News
Threatening texts targeting minorities after election were vile − but they might not be illegal
Following the election, a surge of hateful texts targeting minorities prompted FBI and state investigations, raising questions about the balance between free speech and potential criminality.
The FBI and police in several states are investigating a wave of hateful texts and emails apparently targeting minorities across the United States following the presidential election.
The anonymously sent messages, which may have numbered up to 500,000, varied in their specific language but had similarly menacing themes. Some referred to recipients as “selected for slavery” and ordered them to a plantation to pick cotton. Others said they’d be picked up for deportation or sent to a reeducation camp.
The threats lacked details on timing, location and the like. Some addressed recipients by name, while others contained no greeting or personal identifier. They seemed to be targeting Black people, immigrants and LGBTQ people but may have been dispatched indiscriminately to a wide swath of Americans.
Information technology experts have expressed confidence that the perpetrators will be identified. Yet it’s not clear to me as a professor of constitutional and criminal law that they can be prosecuted. The First Amendment generally protects free speech, even when it’s heinous.
Free expression rules supreme
Several Supreme Court decisions have established that speech may not be punished just because it is offensive or hateful.
“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,” the justices wrote in Texas v. Johnson, a 1989 case that affirmed flag burning is protected expression.
Snyder v. Phelps, a 2010 case involving anti-LGBTQ protesters who carried hateful signs at the funerals of fallen soldiers, strengthened that precedent.
“Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and – as it did here – inflict great pain,” the justices wrote. Nonetheless, they concluded, “We cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course – to protect even hurtful speech.”
Limits to free speech
The Supreme Court has been cautious in recognizing exceptions to the freedom of speech because of its importance to democracy and individual autonomy. Under special circumstances, however, some types of speech can be illegal.
One recognized exception is a “true threat.”
In the 2023 case Counterman v. Colorado, the Supreme Court held that for speech to cross over the true threat line, the speaker must both express an intent to commit violence and recklessly disregard “a substantial risk that his communications would be viewed as threatening violence.”
An example of a true threat under the Counterman case would be for a scorned lover to barrage their ex with messages promising to kill or maim them.
This standard is so new that it has not been tested thoroughly in the lower courts, making predictions risky at best. In my analysis, however, a message mass distributed to thousands of recipients indicating that they had been “selected” to be a slave might not meet the Counterman standard.
Additionally, “slave” is a legal status that hasn’t existed for over 150 years, so the threat to force someone into enslaved labor likely lacks both the peril of physical harm and the plausibility of harmful action. The anonymity of the senders may add to this implausibility.
Courts may also find that the communications didn’t create a “significant” risk that a “reasonable” recipient would feel threatened. An anonymous mass message may be interpreted as spam, or trolling.
Accordingly, the messages probably would not rise to the level of “true threat” exceptions to First Amendment protections.
Other exceptions recognized by the Supreme Court are speech that incites others to imminent lawlessness and “fighting words.”
Yet the November messages didn’t call others to violence, nor were their words likely to provoke it – the two hallmarks of incitement. “Fighting words,” meanwhile, require face-to-face communication that is likely to incite a violent reaction. This did not happen in the November messages, either.
So were any laws broken?
There’s another problem with any legal case against the culprits behind the November messages: What crime would they even be charged with?
The law enforcement officials who’ve pledged to get to the bottom of the matter have expressed outrage and concern, but they have not identified what law they believe was broken.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost is an exception.
“Other people have no First Amendment right to your phone, and free speech doesn’t protect telephone harassment,” Yost said in a post on X on Nov. 7 when he opened an inquiry into the hateful texts received by an an unspecified number of Ohioans.
Yost was likely referring to a 2011 Ohio statute that criminalizes telecommunications that are “threatening, intimidating, menacing, coercive, or obscene with the intent to abuse, threaten, or harass the recipient.”
The intersection of telephone harassment and the First Amendment is less clear, in my analysis. Laws vary by state, but illegal harassment and stalking typically involves physical conduct, which is not protected by the First Amendment – for example, repeated unwanted visits to someone’s home or workplace. Continually following someone in a manner intended to cause fear – or which recklessly causes fear or emotional distress – would be another example.
Could a text or email be characterized as conduct rather than speech? That is unsettled law. And where the law is unclear, novel legal strategies can set a new precedent.
If a court were to decide that the act of sending the November messages was “pure conduct,” rather than protected speech, then anti-harassment laws might be used to prosecute the senders.
Private action
Criminal law aside, people are not powerless against vile communications.
Telecommunications companies are free to block messages, both before they are received and in response to customer requests. After the wave of hateful texts in November, many did just that by closing accounts identified as sources of those messages.
If a blocked sender continues to send similar communications to a target, the elements of harassment would be met. A court could determine that to be expressive conduct or simply speech not protected by the First Amendment.
The U.S. draws the boundary widely around free speech because it enables wide, controversial discussions of politics, law and society. In this case, the senders ran up to the line of protected speech but quite possibility didn’t cross it.
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels,” the author H.L. Mencken once said. “For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
Daniel Hall, Professor of Political Science & Justice and Community Studies, Miami University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The Bridge is a section of the STM Daily News Blog meant for diversity, offering real news stories about bona fide community efforts to perpetuate a greater good. The purpose of The Bridge is to connect the divides that separate us, fostering understanding and empathy among different groups. By highlighting positive initiatives and inspirational actions, The Bridge aims to create a sense of unity and shared purpose. This section brings to light stories of individuals and organizations working tirelessly to promote inclusivity, equality, and mutual respect. Through these narratives, readers are encouraged to appreciate the richness of diverse perspectives and to participate actively in building stronger, more cohesive communities.
https://stmdailynews.com/the-bridge
For generations, the Santa Monica Pier sign has marked the start of a day at the beach. Now, the familiar blue neon landmark is preparing for a journey of its own.
Santa Monica scheduled removal of the 1941 sign for October 20–22, with shipment to Las Vegas anticipated October 26. The timetable is subject to change, according to the city’s October 19 announcement.
The temporary removal accompanies replacement of the aging bridge connecting Ocean Avenue to the pier. It also creates an opportunity to preserve the historic sign.
YESCO will restore it at its Las Vegas facility. The company’s experience includes work on the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign.
Crews will repair neon tubing, treat rust, repaint components and address structural needs while retaining historic features. The sign will remain in secure storage during bridge construction.
Once the project is finished, it will return above the new bridge at a slightly greater height for visibility and vehicle clearance. The city’s latest announcement targets project completion by 2028, ahead of the Los Angeles Olympics and Paralympics.
Meanwhile, visitors can photograph a lighted, half-scale replica near Pier Burger.
For anyone who associates that glowing arch with Southern California memories, its absence will be noticeable. The restoration is intended to ensure future generations can make memories beneath it, too.
Source: City of Santa Monica — October 19, 2026 announcement
Related Links
- City of Santa Monica: Official sign restoration announcement — October 19, 2026. Primary source for removal dates, shipment to Las Vegas, YESCO’s restoration work and the sign’s planned return.
- Santa Monica Daily Press: Sign restoration during bridge rebuild — October 20, 2026. Additional local reporting on the project and visitor access.
- LAist: Sign removal and how to watch — Reporting on the removal schedule and public viewing opportunities.
Follow more Southern California stories at STM Daily News.
Automotive
Slate Truck Gets Real: First Experience Center Opens Ahead of Planned Deliveries
Slate Auto’s first permanent Experience Center gives consumers an up-close look at its customizable electric truck ahead of planned customer deliveries.
Slate Auto’s new Chicago location gives prospective buyers a permanent place to see the minimalist electric pickup, explore customization options and learn about demo opportunities—but it is not yet proof that customer deliveries have begun.
CHICAGO — October 20, 2026 — The Slate Truck is moving out of computer renderings and temporary roadshow stops and into a permanent retail setting. Slate Auto opened its first Experience Center on October 15 at 1053 W. Grand Avenue in Chicago, giving consumers a year-round location to get an up-close look at the company’s highly anticipated electric pickup.
The Near West Side facility occupies a former Tesla location and includes showroom, retail and garage space, along with electric-vehicle charging infrastructure. For Slate, the opening represents an important step in turning strong online interest into a more tangible buying experience as the startup works toward launching its first vehicle.
Visitors can examine the truck’s compact dimensions, deliberately simple cabin and accessory-driven design in person. The center also showcases Slate’s personalization strategy, including exterior wraps, add-on accessories and digital design tools intended to let owners configure the truck around their needs.
Slate has also promoted demonstration opportunities connected with the location, although availability may be limited or appointment-based as the company continues to prepare its fleet. Early media access included passenger rides rather than unrestricted customer test drives, so prospective visitors should confirm current availability before making a special trip.
Why the Chicago opening matters
Until now, most consumers have encountered the Slate Truck through online reservations, media coverage or temporary appearances. A permanent showroom gives buyers a chance to judge details that are difficult to evaluate on a screen, including seating position, bed access, cabin materials and the overall size of the vehicle.
That is especially important for a product built around an unconventional value proposition. Slate is promoting a basic two-seat, two-door electric truck with manual crank windows and no factory-installed infotainment screen or stereo. The company’s strategy is to keep the starting price low and let buyers add features later through accessories and conversion kits.
The physical location also gives Slate a place to explain that approach directly. Rather than presenting the truck as an unfinished vehicle, the company can demonstrate how its modular accessories, wraps and planned SUV-style conversion components are meant to expand the vehicle’s usefulness over time.
Chicago is a logical first market for that effort. The city offers access to a large Midwestern customer base and is within the broader region of Slate’s planned manufacturing operation in Warsaw, Indiana. Reusing a former Tesla store also gives the startup a space already suited to displaying and servicing electric vehicles.
The roadshow continues beyond Chicago
The Experience Center is opening as Slate expands its public demonstration schedule. The company’s events calendar lists a Boston-area demo ride event from October 21 through October 25 at The Shops at Chestnut Hill, followed by an appearance at RADwood in Alameda, California, on October 24 and a New Jersey demo ride event in Freehold from October 28 through October 31.
Slate also lists future stops in Washington, D.C., Raleigh, Atlanta, Miami and Orlando. Together, the permanent Chicago center and the traveling events suggest the company is moving into a broader customer-education phase ahead of planned deliveries.
What has—and has not—changed
The showroom opening does not change Slate’s headline pricing or range claims. The truck is still advertised with a base price of $24,950 before taxes, registration and destination charges. With the currently listed $1,450 destination fee, the entry price would be approximately $26,400 before other costs or optional equipment.
Slate also continues to advertise an estimated range of up to 205 miles. That figure remains an estimate rather than a final EPA-certified rating.
Most importantly, Slate has not publicly confirmed that regular customer production has started or that the first retail deliveries have occurred. Limited deliveries have been reported as possible before the end of December 2026, while many reservation holders may receive later delivery windows in 2027. The Chicago opening is therefore a commercialization milestone, not a manufacturing milestone.
For customers and industry observers, the next major signals will be the start of production at the Warsaw factory, final specifications and EPA range ratings, and confirmed handoffs to paying buyers.
The bottom line
Slate Auto now has a permanent place where consumers can see and evaluate its unusually simple electric truck. That makes the product feel more real and gives the company a platform to explain a customization-heavy business model that may be unfamiliar to traditional truck buyers.
Still, the biggest questions remain unanswered. Opening a showroom demonstrates progress in marketing and customer engagement; producing vehicles at scale, holding the promised price and delivering a 205-mile truck to reservation holders will determine whether Slate can convert enthusiasm into a viable automotive business.
Sources and more information
- Slate Auto events and demo schedule
- Electrek: Slate opens its first Experience Center in Chicago
- Autoblog: Slate opens its first U.S. showroom
- Slate Auto
Category: Consumer Corner / Automotive
Forgotten Genius Fridays
Octavia E. Butler: The Black Woman Who Helped Change Science Fiction
Discover how Octavia E. Butler transformed science fiction, explored Black identity, and helped shape Afrofuturism through her groundbreaking novels.
Forgotten Genius Friday | The Knowledge | STM Daily News
Octavia E. Butler: The Woman Who Reimagined the Future
When we think about science fiction, we often picture spaceships, robots, alien civilizations, and futuristic technology. But what happens when science fiction becomes a way to explore racism, inequality, human survival, and the consequences of our choices?
That is exactly what Octavia E. Butler brought to the genre.
Long before Afrofuturism became a widely recognized cultural movement, Butler was creating extraordinary stories that placed Black characters—especially Black women—at the center of imagined futures.
Her work challenged conventional ideas about who could be a hero, whose experiences mattered, and what science fiction could accomplish.
A Young Girl With a Powerful Imagination
Octavia Estelle Butler was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California.
Raised primarily by her mother and grandmother after her father’s death, Butler grew up shy and found comfort in books and storytelling.
Her mother worked as a domestic employee, and Butler sometimes accompanied her to work. Those experiences exposed her to the racial and economic inequalities that would later influence her fiction.
As a child, Butler loved science fiction, but she noticed something missing: people who looked like her.
Rather than accepting that absence, she began creating stories of her own.
She would eventually become one of the most influential writers in speculative fiction.
Breaking Barriers in Science Fiction
During the 1970s, mainstream American science fiction was largely associated with white male writers and protagonists.
Butler entered that literary world with a different perspective.
Her first published novel, Patternmaster, appeared in 1976. It introduced readers to a world shaped by extraordinary mental abilities, social hierarchies, and struggles for power.
Butler continued developing complex stories that explored humanity’s relationship with authority, identity, biology, and survival.
In 1979, she published one of her best-known novels, Kindred.
The book follows Dana, a Black woman living in 1970s California who is repeatedly transported back to a Maryland plantation before the Civil War.
Through Dana’s experiences, Butler forced readers to confront the brutality of American slavery and its continuing influence on the present.
Rather than treating history as something safely confined to the past, Kindred makes that history immediate and deeply personal.
Imagining the Future—and Warning Us About It
In 1993, Butler published Parable of the Sower, a novel set in a collapsing American society struggling with economic inequality, environmental destruction, violence, and weakened institutions.
Its central character, Lauren Olamina, is a young Black woman who develops a philosophy called Earthseed while searching for a way to survive and build a community.
The novel takes place beginning in 2024, making its imagined future particularly striking to modern readers.
Butler followed it with Parable of the Talents in 1998, continuing her examination of social instability, religious extremism, authoritarianism, and the struggle to create a better future.
Her novels were not literal predictions. They were works of speculative fiction that used recognizable social trends to ask difficult questions about where humanity might be headed.
Octavia Butler and Afrofuturism
Afrofuturism brings together African and African diasporic experiences with science fiction, technology, history, mythology, and imaginative visions of the future.
While artists such as Sun Ra and George Clinton explored cosmic identity through music, performance, and futuristic imagery, Butler used literature to investigate power, history, and humanity’s possible futures.
Her novels frequently placed Black women in situations where they had to navigate extraordinary challenges and reshape the societies around them.
Butler’s work is widely discussed within Afrofuturist scholarship, although her literary contributions also extend beyond any single cultural label.
She demonstrated that Black people did not have to remain secondary characters in someone else’s vision of the future.
They could be the architects of entirely new worlds.
Recognition and a Lasting Legacy
Butler received some of science fiction’s most significant honors, including Hugo and Nebula Awards.
In 1995, she became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, often called a genius grant.
Her work also included the Xenogenesis trilogy, later collected as Lilith’s Brood, which explored humanity’s encounter with an extraterrestrial species and raised questions about consent, adaptation, identity, and survival.
Butler died on February 24, 2006, at age 58.
Yet her influence has continued to grow.
Her novels are studied in classrooms, discussed by scholars, and embraced by new generations of readers and creators interested in science fiction, social justice, and Afrofuturism.
A Genius Who Made Us Think Differently About Tomorrow
Octavia E. Butler was more than a science-fiction author.
She was a visionary storyteller who understood that imagining the future also meant examining the past and questioning the present.
Her stories asked readers to consider how power operates, how communities survive, and how human beings might change.
And perhaps her greatest contribution was demonstrating that the future belongs in the imagination of everyone.
Why Octavia E. Butler Belongs in Forgotten Genius Friday
At STM Daily News, our Forgotten Genius Friday series celebrates extraordinary individuals whose ideas, innovations, and accomplishments helped shape our world, even if their stories aren’t widely known. Octavia E. Butler fits that mission perfectly. Although she received prestigious literary awards and recognition during her lifetime, her influence extends far beyond science fiction. Like the inventors, scientists, and trailblazers we’ve featured in this series, Butler challenged barriers, defied expectations, and opened doors for future generations. Through her imagination, she helped redefine who could tell stories about humanity’s future—and who could be at the center of those stories. Her inclusion in Forgotten Genius Friday reminds us that genius isn’t limited to laboratories and inventions. Sometimes, it begins with a pen, a powerful imagination, and the courage to envision a different world.
Sources and fact-checking
The Huntington Library holds Butler’s literary archive and confirms the chronology of her major novels, awards, and career. The MacArthur Foundation independently documents her 1995 fellowship.
- Official Octavia E. Butler biography
- The Huntington — Octavia E. Butler Papers
- MacArthur Foundation — Octavia Butler
- The Huntington — Telling My Stories exhibition
For more stories about overlooked innovators, writers, scientists, and visionaries who changed our world, explore The Knowledge and Forgotten Genius Friday at STM Daily News.
