Government Censorship on Trial

Supremes to Hear Arguments Monday

Thanks again to the California Globe for running this piece. You can visit the website at: https://californiaglobe.com/

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The government-backed censorship-industrial complex goes on trial Monday when the United States Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the most important free speech case in decades:  Murthy v. Missouri.

The lawsuit – brought by a pair of states and private citizens – argues that the federal government has been engaged in an intentional and dedicated program of censoring the speech of those it disagrees with and laundering the process through a number of social media companies, university “think tanks,”  and “civil society” foundations.

Not only is the argument compelling, it has already prevailed at the district court level with federal Judge Terry Doughty issuing a scathing opinion and a restraining order against the Biden Administration barring it from improperly coercing/working with social media and search outfits like Facebook and Google to crush opinions it found problematic.

After that ruling, the case, formerly and most likely more popularly known as Missouri v. Biden, went to a federal appeals court which kept some of Doughty’s ruling in place and has now ended up with the Supreme Court for final determination (on the initial restraining order at least.)

The plaintiffs, including the states of Missouri and Louisiana and co-authors of Great Barrington Declaration – which called for a more targeted and rational response to the pandemic – Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kuldorff, state clearly that the administration essentially farmed out the actual censorship to the private sector, again Facebook, Google, and Twitter (pre Elon Musk.)

Since filing the suit, the plaintiffs – through documentary evidence and the taking of depositions from people like Dr. Anthony Fauci (who said he couldn’t remember A LOT and which you can watch here  ) have unquestionably found that various government agencies did in fact violate the First Amendment in its so-called battle against “misinformation.”

Note – misinformation is not real, let alone a peril to “our democracy”:   

Misinformation does not and cannot – by definition – exist.

Correct information, incorrect information, true information, false information can all certainly exist, as can partial, missing, complete, and detailed.

Just not misinformation – same with disinformation, by the way.

So why is the term used with such vitriolic abandon?  Why not call something a lie and leave it at that?

Because misinformation is not about describing factual information but about dismissing and denigrating personal opinion and belief…

 In fact, the epithet of misinformation is used most often, begging Al Gore’s pardon, to describe an inconvenient truth.

Inconvenient truths like that the pandemic response was incredibly damaging, that mail-in ballots are inherently less secure than voting in person, that the “vaccines” were not really vaccines, and on and on.

“What is at stake is the future of American civilization,” said Bhattacharya, who will be in attendance during the arguments Monday.  “If the court sides with the Biden administration’s argument that it should be allowed to censor people and ideas it doesn’t like then the First Amendment and American democracy are dead.”

The censorship-industrial complex – exemplified by the actions laid out in the “Twitter Files” which conclusively show various government agencies demanding the company remove and/or suppress “tweets” it did not like  has become the key part of of the Biden administration’s attempt to control the public discussion, again, something no government is allowed to do or ask/chide/coerce/threaten private companies to do on its behalf.

For example, Bhattacharya, an internationally recognized Stanford medical professor, was blacklisted by Twitter  for calling for a more rational pandemic response.

The government’s response so far has been a self-contradictory combination of “we didn’t do it” and “so if we did do it we had to because, um, Russia and crazy anti-vaxxers and churchy types are a threat to, well, us.”

Here in California we saw a small scale version of the censorship effort with the Los Angeles Department of Public Health (successful) efforts to shut down a Twitter page it thought was sending a pandemic message contrary to its own draconian efforts.  

Sadly, department chief Barabra Ferrer and the county prevailed in a Los Angeles court, which found that - even though Ferrer admitted that “misinformation” is in the eye of the beholder and that the department was assisted in stifling the opposition to its maniacal pandemic response by the office of congressman and current senate candidate Adam Schiff – the government did not improperly coerce Twitter to remove the offending site.

While the Missouri case has been and should continue to be almost a “slam dunk” for the plaintiffs, the Supreme Court’s ruling in previous pandemic-related cases (this case goes far beyond just the pandemic, fyi) show that at least one judge – Chief Justice John Roberts, no less – may in fact be wiggly on the issues of freedom of speech and freedom of association.

The court as it stands now should have a majority of (conservative) justices on the side of the plaintiffs, but Roberts will play a crucial role in any decision and that has some court observers worried that the chief justice will bend towards the political wishes of the administration as he has in the recent past, specifically as it relates to California’ pandemic legal challenges.

From a recent Brownstone Institute  – a fervent protector of individual civil rights and the freedom of speech and trenchant critic of the pandemic response – editorial “Can the Chief Justice Stand Up to the Censors?”  :

Just two months into the Covid response, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to rebut the government’s tarnishment of the Bill of Rights. The Justices could affirm that our Constitution has no pandemic exception, and cloaks of benevolent phrasing cannot warrant the usurpation of our liberties.

Instead, Chief Justice Roberts suspended the Constitution in deference to “experts,” thus ushering in three years of emergency orders from charlatans and petty tyrants. It proved a turning point in the Covid response, acting as a green light for prolonged church closings, First Amendment violations, and turnkey totalitarianism.

In May 2020, a California church petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn Governor Gavin Newsom’s restrictions on church attendance. The “fog of war” is no excuse for “violating fundamental constitutional rights,” they argued.

Newsom’s order limited attendance at religious ceremonies to 25% capacity with a maximum of 100 attendees, no matter the size of the venue. The State offered no “justification for this arbitrary cap,” the church explained. Retail stores were permitted to hold 50% capacity at the time, and offices, food packaging, museums, and and “every other sector [had] no percentage cap.”

Four members of the Court were able to see through the state’s flimsy pretext of “public health.” Justice Kavanaugh asked, “Assuming all of the same precautions are taken, why can someone safely walk down a grocery store aisle but not a pew? And why can someone safely interact with a brave deliverywoman but not with a stoic minister?” Justices Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas joined Kavanaugh in voting to grant the church’s motion.

The liberal wing of the court – Justices Kagan, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Breyer – voted to deny the motion without offering any opinion to support their vote.

The critical fifth vote thus came to the Chief Justice. Roberts sided with Governor Newsom, arguing that the Court should defer to “experts” because the “unelected judiciary lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.”

Of course, every tyrant has claimed “competence” to control the lives of his subjects. Our Constitution, however, is designed to restrain all men, regardless of self-proclaimed insight, genius, or title, from abridging the rights of citizens.

The Chief’s fifth vote ignored constitutional text in favor of an imaginary pandemic exception to the Bill of Rights. As the head of the judicial branch, his deciding vote suspended judicial review as lockdowns obliterated Americans’ liberty.

The Chief Justice continued his deference to “experts” for over a year despite their demonstrable failures. Two months after the California decision, he again provided the fifth vote to uphold Nevada’s limit of religious gatherings to 50 people, despite the order permitting casinos to hold up to 500 gamblers at a time. Justice Gorsuch explained in dissent: “the First Amendment prohibits such obvious discrimination against the exercise of religion. The world we inhabit today, with a pandemic upon us, poses unusual challenges. But there is no world in which the Constitution permits Nevada to favor Caesars Palace over Calvary Chapel.”

The death of Justice Ginsburg and the confirmation of Justice Barrett to the Court flipped the 5-4 split, but Chief Justice Roberts continued his pandemic-exception jurisprudence into 2021. In February 2021, he upheld California’s banning on singing in church, explaining that “federal courts owe significant deference to politically accountable officials with the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health.”

In April 2021, he voted to deny Californians’ petition to challenge Governor Newsom’s edict limiting in-home religious gatherings to three households. Justice Barrett, however, overrode his dissent, and the Court restored the petitioners’ First Amendment freedoms.

The censorship-industrial complex – a merger of the regular state, the deep state, the global elitists, and the ever-burgeoning “civil society” of foundations, non-profits, advocacy groups, leftist academia, progressive politicians, and non-governmental organization – set family against family, interfered directly in the 2020 and 2022 elections, cost untold numbers of people their livelihood, and laid a blanket of self-censorship on the nation and it will not stop suppressing the truth until the Supreme Court acts and acts decisively.

Let’s hope they do.

You can listen to the arguments here on Monday morning:  https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_audio/2023