By Jason Cohen
Daily Caller News Foundation
Republican Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt called on a top cybersecurity official to resign Wednesday following a preliminary injunction preventing government coordination with social media platforms to censor protected speech.
Schmitt urged the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Jennifer Easterly to step down in an interview with journalist Michael Shellenberger on Wednesday. A federal judge had issued an injunction Tuesday preventing the Biden administration from coordinating with social media companies to censor content after finding that officials likely violated the First Amendment.
In the case which prompted the injunction, Missouri v. Biden, plaintiffs had alleged that CISA, and specifically Easterly in her prominent position, played a central role in the Biden administration’s censorship scheme. Schmitt, during his time as Missouri Attorney General, initiated the lawsuit against the Biden administration.
“Jennifer Easterly ought to resign,” Schmitt said, adding, “no doubt about that.” “I think that the people getting swept up in this now, who were engaged in it, they ought to be exposed, and there ought to be consequences,” Schmitt declared.
During the 2020 election, CISA facilitated “switchboards” that allowed state and local election officials to flag so-called misinformation, which would then be removed by social media platforms.
Center for Internet Security (CIS), a nonprofit that advocates solutions to help safeguard against online threats, collaborated with election officials and CISA on a “portal” to flag and censor social media “misinformation” during the 2020 general election, according to a CIS report independent journalist Lee Fang obtained in June.
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Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty granted the injunction after finding plaintiffs in the free speech lawsuit Missouri v. Biden, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, had presented “evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.”
This is a huge victory, but Congress must go further.
1. It must defund and dismantle the censorship industry
2. It must demand Big Tech transparency
3. And it must fire @CISAJen, the Director of DHS’ criminal and unconstitutional @CISAgov https://t.co/rYs1VYUT6E
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) July 6, 2023
The Tuesday injunction barred federal officials, including individuals in the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, from engaging with social media platforms for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
“The level of coordination between senior government officials and senior social media executives is astounding,” Schmitt stated in the interview. “There were direct text messages from the surgeon general of the United States to senior Facebook officials saying, ‘Take this down.’ It’s just un-American.”
President Joe Biden’s administration appealed the injunction on Wednesday.
CISA, DHS and Easterly did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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IMPORTANT NOTE: It’s hard to believe it’s really happening, but it is. Male athletes pretend to be females, dominate their sports, and are thereby rapidly destroying women’s competitive sports worldwide. Convicted male criminals suddenly claim to be transgender so they can be confined in a women’s prison and sexually abuse the female inmates there. Men claiming to be female likewise invade women’s locker rooms, bathrooms, schools, dormitories, sororities, shelters, spas and social organizations – and in the process steal women’s scholarships, advancement, honors and myriad other opportunities.
Meanwhile, transgender groomers and recruiters in schools and on social media platforms like TikTok are continually feeding and expanding the current “mass hysteria” craze that has already led countless teen girls to take testosterone and undergo double mastectomies in a pathetic effort to become boys. No wonder the CDC reports 3 in 5 teen girls say they feel “persistently sad or hopeless” and almost 1 in 3 say they have seriously considered committing suicide.
All of this on top of the radical left’s renewed obsession with killing women’s unborn babies via abortion.
The “woke” left’s maniacal attack on women and girls, virtually unreported by the rest of the media, is the entire focus of the sensational June issue of WND’s critically acclaimed WHISTLEBLOWER magazine, titled “THE LEFT’S TOTAL WAR ON WOMEN.” WHISTLEBLOWER is available in both the popular print edition and a state-of-the-art digital version, either single issues or discounted annual subscriptions.
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