Speaking of the First Amendment: The Return of the Free Speech Jedi

​Love or loathe the colorful protests against the National Guard’s deployments into cities, the speech rights of all protesters are our rights. The right to insult, ridicule, offend, and provoke has been firmly established since President Thomas Jefferson let the Sedition Act – which outlawed “false, scandalous, and malicious” statements against the government, Congress and president – expire.
 
Now Fast Company reports that Sam O’Hara, a resident of Washington, D.C., claims he was “tightly handcuffed” and detained for 20 minutes after ignoring a demand by a National Guard member to stop playing the “Imperial March” theme associated with Darth Vader in Star Wars. O’Hara was playing the music while filming National Guard deployments in Washington, D.C., over the summer. Fast Company reports that O’Hara has received more than one million “likes” for his anti-Darth Vader TikTok posts.
 
The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit against the government for violating O’Hara’s First Amendment rights, told the magazine:
 
“Government conduct of this sort might have received legal sanction a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But in the here and now, the First Amendment bars government officials from restraining individuals from recording law enforcement or peacefully protesting, and the Fourth Amendment (along with the District’s prohibition on false arrest) bars groundless seizures.”
 
Michael Perloff, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU in Washington, told Fast Company: “The government doesn’t get to decide if your protest is funny, and government officials can’t punish you for making them the punch line.”
 
That’s true whether your allusion is to Darth Vader or the “Let’s Go Brandon” cry. “No government should be without critics,” Jefferson said. “If its intentions are good, then it has nothing to fear from criticism.”

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