Protect The 1st has followed the long, sorrowful saga of the Illinois Invest in Kids scholarship program, a lifeline for very low-income families to escape failing and dangerous public schools with scholarships to quality private schools.

This 75 percent tax credit served kids whose families were below 300 percent of the poverty level. When the public teachers union flexed its muscle, however, Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) and state lawmakers bowed to the union’s raw political power and let the program die.

The Chicago Tribune writes: “Now these kids have reason to hope.”

What is that hope? The Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), which passed the House and is now a part of the reconciliation bill before the Senate. The ECCA would provide $5 billion a year in tax credits for donations to scholarship-granting organizations for disadvantaged students nationwide to attend quality private schools.

The Tribune writes:

“Opponents of school choice believe that education is a zero-sum game, and that private schools are a threat to the public system. We believe the opposite – that a thriving private and charter system and a strong traditional public system create an educational ecosystem that can serve everyone’s needs. There are things private schools can do that public ones can’t, and the same is very much true in reverse.

“School choice remains popular in Illinois, with a clear majority of residents supporting the concept. More importantly, choice introduces accountability into a system that, for decades, has faced little real competition. When parents have options, schools must respond – whether by improving curriculum, addressing student behavior issues more effectively, or offering stronger support for struggling learners.”

The Tribune concludes:

“Springfield has moved on from the thousands of low-income students it left behind a year and a half ago. Now, the ECCA is their best shot. We hope that the Senate passes a version of the reconciliation bill that includes this program.”

​Steven Greenhut in Reason cautions those on the left and right who want to call a Constitutional convention to revamp our founding document that anyone “who has watched the moronic sausage-making in Congress and state legislatures should be wary of opening Pandora’s Box.”
 
Greenhut points to the United Kingdom to get a sense of where we’d be if the Bill of Rights were up for grabs. Every year, thousands of Britons are detained, questioned, and prosecuted for online posts. Greenhut recounts the story of a 74-year-old grandmother who was arrested by four police officers for holding a sign in proximity to a Glasgow abortion clinic reading, “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.’”
 
He writes that in contrast to the “Congress shall make no law” clarity of the First Amendment, the British speech code allows such quashing of speech to “protect national security,” “territorial integrity” “public safety,” “disorder or crime,” “health or morals,” etc., etc.
 
“A constitutional amendment stating, ‘no law’ is more protective than a statute with asterisks and exceptions,” Greenhut concludes. “With the political Left devoted to limiting speech based on its fixations on race and gender and the political Right's willingness to, say, deport students who take verboten positions on the war in Gaza and malign reporters as enemies of the people, I'd hate to see how speech protections would fare in a refashioned constitution. Traditionally, the Left has taken a ‘living and breathing’ approach, insisting its plain words and founders' intent are up for reinterpretation.
 
“Sadly, modern conservatives, who previously defended originalism, seem ready to ditch the Constitution when it hinders their policy aims.”
 
He quotes Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis from a 1927 free-speech case, Whitney v. California, who noted that the founders, who had won a violent revolution, were not cowards who wanted order over liberty. The Justice wrote: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
 
Greenhut concluded: “We don't need to revisit the Constitution, but to uphold the protections already within it.”

Here are some choice excerpts from Vice President Vance’s recent speech to the Munich Security Conference in which he spoke truth to the dour:

• “What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values …”

 

• “I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Koran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. As the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant, and I’m quoting, ‘a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.’”

 

• “A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes.”

 

• “This last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law. Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime. In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.”

About a Romanian court’s cancellation of a national election in that country after posts on Tik-Tok were deemed Russian disinformation:
​

• “But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”

 

• “But what no democracy, American, German, or European, will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief are invalid or unworthy of even being considered. Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There’s no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.”

​Journalist Matt Taibbi testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. He noted that many politicians, such as former Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry, are publicly justifying curtailment of free speech, saying that the First Amendment gets in the way of building “a consensus.”

Matt Taibbi told the committee that building “consensus” is not his job as a journalist. He went on to say:

“This is an Alamo moment for the First Amendment. Most of America’s closest allies have already adopted draconian speech laws. We’re surrounded. The EU’s new Digital Services Act is the most comprehensive censorship law ever instituted in a democratic society.

“Ranking member Raskin, you don’t have to go as far as Russia or China to find people jailed for speech. Our allies in England now have an Online Safety Act that empowers the government to jail people for nebulous offenses like ‘false communication’ or causing ‘psychological harm.’ Germany, France, Australia, Canada, and other nations have implemented similar ideas.

“These laws are totally incompatible with our system. Our own citizens have been arrested in some of these countries, but our government hasn’t stood up for them. Why? Because many of our bureaucrats believe in these laws.

“Take USAID. Many Americans are in an uproar now because they learned about over $400 million going to an organization called Internews, whose chief Jeanne Bourgault boasted to Congress about training ‘hundreds of thousands of people’ in journalism. Her views are almost identical to Kerry’s.

“She gave a talk about ‘building trust and combatting misinformation’ in India during the pandemic. She said that after months of a ‘really beautifully unified Covid-19 message,’ vaccine enthusiasm rose to 87%, but when ‘mixed information on vaccine efficacy’ got out, hesitancy ensued.

“We’re paying this person to train journalists, and she doesn’t know the press doesn’t exist to promote ‘unity’ or political goals like vaccine enthusiasm. That’s propaganda, not journalism.

“Bourgault also once said that to fight ‘bad content,’ we need to ‘work really hard on exclusion lists or inclusion lists’ and ‘really try to focus our ad dollars’ toward ‘the good news.’”

“Again, if you don’t know the fastest way to erode ‘trust’ in media is by having government sponsor ‘exclusion lists,’ you shouldn’t be getting a dollar in taxpayer money, let alone $476 million. And USAID is just a tiny piece of a censorship machine Michael and I saw across a long list of agencies. Collectively they’ve bought up every part of the news production line: sources, think-tanks, research, ‘fact-checking,’ ‘anti-disinformation,’ commercial media scoring, and when all else fails, censorship.

“It’s a giant closed messaging loop, whose purpose is to transform the free press into a consensus machine. There’s no way to remove the rot surgically. The whole mechanism has to go.
​
“Is there ‘right-wing misinformation’? Hell yes. It exists in every direction. But I grew up a Democrat and don’t remember being afraid of it. At the time, we didn’t need censorship because we figured we had the better argument.”

​Marc Andreessen, inventor of the first internet web browser and leading Silicon Valley tech venture capitalist, is quoted in a piece by Michael Barone in RealClearPolitics, taken from an interview with Free Press founder Bari Weiss.
 
“My concern is that the censorship and political control of AI is a thousand times more dangerous than censorship and political control of social media – maybe a million times more dangerous. The thing with AI is, I think AI is going to be the control layer for everything in the future – how the health care system works, how the education system works, how the government works. So that if AI is woke, biased, censored, politically controlled, you are in a hyper-Orwellian, China-style, social credit system nightmare.”

​Cass Sunstein’s argument that the First Amendment functions as an “arms control agreement” is a sharp, compelling analogy. In a world where everyone wants to censor someone else—whether it’s banning critical race theory or eliminating speech that offends on campuses—Sunstein argues that the Constitution forces all parties to “lay down their arms.”
 
The First Amendment, in Sunstein’s view, serves as a neutral zone, preventing any one group from suppressing another’s speech, no matter how repugnant that speech might seem to them.
 
Sunstein draws a powerful parallel to the 1943 case of *West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette*. In that case, Justice Robert Jackson wrote what Sunstein calls “the greatest opinion in the history of the Supreme Court.” Jackson warned, “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters.” In a clear rebuke to authoritarianism, Jackson argued that “no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.”
 
For Sunstein, this is the essence of the arms control agreement: no viewpoint may be forbidden, no matter how tempting it might be to do so.
 
While Sunstein acknowledges that this broad understanding of the First Amendment is not easily squared with its original meaning, he points out that the robust protections we now have evolved in response to historical moments of danger, like World War II and the 1960s. “It is perhaps unsurprising that a robust understanding of free speech would develop during the war against fascism,” he writes, and that it would solidify during the fierce debates of the 1960s.
 
Sunstein’s advice for today? College administrators, and others in positions of power, “should avoid the temptation” to suppress views they find beyond the pale. They “should lay down their arms.” If we’re going to have a constitutional arms control agreement, everyone needs to disarm—especially those most eager to wield the weapons of censorship. After all, no one should have a monopoly on banning speech. That would be the ultimate arms race.

​The ever-astute Ayaan Hirsi Ali details the decline of free speech in Britain in a way that perfectly delineates the American distinction between incitements to violence (“fighting words”) and speech that is merely ugly.
 
“After the recent [anti-Muslim] riots, people were given prison sentences for posting words and images on social media. In some cases, the illegal incitement to violence was obvious. Julie Sweeney, fifty-three, got a fifteen-month sentence for a Facebook comment: ‘Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.’ Lee Dunn, fifty-one, on the other hand, got eight weeks for sharing three images of Asian-looking men with captions such as ‘Coming to a town near you.’”
 
Ali writes in The Spectator that a “triple whammy” at the end of the century ended a long period of liberalization in the UK’s speech laws – the arrival of fundamentalist Islam in the West, the rise of far-left critical theories of social justice and the advent of the internet as the public square. The UK’s Online Safety Act, passed by the Tory government, could serve as a “censor’s charter” because of its “inclusion of the phrase ‘legal but harmful’ to characterize certain content.”
 
“The losers in all this are not the hapless fools languishing in jail because of their crude online posts,” Ali writes. “The losers are the millions of people who believe the government exists to protect us from foreign enemies and criminals, not to prohibit ideas, words or images that might offend.”

​A letter sent on Monday to the House Judiciary Committee by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg should put to rest whether “jawboning” by the government of highly regulated social media companies on their content moderation is taken as mere suggestions, or as something much more.
 
Zuckerberg wrote to the committee Chairman Jim Jordan:
 
“Officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
 
Zuckerberg also addressed the Hunter-Biden laptop story in the lead up to the 2020 election. He writes that the FBI warned Meta that this story was Russian disinformation. So when Meta saw a New York Post story reporting on the allegations, “we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply.”
 
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again … for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.”
 
As Protect The 1st has said before, government jawboning of highly regulated companies on content moderation cannot help but veer toward censorship. If government agents want to identify a post as dangerous or as foreign disinformation, let them do so publicly.

​For the second time, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro had a chance to stand up for school vouchers to help children from low-income families escape failing public schools to find a quality education in a private school. For the second time, Gov. Shapiro chose what seems to be – superficially at least – the politically expedient path.
 
From The Wall Street Journal:
 
“The Governor has national ambitions, and the teachers unions that oppose vouchers could stand in the way of his chances for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. But he’d also have allies, such as the Black Pastors United for Education, who last month wrote him a letter calling for vouchers. On Friday they wrote him again, saying they never got a response to the first letter, and inviting him to discuss vouchers at a town hall. 
 
“For our lawmakers to disregard this issue of freedom,” says Joshua Robertson, a pastor in Harrisburg, “is unacceptable.” Citing the “dire” education situation in public schools, he adds: “We need a courageous Governor.”

​“Is the Liberty Bell all it’s cracked up to be?”
 
Hear Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik, director of the Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University and the rabbi at Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, make wisecracks and wise observations in the keynote address at Becket’s recent Canterbury gala.

Chaya and Yoni Loffman in RealClearPolicy:

“When we learned that our three-year-old son had autism, we knew that finding the right school would be hard. But we were confident that with the right help and resources, our son could thrive.

“Unfortunately, California politicians disagree. When public schools fail to meet the needs of students with disabilities, the federal and state funding for that student can be redirected to private schools that are better able to accommodate their disabilities. But while California lets secular private schools receive these funds, it completely excludes religious private schools, simply because they are religious.” 
 
Michael Helfand and Maury Litwack in The Hill
 
“A group of Los Angeles Jewish parents, children and two schools were in court this week challenging a California law that explicitly bans religious schools from becoming state-certified special needs schools, all the while allowing other private schools the ability to apply for the same state-certification. 

“The consequences of this law have long been devastating, preventing the Jewish community from accessing the necessary funds to build and operate educational institutions that can meet the needs of its special-needs community. 

“But California’s unlawful exclusion has taken on greater urgency in recent months as allegations of rampant antisemitism have plagued California educational institutions from public schools to college campuses. Now, California’s rules put Jews in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma: You can’t have your own schools, and when you come to our schools, be prepared for an environment hostile to your Jewish identity and practices. California cannot allow this state of affairs to continue.” 

The latest from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.