Elon Musk Beats Biden-Harris on Free Speech

Elon Musk has become the free world’s foremost warrior for individual liberty and free speech. He is one for the ages.

“Twitter was expensive, but free speech is priceless.”

— Elon Musk pic.twitter.com/sbfVo7uGnL

— Dima Zeniuk (@DimaZeniuk) October 25, 2024

Elon Musk Beats Biden’s Regulators on Free Speech

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overrules the National Labor Relations Board over deleting a tweet.

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By Wall Street Journal, October 28, 2024;

Elon Musk scored a First Amendment victory on Friday when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the National Labor Relations Board can’t take away his speech rights (Tesla v. NLRB).

The Fifth Circuit’s 9-8 en banc decision reverses a ruling that the NLRB could force Mr. Musk to delete a 2018 tweet that the United Auto Workers claimed was coercive. The National Labor Relations Act makes it an unfair labor practice for an employer “to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise” of their labor rights.

The NLRB argues that Mr. Musk interfered with the United Auto Worker’s efforts to organize a Tesla factory, citing a years-old tweet that responded to a Twitter user’s question about his views on unions: “Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?”

Mr. Musk later said the “UAW does not have individual stock ownership as part of the compensation at any other company.” The NLRB ruled that Mr. Musk’s statements were an unfair labor practice and ordered him to remove them. A split Fifth Circuit disagreed, holding that the Tesla CEO was entitled to express his views.

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The board is “powerless to delete protected speech,” the unsigned opinion says. “Deletion is a remedy for communications that are, in the First Amendment’s contemplation, not speech at all,” such as “obscene material, perjurious material, or other non-speech material.” The majority declined to decide whether Mr. Musk’s tweet violated labor law.

That’s a shame because government chills speech rights when it punishes people for exercising them. Federal labor law says the “expressing of any views, argument, or opinion, or the dissemination” is not an unfair labor practice “if such expression contains no threat of reprisal or force or promise of benefit.”

The Supreme Court’s Gissel (1969) precedent sets out a confusing standard for what employers can and cannot tell employees: “An employer is free only to tell ‘what he reasonably believes will be the likely economic consequences of unionization that are outside his control,’ and not ‘threats of economic reprisal to be taken solely on his own volition.’”

Continued…..