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Over at Vox, Ian Millhiser

The Supreme Court really should leave the trolling to the professionals. Denying that January 6 was a sui generis event, which it clearly was (unless you count Second Manassas), is now conservative gospel.

But Millhiser calls our attention to a case that the Nine Wise Souls declined to consider. This one comes out of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal judiciarys primary petri dish for growing really bad ideas. The case is Mckesson v. Doe. (Mckesson is civil-rights activist DeRay Mckesson, whom the government has been hassling ever since he helped found the Black Lives Matter movement.) In 2016, Mckesson organized a protest outside the headquarters of the Baton Rouge Police Department in response to the police shooting of a man named Alton Sterling, who got ventilated while pinned to the ground by officers. During the protest, someonenobody knows whothrew a rock and severely injured an officer. The victim of the rock throwing sued Mckesson for having organized the protest.

This, of course, is all bollocks. Suing the organizers of a protest for the actions of each participant is a none-too-subtle assault on the First Amendment, and also an open invitation for false-flag infiltrators seeking to damage the organizers of a protest. The controlling caseat least prior to the present momentwas NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., a 1982 decision in which the Supreme Court refused to hold the leaders of the NAACP who had organized a boycott of white-owned businesses responsible for losses sustained by the store owners. The business owners claimed that their customers had been threatened by some of the boycotters, and they sought in court to hold the NAACP liable for the actions of unnamed people who had associated themselves with the boycott. One intriguing aspect to the case is that the events in question happened in 1969, but the Supreme Court didnt rule until thirteen years later.

The Fifth Circuit tossed out some of Officer Does causes of action but left one alive. The court said Mckesson was responsible for the violence because he had situated the demonstration at the police headquarters, and that he should have anticipated that violence would break out. Thus were First Amendment rights curtailed in the three states coveredTexas, Louisiana, and Mississippiand the Supreme Court on Monday washed its hands of the case, so the curtailment is going to be semi-permanent. Perhaps the carefully cultivated conservative majority blew off the Mckesson case so that it could get around to coddling the insurrectionists. Priorities, people.

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.

Read more here:
Supreme Court Is Apparently Fine with the Assault on the First Amendment That Is Mckesson v. Doe - Esquire