State Battles Against Enemy Within, Rampant Wrong Reads Subverts Effort
The grave and gathering threat imperiling American democracy, and our fellow citizens persists like a mutated virus reproducing itself, looking to infect others: Misinformation, or bad thought.
After years of warning by American liberals, led by Joe Biden and his Disinformation Governance Board, (status unknown), a federal judge disagreed this week, and ruled agencies of U.S. government can no longer coerce major social media outlets into banning writers and censoring works because the U.S. government and liberal establishment do not like the information being read or written.
In a federal case, STATE OF MISSOURI V JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR (CASE NO. 3:22-CV-01213) brought by two governors against the Biden administration, Judge Terry Doughty's ruling
grants an injunction that forbids the Biden administration from contacting social media companies
for "the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any
manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content
containing protected free speech." (MEMORANDUM RULING ON REQUEST FOR PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION; July 4, 2023)
The reaction from Democratic Party press is outrage.
Leah Litman and Laurence H. Tribe conclude in Just Security that this "decision, if left standing, will make us less secure as a nation and will endanger us all every day the injunction remains in force."
Wow.
It's not government goading Big Tech into censorship that is the concern, liberals assure.
It's people writing thought deemed wrong, and people reading these thoughts, that's the problem. Because those readers of misinformation, having contracted this malinformation, will transmit the misinformation to other unsuspecting Americans, not trained in liberal defense of democracy or possessing of individual minds vaccinated against bad thought.
Writes Matt Taibbi, author of the Twitter Files, in reply:
The Missouri v. Biden investigators found the same fact patterns found by Twitter Files reporters like me, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, David Zweig, and Paul Thacker, and then later Andrew Lowenthal, Aaron Mate, Sue Schmidt, Matt Orfalea, Tom Wyatt, Matt Farwell, @Techno_Fog, and many others. They also echoed descriptions by like Jacob Siegel at Tablet, or Robby Soave at Reason, who wrote about similar issues at Facebook.
Those of us who worked on the Twitter Files story initially experienced the same problem investigators and plaintiffs in the Missouri v. Biden case apparently did, being unsure of what to make of the sheer quantity of agencies and companies involved in what looked like organized censorship schemes. I know I wasn’t alone among Twitter Files reporters in being nervous to report that content moderation “requests” were coming from “agencies across the federal government — from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.” It’s what we were seeing, but seemed too nuts to be true. But as time went on, even more topics, government offices, and state-partnered organizations started popping up, leaving little question of what we were looking at.
Eventually, we found the same plot outlined in Missouri v. Biden: pressure from government in the form of threatened regulation, followed by a stream of recommendations about content from multiple agencies (the investigators in this lawsuit even found meddling by the Census Bureau). This was capped by the construction of quasi-private bureaucracies that in some cases appeared to have been conceived as a way for the government to partner on content moderation without being in direct violation of the First Amendment.
Concludes Judge Terry Doughty:
Although this case is still relatively young, and at this stage the Court is only examining it in terms of Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on the merits, the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.” [Note 721]Yes.
The Plaintiffs have presented substantial evidence in support of their claims that they were the victims of a far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign. This court finds that they are likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment free speech claim against the Defendants.
Therefore, a preliminary injunction should issue immediately against the Defendants as set out herein.
[Note 721] An 'Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth' refers to the concept presented in George Orwell's dystopian novel, '1984.' In the novel, the Ministry of Truth is a governmental institution responsible for altering historical records and disseminating propaganda to manipulate and control public perception.
There is a threat to our democracy, but it comes from Biden ideologues, fervent champions of the surveillance state and the censorship-industrial complex.
In the vital decision UNITED STATES v. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT, 407 U.S. 297 (1972), Justice Lewis Powell denounced the Nixon administration’s electronic surveillance, warrantless-wiretapping program not just on Fourth Amendment grounds, but as a betrayal of the sovereign rights of citizens in a democracy to criticize their own government.
Powell's warning should be sounded today:
History abundantly documents the tendency of Government - however benevolent and benign its motives - to view with suspicion those who most fervently dispute its policies. Fourth Amendment protections become the more necessary when the targets of official surveillance may be those suspected of unorthodoxy in their political beliefs. The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent. ... The price of lawful public dissent must not be a dread of subjection to an unchecked surveillance power. Nor must the fear of unauthorized official eavesdropping deter vigorous citizen dissent and discussion of Government action in private conversation. For private dissent, no less than open public discourse, is essential to our free society.
- Justice Lewis Powell (UNITED STATES v. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT, 407 U.S. 297 (1972))
The most bizarre and revealing part of the liberal media script on this court ruling -- that the judge didn't bar *censorship* but merely the US Govt's effort to combat disinformation -- is that the FBI is not only qualified to decree Truth, but it uses censorship to Protect Us: https://t.co/yz50RO6NMU
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 6, 2023
