On campus …
F-bomb shelter. The U.S. Supreme Court says a Pennsylvania high school was wrong to suspend a cheerleader over her profane Snapchat post—“F___ school f___ softball f___ cheer f___ everything”—after she failed to make the varsity team.
■ The 8-1 ruling concluded: “It might be tempting to dismiss [her] words as unworthy of the robust First Amendment protections. … But sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary.”
■ Free Speech Center Director Ken Paulson: “The case had the potential to either expand the free-speech rights of public school students or limit them. It did neither.”
■ The one dissenting justice, Clarence Thomas: Lower courts will be “at a loss” in applying the ruling.
■ CNN commentator Jeffrey Toobin*: The court acknowledges this is just how high schoolers talk.
‘Brave reporting is often being censored by administrators … because the content makes them uncomfortable.’ A coalition of student groups is pressing for passage of a state “Student Journalist Free Speech Act.”
■ Conservative U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik is proposing a national “Campus Free Speech and Restoration Act,” because she says “conservative students across our nation continue to have their voices silenced.”
Trump vs. SNL. The Daily Beast says then-President Donald Trump wanted his administration—including the FCC and the Justice Department—to investigate comedy critical of him from Saturday Night Live, “Jimmy Kimmel and other late-night comedy mischief-makers.”
■ Kimmel: “President Snowflake asked to send the authorities in to stop us from making fun of him. Not only that, he wanted Guillermo to pay for the wall.”
■ Stephen Colbert was outraged: “If the DOJ thugs are kicking down doors to round up the late-night chuckleheads to drag us off to Mar-a-Gulago to be assassinated, I should get more than ‘and the rest.’”
■ Trump denies it, but he does cop to having said that “Alec Baldwin has no talent, certainly when it comes to imitating me.”
■ The ACLU’s Washington, D.C., legal director condemns a federal judge’s ruling that Trump can’t be sued over the violent clearing last summer of largely peaceful protesters from a park as “a stunning rejection of … First Amendment rights” that “effectively places federal officials above the law.”
‘A clear warning to anyone who would … censor honest, critical consumer reviews.’ Attorney Daniel Horwitz hails a Tennessee appeals court’s affirmation of the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by a neurologist against a patient’s daughter’s complaint on Yelp of “totally unprofessional and unethical” behavior.
■ North Carolina’s Supreme Court says a company has an absolute right to petition the government by speaking at zoning meetings, and that right insulates it from a lawsuit.
‘An epidemic of censorship and entitlement.’ A Miss New Jersey pageant contestant took the stage to complain about “professors … teaching students to be narcissists.”
■ On Twitter, where she identified as an “#AntiPCPageantQueen,” she said, “I didn’t even place. But I wouldn’t have changed a single word.”
■ Bloomberg Opinion’s Andreas Kluth: “Banning Offensive Flags Won’t Get Rid of Hate.”
