Federal judges have condemned the Biden administration’s alleged strong-arming of social media platforms to censor content, setting the stage for a potential Supreme Court showdown on U.S. free speech. The New York Post has the story.
Federal judges hammered fresh nails into the coffin of the Biden censorship regime Thursday in New Orleans.
The thrashing the administration received will likely set up an epic Supreme Court battle that could help redefine freedom for our era.
A federal appeals court was hearing the Justice Department’s appeal of a July 4th decision in Missouri v. Biden that ignited pro-freedom rhetorical fireworks across the nation.
Federal Judge Terry Doughty’s opinion condemned the Biden administration for potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
Doughty delivered 155 pages of damning details of federal browbeating, jawboning and coercion of social-media companies.
He issued an injunction blocking the feds from “encouraging, pressuring or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression or reduction of content containing protected free speech”.
The Biden administration rushed to sway the appeals court to postpone enforcement of the injunction and then sought to redefine all its closed-door shenanigans as public service.
In its briefs to the court, the Justice Department declared, “There is a categorical, well-settled distinction between persuasion and coercion,” and castigated Judge Doughty for having “equated legitimate efforts at persuasion with illicit efforts to coerce”.
The department denies that federal agencies bullied social-media companies to suppress any information.
Instead, there were simply requests for “content moderation”, especially regarding Covid.
Actually, there were tens of thousands of ‘requests’ that resulted in the suppression of millions of posts and comments by Americans.
Team Biden champions a ‘no corpse, no delicta’ definition of censorship.
Since federal SWAT teams did not assail the headquarters of social-media firms, the feds are blameless.
Or, as Justice Department lawyer Daniel Tenny told the judges, “There was a back and forth. Sometimes it was more friendly, sometimes people got more testy. There were circumstances in which everyone saw eye to eye, there were circumstances in which they disagreed.”
It’s irrelevant that President Joe Biden publicly accused social-media companies of murder for not censoring far more material and that Biden appointees publicly threatened to destroy the companies via legislation or prosecution.
Nope: It was just neighbourly discussions between good folks.
At the hearing, Judge Don Willett, one of the most principled and penetrating judges in the nation, had no problem with federal agencies publicly criticising what they judged false or dangerous ideas.
But that wasn’t how Team Biden compelled submission: “Here you have Government in secret, in private, out of the public eye, relying on… subtle strong-arming and veiled or not-so-veiled threats.”
Willett vivified how the feds played the game: “That’s a really nice social-media platform you’ve got there, it would be a shame if something happened to it.”
Worth reading in full.
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The sad thing is that a so called liberal judge would have ruled the opposite. Everything is politicised, especially the judicial system. This just hardens the battle.
The Dems won’t look at this and go, oh wow our government did what? They will see it as an attack on them and figure out how to retaliate.
True. What seems to me to have changed is that the consensus within which politics took place has broken down, under attack from the left. We need new countries – I can see no common ground.
Quite so – and when that happens the long term result is civil war. We are gradually learning – yet again – that democracy only functions within a consensus; and that the breadth of that consensus depends in turn on toleration – not approval – but explicitly the permission we give to others to be wrong.
The left withholds that permission, at first through informal means of ostracism, hectoring, bullying and worse; and at last through rafts of oppressive law.
This would be bad enough in isolation, but the left – thorough-going agent of decay that it is – has introduced into society such a disunited agglomeration of ethno-cultural groups, in which it has actively fostered such resentment, bigotry and hatred, that any civil conflict in the west will be more than tinged with racial hatred.
They have done this from a variety of motives, but we can have little doubt that lurking down at the bottom of the toxic mix lies a Marxist will towards the annihilation of civil life in the west.
A single encounter with any of those touting the various lies which sustain the left’s position will demonstrate this point conclusively. They offer fake statistics, skewed history and tendentious reasoning; exposed on such points, they stoop at once to insult and denigration until – at last – if forced into acknowledging their real views, they stand exposed as hate-filled mystics, inviting the apocalypse.
The trouble is that many of them have been sucked into this whirlpool of unreason and hate from moralistic motives – virtue becomes vanity, degrades into shame and ends as puritan rage. And pride prevents retreat.
Bloody hell, you have a cracking turn of phrase, Rumpo…
Today’s YouGov chat:
“Government aims to end smoking by 2030, give us your views”
Even Winston Smith was allowed Victory Gin.
Never in the history of humanity have authoritarian leaders survived and these won’t either.
“Socialism” only ever gets remotely close to working when it is imposed by force – this principle has led to the the tactic of indoctrinating people (the intended enforcers) through the educational system.
Very true. Indeed, it can only be sustained by force since neither human instinct nor abstract reasoning justifies its claims. It is, in short, a sustained moralistic lie imposed by screeching prigs in a state of advanced insanity. People find this hard to believe, in spite of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and all the other scum, because we are hard-wired to assume rationality in our fellow men; but in thousands of ways and on thousands of occasions, human society has succumbed to mass psychosis and millenarian preening – perhaps, as Pascal suggested, because otherwise we might – quite simply – grow bored. The emptiness of the poor human head and our lack of appetite for sustained effort are, in combination, the origin of almost all our self-inflicted disasters.
Even force fails eventually, as the Ceaucescus found out. I’ll help to build the gallows, should I still be alive
I like to think that too. But then I remember the Kim dynasty in North Korea and the CCP in China and realise that it can go on for a very long time.
The left have become absolutely deranged. “Cluck, cluck, jibber, jibber, my old man’s a mushroom” deranged. I think they know they’re responsible for the sh*tshow we’re living in, but instead of behaving sensibly and start rowing back on stuff, they’re doubling down, putting their hands over their ears and shouting “LAH, LAH, LAH, I can’t hear you!!”, like a petulant child. That’s the main problem with the left (the current middle class left, not the old working class left which has been destroyed), they have no ability to think ahead. They think in the now, not the then, and refuse to understand why something they demanded hasn’t turned out as they wanted. Again, like children.
I have a little test. If someone opposes my views, I ask if they could be devils advocate for me, could they argue for my point of view.? Obviouly they can’t because they have never thought about my point of view, only their own. Only by trying to see both sides can you make a reasoned judgement of for or against.
Yes, it’s incredibly important to listen to both sides – even more so if you passionately disagree with one side. Some of the articles I enjoy reading the most are the ones that run counter to my own belief system. Only by considering other points of view can you gain real confidence in your own opinion. Without doing that you’re just living in an echo chamber. Surprised by the number of downvotes you got tbh. Oh well.
Downvotes.? I take them as a badge of honour…
I’ve tried that exact same thing on several occasions. I usually go first and find I pretty much nail their viewpoint. And then they fail miserably. Always. Never fails.
Given that the cornerstone of democracy in the US lies in the first amendment and the right to freedom of speech, without the threat of censorship, I’ve always struggled to reconcile that with philosopher Karl Popper’s ‘paradox of tolerance’: which states that “in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.” Essentially, if a so-called tolerant society permits the existence of intolerant philosophies, it is no longer tolerant. I bet sleepy Joe lies awake at night pondering this.
As the right-thinking’septics’ would say, “Let’s go Brandon.”
So the Biden administration is authoritarian and used the 3 letter agency to enforce its authoritarian policies. Imagine my surprise.