Search
840 results for “leafless”
-
🗣️En nuestro Ejército Bolivariano, nos sentimos orgullosos al contar con hombres y mujeres que dan lo mejor de sí y quienes con dignidad ven hoy materializado en su merecido ascenso al grado o jerarquía superior inmediata, el logro alcanzado por su constancia y esfuerzo.
#Éxitos
.
.
#DemocraciaSaludYPaz
#EjércitoBolivarianoEnMarcha
#EjercitoLibertadorVictorioso
#LealesSiempreTraidoresNunca
#LaFanbesinvencible
#UnionCivicoMilitar,
#PuebloYFANBunidos
#FANB
#venezuela -
You want to know how #CoalregionsEU benefit from #exchangeEU?
Detailed findings, recommendations and main challenges are available in the information leaflets from each exchange, such as the one between #Asturias 🇪🇸 and #Silesia 🇵🇱.
🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/Energy4Europe/status/1598231714471763968
-
💂🏼♂️Los Milician@s de la UPDI Prefundación en compañía del Cmdte APDI La Fría y sus comandos realizan capacitación y entrenamiento del #MTRR para fortalecer el Apresto Operacional ante cualquier Amenaza #MiliciaEsPatria #VenezuelaInexpugnable #FuriaBolivariana #MiliciaPuebloEnArmas #LealesSiempreTraidoresNunca
-
⭕¡No te lo puedes perder! Interactúa con nosotros y entérate de las noticias más resaltantes de tu Ejército Bolivariano👊🏻
#LealesSiempreTraidoresNunca
#quedateencasa
#Fanbsiemprecontigo
#venezuela🇻🇪
#EjércitoBolivariano -
📌Conmemoramos hoy la partida física del insigne héroe apureño General de División José Cornelio Muñoz Silva, triunfador de las Queseras del Medio y Carabobo, quien partió de este plano terrenal un #25jul de 1849 en la histórica Ciudad Bolívar.
¡Su arrojo vive en nuestros soldados!
.
.
#LealesSiempreTraidoresNunca
#EjercitoBolivarianoEnMarcha
#Venezuela
#FANB -
The #bower plant or #bowervine, is a species of flowering plant endemic to eastern #Australia.
It is a woody climber with leaves that have three to nine egg-shaped leaflets, and white or pink trumpet-shaped flowers that are red and hairy inside.
You can see how the leaves are attached (stuck) to the side wall of this residential dwelling.
It is often grown as an ornamental.
The flowers are cute and eye catching.
I haven’t seen many of these around this summer. I really liked this!
♥️🤍♥️🤍
#urbanflora #flora #gardening #garden #victoria #melbourne #Brighton #beautiful #vibrant #flowersofmastodon #godmustbeabotanist #aetherichedonist #makesmehappy
-
The #bower plant or #bowervine, is a species of flowering plant endemic to eastern #Australia.
It is a woody climber with leaves that have three to nine egg-shaped leaflets, and white or pink trumpet-shaped flowers that are red and hairy inside.
You can see how the leaves are attached (stuck) to the side wall of this residential dwelling.
It is often grown as an ornamental.
The flowers are cute and eye catching.
I haven’t seen many of these around this summer. I really liked this!
♥️🤍♥️🤍
#urbanflora #flora #gardening #garden #victoria #melbourne #Brighton #beautiful #vibrant #flowersofmastodon #godmustbeabotanist #aetherichedonist #makesmehappy
-
The #bower plant or #bowervine, is a species of flowering plant endemic to eastern #Australia.
It is a woody climber with leaves that have three to nine egg-shaped leaflets, and white or pink trumpet-shaped flowers that are red and hairy inside.
You can see how the leaves are attached (stuck) to the side wall of this residential dwelling.
It is often grown as an ornamental.
The flowers are cute and eye catching.
I haven’t seen many of these around this summer. I really liked this!
♥️🤍♥️🤍
#urbanflora #flora #gardening #garden #victoria #melbourne #Brighton #beautiful #vibrant #flowersofmastodon #godmustbeabotanist #aetherichedonist #makesmehappy
-
The #bower plant or #bowervine, is a species of flowering plant endemic to eastern #Australia.
It is a woody climber with leaves that have three to nine egg-shaped leaflets, and white or pink trumpet-shaped flowers that are red and hairy inside.
You can see how the leaves are attached (stuck) to the side wall of this residential dwelling.
It is often grown as an ornamental.
The flowers are cute and eye catching.
I haven’t seen many of these around this summer. I really liked this!
♥️🤍♥️🤍
#urbanflora #flora #gardening #garden #victoria #melbourne #Brighton #beautiful #vibrant #flowersofmastodon #godmustbeabotanist #aetherichedonist #makesmehappy
-
@AfterPacket What do you mean "#isrealterrorists" how come when Israel takes a trivet to defend themselves, they're suddenly the bad guys? There's no sides, nobody should be killing. In fact IDF is even dropping leaflets from planes into Gaza, calling on residents to leave their homes and evacuate south. What Hamas is doing is horrible though, they're telling the women and children to stay put so they can hide behind them as fools so Israel will look awful and they can whine about something.
-
El Sol nace por el Esequibo, nuestra tierra se respeta y la defenderemos con la vida! #lealessiempretraidoresnunca #elesequiboesvenezuela #miliciabolivariana #Adi313jiwi #Apure
-
2Feb.Recordando con una sus frases a nuestro Comandante Supremo Hugo Chávez, quien hace 22 años se juramento como Presidente de la República, convirtiendo a Venezuela en una Patria Grande y Soberana. #Chávezvive #laluchasigue #miliciabolivariana #lealessiempretraidoresnunca #ADI314JIWI $#APURE
-
'The basic facts alone are startling. Before Zack #Polanski took over as leader last September, the #Greens in #England and #Wales had around 66,000 members. They are now at 215,000, and still rising at speed.
This means the party has many more people to knock on doors and fold leaflets, as seen with the vast numbers of canvassers the party could call on in winning last month’s #Gorton and #Denton #byelection .'
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/mar/14/green-party-membership-boom
-
Lazy Caturday Reads: Everything is Awful, As Usual
Good Afternoon!!
Shared Reflections, by Rebecca Aldernet
I can’t find any good news this morning–what else is new? The “president” is dangerously demented, his cabinet is full of kooks, his economy is going down the tubes, and he seems determined to start a war in Venezuela. Anyway, here are the stories that caught my attention today.
Venezuela Boat Strikes
I’m sure you’ve heard the reports about Pete Hegseth’s campaign of war crimes against alleged drug boats. Yesterday, The Washington Post published an exclusive report by Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima (gift link): Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all.
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraftfollowed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive,according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.
The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any ofthe men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.
Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
Use the gift link to read the rest. We’re going to need prosecutions if we ever get rid of Trump and his goons.
Phillip M. Bailey at USA Today: Pete Hegseth lashes out at ‘kill them all’ report on boat strikes.
U.S Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is lashing out at a report that he ordered military officials to “kill them all” during one of the Trump administration’s strikes in the Caribbean aimed a boat allegedly carrying drug cargo.
Nataliya Bagatskaya, Echo of the black cats
“As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland,” Hegseth, 45, said in a Nov. 28 post on X.
The defense secretary was responding to a Washington Post story citing two anonymous sources that claimed he ordered troops to leave no survivors after a missile struck the vessel, which was traveling off the Trinidad coast, as two individuals were clinging to the smoldering wreckage.
Since September, the Trump administration has attacked at least 21 boats traversing international waters, killing 83 people. Trump and other officials defend the boat strikes as an attempt to crackdown on illegal narcotics flooding into the U.S., but lawmakers from both parties have criticized the administration for providing no intelligence briefings or other evidence about what the vessels are carrying.
“At this point, I would call them extrajudicial killings,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said during an Oct. 26 appearance on Fox News Sunday. “This is akin to what China does, what Iran does with drug dealers − they summarily execute people without presenting evidence to the public. So it’s wrong.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who shared the story about Hegseth’s alleged order, raised similar concerns about the constitutionality of the strikes in an Nov. 28 post on X.
“If you want to know why Hegseth is panicking about reminders that there is accountably for giving or carrying out illegal orders, it’s likely because he knows he has given illegal orders to murder people,” Murphy said.
Victoria Bisset, Alex Horton, Ellen Nakashima, and Noah Robertson at The Washington Post: Senate committee vows ‘vigorous oversight’ in killing of boat strike survivors.
The head of the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee has pledged “vigorous oversight” after a Washington Post report that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken order to kill all crew members during the first U.S. strike against suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean earlier this year.
A live drone feed showed two survivors from the original crew of 11 clinging to the wreckage of their boat following the initial missile attack on Sept. 2, The Post reported on Friday afternoon. The Special Operations commander overseeing the operation then ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation, killing both survivors. Those people, along with five others in the original report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
Late Friday, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), the committee’s ranking Democrat, issued a statement saying that the committee “is aware of recent news reports — and the Department of Defense’s initial response — regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels.”
The committee, they said, “has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”
If Trump is so concerned about drugs coming into the U.S. from Latin America, why did he just pardon a Honduran drug kingpin?
The New York Times: Trump Announces Pardon for Honduran Ex-President Convicted in Drug Case.
President Trump announced on Friday afternoon that he would grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who, as the center of a sweeping drug case, was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.
By Louis Valtat
The news came as a shock not only to Hondurans, but also to the authorities in the United States who had built a major case and won a conviction against Mr. Hernández. They had accused him of taking bribes during his campaign from Joaquín Guzmán, the notorious former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico known as “El Chapo,” and of running his Central American country like a narco state.
The judge in his case, P. Kevin Castel, had called Mr. Hernández “a two-faced politician hungry for power” who masqueraded as an antidrug crusader while partnering with traffickers. And prosecutors had asked the judge to make sure Mr. Hernández would die behind bars, citing his abuse of power, connections to violent traffickers and “the unfathomable destruction” caused by cocaine.
The prosecution stretched across Mr. Trump’s first term and concluded during Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s time as president. In the end, Mr. Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison in Federal District Court in Manhattan, capping what prosecutors had presented as a sprawling conspiracy.
Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations at the same agency, also reacted with disbelief to the news of the pardon. Mr. Vigil said the move imperiled the reputation of the United States and its international investigations into drug trafficking.
“This action would be nothing short of catastrophic and would destroy the credibility of the U.S. in the international community,” Mr. Vigil said on Friday.
Mr. Trump’s vow to pardon such a high-profile convicted drug trafficker appeared to contradict the president’s campaign to unleash the might of the American military on small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that his administration says, without evidence, are involved in drug trafficking. That campaign has so far killed more than 80 people since it began in September.
There’s probably a bribe involved.
War in Venezuela?
Kelly Rissman at The Independent: Trump tells airlines to consider Venezuela’s airspace closed as US military buildup continues in region.
President Donald Trump told airlines to consider Venezuela’s airspace closed, days after he vowed to take action on land “very soon.”
Following dozens of strikes against alleged drug-carrying boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that have killed more than 80 people since September, Trump suggested to military service members in a Thanksgiving Day phone call that the U.S. would soon take action “on land.”
On Saturday, he urged the clearing of the airspace near the South American country. “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY,” the U.S. president wrote on Truth Social Saturday morning.
Over the weekend, the Federal Aviation Administration also warned airlines to “exercise caution” when flying over Venezuela “due to the worsening security situation and heightened military activity.”
Several airlines cancelled their flights as a result of the FAA’s warning.
By Salah Hefney
Can he do that? A bit more from the Independent story:
Last week, the White House was reportedly considering having U.S. military planes drop leaflets — containing details about the $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Nicolás Maduro — over Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, the Washington Postreported.
For months, the U.S. government has been building up a military presence in the region to curb what Trump administration officials call “narco-terrorists” and has also made it clear it wants to oust Maduro.
Maduro has been in power since 2013, following the death of Hugo Chavez. The U.S. is among more than 50 countries that have refused to recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s head of state, claiming he lost the 2024 presidential election. The State Department has offered rewards for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the Venezuelan president since 2020; the Trump administration raised the reward to $50 million this year.
The U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which Trump alleges are fueled by Maduro’s government. Last month, the State Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization,” claiming it’s headed by Maduro and other high-ranking members of his “illegitimate” regime.
There’s more at the link.
Attacks on National Guard in DC
Jenny Gathright, Emily Davies, and Olivia George at The Washington Post: D.C. police to begin patrolling with National Guard after fatal attack.
National Guard troops patrolling in D.C. will be paired with local law enforcement personnel, at least temporarily, in the wake of the Wednesday attack that killed one National Guard member and critically injured another, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post and two D.C. police officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss planning that is still in progress.
“Officers will conduct high-visibility patrols with the National Guard and provide assistance as needed,” said the email, which was sent to D.C. police leadership Wednesday evening. The email said the situation was “fluid,” and adjustments to the staffing plan could be made in the coming days.
Fabrice Backès, Sandie
If enacted on a long-term basis, the change would significantly shift the way National Guard troops have worked with local and federal law enforcement in the District since their arrival in August. Trump administration officials have credited the troops for helping reduce crime in the city — in part, they argued, because the troops’ presence at Metro stations and on National Park Service lands frees up law enforcement to police other areas of the city. Diverting local police to accompany Guard members would do essentially the opposite by siphoning them from other tasks in D.C. neighborhoods.
The email said the new pairing would start Thursday and Friday.A D.C. police official said some officers had been temporarily detailed to accompany the troops, and a more long-term policy change was under discussion.
The official, who stressed that the discussions were still preliminary, said D.C. police, Metro Transit Police, U.S. Park Police and several other law enforcement agencies were having conversations with the National Guard task force in D.C. about pairing the troops with police officers while they are on city streets. Since their deployment to D.C., groups of National Guard troops have largely operated unaccompanied by police, the official said.
A judge has already said that putting National Guard Troops in DC was illegal, but Trump filed an “emergency appeal.” Meanwhile, two members of the West Virginia National Guard have been shot. One has died and the other is still in critical condition.
NPR: Where things stand with the National Guard shooting in D.C.
Sarah Beckstrom, 20, of Summersville, W.Va., joined the service in 2023. Beckstrom’s father, Gary, called her his “baby girl” and said she had “passed to glory” in a Facebook post on Thursday.
West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey on Friday called for residents to hold a moment of silence for the two victims of the shooting, as both were deployed as part of that state’s National Guard.
Morrisey said in a statement Friday that Beckstrom had made the “ultimate sacrifice” in service to her state and the nation. He added that both Beckstrom and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, had stepped forward and volunteered for the mission in D.C.
Morrisey also said that Wolfe remains in “very critical condition.”
“These two West Virginia heroes were serving our country and protecting our nation’s capital when they were maliciously attacked,” Morrisey said. “Their courage and commitment to duty represent the very best of our state.”
Trump’s Attacks on Woman Journalists
Corbin Bolies at The Wrap: Trump Calls CBS News Correspondent ‘Stupid Person’ in 4th Attack on Female Reporters in 2 Weeks.
President Donald Trump attacked another female reporter on Thursday after she asked him about the vetting of the suspect in a Washington, D.C., shooting that killed a National Guardsman, calling her a “stupid person.”
CBS News’ chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes questioned Trump about reports that Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the alleged gunman who entered the U.S. as part of a Biden-era program for Afghan refugees who fled the nation in 2021, was vetted before he allegedly shot at the National Guardsmen on Wednesday.
By Rebecca Aldernet
Reports indicated that Lakanwal was vetted either through his time working with the CIA in Afghanistan, during the removal process from Afghanistan or during his 2024 asylum application, which the Trump administration approved earlier this year.
Cordes, therefore, asked Trump why he blamed the Biden administration if U.S. officials confirmed vetting of the refugees took place. Trump didn’t enjoy the line of questioning.
“Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?” Trump asked. “Because they came into on a plane along with 1000s of other people that shouldn’t be here, and you’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid person. And we — there’s a law passed that it’s almost impossible not to get to get them out. You can’t get them out once they come in. And they came in and they were unvetted. They were unchecked. There were many of them, and they came on big planes, and it was disgraceful.”
The attack was the latest in a series of swipes at female reporters. Trump on Wednesday described a New York Times reporter as “ugly, inside and out” over a reported story on his age. He also called a Bloomberg News reporter a “piggy” and an ABC News reporter a “terrible person” for her questioning of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Catherine Bouris at The Daily Beast: Trump’s Niece Exposes Why Her Uncle Keeps Attacking Female Reporters.
Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, says one of the reasons the president seems to be increasingly lashing out at female reporters is because he is “rattled.
Mary, 60, discussed the rise in incidents on the Wednesday edition of her show, Mary Trump Live. She noted the 79-year-old president calling a reporter “piggy” while telling her to be quiet during a gaggle aboard Air Force One, and a Truth Social post in which he insulted a New York Times reporter’s looks.
“His misogynistic attacks against reporters in particular are increasing and that means a couple of things,” she explained. “It means that he’s increasingly comfortable lodging such attacks, as he’s been openly misogynistic, as he’s been openly racist and openly Islamophobic and openly anti-immigrant and openly antisemitic. There’s no hiding it anymore.”
”I think it’s also a sign that he’s a little rattled. He’s also never clearly heard of the Streisand effect,” Mary said, referring to the internet phenomenon where somebody inadvertently draws further attention to something while attempting to hide it from the public.
“When you call attention to the thing you want people to ignore, it’s probably a terrible idea.”
Trump’s Ballroom Obsession
Luke Broadwater at The New York Times (gift link): Inside Trump’s Push to Make the White House Ballroom as Big as Possible.
I posted about Trump’s conflicts with his architects on Wednesday. This is an extension of that story. After he met with architect James McCreary in August,
McCrery Architects got to work on the initial drawings for the project, sketching out a design with high ceilings and arched windows reminiscent of Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors. It would have the latest security features, including bulletproof glass. Gold furniture, known to please the president, was added to the renderings.
Black cat with cat lady, Dee Nickerson
It was flashy enough to impress a man of Mr. Trump’s tastes, while largely matching the style of the historic White House without overshadowing it.
That’s when things got tricky.
In offering up his initial design, Mr. McCrery could not have known that Mr. Trump’s vision for the project was growing. What started as a 500-seat ballroom connected to the East Wing grew to 650 seats. Next, he wanted a 999-seat ballroom, then room for 1,350. Even as Mr. Trump assured the public in July that the ballroom would not touch the existing structure, he already had approved plans to demolish the East Wing to make way for something that could hold several thousand people, according to three people familiar with the timeline.
The latest plan, which officials said was still preliminary, calls for a ballroom much larger than the West Wing and the Executive Mansion. Mr. Trump has said publicly that he would like a ballroom big enough to hold a crowd for a presidential inauguration.
The size of the project was not the only issue raising alarms. Mr. Trump also told people working on the ballroom that they did not need to follow permitting, zoning or code requirements because the structure is on White House grounds, according to three people familiar with his comments. (The firms involved have insisted on following industry standards.)
In recent weeks, Mr. McCrery has pulled back from day-to-day involvement in the project, two people familiar with the matter told The New York Times. They emphasized that Mr. McCrery was still involved as a consultant on the design and proud to be working for Mr. Trump.
Trump has destroyed our government; now he’s working on destroying the White House. Use the gift link to read the whole awful story.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What do you think?
#andrewWolfe #donaldTrump #honduras #juanOrlandoHernandez #nationalGuardInDc #nicolasMaduro #peteHegseth #sarahBeckstrom #trumpAttacksOnWomenJournalists #trumpsBallroomObsession #venezuela #venezuelaBoatStrikes
-
Fwd: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making – CNN – What Matters
October 10, 2025
: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making
“If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY,” then-candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign video.
But less than nine months into his second term, he was explaining his administration’s stance this this way:
“We took the freedom of speech away,” he said at a White House event Wednesday as he tried to explain his call to put people who burn the American flag behind bars for years despite a very clear Supreme Court decision that lists flag burning as free speech.
Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.
While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a multi-front war over what people can say in the US:
► A Ronald Reagan-appointed judge accused Trump’s administration of a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment” for targeting and deporting pro-Palestinian academics.
► Conservative Supreme Court justices were skeptical at oral arguments over a Colorado law that bans debunked LGBT conversion therapy, suggesting it may step on the free speech rights of therapists.
► Trump wants colleges and universities to clamp down on campus speech in exchange for federal funding.
► He applauded his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, for trying to get Jimmy Kimmel’s show canceled by ABC, an effort that backfired.
► His lawsuits against media companies and law firms, none of which appear to stand on firm legal ground, have nonetheless been wildly successful in extracting settlement payments and sending a message to firms that would oppose him.
► Companies like YouTube have reinstated accounts or made plans to do so for members of his administration, such as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who were suspended for spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
► His attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised to go after “hate speech” by people who she perceived as celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
The hate speech element is particularly concerning to experts because in recent decades, it has become a tenet of Supreme Court cases and free speech advocates that “hate speech” is such a nebulous term that leaving it unprotected would invite exactly the type of selective viewpoint-policing that the administration now stands accused of.
The hate speech in question was not any obviously repugnant White supremacist or racist ideology, but rather comments related to Kirk’s death, potentially including those who celebrated it. But we don’t really know since Bondi has not been specific.
Congress undercut the First Amendment almost immediately
US history is full of pendulum swings back and forth between freedom and restriction of speech.
The First Amendment, adopted shortly after the Constitution, guarantees Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But within a few years, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams, during the undeclared Quasi War between the US and France.
“The sad truth is, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan, right from the outset, when it’s first invented in the early 18th century,” according to Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton University and author of the recent book “What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was among those arrested for “libeling” Adams under the law. Federalists also threw a Vermont publisher and congressman, Matthew Lyon, in jail for criticizing Adams in print.
(Among other things, Lyon wrote that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp,” and, separately, started a fight on the House floor over Adams’ foreign policy. Lyon, attacked with a cane after he spat tobacco juice at a fellow lawmaker, defended himself with fire tongs.)
Far from silencing Lyon, however, the Sedition Act backfired. Lyon ran a successful campaign for Congress from jail. The unpopularity of the clampdown on speech helped lead to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Running for president from prison
Another wartime restriction on speech, the Sedition Act of 1918, led to the conviction and sentencing to 10 years in prison of the socialist Eugene Debs for his criticism of the draft during World War I.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but Debs ran a presidential campaign from his jail cell in 1920 and got nearly 1 million votes. President Warren G. Harding later commuted Debs’ sentence.
Marketplace of ideas
Courts and people have complex and nuanced views on free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous majority opinion upholding Debs’ conviction, but he also wrote a key dissent in a case involving the conviction of Russian immigrants who distributed leaflets calling for a general strike in the US to interrupt the war effort.
In that 1919 dissent, he espoused what would become a more absolutist view of the benefits of free speech. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” he wrote.
Free speech and civil rights
In the US, the evolution of speech has also turned on issues of race.
“If you go to the 1830s you would see that abolitionism was brutally suppressed in many Southern states,” according to Jacob Mchangama, executive director at the Future of Free Speech, a think tank at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“You would face jail if you spread abolitionist writings, so that was an attempt to try and contain abolitionists in the North from spreading their ideas to the South,” he told me in a phone interview.
Generations later, it was the civil rights movement that helped secure more and more protections for speech.
“The steady expansion of the First Amendment was to a very large extent accomplished by civil rights groups; you had the NAACP and Jewish organizations who were persuaded that adopting laws against group libel, as hate speech was often called, was detrimental to minorities,” Mchangama said.
Those protections have also helped protect the type of hateful speech that civil rights groups would abhor. Thurgood Marshall argued in favor of school desegregation at the Supreme Court as an NAACP lawyer in the Brown v. Board of Education case.
Later, as a Supreme Court justice, he ruled against an Ohio law in favor of KKK member Charles Brandenburg’s right to free speech.
It’s an important distinction between the US and much of the rest of the world, where laws are more likely to restrict speech. Mchangama points to people in European countries who have been jailed over Facebook posts, for instance.
Those cases are why Trump and Vice President JD Vance have both sought to lecture European countries about free speech — lectures that have not aged well as the Trump administration now tries to clamp down on dissent on college campuses and on television, among other places.
A third Red Scare
Dabhoiwala fears the US is entering a disturbing new period where speech is in danger.
Protections we enjoy today, he said, come out of the Red Scares of the late 1910s and the 1950s, “when government was trying to shut down socialist and communist speech and the speech of homosexuals and the speech of other kind of progressives.”
“And yet what we’re seeing is really a third Red Scare where once again, we have an authoritarian government trying to shut down political voices that it disagrees with,” Dabhoiwala said.
Flaw in the First Amendment?
The larger issue may be what Dabhoiwala sees as a major flaw in the First Amendment, which protects speech from the government but is narrowly drawn.
“The government may not censor you, but any private corporation can sack people for putting a bumper sticker on their car or for posting something online, and that’s that,” he said.
To that point, Kimmel was put back on the air not because of a definitive government action, but because ABC’s parent company, Disney, made a business decision.
ABC needs its broadcast licenses, although fewer and fewer people watch TV over the air. Tech companies jealously guard their exemption from liability for what’s posted on their platforms, a relic of telecommunications law that was passed in the 1990s before the Internet was much of a thing. If you’ve heard the term “section 230,” that’s what people are talking about.
“We’re in such a mess because these providers don’t have any legal responsibility to the truth or to the common good, and they are happily monetizing and making giant amounts of profit out of spreading lies and untruths alongside truth and deliberation of a serious kind,” Dabhoiwala said.
The problem of misinformation vs. the problem of misinformation correction
Mchangama agrees that untruths can spread quickly online, but he thinks the effects can be blown out of proportion and would be impossible to stop through content moderation.
“If you believe that everyone with an internet connection should be able to participate in the public sphere, then I think it’s impossible to try and combat mis- and disinformation through content moderation, because what constitutes mis- and disinformation is often very difficult to determine,” he said.
Dabhoiwala sees things differently. He wants more out of social media platforms because misinformation spreads quickly, but fact checking takes time.
“The moment we say this is all just the same and free speech, say what you like, you open the door to vast quantities of misinformation, to manipulation by hostile outside actors, by politicians just bullshitting their way to power,” he said.
Mchangama, on the other hand, hopes the American left will look at the Trump administration today and dial back on efforts to control speech.
“Power changes hands,” Mchangama said.
New leaders have new ideas about which groups are worthy of protection, and which should be targeted, which is what we’re seeing right now with Trump.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making.
#2025 #America #CNN #CNNWhatMatters #DonaldTrump #Education #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USConstitution #UnitedStates #WhatMatters
-
Fwd: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making – CNN – What Matters
October 10, 2025
: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making
“If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY,” then-candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign video.
But less than nine months into his second term, he was explaining his administration’s stance this this way:
“We took the freedom of speech away,” he said at a White House event Wednesday as he tried to explain his call to put people who burn the American flag behind bars for years despite a very clear Supreme Court decision that lists flag burning as free speech.
Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.
While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a multi-front war over what people can say in the US:
► A Ronald Reagan-appointed judge accused Trump’s administration of a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment” for targeting and deporting pro-Palestinian academics.
► Conservative Supreme Court justices were skeptical at oral arguments over a Colorado law that bans debunked LGBT conversion therapy, suggesting it may step on the free speech rights of therapists.
► Trump wants colleges and universities to clamp down on campus speech in exchange for federal funding.
► He applauded his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, for trying to get Jimmy Kimmel’s show canceled by ABC, an effort that backfired.
► His lawsuits against media companies and law firms, none of which appear to stand on firm legal ground, have nonetheless been wildly successful in extracting settlement payments and sending a message to firms that would oppose him.
► Companies like YouTube have reinstated accounts or made plans to do so for members of his administration, such as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who were suspended for spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
► His attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised to go after “hate speech” by people who she perceived as celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
The hate speech element is particularly concerning to experts because in recent decades, it has become a tenet of Supreme Court cases and free speech advocates that “hate speech” is such a nebulous term that leaving it unprotected would invite exactly the type of selective viewpoint-policing that the administration now stands accused of.
The hate speech in question was not any obviously repugnant White supremacist or racist ideology, but rather comments related to Kirk’s death, potentially including those who celebrated it. But we don’t really know since Bondi has not been specific.
Congress undercut the First Amendment almost immediately
US history is full of pendulum swings back and forth between freedom and restriction of speech.
The First Amendment, adopted shortly after the Constitution, guarantees Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But within a few years, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams, during the undeclared Quasi War between the US and France.
“The sad truth is, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan, right from the outset, when it’s first invented in the early 18th century,” according to Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton University and author of the recent book “What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was among those arrested for “libeling” Adams under the law. Federalists also threw a Vermont publisher and congressman, Matthew Lyon, in jail for criticizing Adams in print.
(Among other things, Lyon wrote that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp,” and, separately, started a fight on the House floor over Adams’ foreign policy. Lyon, attacked with a cane after he spat tobacco juice at a fellow lawmaker, defended himself with fire tongs.)
Far from silencing Lyon, however, the Sedition Act backfired. Lyon ran a successful campaign for Congress from jail. The unpopularity of the clampdown on speech helped lead to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Running for president from prison
Another wartime restriction on speech, the Sedition Act of 1918, led to the conviction and sentencing to 10 years in prison of the socialist Eugene Debs for his criticism of the draft during World War I.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but Debs ran a presidential campaign from his jail cell in 1920 and got nearly 1 million votes. President Warren G. Harding later commuted Debs’ sentence.
Marketplace of ideas
Courts and people have complex and nuanced views on free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous majority opinion upholding Debs’ conviction, but he also wrote a key dissent in a case involving the conviction of Russian immigrants who distributed leaflets calling for a general strike in the US to interrupt the war effort.
In that 1919 dissent, he espoused what would become a more absolutist view of the benefits of free speech. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” he wrote.
Free speech and civil rights
In the US, the evolution of speech has also turned on issues of race.
“If you go to the 1830s you would see that abolitionism was brutally suppressed in many Southern states,” according to Jacob Mchangama, executive director at the Future of Free Speech, a think tank at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“You would face jail if you spread abolitionist writings, so that was an attempt to try and contain abolitionists in the North from spreading their ideas to the South,” he told me in a phone interview.
Generations later, it was the civil rights movement that helped secure more and more protections for speech.
“The steady expansion of the First Amendment was to a very large extent accomplished by civil rights groups; you had the NAACP and Jewish organizations who were persuaded that adopting laws against group libel, as hate speech was often called, was detrimental to minorities,” Mchangama said.
Those protections have also helped protect the type of hateful speech that civil rights groups would abhor. Thurgood Marshall argued in favor of school desegregation at the Supreme Court as an NAACP lawyer in the Brown v. Board of Education case.
Later, as a Supreme Court justice, he ruled against an Ohio law in favor of KKK member Charles Brandenburg’s right to free speech.
It’s an important distinction between the US and much of the rest of the world, where laws are more likely to restrict speech. Mchangama points to people in European countries who have been jailed over Facebook posts, for instance.
Those cases are why Trump and Vice President JD Vance have both sought to lecture European countries about free speech — lectures that have not aged well as the Trump administration now tries to clamp down on dissent on college campuses and on television, among other places.
A third Red Scare
Dabhoiwala fears the US is entering a disturbing new period where speech is in danger.
Protections we enjoy today, he said, come out of the Red Scares of the late 1910s and the 1950s, “when government was trying to shut down socialist and communist speech and the speech of homosexuals and the speech of other kind of progressives.”
“And yet what we’re seeing is really a third Red Scare where once again, we have an authoritarian government trying to shut down political voices that it disagrees with,” Dabhoiwala said.
Flaw in the First Amendment?
The larger issue may be what Dabhoiwala sees as a major flaw in the First Amendment, which protects speech from the government but is narrowly drawn.
“The government may not censor you, but any private corporation can sack people for putting a bumper sticker on their car or for posting something online, and that’s that,” he said.
To that point, Kimmel was put back on the air not because of a definitive government action, but because ABC’s parent company, Disney, made a business decision.
ABC needs its broadcast licenses, although fewer and fewer people watch TV over the air. Tech companies jealously guard their exemption from liability for what’s posted on their platforms, a relic of telecommunications law that was passed in the 1990s before the Internet was much of a thing. If you’ve heard the term “section 230,” that’s what people are talking about.
“We’re in such a mess because these providers don’t have any legal responsibility to the truth or to the common good, and they are happily monetizing and making giant amounts of profit out of spreading lies and untruths alongside truth and deliberation of a serious kind,” Dabhoiwala said.
The problem of misinformation vs. the problem of misinformation correction
Mchangama agrees that untruths can spread quickly online, but he thinks the effects can be blown out of proportion and would be impossible to stop through content moderation.
“If you believe that everyone with an internet connection should be able to participate in the public sphere, then I think it’s impossible to try and combat mis- and disinformation through content moderation, because what constitutes mis- and disinformation is often very difficult to determine,” he said.
Dabhoiwala sees things differently. He wants more out of social media platforms because misinformation spreads quickly, but fact checking takes time.
“The moment we say this is all just the same and free speech, say what you like, you open the door to vast quantities of misinformation, to manipulation by hostile outside actors, by politicians just bullshitting their way to power,” he said.
Mchangama, on the other hand, hopes the American left will look at the Trump administration today and dial back on efforts to control speech.
“Power changes hands,” Mchangama said.
New leaders have new ideas about which groups are worthy of protection, and which should be targeted, which is what we’re seeing right now with Trump.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making.
#2025 #America #CNN #CNNWhatMatters #DonaldTrump #Education #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USConstitution #UnitedStates #WhatMatters
-
Fwd: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making – CNN – What Matters
October 10, 2025
: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making
“If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY,” then-candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign video.
But less than nine months into his second term, he was explaining his administration’s stance this this way:
“We took the freedom of speech away,” he said at a White House event Wednesday as he tried to explain his call to put people who burn the American flag behind bars for years despite a very clear Supreme Court decision that lists flag burning as free speech.
Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.
While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a multi-front war over what people can say in the US:
► A Ronald Reagan-appointed judge accused Trump’s administration of a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment” for targeting and deporting pro-Palestinian academics.
► Conservative Supreme Court justices were skeptical at oral arguments over a Colorado law that bans debunked LGBT conversion therapy, suggesting it may step on the free speech rights of therapists.
► Trump wants colleges and universities to clamp down on campus speech in exchange for federal funding.
► He applauded his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, for trying to get Jimmy Kimmel’s show canceled by ABC, an effort that backfired.
► His lawsuits against media companies and law firms, none of which appear to stand on firm legal ground, have nonetheless been wildly successful in extracting settlement payments and sending a message to firms that would oppose him.
► Companies like YouTube have reinstated accounts or made plans to do so for members of his administration, such as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who were suspended for spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
► His attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised to go after “hate speech” by people who she perceived as celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
The hate speech element is particularly concerning to experts because in recent decades, it has become a tenet of Supreme Court cases and free speech advocates that “hate speech” is such a nebulous term that leaving it unprotected would invite exactly the type of selective viewpoint-policing that the administration now stands accused of.
The hate speech in question was not any obviously repugnant White supremacist or racist ideology, but rather comments related to Kirk’s death, potentially including those who celebrated it. But we don’t really know since Bondi has not been specific.
Congress undercut the First Amendment almost immediately
US history is full of pendulum swings back and forth between freedom and restriction of speech.
The First Amendment, adopted shortly after the Constitution, guarantees Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But within a few years, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams, during the undeclared Quasi War between the US and France.
“The sad truth is, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan, right from the outset, when it’s first invented in the early 18th century,” according to Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton University and author of the recent book “What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was among those arrested for “libeling” Adams under the law. Federalists also threw a Vermont publisher and congressman, Matthew Lyon, in jail for criticizing Adams in print.
(Among other things, Lyon wrote that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp,” and, separately, started a fight on the House floor over Adams’ foreign policy. Lyon, attacked with a cane after he spat tobacco juice at a fellow lawmaker, defended himself with fire tongs.)
Far from silencing Lyon, however, the Sedition Act backfired. Lyon ran a successful campaign for Congress from jail. The unpopularity of the clampdown on speech helped lead to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Running for president from prison
Another wartime restriction on speech, the Sedition Act of 1918, led to the conviction and sentencing to 10 years in prison of the socialist Eugene Debs for his criticism of the draft during World War I.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but Debs ran a presidential campaign from his jail cell in 1920 and got nearly 1 million votes. President Warren G. Harding later commuted Debs’ sentence.
Marketplace of ideas
Courts and people have complex and nuanced views on free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous majority opinion upholding Debs’ conviction, but he also wrote a key dissent in a case involving the conviction of Russian immigrants who distributed leaflets calling for a general strike in the US to interrupt the war effort.
In that 1919 dissent, he espoused what would become a more absolutist view of the benefits of free speech. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” he wrote.
Free speech and civil rights
In the US, the evolution of speech has also turned on issues of race.
“If you go to the 1830s you would see that abolitionism was brutally suppressed in many Southern states,” according to Jacob Mchangama, executive director at the Future of Free Speech, a think tank at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“You would face jail if you spread abolitionist writings, so that was an attempt to try and contain abolitionists in the North from spreading their ideas to the South,” he told me in a phone interview.
Generations later, it was the civil rights movement that helped secure more and more protections for speech.
“The steady expansion of the First Amendment was to a very large extent accomplished by civil rights groups; you had the NAACP and Jewish organizations who were persuaded that adopting laws against group libel, as hate speech was often called, was detrimental to minorities,” Mchangama said.
Those protections have also helped protect the type of hateful speech that civil rights groups would abhor. Thurgood Marshall argued in favor of school desegregation at the Supreme Court as an NAACP lawyer in the Brown v. Board of Education case.
Later, as a Supreme Court justice, he ruled against an Ohio law in favor of KKK member Charles Brandenburg’s right to free speech.
It’s an important distinction between the US and much of the rest of the world, where laws are more likely to restrict speech. Mchangama points to people in European countries who have been jailed over Facebook posts, for instance.
Those cases are why Trump and Vice President JD Vance have both sought to lecture European countries about free speech — lectures that have not aged well as the Trump administration now tries to clamp down on dissent on college campuses and on television, among other places.
A third Red Scare
Dabhoiwala fears the US is entering a disturbing new period where speech is in danger.
Protections we enjoy today, he said, come out of the Red Scares of the late 1910s and the 1950s, “when government was trying to shut down socialist and communist speech and the speech of homosexuals and the speech of other kind of progressives.”
“And yet what we’re seeing is really a third Red Scare where once again, we have an authoritarian government trying to shut down political voices that it disagrees with,” Dabhoiwala said.
Flaw in the First Amendment?
The larger issue may be what Dabhoiwala sees as a major flaw in the First Amendment, which protects speech from the government but is narrowly drawn.
“The government may not censor you, but any private corporation can sack people for putting a bumper sticker on their car or for posting something online, and that’s that,” he said.
To that point, Kimmel was put back on the air not because of a definitive government action, but because ABC’s parent company, Disney, made a business decision.
ABC needs its broadcast licenses, although fewer and fewer people watch TV over the air. Tech companies jealously guard their exemption from liability for what’s posted on their platforms, a relic of telecommunications law that was passed in the 1990s before the Internet was much of a thing. If you’ve heard the term “section 230,” that’s what people are talking about.
“We’re in such a mess because these providers don’t have any legal responsibility to the truth or to the common good, and they are happily monetizing and making giant amounts of profit out of spreading lies and untruths alongside truth and deliberation of a serious kind,” Dabhoiwala said.
The problem of misinformation vs. the problem of misinformation correction
Mchangama agrees that untruths can spread quickly online, but he thinks the effects can be blown out of proportion and would be impossible to stop through content moderation.
“If you believe that everyone with an internet connection should be able to participate in the public sphere, then I think it’s impossible to try and combat mis- and disinformation through content moderation, because what constitutes mis- and disinformation is often very difficult to determine,” he said.
Dabhoiwala sees things differently. He wants more out of social media platforms because misinformation spreads quickly, but fact checking takes time.
“The moment we say this is all just the same and free speech, say what you like, you open the door to vast quantities of misinformation, to manipulation by hostile outside actors, by politicians just bullshitting their way to power,” he said.
Mchangama, on the other hand, hopes the American left will look at the Trump administration today and dial back on efforts to control speech.
“Power changes hands,” Mchangama said.
New leaders have new ideas about which groups are worthy of protection, and which should be targeted, which is what we’re seeing right now with Trump.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making.
#2025 #America #CNN #CNNWhatMatters #DonaldTrump #Education #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USConstitution #UnitedStates #WhatMatters
-
Fwd: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making – CNN – What Matters
October 10, 2025
: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making
“If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY,” then-candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign video.
But less than nine months into his second term, he was explaining his administration’s stance this this way:
“We took the freedom of speech away,” he said at a White House event Wednesday as he tried to explain his call to put people who burn the American flag behind bars for years despite a very clear Supreme Court decision that lists flag burning as free speech.
Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.
While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a multi-front war over what people can say in the US:
► A Ronald Reagan-appointed judge accused Trump’s administration of a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment” for targeting and deporting pro-Palestinian academics.
► Conservative Supreme Court justices were skeptical at oral arguments over a Colorado law that bans debunked LGBT conversion therapy, suggesting it may step on the free speech rights of therapists.
► Trump wants colleges and universities to clamp down on campus speech in exchange for federal funding.
► He applauded his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, for trying to get Jimmy Kimmel’s show canceled by ABC, an effort that backfired.
► His lawsuits against media companies and law firms, none of which appear to stand on firm legal ground, have nonetheless been wildly successful in extracting settlement payments and sending a message to firms that would oppose him.
► Companies like YouTube have reinstated accounts or made plans to do so for members of his administration, such as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who were suspended for spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
► His attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised to go after “hate speech” by people who she perceived as celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
The hate speech element is particularly concerning to experts because in recent decades, it has become a tenet of Supreme Court cases and free speech advocates that “hate speech” is such a nebulous term that leaving it unprotected would invite exactly the type of selective viewpoint-policing that the administration now stands accused of.
The hate speech in question was not any obviously repugnant White supremacist or racist ideology, but rather comments related to Kirk’s death, potentially including those who celebrated it. But we don’t really know since Bondi has not been specific.
Congress undercut the First Amendment almost immediately
US history is full of pendulum swings back and forth between freedom and restriction of speech.
The First Amendment, adopted shortly after the Constitution, guarantees Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But within a few years, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams, during the undeclared Quasi War between the US and France.
“The sad truth is, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan, right from the outset, when it’s first invented in the early 18th century,” according to Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton University and author of the recent book “What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was among those arrested for “libeling” Adams under the law. Federalists also threw a Vermont publisher and congressman, Matthew Lyon, in jail for criticizing Adams in print.
(Among other things, Lyon wrote that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp,” and, separately, started a fight on the House floor over Adams’ foreign policy. Lyon, attacked with a cane after he spat tobacco juice at a fellow lawmaker, defended himself with fire tongs.)
Far from silencing Lyon, however, the Sedition Act backfired. Lyon ran a successful campaign for Congress from jail. The unpopularity of the clampdown on speech helped lead to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Running for president from prison
Another wartime restriction on speech, the Sedition Act of 1918, led to the conviction and sentencing to 10 years in prison of the socialist Eugene Debs for his criticism of the draft during World War I.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but Debs ran a presidential campaign from his jail cell in 1920 and got nearly 1 million votes. President Warren G. Harding later commuted Debs’ sentence.
Marketplace of ideas
Courts and people have complex and nuanced views on free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous majority opinion upholding Debs’ conviction, but he also wrote a key dissent in a case involving the conviction of Russian immigrants who distributed leaflets calling for a general strike in the US to interrupt the war effort.
In that 1919 dissent, he espoused what would become a more absolutist view of the benefits of free speech. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” he wrote.
Free speech and civil rights
In the US, the evolution of speech has also turned on issues of race.
“If you go to the 1830s you would see that abolitionism was brutally suppressed in many Southern states,” according to Jacob Mchangama, executive director at the Future of Free Speech, a think tank at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“You would face jail if you spread abolitionist writings, so that was an attempt to try and contain abolitionists in the North from spreading their ideas to the South,” he told me in a phone interview.
Generations later, it was the civil rights movement that helped secure more and more protections for speech.
“The steady expansion of the First Amendment was to a very large extent accomplished by civil rights groups; you had the NAACP and Jewish organizations who were persuaded that adopting laws against group libel, as hate speech was often called, was detrimental to minorities,” Mchangama said.
Those protections have also helped protect the type of hateful speech that civil rights groups would abhor. Thurgood Marshall argued in favor of school desegregation at the Supreme Court as an NAACP lawyer in the Brown v. Board of Education case.
Later, as a Supreme Court justice, he ruled against an Ohio law in favor of KKK member Charles Brandenburg’s right to free speech.
It’s an important distinction between the US and much of the rest of the world, where laws are more likely to restrict speech. Mchangama points to people in European countries who have been jailed over Facebook posts, for instance.
Those cases are why Trump and Vice President JD Vance have both sought to lecture European countries about free speech — lectures that have not aged well as the Trump administration now tries to clamp down on dissent on college campuses and on television, among other places.
A third Red Scare
Dabhoiwala fears the US is entering a disturbing new period where speech is in danger.
Protections we enjoy today, he said, come out of the Red Scares of the late 1910s and the 1950s, “when government was trying to shut down socialist and communist speech and the speech of homosexuals and the speech of other kind of progressives.”
“And yet what we’re seeing is really a third Red Scare where once again, we have an authoritarian government trying to shut down political voices that it disagrees with,” Dabhoiwala said.
Flaw in the First Amendment?
The larger issue may be what Dabhoiwala sees as a major flaw in the First Amendment, which protects speech from the government but is narrowly drawn.
“The government may not censor you, but any private corporation can sack people for putting a bumper sticker on their car or for posting something online, and that’s that,” he said.
To that point, Kimmel was put back on the air not because of a definitive government action, but because ABC’s parent company, Disney, made a business decision.
ABC needs its broadcast licenses, although fewer and fewer people watch TV over the air. Tech companies jealously guard their exemption from liability for what’s posted on their platforms, a relic of telecommunications law that was passed in the 1990s before the Internet was much of a thing. If you’ve heard the term “section 230,” that’s what people are talking about.
“We’re in such a mess because these providers don’t have any legal responsibility to the truth or to the common good, and they are happily monetizing and making giant amounts of profit out of spreading lies and untruths alongside truth and deliberation of a serious kind,” Dabhoiwala said.
The problem of misinformation vs. the problem of misinformation correction
Mchangama agrees that untruths can spread quickly online, but he thinks the effects can be blown out of proportion and would be impossible to stop through content moderation.
“If you believe that everyone with an internet connection should be able to participate in the public sphere, then I think it’s impossible to try and combat mis- and disinformation through content moderation, because what constitutes mis- and disinformation is often very difficult to determine,” he said.
Dabhoiwala sees things differently. He wants more out of social media platforms because misinformation spreads quickly, but fact checking takes time.
“The moment we say this is all just the same and free speech, say what you like, you open the door to vast quantities of misinformation, to manipulation by hostile outside actors, by politicians just bullshitting their way to power,” he said.
Mchangama, on the other hand, hopes the American left will look at the Trump administration today and dial back on efforts to control speech.
“Power changes hands,” Mchangama said.
New leaders have new ideas about which groups are worthy of protection, and which should be targeted, which is what we’re seeing right now with Trump.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making.
#2025 #America #CNN #CNNWhatMatters #DonaldTrump #Education #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USConstitution #UnitedStates #WhatMatters
-
Fwd: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making – CNN – What Matters
October 10, 2025
: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making
“If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY,” then-candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign video.
But less than nine months into his second term, he was explaining his administration’s stance this this way:
“We took the freedom of speech away,” he said at a White House event Wednesday as he tried to explain his call to put people who burn the American flag behind bars for years despite a very clear Supreme Court decision that lists flag burning as free speech.
Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.
While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a multi-front war over what people can say in the US:
► A Ronald Reagan-appointed judge accused Trump’s administration of a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment” for targeting and deporting pro-Palestinian academics.
► Conservative Supreme Court justices were skeptical at oral arguments over a Colorado law that bans debunked LGBT conversion therapy, suggesting it may step on the free speech rights of therapists.
► Trump wants colleges and universities to clamp down on campus speech in exchange for federal funding.
► He applauded his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, for trying to get Jimmy Kimmel’s show canceled by ABC, an effort that backfired.
► His lawsuits against media companies and law firms, none of which appear to stand on firm legal ground, have nonetheless been wildly successful in extracting settlement payments and sending a message to firms that would oppose him.
► Companies like YouTube have reinstated accounts or made plans to do so for members of his administration, such as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who were suspended for spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
► His attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised to go after “hate speech” by people who she perceived as celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
The hate speech element is particularly concerning to experts because in recent decades, it has become a tenet of Supreme Court cases and free speech advocates that “hate speech” is such a nebulous term that leaving it unprotected would invite exactly the type of selective viewpoint-policing that the administration now stands accused of.
The hate speech in question was not any obviously repugnant White supremacist or racist ideology, but rather comments related to Kirk’s death, potentially including those who celebrated it. But we don’t really know since Bondi has not been specific.
Congress undercut the First Amendment almost immediately
US history is full of pendulum swings back and forth between freedom and restriction of speech.
The First Amendment, adopted shortly after the Constitution, guarantees Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But within a few years, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams, during the undeclared Quasi War between the US and France.
“The sad truth is, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan, right from the outset, when it’s first invented in the early 18th century,” according to Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton University and author of the recent book “What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was among those arrested for “libeling” Adams under the law. Federalists also threw a Vermont publisher and congressman, Matthew Lyon, in jail for criticizing Adams in print.
(Among other things, Lyon wrote that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp,” and, separately, started a fight on the House floor over Adams’ foreign policy. Lyon, attacked with a cane after he spat tobacco juice at a fellow lawmaker, defended himself with fire tongs.)
Far from silencing Lyon, however, the Sedition Act backfired. Lyon ran a successful campaign for Congress from jail. The unpopularity of the clampdown on speech helped lead to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Running for president from prison
Another wartime restriction on speech, the Sedition Act of 1918, led to the conviction and sentencing to 10 years in prison of the socialist Eugene Debs for his criticism of the draft during World War I.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but Debs ran a presidential campaign from his jail cell in 1920 and got nearly 1 million votes. President Warren G. Harding later commuted Debs’ sentence.
Marketplace of ideas
Courts and people have complex and nuanced views on free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous majority opinion upholding Debs’ conviction, but he also wrote a key dissent in a case involving the conviction of Russian immigrants who distributed leaflets calling for a general strike in the US to interrupt the war effort.
In that 1919 dissent, he espoused what would become a more absolutist view of the benefits of free speech. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” he wrote.
Free speech and civil rights
In the US, the evolution of speech has also turned on issues of race.
“If you go to the 1830s you would see that abolitionism was brutally suppressed in many Southern states,” according to Jacob Mchangama, executive director at the Future of Free Speech, a think tank at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“You would face jail if you spread abolitionist writings, so that was an attempt to try and contain abolitionists in the North from spreading their ideas to the South,” he told me in a phone interview.
Generations later, it was the civil rights movement that helped secure more and more protections for speech.
“The steady expansion of the First Amendment was to a very large extent accomplished by civil rights groups; you had the NAACP and Jewish organizations who were persuaded that adopting laws against group libel, as hate speech was often called, was detrimental to minorities,” Mchangama said.
Those protections have also helped protect the type of hateful speech that civil rights groups would abhor. Thurgood Marshall argued in favor of school desegregation at the Supreme Court as an NAACP lawyer in the Brown v. Board of Education case.
Later, as a Supreme Court justice, he ruled against an Ohio law in favor of KKK member Charles Brandenburg’s right to free speech.
It’s an important distinction between the US and much of the rest of the world, where laws are more likely to restrict speech. Mchangama points to people in European countries who have been jailed over Facebook posts, for instance.
Those cases are why Trump and Vice President JD Vance have both sought to lecture European countries about free speech — lectures that have not aged well as the Trump administration now tries to clamp down on dissent on college campuses and on television, among other places.
A third Red Scare
Dabhoiwala fears the US is entering a disturbing new period where speech is in danger.
Protections we enjoy today, he said, come out of the Red Scares of the late 1910s and the 1950s, “when government was trying to shut down socialist and communist speech and the speech of homosexuals and the speech of other kind of progressives.”
“And yet what we’re seeing is really a third Red Scare where once again, we have an authoritarian government trying to shut down political voices that it disagrees with,” Dabhoiwala said.
Flaw in the First Amendment?
The larger issue may be what Dabhoiwala sees as a major flaw in the First Amendment, which protects speech from the government but is narrowly drawn.
“The government may not censor you, but any private corporation can sack people for putting a bumper sticker on their car or for posting something online, and that’s that,” he said.
To that point, Kimmel was put back on the air not because of a definitive government action, but because ABC’s parent company, Disney, made a business decision.
ABC needs its broadcast licenses, although fewer and fewer people watch TV over the air. Tech companies jealously guard their exemption from liability for what’s posted on their platforms, a relic of telecommunications law that was passed in the 1990s before the Internet was much of a thing. If you’ve heard the term “section 230,” that’s what people are talking about.
“We’re in such a mess because these providers don’t have any legal responsibility to the truth or to the common good, and they are happily monetizing and making giant amounts of profit out of spreading lies and untruths alongside truth and deliberation of a serious kind,” Dabhoiwala said.
The problem of misinformation vs. the problem of misinformation correction
Mchangama agrees that untruths can spread quickly online, but he thinks the effects can be blown out of proportion and would be impossible to stop through content moderation.
“If you believe that everyone with an internet connection should be able to participate in the public sphere, then I think it’s impossible to try and combat mis- and disinformation through content moderation, because what constitutes mis- and disinformation is often very difficult to determine,” he said.
Dabhoiwala sees things differently. He wants more out of social media platforms because misinformation spreads quickly, but fact checking takes time.
“The moment we say this is all just the same and free speech, say what you like, you open the door to vast quantities of misinformation, to manipulation by hostile outside actors, by politicians just bullshitting their way to power,” he said.
Mchangama, on the other hand, hopes the American left will look at the Trump administration today and dial back on efforts to control speech.
“Power changes hands,” Mchangama said.
New leaders have new ideas about which groups are worthy of protection, and which should be targeted, which is what we’re seeing right now with Trump.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making.
#2025 #America #CNN #CNNWhatMatters #DonaldTrump #Education #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USConstitution #UnitedStates #WhatMatters
-
https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/5929807
Saheli, a 'non-steroidal non-hormonal contraceptive pill'. Saheli dosage starts 1 pill per half-week for ... (?), then 1 pill weekly. Basically induce a brief, mini-menopause that stops when you stop the pills. https://saheliinfo.com/clinical-evidence
Then! ONE-YEAR vaginal ring Annovera. Unlike monthly-ish vaginal rings, (https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/product/6449/smpc) this thicker vaginal ring holds enough for 13 cycles with one week bleeding breaks, or 12 if you skip periods. Think "buff NuvaRing". https://www.annoverahcp.com/
Speaking of intra-uterine system / device options: the UK does several! We are no longer stuck with the larger, higher dose Mirena hIUS. https://www.mirena.co.uk/ I want the smaller, lower dose (but shorter duration) Jaydess https://www.fsrh.org/Public/Public/Documents/ceu-product-review-jaydess-apr-14.aspx or Kyleena. https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/product/769/smpc
(You can fit a non-hormonal IUD copper coil as emergency contraception, within 10 days of unprotected sex. Fitting it as regular birth control anytime otherwise is also fine, when not pregnant.) https://patient.info/sexual-health/long-acting-reversible-contraceptives-larc/intrauterine-contraceptive-device
Finally, vasectomy. New part is "I found multiple cases where doctors did their own vasectomies". This may be helpful for hesitant cis men and AMAB people to know. Vasectomies are reversible ("easily", according to a medical nerd friend, but obv different people's bodies respond to things in weird, cool ways, so everything depends). https://www.baus.org.uk/_userfiles/pages/files/Patients/Leaflets/Vasectomy.pdf
I am not a doctor. Even if I were, I am not YOUR doctor. I do not have access to your medical records.
I'm just infodumping useful info to prevent unwanted pregnancies, minimise unplanned pregnancies, and mitigate risks. https://cks.nice.org.uk/topics/contraception-sterilization/management/male-sterilization-vasectomy/#contraception #contraceptive #sexEd #POP #progesterone #hormones #HRT #HormoneReplacementTherapy #birth #BirthControl #familyPlanning #PlannedParenthood #sex #Sexual #SexualHealth #healthcare #ReproductiveHealthcare #ReproductiveRights #pregnancy #InternalCondoms #ExternalCondoms #Condom #ContraceptiveDiaphragm #CayaPhragm #spermicide #vaginalRing #NuvaRing #patch #injection #IUS #hormonalIUD #IUD #copperCoil #medicine #UnitedKingdom #UK #England #Scotland #Wales #NorthernIreland #GreatBritain #Britain
-
https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/5929807
Saheli, a 'non-steroidal non-hormonal contraceptive pill'. Saheli dosage starts 1 pill per half-week for ... (?), then 1 pill weekly. Basically induce a brief, mini-menopause that stops when you stop the pills. https://saheliinfo.com/clinical-evidence
Then! ONE-YEAR vaginal ring Annovera. Unlike monthly-ish vaginal rings, (https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/product/6449/smpc) this thicker vaginal ring holds enough for 13 cycles with one week bleeding breaks, or 12 if you skip periods. Think "buff NuvaRing". https://www.annoverahcp.com/
Speaking of intra-uterine system / device options: the UK does several! We are no longer stuck with the larger, higher dose Mirena hIUS. https://www.mirena.co.uk/ I want the smaller, lower dose (but shorter duration) Jaydess https://www.fsrh.org/Public/Public/Documents/ceu-product-review-jaydess-apr-14.aspx or Kyleena. https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/product/769/smpc
(You can fit a non-hormonal IUD copper coil as emergency contraception, within 10 days of unprotected sex. Fitting it as regular birth control anytime otherwise is also fine, when not pregnant.) https://patient.info/sexual-health/long-acting-reversible-contraceptives-larc/intrauterine-contraceptive-device
Finally, vasectomy. New part is "I found multiple cases where doctors did their own vasectomies". This may be helpful for hesitant cis men and AMAB people to know. Vasectomies are reversible ("easily", according to a medical nerd friend, but obv different people's bodies respond to things in weird, cool ways, so everything depends). https://www.baus.org.uk/_userfiles/pages/files/Patients/Leaflets/Vasectomy.pdf
I am not a doctor. Even if I were, I am not YOUR doctor. I do not have access to your medical records.
I'm just infodumping useful info to prevent unwanted pregnancies, minimise unplanned pregnancies, and mitigate risks. https://cks.nice.org.uk/topics/contraception-sterilization/management/male-sterilization-vasectomy/#contraception #contraceptive #sexEd #POP #progesterone #hormones #HRT #HormoneReplacementTherapy #birth #BirthControl #familyPlanning #PlannedParenthood #sex #Sexual #SexualHealth #healthcare #ReproductiveHealthcare #ReproductiveRights #pregnancy #InternalCondoms #ExternalCondoms #Condom #ContraceptiveDiaphragm #CayaPhragm #spermicide #vaginalRing #NuvaRing #patch #injection #IUS #hormonalIUD #IUD #copperCoil #medicine #UnitedKingdom #UK #England #Scotland #Wales #NorthernIreland #GreatBritain #Britain
-
https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/5929807
Saheli, a 'non-steroidal non-hormonal contraceptive pill'. Saheli dosage starts 1 pill per half-week for ... (?), then 1 pill weekly. Basically induce a brief, mini-menopause that stops when you stop the pills. https://saheliinfo.com/clinical-evidence
Then! ONE-YEAR vaginal ring Annovera. Unlike monthly-ish vaginal rings, (https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/product/6449/smpc) this thicker vaginal ring holds enough for 13 cycles with one week bleeding breaks, or 12 if you skip periods. Think "buff NuvaRing". https://www.annoverahcp.com/
Speaking of intra-uterine system / device options: the UK does several! We are no longer stuck with the larger, higher dose Mirena hIUS. https://www.mirena.co.uk/ I want the smaller, lower dose (but shorter duration) Jaydess https://www.fsrh.org/Public/Public/Documents/ceu-product-review-jaydess-apr-14.aspx or Kyleena. https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/product/769/smpc
(You can fit a non-hormonal IUD copper coil as emergency contraception, within 10 days of unprotected sex. Fitting it as regular birth control anytime otherwise is also fine, when not pregnant.) https://patient.info/sexual-health/long-acting-reversible-contraceptives-larc/intrauterine-contraceptive-device
Finally, vasectomy. New part is "I found multiple cases where doctors did their own vasectomies". This may be helpful for hesitant cis men and AMAB people to know. Vasectomies are reversible ("easily", according to a medical nerd friend, but obv different people's bodies respond to things in weird, cool ways, so everything depends). https://www.baus.org.uk/_userfiles/pages/files/Patients/Leaflets/Vasectomy.pdf
I am not a doctor. Even if I were, I am not YOUR doctor. I do not have access to your medical records.
I'm just infodumping useful info to prevent unwanted pregnancies, minimise unplanned pregnancies, and mitigate risks. https://cks.nice.org.uk/topics/contraception-sterilization/management/male-sterilization-vasectomy/#contraception #contraceptive #sexEd #POP #progesterone #hormones #HRT #HormoneReplacementTherapy #birth #BirthControl #familyPlanning #PlannedParenthood #sex #Sexual #SexualHealth #healthcare #ReproductiveHealthcare #ReproductiveRights #pregnancy #InternalCondoms #ExternalCondoms #Condom #ContraceptiveDiaphragm #CayaPhragm #spermicide #vaginalRing #NuvaRing #patch #injection #IUS #hormonalIUD #IUD #copperCoil #medicine #UnitedKingdom #UK #England #Scotland #Wales #NorthernIreland #GreatBritain #Britain
-
https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/5929807
Saheli, a 'non-steroidal non-hormonal contraceptive pill'. Saheli dosage starts 1 pill per half-week for ... (?), then 1 pill weekly. Basically induce a brief, mini-menopause that stops when you stop the pills. https://saheliinfo.com/clinical-evidence
Then! ONE-YEAR vaginal ring Annovera. Unlike monthly-ish vaginal rings, (https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/product/6449/smpc) this thicker vaginal ring holds enough for 13 cycles with one week bleeding breaks, or 12 if you skip periods. Think "buff NuvaRing". https://www.annoverahcp.com/
Speaking of intra-uterine system / device options: the UK does several! We are no longer stuck with the larger, higher dose Mirena hIUS. https://www.mirena.co.uk/ I want the smaller, lower dose (but shorter duration) Jaydess https://www.fsrh.org/Public/Public/Documents/ceu-product-review-jaydess-apr-14.aspx or Kyleena. https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/product/769/smpc
(You can fit a non-hormonal IUD copper coil as emergency contraception, within 10 days of unprotected sex. Fitting it as regular birth control anytime otherwise is also fine, when not pregnant.) https://patient.info/sexual-health/long-acting-reversible-contraceptives-larc/intrauterine-contraceptive-device
Finally, vasectomy. New part is "I found multiple cases where doctors did their own vasectomies". This may be helpful for hesitant cis men and AMAB people to know. Vasectomies are reversible ("easily", according to a medical nerd friend, but obv different people's bodies respond to things in weird, cool ways, so everything depends). https://www.baus.org.uk/_userfiles/pages/files/Patients/Leaflets/Vasectomy.pdf
I am not a doctor. Even if I were, I am not YOUR doctor. I do not have access to your medical records.
I'm just infodumping useful info to prevent unwanted pregnancies, minimise unplanned pregnancies, and mitigate risks. https://cks.nice.org.uk/topics/contraception-sterilization/management/male-sterilization-vasectomy/#contraception #contraceptive #sexEd #POP #progesterone #hormones #HRT #HormoneReplacementTherapy #birth #BirthControl #familyPlanning #PlannedParenthood #sex #Sexual #SexualHealth #healthcare #ReproductiveHealthcare #ReproductiveRights #pregnancy #InternalCondoms #ExternalCondoms #Condom #ContraceptiveDiaphragm #CayaPhragm #spermicide #vaginalRing #NuvaRing #patch #injection #IUS #hormonalIUD #IUD #copperCoil #medicine #UnitedKingdom #UK #England #Scotland #Wales #NorthernIreland #GreatBritain #Britain
-
https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/5929807
Saheli, a 'non-steroidal non-hormonal contraceptive pill'. Saheli dosage starts 1 pill per half-week for ... (?), then 1 pill weekly. Basically induce a brief, mini-menopause that stops when you stop the pills. https://saheliinfo.com/clinical-evidence
Then! ONE-YEAR vaginal ring Annovera. Unlike monthly-ish vaginal rings, (https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/product/6449/smpc) this thicker vaginal ring holds enough for 13 cycles with one week bleeding breaks, or 12 if you skip periods. Think "buff NuvaRing". https://www.annoverahcp.com/
Speaking of intra-uterine system / device options: the UK does several! We are no longer stuck with the larger, higher dose Mirena hIUS. https://www.mirena.co.uk/ I want the smaller, lower dose (but shorter duration) Jaydess https://www.fsrh.org/Public/Public/Documents/ceu-product-review-jaydess-apr-14.aspx or Kyleena. https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/product/769/smpc
(You can fit a non-hormonal IUD copper coil as emergency contraception, within 10 days of unprotected sex. Fitting it as regular birth control anytime otherwise is also fine, when not pregnant.) https://patient.info/sexual-health/long-acting-reversible-contraceptives-larc/intrauterine-contraceptive-device
Finally, vasectomy. New part is "I found multiple cases where doctors did their own vasectomies". This may be helpful for hesitant cis men and AMAB people to know. Vasectomies are reversible ("easily", according to a medical nerd friend, but obv different people's bodies respond to things in weird, cool ways, so everything depends). https://www.baus.org.uk/_userfiles/pages/files/Patients/Leaflets/Vasectomy.pdf
I am not a doctor. Even if I were, I am not YOUR doctor. I do not have access to your medical records.
I'm just infodumping useful info to prevent unwanted pregnancies, minimise unplanned pregnancies, and mitigate risks. https://cks.nice.org.uk/topics/contraception-sterilization/management/male-sterilization-vasectomy/#contraception #contraceptive #sexEd #POP #progesterone #hormones #HRT #HormoneReplacementTherapy #birth #BirthControl #familyPlanning #PlannedParenthood #sex #Sexual #SexualHealth #healthcare #ReproductiveHealthcare #ReproductiveRights #pregnancy #InternalCondoms #ExternalCondoms #Condom #ContraceptiveDiaphragm #CayaPhragm #spermicide #vaginalRing #NuvaRing #patch #injection #IUS #hormonalIUD #IUD #copperCoil #medicine #UnitedKingdom #UK #England #Scotland #Wales #NorthernIreland #GreatBritain #Britain
-
Today's pot-banging protest at Assen railway station. A group of us gathered as we do every Thursday evening from 18:00 until 19:00.
There's very obviously more interest from the public now than there was a few weeks ago. Several people came up and asked for leaflets rather than having to be offered one. Other people walked past doing thumb's up and peace signs with their hands.
Israel has for a long time managed to convince people in the west that they are somehow the victims of their own violence. Their recent war crimes have been so blatant that they have lifted the veils from many people's eyes.
Everyone can now see for themselves who the real terrorist state of the middle east is.
#Assen #Gaza #Palestine #potbangingforgaza #bds #bdsusa #bdsisrael #israelTerroristState #israelwarCrimes -
Photos from last Thursday and this evening of the weekly protest for Gaza at Assen railway station. Last week we were pot banging, as we do most weeks. This week we listened in silence as names of Palestinians killed by the Israelis were read out.
Each name is read out with the age of the deceased. In one hour we had time only for a small fraction of the dead. There's time to remember only a few hundred out of the tens of thousands who have been killed.
Clearly many people were touched by the message, especially when they heard the names of young children. Many people took leaflets. Hopefully many of them will at the very least be prepared to join the boycott of Israeli goods.
Who wouldn't be affected by the murder of infants ?
#potbangingforgaza #assen #bds #boycottisrael #israeliWarCrimes #palestine #gaza -
@Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂ Was ist faktisch passiert? Amerikanische Bundesbehörden haben sich unter merkwürdigen Namen bei Bluesky angemeldet und Statements gebracht wie "nah Bluesky, wir haben gehört das ist ein schöner Platz". Es hanelt sich also offenbar um ein politisch gezieltes Trolling einer linksliberalen Plattform, die aufgrund ihrer Struktur technisch keine Möglichkeit bietet, von autoritären Strukturen oder Einzelpersonen übernommen zu werden.
Ich empfehle die ersten Minuten vom Podcast #hakendran. @Gavin Karlmeier spricht hier, wenn ich es richtig in Erinnerung habe, von "kollaborierten Trolling". Es ist also eher ein Aktion, die Bluesky torpedieren soll, weil es eben ein Dorn im Auge ist. Dass damit die ganzen Leute, die jetzt an dem Aufschrei beteiligt sind, eigentlich im Sinne der amerikanischen Regierung agieren und freiwillige Helfershelfer, "nützliche Idioten", sind, merken sie gar nicht.
#^
Trollenspiel und Gesichtsverlust (mit Dennis Horn)
by Haken dran – das Social-Media-Update der c't on YouTube
An dem ganzen Aufschrei beweist sich aber vor allem eines: Gar nicht mal so sehr, dass das Mastodon Umfeld eben doch mehr Twitter/X ist als es immer selbst zu glauben scheint, weil es sich nämlich einfach aufscheuchen lässt, sondern es zeigt, dass die allgemeine Vorstellung von Nerds auf Mastodon völlig verkehrt ist. Anhand der Bluesky Diskussion würde ich sagen, basiert das technische Verständnisse auf der Ebene, das auch mein Hund hat. Paradoxerweise erwartet diese Bubble, die sich jetzt empört, ein zentralistisches Eingreifen, dabei haben sich objektiv gesehen einfach nur Regierungsbehörden angemeldet, die als Regierungsbehörden mit einem Haken verifiziert wurden.
Technisch zu Bluesky. Die Mastodon Bubble beweist ihr technisches Unverständnis, und es schwappt auch zu anderen Bubbles im Fediverse rüber, ich lese auch von Leuten, die bei Sharkey sind, einfach nur Dinge, wo ich den Kopf schütteln muss. Was ist denn überhaupt Bluesky? Bluesky ist der Name der Firma, die das AT Protokoll entwickelt und die erste Applikation geschrieben hat. Das AT Protokoll, das sie entwickeln, ist aber unabhängig von der Firma. Dieses Protokoll war die Antwort auf ActivityPub, bei dem klassisch wie bei X/Twitter und anderen alten Socialmedia Systemen der Nutzer seine Beiträge, Follower, Likes etc, bei einer konkreten Firma bzw. der angebotenen Socialmedia Plattform speichert. Geht jemand von X weg, sind seine Beiträge verloren. Alles, was er geschrieben hat, ist verloren. Bei Mastodon ist es sehr ähnlich. Die Nutzer melden sich bei einer Instanz an und überlassen dann ihre Beiträge und die Moderation vollständig dem Instanzinhaber. Mittlerweile wurde das Problem erkannt:
#^http://tiny.cc/392u001
Beim AT Proto ist das gänzlich anders. Die persönlichen Daten, also alles, was Du schreibst, gehört Dir, nicht Bluesky. Man ist auch nicht "auf Bluesky", sondern die eigenen Daten sind getrennt von Anbieter, Firma und deren Strukturen. Man spricht hier von "personal data server" (PDS). Diesen PDS kann ich natürlich von Bluesky verwalten lassen, aber auch von Alternativen wie Blacksky, und derzeit in Arbeit Northsky oder Eurosky. Ich kann diesen PDS aber auch zu Hause auf einem Server liegen haben oder mir irgendwo einen Server anmieten, wo ich meine Daten lagere. Mein PDS liegt auf dem gleichen Server wie meine Hubzilla Instanz. Wenn Bluesky ausfällt oder mir eben die Moderation nicht gefällt, kann ich über Blacksky ins AT Proto Netzwerk gehen, oder eine andere Alternative. Ich kann beim Ausfall aller derzeitigen Zugänge für "Bluesky" auch einfach meinen PDS liegen lassen und irgendwann wieder ins AT Proto gehen und bin eben Herr meiner Daten, was Mastodon Nutzerinnen eben so nicht kennen.
Deswegen entstehen allerdings auch Besonderheiten in der Moderation, Paul Frazee hat dazu geschrieben.
#^Update on Protocol Moderation - Paul's LeafletsWhere account takedowns happen is important
Die Moderation verläuft im ATProto nach einem Labelsystem. Beiträge werden gelabelt und die Nutzerin kann entscheiden, welche Beiträge sie mit einer Verwarnung versehen lassen oder ganz ausblenden möchte. Die Moderationsservices sind zudem unabhängig von Bluesky, ich kann z.b. einen Moderationsservice der schwarzen Community abonnieren, weil ich den begründeten Verdacht habe, dass die Member dieses Teams ein besseres Verständnis von Diskriminierung haben als das wohl mehrheitlich weiße Bluesky Team. Ich kann auch den Moderationsservice von medizinischen Teams abonnieren, die medizinische Falschinformationen als solche labeln. Kurzum, bei "Bluesky" ist also nicht nur der eigenen Datenserver völlig unabhängig von Bluesky, auch die Moderation ist unabhängig.
Mastodon Nutzerinnen, die von "Bluesky" zu Mastodon wechseln, machen also etwas kurioses: sie geben ihren "personal data server" und die Möglichkeit kompetenter Moderation auf und wechseln zu einem System, wo sie dem Instanzinhaber nicht nur ihre Daten zuschreiben, sondern auch die Moderationskompetenz in allen Bereichen zutrauen. Es ist eben ein viel stärkerer Rückfall in Twitter/X Strukturen. Wären sie wenigstens zu Hubzilla oder (streams) gegangen, wo man mit der nomadischen Identität die Kontrolle behält, oder hätte eine eigene Fedinstanz aufgesetzt, um Herr ihrer Daten zu bleiben, aber diejenigen, die jetzt einfach zu einer Mastodon Instanz wechseln und auf Bluesky schimpfen, haben offensichtlich gar nicht das AT Proto System verstanden und Twitter/X steckt tatsächlich noch mehr in ihnen drin als ihnen lieb ist.
Dabei könnte man auch einfach sagen: Mir gefällt das Fediverse besser, deshalb bin ich da. Aber das wäre natürlich zu einfach.
#ATProto #Bluesky #Socialmedia #NomadicIdentity -
The point to consider is that there is only me trying to inform (or rather I used to) the adults in the village about the medical & enviro evidence
But, the industries spread disinfromation on a, well, industrial scale. For example, the local wood fuel businesses post leaflets containing disinformation to local people's addresses. The politcians that many local folk watch on TV talk nonsense. The adverts sell stuff, not inform folk about a product's negative effects
-
"#WalnutTrees are any species of tree in the plant genus Juglans, the type genus of the family #Juglandaceae, the seeds of which are referred to as walnuts. All species are deciduous trees, 10–40 metres (33–131 ft) tall, with pinnate leaves 200–900 millimetres (7.9–35.4 in), with 5–25 leaflets; the shoots have chambered pith, a character shared with the wingnuts (Pterocarya), but not the hickories (Carya) in the same family.
"The 21 species in the genus range across the north temperate #OldWorld from southeast #Europe east to #Japan, and more widely in the #NewWorld from southeast #Canada west to #California and south to #Argentina.
"Edible walnuts, which are consumed worldwide, are usually harvested from cultivated varieties of the species Juglans regia. China produces half of the world total of walnuts."
Learn more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juglans
