That being said there's a common trope coming from the loudest and most moral busybodies in academia that "Americans just want babysitters for their kids three quarters of the year". Sometimes I think it's projection.
If you read the last paragraph of Thomas's dissent, it's clear he's more troubled with the laziness of the majority opinion than he is by the specific result. It reads like he wanted to really dig into the issues Alito raised in a concurring opinion, but didn't feel like he should because only Alito and Gorsuch concurred with that one, and debating those issues at length would be like bikeshedding. Maybe they were on the cusp of getting him to sign on, but they ran out of time and there were unresolved differences that led him to write the dissent.
Thomas's dissent should get everyone to think carefully about the scope of rights to discipline children in loco parentis in various circumstances. If you send your children to a friend's house, or with their friends' parents on some trip or to some event, you're granting those parents virtually unlimited ordinary disciplinary authority (subject to criminal and family law limitations). Voluntarily sending your kids to school could be seen (and, as Thomas points out, was historically seen) to create much the same dynamic.
I quote: "The Court overrides that decision—without even mentioning the 150 years of history supporting the coach. Using broad brushstrokes, the majority outlines the scope of school authority. When students are on campus, the majority says, schools have authority in loco parentis—that is, as substitutes of parents—to discipline speech and conduct. Off campus, the authority of schools is somewhat less. At that level of generality, I agree. But the majority omits important detail. What authority does a school have when it operates in loco parentis? How much less authority do schools have over off-campus speech and conduct? And how does a court decide if speech is on or off campus? Disregarding these important issues, the majority simply posits three vague considerations and reaches an outcome. A more searching review reveals that schools historically could discipline students in circumstances like those presented here. Because the majority does not attempt to explain why we should not apply this historical rule and does not attempt to tether its approach to anything stable, I respectfully dissent. " https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20-255_g3bi.pdf Page 34
If you actually read his dissent, instead of a hack summary, you would see he thinks they didn't go far enough in constraining the schools. Quite the opposite of what is implied by CNN.
Before I get the deluge of "WHATABOUT fox news" comments. Yes, Fox news is horrible and they are never charitable either.
The process of the court's opinion-writing sometimes involves several justices circulating draft opinions and trying to recruit others to sign on. Thomas might have written such a draft opinion with very careful reasoning, perhaps even concurring in the majority's judgment, but nobody else was willing to sign on to some of his specific reasoning that he thought was crucial, so he took his toys and went home.
Had he agreed with the outcome but not the opinion, he'd write a concurrence (like Alito did).
Multiple times in Thomas's dissent he says the couch was right to have punished from prior standards. His dissent can be boiled down to "The court is not considering prior precedence and should have sided with the couch".
> While the majority entirely ignores the relevant history,I would begin the assessment of the scope of free-speech rights incorporated against the States by looking to “what‘ordinary citizens’ at the time of [the Fourteenth Amend-ment’s] ratification would have understood” the right to en-compass. McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U. S. 742, 813 (2010) (THOMAS, J., concurring in part and concurring in judg-ment). Cases and treatises from that era reveal that public schools retained substantial authority to discipline stu-dents. As I have previously explained, that authority was near plenary while students were at school. See Morse v. Frederick, 551 U. S. 393, 419 (2007) (concurring opinion).Authority also extended to when students were traveling toor from school. See, e.g., Lander v. Seaver, 32 Vt. 114, 120 (1859). And, although schools had less authority after a student returned home, it was well settled that they still could discipline students for off-campus speech or conduct that had a proximate tendency to harm the school environ-ment.
But the reasoning of this case indicates that a message sent by a high school student who has a million followers on twitter could be regulated by a school, even if that same message would not have been allowed to be regulated if sent by someone with 5 followers. This is because the large number of followers increases the likelihood of a "substantial disruption" (a term of art from prior cases).
An interesting question: what if someone with 5 followers sends a tweet, which is then picked up and RT'd by someone with a million followers? Should the school be able to regulate the original message (i.e., punish the student) simply because someone with a large following agreed with them? Presumably they couldn't punish the student before the RT, but what about after?
Not sure if this answers your question but some possible examples:
- corporate insiders have "freedom of speech" restricted in the sense that they can be punished for "manipulating stock price". E.g. Elon Musk tweets: https://www.google.com/search?q=ceo+tweets+accussed+manipula...
- book authors writing fiction getting sued for libel/slander so some writers creatively get around it with the "small penis" rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_penis_rule
Second case is of government putting those restrictions on you. Can public school put such restrictions on students ? I do not know and I am not familiar with this case.
The cynic in me think he might have his own brand of flavored water to launch.
You are confusing "free speech" and "the First Amendment". Free speech has nothing to do with government; it's a generally applicable concept. The First Amendment specifies a requirement for the government to respect freedom of speech. That wouldn't even make sense if freedom of speech weren't a general concept.
Free speech as a general concept is irrelevant in the eyes of law unless you have some specific law governing the specific scenarios. (Employees being punished for how they voted in general election.)
Free speech could be a virtue but it is a virtue like "not lying". It is perfectly legal to lie in many circumstances.
I was responding to the claim "Free speech is always about freedom from government control", emphasis mine. Where did "in the eyes of law" come from? How is this contributing to the conversation?
It's okay to just admit that someone else's clarification was helpful and move on. You don't have to add irrelevant, non-clarifying addenda in order to seem like the more knowledgeable party.
> Advocacy of force or criminal activity does not receive First Amendment protections if (1) the advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and (2) is likely to incite or produce such action.
So in your example the school would simply need to require consent from students to have their speech restricted before they can participate in extracurricular programs like the football team.
If you actually read his dissent, instead of a hack summary, you would see he thinks they didn't go far enough in constraining the schools. Quite the opposite of what is implied by CNN. But hey, as long as someone holds a dissenting political opinion they aren't human and therefor fair game, right?