A Truly Disturbing Case Of Censorship
Murthy v Missouri: Supreme Court To Hear Social Media Censorship Case
On Monday (March 18th) the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in Murthy v Missouri, a case that may very well be the most disturbing case I have ever covered here on this channel. In the lower courts this case had been docketed as Missouri v Biden.
This case has to do with the practice of jawboning. Jawboning is a term that refers to governments taking action to do something indirectly that they are unable to take action on directly. They accomplish this by leaning on intermediaries to do the thing they are not authorized to do themselves. We are talking about censorship that facially violates the first amendment. And a fundamental principle in constitutional law is that anything the government is not empowered to do directly, they are equally barred from doing indirectly. This kind of state action seems especially egregious, as the very fact they are engaging in jawboning tells you they completely understand that the activity they are engaging in is a usurpation of power.
Because of the complexity of this case, and the fact that this case is one that cannot be discussed without a more thorough understanding than usual of the facts of the case and its procedural history in the lower courts, today we will be discussing the background of the case and its preliminary injunction granted by the district Court in July last year. The next piece will cover the fifth circuit appeal and the merits of the case on which the Supreme Court would grant cert back on October 20th, 2023. This will get us up to speed so that when the Court hears oral arguments in the case this coming Monday March 18th you will understand everything you need to fully comprehend this case when it does come before the court next week.
But understanding the basics of this case that we will be covering here today is important for another reason. Because to the extent people do learn about cases such as this, they usually get their understanding from the corporate media, or from politically derived discussions of the case. I dare say that anyone whose understanding of this case comes from any of those sources doesn’t understand this case.
To the extent this case has been discussed in the liberal media and by liberal politicians, it has been discussed the same way Vox describes it here “Murthy would devastate a democratic administration’s ability to ask social media companies to voluntarily remove content.” The truth is that these correspondences between government and social media and the extent to which they threaten and coerce social media companies is shocking.
On the other hand we have the Republican media and its political class which discuss this coercive censorship as being a completely new phenomenon as of January 2021. Furthermore, they claim they, the GOP, are the principled defenders of online free speech. We have begun to discuss these falsehoods and rank hypocrisies in my coverage of the Netchoice cases—and we will be exploring those issues even further in the next Murthy v Missouri episode.
So let’s, as quickly as possible sum up the basic facts of the case and the procedural history up to and including the district court preliminary injunction of July 4th 2023.
So this case was filed by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana, filed in conjunction with a non-profit known as the New Civil Liberties Alliance. They filed suit back in May of 2022 on behalf of two buckets of plaintiffs. One was on behalf of the citizens of those two states alleging they had been damaged by the restrictions on the first amendment’s free flow of information that came about as a result of the allegations. But they also filed on behalf of several individual plaintiffs. Two doctors and one journalist from the gateway pundit.
The defendants are an alphabet list of agencies in the federal government. They also include President Biden, numerous cabinet members (including Surgeon General Vivek Murthy)—And from high and mid-level staffers of agencies, including CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) who are perhaps the most pervasive and malicious of the named defendants. But this list also included the DOJ, the FBI, The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the CDC, Homeland Security and a few others who are named defendants but not really involved in the preliminary injunction we are discussing today. Such as the Census Bureau and the FDA.
Procedural History
The procedural history for the preliminary injunction filed on July 4th 2023 is as follows—
A complaint is filed on May 5th.
A motion for preliminary injunction filed on June 14th 2022.
With a motion to Dismiss filed on July 12th
A number of amended complaints are filed throughout late 2022.
The Court would grant discovery back in September.
Depositions taken from many notable individuals, including Dr. Fauci, press secretary Kareem Jean-Pierre. The Court made extensive factual findings in this preliminary injunction. Which, I will link to on the show notes page for this episode, and which everyone should go read for themselves.
(See: Opinion Of The Court, filed July 4, 2023)1
Usually specific dates in the procedural history aren’t important, but I highlight them for the simple reason that to have a federal court case go from complaint to a decision of the court in just about a year and 2 months is lightning fast litigation, and I believe underwrites the grave nature and serious implications of this case, which is nothing short of a mass-censorship case of potentially millions of people in this country all done through seedy back-channel threats and coercion to hide what should be a nationwide outrage.
I mean for the last 6 years two presidential administrations flagrantly violated the first amendment on an unprecedented scale and liberals want to pretend there’s nothing to see here at all, and Republicans are desperate to deny the fact their golden boy and the presumed nominee in the election later this year is every bit as guilty of this same mass censorship. What Republicans want to keep hidden is the fact that the only reason Trump isn’t also a named defendant is because they are suing these politicians in their official capacity, and as Trump isn’t in office he can’t be a party to this case. Though this social media jawboning goes back to at least 2018 and was carried out by Trump personally and numerous members of his past administration.
The allegations of the complaint, in short are that the Biden Administration specifically pressured and coerced the major social media companies to censor the plaintiffs for their disfavored speech online. The topics included the Hunter Biden laptop story, the efficacy of masks, of the covid vaccine, of the lab leak theory and issues around questions of election integrity. They also demanded the removal of parody accounts mocking members of the first family.
The allegations by the State plaintiffs are that the extensive federal censorship outlined in the complaint restricts the free flow of information on these platforms & that in turn hurts the residents of the States. The attorneys general of these states are suing under what is known as Parens Patriae Standing to sue the federal government.
Parens patriae is Latin for "parent of the country or homeland." Under parens patriae, a state or court has a paternal and protective role over its citizens or others subject to its jurisdiction.
The doctrine of parens patriae is a doctrine under which a state has third-party standing to bring a lawsuit on behalf of a citizen when the suit implicates a state’s quasi-sovereign interests for the well-being of its citizens.
A further amended complaint asserts an additional First Amendment speech violations based on viewpoint discrimination. So it’s not just that censorship occurred, but that it occurred on the basis of viewpoint discrimination. Essentially, the decision to target the plaintiffs and their posts for censorship were regulations based on their perceived conservative viewpoints, or viewpoints that were contrary to the government’s position on issues related to topics such as Covid-19 or election integrity.
Following completion of depositions and the discovery phase a third amended complaint was filed in May of 2023. The preliminary injunction would be granted barely two months later—which is an unbelievably fast pace for federal cases. I would say this fact speaks to the grave importance being put on this issue by the courts… and rightfully so.
The injunction that was granted was sweeping in its scope and it came out almost entirely in favor of the plaintiffs and their allegations in this case, with just a couple of exceptions that we will get to a little later. The sweeping nature of the preliminary injunction was based on the Court’s careful analysis and determination that the plaintiffs were very likely to succeed on the merits of their case. In this instance, there is no case filed against the social media companies themselves. This case focused exclusively on the government’s actions.
The Court also went to great lengths to detail specific examples of the government’s actions going well beyond the government exercising its own right to engage in speech. The Court found it was clear that the government’s actions coerced social media companies, using their police powers in seeking to take down specific disfavored viewpoints, as well as giving significant encouragement to the social media companies to censor a vast plane of protected speech.
They noted that starting in the first days of the Biden Administration we began to see the start of what would become increasingly aggressive rhetoric from the White House demanding social media companies, specifically Facebook and Twitter remove certain posts and certain speakers. When that didn’t happen as quickly as the government felt it should they demonstrated a pattern of escalating aggressive rhetoric.
The government commonly refers to these companies as “our partners”… For example, one correspondence said “I thought you guys were our partners, are you going to cooperate, or are we going to have to take this in a different direction.” And this sort of sentiment is one you find repeated in virtually every communication from pretty much every government official when contacting pretty much every social media company.
You may be wondering why it matters whether a social media company chooses to engage in a “partnership” with the government. The issue is that we can find concrete examples of the government using these arrangements to achieve censorship by other means.
In February 2020, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emailed Dr. Anthony Fauci offering a partnership to promote accurate information about Wuhan coronavirus. That led to Facebook, at Fauci's direction, censoring the lab leak theory for more than year. As we now know from FOIA requests, on January 31, 2020, Dr. Fauci had received an email with a report from an NIH scientist, Dr. Kristian Andersen, who said the virus was potentially engineered in a lab.
"On a phylogenetic tree the virus looks totally normal and the close clustering with bats suggest that bats serve as the reservoir. The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,"
~Kristian Andersen January 31, 20202
Because of this Facebook/government partnership, Facebook pre-emptively censored credible scientific information for more than a year, because Dr. Fauci was able to beat expert scientists, with a credible theory based on empirical evidence to the punch. So their voices never even had a chance to be heard or their facts evaluated on this matter of public health that Fauci knew to be supported by his agency’s own evidence.
According to the opinion of the Court in this preliminary injunction, as a regulated company you would find at least some of this language to be beyond friendly suggestions and straying into specific discussions with threats—such as responding to pushback from these companies that if they weren’t going to play ball, perhaps Section 230 was too broad and needed to be repealed. The government is clearly saying “you’re right, we can’t force you. But if you won’t do what we tell you to do the government will start revoking legal protections until we can force you to act.”
They have also demonstrated no qualms about reminding these companies they have plenty of other tools, short of exercising force over these companies’ actions that can be employed to make things much more difficult and unpleasant in the meantime.
Another escalation tactic they would employ following pushback from the social media companies was to make threats about bringing anti-trust suits against these companies if they didn’t do the governments bidding. The Court concluded that tacking threats onto requests for voluntary compliance is clearly a coercive act.
There is a real Mafioso protection racket vibe emanating from these communications.
Another term the government would use to obfuscate their tactics was to call their communications “significant encouragement”. The court’s findings would characterize ”significant encouragement” as:
“Defendants used meetings and communications with social-media companies to pressure those companies to take down, reduce, and suppress the free speech of American citizens.”
(Opinion Of The Court, page 93-94)
…[W]hen a state has so involved itself in the private party’s conduct, it cannot claim the conduct occurred as a result of private choice, even if the private party would have acted independently. Peterson v. City of Greenville, 373 U.S. 244, 247–248 (1963).
(Opinion Of The Court, page 90)
I believe we will hear a lot more about this as the case evolves. That is, the extent to which, even though sometimes the social media companies were immediately willing to engage in some of this censorship following a mere request, the extent to which the State’s actions (or, the proximate cause, if you will) had such an impact that they're inextricably intertwined in the outcome.
The court found that some defendants, not all, but some made explicit threats towards social media companies to coerce content moderation decisions. Some defendants use threats to curtail immunity. One source of this pressure came specifically from the White House defendants. Even when these communications didn’t come with any overt threat or coercion, one should keep in mind these companies were faced with unrelenting pressure from the most powerful office in the world.
So, here's the scope of the injunction-- The court granted the motion for a preliminary injunction and enjoined the government defendants who were before the court for purposes of the injunction, which is not all the defendants, from meeting with social media companies for the purpose of censoring protected speech, from flagging content or posts and then forwarding the post to social media companies for removal. Basically creating something of a censorship machine inside the government that were then transmitted to the social media companies and telling them to execute on these decisions made by the government.
Additionally, they enjoined the government from encouraging or pressuring companies to change their guidelines or their terms of service with respect to content moderation.
There’s many examples where the government would request specific post or topics be taken down, to which the social media companies would say “Hey government that's actually not a violation of our content guidelines. We can’t do that just because you may not like something.” To which the government would often say “Well, we don't care about your guidelines we've just we've just moved the goal posts, so you better take it down.” Which was unfortunately effective at modifying these companies attitudes. In this way, the Court found these companies were being forced to change their guidelines, according to the government’s whims, or to take actions they did not want to, in contravention of their guidelines, to avoid the government’s further censorship or retaliatory action.
The government was additionally barred from requesting content reports from these social media companies detailing the actions they had taken to remove, delete and suppress content. So, in other words, the court found the government's demands for information often going beyond helpful suggestions to monitoring these companies for tactics that would effectively increase their compliance with demands.
They were also barred from notifying social media companies to BOLO (be on the lookout) for specific posts or types of posts.
But there are also some exceptions mentioned in the injunction, that I believe will get much more interesting and be even more important in their upcoming appeal. These specific exceptions the injunction contains are for criminal activity, national security threats (which was the initial purpose and function of CISA in the first place), also criminal efforts to suppress voting, matters of public safety (which seems like a ridiculous loophole, because so much of the material being censored had to do with covid, including vaccine safety and efficacy, as well as mask safety and efficacy. While the Court identified that Covid censorship as problematic viewpoint discrimination, the government could plausibly say those were matters of public safety. Other exceptions included permissible government speech that promotes government policies or views on matters of public concern, so the government is still (as it should be) free to express their own views on these matters. It also exempts communications about cyber security attacks and removing or reducing content not protected by the First Amendment.
These exceptions are as interesting as the injunction itself, seeing as how it’s left up to thousands of individuals in the government and in the social media companies to basically decide for themselves what is or is not protected First Amendment speech. Seeing as how even first amendment lawyers have wide differences of opinion over what is and is not protected first amendment speech, Can imagine how it will be with so many people who are not lawyers looking at this requirement and having to ask themselves “how do we comply with this particular provision?”
With such sweeping language in this injunction about what the government is prevented from doing and with the handful of exceptions creating loopholes you could drive a mac truck through, pretty much every first amendment attorney and scholar commenting on the injunction share in criticizing the injunction as both overly broad and under inclusive at the same time.
Opinion Of The Court
Nearly half of the 155 page preliminary injunction consists of the communications and actions that took place between the government and various social media companies, I just wanted to highlight some that I found especially troubling or informative, or representative of common patterns of abuse that repeat throughout the Court’s findings. Including where social media companies initially pushed back against a certain demand that they later gave into under rising pressure, as well as some of the most egregious examples of the government’s actions unquestionably going well beyond “voluntary recommendations and requests”… Let’s start with communications from The White House. The key player in most of these is Rob Flaherty (“Flaherty”), former Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Digital Strategy.
The first contact came a mere three days into the Biden Administration, Rob Flaherty contacted Twitter about a parody account linked to Finnegan Biden, Hunter Biden’s daughter and President Biden’s granddaughter. He told them to “Please remove this account immediately.” Three hours after that demand was made, Flaherty again called to press them, saying. Saying he speaks for the President, who “Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately,” Twitter suspended the parody account within forty-five minutes of Flaherty’s second request. (Opinion, page 9)
On February 7, 2021, Twitter sent Flaherty a “Twitter’s Partner Support Portal” for expedited review of flagging content for censorship. Twitter recommended that Flaherty designate a list of authorized White House staff to enroll in Twitter’s Partner Support Portal and explained that when authorized reporters submit a “ticket” using the portal, the requests are “prioritized” automatically. Twitter also stated that it had been “recently bombarded” with censorship requests from the White House and would prefer to have a streamlined process. Twitter noted that “[i]n a given day last week for example, we had more than four different people within the White House reaching out for issues.” (Page 10)
On February 9, 2021, Flaherty followed up with Facebook in regard to its COVID-19 policy, accusing Facebook of causing “political violence” spurred by Facebook groups by failing to censor false COVID-19 claims. Facebook responded the same day and stated that “vaccine-skeptical” content does not violate Facebook’s policies. However, Facebook stated that it will have the content’s “distribution reduced” and strong warning labels added, “so fewer people will see the post.” In other words, even though “vaccine-skeptical” content did not violate Facebook’s policy, it was treated as though it was. (pages 10-11)
Facebook also informed Flaherty that it was working to censor content that does not violate Facebook’s policy in other ways by “preventing posts discouraging vaccines from going viral on our platform” (page 11)
On March 15, 2021, Flaherty insisted Facebook get more aggressive about censoring what Facebook called “borderline content”.
This was content that did not violate any of Facebook’s community guidelines and which contained no “actionable misinformation.” Flaherty also accused Facebook of being the “top driver of vaccine hesitancy.” In response to Flaherty’s email, Facebook responded, stating: “We obviously have work to do to gain your trust…We are also working to get you useful information that’s on the level. That’s my job and I take it seriously – I’ll continue to do it to the best of my ability, and I’ll expect you to hold me accountable.” Slavitt, who was copied on Facebook’s email added more pressure by stating, “Internally, we have been considering our options on what to do about it.” (pages 13-14).
Which could only mean that if Facebook wasn’t willing to ban borderline content the Biden administration flagged, the Biden Administration was considering how to use the police power to force this content off their site.
Sunday, March 21, 2021, noting that the White House had demanded a consistent point of contact with Facebook, additional access to Facebook, “Levers for Tackling Vaccine Hesitancy Content.” This was followed by an extensive exchange of further communications that day. The final communication from Flaherty in that exchange was to say
I care mostly about what actions and changes you are making to ensure you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse.
He accused Facebook of being responsible for the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, and indicating that Facebook would be similarly responsible for COVID-related deaths if it did not censor more information. Taken collectively, the Court’s finding was that the White House wanted to establish a formal arrangement with someone they could contact at Facebook, with the authority to immediately pull down any specific post the White House flagged for removal. (page 15)
On April 13, 2021, a Facebook report noted that vaccine hesitancy content does not violate Facebook’s content-moderation policies, but indicated that Facebook still censors this content. This includes:
True but shocking claims or personal anecdotes;
Discussing the choice to vaccinate in terms of personal or civil liberties; and
Concerns related to mistrust in institutions or individuals.
On April 14, 2021, Flaherty demanded the censorship of Fox News host Tomi Lahren because the top post about vaccines that day was Tomi Lahren stating she won’t take a vaccine.” (page 16)
On April 14, 2021, Slavitt emailed Facebook executive Nick Clegg (“Clegg”) with a message expressing displeasure with Facebook’s failure to censor Tucker Carlson. Slavitt stated, “Not for nothing but the last time we did this dance, it ended in an insurrection.” Facebook reported the Tucker Carlson content had not violated Facebook’s policy, but Facebook gave the video a 50% demotion for seven days and stated that it would continue to demote the video. (page 17)
On May 5, 2021, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki (“Psaki”) publicly began pushing Facebook and other social-media platforms to censor COVID-19 misinformation. At a White House Press Conference, Psaki publicly reminded Facebook and other social-media platforms of the threat of “legal consequences” if they do not censor misinformation more aggressively. Psaki linked the threat of a “robust anti-trust program” with the White House’s censorship demand. (page 22)
It should be noted that Mark Zuckerberg had previously said that the kind of anti-trust program that they are being threatened with would pose an “existential threat” to the continued existence of Facebook. This is truly one of the most disturbing of all threats. It beggars belief that the White House Press Secretary could say to a that if a social media company doesn’t comply with unconstitutional demands by the government to censor viewpoint based speech, they would take legal action, by blatantly abusing anti-trust laws by bringing an anti-trust suit, not to regulate that company for engaging in anti-competitive conduct, but as a punitive measure to punish this company for not censoring citizens based on viewpoint discrimination when they knew, because Zuckerberg had previously stated this, that the legal consequences she was threatening them with would literally destroy their companies’ ability to exist…. And the major news networks whose journalists were in that room and heard her say that are the very same networks who are now running stories claiming this is “a case that seeks to prevent the democratic administration from asking media companies to voluntarily remove content.”
On July 20, 2021, at a White House Press Conference, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield (“Bedingfield”) stated that the White House would be announcing whether social-media platforms are legally liable for misinformation spread on their platforms and examining how misinformation fits into the liability protection granted by Section 230 and they were considering whether §230 should be amended/repealed for the sake of holding these companies accountable in a real way. (page 24)
On November 30, 2021, the White House’s Christian Tom (“Tom”) emailed Twitter requesting that Twitter watch a video of First Lady Jill Biden that had been edited to make it sound as if the First Lady were profanely heckling children while reading to them. Twitter responded within six minutes, agreeing to “escalate with the team for further review.” Twitter advised users that the video had been edited for comedic effect. Tom then requested Twitter apply a “Manipulated Media” disclaimer to the video. After Twitter told Tom the video was not subject to labeling under its policy, Tom disputed Twitter’s interpretation of its own policy and added Michael LaRosa (“LaRosa”), the First Lady’s Press Secretary, into the conversation. Further efforts by Tom and LaRosa to censor the video on December 9, 13, and 17 finally resulted in the video’s removal. (page 25)
At an April 25, 2022, White House press conference, after being asked to respond to news that Elon Musk may buy Twitter, Psaki again mentioned the threat to social-media companies to amend or repeal Section 230, linking these threats to social-media platforms’ failure to censor misinformation and disinformation. (page 26)
In addition to misinformation regarding COVID-19, the White House also asked social-media companies to censor misinformation regarding climate change, gender discussions, abortion, and economic policy. (page 26)
June 14, 2022, the White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy (“McCarthy”) blamed social-media companies for allowing misinformation and disinformation about climate change to spread and explicitly tied these censorship demands with threats of adverse legislation regarding the Communications Decency Act. (page 26)
June 16, 2022, Memorandum discussed the creation of a task force to reel in “online harassment and abuse” and to develop programs targeting such disinformation campaigns. This despite the fact that what they were actually targeting was facially unrelated to “disinformation campaigns”. The Court’s findings were that they labeled these efforts to remove disinformation because they had no authority to target the type of content they were actually going after. The Memorandum also called for the Task Force to confer with technology experts and again threatened social-media platforms with adverse legal consequences if the platforms did not censor aggressively enough. (page 27)
On August 11, 2022, Flaherty emailed Twitter to dispute a note added by Twitter to one of President Biden’s tweets about gas prices. (page 27)
On page 61, there was also a finding made against the FBI, that at the FBI’s behest “The FBI communicated with social-media platforms using two alternative, encrypted channels, Signal and Teleporter.” The Court found that one reason this has been done was so the FBI could routinely take advantage of a feature these encrypted channels have. Namely, self-deleting messages.
This means in clear violation of Federal laws under 28 U.S. Code § 1732 and 44 U.S.C. § 3106. As well as 36 CFR, part 1230, which is punishable under 18 U.S.C. §641 and §2071
These various laws and regulations pertain to the FBI engaged in unlawful removal, defacing, alteration, corruption, deletion, erasure, or other destruction of records, whenever they would routinely communicate with these social media companies using technology that irrevocably deleted their communications…
Now, when it came to the White House’s defense of these and the other plethora of actions they took that are cited in this preliminary injunction a couple of their defenses really stood out to me.
“While not admitting any fault in the suppression of free speech, Defendants blame the Russians, COVID-19, and capitalism for any suppression of free speech by social-media companies.”
(Opinion Of The Court, page 117)
Another important part of this Court’s opinion comes in the form of the Biden Administration’s defense of the statement made by White House Communications Director, Kate Bedingfield’s announcement that:
“[T]he White House is assessing whether social-media platforms are legally liable for misinformation spread on their platforms, and examining how misinformation fits into the liability protection process by Section 230 of The Communication Decency Act.”
(Opinion, page 99)
The defense offered by the Biden Administration about why those §230 threats cannot be coercive was because it wasn’t just them, that many republicans want to repeal section 230 as well. The court immediately flipped that on its head, because it noted the fact that there was bipartisan support to revoke 230 made the threat more real.
With respect to 47 U.S.C. § 230, Defendants argue that there can be no coercion for threatening to revoke and/or amend Section 230 because the call to amend it has been bipartisan. However, Defendants combined their threats to amend Section 230 with the power to do so by holding a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and in holding the Presidency.
They also combined their threats to amend Section 230 with emails, meetings, press conferences, and intense pressure by the White House, as well as the Surgeon General Defendants. Regardless, the fact that the threats to amend Section 230 were bipartisan makes it even more likely that Defendants had the power to amend Section 230. All that is required is that the government’s words or actions “could reasonably be interpreted as an implied threat.” Cuomo, 350 F. Supp. 3d at 114.
With the Supreme Court recently making clear that Section 230 shields social-media platforms from legal responsibility for what their users post, Gonzalez v. Google, 143 S. Ct. 1191 (2023), Section 230 is even more valuable to these social-media platforms. These actions could reasonably be interpreted as an implied threat by the Defendants, amounting to coercion.
(Opinion Of The Court, pages 99-100)
Conclusion
It should make everyone’s blood run cold to hear the government ever claim they are the arbiter of truth.
During the pandemic there was a vast amount of mis, dis and malinformation that proliferated. Much of that information was harmful. Much of that harmful information came from the government. Meanwhile, a fair share of erstwhile “conspiracy theory” topics have become perfectly acceptable points of debate. The lab leak theory, the limited effectiveness of mRNA vaccines, the health risks of the vaccine and the efficacy of natural immunity are but a few of the myriad claims that were categorically denied by the government as fringe theories, too dangerous to exist in the global commons. Anyone who made these claims was subject to censorship & social ostracization. Yet today these are all now recognized to be at least potentially true statements, if not categorically proven facts.
We shouldn’t need such overwhelming and shocking evidence about the fallibility of people in power, if not the intentional deception by government actors to understand that making other people who happen to get their job through the democratic process the infallible deciders of what is true and what is false.
If, in situations like that, the government wants to act as a source of true and factual information that’s perfectly alright. But letting them claim they are the only source of what is true and factual is unbelievably ignorant and dangerous, even in lesser circumstances where the consequences aren’t nearly as severe.
Besides, no one supporting the current government (not just now, but at any given moment in time) ever considers that there will be a time when it won’t be their guy deciding what is true and what is false. To all of the news organizations and the political commentators and democrat voters who are defending the Biden administration and the actions they took in this case, because you trust Joe Biden to only abuse his power in ways you approve of.
Consider the very real possibility that come January 2025 you may well be handing all this power back to Donald Trump for another four years. Are you really okay with that because at the moment, the guy who is abusing this power is doing so in a manner you perceive does you no harm?
In this sense, the rest of us would do well to remember that the Biden Administration didn’t create this situation of fear, they merely exploited it —and rather successfully, I might add.
Cassius was right that the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
No one with a shred of moral fiber should be defending a single thing in this case. The government is violating your first amendment rights. And there is no first amendment exception for viewpoints that are wrong. That is even truer when we are talking about viewpoints you merely assume are wrong, because they disagree with yours.
Cartago Delenda Est
Missouri v. Biden, No. 22-cv-1213 (W.D. La., July 4, 2023)
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Letter-to-Dr-Andersen.pdf