Back in 2008, Chattanooga, Tennessee decided to build its own city-owned fiber broadband network on the back of its existing electrical utility, EPB. In the years since, the network has become one of the most popular in the nation, offering affordable, 25 gigabits per second fiber access to local residents.
It almost struggled to be, thanks to the usual bullshit behavior by regional telecom monopolies like Comcast. Comcast tried repeatedly to sue the network out of existence. As we’ve seen elsewhere, they also used co-funded “free market think tanks,” fake consumer groups, and for-hire pundits to seed lies in the local populace about how community broadband was a dangerous, inevitable boondoggle.
Benefits range from savings on upgraded smart city meters, local consumer savings on broadband access, free marketing due to the network’s popularity, improved health care outcomes, expanded business and remote work opportunities, improved tourism to revitalized parts of the city, and direct profits from the network itself:
“Since the project was fully completed in 2011, it has returned more than six times the original cost of the investment,” said Bento Lobo, Ph.D., lead author and director of the Department of Finance and Economics at the UTC Rollins College of Business – describing Chattanooga’s fiber network as “one of our community’s most meaningful and impactful investments.”
Telecom monopolies (and the various academics, consultants, lobbyists, and think tankers) spent decades insisting these sorts of networks would be a socialist nightmare and inevitable boondoggle. They did this, because they know that this sort of approach — treating broadband access as a community-owned utility and public good — is extremely effective and extremely popular.
And while telecoms have tried desperately to seed partisan division in the discussions surrounding municipal broadband viability, in reality they see broad, bipartisan support across the electorate. More often than not, they wind up getting built in Conservative cities and counties, thanks in part to frustration with Republican policies on telecom (which almost always involve coddling the regional monopoly).
Republicans and their telecom allies (including fake “taxpayer protection groups”) will breathlessly insist this is all a dangerous waste of taxpayer resources. But if you pay attention, you’ll notice they never have a single bad word to say about the billions taxpayers throw at regional giants like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon in exchange for broadband networks that are always, curiously, left half-completed.
Open access fiber networks come in a variety of flavors, including directly municipally owned, an extension of the existing city utility, a cooperative, or a public-private partnerships. These creative, locally controlled solutions really do work and are very popular; but routinely get derailed because the U.S., if you hadn’t noticed, is often too corrupt to function in the public interest.
Sixteen states still have laws, ghost written by telecom monopoly lawyers, either banning community owned networks or limiting how they can fund or where they can expand. And at the heat of COVID lockdowns, when these networks were showcasing their significant benefits to local communities, House Republicans responded by trying to ban them country wide.
One afternoon in mid-September, a group of middle school girls in rural East Tennessee decided to film a TikTok video while waiting to begin cheerleading practice.
In the 45-second video posted later that day, one girl enters the classroom holding a cellphone. “Put your hands up,” she says, while a classmate flickers the lights on and off. As the camera pans across the classroom, several girls dramatically fall back on a desk or the floor and lie motionless, pretending they were killed.
When another student enters and surveys the bodies on the ground in poorly feigned shock, few manage to suppress their giggles. Throughout the video, which ProPublica obtained, a line of text reads: “To be continued……”
Penny Jackson’s 11-year-old granddaughter was one of the South Greene Middle School cheerleaders who played dead. She said the co-captains told her what to do and she did it, unaware of how it would be used. The next day, she was horrified when the police came to school to question her and her teammates.
By the end of the day, the Greene County Sheriff’s Department charged her and 15 other middle school cheerleaders with disorderly conduct for making and posting the video. Standing outside the school’s brick facade, Lt. Teddy Lawing said in a press conference that the girls had to be “held accountable through the court system” to show that “this type of activity is not warranted.” The sheriff’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the incident.
Widespread fear of school shootings is colliding with algorithms that accelerate the spread of the most outrageous messages to cause chaos across the country. Social videos, memes and retweets are becoming fodder for criminal charges in an era of heightened responses to student threats. Authorities say harsh punishment is crucial to deter students from making threatening posts that multiply rapidly and obscure their original source.
In many cases, especially in Tennessee, police are charging students for jokes and misinterpretations, drawing criticism from families and school violence prevention experts who believe a measured approach is more appropriate. Students are learning the hard way that they can’t control where their social media messages travel. In central Tennessee last fall, a 16-year-old privately shared a video he created using artificial intelligence, and a friend forwarded it to others on Snapchat. The 16-year-old was expelled and charged with threatening mass violence, even though his school acknowledged the video was intended as a private joke.
Other students have been charged with felonies for resharing posts they didn’t create. As ProPublica wrote in May, a 12-year-old in Nashville was arrested and expelled this year for sharing a screenshot of threatening texts on Instagram. He told school officials he was attempting to warn others and wanted to “feel heroic.”
In Greene County, the cheerleaders’ video sent waves through the small rural community, especially since it was posted several days after the fatal Apalachee High School shooting one state away. The Georgia incident had spawned thousands of false threats looping through social media feeds across the country. Lawing told ProPublica and WPLN at the time that his officers had fielded about a dozen social media threats within a week and struggled to investigate them. “We couldn’t really track back to any particular person,” he said.
But the cheerleaders’ video, with their faces clearly visible, was easy to trace.
Jackson understands that the video was in “very poor taste,” but she believes the police overreacted and traumatized her granddaughter in the process. “I think they blew it completely out of the water,” she said. “To me, it wasn’t serious enough to do that, to go to court.”
That perspective is shared by Makenzie Perkins, the threat assessment supervisor of Collierville Schools, outside of Memphis. She is helping her school district chart a different path in managing alleged social media threats. Perkins has sought specific training on how to sort out credible threats online from thoughtless reposts, allowing her to focus on students who pose real danger instead of punishing everyone.
The charges in Greene County, she said, did not serve a real purpose and indicate a lack of understanding about how to handle these incidents. “You’re never going to suspend, expel or charge your way out of targeted mass violence,” she said. “Did those charges make that school safer? No.”
When 16-year-old D.C. saw an advertisement for an AI video app last October, he eagerly downloaded it and began roasting his friends. In one video he created, his friend stood in the Lincoln County High School cafeteria, his mouth and eyes moving unnaturally as he threatened to shoot up the school and bring a bomb in his backpack. (We are using D.C.’s initials and his dad’s middle name to protect their privacy, because D.C. is a minor.)
D.C. sent it to a private Snapchat group of about 10 friends, hoping they would find it hilarious. After all, they had all teased this friend about his dark clothes and quiet nature. But the friend did not think it was funny. That evening, D.C. showed the video to his dad, Alan, who immediately made him delete it as well as the app. “I explained how it could be misinterpreted, how inappropriate it was in today’s climate,” Alan recalled to ProPublica.
It was too late. One student in the chat had already copied D.C.’s video and sent it to other students on Snapchat, where it began to spread, severed from its initial context.
That evening, a parent reported the video to school officials, who called in local police to do an investigation. D.C. begged his dad to take him to the police station that night, worried the friend in the video would get in trouble — but Alan thought it could wait until morning.
The next day, D.C. rushed to school administrators to explain and apologize. According to Alan, administrators told D.C. they “understood it was a dumb mistake,” uncharacteristic for the straight-A student with no history of disciplinary issues. In a press release, Lincoln County High School said administrators were “made aware of a prank threat that was intended as a joke between friends.”
But later that day, D.C. was expelled from school for a year and charged with a felony for making a threat of mass violence. As an explanation, the sheriff’s deputy wrote in the affidavit, “Above student did create and distribute a video on social media threatening to shoot the school and bring a bomb.”
During a subsequent hearing where D.C. appealed his school expulsion, Lincoln County Schools administrators described their initial panic when seeing the video. Alan shared an audio recording of the hearing with ProPublica. Officials didn’t know that the video was generated by AI until the school counselor saw a small logo in the corner. “Everybody was on pins and needles,” the counselor said at the hearing. “What are we going to do to protect the kids or keep everybody calm the next day if it gets out?” The school district declined to respond to ProPublica’s questions about how officials handled the incident, even though Alan signed a privacy waiver giving them permission to do so.
Alan watched D.C. wither after his expulsion: His girlfriend broke up with him, and some of his friends began to avoid him. D.C. lay awake at night looking through text messages he sent years ago, terrified someone decades later would find something that could ruin his life. “If they are punishing him for creating the image, when does his liability expire?” Alan wondered. “If it’s shared again a year from now, will he be expelled again?”
Alan, a teacher in the school district, coped by voraciously reading court cases and news articles that could shed light on what was happening to his son. He stumbled on a case hundreds of miles north in Pennsylvania, the facts of which were eerily similar to D.C.’s.
In April 2018, two kids, J.S. and his friend, messaged back and forth mocking another student by suggesting he looked like a school shooter. (The court record uses J.S. instead of his full name to protect the student’s anonymity.) J.S. created two memes and sent them to his friend in a private Snapchat conversation. His friend shared the memes publicly on Snapchat, where they were seen by 20 to 40 other students. School administrators permanently expelled J.S., so he and his parents sued the school.
In 2021, after a series of appeals, Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled in J.S.’s favor. While the memes were “mean-spirited, sophomoric, inartful, misguided, and crude,” the state Supreme Court justices wrote in their opinion, they were “plainly not intended to threaten Student One, Student Two, or any other person.”
The justices also shared their sympathy with the challenges schools faced in providing a “safe and quality educational experience” in the modern age. “We recognize that this charge is compounded by technological developments such as social media, which transcend the geographic boundaries of the school. It is a thankless task for which we are all indebted.”
After multiple disciplinary appeals, D.C.’s school upheld the decision to keep him out of school for a year. His parents found a private school that agreed to let him enroll, and he slowly emerged from his depression to continue his straight-A streak there. His charge in court was dismissed in December after he wrote a 500-word essay for the judge on the dangers of social media, according to Alan.
Thinking back on the video months later, D.C. explained that jokes about school violence are common among his classmates. “We try to make fun of it so that it doesn’t seem as serious or like it could really happen,” he said. “It’s just so widespread that we’re all desensitized to it.”
He wonders if letting him back to school would have been more effective in deterring future hoax threats. “I could have gone back to school and said, ‘You know, we can’t make jokes like that because you can get in big trouble for it,’” he said. “I just disappeared for everyone at that school.”
When a school district came across an alarming post on Snapchat in 2023, officials reached out to Safer Schools Together, an organization that helps educators handle school threats. In the post, a pistol flanked by two assault rifles lay on a rumpled white bedsheet. The text overlaid on the photo read, “I’m shooting up central I’m tired of getting picked on everyone is dying tomorrow.”
Steven MacDonald, training manager and development director for Safer Schools Together, recounted this story in a virtual tutorial posted last year on using online tools to trace and manage social media threats. He asked the school officials watching his tutorial what they would do next. “How do we figure out if this is really our student’s bedroom?”
According to MacDonald, it took his organization’s staff only a minute to put the text in quotation marks and run it through Google. A single local news article popped up showing that two kids had been arrested for sharing this exact Snapchat post in Columbia, Tennessee — far from the original district.
“We were able to reach out and respond and say, ‘You know what, this is not targeting your district,’” MacDonald said. Administrators were reassured there was a low likelihood of immediate violence, and they could focus on finding out who was recirculating the old threat and why.
In the training video, MacDonald reviewed skills that, until recently, have been more relevant to police investigators than school principals: How to reverse image search photos of guns to determine whether a post contains a stock image. How to use Snapchat to find contact names for unknown phone numbers. How to analyze the language in the social media posts of a high-risk student.
“We know that why you’re here is because of the increase and the sheer volume of these threats that you may have seen circulated, the non-credible threats that might have even ended up in your districts,” he said. Between last April and this April, Safer Schools Together identified drastic increases in “threat related behavior” and graphic or derogatory social media posts.
Back in the Memphis suburbs, Perkins and other Collierville Schools administrators have attended multiple digital threat assessment training sessions hosted by Safer Schools Together. “I’ve had to learn a lot more apps and social media than I ever thought,” Perkins said.
The knowledge, she said, came in handy during one recent incident in her district. Local police called the district to report that a student had called 911 and reported an Instagram threat targeting a particular school. They sent Perkins a photo of the Instagram profile and username. She began using open source websites to scour the internet for other appearances of the picture and username. She also used a website that allows people to view Instagram stories without alerting the user to gather more information.
With the help of police, Perkins and her team identified that the post was created by someone at the same IP address as the student who had reported the threat. The girl, who was in elementary school, confessed to police that she had done it.
The next day, Perkins and her team interviewed the student, her parents and teachers to understand her motive and goal. “It ended up that there had been some recent viral social media threats going around,” Perkins said. “This individual recognized that it drew in a lot of attention.”
Instead of expelling the girl, school administrators worked with her parents to develop a plan to manage her behavior. They came up with ideas for the girl to receive positive attention while stressing to her family that she had exhibited “extreme behavior” that signaled a need for intensive help. By the end of the day, they had tamped down concerns about immediate violence and created a plan of action.
In many other districts, Perkins said, the girl might have been arrested and expelled for a year without any support — which does not help move students away from the path of violence. “A lot of districts across our state haven’t been trained,” she said. “They’re doing this without guidance.”
Watching the cheerleaders’ TikTok video, it would be easy to miss Allison Bolinger, then the 19-year-old assistant coach. The camera quickly flashes across her standing and smiling in the corner of the room watching the pretend-dead girls.
Bolinger said she and the head coach had been next door planning future rehearsals. Bolinger entered the room soon after the students began filming and “didn’t think anything of it.” Cheerleading practice went forward as usual that afternoon. The next day, she got a call from her dad: The cheerleaders were suspended from school, and Bolinger would have to answer questions from the police.
“I didn’t even know the TikTok was posted. I hadn’t seen it,” she said. “By the time I went to go look for it, it was already taken down.” Bolinger said she ended up losing her job as a result of the incident. She heard whispers around the small community that she was responsible for allowing them to create the video.
Bolinger said she didn’t realize the video was related to school shootings when she was in the room. She often wishes she had asked them at the time to explain the video they were making. “I have beat myself up about that so many times,” she said. “Then again, they’re also children. If they don’t make it here, they’ll probably make it at home.”
Jackson, the grandmother of the 11-year-old in the video, blames Bolinger for not stopping the middle schoolers and faults the police for overreacting. She said all the students, whether or not their families hired a lawyer, got the same punishment in court: three months of probation for a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, which could be extended if their grades dropped or they got in trouble again. Each family had to pay more than $100 in court costs, Jackson said, a significant amount for some.
Jackson’s granddaughter successfully completed probation, which also involved writing and submitting a letter of apology to the judge. She was too scared about getting in trouble again to continue on the cheerleading team for the rest of the school year.
Jackson thinks that officials’ outsize response to the video made everything worse. “They shouldn’t even have done nothing until they investigated it, instead of making them out to be terrorists and traumatizing these girls,” she said.
Here’s how you know the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case represents something fundamentally broken in government accountability: within hours of two federal judges ordering his release and explicitly warning the government not to play games with him, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin went on X to repeat laughably false claims about Abrego while declaring that he “will never walk America’s streets again” and calling one of the judges “lawless” and “unhinged.”
That’s a Department of Homeland Security official publicly announcing the government’s intent to defy court orders while repeating laughable claims that judges have already called “bordering on fanciful.”
The backstory matters because it shows this isn’t just bureaucratic incompetence—it’s a pattern of lawlessness that continues even when judges explicitly call it out.
Of course, once they had cooked up a completely bogus indictment, based off of letting actual traffickers go freein exchange for claims about Abrego, suddenly it turned out that they were able to bring him back to the US… to face these laughable charges.
Multiple judges have called out the frivolous nature of the charges, and the US government said “well if you free him, we’ll just traffic him to some random third country that isn’t El Salvador.”
Which brings us to this week’s judicial smackdown—and the government’s immediate decision to make its intentions to ignore it clear.
On Wednesday, Judge Waverly Crenshaw ordered that Abrego be released from detention. There’s a lot to the ruling, but in short, the court is not persuaded that Abrego is a flight risk:
The insufficiency of this evidence is underscored by what is not in the record that normally warrants a finding that a defendant is at risk for nonappearance. The Government has presented no evidence that Abrego has failed to appear for court proceedings in the past, that he failed to abide by the protective orders Ms. Vasquez took out against him, or that he has otherwise ever shown a pattern of disrespect for the law. Nor has the Government presented evidence that Abrego has the financial means to finance flight, even if he wanted to. To the contrary, the Court has evidence before it that suggests that if the Court released Abrego on conditions, he would comply. As the Pretrial Services Report demonstrates, Abrego has reported to an ICE officer on four separate occasions from October 23, 2020 to January 2, 2024. Further, as the THP body camera footage from November 30, 2022 demonstrates, when Abrego was pulled over that night, although not fully truthful, he did not flee or attempt to flee, was cooperative, answered the officer’s questions, and provided the officer with the information requested to the extent he was able to do so. This cuts against the notion that Abrego disrespects the law so much that he would voluntarily avoid future court proceedings or court orders if released.
Perhaps more importantly, the judge sees no reason to believe that Abrego is “a danger to the community.”
As the Court discussed above, the Government’s general statements about the crimes brought against Abrego, and the evidence it has in support of those crimes, do not prove Abrego’s dangerousness. See supra, Section III.B.2.a. Although the Government has presented evidence by a preponderance that Abrego transported minors, there is no solid evidence in the record indicating any of them, or others transported, were physically or emotionally harmed by Abrego. And Abrego is correct that these crimes are not those that are considered typically violent such that a presumption of detention is warranted. See supra, Section III.B.2.a. While the Court does give some weight to Agent Joseph’s testimony that CW-1 and CW-1 stated Abrego was involved with guns and drugs while participating in the human smuggling conspiracy, the Court notes that this testimony was based on witness statements that evolved throughout the interview process, and so it alone cannot show that Abrego is a danger to the community such that he cannot be released.
Those “evolving” witness statements are detailed by the court and make the claims by the informant—again who asked for and received protections from the US government for making these claims against Abrego—look pretty sketchy.
Indeed, the court calls out the DOJ’s “poor attempts” to claim that Abrego is a high-ranking member of MS-13. Or even connected to MS-13 at all, saying that the DOJ’s argument “border[ed] on fanciful.”
Nor does the Government’s poor attempts to tie Abrego to MS-13 get it there. Of the three witnesses Agent Joseph testified about that discussed Abrego’s purported affiliation with MS-13, the closest any of them come to stating that Abrego is a member of MS-13 is two witnesses stating he was “familial” with gang members and a third witness stating she “believed” him to be a member. Entirely absent from the record, however, are any indications that such “belief” is rooted in fact or that such “familial” nature came from his actual membership in or support of MS-13 rather than the simple fact that he, like many members of MS-13, is El Salvadorian. For instance, there is no evidence before the Court that Abrego: has markings or tattoos showing gang affiliation; has working relationships with known MS-13 members; ever told any of the witnesses that he is a MS-13 member; or has ever been affiliated with any sort of gang activity.12 To the contrary, Agent Joseph presented testimony based on statements from cooperating witnesses that Abrego transported both Barrio 18 and MS-13 members alike, and was cordial with both during those trips. This cuts against the already slim evidence demonstrating Abrego is a member of MS-13. Based on the record before it, for the Court to find that Abrego is member of or in affiliation with MS13, it would have to make so many inferences from the Government’s proffered evidence in its favor that such conclusion would border on fanciful.
The magistrate judge on that same case (the one who initially argued Abrego should be freed) has put a 30-day stay on the ruling to allow the government to appeal (meaning that Abrego Garcia will spend today, which apparently is his 30th birthday, still detained).
Around the same time, over in Maryland, Judge Paula Xinis, who is handling the original Abrego case (the “facilitate his return” case), issued an order saying that Abrego needs to be returned to Maryland, but more importantly put a ton of restrictions on the federal government not to fuck with Abrego:
By Order of this Court, Defendants (1) are prohibited from taking Abrego Garcia into immediate ICE custody in Tennessee; (2) must restore him to his ICE Order of Supervision in Baltimore; and (3) if they initiate third-country removal proceedings, must provide seventy-two (72) business hours’ notice to Abrego Garcia and his counsel of the intended third country, as more fully detailed below.
Judge Xinis reminds everyone how badly the DOJ fucked around on this case and notes in passing that sanctions are still on the line.
For three months after this Court issued the injunction, Defendants disclaimed any authority to facilitate his return and disregarded court orders. Defendants’ defiance and foot-dragging are, to be sure, the subject of a separate sanctions motion. ECF No. 195. The Court will not recount this troubling history in detail, other than to note Defendants’ persistent lack of transparency with the tribunal adds to why further injunctive relief is warranted.
Eventually, on June 6, 2025, Defendants returned Abrego Garcia much the same way they had removed him—in secret and with no advance notice. Nonetheless, he is back, and the first part of this Court’s injunctive relief has been met.But Defendants have demonstrated no appetite for fulfilling the second part: to restore Abrego Garcia to the status quo ante.
In a footnote, Judge Xinis separately notes that to this day, the government hasn’t even explained how Abrego got back and no one in the government—at any point—informed his family or lawyers, who all found out about it on the news.
The judge isn’t saying that the government can’t start immigration proceedings against him, but that it must actually allow for the kind of due process he’s been denied this year:
That said, once Abrego Garcia is restored to ICE supervision in this District, he may be ordered to appear at the Baltimore Field Office for commencement of immigration proceedings, and these proceedings may or may not include lawful arrest, detention and eventual removal. So long as such actions are taken within the bounds of the Constitution and applicable statutes, this Court will have nothing further to say.
But Judge Xinis wasn’t born yesterday. She knows how much the DOJ has been lying to her.
Defendants have done little to assure the Court that absent intervention, Abrego Garcia’s due process rights will be protected.
And this is where McLaughlin’s immediate violation becomes so telling. Rather than acknowledge the judicial findings or express any intent to comply with court orders, DHS doubled down on the same fabricated narrative that judges have systematically dismantled.
McLaughlin’s tweets weren’t just inappropriate—they were a confession. Hours after one judge ordered Abrego’s release and another explicitly prohibited DHS from taking him into ICE custody, McLaughlin declared he “will never walk America’s streets again”—publicly announcing the government’s intent to violate both orders.
Separately, Abrego’s lawyers filed a motion with Judge Crenshaw arguing that McLaughlin’s statements violate local court rules designed to protect defendants’ right to a fair trial. The filing makes clear this isn’t just about inappropriate tweeting:
These are exactly the kinds of statements that Local Criminal Rule 2.01 recognizes are likely to prejudice Mr. Abrego’s right to a fair trial, as Mr. Abrego has already argued about similar statements the government has made. (See Dkt 69 at 11-13; Dkt 94 at 2). The government has persisted in its efforts to use press statements outside of court to persuade the public of its allegation that Mr. Abrego is a member of MS-13—an allegation the Court described, just yesterday, as “border[ing] on the fanciful.” (Dkt. 95 at 32). These repeated public statements are likely to taint the jury pool. They are likely to endanger Mr. Abrego and his family. And they violate this Court’s Local Criminal Rules and Mr. Abrego’s due process rights.
Indeed, McLaughlin’s unhinged tweets seem only likely to help Abrego, as it makes it clear that since the government can’t stop lying about him, there’s no way he can get a fair trial.
But the real story here isn’t legal strategy—it’s the gleeful lawlessness on display. This isn’t bureaucratic incompetence or even garden-variety cover-ups. This is a government so committed to never admitting error that they will fabricate evidence, defy court orders, and publicly attack federal judges rather than acknowledge they accidentally trafficked an innocent man to a torture camp.
The cruelty isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. McLaughlin’s tweets weren’t a communications mistake—they were a deliberate middle finger to two federal courts and a public declaration that this administration considers itself above judicial oversight. They’d rather destroy one man’s life than admit their “mass deportation” strategy is a lawless mess that sends innocent people to be tortured.
That’s not just evil. It’s really fucking stupid evil, performed for an audience that cheers when government officials brag about ignoring judges. And that should terrify anyone who thinks courts might someday protect them from an out-of-control executive branch.
Book bans are all the rage these days, as you likely well know. Far too many people, and folks in government more importantly, seem to have read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 not as a lesson in the dangers of new media, but as some sort of instruction manual for how to treat literature. But the real story here is that a bunch of cowardly state and federal politicians are placating the desires largely of the religious right, who are seeking to tightly control the books that children have access to in public, secular schools. And if you can’t manage to understand how plainly that is the antithesis of our form of government, then you’re beyond help.
But because authoritarianism makes a fool of itself as a habit, and religiously-based authoritarianism all the moreso, then end result of these attempts at censorship always eventually reveal themselves as absurd. And if you need an example of that, you need only look at the state of Tennessee.
Magic Tree House author Mary Pope Osborne, children’s poet Shel Silverstein and Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson have joined Judy Blume, Sarah J. Maas, Eric Carle and Kurt Vonnegut on a mind-boggling list of hundreds of books purged from some Tennessee school libraries.
The removals are the result of a growing political movement to control information through book banning. In 2024, the state legislature amended the “Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022” to specify that any materials that “in whole or in part” contain any “nudity, or descriptions or depictions of sexual excitement, sexual conduct, excess violence, or sadomasochistic abuse” are inappropriate for all students and do not belong in a school library. This change means books are not evaluated as a whole, and excerpts can be considered without context, if they have any content that is deemed to cross these lines. This leaves no room for educators and librarians to curate collections that reflect the real world and serve the educational needs of today’s students.
And because you have groups of far-right activists marching around looking for any scintilla of material over which they can manufacture faux outrage, you get these examples of books being banned for their terrible, awful, smutty content. Such as a Magic Tree House, book that was banned because it had this pornographical image on its cover:
Special thanks to Mike Masnick for briefly allowing me to post porn images on BestNetTech. And for all of you whose naughty bits are currently twitching due to that book cover, I offer you my sincerest apologies.
But if you thought that was bad, check out this panel image from a Calvin & Hobbes book that got it banned. Here we have the nude image of a child on full display.
Now, I sure hope everyone realizes that the above is a dalliance into sarcasm, because I was laying it on quite thick. I grew up on Calvin & Hobbes, not to mention Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic, which was also banned. Why? More butts, that’s why. And, because the universe is not without a sense of irony, one school even had to ban a book authored by an alumnus.
Oak Ridge Schools, where a significant number of the bans target art history books, even removed Richard Jolley: Sculptor of Glass, a collection of works by the artist, who graduated from Oak Ridge High School.
“Regarding the book written by Mr. Jolley, we were thrilled to feature a book written by an ORHS alumni on our shelves and were equally disappointed to have to remove it,” Molly Gallagher Smith, an Oak Ridge Schools spokeswoman, told WBIR. “Unfortunately, as an artist, Mr. Jolley’s book features depictions of the human body that are in direct violation of the law.”
There are more and the bans hit all the notes you would expect: LGBTQ+ material, books about the Holocaust, books about African American contributions to government and science, and, because of course, Fahrenheit 451 itself.
Now, this is indeed all absurd, but it isn’t remotely funny. There is a ton of literature, hundreds of books, that are being banned under this Tennessee law. Many of them reportedly without going through any review process.
And many of the bans are coming without any review or discussion. The Tennessee Association of School Libraries found in a survey of its members that in 20% of school districts, books were removed from the shelves at the command of district leaders without any sort of review process. “Librarians and educators are concerned that we will end up pulling a massive amount of books without looking at the books as a whole,” one member said in the survey. “It’s a slippery slope,” said another, “and I’m fearful of the next topic that will be regulated.”
Open up book bans to the frothy-mouthed mob. What could possibly go wrong, other than keeping valuable literature out of the hands of our children?
New laws in Georgia and New Mexico are requiring harsher punishments for students — or anyone else — who make threats against schools, despite growing evidence that a similar law is ensnaring students who posed no risk to others.
ProPublica and WPLN News have documented how a 2024 Tennessee law that made threats of mass violence at school a felony has led to students being arrested based on rumors and for noncredible threats. In one case, a Hamilton County deputy arrested an autistic 13-year-old in August for saying his backpack would blow up, though the teen later said he just wanted to protect the stuffed bunny inside.
In the same county almost two months later, a deputy tracked down and arrested an 11-year-old student at a family birthday party. The child later explained he had overheard one student asking if another was going to shoot up the school tomorrow, and that he answered “yes” for him. Last month, the public charter school agreed to pay the student’s family $100,000 to settle a federal lawsuit claiming school officials wrongly reported him to police. The school also agreed to implement training on how to handle these types of incidents, including reporting only “valid” threats to police.
Tennessee requires schools to assess whether threats of mass violence are valid before expelling students. But the felony law does not hold police to the same standard, which has led to the arrests of students who had no intent to disrupt school or carry out a threat.
In Tennessee’s recent legislative session, civil and disability rights advocates unsuccessfully pushed to change the law to specify that police could arrest only students who make credible threats. They argued that very young students and students who act disruptively as a result of a disability should be excluded from felony charges.
Several Tennessee lawmakers from both parties also voiced their dissatisfaction with the school threats law during the session, citing the harm done to children who did not pose real danger. “I’m still struggling through the unintended consequences because I’m still not entirely happy with what we did before,” Sen. Kerry Roberts, a Republican, said at a committee hearing in April. “We’re still struggling to get that right.”
But Greg Mays, the deputy commissioner of the Department of Safety and Homeland Security, told a committee of lawmakers in March that in his “informed opinion,” the law was having a “deterrent effect” on students who make threats. Mays told ProPublica that the number of threats his office was tracking had decreased since the law went into effect. His office did not immediately release that number and previously denied requests for the number of threats it has tracked, calling the information “confidential.”
According to data ProPublica obtained through a records request, the number of students criminally charged is growing, not shrinking. This past school year through the end of March, the number of charges for threats of mass violence in juvenile court has jumped to 652, compared to 519 the entire previous school year, when it was classified as a misdemeanor. Both years, students were rarely found “delinquent,” which is equivalent to guilty in adult court. The youngest child charged so far this year is 6.
Rather than tempering its approach, Tennessee toughened it this year. The Legislature added another, higher-level felony to the books for anyone who “knowingly” makes a school threat against four or more people if others “reasonably” believe the threat will be carried out. Legal and disability rights advocates told lawmakers they worried the new law would result in even more confusion among police and school officials who handle threats.
Despite the outcry over increased arrests in Tennessee, two states followed its lead by passing laws that will crack down harder on hoax threats.
In New Mexico, lawmakers increased the charge for a shooting threat from a misdemeanor to a felony, in response to the wave of school threats over the previous year. To be charged with a felony, a person must “intentionally and maliciously” communicate the threat to terrorize others, cause the evacuation of a public building or prompt a police response.
Critics of the bill warned that even with the requirement to prove intent, it was written too vaguely and could harm students.
“This broad definition could criminalize what is described as ‘thought crimes’ or ‘idle threats,’ with implications for statements made by children or juveniles without a full appreciation of the consequences,” the public defenders’ office argued, according to a state analysis of an earlier, similar version of the legislation.
After a 14-year-old shot and killed four people at Apalachee High School in Georgia last September, the state’s House Speaker Jon Burns vowed to take tougher action against students who make threats.
He sponsored legislation that makes it a felony to issue a death threat against a person at a school that terrorizes people or causes an evacuation. The law, which went into effect in April, says someone can be charged either if they intend to cause such harm or if they make a threat “in reckless disregard of the risk” of that harm.
Neither Burns nor the sponsor of the New Mexico bill responded to requests for comment.
Georgia also considered a bill that would treat any 13- to 17-year-old who makes a terroristic threat at school as an adult in court. But after pushback from advocates, the bill’s author, Sen. Greg Dolezal, a Republican, removed threats from the list of offenses that could result in transfer to adult court.
During a March committee hearing, Dolezal acknowledged advocates’ concerns with the original bill language. “We recognize that there is actually a difference between people who actually commit these crimes and minors who are unwisely threatening but perhaps without an intent to ever actually follow through on it,” he said.
Other states also considered passing harsher penalties for school threats.
In Alabama, Rep. Alan Baker, a Republican, sponsored a bill that removes the requirement that a threat be “credible and imminent” to result in a criminal charge. The bill passed easily in both chambers but did not go through the final steps necessary to make it through the Legislature.
Baker said the broader version of the penalty was intended to target hoax threats that cause panic at schools. A first offense would be a misdemeanor; any threats after that would be a felony. “You’re just talking about a very disruptive type of scenario, even though it may be determined that it was just a hoax,” Baker said. “That’s why there needed to be something that would be a little bit more harsh.”
Baker told ProPublica that he plans to reintroduce the bill next session.
Pennsylvania is considering legislation that would make threats against schools a felony, regardless of credibility. The bill would also require offenders to pay restitution, including the cost of supplies and compensation for employees’ time spent responding to the threat.
In a memo last December, state Sen. Michele Brooks, a Republican, cited the “cruel and extremely depraved hoax” threats following Nashville’s Covenant School shooting as the reason for the proposal. “These calls triggered a massive emergency response, creating perilous conditions for students, teachers and public safety agencies alike,” she wrote.
The ACLU of Pennsylvania opposes the legislation, calling it a “broad expansion” of current law that could lead to “excessive” costs for children.
Pennsylvania’s Legislature adjourns at the end of December.
There are lots of things we could be doing to limit school shootings. But none of those have been tried because most people, lobbyists, and politicians continue to believe issuing “thoughts and prayers” statements while standing on children’s graves is the absolute utmost they should be expected to do.
Instead of common sense measures that have managed to keep every other First World country almost completely free of school shootings, the US continues to take a hands-off approach… I mean, not counting the pallbearers asked to deliver innocent children to their final place of rest.
One of the so-called solutions is making tech companies richer while not actually making kids any safer. Lots of firms are offering “gun detection tech” to schools which seem to be more prone to false positives than life-saving gun detections.
While a lot of recent attention has been directed at Evolv — due to its failures pretty much everywhere (hospitals, schools, subways) it’s been deployed — this recent tragedy adds another tech company to the list of entities that are well-meaning, but ultimately useless, when lives are on the line. Here’s the latest bad news/worse news, as reported by Nashville (TN) Fox affiliate, WZTV.
The technology system meant to prevent school shootings failed to detect the Antioch High School shooter’s gun, an official confirms.
A Metro Nashville Public Schools’ spokesperson says based on the camera location and the shooter in relation to the camera, it did not detect the weapon.
MNPS adds the camera did activate an alarm trigger when law enforcement and school resource officers arrived with their weapons.
The technology, Omnialert, is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) gun detection used in all Metro Schools.
Gun detection tech isn’t much use when it only detects weapons carried by law enforcement officers deployed to neutralize an active shooter. Obviously, everyone in the building and the underperforming AI expected an armed response to a school shooting. “Detecting” blatantly obvious things isn’t anyone’s definition of “detection,” a term that’s normally associated with acts of intuition where things not immediately apparent are sussed out by instinct, skill, or… I don’t know… reliable tech.
I’m sure Omnilert appreciates the inadvertent typo, which will help muddy the search results and brush a bit of its earned shame off its shoulders. The company is Omnilert and it claims it’s the ultimate blend of military know-how and AI magic. (Omnialert is a brand linked to othernon-gun detection products.)
Our expertise in AI has roots in the U.S. Department of Defense and DARPA related to real-time target recognition and threat classification. That military focus on high reliability and precision carried through to the development of our AI threat detection that goes beyond identifying guns to finding active shooter threats.
We employ a data-centric AI methodology that prioritizes high-quality training data. While traditional methods focus on data volume, sourcing millions of gun images, we take a quality-over-quantity approach. Our training data is hand-curated with rich annotations that improve accuracy and increase reliability.
Cool cool cool. Thanks for letting us know your failure was bespoke (“hand-curated”), rather than just off-the-shelf “hey man is that a gun” detection algos that aren’t backstopped by human assistance. If nothing else, it lets us know the company has a bit of blood on its “curating” hands before we even have to enter the discovery phase of post-school shooting litigation.
503 mass shootings in the U.S. and 330 incidents in schools highlight the ongoing need to provide layers of protection including technologies such as AI visual gun detection
… and ends with this:
Protect your people, facilities, and operations with Omnilert’s AI-powered visual gun detection. Act now to transform your security cameras into proactive, life-saving tools.
Maybe the tech is better than this very limited sample size shows. Maybe it isn’t. Either way, it failed when it mattered most, resulting in the killing of one student and the wounding of another. And only the most extreme cynic would claim that’s an acceptable loss in comparison to other mass shootings.
Taxpayers were asked (although not explicitly) to pay for a product that didn’t do the only thing it’s supposed to do when it mattered most. And most likely they’ll be expected to keep paying for it because it might do the job the next time around. There are many useful ways to limit gun violence, but this nation will never go for them. Instead, we’ll just keep sacrificing kids to the AI gods because somehow that’s more acceptable than asking citizens to subject themselves to a bit more scrutiny before being allowed to purchase and carry deadly weapons.
Well, that didn’t take long. A short-lived win for civil liberties and the Free Speech Coalition has been undone by the Sixth Circuit Appeals court. The reasoning behind the roll back of the injunction are questionable, to say the least.
The legislature has a compelling interest in protecting children from harmful content, and that is uncontested. But in its attempt to protect children, the State will unavoidably suppress a large amount of speech that adults have a First Amendment right to give and receive. The legislature’s goal, however admirable, does not allow it to undermine an adult’s freedom of speech. Neither the legislature nor this Court can turn a blind eye to the Constitution.
Of most concern was the disturbing amount of vagueness in a law that couldn’t seem to define what was or wasn’t covered by it. It also provided no guidance as to how sites were supposed to determine if the content they hosted was more than 30% pornographic. Here’s a quote from one affected site owner the lower court included as a footnote:
“I do not know whether to evaluate the running time of the videos, the lines of code required to display the videos, the size of the files containing viewable content, or some other metric. For that matter, I do not know how to compare text to photos, or photos to videos.”
It also provided no clear directions as to how to go about age verification, while saddling affected sites (and sites that might be affected if someone bringing action against them came up with 30% by using different math) with the burden of figuring this out on their own. No service or method was declared to be acceptable, meaning any choice made to comply with the law might end up being the wrong one.
The lower court said it was extremely intrusive (and obviously unconstitutional) to demand adults give up their privacy to access content they had every legal right to access. And it made even less sense to apply this imposition to users accessing sites where more than two-thirds of the content isn’t considered “harmful to minors” under the statute.
None of that matters to the Sixth Circuit. The law is good, says the appeals court, because some stuff on porn sites is objectively bad. It’s common sense arguments versus moral panic at the Sixth, and the moral panic-ists have the upper hand, at least for the moment. From the order [PDF] staying the injunction:
Tennessee’s law seeks to protect children from the devastating effects of easy access to on-demand pornography. These effects are well-documented; they include social disengagement, increased delinquency, mental health and body-image difficulties (especially for girls), riskier and earlier sexual behaviors and increased transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, increased objectification of women and stereotyping, and greater likelihoods of committing and suffering sexual violence. R. 29-2, Principi Study, PageID 480-82.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. One celebrated investigation of a leading pornography site found the site ‘infested with rape videos’ and described how it ‘monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags.’ Nicholas Kristof, The Children of Pornhub, N.Y. Times (Dec. 4, 2020). And that barely even scratches the surface. Searches for ‘girls under 18’ or ’14yo’ yielded hundreds of thousands of results. This content corrodes healthy childhood development and poisons impressionable minds; pornography sites will show kids ‘how to have anal sex long before they’ve had their first kiss.’ Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness 105 (2024).
Children can’t buy cigarettes or alcohol, much less visit a strip club, but in the online Wild West, anything goes for anyone of any age. Children’s easy access to hardcore internet pornography, made possible by modern computers and smartphones, is part of what one social psychologist has called ‘the Great Rewiring of Childhood.’ Id. at 35
That’s the counterargument presented by the court. It barely asks Tennessee AG Jonathan Skrmetti to argue anything more than “no, it isn’t” when confronting several well thought-out assertions of unconstitutionality.
The last citation is probably the worst:
What’s more, other circuits (and the Supreme Court) have let similar state laws go into effect. The Fifth Circuit vacated a preliminary injunction and determined that Texas’s age-verification law was likely constitutional because under Ginsberg v. New York, (1968), laws regulating speech that is obscene for minors need only satisfy rational-basis review. Free Speech Coal. v. Paxton, (5th Cir. 2024), stay denied 144 S. Ct. 1473 (mem.), cert. granted 144 S. Ct. 2714 (mem.). And when the Supreme Court granted certiorari, it declined to block Texas’s law pending appeal. 144 S. Ct. 1473 (mem.); 144 S. Ct. 2714 (mem.). The Seventh Circuit then stayed an injunction against Indiana’s age-verification law, letting the law go into effect while the Supreme Court considered the Paxton case.
What’s more, this certain appellate court that has spent the last few years engaging in some truly batshit interpretations of the First Amendment vacated an injunction and this Supreme Court, which has spent the last few years engaging in some truly batshit interpretations of all sorts of constitutional rights, didn’t put it back in place. And then another circuit entirely simply chose to hold off until an extremely relevant case was fully decided.
That’s not a judgment on the merits of the arguments in front of this court. This is just a judge clearly sympathetic to Tennessee’s case finding reasons to let the law go into effect while it tosses it back to the lower court with no clear instructions as to what it’s supposed to do with this quasi-op-ed the Sixth Circuit is pretending is an order that actually has something to say about the issues at hand.
As Michael McGrady pointed out in his recent guest post for BestNetTech, nearly 41 percent of Americans subject to age verification laws targeting porn and, of course, porn consumers. An emboldened pseudo-theocratic wing of the Republican party is taking everything old and unconstitutional and making it new again, presumably in hopes of sliding it past courts now staffed with Trump’s personal picks.
Fortunately, that percentage has dipped a bit in recent days. For how long remains to be seen, but the Free Speech Coalition (which is also suing the state of Florida over similar legislation) has secured an injunction blocking Tennessee’s age verification law.
The federal court decision [PDF] is a thoroughly enjoyable read, not just for its unabashed support for First Amendment rights, but also its extremely choice selection of citations, asides, and direct quotes from the Free Speech Coalition’s lawsuit.
The first paragraph is an absolute banger:
The First Amendment is not shy in its protective sweep. It sits at the top of our Bill of Rights as the “star in our constitutional constellation” because its light reaches orthodox and unorthodox expression alike. 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, 600 U.S. 570, 584–85 (2023) (quoting West Virginia Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943)). To be sure, freedom of speech is not absolute. But the door preventing the state from intruding into this area “must be kept tightly closed and opened only the slightest crack necessary” to promote state interests. Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557, 563 (1969) (quoting Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476, 488 (1957)). Based on the record at this stage, it appears that Tennessee has wedged its foot in the door farther than the Constitution will likely tolerate.
The second paragraph is just as solid.
The Protect Tennessee Minors Act stands in a graveyard full of similar content-based restrictions at the state and federal level that lived—and died—before it. It imposes criminal and civil liability on any individual or commercial entity that publishes a website comprised of one-third content that is harmful to minors without first verifying that each visitor is at least eighteen years old. 2024 Tenn. Pub. Acts, ch. 1021, § 1 (to be codified at Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-17-912) (“PTMA”). Plaintiffs seek to enjoin the Attorney General from enforcing the PTMA before it becomes effective on January 1, 2025. Not only does the PTMA suffer from the same First Amendment fatalities as the state and federal laws that came before it, it also uniquely exacerbates those shortcomings in its overbreadth.
And the state’s “for the children” protestations are swept away before the third paragraph is even complete.
The legislature has a compelling interest in protecting children from harmful content, and that is uncontested. But in its attempt to protect children, the State will unavoidably suppress a large amount of speech that adults have a First Amendment right to give and receive. The legislature’s goal, however admirable, does not allow it to undermine an adult’s freedom of speech. Neither the legislature nor this Court can turn a blind eye to the Constitution.
Ah. That’s refreshing. Just a pure blast of constitutional righteousness, both in its original form and the way the hippies use the term. (Just to make it clear, my compliment of choice is “groovy,” which is similarly dated slang but at least was last uttered by a man with a chainsaw for an arm.)
The law is also ridiculous, on top of being unconstitutional. It mandates hourly verification of the user’s age. It requires websites that contain more than a third “harmful to minors” content (also vaguely defined) to collect and keep users’ personal information. However, the government graciously allows sites to use any “commercially reasonable method” to accomplish this intrusion, but does not provide any examples of what methods the state would find acceptable.
A footnote quoting one of the targeted websites makes it clear how impractical and unworkable this law is (here discussing the one-third content specification), even if it were constitutional.
“I do not know whether to evaluate the running time of the videos, the lines of code required to display the videos, the size of the files containing viewable content, or some other metric. For that matter, I do not know how to compare text to photos, or photos to videos.”
But it isn’t constitutional, so the court doesn’t need to address that specific complaint. However, it does take care to point it out because idiot legislators should be forced to confront the stupidity of their own mandates.
Speaking of being forced to confront, the court drops another bit of bench-slapping on the state, with another pithy citation.
In its crusade against internet pornography, Tennessee would “burn the house to roast the pig.” See Butler v. Michigan, 352 U.S. 380, 383 (1957). The First Amendment undoubtedly requires more precision than this kind of scorched-earth approach.
The state argued that this was no different that the recently challenged anti-drag show law that was recently (and narrowly) allowed to continue existing by the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court. But this court says these aren’t remotely the same thing, even if both laws supposedly have the same goal: preventing kids from accessing adult content.
The AEA’s burden on adult speech is not comparable to the burden at issue here. There is a stark difference between requiring a brick-and-mortar location to spare one second to check government issued identification and requiring a website to pay a substantial amount of money to a third party to electronically verify a user’s age in a manner that is not easily circumvented. Moreover, while an individual attending an event in-person has already given up some modicum of privacy to do so, an adult inside his home using his computer to access a website has not.
Only legislators who believe it’s their god-given duty (and I mean that possibly literally) to foist their morality on everyone else would think this sort of thing would survive a constitutional review.
[T]he PTMA forces adult content creators to take costly measures to display constitutionally protected material, and it forces adult content consumers to give up their privacy to access material they have a constitutional right to access. The PTMA creates this barrier to constitutionally protected speech even if two-thirds of the content available on the website is not deemed harmful to minors.
And only legislators more interested in censoring than governing would allow this garbled language to land on the governor’s desk unaltered, replete with contradictions and a total lack of internal coherency.
Even if the Court narrowly construes subpart (i) to make it redundant, this would not save the PTMA. Subpart (ii) is separated from subpart (i) of subsection (A) by another disjunctive. PTMA § (b)(5)(A). This means that content that “principally consists of” an enumerated organ or act is subject to the regulation even if it is not “designed to appeal to or pander to the prurient interest” and even if it is not “sexually explicit and harmful or inappropriate for minors.”
Moreover, there is no requirement for these forbidden depictions to be patently offensive. In essence, “text” that “principally consists of” the words “pubic hair, vulva, vagina, penis, testicles, anus, or nipple” does not even have to be “harmful” for minors to fall under the definition of “content harmful to minors.” The AG argues that this is irrelevant because the catch-all provision at the end requires that the text be measured by its value. But that catch-all provision would not solve this problem—just because content may not have serious value for minors does not make it harmful for them. Plaintiffs emphasize, and this Court agrees, that under the PTMA, the mere phrase “the human nipple” and the symbols “(o)(o)” would be subject to the age-verification requirement so long as they lack serious value for minors, even though they would not qualify as obscene.
The state gets completely owned here. It’s 36 pages of the court repeatedly telling legislators and the state AG that they are wrong, occasionally interrupted by a little procedural paperwork dealing with standing and standards of review. Every argument raised by the state is shut down. Every citation immediately countered.
For now, Tennessee’s age verification law is dead. But hope springs eternal in the hearts of these haters. It won’t stay dead forever. However, the First Amendment isn’t going anywhere either, and this particular needle doesn’t appear to have a hole that can be threaded, no matter how many times legislators head back for a rewrite.
This stop may not have been all that pretextual — after all, the officer clocked the driver doing 69 mph in a 55 mph speed limit — but it swiftly turned pretextual for reasons the officer couldn’t competently explain.
And that’s what cost the officer (and the prosecution) their evidence. Back in 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that traffic stops end when the objective of the stop has been completed. That means that once a driver has been issued a warning or citation, they’re free to go.
Recognizing this might cramp their preferred pretextual style, officers increased the number of questions they asked of drivers and slow-walked the other steps required to complete a traffic stop. Because nothing makes a pretext more useless than actually having to engage with the stated objective of the traffic stop.
Well, lots of lower courts have already spotted this shift in tactics and responded accordingly. The key point wasn’t “completing” the “objective” of the stop. The real point made by the Rodriguez decision was that cops could no longer extend traffic stops without sufficient reasonable suspicion to do so. And that’s where cops keep tripping over themselves.
In this case, handled by the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court, the officer stumbled more than most when defending her unreasonably extended traffic stop in court. Officer Kristen Cox, who was a member of the Knoxville (TN) Police Department’s “drug interdiction team,” pulled over Nathaniel Taylor for speeding on Interstate 275. She asked Taylor for his license, registration, and insurance information. Taylor complied, but had trouble locating his insurance info.
Officer Cox told him to keep looking for his proof of insurance, telling him he could avoid a ticket if he could find it. Then she went back to her car to run his license. When she did, she discovered he had a criminal record.
Then she made her first stab at generating enough reasonable suspicion to extend the stop. And then she immediately undercut her own narrative when testifying in court. From the decision [PDF]:
Back in her patrol car, Officer Cox checked Taylor’s records and discovered that he had a criminal history involving weapons, assaults, and simple possession of drugs. Meanwhile, she also observed him making large reaching movements in his car, which she acknowledged were consistent with rummaging for the proof of insurance that she asked him to look for.
Not a great start. But then it got worse.
Taylor eventually found documentation and flagged down Officer Cox by waving his hand and insurance paper out of the driver’s side window. When Officer Cox returned to Taylor’s vehicle, Taylor handed her an insurance bill, which Officer Cox accepted as sufficient documentation. Officer Cox informed him that she would not ticket him for driving without insurance. She also told Taylor not to make any further movements because he was making her nervous. But Officer Cox also acknowledged that the movements were because “[Taylor] was doing what [she] asked.”
You can’t have it both ways, although many cops believe (and attest) that they should. They should be able to issue conflicting orders and react to partial compliance as a dangerous form of potential violence, rather than just the actions of someone attempting to do the impossible.
The officer returned to her car to write the speeding ticket. But rather than just do that, she also requested a K-9 unit due to the fact that she had observed air fresheners in the car, Taylor’s criminal history, and her disbelief in Taylor’s stated travel plans — plans he had never stated because he was only asked where he was coming from (a job interview at a nearby business according to Taylor) but never asked where he was going. Those aren’t “travel plans” and, as such, cannot legitimately be considered reasonably suspicious.
Nonethless, the drug dog arrived and did the thing, which gave officers permission to perform a warrantless search of Taylor’s car. Despite the dog supposedly “alerting,” no drugs were found. The only thing officers found was a gun that Taylor wasn’t allowed to possess as a convicted felon. A grand jury indicted him and the case went to trial.
The trial court ruled the stop was not unlawfully extended and allowed the results of the search to be admitted as evidence. The Sixth Circuit court, however, restores Taylor’s rights and affirms the findings of the Supreme Court’s Rodriguez decision. This stop was unlawfully extended because Officer Cox never had the reasonable suspicion required to take it past the point of its stated objective: the speeding cited when Cox first pulled Taylor over.
First, the court shoots down the officer’s claim about “suspicious” travel plans by pointing out she didn’t have enough information on hand to draw the inferences she stated in support of extending the stop.
Here, after learning that Taylor had just come from a job interview, Officer Cox “didn’t feel like he took the most efficient route to get” to the address on his driver’s license. But Officer Cox never asked Taylor where he was going. In fact, she admitted that she just made a guess about where Taylor was headed.
That Officer Cox felt Taylor had too many air fresheners in his car doesn’t matter either.
Like the value of a defendant’s criminal history, the strong odor of air fresheners during a traffic stop plays more of a supporting role to other, stronger indicators of criminal activity in making the reasonable-suspicion determination. But here, there is no evidence of an odor, rendering the presence of air fresheners even less probative.Officer Cox did not indicate a strong smell of air fresheners, any trace odor of marijuana, or any other suspicious scent in Taylor’s vehicle. Quite the opposite: she said she did not “smell anything.” Rather, she merely observed that Taylor had several air fresheners on his gear shift. So we give little weight to the air fresheners on the gear shift of Taylor’s vehicle.
In totality, it doesn’t add up. Separately, the factors are weak. Combined into a whole — including Officer Cox testifying that movements made by Taylor in response to her direct request for insurance documentation were somehow also suspicious — there’s still not enough to justify extending the stop, much less the search that followed it.
The threshold for reasonable suspicion may be low, but it is not nonexistent. Thus, we hold that Officer Cox lacked a reasonable, articulable suspicion of criminal activity that justified extending Taylor’s stop to conduct a dog sniff.
And there’s no “good faith exception” to save the day. As the Appeals Court points out, “good faith” is an exception that applies to searches predicated on questionable warrants and no warrant was used here.
[We] decline to extend the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule to salvage unconstitutional Terry stops.
The evidence is gone, which means there’s no case and no chance for a conviction. Officer Cox went fishing and managed to land a felon-in-possession. But while lots of courts will go out of their way to ensure law enforcement’s fish don’t get tossed back in the proverbial lake, the Sixth Circuit isn’t willing to play that game — not with these stakes (constitutional rights) and this almost complete lack of suspicion any court (much less cop) should call “reasonable.”
Like a bunch of other states run by people who hate the people they serve (except for the people who harbor the same hatred), Tennessee has decided it should get into the book-banning business — years after literal Nazis made this sort of thing politically untenable. Or so we thought.
Now, before the pedants step in to criticize the headline, I understand the law doesn’t actually authorize book bans. But it achieves the same end result by creating a long (but vague) list of content that supposedly isn’t appropriate for schoolchildren, no matter what their ages. And then it goes further by requiring schools to maintain and post lists of all books in their libraries, as well as humor “challenges” raised by activist groups that just want to see the immediate removal of content they don’t like.
Unsurprisingly, the books “challenged” the most are ones that contain anything remotely LGBTQ-related, as well as anything that might portray minorities in a positive light and/or white Americans in a negative light, even if the books factually depict historical events.
At a school board meeting in Wilson County on Thursday, Director of Schools Jeff Luttrell included in his report a full list of 390 books that have been banned by the county. The titles include “The Green Mile” by Steven King, “Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold, “Wacky Wednesday” by Dr. Seuss, “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline, “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead and more.
Wilson County Schools has removed about 425 book titles from its shelves to comply with new state law that went into effect July 1 prohibiting books and materials with references to sex and violence in public school libraries, according to a new report.
And there may be more to add to that list in the near future, according to the district’s public information officer, Bart Barker.
“This is an ongoing process,” Barker said as librarians continue to meet regularly “to get a collective opinion,” about book titles that should be pulled from schools based on the law.
This is supposedly the full list [PDF] of books removed by Wilson County Schools. A brief scan of the list will make it clear a lot of what’s being removed contains subject matter people with [vomit] “conservative values” which to see erased from public discourse. And the rest of it just appears to be content that fits within the extremely vague, overly-broad list of things the state feels even high school students shouldn’t be allowed to access, even if they do so on a daily basis away from schools.
It’s stupid and abhorrent. And it’s also a very popular thing to do. Full-time censors working for the government have aligned themselves with censorial hobbyists who spend their copious amounts of free time raising book challenges, yelling about stuff at school board meetings, and otherwise doing everything they can to force the government to force other people to comply with their narrow-minded worldview. At this point, we’re only a can of gas and a handful of matches away from government-ordained book burnings. It’s not going to take too many more elections to push this nation over the edge, set it adrift from its free speech moorings, and place us under the heels of people who pretend to be public servants while doing everything they can to keep the public as subservient as possible.
