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Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 150 stations and on Apple podcast. Law and Disorder provides timely legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and practices of torture exercised by the US government and private corporations.
Law and Disorder January 27, 2025
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The First Amendment And TikTok
On January 17, for the first time in modern American history, a unanimous US Supreme Court upheld a sweeping prior restraint on free speech imposed by Congress banning over 170 million users in the United States from having access to the popular social media platform TikTok that the Court itself admitted “allows users to create, publish, view, share, and interact with short videos overlaid with audio and text.” In 2023 alone, U. S. TikTok users uploaded more than 5.5 billion videos, which were in turn viewed more than 13 trillion times around the world. The avoid the ban, the law requires TikTok’s parent company, the China-based ByteDance, to divest its ownership.
From January 18 to 19, the ban was in effect for about 12 hours until Donald Trump tweeted that as President he would grant a stay of execution, pending a potential sale of TikTok. It was only 12 hours some may say, but it is estimated that during that time the ban blocked 6,750,000 videos that would have been viewed over 178,000,000 times worldwide. The ban is easily the most extensive act of censorship in human history.
Shortly after he was sworn in, Trump signed an Executive Order purporting to suspend the ban for 75 days. Serious questions have been raised whether Trump’s order is legal and enforceable. And despite his order, Apple and Google have still not reinstated TikTok at their stores preventing new subscribers from accessing TikTok.
Meanwhile, the First Amendment rights of 170 million TikTok users hang in the balance.
Guest – Ramya Krishnan is a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School. Her litigation focuses on issues related to government transparency, protest, privacy, and social media. Ramya co-authored the Knight Institute’s amicus brief in TikTok. v. Garland, one of the lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the TikTok ban which resulted in the Supreme Court’s decision. Read Amicus Brief
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Federal Court Rejects Attempt To Remove Ethnic Studies Curriculum
As Israel’s war in Gaza and the West Bank rages on, the free speech battles here in the United States continue with Congress, state legislatures and college administrators trying to silence pro-Palestinian protests by conflating criticism of Israel with the odious epithet of “antisemitism.” Pro-Palestinian groups are being banned, students are being disciplined, and faculty members are being suspended and fired.
But last November, there was some hopeful news when a federal court rejected attempts by Jewish parents and teachers to remove an ethnic studies curriculum from the Los Angeles Unified School District that they had labelled “antisemitic” and “anti-Zionist.”
On November 30, 2024, in a 49-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Fernando M. Olguin wrote that a system of education “which discovers truth out of a multitude of tongues” must allow teachers and their students “to explore difficult and conflicting ideas.” He added that “we must be careful not to curb intellectual freedom by imposing dogmatic restrictions that chill teachers from adopting the pedagogical methods they believe are most effective,”
The ruling represents a welcome rebuke to the efforts of Republican state legislators and conservative parent groups to try to restrict the teaching of comprehensive American history in public schools, to ban books that examine that history as well as racism, sexism, and LGBTQ issues, and to eliminate programs that seek to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion in American education.
In 2022, a group calling itself “Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles,” comprised of what the lawsuit calls Jewish, Zionist teachers and parents of students sued the Los Angeles Unified School District; United Teachers of Los Angeles; its president Cecily Myart-Cruz; the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium; Theresa Montaño, the Consortium’s secretary; and Guadalupe Carrasco, its co-founder.
To discuss the important free speech and academic freedom issues involved in this case, we’ve invited the lawyer who represented the ethnic studies curriculum, Ms Montano and Ms Carrasco.
Guest – Mark Kleiman is a former activist and organizer and a long-time civil rights and human rights attorney. With extensive experience in whistleblower protection, he has brought cases that exposed massive fraud against public programs and has forced drug companies, nursing home chains, and defense contractors to repay hundreds of millions of dollars. Since 2019 he has devoted thousands of hours to defending activists, scholars, and students who have been attacked for their defense of Palestinian human rights.
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Law and Disorder January 20, 2025
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Malcolm X Shabazz et al. v. USA
A groundbreaking legal case seeks justice for the family of most iconic civil rights leaders, Malcolm X. In an unprecedented lawsuit filed by his daughters, the Shabazz family is challenging the U.S. government, the City of New York, and several high-ranking law enforcement agencies. At the heart of the case is the claim that state actors, including the FBI and NYPD, played an active role in the assassination of Malcolm X on February 22, 1965, and that this involvement has been systematically covered up for decades.
This suit, Malcolm X Shabazz et al. v. USA, not only seeks justice for the wrongful death of Malcolm X but aims to hold the government accountable for its complicity in the assassination. The case draws on newly uncovered evidence that links federal agencies to the events surrounding Malcolm X’s death, as well as the subsequent framing and wrongful conviction of two men who were exonerated in 2021.
The legal team behind this case includes civil rights attorneys Benjamin Crump and G. Flint Taylor, and if successful, their argument could rewrite the historical narrative surrounding one of America’s tragic and significant moments. At the core of this case is the question: How deep was the state’s involvement in silencing Malcolm X? Was the assassination part of a coordinated campaign by law enforcement agencies determined to prevent the rise of powerful Black leaders? The lawsuit raises profound questions about the government’s role in suppressing movements for racial justice and civil rights, both in the past and in the present.
Guest – Flint Taylor of the Peoples Law Office. Flint represented the family of Fred Hampton and revealed that the FBI and Chicago Police Department murdered him in 1969. Flint is an editor of the Police Misconduct Law Reporter and is author of The Torture Machine: Racism And Police Violence In Chicago.
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A History Of Anti-Black Racism
National chauvinism and racism are essential features of fascism. The practice of white racism in the United States during the Jim Crow era was something that Hitler’s party in Germany studied and emulated. This kind of anti-black racism went on in the United States from shortly after the Civil War up until the 1960s. It has never really gone away as the mass mobilizations of the Black Lives Matter movement has recently demonstrated. This Black resistance, this fight back, will be a central aspect of anti-fascist activity in the future.
Guest – Bill Mullen is professor emeritus of American studies at Purdue University and the co-founder of The Campus Anti-fascist Network. He’s also co-author of The Black Antifascist Tradition and his new book published last month We Charge Genocide: American Ashes and the Rule of Law.
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Law and Disorder January 13, 2025
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Remembering The Legacy of Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter passed away on December 29, 2024, at the age of 100. His legacy in human rights has left an indelible mark on global diplomacy. Elected in 1977 as the 39th President of the United States, Carter made human rights a central theme of his administration. He believed that as a global power, the US had a responsibility to champion freedom, dignity, and justice for all people, regardless of nationality or political system. This vision led to the introduction of policies aimed at addressing both the internal injustices within the U.S. and the broader human rights violations occurring around the world.
One of Carter’s most significant achievements in this realm was his focus on condemning authoritarian regimes and promoting democratic movements. His administration applied pressure on governments, particularly in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, to uphold human rights standards, often linking U.S. foreign aid and diplomatic relations to a country’s record on human rights. Though controversial at times—especially in relation to U.S. alliances with regimes like those in Iran and Egypt—Carter’s commitment to human rights was revolutionary in its directness.
Beyond policy, Carter also helped create lasting institutions that would carry forward his vision. The Carter Center, founded in 1982, became a beacon for promoting democracy, advancing health, and improving human rights globally. Through the Center, Carter personally monitored elections, mediated peace talks, and worked to eliminate diseases that disproportionately affected the world’s most vulnerable populations. After leaving office, Carter’s work as a human rights advocate set a new precedent for U.S. foreign policy, showing that human rights can—and should—be a priority in shaping international relations and peace efforts.
Guest – Mischa Geracoulis is a journalist and critical media literacy expert. Mischa is the Curriculum Development Coordinator at Project Censored, and serves on the editorial board of the Censored Press and The Markaz Review. She writes about journalistic ethics and standards, press and academic freedoms, identity and culture, and the protracted disinformation campaign against the Armenian Genocide. She is author of the forthcoming book to be published by Routledge, Media Framing and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage.
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War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine
The United States is engaged in constant, if often invisible, wars. Or, if not invisible, at least not accurately and fully reported on in the corporate media. Thereby leaving the people of the United States far from fully informed as to what and where U.S. military troops are stationed or engaged in military action. For example, while there has been a great deal of media coverage of the U.S. supported Israeli war in Palestine, one would have needed to pay extra close attention to that coverage to know that the U.S., even before that war began, had 40,000 U.S. troops stationed in the area. Or that the Biden Administration has just recently sent at least 1,500 more to join them. And how many of us know that late last year retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick, said that, and I quote: “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. Everyone understands that we (Israel) can’t fight this war without the United States.
So last year, Norman Solomon, our guest today, wrote a much noted and much-admired book titled, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine. And that book has just been reissued with an up-dated afterword about the Gaza War, by the author. Naomi Klein, best-selling author of The Shock Doctrine, says the book is “A Staggeringly Important Intervention”. Noam Chomsky, says Solomon’s book is a “gripping and painful study of the mechanisms behind our invisible, but perpetual, national state of war.”
Guest – Norman Solomon is the co-founder of RootsAction.org and Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, and is, in fact, the author or co-author, of 12 books, most touching on today’s topic in either close or tangential ways. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
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