When a law originally designed to crack down on leftist and labor organizers were used to prosecute a Ku Klux Klan leader after a cross burning in the 1960s, the supreme court set a new standard, concluding that the law violated the Klan leader’s free speech rights.
The US government, Carroll said, “has not been great about being consistent about how it treats different types of dissenters”. “Dissenters calling for change in social conditions or racial conditions or class conditions tend to be much more heavily prosecuted than folks who do things like engage in voter intimidation or engage in acts of white-based maintenance of power.” Sedition laws in the early 20th century, including the Sedition Act of 1918, was “not only focused on World War I”, but “really focused on shutting down socialists and communists, who the government thought were going to be a threat to democracy”, said Roy Gutterman, the director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University.
An estimated 12.4 million individual adult renters have reported they are behind on rent payments, based on the latest US census survey data, while nearly 83 million adults have reported struggling to afford expenses for basic necessities such as rent, mortgage, food, car payments, medical expenses or student loans in the past seven days. According to Moody’s Analytics, nearly 12 million renters in the US will owe an average of $5,850 in rent and utilities by January.