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A federal court ruled last week that an Ohio school district violated the First Amendment rights of a Christian teacher, which experts are hailing as a victory for free speech and religious liberty.

Hired as a full-time English teacher at the end of the 2021 academic school year, Vivian Geraghty had resigned from her position in 2022 after being told to use a student’s “preferred pronouns.” The argument she gave in her lawsuit was that the use of pronouns that didn’t reflect the child’s biological sex “would force her to embrace the concept of gender identity against her religious belief that God created two unchanging sexes, male and female.”

According to district court Judge Pamela Barker, the Jackson Local School District “compelled Geraghty to use the students’ preferred names and pronouns.” In doing so, it forced the teacher “to utter what was not in her mind about a question of political and religious significance.”

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A pro-life activist who was arrested for quietly praying outside of an abortion clinic has been paid approximately $17,000 USD from the West Midlands Police in Birmingham, England, according to Fox News.

After the arrest she filed a claim accusing the police of false imprisonment, assault and wrongful arrest. She was detained for allegedly violating a Public Space Protection Order, the police said at the time.

The women, UK March for Life Director Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, said: “Clearly, I’m delighted to have this, but there’s almost a bit of déjà vu. While I’m saying I’m delighted, I feel vindicated.”

The Daily Beast.

Curb Your Enthusiasm star Cheryl Hines took more heat for her husband Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decisions on Friday, after Kennedy bowed out of the presidential race and endorsed Donald Trump.

But her husband feels very differently about the former president, who he endorsed Trump as he blamed the media for his inability to gain traction in White House race.

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And so it goes.

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Rep. Matt Gaetz,R-Fla., is facing a primary challenge from a candidate backed by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., in Tuesday’s primary, the final stop on what’s being branded as McCarthy’s “revenge tour.”

It would appear that the House is well rid of this … person.

UPDATE: Gaetz fends off primary challenge in Florida, dealing blow to McCarthy (Julia Mueller/The Hill)

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The Southern Poverty Law Center, which pressures financial institutions to blacklist the mainstream conservative and Christian organizations it places on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, published an article purportedly “debunking ADF’s ‘debanking’ conspiracy theory.”

Alliance Defending Freedom, the organization SPLC attacked, has raised the alarm about financial institutions denying banking services to customers based on their religious or political affiliations. ADF has pointed to numerous instances of what it describes as debanking, though the banks in question claim the denials of service were not religiously or politically motivated.

SPLC not only took the banks’ word for it, but acted as though its own calls for financial institutions to stop “funding hate” did not amount to a debanking pressure campaign.

Read it.

A Michigan jury has found seven pro-life activists guilty of engaging in a conspiracy against rights and violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE, Act for peacefully protesting outside of an abortion clinic.

The charges against the pro-life activists were brought by President Joe Biden’s administration, specifically the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division led by Kristen Clarke. The Daily Wire reported Tuesday that the DOJ has used the conspiracy against rights charge, which was originally designed for the Ku Klux Klan, to prosecute the pro-lifers, who face 10 years in prison as well as heavy fines.

One of these pro-life activists is 89-year-old Eva Edl, who survived a World War II-era death camp before escaping to the United States. She has devoted her life to protecting unborn babies.

Read it.

The Civil War tore America apart and left 600,000 dead. Still, despite its ferocity, it had at its heart only one big issue: whether the Constitution’s promise of individual liberty overrode states’ rights to govern themselves. Otherwise, Americans were much the same: the Bible, hard work, heterosexuality, the nuclear family, anti-crime, etc.

America today actually faces a more profound schism than it did then because we’ve become two entirely different people.

An opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle really hammers the point home, as a regular columnist looks at a county fair in the Heartland and sees a dystopian world.

Soleil Ho identifies herself a plural being who should be referred to as “they” and “them.” She is “an opinion columnist and cultural critic, focusing on gender, race, food policy and life in San Francisco.” She’s even made it to Joy Reid’s show for exposing the horror of parents who are opposed to the push to destroy their children’s biological reality with the lunacy of “transgenderism.”

UK Daily Mail.

Blake Lively is yet again under fire after internet sleuths unearthed a series of noughties interviews where she repeatedly used the transphobic slur ‘tranny.’

Confirming the undoubtable truth that proglodytes have no sense of humor.

PREPARE TO CANCEL … ACTIVATE!

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Former Texas Children’s Hospital nurse Vanessa Sivadge says that she has been terminated after blowing the whistle on the hospital’s alleged use of Texas Medicaid to cover attempted sex changes for children.

Texas Children’s has denied that it used Texas Medicaid to cover cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for minors, as Sivadge has alleged. The hospital did not immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s multiple requests for comment about the alleged termination on Monday afternoon.

In a written statement to journalist Chris Rufo, Sivadge shared that she submitted a religious accommodation request to her supervisor at the hospital on May 31, asking to be transferred out of the endocrinology clinic.

ProPublica.

With millions in expanded tax credits and direct state funding going to anti-abortion groups, the nonprofit Coalition Life has expanded its operations beyond Missouri and into states where the procedure is still legal.

How extraordinary–wonder where they got that plan?

Newsbusters.

Joe Rogan made The Hollywood Reporter’s list of the most powerful podcasters. Of course.

Rogan has been at or near the top of the podcast charts for some time now.

When you read the bios of his fellow podcasters, though, something jumps out. Rogan appears to be the only one brimming with negative information.

Hmmm.

Read it.

MPs voted for legislation last year that would ban silent prayer within ‘buffer zones’ 150 metres around the location of a clinic or hospital providing abortion services.

However, this has not come come into force and guidance was subsequently published allowing silent prayer within ‘safe access zones’ where activists would be able to hand out leaflets and engage in conversations with women considering abortions.

The guidance stated that, “Silent prayer, being the engagement of the mind and thought in prayer towards God, is protected as an absolute right under the Human Rights Act 1998 and should not, on its own, be considered to be an offence under any circumstances.”

The issue shot to public attention in March 2023 when campaigner Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was arrested by police for silently praying in front of a British Pregnancy Advisory Services clinic that was subject to a ‘buffer zone’ order.

Read it.

A Los Angeles County school district offers an ethnic studies course covering the “intersectionality” of “identity markers” such as race, gender, and sexual orientation.

“Ethnic Studies aims to educate students on social justice themes related to ethnicity, identity, and the historical element that is the common denominator, while providing students with a democratic toolkit intended to support student’s project-based learning needs,” according to a course overview obtained through a public records request by the Center for American Liberty and shared with The Daily Signal.

The class, offered to seniors at Clark Magnet High School in the Glendale Unified School District, encourages “social activism” by “building on the district’s social justice standards while incorporating the new history social science framework.”

California Assembly Bill 101 made ethnic studies a high school graduation requirement in 2021.

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Can’t have that.

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A conservative college professor has agreed to settle his lawsuit against a California community college district for $2.4 million after arguing that school officials retaliated against him and a colleague.

Read it.

Stomach doctors at Seattle Children’s Hospital were forced to attend a racially segregated diversity training that included lessons on “critical race theory,” claimed black people are “systematically targeted for demise,” and pressed white doctors to “tap into their repressed racial memories” to develop a white “race-consciousness,” according to slides from the training obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Held in August 2022, the training was mandatory for the gastroenterology department and divided participants into three “racial caucuses”—a white caucus, a black caucus, and a “Non-Black POC Caucus”—to “minimize harm to our black learners and facilitator.”

The Foundry.

Do you want a perspective other than the stifling woke orthodoxy being imposed on society through classrooms, TV shows, and corporate boardrooms? Tired of seeing “LGBTQ” this and “BIPOC” or “AAPI” that? Do you want a discussion of ideas without constant identity politics?

You just might be a white supremacist.

The Guardian.

Far-left marches, on the other hand, have clear sailing.

Read it.

Facebook has nuked the account of famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins after he said that genetically male boxers should not be allowed to fight women in the Olympics.

Welcome to our world. Be careful not to step in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

The Foundry.

The top practitioners of critical race theory just held a weeklong “summer school” in Nashville, Tennessee, to strategize, assess the movement, and debate how best to proselytize the next generation. It was an instructive six days of revolutionary agitprop.

Two things immediately stood out. The first is that, yes, despite its protestations to the contrary, the architects of CRT know they must focus intently on those who participate in the teaching profession. If CRT is a tool to be used for “revolutionizing a culture,” as its intellectual godfather, Derrick Bell, once put it, it must be implemented by teachers starting in K-12 and through graduate school.

K-12 teachers, along with students at all levels, were given special ticket prices to the CRT conference at a deep discount, as my colleague and friend Jonathan Butcher pointed out. K-12 principals also were given a special package, though at a smaller discount.

Read it.

Time to leave.

UPDATE: As the sun sets on British and Canadian liberty

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We have witnessed two types of rioting here in the UK since three little girls were murdered in the northern English town of Southport on July 29th by the son of Rwandan immigrants.

There have been physical riots in assorted towns and cities; local outbursts of brick-chucking violent unrest involving clashes with police, and some reprehensible attacks on hostels holding migrants or mosques. These riots pose an immediate problem of public order; they may have abated, at least for now.

And then there is the national counter-riot of political prejudice staged by the Labour government, the mainstream media, and the rest of the liberal establishment, left-handedly hurling brickbats at everybody from Nigel Farage to Elon Musk.

Unlike the incoherent protests on the streets, this top-down political riot has a clear aim: exploiting the unrest to try to shift the blame for Britain’s problems onto “far-right thugs,” smear the white working class as racists, and justify a new crackdown on free speech and democracy.

Read it.

A Massachusetts District Court Judge has dismissed Mexico’s $10 billion lawsuit against six out of the eight named American gun manufacturers that the country argues are responsible for firearms flooding south across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Newsbusters.

The racial Marxists running Harvard University tried… and FAILED to stop their Jewish students from attempting to sue them.

U.S. district judge Richard Stearns denied the school’s plea, Tuesday, to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of being a safe space for raging Jew haters. His 25-page decision claimed the six student plaintiffs make credible allegations that Harvard not only failed to respond to antisemitic harassment and physical violence by faculty and classmates, but the school “failed its Jewish students” entirely.

He also said he was “dubious” Harvard could argue the First Amendment protected the campus jihadists. Apparently, calling for the genocide of Jewish students does NOT “depend on the context” – like their former DEI president Claudine Gay said in her disastrous testimony to the House Committee investigating antisemitism.

Read it.

A federal judge ordered a California community college on Aug. 2 not to enforce a poster policy that was used against three students whose anti-communist posters were taken down.

U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston found that the poster policy of Fresno-based Clovis Community College violated the students’ First Amendment and 14th Amendment rights.

The policy forbade students from displaying material at the taxpayer-funded school containing language or themes deemed “inappropriate” or “offensive.”

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Wednesday’s PBS News Hour segment posed as an even-handed examination of declining trust in the news media, setting up Fox News on the right matching MSNBC on the left as both being to blame. But veteran reporter Judy Woodruff’s framing of bias, as a problem only for cable news and its opinion-heavy political coverage, leaves out the constant bias that occurs on those presumed bastions of objectivity, the Big Three broadcast networks, not to mention PBS and CNN.

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And that tells you everything you need to know about the Crust.

Read it.

A new nonprofit organization has released a map revealing leftist groups spewing hate and inspiring violence, countering the narrative that all animus and political violence comes from the Right.

The map aims to balance the notorious far-left bias of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy and creating a map to monitor Klan groups and others it claimed were fellow travelers.

The SPLC’s “hate map” has since grown to include many mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits that have nothing to do with hate, much less white supremacy, yet the SPLC continues to claim the map shows the “infrastructure upholding white supremacy.”

Read it.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., will introduce legislation Thursday reaffirming that presidents do not have immunity for criminal actions, an attempt to reverse the Supreme Court’s landmark decision last month. Schumer’s No Kings Act would attempt to invalidate …

UPDATE: Schumer Bill Aims to Nullify Court’s Presidential Immunity Ruling

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A Denver high school allows students to take classes such as Queer Literature and Gender Studies to earn a “Seal of Diversity” award.

Students can submit a short, five-minute application to be part of the program, then take “diversity, equity, and inclusion”-related classes and engage with a DEI-related club or organization on campus to receive the award, according to documents obtained by The Daily Signal through a Colorado Open Records Act request.

“This award, to me, represents who we are, and should all aspire to be at East [High School], and I’m so proud of how many of you live that every day,” social studies teacher Dylan Fehrman said to members of the program in a message on March 23, 2023.

The Colorado Parent Advocacy Network told The Daily Signal it’s calling for an investigation into the classes, lesson plans, books, articles, and other materials used in the Seal of Diversity program.

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A Bakersfield College professor who was investigated and disciplined after he questioned the use of grant money to fund social justice initiatives at his school has agreed to a $2.4 million settlement to resolve his lawsuit.

Matthew Garrett, formerly a tenured history professor at the California community college, will receive $2,245,480 divided into monthly payments for the next 20 years as well as an immediate one-time payment of $154,520 as “compensation for back wages and medical benefits since [his] dismissal,” according to the July 10 settlement agreement.

Also under the terms of the settlement, Garrett agreed to resign from his job with the Kern Community College District. Administrators, in turn, have withdrawn and sealed any and all accusations and reports accusing him of “unprofessional conduct.”

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Jamiee Michell, a lesbian who founded the organization Gays Against Groomers, finds it ironic and “hilarious” that the Southern Poverty Law Center brands her openly LGBTQ group an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.”

“It classifies us as an anti-LGBTQ hate group, which is the most ironic and hilarious thing ever because everybody in our organization is gay and we even have a few trans people,” Michell tells The Daily Signal in an interview at the Republican National Convention earlier this month.

She says the SPLC, Anti-Defamation League, and other liberal organizations “labeled us anti-ourselves just for speaking out, wanting to protect children.”

Read it.

As people grow increasingly wary of dangers around them, a split-screen has again opened up on how the Left and Right approach the threat of terrorism. On the Left, you have the Army being trained on the purported terrorist threat posed by Christian pro-lifers. On the other, elected officials are finally probing pro-Hamas groups.

The pro-life groups presented as terrorist threats to U.S. Army soldiers were National Right to Life and Operation Rescue, two Christian-based groups with zero history of violence. The pro-Hamas groups that Republican state and federal elected officials want probed organized violent protests in U.S. campuses and cities to advocate Hamas, a Gaza-based Iranian proxy group that the State Department has designated as a terrorist organization.

Read it.

Big tech’s crackdown on “gunfluencers” is nothing new, but policies at social media companies are becoming increasingly restrictive (read: here), leading to the demonetization of numerous channels. The latest victim of this aggressive censorship isn’t even the typical gun YouTuber but instead a competitive rifle shooter on Team USA for the Paralympics.

Just The News reports that McKenna Geer, a competitive rifle shooter, had her Instagram account censored before she heads to Paris for the Paralympic Games in late August. Next week, the Olympic Games are set to begin.

Nature.

You can’t make this shit up.

Read it.

When Google and YouTube first announced that they would be demonetizing a host of channels back in 2017 (including firearms related content) they said is was because advertisers were “complaining” about their ads being featured in videos that were contrary to their messaging. In other words, the excuse was that ads embedded on firearms channels might give their customers the “wrong impression” about those companies and their products, and Google didn’t want to anger their advertising partners.

It’s hard to say how accurate this claim was. The exposure of ESG and Big Tech collusion with government agencies to censor conservative platforms supports the idea that there was probably an organized corporate push to suppress the political opposition on YouTube as much as there was an effort to shut them down on social media.

The majority of conservative content creators understood that this was not about advertisers, it was about narratives. The exploding popularity of gun channels runs contrary to the media assertion that American society is moving increasingly to the left. And, even though gun channels mostly focus on firearms and instruction, they also promoted conservative and constitutional values which represent a thorn in the side of the establishment.

More proof has surfaced that randomized advertising and company complaints were never the issue. Gun related channels are reporting that Google/YouTube is not only demonetizing them, they are also no longer allowed to feature private sponsors that market gun related products.

Read it.

So, the truth has come to light: the European Commission offered social media platforms secret illegal deals in the run-up to the recent European elections, that if they censored speech without telling anyone, they would be immune from prosecution under the Digital Services Act (DSA).

This claim, made by X owner Elon Musk in a tweet on Friday, in which he revealed X had refused to cooperate with the deal but that Facebook and Google had, is extraordinary. It is remarkable because, throughout the recent elections, Brussels was constantly warning of Europe being under threat of fake news, disinformation, and hate speech emanating from Russia, while in reality, European citizens were under attack from the anti-democratic and hateful censorious attitude of EU elites.

Musk has exposed the arrogant hypocrisy of the Brussels elite and their so-called allegiance to defending European values like democracy and free speech.

Geez, you’d think they were Democrats or something.

Read it.

“The First Amendment Is Out of Control.” That headline in a recent column in the New York Times warned Americans of a menace lurking around them and threatening their livelihoods and very lives. That menace is free speech and the media and academia are ramping up attacks on a right that once defined us as a people.

And these are people calling Trump the ‘New Hitler’. I think Adolf would recognize them before anybody.

Jonathan Turley.

If Democrats are looking for The New Hitler, all they have to do is cast their eyes on the White House.

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Columbia University announced it is removing three deans who sent antisemitic texts, calling them “upsetting.”In a letter, President Minouche Shafik said the texts were sent during a reunion weekend entitled “Jewish Life on Campus: Past, Present and Future,” in May.

UPDATE: Moving the Priests Around: Columbia To Reassign Deans at Center of Texting Scandal

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In an odd tactical decision, the Biden-Harris campaign has chosen to demonize the Heritage Foundation and tie that organization to Donald Trump. Heritage has published the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. It is a compendium of recommended conservative policies, intended to be “the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025.”

Donald Trump has nothing to do with the Heritage Foundation, and had nothing to do with Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. Some of the policies recommended by Heritage, such as free trade, reduced tariffs, and nationwide limitations on abortion, are at odds with Trump’s policies. Nevertheless, the Biden campaign finds it worthwhile to demonize Heritage:

First of all, Heritage has produced a document of over 800 pages. Ain’t nobody got time for dat. And it says nothing about immigration, so it is just the same old Crustian bullshit.

Secondly, this sort of thorough transition preparation is something that Democrats are good at and Republicans suck at, which is why we’re in the pickle we’re in right now, and why Trump’s first administration got so little done. One of the things they did get done, of course, was in the area of judicial nominations, including the current kick-ass Supreme Court, and that was the result of efforts by the Federalist Society. So the assistance of such think-tank organizations can be significant … if Trump allows it to be. And that’s why the Democrats are trying so hard to step on it. My rule of thumb is that if Democrats hate something, it’s probably the right thing to do.

Read it.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., on Monday issued a vow to file articles of impeachment after the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity, which she described as “an assault on American democracy.”

More Trump Derangement Syndrome:

The Supreme Court Puts Trump Above the Law (The Atlantic)

The President Can Now Assassinate You, Officially (The Nation)

Van Jones: ‘MAGA Hats’ SCOTUS Just Gave Presidents a ‘License to Thug’

ABC Panics SCOTUS Case Is ‘Absolute’ Win for Trump; ‘Hard to Square’ With Constitution

The Other McCain.

We’re living in a 21st-century Salem, and the folks who want to hang witches all claim to be “progressive.” Basically anybody who votes Republican nowadays is suspected of witchcraft — “white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi”! — and whatever actual danger there may be from such extremism is obscured by the hysterical paranoia of self-appointed witch-hunters like Casey Newton.

If everybody is a Nazi, nobody is Nazi. If you start exaggerating the extent of extremism by expanding the definition to include anyone you disagree with, don’t pretend that your diminished credibility is anyone’s fault but your own. That’s basically what happened to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which began putting dots on its annual “Hate Map” to represent alleged threats that reasonable people might doubt were very harmful. One of the tricks the SPLC employed was to list every local chapter of, e.g., the Eagle Forum as a separate “hate group.”

David Frum carries a tanker full of water for the Left.

The debate was a travesty—because its whole premise was to treat a failed coup leader as a legitimate candidate for the presidency again.

You’d never know that this guy (like his fellow sell-out, Conor Friedersdorf) was once an intern at National Review.

Hm. Well, maybe you would….

Read it.

A CDU politician in Germany is under investigation for hate crimes after he reacted to a knife attack by an Afghan migrant by calling for the expulsion of foreign criminals from the country.

Read it.

The editor-in-chief and publisher of The Tennessee Star was ordered to appear in court last week and threatened with charges of contempt after his newspaper reported on an anonymously leaked collection of documents authored by Nashville mass shooter Audrey Elizabeth Hale. Michael Patrick Leahy was joined by his attorneys in court on Monday for a “show-cause hearing,” where the journalist was asked by Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea Myles to demonstrate why his outlet’s reporting does not subject him to contempt proceedings and sanctions.

On March 27, 2023, Hale (born Audrey Elizabeth Hale) entered the Covenant School armed with three semiautomatic guns and murdered six people, including three 9-year-old children. Hale, who was eventually shot and killed by police in the school, was a transgender man and former student at Covenant who harbored extremist sentiments on race, gender, and politics. The massacre remains the deadliest mass shooting in Tennessee history.

Adam Goldstein, a senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told RealClear last week that there is no legal basis whatsoever on which Myles can pursue contempt proceedings against Leahy. “It has not been alleged by anyone to date that the Star or Leahy did anything unlawful to obtain this information,” Goldstein said, speaking of the leaked documents, “or that the information was not basically accurate as published.” Reporting on leaked documents, however they were obtained by a source, is an essential journalistic practice protected by U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

Can you say “Pentagon Papers”? I’m sure you can.

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Study comparing the genetic activity of mitochondria, the cell’s power plants, in males and females finds extreme differences, suggesting certain disease therapies must be tailored to each sex.

Oops–this will get you cancelled by the Wokerati for the ThoughtCrime of Noticing.

Read it.

A German woman reacting to the vicious gang rape of a 15-year-old by ten predominately migrant men is set to spend a weekend behind bars for alleged “hate postings” made over WhatsApp to one of the attackers.

The gang rape was perpetrated in September 2020 in a prominent public park in Hamburg, with the ten men, ranging from 16 to 20 years old, taking advantage of the teen’s inebriated state and the lack of witnesses due to ongoing lockdown measures.

The nature of the gang rape, as well as the fact it was organized over a group chat, attracted particular horror in the courtroom and the popular press.

German press reports that five of the ten men were non-German nationals, including from Afghanistan and Syria, with all of the attackers of non-German extraction. Only one of the men found guilty at the trial was given a prison sentence—of two years and nine months. The rest of the attackers were given mild community service and suspended sentences.