Arizona State University (ASU) and Northern Arizona University (NAU) announced Monday that they would begin banning TikTok from their campuses.
In statements to media outlets, the universities cited orders from the Biden administration regarding federal contractors as the rationale for walking back their usage of the platform.
Both ASU and NAU said they would begin deactivating their university-affiliated accounts beginning on Monday. One of ASU’s main accounts, @arizonastateuniversity, last posted in February. One of NAU’s main accounts, @nausocial, last posted a recruitment video to the platform on Monday.
Initial information provided by an ASU spokesperson relayed that ASU would block access to TikTok on its WiFi and university networks. However, in a revised statement, ASU noted that the ban would concern ASU-managed devices, not student devices accessing university networks.
“TikTok will no longer be allowed to be installed on ASU-managed devices as the university takes steps following President Biden’s recent order for federal contractors,” stated ASU.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued the order in late February, giving federal agencies and contractors up to 30 days to comply. OMB Director Shalanda Young cited the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 as the basis for the guidance.
The act instructed the OMB, the administrator of General Services, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the director of National Intelligence, and the secretary of Defense to craft guidance removing TikTok from government devices.
According to the OMB guidance, federal agencies are currently in the second phase of this order: 90 days of ensuring compliance and ceasing contracts with the noncompliant. The third phase directs federal agencies to ensure compliance in future contracts and solicitations for 120 days.
The act made exceptions to the ban for law enforcement activities, national security interests and activities, and security research. However, each exercise of this exception must be given via approval and documentation from an agency head or their designee on an annual basis.
Then last month, a TikTok spokesperson claimed to multiple media outlets that the Biden administration demanded that its parent company, ByteDance, either sell TikTok or face a nationwide ban. The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee had voted earlier in the month to given Biden the power to ban the app.
As tensions between the Biden administration and TikTok mounted, the White House faced scrutiny for posting a video reportedly created using another app owned by ByteDance: CapCut.
Biden has also faced criticisms for his use of TikTok influencers for the past two years to attract younger voters, inviting controversial figures like transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney and LGBTQ entertainer Benito Skinner (Benny Drama) to the White House.
The Biden administration also authorized thousands in cash payments to create an “influencer army” using TikTok stars. One of them, Ellie Zeiler, was asked to push Biden administration messaging on the Ukraine war, rising gas prices, and historic inflation rates onto her 10 million followers.
NEW: I’ve obtained the *Confidential* White House PR email sent to TikTok influencers begging them to “do an intimate” zoom call with Dr. Fauci.
The Goldwater Institute announced on Tuesday that they submitted a supportive brief in a lawsuit accusing Washington Elementary School District (WESD) of discriminating against Christians.
WESD decided to end its contract with Arizona Christian University (ACU) earlier this year over the school’s religious beliefs. The lawsuit was filed initially by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) on behalf of ACU early last month.
WESD is the largest elementary school district in the state, and had partnered with ACU for 11 years without issue, according to court documents.
In their press release, the Goldwater Institute claimed that WESD violated the constitutional rights of free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of association for both ACU and its students to free speech. The Goldwater Institute further claimed that WESD’s actions ran afoul of the Arizona Constitution’s “religious test” clauses, which prohibit the government from discriminating based on religion when making hiring decisions.
The organization also pointed out that WESD committed the alleged discrimination despite grappling with an ongoing, historic teacher shortage like other districts.
In the Goldwater Institute’s amicus, or “friend-of-the-court,” brief, the organization said that WESD had unconstitutionally conditioned employment based on ACU’s faith.
“Defendants’ hostility toward Christians is apparently so intense that they cut off a long-standing teacher training program during an historic nationwide teacher shortage, simply because the teachers attended Arizona Christian University (ACU)—a school that espouses traditional Christian beliefs on its website,” said the organization.
ACU believes in Biblical teachings on marriage and sexuality, including that “God created man and woman in His image and likeness, that God wonderfully and immutably creates each person as male or female, and that God intends sexual intimacy to occur only between a man and woman who are married to each other,” per court filings.
AZ Free News first broke the story about WESD’s alleged discrimination. The ultimate decision to cut ties with ACU traces back to public comments from WESD Governing Board Member Tamillia Valenzuela.
Valenzuela — a self-described neurodivergent, queer furry — declared during a board meeting that ACU’s mission of prioritizing Jesus Christ’s teachings didn’t align with WESD priorities. In previous board meetings, Valenzuela has decried any Christian presence at WESD. In contemplating whether to continue the district’s contract with Grand Canyon University (GCU), Valenzuela insisted that WESD should cut ties there as well due to the university being a private Christian institution.
“I am wondering if there’s other options available, one so we are not actively engaging with an institution that’s causing harm and also so we can have options that are not based on a certain faith,” said Valenzuela.
ADF has asked for a preliminary injunction in the case. Their filing outlined various grievances against WESD in regard to their opposition against ACU for its religious beliefs. This included WESD governing board member remarks accusing ACU student teachers of being “openly bigoted,” causing LGBTQ+ people to feel “unsafe.”
“The School District’s policy therefore is loud and clear: Christians with disfavored beliefs are neither welcome nor allowed to serve in the District,” stated ADF.
There will be oral arguments in the case, Arizona Christian University v. Washington Elementary School District, next Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. at the Sandra Day O’Connor courthouse.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
Another legislative attempt to give Arizona law enforcement more space to do its job is meeting resistance from Democrats.
SB 1047, sponsored by Senator John Kavanagh, “expands the criminal classifications of third degree criminal trespass and refusing to aid a peace officer,” according to the purpose provided by the State Senate. The bill “classifies as third degree criminal trespass, knowingly entering or remaining at the site of a natural disaster, a traffic accident or another type of accident, a civil disturbance or an active law enforcement investigation, if there is active law enforcement intervention into criminal activity at the site and law enforcement communicates that public access is restricted.”
The bill also “classifies, as refusing to aid a peace officer, refusing to remain at a reasonable distance, as determined by the peace officer, from the location where the peace officer is actively intervening in a dangerous or potentially violent criminal occurrence with another person who is threatening or agitated or who appears to be emotionally unstable.”
In March, SB 1047 passed the Senate with a party-line 16-12 vote – with two members not voting (Gonzales and Diaz). It had previously cleared the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Public Safety, and Border Security with a 4-3 vote, and the Rules Committee with a 4-3 tally.
After the Senate voted to approved SB 1047, the House wasted no time to start its consideration of this legislation. The House Committee on Military Affairs & Public Safety passed the bill – also along party lines – with an 8-7 vote.
Legislative Democrats have strongly opposed this bill throughout the session. The Arizona Senate Democrats Caucus tweeted, “Did you know? SB 1047 would reduce police accountability.”
— Arizona Senate Democrats (@AZSenateDems) March 1, 2023
The Arizona House Democrats also shared similar concerns with the bill this week, writing, “Sen. John Kavanagh’s unconstitutional attempt last year to prevent filming police activity never went into effect because no attorneys would defend it. So now he’s back in House Public Safety Committee with SB 1047 which would prevent observing police activity.”
Representatives from the Arizona Association of Counties and the Arizona Police Association supported SB 1047, while representatives from the State Conference NAACP, Arizona Attorneys for Criminal Justice, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona opposed its passage.
The bill now awaits its fate in the Arizona House of Representatives.
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
The question before the appellate court is whether Arizona’s 15 counties are restricted to performing a hand count audit of only a very small percent of machine tabulated ballots, or if a county’s Board of Supervisors (BOS) have authority to demand a higher audit percent—even 100 percent—of those ballots to check the accuracy of the electronic tabulation.
The issue dates back to October 2022 when the Cochise County BOS approved a Resolution to have County Recorder David Stevens conduct a hand count audit of all ballots cast in-person on election day at the county’s 17 voting centers. The Resolution was challenged in court by the Arizona Alliance of Retired Americans (AARA).
Cochise County came out on the losing end of the case, which cost taxpayers nearly $90,000 in attorney’s fees to AARA. Now, the matter is in front of the Court of Appeals, with the county seeking to be vindicated for its hand count audit plan.
AARA filed its answering brief to the appeal last week. It asks for the county’s appeal to be dismissed as moot.
“Not only is the 2022 election over, but the mandatory audits prescribed by law have been conducted, and the election results were canvassed and certified,” AARA’s brief argues.
But if the Court of Appeals decides to weigh in on the question of whether Cochise County had authority to order a full hand count audit – of the early ballots, election day ballots, or both – then AARA argues the answer is no.
“Appellants are only legally authorized to conduct hand count audits in accordance with these statutorily prescribed procedures and cannot require a hand count audit of all ballots,” the brief argues. “Hand count audits must start with small, random samples for a limited number of races, and expand only on an individual race basis and only if hand counts repeatedly differ from electronic tabulations by more than a designated margin for error.”
AARA’s brief ignores the policy issue of whether an expanded hand count audit process would be better than the current law it claims is controlling.
Cochise County has until April 17 to file a reply brief with the Court of Appeals. There is no deadline for when a ruling must be issued.
The supervisors in favor of the expanded audit were Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, who took the position that “many voters” lacked confidence in the voting system. A 100 percent audit of in-person election day ballots was justified, they argued, to “enhance voter confidence.”
The Resolution passed on a 2 to 1 vote on Oct. 24, 2022. AARA and one of its local members sued the county the next week, seeking a court order enjoining, or barring, anyone from complying with the Resolution.
Judge Casey McGinley was brought in from Pima County Superior Court by Cochise County’s presiding judge to hear the case. McGinley ruled one day before Election Day that the county and Stevens could not engage in the expanded hand count audit.
McGinley went one step further, ruling that there could also be no full audit of early ballots.
According to McGinley, ARS 16-602(B) requires the audit of ballots casts at voting centers on election day to be “randomly selected.” Selecting 100 percent of those ballots from the start would render the statutory language and the mechanism for a limited expansion of the hand count audit superfluous, he noted.
McGinley further ruled that ARS 16-602(F) establishes 5,000 as the maximum number of early ballots which may be initially part of a hand count audit, despite contradictory language included in the EPM which states counties “may elect to audit a higher number of ballots at their discretion.”
In its appeal, the Cochise County defendants contend hand count audits based on a random sampling of ballots was intended to prevent election officials from auditing races for improper purposes. There would be no concern with how certain races were selected if 100 percent were audited, they contend.
If the Cochise County BOS loses on appeal, attorneys for AARA have asked for a new order requiring the county to pay the group’s court costs and attorney’s fees in connection with the appeal.
Cochise County taxpayers are also on the hook for the fees paid to the attorney for the supervisors and Stevens, including during the appeal.
Terri Jo Neff is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or send her news tips here.
As many California residents head east to Arizona in response to policies they find objectionable, Maricopa County appears to be taking a leap toward adopting some of those same policies.
The Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG) recently contracted with a California-based consulting firm to “identify and evaluate new and available ozone precursor control measures that could be implemented within the nonattainment area” – which is an “eight-hour ozone boundary for the 2015 ozone standard (2015 National Ambient Air Quality Standard). According to the Final Report from the consulting firm, the area runs north to south from the Yavapai County line to Hunt Highway; and west to east from 499th Avenue to the Gila and Pinal County lines.
One of the geneses of this report stems from a little-discussed published rule from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in fall 2022, which moved “the region up the severity ladder for ozone pollution, reclassifying the region from ‘marginal’ to ‘moderate’ nonattainment for the ozone pollution standard.
In a press release dated September 2022, MAG revealed that “in 2015, the EPA tightened the ozone pollution standard from 75 parts per billion to 70 parts per billion,” and that the region encompassing “Maricopa County and portions of Pinal County missed that deadline.”
MAG wrote in the September release, that “the moderate nonattainment area classification requires new actions and measures, including:
New control measures to reduce the types of emissions that create ozone.
Emission offset requirement for new, large facilities locating in the nonattainment area and major expansions to large, existing facilities, which are required to offset every ton of emissions by 1.15 tons.
Contingency measures (i.e., measures to be deployed if the nonattainment area does not meet yearly emission reduction milestones).
Potential emission controls for intrastate facilities or other emission sources located outside the Phoenix-Mesa nonattainment area.”
Enter the consultant’s Final Report this spring, which suggested “approximately 50% reduction in nonattainment area anthropogenic NOx and VOC emissions” in order to bring the region into compliance with the EPA’s standard by an August 3, 2024, deadline. An Arizona Department of Environmental Quality Division Director recently admitted that “Maricopa County businesses and residents have done a fantastic job of reducing ozone pollution by 12.5 percent since 2000.” But Maricopa County would have to exponentially and substantially pick up the pace of slashing emissions in just over one year – compared to the two-plus decades of work to cut pollution by 12.5 percent. And that is likely impossible.
But MAG is still planning to move forward with this plan, and to meet this deadline, it included suggested measures to reduce ozone in the Maricopa Nonattainment Area to meet Clean Air Act requirements related to the 2015 ozone standard. Some of the suggested measures include adopting standards similar to California like banning the internal combustion engine, banning gas appliances, and a host of regulations on various business activities.
There is a tight turnaround for approval of these drastic measures to cut emissions in Maricopa County. Before the end of April, the “MAG Regional Council may approve the Draft Suggested List of Measures” after receiving recommendations from the MAG Management Committee. Then, over this summer, “implementing entities provide commitments to implement measures, or reasoned justification for non-implementation, to MAG for inclusion in a nonattainment area state implementation plan submission to EPA.”
The EPA guidance instructs that “states should consider all available measures, including those being implemented in other areas, but must adopt measures for an area only if those measures are economically and technologically feasible and will advance the attainment date or are necessary for reasonable further progress.” According to the March 6 Draft Suggested List of Measures to Reduce Ozone in the Maricopa Nonattainment Area, “if an entity decides that a measure on the Suggested List is not available or feasible for implementation, the entity will provide a justification for why the measure is not available or feasible.”
Cities, towns, and Maricopa County may soon be forced to decide between complying with extremely onerous measures to bring down a tremendous amount of emissions in a hurry or losing out on a generous offering of federal dollars (along with financial penalties that could be levied against those jurisdictions), setting up a potential battle over federalism that will determine Maricopa County’s (and eventually Arizona’s) commitment to its libertarian and freedom-minded roots or deviation to California’s environmentalism policies and politics.
Arizona Legislative Republicans and Democrats are continuing their legendary clashes over a bill that would severely punish unlawful exposures to minors.
SB 1698, sponsored by Senator Justine Wadsack, “establishes unlawful exposure to an adult oriented performance or business as a class 4 felony offense punishable as a dangerous crime against children and requires a person convicted of the offense to register as a sex offender,” according to the overview provided by the Arizona House of Representatives.
In a video explanation of the genesis behind this bill’s introduction, Senator Wadsack said she “felt a conviction to create this bill after coming across events like the drag queen story hours, which involve sexual adult performance in sexually explicit attire, reading books to children – often elementary school age.”
"I'm passionately working on a bill which establishes the offense of unlawful exposure to an adult oriented performance or business and classifies a violation as a class 4 felony."
In February, SB 1698 passed both the Senate Judiciary and Rules Committee, before it was approved by the entire Senate chamber in early March by a 16-14 party-line vote. Before the vote on the Senate floor, Senator Wadsack inserted a five-part floor amendment, which (among other things) removed the definition of “drag show” from the original bill.
After the final Senate action on the bill, it was transmitted to the Arizona House of Representatives, where it was assigned to the House Judiciary Committee.
#SB1698: My bill just passed in the Senate! It makes it unlawful for adult oriented performances, such as Drag Queen Story Hour as it specifically targets children.
— AZ Senator Justine Wadsack (@Wadsack4Arizona) March 2, 2023
This week, the House Judiciary Committee considered the bill, and, after vigorous debate, passed it by a vote of 5-3. All Republicans voted to affirm the legislation, and Democrats voted to oppose. House Democrats labeled SB 1698 as one of the chamber’s “hateful bills,” linking the policy proposed by Wadsack to a hypothetical outcome that would see the end of “school-play versions of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.”
Hateful Bills Alert 🚨 Sen. Justine Wadsack’s SB1698 criminalizing drag shows in House Judiciary 9am. And SB1026 Sen. John Kavanagh’s bill to ban state funding for drag performances (House Government 10 am) so fare thee well school-play version of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” pic.twitter.com/BY9hOpfK2Z
House Judiciary Committee Republicans made their voices heard during this hearing, pushing back against individuals speaking out against the bill and their colleagues from across the aisle. Representative Alexander Kolodin said, “All this bill does is prohibit parents from taking their kids to a sex show or a drag show. It’s common sense. How could you be against that?”
Representative Cory McGarr stated that “there is a growing trend that for some reason we are pushing hyper-sexual material on children. But to oppose this bill on the merit, to me, seems completely insane.”
Countering the naysayers of the bill, the bill sponsor, Senator Wadsack, previously clarified what her legislation does or does not do: “This bill does not target entertainers who are performing for adults. This bill also deals with individuals providing adult entertainment to minors, which is absolutely what crosses the line.”
Representatives from the National Association of Social Workers, Children’s Action alliance, American Civil Liberties Union of AZ, AZ Attorneys for Criminal Justice, and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona registered in opposition to the bill during the legislative process.
SB 1698 is expected to make its way to the House floor for a vote in the near future.
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
