The chief of a legal team fighting Joe Biden’s assault on First Amendment speech rights says a new preliminary injunction against Biden administration officials meeting with tech companies is a good start.
WND reported Tuesday that U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty of Louisiana has issued an order preventing, at least for now, White House officials from meeting with tech companies to scheme “about social media censorship.”
The ruling came in lawsuits filed by Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general, who are charging that the Biden administration coerced or “significantly encourage[d]” tech companies to suppress free speech during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The ban on meetings includes members of Biden’s cabinet as well as White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre.
For now, they are not allowed to contact social media companies in efforts to suppress speech.
Involved in the lawsuits are the biggest players on the web, including Google, Meta and Twitter.
It’s now well known that the Biden administration had channels to direct that certain speech be suppressed. Since it was not supposed to do that, as a government, it would contact various foundations or institutions with concerns, and lists of stories. Those groups then would complain to social media corporations to try to get those censored.
Fox reported it obtained a copy of the injunction, which said Biden’s actions “likely violate the Free Speech Clause.” Further, the court ruling said the court was “not persuaded by defendants’ arguments.”
“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,’” Doughty charged.
“If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” the decision said. “In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the federal government, and particularly the defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.”
The judge pointedly noted that the censorship campaign by Biden “almost exclusively targeted conservative speech.”
Mark Chenowith is chief of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which is representing several epidemiologists and co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration in the case.
“Judge Doughty’s ruling in the Missouri v. Biden case reinforces what the New Civil Liberties Alliance has been saying from the start of this case,” Chenowith said. “The federal government has been deliberately censoring speech protected by the First Amendment.
“Its conduct has not merely threatened free speech; our government has actively suppressed free speech in an orchestrated, unprecedented and entirely unlawful manner. The Biden administration’s outrageous assault on the Constitution and on the civil liberties of Americans must end. Judge Doughty’s preliminary injunction will help immensely.”
The NCLA explained its scientist clients “were censored for sharing scientific speech on social media.”
“Social media platforms, acting at the federal government’s behest, repeatedly censored NCLA’s clients for articulating views on those platforms in opposition to government-approved views on Covid-19 restrictions. NCLA’s clients were blacklisted, shadow-banned, de-boosted, throttled, and censored, merely for articulating views opposed to government-approved views on Covid-19 restrictions and regulations,” the organization explained.
NCLA explained, “Public statements, emails, and recent publicly released documents establish that the president of the United States and other senior officials in the Biden administration violated the First Amendment by directing social-media companies to censor viewpoints that conflict with the government’s messaging on Covid-19.”
It is representing Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, as well as Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Jill Hines.
“Social media platforms, acting at the federal government’s behest, repeatedly censored NCLA’s clients for articulating views on those platforms in opposition to government-approved views on Covid-19 restrictions,” the organization reported.
“This insidious censorship was the direct result of the federal government’s ongoing campaign to silence those who voice perspectives that deviate from those of the Biden administration. Government officials’ public threats to punish social media companies that did not do their bidding demonstrate this linkage, as do emails from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Homeland Security to social media companies that only recently were made public.”
The organization charged that government censorship of this type “strikes at the heart of what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect – free speech, especially political speech.”
“The federal government is deciding whose voices and ideas may be heard, and whose voices and ideas must be silenced,” it said.
