County high school is warning teachers to skip classroom libraries and closed the school library over concerns surrounding a new state law.

Under the law, any brief mention of sex, nudity or excess violence can lead to a book ban.

The Wilson County Director of Schools says they are temporarily closing the library at Green Hill High School to sort through books to make sure they get rid of the those that are required to be banned.

So, as teachers and librarians follow the government’s orders to ensure they’re only exposed to content the legislative majority likes, students are going be struggling to comprehend the things they’re learning in civics classes about their fundamental rights.

And all the bill’s supporters have to offer are patently false assertions about how bad things have been for unprotected students prior to the institution of this law.

Senator Pody explains they are trying to protect children from pornography which they’ve found in the past to be available in public schools.

I guarantee you this isn’t true. Notably, Senator Pody offers no times, dates, locations, or any other verification of his claim “pornography” has been found in school libraries or classrooms. Unfortunately, he’s representative of the legislative majority and its ideals. It’s nothing but censorship propelled by bigotry and backed by lies. Caught in the crossfire are the kids and the public school employees who just want to give them the best education they can.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, age appropriate, bill lee, book ban, censorship, libraries, tennessee

Appeals Court Tosses Lawsuit Brought Against Tennessee’s Anti-Drag Show Law

from the whatever-it-takes-to-make-the-haters-happier dept

In 2023, Tennessee enacted a new law — one that rewrote part of its existing adult entertainment statutes for the sole purpose of making it easier to prosecute drag performers. Sure, legislators took care to talk around the issue when debating it on the floor, but the bill’s language added “male or female impersonators” to the state’s definition of “adult cabaret” performers, instantly equating them with strippers, topless dancers, and other adult entertainers.

The law never went into effect, though. It was immediately challenged by Friends of George’s, a venue dedicated to drag performances. In June 2023, it obtained a permanent injunction blocking the law from being enforced, with the federal court concluding the hasty rewrite of the existing adult cabaret law sought targeted a specific form of entertainment unlawfully.

This District Court does not find that the Tennessee General Assembly’s predominate concerns were “increase in sexual exploitation.” Rather, the Court finds that their predominate concerns involved the suppression of unpopular views of those who wish to impersonate a gender that is different from the one with which they were born. Defendant’s identification of “increase in sexual exploitation” as the legislature’s predominate concern in passing the AEA draws not from legislators, but from Ms. Starbuck’s testimony. (“It’s no wonder we have skyrocketing mental health crisis amongst our confused and vulnerable youth with more sexual exploitation crimes reported than ever before.”). The only other time “sexual exploitation” was mentioned in the legislative transcript was in Ms. Starbuck’s testimony. (“[Children] are seeing adults clap every time an article of clothing is removed, the adults are thunderously clapping. And so they are making associations that when you take your clothes off, you’re rewarded money . . . But continuing that behavior is sending that message to children and it[’]s normalizing that sexual exploitation.”) On the other hand, the record is replete with references to the expressive conduct of “male or female impersonators,” “drag shows,” “Pride” events, and more. The Court’s determination that the AEA was enacted for an impermissible purpose is broad enough to reject the notion that the AEA is aimed not at the content of expressive speech but rather at its secondary effects.

This injunction was immediately violated by the state, which tried to use it to go after other drag performers and performances. This earned District Attorney Ryan Desmond and a handful of Greer County law enforcement officials a benchslap from the federal court reminding them that an injunction means no enforcement anywhere, not just against the plaintiffs of the lawsuit.

The state appealed and, unfortunately, the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court has proclaimed Friends of George’s (FOG) has no standing to pursue a challenge of this anti-LGBTQ+ law.

The opinion [PDF] is quite the read. To find out everything wrong with the majority ruling, one only needs to head to the dissent, which points out the numerous ways the rest of the court got this wrong.

The majority says Friends of George’s has no reason to believe the law will be used to prosecute it or its performers by pointing to none other than FOG’s own presentations covering the content of its drag performances. As the majority sees it, the venue has no intention of violating the Adult Entertainment Act (the anti-drag law attached to existing adult entertainment regulations). Therefore, it should fear no reprisal. And if there’s no potential for reprisal, there’s no lawsuit.

But that misses the point. This rewriting of the law allows the state to criminally prosecute performers and venue owners. And, by attaching it to statutory regulations that don’t normally involve criminal prosecutions, legislators have created a way to bypass its obligations to prove defendants intended to violate the law.

The dissent from Judge Mathis points out that the law’s wording and crafting make it possible for the law to be wielded against Friends of George’s, whether or not its performances or performers intend to violate the law. It gives the state and its law enforcement a pair of loaded dice to work with — something the majority apparently believes presents no future harm to venues or performers.

For one, the AEA is a strict-liability crime. Criminal offenses housed in Tennessee’s Criminal Code require “[a] culpable mental state . . . unless the definition of an offense plainly dispenses with a mental element.” Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-11-301(b). “[I]ntent, knowledge or recklessness suffices to establish the culpable mental state.” Id. § 39-11-301(c). But the AEA lacks a scienter requirement because it is not in the Criminal Code. The Tennessee legislature placed the AEA in the part of the Tennessee Code that regulates adult-oriented businesses. “[P]ublic welfare or regulatory offenses which allow for a form of strict criminal liability through statutes . . . do not require the defendant to know the facts that make his conduct illegal.” State v. Terry, No. E2021-00406, 2022 WL 1288587, at *11 (Tenn. Crim. App. Apr. 29, 2022) Thus, to establish a violation of the AEA, a prosecutor would not have to prove that a defendant acted with a culpable mental state.

Second, the AEA’s broadness makes it easier to enforce. Mulroy can prosecute a violation of the law for conduct that occurs at any location that “could be viewed by a person who is not an adult.” Tenn. Code Ann. § 7-51-1407(c)(1)(B). This includes the Evergreen Theater where FOG performs—the trial evidence showed that minors have been admitted to FOG’s shows. And, as Mulroy conceded at oral argument, it also includes the home where minors live or have access. Keep in mind, the AEA applies to, among others, male and female impersonators. Id. § 7-51 1401(3), (7). Males can impersonate females. But males can also impersonate other males. And females can impersonate males and females.

Furthermore, the law allows law enforcement to decide what is “harmful to minors,” giving it vast amounts of discretion. The “I know it when I see it” standard is no standard at all, Judge Mathis points out. Finally, Shelby County District Attorney General Steven Mulroy has made it clear he intends to enforce the law, which means he’s the proper target for FOG’s lawsuit. All of this adds up to the standing the majority claims the venue doesn’t possess.

The dissent then draws attention to AG Mulroy’s own statements and assertions in defense of the law. At least one defense of the law is a new argument — the sort of thing that isn’t supposed to be considered by appellate courts when handling an appeal. If you didn’t make the argument at the lower level, you can’t introduce it during your appeal of that ruling.

Furthermore, the legislative history of the law’s crafting and passage makes it clear the AEA only seeks to punish certain forms of speech. AG Mulroy’s “for the children” arguments in court are undercut by some pretty inconvenient facts.

Contrary to Mulroy’s assertions, the legislative record does not reflect that sexual-exploitation crimes against children were a “predominate concern” of the Tennessee legislature. The statutory text does not mention, or create an inference, that sexual-exploitation crimes were the main concern of the legislature in passing the AEA. The legislative history bolsters this conclusion. Only one person mentioned a concern related to sexual exploitation: Ms. Starbuck, who testified as a witness at a committee hearing. The legislators did not discuss sexual exploitation or sexual assaults at all. Supporters of the AEA bill instead focused on the expressive content. And neither the text of the AEA nor the legislative record makes a connection between the conduct the AEA seeks to regulate and the risk of sexual exploitation.

In sum, the AEA is a content-based restriction on speech. It is not a time, place, or manner restriction.

And that’s what it always has been. The real goal of the law — which legislators attempted to talk around by pretending it was about something else — was to punish certain people who engaged in certain forms of speech. If Friends of George’s was violating existing adult entertainment statutes, the state always had the option to enforce those laws. But because it wasn’t, legislators decided to treat male and female impersonators as de facto adult entertainers, whether or not they created and performed “adult” content.

The bigots get a win here. This lawsuit will be dismissed upon its return to the lower court. But that law still remains unconstitutional and whether it’s Friends of George’s mounting a second attack on it or another venue in the state raising a challenge, it will eventually be hit with another permanent injunction. Hopefully, the next one will be a bit more permanent than this one was.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 6th circuit, adult entertainment act, anti-drag, gop, ronnie greer, tennessee

New Tennessee Law Says Law Enforcement Doesn’t Need Warrants To Fly Drones Over Private Property

from the why-it's-probably-just-like-flying-an-airplane dept

This is not great news, even if the law pretty much aligns with case law. Nonetheless, this is concerning.

Tennessee law enforcement agencies will continue to be able to use drones without a search warrant in various investigations following the approval of a bill earlier this year.

In 2021, the Tennessee General Assembly approved a new set of laws regarding law enforcement use of drones. The provisions would have ended on July 1, 2024. However, during the latest legislative session, lawmakers voted to extend them.

So, the first concern is that state legislators felt compelled to craft a new law creating a warrant exception. Most case law says there’s no expectation of privacy in areas that can be viewed by the public. Now, you can put a privacy fence around your property to ensure passersby can’t see what’s happening in your yard, but the prevailing argument is that any plane passing over your place would unveil the contents of your property despite your proactive fencing.

Now, it’s tough to compare the random flyover by high altitude planes to police surveillance. But courts have, and they’ve found that whether it’s a passenger plane, cop helicopter, or that one guy in your neighborhood with levitation superpowers, it’s all just plain view.

But Tennessee is different. Prior to 2021, warrants were required to fly drones over personal property. And for good reason! You should need a demonstrable and justifiable reason to fly a camera over someone’s private property, especially one that is as maneuverable as a drone. There’s no comparison to this and a low-flying plane. A plane can’t perform the tight circling needed to engage in uninterrupted surveillance. And a plane can’t fly low enough to get all up and personal with the curtilage, like a well-piloted drone can.

Because cops deserve all the deference and despite the fact that tons of warrant exceptions exist that officers could make use of to invade someone’s privacy by piloting a drone into their yard, Tennessee legislators still felt compelled to change the law.

And, of course, law enforcement officials showed up to defend the removal of a warrant requirement, using highly specific anecdotal evidence.

Several law enforcement agencies across Middle Tennessee have employed drones in various capacities over the past few years. In July 2023, the Sumner County Sheriff’s Office said a drone helped deputies save a man’s life during a tense welfare check.

While responding to the call, authorities said they spotted a razor blade and a blood trail leading into a 50-acre cornfield. The 5-foot-tall crops were so dense that deputies could not see the man. Minutes after launching a drone, they found him in the middle of the field.

[…]

Drones were deployed to help search for 22-year-old Riley Strain after he went missing in Nashville during a fraternity trip in March.

In Putnam County, the devices have been useful in helping deputies track suspects and during drug investigations. When a man crashed his car and ran into the woods in February, deputies launched one of their tracking drones to quickly take the man into custody.

It all sounds so logical! Of course a warrant requirement would get in the way in these particular situations. But that’s not what people are worried about when they demand warrant requirements for drone deployments. Every single one of the anecdotes offered would already fall outside of the state’s warrant requirements. The first one would fall under the community caretaking exception. The second would be exigent circumstances. And the third arguably wouldn’t need a warrant because the drone may have only surveilled publicly property. (Even if it didn’t, the “hot pursuit” exception would have applied.)

What’s of concern here is the other stuff. Bored officers lofting drones into the air for minutes or hours on end trolling for some sort of “plain view” evidence they can use to obtain search warrants or, in even worse scenarios, use to claim search warrants (for on the ground, in-person searches) weren’t necessary.

What lawmakers should have done is kept the warrant requirement to remain in place. There’s no reason to remove it entirely just because there will periodically be cases where warrants aren’t practicable. But in those cases, plenty of long-existing warrant requirements already apply. So, law enforcement agencies wouldn’t be losing anything under the pre-2021 law. But now, they stand to gain everything because the state has declared warrants are the exception, not the rule.

Filed Under: drones, fourth amendment, privacy, surveillance, tennessee

Tennessee Woman Scores A Win In Free Speech Lawsuit Filed Over Her ‘Fuck ‘Em Both 2024’ Yard Sign

from the whole-lot-cheaper-to-just-respect-the-Constitution dept

Daniel Horwitz — who has fought plenty of free speech battles for Tennesseans — has secured an extremely quick victory for his client, Lakeland resident Julie Pereira.

According to the complaint [PDF], which was filed June 6 of this year, the city of Lakeland took offense to a sign Pereira had placed in her yard. It was bit of political speech that expressed her opinion about Donald Trump and Joe Biden all in one pithy phrase: “Fuck ‘Em Both 2024.”

Someone in power didn’t like the sign. The city decided it would start fining Pereira by leveraging its sign regulations which forbid a long list of things.

In particular, the City of Lakeland and its Code Enforcement Officer, Defendant Katrina Shields, believe that Ms. Pereira’s Political Sign violates City of Lakeland sign regulations that prohibit “statements of an obscene, indecent, or immoral character which would offend public morals or decency” and “statements, words or pictures of an obscene nature.”

The city believed this sign fell under that laundry list of forbiddables, but it actually doesn’t. Making things worse is the shifting set of restrictions the city applies to signs, based on little more than the city’s perception of what each sign it seeks to regulate actually is.

[U]nder the City of Lakeland’s Municipal Code, signs are regulated differently depending on whether they are “works of art with no commercial message,” “special event signs for community events,” “incidental signs,” “window signs,” “building marker” signs, “changeable copy signs,” “construction signs,” “directory signs,” “identification signs,” “menu board” signs, “model home” signs, “principal ground” signs, “real estate” (but not single-family residential) signs, “residential real estate” signs, “subdivision entry” signs, “temporary signs,” “wall signs” (depending on whether they are nonresidential or residential), “temporary residential yard” signs, “suspended signs,” or—as here—“political signs.”

Political signs are subject to the most restrictions, governing everything from how many can be placed in any area to how long they can remain in place. The city decided this was a political sign (rather than a “work of art” or a “temporary residential yard sign”) and started fining Pereira.

Pereira — under the threat of further enforcement — even neutered her sign in an attempt to placate the unconstitutional desires of city regulators.

She shouldn’t have had to do this, as Horwitz points out in the lawsuit:

This coerced modification has satisfied the Defendants. It does not satisfy Ms. Pereira, though, any more than a jacket bearing the words “F*ck the Draft” would have satisfied Paul Cohen. Cf. Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15, 26 (1971).

The lawsuit swiftly followed the incursion on Pereira’s free speech rights (which included nearly $700 in fines). And now a settlement [PDF] has just as swiftly followed this lawsuit. Apparently, all the city needed was a legitimate challenge of its sign statutes and a few minutes to think about it.

Not only will the city be refunding the fines charged to Pereira and covering her legal fees, it has also agreed the law (as applied to Pereira) is unconstitutional. Yeah, it’s a bit of a unicorn. A government has agreed to settle without attaching a clause denying any wrongdoing.

Under Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971), the Plaintiff’s political sign is not obscene, and the Defendants may not lawfully regulate it based on the viewpoint it expresses.

For these reasons, the Court DECLARES UNCONSTITUTIONAL the Defendants’ enforcement action against the Plaintiff for displaying her unredacted political yard sign, a copy of which is set forth in the record at Doc. 1-1. The Defendants are thus PERMANENTLY ENJOINED from taking any further enforcement action against the Plaintiff for displaying her unredacted political yard sign.

That’s the language the city has agreed to. All it needs now is a judge’s signature. And with this win, others in the same city should feel free to let their freak fuck flags fly.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, daniel horwitz, first amendment, free speech, fuck em both, julie pereira, lakeland, tennessee

Chemtrail Legislation Is The New Normal In A Severely Abnormal America

from the Make-America-Stupid-Again dept

It’s enough to make you want to shoot yourself in the face in embarrassment. It’s enough to make you want to dress as a mime when visiting Europe because at least you won’t be mistaken for an American. It’s enough to make you wonder how the Land of the Free became the Land of the Besotted Idiots so quickly during the four years overseen by a lame duck president more famous for sexual harassment, failed lawsuits, and bankruptcies than actual governance.

And yet, here we are. We live in a post-truth America. To be sure, America’s relationship with the truth has always been a bit iffy, given a history that includes genocide and slavery. But we always thought we were continuously improving, however slightly, year-over-year. That all came to a halt in 2016, when the Electoral College decided Donald Trump was our new president.

Trump had already shown he was incapable of competently managing property located on prime NYC real estate. Post-election, he proved he was incapable of managing international relationships, pandemic protocols, and his own re-election campaign.

But Trump did achieve something: he rallied the masses to proclaim his election loss “stolen.” He stoked the fires of several conspiracy theories, aided and abetted by tech shitlords (Elon Musk) and social media gadflies (Joe Rogan, etc.) to subvert the normal (if boring) operation of government machinery. Trump acolytes and supplicants took control of local governments, crafting spittle-flecked legislation comprehensible only to those incapable of understanding anything normal and willing to back legislation that reads more like a rejected letter to the editor than anything a legislator should ever seriously consider submitting to their legislature.

Thanks to this turn of events — spearheaded by a president who promoted conspiracy theories, referred to COVID-19 as the “kung flu,” and otherwise ensured no one would take him seriously but the least serious of constituents — the country is now overrun by legislators who have abdicated their responsibility to the general public in favor of embracing the most embarrassing members of their voting base.

And that voting base is filled with people too cowardly to just say “It’s the Jews,” even when represented by legislators who say “It’s the Jews.” It’s pre-WWII Germany all over the place, with the people who blame any outsider (immigrants, Jews, Blacks, liberals) for any friction they encounter in their personal lives turning out in record numbers to elevate the most shameless of bigots to governmental positions.

To justify this elevation of hate, voters (and the legislators that cater to them) entertain large number of conspiracy theories, including those that have been debunked for longer than they’ve been alive.

Enter the new era of “chemtrail” legislation. This new wave appeases an extremely shitty voter base by doing two things: giving credence to chemtrail conspiracy theories and/or preventing anyone from engaging in projects that might result in the limitation of greenhouse gases or other side effects of climate change.

It’s win-win for these fuckheads. And that’s why we’re now seeing batshit insane legislation spreading from the states you expect to see it in (i.e., the “Red” states) to areas where normality has long been the accepted state of affairs.

Let’s turn it over to Kevin Underhill and his insanely amusing and informational blog, Lowering the Bar. Recounting the recent effort by the Tennessee legislature to enact an anti-chemtrail bill, Underhill notes that the legislature was far too cowardly to enact an extremely helpful amendment that would have made it clear exactly what was going on here.

Sadly, the House refused to adopt a second proposed amendment to the bill, this one proposed by Rep. John Ray Clemmons (D–Nashville). Amendment No. 2 looked an awful lot like Amendment No. 1 (which inserted the chemtrails stuff), but with a couple of tweaks.

And what was this addition to the proposed conspiracy theory-coddling bill? Well, it was an amendment that treated the proposed law with all the respect it deserved.

WHEREAS, it is documented, among those within the pseudoscience of cryptozoology, that there exists a large and hairy human-like creature that inhabits forests of North America, and

WHEREAS, this creature is commonly referred to as a yeti, Bigfoot, or Sasquatch…

This amendment was rejected, apparently because the self-serious people engaging in chemtrail conspiracy theories felt this undercut the seriousness of banning something that wasn’t happening, has never happened, and will never happen.

[O]nly 18 representatives voted for the Sasquatch Amendment, with 71 voting against.

But the problem is not confined to the areas where the voting base views itself as “conservative,” while approving of the government expanding its remit to cover anything subject to conspiracy theories, Jewish control, or involving non-whites existing in America.

As Underhill reports, even the great liberal playground that is the Minnesota legislature has been subjected to a conspiracy theory fueled bill by state legislators who appear to believe catering to the most ignorant voters is a long-term strategy worth pursuing.

Minnesota’s SF 4630 makes Tennessee’s bill look positively sane. That one would not only ban chemtrailing—or as the bill pseudoscientifically describes it, “stratospheric aerosol injection”—it is also super-worried about “excessive electromagnetic radiation” that the same conspirators are trying to harm brains and/or the environment with. And if you have been releasing “xenobiotic agents” in Minnesota, you could be in big trouble if this passes. What are xenobiotic agents? The bill defines “xenobiotic” as “foreign to the body or to an ecological system,” and I guarantee you that whoever drafted this thing has no idea what that might mean.

There are no safe spaces in America. As we’ve suspected all along, the people with the least common sense command the most power. While we’ve seen the occasional aberration over the years, four years of Trump has resulted in a legislative dynamic where being seriously stupid is not only acceptable, but might actually be the best way to ensure re-election. Canada has never looked so good, no matter what libertarians might opine about its free healthcare and general politeness.

The only things keeping America from becoming the new Third Reich are its square footage and its diversity. But let’s not fool ourselves. Legislators who’ve traded in their reputation for a remora-esque existence on the Trump Train deeply desire a country where bigotry is backed by government force. And while the current Israel-Palestine conflict makes it extremely difficult to go after Jews directly, the moment that pressure resides, these idiots will start dipping their conspiracy into the deep well of antisemitism that has always existed in this country, adding those “foreigners” to the long list of non-whites they believe are ruining what used to be a pretty great nation.

Filed Under: alternative facts, bigfoot, chemtrails, conspiracy theories, gop, minnesota, tennessee, xenobiotics

Tennessee Senate Votes To Ban Chemtrails Because What Even The Fuck

from the bats-are-running-the-belfry dept

Look, I’m nearing 50. I’ve been around. I have seen some absolute clown shit from politicians. I have witnessed years of things like “bridges to nowhere” and self-aggrandizement taking the form of renamed airports or whatever. I have seen any number of candidates step into the arena with a headful of moronic ideas.

But things changed for the definite worse once Donald Trump took office. Once this happened, politicians who normally would have been marginalized into nonexistence for their trumpeting of conspiracy theories suddenly became the sort of people the public chose to elevate into public offices.

And this is just another example of how America is turning democracy into a farce.

To be fair, Tennessee’s politicians haven’t exactly been great. At least they finally passed an anti-SLAPP law with enough teeth to prevent people from suing people over things they didn’t actually say. But since Trump’s arrival on the political scene, they’ve gotten considerably worse.

Here’s what’s happened in recent years. In 2020, state rep Jay Reedy asked Congress (the federal version) to get back to the important government business of banning flag burning — something that went out of fashion decades ago when it was ruled protected speech (multiple times!) by the US Supreme Court. In 2021, state legislators decided the man who tried to sue Apple because he couldn’t stop looking at porn had good ideas about compelled morality. They pushed an anti-Section 230 law that would have made it impossible for the state government to invest in anything tech-related. In 2023, legislators joined other idiotic legislators around the nation by passing an anti-drag show law that clearly and comprehensively violated the First Amendment.

Just incredibly stupid shit from legislators who are expected to know better… or at least were expected to know better until the nation was overseen by a president who firmly believed the rule of law should only apply to people he didn’t like.

Now, there’s this: a simple bill originally meant to ensure a minor oversight position would be filled in a timely manner got hijacked by 25 state senators to support a hideous blend of conspiracy theories and climate change denial.

I’m going to turn this over to Kevin Underhill, the man behind the wonderful and devastatingly funny legal blog, Lowering The Bar. Underhill explains how a bill that was only supposed to ensure empty seats on the state’s Air Pollution Control Board could only remain vacant for 30 days turned into one of the stupidest bills to ever receive majority support from the Tennessee state senate.

[A]t some point between January 31 and last week, it appears that the sponsors of SB 2691 and a companion measure, HB 2063, became aware of a far greater threat to the public welfare than the 180-day vacancy-reporting period. Which seems not to have been an emergency after all, since the committee completely gutted SB 2691 with an amendment that did this instead:

That links to the bill, which assumes one thing and mandates more things, none of which have any basis in reality:

WHEREAS, it is documented that the federal government or other entities acting on the federal government’s behalf or at the federal government’s request may conduct geoengineering experiments by intentionally dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere, and _those activities may occur within the State of Tennessee_…

Um.

SECTION 1. Tennessee Code Annotated, Title 68, Chapter 201, Part 1, is amended by adding the following as a new section:

The intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus within the borders of this state into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight is prohibited.

And there it is. The legalese grants this proposal a gossamer-thin sheen of respectability, but it doesn’t take too much examination to understand what this amendment targets. I’ll hand it back to Underhill to explain the batshit proposal masquerading as serious government work state legislators are expected to do:

As the Nashville Tennessean (not the most creative name, but they do good work) explains here, what’s going on is chemtrails. Or, rather, a belief in “the chemtrail theory,” which the Tennessean explains is “the belief that the [federal] government is secretly adding toxic chemicals to the atmosphere from aircraft, similar to contrails [the condensation trails that jets leave behind].” Why would it do that? As this Harvard University group puts it, “[v]arious different motivations for this alleged spraying are speculated, including sterilization, reduction of life expectancy, mind control, or weather control.” So in other words, on March 18 there were at least 25 Tennessee senators in a room wearing tinfoil hats.

Yeah, that’s the level of service Tennesseans can expect from at least 25 members of the state senate. While they did have enough restraint to avoid speculating about things like mass sterilization, mind control, or other extremes of chemtrail conspiracies, they still felt it was worth including, if only for the reason of preventing any federal or local efforts to (very speculatively) improve environmental conditions.

[T]he bill refers only to chemtrailing “with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight.” In other words, this seems to be something about climate change. So they’re proposing to ban something that isn’t real to make a statement about something that is.

Which is somehow even worse than just embracing the crazy. This is virtue signalling via conspiracy theory — something these senators clearly believe will signal to their voting base that they’re willing to do anything to ignore the reality of climate change, up to and including writing bills that are completely divorced from all reality.

The good news, so to speak, is that this amendment will cost taxpayers nothing more than the money they’re blowing on these senators’ salaries. The Fiscal Review Committee has noted this amendment won’t cost any money because this is something that has never happened, isn’t currently happening, and will probably never happen in the future.

It is assumed the action prohibited by this legislation is not currently occurring in this state, nor will it in the future; therefore, this legislation will result in no significant fiscal impact on the state government.

Chemtrails just aren’t real. If there are any efforts to “change” the climate, it’s mostly efforts like cloud seeding, which doesn’t involve contrails, which are nothing more than clouds of water vapor left behind as planes pass through the sky and heat the air. No one has been able to show the climate can be altered in any noticeable or provable fashion by sending planes into the air to disperse… stuff.

Somehow, I think this will have no effect on the electability of these senators during the next state senate race. This stupidity will likely be replaced by something stupider in the near future. Those who think these representatives are idiots likely already did. Those who don’t won’t care and will vote them back in. Voters still on the fence may decide this is the sort of thing they like: a performative push-back against climate change concern via a bill that bans something that isn’t happening and likely is never going to happen. And everything will just keep getting worse so long as the electorate is willing to embrace conspiracy theorists, rather than hustle them towards the exit.

Filed Under: chemtrails, tennessee

Knoxville Is Building The Biggest Community-Owned Broadband Network In U.S. History

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Mon, Dec 18th 2023 05:30am - Karl Bode

Knoxville, Tennessee is making progress on an ambitious, 700millionplantodeliver700 million plan to deliver 700millionplantodeliver65 gigabit fiber connections to every last city resident. With no usage caps, weird fees, or long-term contracts. Once completed, the city-owned fiber network, run through the city’s existing city-owned electrical utility, will be the biggest community-owned broadband network in the U.S.

The Knoxville Utility Board (KUB) says it has managed to deploy 1,100 miles of fiber infrastructure and connect more than 50,000 local residents so far as it makes headway on what’s expected to be a seven year project. In addition to gigabit speeds for 65,KUBisalsoofferinglocalssymmetrical2.5Gbpsservicefor65, KUB is also offering locals symmetrical 2.5 Gbps service for 65,KUBisalsoofferinglocalssymmetrical2.5Gbpsservicefor150 a month; and symmetrical 10 Gbps service for $300 a month.

In 2021 the city-owned utility decided to offer locals residential fiber after decades of complaints by locals about a lack of competition. Like many cities, Knoxville broadband is largely comprised of just two giant regional monopolies (AT&T, Comcast), resulting in slow speeds, spotty access, and high prices.

AT&T and Comcast attempted to undermine the project at every opportunity (Comcast sued Chattanooga for building a similar network), and tried their best to get locals to sign long-term contracts before the city-owned network is completed. Locals weren’t particularly impressed:

“Comcast thanked me for being a customer for 23 years, but it’s not because I’ve had the option to go anywhere else,” said local entrepreneur Tyler Roy, who said he had once driven across town during rush hour because that was faster than uploading a file to his home device. “They have had 23 years to fix these problems and they haven’t.”

Knoxville is one of more than 900 communities that have decided to build their own community broadband networks in response to obvious market failure. Data routinely shows community-owned networks result in lower prices, faster speeds, and better customer service. And as locally-owned operations, they’re more directly accountable to their neighbors.

In many regions, it’s the local city-owned utility, or a cooperative that’s leading the charge. Elsewhere, it’s exclusively the municipality. And in many regions, municipalities that can’t handle the cost or logistics of building fiber networks will partner with an existing, usually a smaller private operator (see Fort Worth’s recent partnership with Sprocket Networks or the work Ting has been up to).

In many cities, municipalities are eyeing open access fiber networks (see our recent Copia report on this subject). Such networks allow numerous ISPs to come in and compete in layers on a centralized city-owned infrastructure, reduce access costs for new entrants, and drive down broadband costs for residents and local businesses alike via a strange concept known as competition.

Federal regulators, who’ve largely turned a blind eye to the way politically powerful regional monopolies drive up costs for consumers, haven’t been particularly helpful. Republicans, you might recall, tried to pass a bill banning all community-owned broadband networks at the peak of the pandemic when such networks were busy showing their utility and benefit.

Democrats, in contrast, often pay empty lip service to the digital divide. Not only can they not openly admit monopolies are a problem, but they’ve also largely avoided lending even basic messaging support to what’s become a massive grass roots movement of pissed off locals — again, for fear of upsetting politically powerful companies tethered to our domestic surveillance operations.

What has dramatically helped the community-owned broadband movement has been a historic round of new subsidies and loans made possible by the infrastructure bill. More than $45 billion in broadband subsides are now headed to the states, and while a lot of that money will be thrown in the laps of monopolies, a sizeable chunk is winding its way to local community-owned networks.

I’ve spent most of the last two years talking to and writing about a different community every week. Many of them are not only building affordable fiber networks, they’re delivering what amounts to free access to low-income residents thanks to the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (at risk of being defunded due to Congressional incompetence).

Most of these communities aren’t building broadband networks because they think it’s fun. They’re building broadband networks because decades of federal regulatory incompetence and regional monopolies have resulted in market failure and costly, substandard service, giving them no other choice.

Large, entrenched regional monopolies could have responded to this movement by building faster, better, cheaper networks. Instead they found it less expensive to sue cities trying to build better infrastructure, or pass state laws banning municipalities from even pondering the idea. That hasn’t worked, so they’re increasingly facing the first meaningful challenge to their power in a generation.

And because such networks have widespread, bipartisan public support, and the animosity for regional monopolies runs so deep after decades of dysfunction, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and Charter are having a hell of a time trying to spin this extremely popular movement as a negative.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, knoxville, knoxville utilities board, municipal broadband, tennessee

Another State Lawmaker Wants To Criminalize Porn Through Age Verification

from the the-first-amendment-does-still-exist dept

Here we go again, everyone. Another far-right state lawmaker has introduced a bill requiring age verification in order to access porn sites from within state limits. This time it is Tennessee state Rep. Patsy Hazlewood who introduced yet another extreme age verification proposal that essentially makes it a crime to own a legally operating porn website protected by the First Amendment – regardless of whether the material protects certain regional regulations.

Referred to as the Protect Tennessee Minors Act, her bill takes a few notes from other far-right lawmakers in Ohio and Indiana. Both state legislatures have bills that levy misdemeanors and felonies on companies that own adult entertainment websites that fail or choose not to follow age verification requirements. The proposal in Ohio makes it a crime for users to circumvent an age gate through legally available means, like a VPN. The act, or House Bill 1614, is a pre-filing for 2024’s legislative session, and it adopts a new Class C felony for failure to comply with the law.

While the official bill language has yet to be published, House Bill 1614 is what we in the adult entertainment industry press call a “copycat” of mandatory age verification first adopted in the state of Louisiana. Throughout this year, proposals targeting adult entertainment websites with age-gating rules have grown exponentially extreme. Rep. Hazlewood’s bill fits this clear mold.

In a statement to a local news station, Rep. Hazlewood said, “I think we all have a responsibility as a society to protect our children.” A grandparent herself, Hazlewood told the news station that she’s received input from parents in her legislative district that inspired her to propose this bill – nowhere else. It is hard to believe when every conservative lawmaker with a savior complex is buying into fascistic lawmaking trends set forth by select groups, such as Project 2025, Heritage Foundation, National Center on Sexual Exploitation, and the even crazier American Principles Project, among others. Minors shouldn’t view porn by any means. But we have to be realistic.

Rep. Hazlewood’s bill — and virtually every age verification proposal in state legislatures and Congress — certainly lack input from adult entertainment industry members, consumers, law enforcement, and actual anti-trafficking groups. Why are the Patsy Hazlewoods of the world so focused on digital content that is already heavily age-restricted? I’m well aware of the lawsuits against Meta Platforms and their social networks, Facebook and Instagram. I am also aware of the anti-LGBTQ+ Kids Online Safety Act and parents begging the government to do their jobs.

However, a significant volume of sexual abuse imagery isn’t tied to the online adult industry, and mandatory age verification for end users isn’t the answer to fighting against these heinous acts.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez argued in a new lawsuit that platforms like Pornhub and OnlyFans do more to counter CSAM and non-consensual intimate imagery (revenge porn) than platforms like Facebook and Instagram. National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) CyberTipline data overwhelmingly confirms this fact. Age gates on porn sites – or even social media networks – will not curtail CSAM online. Admittedly, the parent companies that own the mentioned platforms are involved in programs that locate, remove, and report cases of CSAM and non-consensual intimate imagery (e.g., NCMEC’s TakeItDown program). The age verification hypothesis certainly doesn’t solve this problem, and it shouldn’t come at the expense of the First Amendment rights of adults who are not breaking laws or imposing harm on others.

Michael McGrady covers the legal and tech side of the online porn business, among other topics. He is the politics and legal contributing editor for AVN.com.

Filed Under: adult content, age verification, csam, patsy hazlewood, tennessee

Tennessee Teen Sues School For Suspending Him After He Posted Memes Mocking His Principal

from the thicken-that-skin-up,-administrators dept

Students rights are limited on school grounds. But they don’t cease to exist. And what they do off-campus is subject to even fewer limitations.

These are long-held facts backed by years of court precedent, the most famous of which is the Supreme Court’s 1969 Tinker decision. This is the baseline for school-student interactions when it comes to constitutional rights, as written by Justice Abe Fortas:

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

And yet, there are still plenty of school administrators who feel otherwise. When they act on their ignorance, they get sued. That’s what’s happening in a Tennessee federal court right now. A student suspended for mocking his principal via his personal social media accounts has obtained the backing of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and is suing the offended party, as well as the entity that employs him.

A Tennessee student is suing his school district after he was suspended for posting memes making fun of his principal.

The 17-year-old student shared three memes that he made and published online with the principal’s face cut out on different backgrounds.

One meme showed the principal as a cat in a french maid’s outfit. The stunt resulted in a three-day, out-of-school suspension for the student.

That summary comes courtesy of UK news agency, The Guardian. Somehow, domestic coverage by large news agencies like NBC did not apparently include any link to the actual lawsuit, so it’s the UK getting our clicks for its coverage of non-domestic litigation.

The complaint [PDF] helpfully includes the social media posts the school felt necessitated a suspension. Not only do they show the mockery was harmless, it also allows those of us covering this lawsuit to further this extremely mild ridicule of an apparently humorless school administrator.

Plaintiff I.P. posted three images about his Tullahoma High School principal, Defendant Jason Quick. One showed Quick holding a box of vegetables, another (which I.P. merely reposted) showed Quick in a dress with cat ears and whiskers, and the third showed Quick’s face on a video game character being hugged by a cartoon bird. I.P. intended the images to satirize, in I.P.’s view, Quick’s overly serious demeanor. I.P. posted each image from his own device, off campus, and on his own time.

For that, the student was suspended. Not only did it prove his point (that principal Quick is “overly serious,”), it generated a constitutional cause of action that’s going to be extremely difficult to defend in federal court.

The baseline for constitutionality is whether or not a student’s actions “substantially disrupt” the everyday business of educating. There’s nothing on the record that suggests anything other than Principal Quick’s ego was (briefly) disrupted. The school (or, as personified by Quick) cannot forbid students from satirizing educators or administrators — not if there’s no resulting disruption.

And the school can’t get around these restrictions just by crafting unconstitutional policies.

To suspend I.P., Quick relied on a Tullahoma High School policy prohibiting students, whether at home or school, from posting pictures that “result[] in the embarrassment, demeaning, or discrediting of any student or staff,” regardless of whether the pictures substantially disrupt the school day. That policy is squarely unconstitutional under Mahanoy, and so is I.P.’s suspension.

That last sentence references the US Supreme Court’s 2021 decision finding that a school can’t suspend (or boot from the cheerleading squad) a student who said nothing more than “fuck cheer” in a personal social media post. And the long string of f-bombs delivered in that case are far more facially offensive than these innocuous memes the principal felt deserved to be met with a suspension.

A school simply cannot forbid criticism of its employees. That this school thought it could — and that it could use this policy to suspend someone — is likely going to see it lose this lawsuit, along with this policy, in the near future.

And it’s not even a close case in terms of physical location. The first meme was posted while the student was visiting his father in Alabama two days after the school year ended. (It’s ~40 miles from Tullahoma High School to the Alabama border.) The next post appeared nearly three weeks later, posted by I.P. while vacationing with his family in Italy. Only the last posting occurred either during a school year or in the vicinity of physical school building. I.P. posted the last one from his home, following his second day of his junior year.

Given the time and distance of the first two posts, it’s incredibly unlikely posts sent during summer vacation from distant vacation spots caused any disruption at all at the (closed) school. And there doesn’t appear to be any indication the last posting caused any problems either, despite it actually happening during the school year.

In fact, the school appeared to be so un-disrupted it took administrators eight days after I.P.’s final post to drag him into the office and suspend him. Upon being told he was being suspended, I.P. suffered a panic attack in the school office — something I.P. asserts administrators should have known would be the likely effect of this unexpected disciplinary action since the school had already instituted a “504 Plan” to accommodate I.P.’s clinically diagnosed depression and anxiety.

So, there are physical and mental injuries on top of the constitutional injuries. And, unless the school has a bunch of disruption related evidence up its sleeve, it’s going to find itself on the hook for what looks entirely like an unamused principal finding a way to punish a student for mocking him. That’s not how the law works and no amount of unlawful school policies can excuse what happened here.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, free speech, jason quick, memes, principal, school, suspended, tennessee, tinker

Tennessee Appeals Court Says Vanity License Plates Are Likely Protected Speech

from the SUCKIT dept

There have been lots of legal battles fought over proprietary blends of numbers and letters. States collecting a premium for vanity plates claim this is government speech, since it’s a state-issued plate. Or, if it’s not quite government speech, it’s the government’s tacit approval of this speech, even if the vanity plate really only contains statements made by plate owners.

There’s no unified take on license plates, even if the Supreme Court has (sort of) weighed in on the matter. That decision dealt with “specialty plates,” which involve driver-generated designs, rather than driver-generated phrases placed on government-designed plates. That difference matters. But the ruling in Walker isn’t conclusive enough to prevent nearly every court dealing with this issue to come to different conclusions.

This decision [PDF], brought to us by the lawyer who won this part of the battle, First Amendment lawyer Daniel Horwitz (almost a Techdirt regular at this point), sides with the driver. Tennessee resident Leah Gilliam applied for a vanity plate more than a decade ago. She was granted a vanity plate reading “69PWNDU” on January 31, 2011. Nothing happened for more than 10 years.

Then this happened:

On May 7, 2021, the Department’s then-Chief of Staff, Justin Moorhead, received a text message on his personal cell phone containing a picture of Plaintiff’s license plate. The message stated: “If I could take a moment of personal privilege and acknowledge the tireless work that Justin does for his department[.] I commend you sir[.]” Mr. Moorhead responded: “Hahah thank you for your citizen[’]s report[.]” Thereafter, Mr. Moorhead brought Plaintiff’s license plate to the attention of the Inventory Unit. The Department reviewed the plate, determined it was erroneously issued to Plaintiff, and revoked it.

That decision to follow up on a text message by revoking a plate that had provided the state with a decade’s-worth of vanity plate fees resulted in this lawsuit. The trial court handed down a rejection of the Gilliam’s constitutional claims.

The panel held that the alphanumeric configurations on vanity license plates are government speech because they convey government agreement with the message displayed. Further, license plates are “government mandated, government controlled, and government issued IDs that have traditionally been used as a medium for government speech.” Inasmuch as the message on the plate amounts to government speech, the panel concluded that the “Free Speech Clause . . . does not regulate government speech[,]” and thus “[t]he constitutional rights the Plaintiff claims in her complaint to have been violated are not triggered or implicated[.]”

The state Appeals Court, however, is not so sure. There’s a lot on the record that says the state definitely knows the messages on vanity plates are not government speech. And it knows this because it said as much during its testimony. Further, it’s painfully clear that any other driver reading a vanity plate knows it’s not speech originating from the government.

[T]he State posits that the message is simply one of identification. That is, regardless of the alphanumeric configuration, the “government message” is that the vehicle is lawfully registered with the State. On the other hand, Plaintiff claims that there is no evidence the State has ever used vanity license plates to communicate with the public. To this, the State avers that our analysis should focus on “the medium of expression, not the history of a ‘program’ related to the medium.”

The State’s argument does not hold water. The State wants to focus on the medium, but what is at issue here, specifically, is the alphanumeric configuration as opposed to the background of a specialized plate, the sticker communicating the month registration expires, or the state the plate belongs to. Vanity plates (that is, the use of personalized alphanumeric configurations chosen by the public) did not come into existence until 1998, and since then they communicate what the individual driver, not the government, chooses.

The court hammers this point home after addressing more of the state’s futile, contradictory arguments:

[W]e are unpersuaded by the State’s position that it historically has communicated an “ID” message through the alphanumeric configurations on license plates. If this were true, the message on the vanity plates would be inapposite, and the State would have no incentive to regulate said messages. Stated differently, to the extent the unique alphanumeric configuration serves only to identify a vehicle as lawfully registered, then it is unclear why the State has an interest in the phonetic message.

Don’t be obtuse, says the court:

We are unpersuaded that citizens, upon viewing messages such as BIGRACK, TOPLS69, and WYTRASH, affixed to personal vehicles believe that the State is conveying a message to the public.

So, if it’s not the government’s speech, it’s citizens’ speech. And there are limits to how the government can regulate this, even if the speech is borne by an object issued by the state.

Even if the government can regulate this speech, it can’t do it the way the state is doing it. To avoid constitutional issues, the regulation should, at the very least, be consistent. And it’s anything but that when Tennessee engages in policing vanity plates.

Although the statutory framework allows the Department to approve or deny vanity license plate messages, the record establishes that in reality, the Department’s oversight has been inconsistent. Plaintiff displayed the vanity plate at issue for a decade before the Department revoked it. Had an acquaintance of Mr. Moorhead not photographed the plate and texted the photo to Mr. Moorhead, it is unknown whether the plate would have been revoked at all. Further, the Department has no written policies about how to screen vanity plate applications for “good taste and decency.” Rather, the record shows that the approval process depends largely upon the judgment of the particular Inventory Unit team member reviewing the application that particular day.

The case will head back to the lower court with specific instructions to actually engage with the First Amendment issues raised and the appeals court’s discussion of these issues.

[P]er this Court’s decision, the panel will have to re-evaluate Plaintiff’s claims in an entirely different framework, to-wit, the strictures of the First Amendment and forum analysis.

Does this mean the lower court will find the regulation of vanity plates unconstitutional? That’s not guaranteed. But there’s a far better chance it will find in favor of Horwitz and his client, considering the state’s arguments to the contrary have been punctured brutally and repeatedly by the higher court. And if Tennessee is really worried about possibly being viewed as the source of off-color phonetics, it could just end the vanity plate program and try to get by with a little less revenue.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, daniel horwitz, free speech, license plates, tennessee, vanity plates