#slapps

First, here is what the bill is for people who want to read about it:

Link to bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/188/all-info

Summary of the bill:

"It is a bill that prohibits federal employees and contractors from directing online platforms to censor any speech that is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and for other purposes."

I have not heard of this bill ,BUT I personally think that it is a win for free speech! I am all for free speech, even opinions that I don't necessarily believe in or promote. I also think individuals should be able to face the consequences/be held accountable for saying bad things using their free speech by the public/law (if it goes against a law in that country).

This bill also targets SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation): This is a legal tatic to intimidate/silence critics by burdening them with expensive/baseless lawsuits rather than on lawsuits with merit. For example: They might target a group talking about environmental issues to drain their resources in order for them not to talk about that issue anymore!

Link to more on the bill:

https://raskin.house.gov/2024/12/raskin-wyden-kiley-introduce-bipartisan-legislation-promoting-free-speech-cracking-down-on-frivolous-strategic-lawsuits-against-public-participation

Religion News Association Conference panel talk

What Reporters are Getting Wrong: Lawsuits, Bias and the Nature of Truth” - David Johnson, a former reporter and editor at the Odessa American in Texas, was one of four Seattle-area Satanists known as “Queer Satanic” who were sued by The Satanic Temple from 2020 to 2024 in federal and state courts.

We're still working on getting a full transcript and captions generated for this, but the non-bootleg version of the talk David of @QueerSatanic gave in April is finally available.

Now, after this talk was delivered, The Satanic Temple did end up appealing its district court loss against Newsweek and its reporter Julia Duin for writing about us, so unfortunately that story has not got a happy ending yet.

Meanwhile, TST co-owner Doug Misicko ("Lucien Greaves") continues to have a very normal one, talking about the case on his Substack but without, yanno, linking back to the court case or any of the filings he references, or any outgoing links it seems like, actually. Misicko's sycophantic audience will likely not notice or care, but one would hope at some point folk would want to look at the docket and filings for themselves instead of trusting a guy who keeps losing court cases to accurately describe why his abusive religious organization keeps getting its shit kicked in.

Maybe we'll do a closer reading of Misicko's article, maybe not. But The Satanic Temple sued us repeatedly and lost repeatedly. TST sued a magazine and reporter for writing about us, and they lost. TST and its owners are as incompetent as they are malicious.

They may threaten you or even sue you for speaking out against them, even when it is actively counterproductive and dipshit move on their part, but know that they will lose if you stand up for yourself and fight back against them.

The Satanic Temple is very bad at court cases.

A federal district court judge in New York today sided with the online magazine Newsweek against The Satanic Temple, a tax-exempt church, finding there was no basis by the nontheistic religious organization to continue the defamation case against the publisher.

This should be the end of a case that started either three or five years ago, depending on what you want to start counting by.

The Satanic Temple sued the Newsweek and its reporter Julia Duin in February 2022 in retaliation for Duin writing and Newsweek publishing a critical article about TST in October 2021; that article centered on TST suing four former Washington State members in April 2020. That is, us. The Temple repeatedly lost their lawsuits against us over the next four-plus, the final one ending in October 2024.

More here:

Also, it's not official yet, but "Satanic Temple’s Idaho Abortion Ban Appeal Looks Likely to Fail"

Title comes from this Bloomberg writeup that probably is paywalled, but is pretty negative:

A panel of Ninth Circuit judges on Wednesday appeared unlikely to give the Satanic Temple another shot at suing Idaho over measures that bar it from providing abortion care to members in the state. Questions of the group’s standing to sue—personal, associational, organizational, or otherwise—dominated the oral arguments, with Judge M. Margaret McKeown asking attorneys for both sides to clarify how the Satanic Temple can proceed when it hasn’t named any member who lives in Idaho, is pregnant, and wants to end the pregnancy. It can’t, state’s attorney Alan Hurst told the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But W. James Mac Naughton, a private practitioner in Newton, N.J., representing the Satanic Temple, said there’s a “statistical probability” that such a person exists. In his analysis, at least three people in Idaho currently are being harmed by laws that prevent the Satanic Temple from setting up a clinic or mailing abortion-inducing pills into the state, he said. Without a name, however, there’s no way to show the Satanic Temple’s claimed harm is anything more that pure speculation, Hurst said. Judge John B. Owens didn’t have any substantive questions for the attorneys, while Judge Ronald M. Gould stayed silent.

It goes on about some more of the background, but you can also just see all of their cases on The.Satanic.Wiki.

This Courthouse news article should be fully accessible and also characterizes it similarly: