ONE SHOW. TWO MEN. NO RULES..

DEFINITION:

free·dom of speech

Meanwhile, bans on books and drag performances are growing increasingly common nationwide.

“We are seeing tremendous attacks on First Amendment freedoms across the country right now, at all levels of government. Censorship is proliferating, and it’s deeply troubling,” said Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

“This year, we’re seeing a wave of bills targeting drag performances, where simply being gender nonconforming is enough to trigger the penalty. We’re also seeing a wave of bills regulating what can be in public or K-12 school libraries,” Cohn said. “On college campuses, we have been tracking data about attempts to get faculty members punished or even fired for speech or expression and the numbers are startling — it’s the highest rate that we’ve seen in our 20 years of existence.”

First Amendment rights had been stable in America for decades, said Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, but in recent years many states have reverted to the anti-speech tactics employed by people like Sen. Joe McCarthy during the “Red Scare” of the early 1950s.

WATCH: Librarians in Louisiana at odds with conservative activists working to ban books

McCarthy and others tried to silence political opponents by accusing them of being communists or socialists, using fear and public accusations to suppress basic free speech rights. The term “McCarthyism” became synonymous with baseless attacks on free expression, and the U.S. Supreme Court has referred to the phenomena in several First Amendment-related rulings.

“We are seeing a concerted wave that we have not seen in decades,” said Paulson, highlighting states like Florida where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has pushed for legislation that would criminalize drag shows, limit what pronouns teachers can use for students, allow parents to determine what books can be in libraries and block some history classes entirely.

“It’s pretty mind-boggling that so many politicians are waving the flag of freedom while doing anything they possibly can to infringe on the free speech rights of Americans,” Paulson said.

Still, no one political group has a monopoly on censorship — aggression is increasing across the spectrum, Cohn said.

Washington state’s bias hotline bill, which died in committee earlier this year, was sponsored by Democratic Sen. Javier Valdez and backed by several groups including the Anti-Defamation League, Urban League, Council on American-Islamic Relations and others. It aimed to help the state collect information about hate crimes and bias incidents and to provide support and compensation to victims at a time when hate crime reports are rising.

Opponents, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said they feared it would chill protected speech because it encompasses both criminal behavior and offensively biased statements.

Hate speech can be damaging and repugnant, but is still generally protected by the First Amendment. The Department of Homeland Security and experts who study extremism have warned that hateful rhetoric can be seen as a call to action by extremists groups.

READ MORE: Arizona’s conservative superintendent sets up critical race theory hotline

Oregon created a similar bias hotline in 2019. It received nearly 1,700 calls in 2021, with nearly 60 percent of the reported incidents falling short of criminal standards, according to an annual report from Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum’s office.

“People in power target their political adversaries, so who is being silenced really depends on where you are on the map and its individual context,” Cohn said.

Artist Katrina Majkut experienced that first-hand last week, when artworks she had shown in more than two dozen states over the past decade were unexpectedly censored at a small state school in Lewiston, Idaho.

Majkut uses embroidery to highlight and subvert historically narrow ideas of wifedom and motherhood. She was hired to curate an exhibit at Lewis-Clark State College focusing on health care issues like chronic illness, pregnancy and gun violence.

But March 2, a day before the show’s opening, Majkut and two other artists were told some of their work would be removed over administrator fears about running afoul of Idaho’s “No Public Funds for Abortion Act.”

The 2021 law bars state-funded entities from promoting abortion or taking other measures that could be seen as training or counseling someone in favor of abortion.

Majkut’s cross-stitch depicting misoprostol and mifepristone tablets — which can be used together to induce abortion early in pregnancy — was removed from the exhibit along with a wall plaque detailing Idaho’s abortion laws.

Four documentary video and audio works by artist Lydia Nobles that showed women talking about their own experiences with abortion were also removed. And part of artist Michelle Harney’s series of 1920s-era letters written to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger were stricken from the show.

“To be censored like that is shocking and surreal,” said Majkut, who designs her art to be educational rather than confrontational. “If the most even-keeled, bipartisan artwork around this topic is censored, then everything is going to be censored.”

READ MORE: Florida Republicans advance bills on gender identity, defamation

Logan Fowler, the spokesman for LCSC, said the school made the decision after consulting with attorneys about whether showing the art could violate the law. Republican Rep. Bruce Skaug, the author of the law, said Tuesday that it was not intended to “prevent open discussion” of abortion — only to prevent tax dollars from being used to promote it.

The art exhibit censorship comes just two months after another controversial decision by Skaug. As chairman of the Idaho House Judiciary and Rules Committee, Skaug announced in January that people under age 18 would not be allowed to testify in his committee. Another Republican committee chair soon followed suit.

Lawmakers have the ability to limit committee testimony, and often use those limits to keep the legislature’s work focused and timely. Still, the age-based speech restriction appeared to be a first for the state.

A group of teens took action, launching phone and email campaigns staging protests.

“There is a clear lack of foresight in politicians who seek to eliminate the voices of those who will one day elect and eventually supersede them,” a group of 32 high school student leaders wrote in a joint opinion piece sent to news outlets across the state. “We ask Idaho’s Republican leaders, what are you so afraid of?”

The lawmakers eventually modified their rules, allowing youth to testify as long as they have signed permission slips from a parent or guardian.

Skaug said the rule was necessary to ensure parents are aware if their kids are leaving school to testify at the Statehouse. He still intends to give priority to older residents when testimony time is limited, but said he’s not aware of any youth actually being denied the chance to testify so far this year.

For Cohn, the efforts in Idaho and elsewhere reflect the danger of trying to restrict the expression of people who hold opposing views.

“We have to be ever-vigilant if we want our culture of individual freedoms to prevail,” he said. “Bad ideas are better dealt with through debate and dialogue than government censorship.”

Then in 1966, after the previous owner declared bankruptcy, her father asked her out of the blue if she thought it would be a good idea to take over the club. It was an offer she couldn’t refuse. She’d been a Cavern fanatic since it was a jazz club, hardly missing a lunchtime or evening rock session until its closure a few weeks before – amid mass protests by Liverpool youth.

Now she was suddenly part of a new family business, faced with the task of helping to breathe new life into the now dilapidated rock ’n’ rollin' launchpad of the legendary Mersey Beat. 

This first-hand account of her ten years frequenting and eventually helping to run the original Cavern Club is an authentic inside story of this unique Beatles shrine, full of triumphs and failures – and surprise celebrity encounters.

On a single night in 2018, 4,093 children under the age of 18 were counted as homeless because they were not part of a family with children or not under the care of a parent or guardian, according to the Annual Homeless Assessment Report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The National Runaway Safeline reports that between 1.6 million and 2.8 million youth run away each year.

In 2020, of the 27,000 missing child cases reported to the Center, 91% were for endangered runaways. NCMEC provides support services to families and victims and raises awareness to help bring these youth home. Last year the Center launched the “Runaway Train” campaign, which reimagined the music video from 25 years earlier that featured missing children and helped close 21 cases. The dynamic new video updates images of missing children based on a viewer's location.

Runaway and homeless youth are more likely to engage in substance use and delinquent behavior, become teenage parents, drop out of school, suffer from sexually transmitted diseases, meet the criteria for mental illness, and have an increased risk of being sexual exploited and trafficked. The risk for homelessness is also increased for youth living in the foster care system. In fact, youth who experience multiple placements in foster care, have a history of running away from them, and who have spent time in a group home are most at risk of homelessness. Those aged 15 when they first enter foster care have the highest risk of running away. Homeless youth also have a high rate of involvement in the juvenile justice system.

How was it that his head was so badly damaged in multiple places if all that happened was he slipped on the bathroom floor?

Saget was on a comedy tour in Florida, with his first show of 2022 at the Hard Rock Live in Orlando, and had performed in Ponte Vedra Beach near Jacksonville the day before, according to his Instagram page.

In his final Instagram post, Saget shared a photo of himself on stage with the caption, "I’m back in comedy like I was when I was 26. I guess I’m finding my new voice and loving every moment of it." 

Citing authorities, Saget "accidentally hit the back of his head on something, thought nothing of it and went to sleep," the statement read. It also noted that "no drugs or alcohol were involved."

A fracture was found at the base of Saget's skull with evidence of bleeding around the brain, according to the medical examiner.

The medical examiner suggested that Saget may have fallen and hit something hard, following by something soft, such as a carpeted floor.

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ORLANDO, Fla. — Fractures around Bob Saget's eye sockets and bleeding around his brain were possibly caused by the comedian hitting "something hard, covered by something soft," such as a carpeted floor, according to a report released Tuesday that provides more details of the TV's star's death.

In the incident report released by the Orange County Sheriff's Office in Orlando, a detective notes that Chief Medical Examiner Joshua Stephany said the fractures "would have stunned Mr. Saget," and that he would have experienced dizziness.

Had he been with people at the time, they would have noticed "confusion, balance, and/or slurred speech," the report states. It does not pinpoint a location for Saget's fall, but Stephany told the detective it would have been impossible with that type of injury for Saget to make a two-hour drive from the Jacksonville area to Orlando as he did the night before his body was discovered.

Tonight, Dan Ealey will get to see McCartney once again, this time as a guest of the band when the former Beatle plays Thompson-Boling Arena.

To Ealey, McCartney is like Beethoven. In music, both have the same stature, he said.

"When I met Paul (in 1974) I said to my friends, Who can you meet in your life that will be remembered a thousand years from now?" Ealey told WBIR on Tuesday.

"I'm certain that Paul will be one of them."

LISTEN TO THIS MUST HEAR INTERVIEW WITH THE MAN WHO LIVED THE LEGEND