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Judge Censors Editorial Criticizing City Officials. Let’s Make Them Famous – Twitchy

February 20, 2025
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Judge Censors Editorial Criticizing City Officials. Let’s Make Them Famous – Twitchy
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Let’s give this story the maximum Streisand Effect, shall we? 

Adam Steinbaugh, who describes himself as a First Amendment lawyer with FIRE (a true civil rights/free speech organization that we previously mentioned here) shares with us a pretty blatant violation of the First Amendment:





Basically, the Clarksdale Press Register published an unsigned editorial criticizing recent action by the city officials. The city then ran to a judge and demanded a restraining order requiring them to remove the editorial. We won’t quote the order at length but the core justification is that this supposedly defamatory of the city, exhibiting malice in the form of reckless disregard for the truth, and ‘interferes with [various public officials’] legitimate function to advocate for legislation they believe would help their municipality.’

We found a link to the editorial, but it appears to have been removed as ordered. But as they say the Internet is forever, so Adam found a picture of it…

…and you can read a dirty cut and paste of the text, here:

The gist of the editorial is this. Apparently, there was this idea to petition the Mississippi legislature to add a sin tax on alcohol, tobacco and marijuana in order to pay for more police. But according to the newspaper, the proposal was changed so that instead it would pay to ‘support and promote public safety, crime prevention and continued economic growth in the city’ which is much broader than just paying for more cops or increasing the wages of the ones already on the force. The paper felt that this would give rise to … well, the kind of waste that DOGE is trying to eliminate from the federal bureaucracy and indeed, the editorial suggests via a question that there might be kickbacks involved. Furthermore, when the meeting was held to make this proposal, they didn’t give proper notice and the paper saw that as sinister.

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Mind you, we don’t know if these facts are true. We are just trying to summarize what this editorial said, so you can see whether or not the judge was right to censor it. And bluntly, the judge was wrong. 

Back to Adam’s thread:

Again, to prevent any need to squint, he is quoting from the seminal case of New York Times v. Sullivan, where the Supreme Court said:

For good reason, ‘no court of last resort in this country has ever held, or even suggested, that prosecutions for libel on government have any place in the American system of jurisprudence.’

In other words, the government itself can’t sue for libel at all.

Basically, orders to take things down or to stop publishing them is almost never allowed in court. To our knowledge, the only exception that might exist is more or less military secrets.

And it gets worse:





That is generally true, but the judge doesn’t even appear to have given both sides a chance to be heard and thus hasn’t even tested the factual accuracy of the city’s allegations in a proper hearing.

As we noted above, the court found that there was what we call ‘constitutional malice.’ That is legal code for that the statement was affirmatively false (meaning that the person claiming to be defamed has to prove it is actually false), and that the person making the statement 1) knew it was false or 2) had a reckless disregard for the truth or falsity of that statement. They are unlikely to know that malice existed without actually getting evidence from employees of the newspaper.

And it is worth circling back to the alleged harm it caused. The judge claimed that the defamatory statements ‘interferes with [various public officials’] legitimate function to advocate for legislation they believe would help their municipality.’ In other words, it makes it harder for the city officials to make an argument, which is a laughably terrible justification. It basically amounts to silencing the opposition because they really need to.

All and all, this is pretty damning behavior. 

Heh. Cleary, he is referring to this nonsense from CBS.





Honestly, this has us thinking that maybe we need a version of Musk’s DOGE in every community.

The cut off text says:

There are many ‘motivated’ judges who’ve outed themselves over the last few weeks as they strain to find bases for wacky TROs of all shapes and sizes.

No, you blame the city officials who are so thin skinned they demanded it; you blame their lawyers for making the argument and not refusing to file this dumb petition; and you blame the judge for granting it.

It costs nothing to reproduce it on the Internet. To quote our late friend, John Hoge: ‘Don’t pick a fight with someone who buys pixels by the terabyte.’

Honestly, we don’t care what the local politics is, or the race of the people involved. They are acting like fascist thugs. That’s all we need to know.

Don’t do this. Don’t call the court. The judge can’t consider what you say to her and you could theoretically get yourself in trouble.





The cut off text:

She was elected to her mother’s seat in November 2018 and took the oath of office administered by her mother on January 2, 2019.

We are making that face, too.

It’s an inexact term, frankly. It’s like someone saying they are pro-life when they really mean they are opposed to killing babies in the womb and other innocents, but are perfectly fine with war, lethal self-defense and the death penalty when each are justified. (Don’t read that as criticism: This author is exactly that kind of pro-life advocate.) 

In the case of ‘prior restraint,’ it generally is used to refer to any kind of injunction as relief for allegedly illegal speech. In this case, while the judge didn’t say so explicitly, it carries with it the implicit instruction not to republish it—at least not by any of the named parties—so there is an element of prior-ness to the restraint, too.

We hear Barbara Streisand is warming up her singing voice.

True. But even a minute of censorship is too long.





It’s labeled a parody account, but everything he said seems reasonable.

You might not be a lawyer, but you would be better at this than the judge.

She is referring to the Society of Professional Journalists and good for them if they are paying attention.

Finally:

So sayeth, Walter Sobchak, Esq.

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