October 4, 2021 at 1:57 p.m.
One small step for a teen, one giant leap for free speech
One small step for a teen, one giant leap for free speech
As the story in today's edition recounts, Marquette County patrol sergeant Cameron Klump, at the direction of sheriff Joseph Konrath, threatened to arrest Amyiah Cohoon for disorderly conduct if she did not take down an Instagram post about having Covid-19.
It's not clear that Cohoon ever had Covid-19 - she tested negative but might have missed the window for testing - but she did have an "acute upper respiratory infection" and her doctors said it might just have been the coronavirus.
Cohoon posted she had beaten the virus, among other things. This was very early in the pandemic and the posts generated a number of concerned calls to the girl's school district and to the county health department. Ultimately, it was referred to the sheriff's department, and Konrath dispatched Klump to the family's house to tell them to remove the post or else.
They obediently did but later sued and, last week, with the help of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), they won.
Readers can read the details in the story, but, at first blush, it seems to be a minor and, some might say, even hollow victory. The judge said the officers violated Cohoon's First Amendment rights, but there were effectively no consequences for the officers, leaving them free to pursue their police-state thuggery in the future.
But the case is important, even critical, for multiple reasons.
First, it's important because of the free speech principles judge Brett Ludwig articulated in the decision, reaffirming the critical idea that civil rights are civil rights precisely because they are fundamental and cannot be taken away to "protect" the public from whatever the day's flavor of "threat" to public health is.
"The First Amendment is not a game setting for the government to toggle off and on," Ludwig wrote in the decision. "It applies in times of tranquility and times of strife."
Others have pointed out that the Bill of Rights was crafted in a time of upheaval, strife, and stress, and that was the point of it: to serve as an anchor for civil liberties at precisely the times when they are most likely to be challenged.
Ludwig understood even more, that in those times of strife, those seeking to shoot down all explanations that do not align with official narratives are likely to pose the most danger.
"The Marquette County sheriff had no more ability to silence Amyiah Cohoon's posts than it would to silence the many talking heads on cable news, who routinely pronounce one-sided hot takes on the issues of the day, purposefully ignoring any inconvenient facts that might disrupt their preferred narratives," Ludwig wrote.
In other words, the people out to suppress speech, to foreclose public debate, are almost always the ones who believe their arguments are the weakest, though their power may be the strongest. Or, as entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy put it recently: "Name one time in human history when the groups fighting to ban books and censor speech were the good guys. I'll wait."
Ludwig understood - and expressed in a court opinion - that without free speech there must always be an arbiter of speech, and those arbiters are hardly unbiased or even accurate.
Second, Ludwig's decision helps expose just how deceptive the real liars in this country are. Brilliantly, the people who most spread real disinformation deflect from their lies by branding those expressing alternative narratives, or who call them out, as the liars.
The Hunter Biden case should be an extraordinary example, but it is quite commonplace these days as a tactic used by the liberal corporate media and their Democratic overlords. In the weeks before the presidential election, Twitter and Facebook censored stories about emails found on Hunter Biden's laptop in an aggressive effort to protect Joe Biden's election, and every mainstream national corporate media outlet, save Fox, denounced the emails as fraudulent and part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
Everyone now knows that the emails were authentic, of course, and a new book by Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger dispenses with any doubt about that. Of course, his book is getting little-to-no media coverage. Those who suppressed the truth and spread a CIA-driven lie that it was all Russian disinformation were the real liars and spreaders of disinformation.
The same tactics were more crudely happening in Marquette County. Since they couldn't just censor Amyiah Cohoon like Instagram could have, the sheriff's department coerced her, through its threats and intimidation, into self-censorship. As Ludwig pointed out, coerced self-censorship is censorship and a violation of the First Amendment.
More than that, as the judge also wrote, just like the national media does to those who dare to defy its narratives, the school district sent out a communication branding Cohoon as a liar seeking attention.
That communication conveniently ignored two important facts, namely, that Cohoon's doctors had told her she might actually have had Covid despite her negative test, and, second, that the teen was really sick with an acute upper respiratory infection, whether it was Covid or not. That's information the public has a right to know in the early stages of what the government calls a deadly pandemic that is driven by - wait for it - a virus that triggers acute upper respiratory infections.
Her information might or might not have been complete or accurate, but opening up the widest possible avenues of knowledge about what is happening in the world is the best pathway to the truth, even when the pavement contains some cracked bricks along the way.
One thing is for sure, the path paved by the powerful, who allow no detours or discussions, almost always contains the most cracked concrete - Hunter Biden, Marquette law enforcement, the local school district - and predictably ends at a dead-end with no turn-around.
This case also provides the clearest example yet of how police-state mentality when it comes to state-condoned expression and speech can become an actual police state in practice. It's far away when social media terminate Trump, or censor real news, or kill Parler.
That's bad, we say, but that's happening somewhere else, in a land far away. It doesn't really affect me.
But when the police are standing in your front yard, trying to cancel you because you exercised your basic right as an American citizen, it's very real and it illustrates just how close we are in this age of censorship to the brutal tactics we see the government of Australia now using against its citizens.
So far away censorship is, and yet so close.
Finally, the case underscores just how important it is that every citizen fight censorship and growing government oppression in whatever way they can. Amyiah Cohoon and her family decided to take a stand against police state bullying and they have won in court. It may be a small victory, but such victories accumulate until one day one small case breaks the camel's back.
In such resistance resides the hope of the future and the prospects for our civil liberties. This week we salute Amyiah Cohoon and her family and everyone else with the courage to fight government and media censorship, whether masked as a suspended social media account or a police officer in your face.
Remember, the government, the Democratic Party, and the media own the narrative of our world. They will continue owning it ... until they don't. Amyiah Cohoon has helped us all by taking back a little piece of the narrative. It was a small and local step for sure, but for her a huge one in her life, and likely a giant leap in our lives, too.
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