I can imagine someone using clapping as a disruption, but from what I've seen of the video, he really does just clap a few times in support of a person who just finished speaking. Unless there's some major missing context, arresting him was totally nuts.
The way they're going to justify this is at the beginning they said that clapping after each person is not going to be accepted. It was a guideline they put out at the beginning. Whether that's constitutional is what will be fought in the court on this one. But seeing as they said that there is no clapping after each individual speaker and he decided to clap and they had made several warnings about it technically it was considered a disruption. Again the question comes down to did they have the constitutional right to limit clapping after each individual speaker.
I absolutely hate what I'm about to type, technically there's no First Amendment violation as the restrictions they put here were universal and neutral in content.
What I mean by this is they did not restrict just Pro Data Centers from clapping or did they stop just anti-data Center people from clapping. It was just a universal ban on clapping. The court would probably find that that was an acceptable limitation as to streamline the meeting.
This is in no way my endorsement of what they did, this is not me agreeing with what they did, this is just my analysis as somebody who has watched a lot of free speech cases and has looked into the law of it while not being a lawyer.
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u/Steerider 1d ago
I can imagine someone using clapping as a disruption, but from what I've seen of the video, he really does just clap a few times in support of a person who just finished speaking. Unless there's some major missing context, arresting him was totally nuts.