As I reported last week, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Louisiana ordered an injunction against federal government censorship of social media, pending the ultimate disposition of the case. The ruling came in a lawsuit seeking damages for state-directed censorship of social media in apparent violation of the First Amendment.
“Plaintiffs have produced evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content. Defendants’ alleged suppression has potentially resulted in millions of free speech violations,” the judge said in his ruling.
Consequently, the corporate state media, which ironically serves as the biggest cheerleader of government suppression of speech, lost its collective mind.
New reporting indicates that the Brandon entity is refusing to abide by the court’s order, instead requesting an appeals court to block the order.
Via Associated Press:
The Biden administration asked a federal appeals court Monday to temporarily block a lower court’s order limiting executive branch officials’ discussions with social media companies about controversial online posts.
The request for an emergency stay was filed at the 5th U.S. District Court of Appeals shortly after U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty rejected an administration motion that he put his own July 4 order on hold. The order came in a lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, as well as a conservative website owner and four individual critics of government COVID-19 policies.
It should be profoundly disturbing to any American with a semblance of understanding of the Constitution that it’s come to the point that a federal judge has to intervene to stop the government from brazenly and shamelessly spending public resources to stifle the Constitutionally protected expression of citizens in an allegedly free country.
For an entity that professes a deep, abiding respect for the “independent” judiciary (as I wrote elsewhere, every branch of government and even federal agency is “independent” — free of democratic influence — in the new technocracy), this would seem to contradict that deeply held commitment.
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My personal Facebook and Medium accounts were suspended in the throes of the pandemic on dubious grounds, at the same time as I was writing about COVID-19 and transgenderism. I don’t necessarily believe that I am high-profile enough to have garnered the attention of the federal government in this regard, but the point is that the feds were piggybacking their specific censorship demands on the back of an already-robust censorship regime centered on maintaining the official Public Health™ narrative.
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