By now most ice cream lovers have heard the news: Ben & Jerry’s is pulling its scoops out of Israel as part of the global Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement targeting the Jewish state. While participation in a movement rooted in deep anti-Semitism is itself despicable – so too the political stance that Jews have no right to live in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, home to the Western Wall – the decision to inflict economic harm on an Israeli company for political ends also comes with extensive legal, financial and reputational hurdles.

Unilever, a publicly traded company (NYSE: UL) that owns the Ben & Jerry’s brand, faces a rocky road ahead and is already finding itself in deep fudge with states around the country.

As of today, 33 states in America have adopted some form of anti-boycott law that requires the state to blacklist any company that boycotts Israel. Twelve of those states require their pension funds to divest any direct holdings and warn fund managers against indirect holdings of the blacklisted company. Twenty-one other states also prohibit state contracting with the blacklisted firm. In the last 24 hours, Texas and Florida have begun the process of blacklisting Unilever.

Former president Donald J. Trump has bullied his way back into the public eye with his recent broadside against Twitter, Facebook, and Google (YouTube). The target of his lawsuit is their systematic and allegedly unconstitutional censorship of political speech, including, of course, his own. His critics predict that the lawsuit will suffer an early and ignominious death. “ ‘As stupid as you’d think’: Trump’s social media lawsuit looks like a mess,” blared Vanity Fair. Tech journalist Kara Swisher, writing in the New York Times, dismissed Trump as a First Amendment dummy who fails to understand that the amendment applies only to “Congress, not Facebook. Congress, not Twitter. Congress, not YouTube.” Vanderbilt University law professor Brian Fitzpatrick indignantly proclaimed that privately controlled companies are, in Vanity Fair’s paraphrase, “not beholden to the same speech laws that public platforms are”—and fully expects that Trump’s lawyers will face legal sanctions for filing a frivolous lawsuit that is, he argues, a thinly disguised fundraising effort by the former president. While noted First Amendment expert and dean of Berkeley Law School Erwin Chemerinsky allowed that many cases fall into “a gray area,” he insisted that this lawsuit against private parties does not.

That is, until you read the actual complaint, which shows that Trump’s lawyers are aware of these objections. It is indeed a gray-area question as to whether they have pleaded enough facts to overcome the bedrock principle that the First Amendment does not apply to private action. It turns out that matters are more complicated than his critics acknowledge.

For example, the Trump complaint alleged that Twitter acted “in concert” with the CDC and prominent officials of the incoming Biden administration when it decided to impose a lifetime ban on Trump’s Twitter account on the grounds that his actions on January 6, 2021, amounted to an incitement to violence that remains present after the Senate certified the election of Joe Biden.

Mark Alexander’s daily round-up of Internet pictures had this image: