Reining In The Federal Government’s Censorship Machine
A very good thing happened last week. A federal judge – with a spine – ruled that several individuals, agencies, and departments in the Biden administration were forbidden from communicating with BigTech corporations to affect censorship. While this is a great victory in the battle for free speech, we need to go further.
Only the politically partisan and those blind to despotism are unaware of the aggressive attack being executed on our inalienable right to free speech here in the United States. And while this right is codified in the First Amendment to the US Constitution in the Bill of Rights – giving Americans a lawful claim to the right, it is an oppressive cancer that is rapidly spreading around the world, all thanks to the lemming-like mindset fomented during the “COVID incident” and an opportunistic globalist class that seeks to attain the status of “lord and master”.
The Ruling
Louisiana District Federal Judge Terry Doughty temporarily blocked numerous federal agencies and employees from instructing BigTech social media platforms to censor speech
The ruling in Missouri v. Biden forbids the Department of Health & Human Services, the CDC, the Justice Department, the FBI, several White House officials, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department – and more – from contacting the private sector companies about restricting certain content.
Conversely, Judge Doughty also included a list of instances when the government may continue to coordinate with BigTech companies, including notifying companies about threats to national security, criminal efforts to suppress voting, “malicious” activity, and foreign attempts to influence elections.
The ruling technically blocks the government from lobbying or collusion with social media companies to censor content that is deemed legal under the First Amendment. Judge Doughty strongly indicated that he considers the government’s actions unconstitutional.
Emails and texts examined in the case show that officials continuously pressured employees at Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram about censorship, the efficiency of “misinformation” policies, and accusing employees of harming the public if they didn’t censor enough vaccine-related content.
Federal agencies worked with universities and nonprofits to report thousands of posts for social media platforms to suppress.
Judge Doughty says the plaintiffs will “likely” prove that the government violated the First Amendment and that it may have committed “viewpoint discrimination” by targeting mostly right-leaning content.
The Hill headline regarding the case read, “Court ruling prompts fears of ‘Wild West' of disinformation”. The article insists the ruling “could make it harder to curb disinformation as the 2024 election nears.”
NPR declared the decision would hinder “the government’s ability…to address false and misleading claims about COVID, vaccines, voting, and other issues that could undermine public health and erode confidence in election results”.
And The New York Times, stunningly – or maybe arrogantly, is still calling the claim that “COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent transmission of the disease” a “debunked” theory, despite being proven true by a variety of authoritative sources a long time ago.
Why The Ruling Must Be Taken A Step Further
While Judge Doughty is to be applauded for his ruling, the truth of the matter is this. We need to bring the matter through to the US Supreme Court to slap the federal government back into line with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights where all of our inalienable rights and the limitations of the federal government are concerned.
As Americans, we are meant to exist in a constant state of our inalienable rights. Our rights to free speech and a free press, freedom to practice our religions, to redress government, to assemble, to bear arms, to be secure in our persons and property, to due process, and more (as enumerated in the Bill of Rights), are rights that exist in a constant state. The government doesn’t grant these rights and they are not suggestions for the private sector to choose to abide by.
Yet, increasingly, we hear that the Bill of Rights only applies to the relationship between government and citizens and nowhere else; that our inalienable rights are not sacrosanct in the private sector.
This idea is not only in error, it is antithetical to everything on which our country was founded. Short of causing physical harm to another or infringing on another’s rights, each and every American has a right to exist in a constant state of each of those rights.
Meta and Twitter have no right to limit free speech. Coca-Cola has no right to force people into submitting to a certain way of thinking or silence. BlackRock and Bank of America have no right to create barriers to lawful ownership of a firearm. But because society has acquiesced to the false notion that the private sector isn’t held to the same standards regarding our inalienable rights as the government – without the citizenry questioning their authority to do so, both in the marketplace and in the courts – they assume the arrogance necessary to infringe upon of rights and do so with impunity.
Evidently, we must push this issue to the US Supreme Court to finally have the issue re-codified into law as if the Bill of Rights wasn’t clear enough. Even then, if this issue isn’t brought before the Court in a manner that excludes the Justices’ cop-out excuse of “standing” so as not to hear the case, by the time it re-emerges in front of the Court, the makeup of the Court could be different and more sympathetic to the pathetic ideology of wokeness.
As Ronald Reagan was famous for saying; “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
It’s sad but true. We must fight to preserve our rights from what is now an oppressive and encroaching government and an arrogant and irresponsible BigTech community. If we do not, those rights will soon mean nothing.
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