The First Amendment ensures speech, not paychecks. From TV hosts to pastors, free expression at work often collides with financial realities.
The first amendment protects our free speech but employers will protect their bottom line.
However, to some extent, there are some limitations and barriers for all of us. When he began his career, national radio personality Howard Stern couldn’t keep a job. His content was so raw and shocking that station owners and managers couldn’t afford to keep him on because advertisers couldn’t afford to risk supporting him. Things changed. He eventually became acceptable to enough listeners that he was hugely profitable. A massive contract with Sirius XM radio gave him a huge audience, allowed him to say whatever he wanted and paid him handsomely. Since 2004, they have paid him hundreds of millions of dollars. His employer found him to be profitable and accepted by many.
Stearns’ contract recently expired and his deal hasn’t been renewed. The renewal won’t be based on Stearns’ freedom of speech but it will be based on whether he will be profitable for Sirius XM radio which means he probably won’t be returning.
Glenn Mollette
Jimmy Kimmel is off the air, for now. He has been making a nice $15M a year salary from the Disney corporation who owns ABC and the ESPN network as well. He has had a nice job with them for 20 years and come out five nights a week saying whatever he wanted to say. After some recent comments made about Charlie Kirk that have been replayed numerous times on national TV, Disney decided to take his show down for a while, possibly forever.
Stations across the country let it be known to Disney they weren’t going to air Kimmel’s show after his remarks about Kirk and Disney listened. It was about money. Disney is in the business to make money, big money. The Stephen Colbert show was losing $40M a year and Colbert’s show had better ratings than Kimmel. The idea of losing millions of dollars on Kimmel was unacceptable to Disney. If TV station chains, cable companies and local stations around the country had applauded Kimmel, if ratings and profitability had soared, Disney would have kept Kimmel on.
No employer is going to keep you on the payroll if your mouth is bankrupting the business. You may have the right to speak but you may be speaking on the street corner somewhere without a paycheck if the employer doesn’t like what you are saying.
The minister of your local church may have the freedom to preach the Bible. Yet, he or she could find themselves unemployed if they ruffle enough feathers of the congregation’s leadership. A politician may speak freely but only has a job if he or she can sway enough voters. You can walk into wherever you work and say whatever you want about the company or your boss. Most likely, you’ll end up in the unemployment line. Plus, you will not be able to obtain a reference or recommendation for your next interview.
Yes, we have freedom of speech but it has limitations and consequences. Charlie Kirk was his own employer. That seems to be about the only way you can really pull off free speech. He said just about whatever he wanted and there wasn’t anyone to fire him, so someone killed him. Sadly, Charlie Kirk’s free speech cost him his life.
There is almost always a price to be paid for freedom of speech. It is important and it is American, but your employer doesn’t have to agree with you or keep you on the payroll.
About the author ~
Glen Mollett is the author of 13 books including Uncommom Sense, the Spiritual Chocolate series, Grandpa's Store, Minister's Guidebook insights from a fellow minister. His column is published weekly in over 600 publications in all 50 states.
The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily representative of any other group or organization. We welcome comments and views from our readers. Submit your letters to the editor or commentary on a current event 24/7 to editor@oursentinel.com.
Charlie Kirk assassination legacy, history of assassinated American leaders, free speech and violence in America, political debate versus violence, legacy of voices after tragedy
Florida’s education commissioner seeks to revoke a teacher’s license over a social media post about Charlie Kirk’s death, citing gross immorality.
TALLAHASSEE, FL - Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas has found probable cause that a Clay County teacher displayed “gross immorality” in posting about Charlie Kirk’s death, he announced Monday as Attorney General James Uthmeier launched a tip line to report “violent extremism.”
The teacher, left nameless by Kamoutsas, could lose her teaching license after she posted to social media, “This may not be the obituary. [sic] We were all hoping to wake up to, but this is a close second for me,” News 4 Jax reported. Kamoutsas said the post included an article about Kirk’s assassination, which occurred at a college in Utah.
Photo: Anthony Roberts/Unsplash
In keeping with his promise two weeks ago to investigate teachers making “despicable comments” about Kirk’s death, Kamoutsas said he found probable cause on four Education Code violations. Either the teacher can forfeit her license, or she can be tried in front of department’s Education Practices Commission or the Department of Administrative Hearings.
The commissioner is seeking the revocation of the teacher’s license.
“As these posts continue to circulate, more and more students are exposed to the dangerous and false idea that violence is an acceptable response to differing beliefs, an idea that has no place and will have no place here in Florida schools,” Kamoutsas said.
The four standards Kamoutsas alleges the teacher breached are gross immorality, failure to protect the health, safety and welfare of students, reduced effectiveness as an educator, and failing to distinguish her personal views from the school’s.
“Holding educators accountable for speech that celebrates violence in schools is not a violation of free speech, it is a necessary step to uphold the standards of the teaching profession and the safety of our schools,” Kamoutsas said.
Last week, Florida Education Association President Andrew Spar told the Phoenix that the commissioner’s letter to superintendents vowing investigations sends a “chilling effect throughout the profession.”
“For the commissioner to say there’s no longer a second-chance mentality in education and that he’s going to personally investigate and essentially be the investigator, the prosecutor, and the judge and jury in all of these cases is quite concerning,” Spar said.
New portal for complaints
On a broader scope, Uthmeier’s office opened the “Combatting Violent Extremism Portal” “where people will be able to report anything they observe or hear that is a call for violence or a threat for violence against other individuals,” he said.
“Let me be clear, we respect the First Amendment more than anybody. We’re not going to be the cancel culture that we’ve seen from so long from the Left. We’re not going to believe in silencing individuals. But there’s a big difference when it comes to a threat of violence, a call for violence. That is not protected by the First Amendment,” Uthmeier said.
Since Kirk’s death, people nationwide have lost jobs for speaking about Kirk’s death in a manner their employer views as disfavored, such as late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.
Teachers are held to higher standards than many other professions, the state officials said.
“It’s never been more important for people to speak up, for us to have safe academic environments where people feel confident to engage in discussion, free from attack, free from violence,” Uthmeier said.
The portal, not exclusive to education settings, allows people to submit screenshots, videos, or other evidence of threatened violence to Uthmeier’s office, anonymously if they want to.
“We must protect before people are shot, before explosives go off,” Uthmeier said.
Warning against abusing the portal, Uthmeier said, “We’re going to take everything seriously and, if you abuse this, if you provide something in a dishonest fashion to law enforcement, we’ll hold you accountable as well.”
The campaign in-part mimics the Office of Parental Rights Uthmeier added to his office earlier this year to field complaints alleging violation of parental-rights laws.
“The First Amendment does not protect speech that is likely and intended to provoke immediate acts of violence, or speech that expresses a serious intent to commit a specific act of violence, but it does protect robust free expression, which includes criticism of the past words and actions of prominent public figures,” the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida said in an online statement last week following the state’s announcement it would investigate teachers.
“Dissent, disagreement, and counterspeech that criticizes political views should not be confused with condoning or encouraging violence,” the ACLU said, and retaliation for such speech “feeds hostility and division.”
After Kirk was killed, the ACLU continued, “Most people likely encountered speech they found despicable no matter where they fall on the political spectrum — that is the nature of a democracy where free speech is protected. While calling for further violence or condoning what happened to Charlie Kirk is wrong, many of the posts being cited for retaliation constitute core protected speech.”
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.
Florida teacher license revocation case, Charlie Kirk death social media reaction, Florida extremism reporting portal, free speech in Florida schools, ACLU response to Florida teacher discipline
An astonishing number of Trump supporters took the dangling video bait and swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
After last weekend's Hands Off! protests across the country, TikTok creator @redsaidblue posted a satirical video, sprinkled with subtle digs at popular MAGA stereotypes, in which she claimed to be attending the protest as a paid participant. In the video, she described what she could and couldn’t wear, who her point of contact was, and that she would receive a bonus for bringing a sign.
"I got paid $100 for going to the protest, and I got an extra $10 for bringing the sign," she confesses to viewers in character as a Trump supporter going over to the other side to make a few bucks. "Overall, it was a pretty good experience. The people were pretty nice."
A MAGA supporter on X (formerly Twitter) with over 200,000 followers, "@TheEXECUTlONER_", posted the performance to his account and encouraged other Trump supporters to share it. The buffoonery sailed by unchecked by rational thought or rudimentary critical thinking.
There were 1,400 Hands Off! demonstrations across the country on Saturday. The majority drew well over 1,000 participants. Conservatively, someone or some entity would have spent around $140 million (before signs). The kicker: an estimated 3 million people took part in the nationwide protests. If all the marchers were punching the proverbial clock, someone would have spent $300 million—which might have been a boon to the economy after the stock market experienced its steepest plunge since COVID, during Trump’s first term.
While @redsaidblue wasn’t actually paid to protest—it's not clear if she even attended one—the blue-check MAGA user is making bank. As of this story, the video had been shared by 24,000 other accounts on the social media platform. While the young woman wasn’t actually paid for the protest, the account that posted her video is cleaning up, having collected 47,000 likes and over 3,000 comments so far.
Meanwhile, the creator began receiving negative backlash from liberals for posting the video, which she eventually took down. She is now attempting to remove copies from the internet. Supporters from the left were enraged, claiming her video added fuel to the political fire by implying extreme right conservatives aren’t smart enough to recognize when they’re being punked.
It appears her critics were right. The video—or screenshots with text excerpts from it—is circulating on conservative social media channels as supposed proof that liberal protesters are social justice mercenaries, reinforcing the narrative that liberals only protest against the Trump administration because they are paid.
Redsaidblue posted a follow-up video to her TikTok account yesterday, apologizing to fellow liberals for harming their movement.
"I truly thought it was so obvious that it was a joke. I thought that if anyone did take it seriously, if they shared it with someone else, the next person would be like, "Bro, that's satire".
Do paid protesters actually exist? They don't, according to an article from USA Today.
"Time after time, claims of "paid protesters" have been debunked, sometimes by the very people who made them in the first place," according to an article by John R. Roby.
Leo Gertner wrote a piece for The Washington Post entitled, "So what if protesters are paid?"
Gertner wrote, "So the next time someone tries to discredit a movement by insinuating that some of the people on the ground are being compensated, ask the all-important question: So what?"
What's the old saying? Freedom isn't free.
Op-Ed by Jennifer Lauren Hamad
The F-bombs that a frustrated cheerleader dropped in a Snapchat post after failing to land a spot on the varsity cheerleading team at her school recently detonated in the U.S. Supreme Court into a victory for student free speech and student activist organizations, like the one I led, that collaborated in submitting an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court.
In the historic B.L. v. Mahanoy Area School District case, the Court ruled that the school’s actions in punishing Levy for her undisruptive off-campus speech were unconstitutional. Although student organizations are overwhelmingly relieved by this ruling, we remain unnerved by the dystopian reality of what could have been had the Courts ruled in favor of Mahanoy.
Social media has become the indispensable virtual voice of youth that has galvanized youth activism by making national and global exchange of views possible. However, if public schools succeeded in punishing off-campus speech, social media would have become synonymous with a virtual school classroom where schools have authority to regulate speech just as they would in a physical classroom. This would blur the metaphorical dividing line that separates speech "in the school context and beyond it" (established by Tinker v. Des Moines), leaving students without clarity on when they are afforded their full constitutional right to free speech. This ambiguity would become oppressive and subject students to the feeling that their speech is regulated 24/7, effectively stifling youth activism and threatening the existence of the student organizations that depend upon it.
Although Tinker’s precedent established that a school could punish students for speech if it disrupts the educational process, Levy’s case quickly revealed that Tinker could be applied to stifle what the late Congressman John Lewis deemed to be "good trouble"- "fearless agitation designed to provoke, challenge, and move the nation forward". Instead of restricting Tinker’s application to off-campus speech that disrupts the educational environment (e.g. threats of violence, harassment, bullying, etc.), schools could turn any off-campus political/social activism or speech they disapprove of into a case of “disruption.” Student speech that criticizes an educational institution, its policies, or the behavior of its personnel would become particularly vulnerable to retaliatory disciplinary action from schools.
Perhaps one of the most concerning assertions made by the Mahanoy Area School District was that a student "targets" or "directs speech at a school" anytime he or she "refers to school affairs or sends speech directed to classmates". This suggests students "target" their school by merely offering their opinion about a school program or policy or discussing school affairs with their peers.
Under this notion, my organization would not have been able to speak at board meetings, lobby for educational legislation, speak out about issues like student mental health, write op-eds, speak to reporters, or merely share stories amongst members without the imminent threat of punishment. This excessive and unwarranted control of speech would inevitably disenfranchise and disempower students.
A school could overextend its disciplinary power to punish any and all speech that concerns the educational process. Such far-reaching censorship would mean the beginning of the end of American democracy, as our public schools would quickly transform from the cradles of democracy into totalitarian enclaves where students become accustomed to an imbalance of power that strips them of their basic freedoms.
As the looming threat of punishment causes students to decline to share their opinions and partake in activism, vital student representation would be lost. This strong push to punish off-campus student expression related to education is alarming and would suppress eyewitness accounts of issues in our American public schools that would otherwise be revealed through the sharing of student experiences through social and political youth activism. Criticism of everything from educational inequities to school safety issues could be hidden from public knowledge if off-campus student speech were regulated and punishable by schools, resulting in the erasure of the student narrative.
Conveying the student narrative is a powerful tool used by students to inform decision-making on policies that directly affect their education. In the absence of student voice, students would be subjected to policies implemented without their input. Before schools know it, students would be crying "NO EDUCATION WITHOUT STUDENT REPRESENTATION!," echoing the sentiments of our American Revolutionary forefathers.
Jennifer Lauren Hamad served as Speaker of the Houston Independent School District Student Congress that represents HISD’s 215,000+ students and collaborated with other student voice organizations to submit an amicus curiae brief to the U.S. Supreme Court for the B.L. v. Mahanoy Area School District case. She is also an incoming freshman at Stanford University.
by Howard C. Self, President Right To Believe
As 2020 is drawing to a close, we all hope that we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel in this year of the pandemic. The advent of vaccines is hopeful, yet the United States and other nations face a third wave of COVID infections. And as municipal and state governments impose new restrictions, there is growing concern about impacts on individual liberty and religious freedom.
In a recent speech to the Federalist Society, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said, “We have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive and prolonged as those experienced for most of 2020… the COVID crisis has served as a sort of constitutional stress test. And in doing so it has highlighted disturbing trends that were already present before the virus struck.” Alito went on to cite numerous court cases impacting the free exercise of religion as indicative that “religious liberty is in danger of becoming a second-class right.”
Last month, the Supreme Court sided with the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and an Orthodox Jewish congregation. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that New York could not restrict religious gatherings more than others. In the opinion, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote, “There is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues, and mosques.”
In a similar case resolved just last week, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., filed a suit in federal court against Mayor Muriel Bowser. The mayor had imposed a numeric limit of 50 on religious gatherings, no matter the size of the facility, whereas businesses were limited to a percentage of capacity. Fortunately, the city reneged and issued an amended order that treats religious congregations the same as other entities. But it took a lawsuit to get there.
The disturbing trends referenced by Alito are all too familiar to religious leaders, many of whom are alarmed by growing bias and overreach by government officials and the courts, and concerned about protecting their rights to the free exercise of their faiths. Another example of this concern is a case before the District of Columbia Superior Court. Earlier this month, Judge Jennifer M. Anderson issued a “remedies judgment” in the controversial Family Federation for World Peace and Unification International et al v. Hyun Jin Moon et al case, which totally disregards the defendants’ First Amendment rights and due process. The case is sure to be continued through the appeals process.
This case before the D.C. Superior Court involves protracted disputes within the Unification Movement founded by the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Though it was initially and properly dismissed on First Amendment grounds because it clearly involved religious disputes in which courts cannot intervene, this complex and extremely costly case has been extended by subsequent rulings for more than nine years.
It is well-established legal precedent that the First Amendment prohibits the courts from interfering in disputes about the teachings and leadership of religious groups. Yet that is precisely what the D.C. court has done in this case. As evident in both summary judgment and remedies rulings, the court disregarded voluminous evidence of an emerging religious movement wrestling with issues of succession and doctrine. It decided that it could sidestep First Amendment prohibitions and evaluate the religious purposes of UCI, a D.C. non-profit corporation established to advance the principles and work of the Unification movement. In doing so, the court in effect took sides in a religious schism.
The onerous actions taken by the D.C. court in its remedies ruling of Dec. 4 are cause for great alarm among religious and nonprofit leaders alike. Based on its unconstitutional evaluation of UCI’s religious purposes, the court found that four directors had breached their fiduciary duty, ordered them removed from the board, and made them personally responsible for crushing financial penalties. This severe judgment was imposed even though in its ruling, the court acknowledged that the four directors had not received any personal benefit.
So why does this matter? The D.C. Superior Court’s rulings in this case have trampled upon First Amendment protections, making determinations about religious teachings and leadership, and thereby taking sides in a schism. Such dangerous precedents make all religious groups more vulnerable to government intrusion. The court took the unprecedented step of removing a majority of the directors of this nonprofit’s board, seriously overstepping its authority and disregarding requirements specifically articulated in D.C. law. Board members of every nonprofit incorporated in the District of Columbia should be alarmed about the details of this case, for there could be dire extralegal ramifications should they face any disputes before the D.C. court.
It should also concern people of all faiths that the courts are often all too ready to use such cases as opportunities to expand their powers and authority. Judicial overreach opens a Pandora’s box of government encroachment into religious expression and free exercise. It can, and often does, lead to protracted legal battles; distracting religious organizations and nonprofits from their primary missions; and forcing them to bear heavy costs to defend themselves.
If judges can decide what aspects of your faith are valid, or what is not in the public interest, the implications for religious freedom are vast. It opens the door for government, not God, to be the final arbiter of the human conscience.
Commenting on such current challenges to religious freedom, Bishop Paul Murray, chairman of the Religious Freedom Commission of One Way Churches International, noted, "Judicial overreach is a growing concern for faith leaders of all backgrounds. Freedom of religion, belief and conscience is our first and most fundamental right. Rulings like the ones in this case remind us that we must be vigilant and stand together to safeguard the First Amendment rights of all."
Howard C. Self is the president of Right To Believe, a not-for-profit organization fighting to protect religious rights from undue governmental interference. He has also held leadership roles at the Family Peace Association and in the Unification Movement, which are affiliated with UCI, the ultimate holding company that owns United Press International.
-----------------------------------------------------------
by Glenn Mollette, Guest Commentator
