by Greg Piper
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona censored a Rhode Island mother who responded to his criticism of efforts to remove sexually graphic books from public school libraries by posting images from those books on his X account, a First Amendment lawsuit claims.
The Biden-Harris administration official hid the comment with the Fun Home image posted by Nicole Solas – a frequent bee in the bonnet of the Ocean State’s education establishment and public officials, especially Attorney General Peter Neronha, for her public records requests – meaning that other X users couldn’t see it unless they clicked “hidden replies,” she alleges.
He did the same when Solas, also a lawyer, posted an image from another book frequently targeted for removal from school libraries, Gender Queer, according to the suit on her behalf by the Center for American Liberty. Both books depict minors performing oral sex on other minors.
Solas “commonly interacts with the accounts of public officials on X in connection with her public advocacy concerning the sexualization and politicization of public education, especially in younger grades,” the suit says.
Her fights in Rhode Island made her a “national figure,” with Fox News publishing her editorial in 2022 that challenged the American Library Association’s claim that Gender Queer had ever been “banned” and argued that “if there is any censorship related to adult-themed books,” it concerns “dissent from the narrative of books being ‘banned,'” the suit says.
This summer Solas sued her school district and former board members for allegedly outsourcing intimidation of her to teachers unions, who sued Solas to block her requests for district curriculum and teaching materials related to critical race theory and gender identity.
“The truth is parents don’t want pornography in school,” Solas said in an X video on the Cardona lawsuit with blurred images from Fun Home, Gender Queer, This Book Is Gay, Flamer, and Let’s Talk About It, which have all faced removal campaigns as age-inappropriate books.
🚨 BREAKING: The Center for American Liberty filed a federal lawsuit against @SecCardona for violating the First Amendment by censoring @Nicoletta0602 who exposed graphic content in schoolbooks. @pnjaban @RonColeman @mark_trammell @EricSell pic.twitter.com/ym5c6O7QpA
— Center for American Liberty (@Liberty_Ctr) October 24, 2024
Cardona responded to her posts by removing them from “the public forum and hiding the pornography that is in fact in public school,” she said. The Department of Education, which “accuses everyone else of censorship, is now censoring me because I disagreed” that such removal from school libraries is censorship.
Solas told Just the News that she blurred the Fun Home image in her comment but not the Gender Queer image in her comment the next day, both hidden by Cardona. They appear as such in the lawsuit, but the Center for American Liberty, led by GOP superlawyer Harmeet Dhillon, blurred all images in her video, she said.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals set off a legal stampede against public officials on social media in 2020 when it banned then-President Trump from blocking his critics on the social media platform then known as Twitter, deeming his massively popular account a “public forum” because he used it “as a primary vehicle for his official communications … many of great national importance.”
Inexplicably, Cardona didn’t touch Libs of TikTok’s comment with “dozens of pornographic images from school books widely reported as ‘banned books'” even though it “contained far more pornographic images,” expressed the same disagreement and was far more widely seen than her comment because of the account’s millions of followers, the Solas suit says.
She assumes her first comment would have gotten higher traffic if not hidden because her second reply that called out Cardona out for censoring her, which he didn’t hide, received three times as many views, according to the suit.
Solas said she wouldn’t have even known her comment was hidden without other X users alerting her because X doesn’t notify users when that happens.
“Secretary Cardona knew or should have known” his two actions against her comments amount to “unconstitutional censorship” because hidden comments are “moved to a separate page,” according to the 20-page suit.
Cardona hid replies from two others to his original Sept. 17 post, one of whom also posted Gender Queer images. He didn’t hide anyone but Solas when she posted more Gender Queer images in response to his Sept. 18 post that asked why anyone wouldn’t want “diversity,” though many other “replies contain the same viewpoint or imagery,” the suit says.
Solas suspects the federal official is targeting her “because of her high profile, her reputation among people interested in this debate, and her past activism on this issue.”
The suit demands a ban on Cardona engaging in “viewpoint-based exclusion or censorship of posts” by Solas or others “by blocking posts, deleting or hiding posts, or restricting users from being able to comment,” calling it a violation of her constitutional right to “petition the government for grievances.”
The Department of Education did not respond to Just the News queries Thursday.
The Supreme Court heard two similar cases soon after Solas, responding to Neronha’s dare to sue him, posted records showing he muted her, this Just the News reporter and 150 others on his personal X account, where he mixes personal and official business and identifies himself as AG. Muting means an X account can covertly remove others’ posts from its timeline.
The high court remanded those cases back to the 6th and 9th circuits after ruling that a public official who blocks comments must have “possessed actual authority to speak on the State’s behalf on a particular matter” and “purported to exercise that authority when speaking in the relevant social-media posts” to violate the First Amendment.
The bad blood between Solas and Neronha goes back to her asking his office to force open school district meetings that considered race-related proposals. The next year she filed a complaint against his office for “willful violation” of the Access to Public Records Act and asked for a “special independent counsel” to review it.
They have continued squabbling on X, with Neronha calling Solas a “lunatic” last week when she responded to his post about recruiting “newly minted physicians” to the state by asking whether those doctors “have to sterilize and mutilate children for transgender conversion like your wife’s medical group does?”
Solas wrote a year ago about Coastal Medical, where Neronha’s wife works, discharging her children in alleged violation of state law “in retaliation for me not wanting my kids exposed to sexual content & gender ideology” in exam rooms with stickers at “child’s eye level” that say “sexual orientation,” “gender expression” and “gender identity.”
Youth Pride RI, ensnared in another Solas public records fight, recommends Coastal Medical for so-called gender affirming care. “You went on the radio making fun of me (and all parents) for protesting this barbaric medical abuse sterilizing & mutilating children,” Solas told Neronha.
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Just the News’ Greg Piper has covered law and policy for nearly two decades, with a focus on tech companies, civil liberties and higher education.
