Our Cities Are Silencing Us - Official Release

This is the true story of a small counter-movement attempting to germinate in a hostile political stronghold in Santa Cruz, California. There are likely other small movements in Black Lives Matter cities around the United States, facing similar hostility and attacks by their own city leaders. Yet, the size of a movement is thankfully impertinent to the laws of the land. The Bill of Rights applies to the individual, not to any particular group or ideology. One individual’s voice is no less valid, and should be no less heard, than the voices of many. We place the duties to protect these individual rights into the hands of our elected officials and our judiciary. These fragile rights easily and regularly come under assault by government leaders who choose their politics over the innate laws of humanity so thoughtfully dispensed by our Founding Fathers. The City of Santa Cruz should be no different. In its obsession to establish and preserve Santa Cruz as a Black Lives Matter city, the Mayor, the City Council and the Chief of Police made one crucial miscalculation in their avaricious efforts to ward off detractors to the Black Lives Matter movement----they silenced a small voice that chose to fight back. In doing so, the city set off a chain reaction of a slew of Constitutional violations that would make most legal scholars cringe: infringing on 1st amendment rights by disrupting the Free Speech Mural protest and arresting its organizer, advocating for one movement over another through disproportionate uses of city resources and disparate interpretations and enforcements of the law and, lastly, surpassing the restraints placed on government speech in its suppression of a constituent voice, thereby failing in its obligation to be, quote, accountable to the electorate, end quote, as expressed in the Supreme Court decision Board of Regents of University of Wisconsin System versus Southworth. Government speech certainly permits a local government to leverage state powers in its advocacy of a particular movement, but it crosses an important line when, in doing so, it simultaneously uses those powers, or denies those powers, to delay, obstruct, misinform, discourage, denigrate, smear, restrain and even terminate a counter-movement, no matter what its size or composition. That’s discrimination--in its most naked form.Show more

We oftentimes do not realize that the fight to protect and defend our Constitutional rights begins locally. It is within each of our capacities, AND obligations, to effect change in our own communities: to call out local tyrants and to punish them accordingly. We cannot rely on our local leaders to protect these critical rights, as they are often the abusers themselves. That responsibility falls upon each of us, to be vigilant protectors of these rights, such as our right to speech. Until we overcome our fears and test our voices in a hostile world, the only sounds that we will ever hear are from the voices that have made us silent in the first place.

About the First Amendment Preservation Society, Inc. (FARPS): Founded in 2020 and located in Santa Cruz, California, FARPS came into existence as a response to two important events: (1) the violence that took place in the aftermath of the June 2, 2016, Donald Trump Rally in San Jose, California and (2) the massive censorship attacks, beginning in Spring-2020, of many conservative and some moderate voices on the major “BIG TECH” platforms. Our mission is to stand up and defend the free speech rights of the oppressed and silent, so they may speak again.