The government has a legitimate role in communicating information to citizens on a broad array of subjects. What is not legitimate is the government suppressing other opinions and blocking people from expressing their views to defeat what the government deems “misinformation.”
Let’s get one thing out of the way right away. Free speech issues can get messy. However, Joe Biden has supercharged the issue by denying many more than just a few nut jobs we have concerns about. (None of us wants some doomsday cult telling people to kill themselves.) I have concerns about what I term “Consequential Political Speech,” which is speech blocked for political or other reasons as a means to achieve Biden administration goals.
The Supreme Court just heard a case foundational to progressives’ quest for equity through the control of information. The case involved social media censorship. To refresh everyone’s memory, here’s a partial list of issues the government had in it sights, as it pressured social media firms to delete or modify posts, or even ban people from platforms, people the government claimed were spreading serial misinformation:
- Mask mandates. It must be remembered that the federal government flip-flopped on this issue several times. Also, mask shortages were why Tony Fauci said people did not need masks, thereby lying to the nation: “Public officials initially discouraged masks over fears of shortages for health care providers.”
- COVID remedies not FDA approved for that use. The Biden administration evolved from just vaccine shots to a few approved drugs over time. However, the NIH and CDC fought all the front-line cures, now considered standard, for much longer than was necessary or supported by science. Why? Government officials feared losing control of the narrative. Political ideologies drove public actions and health behaviors in the first year of the global pandemic.
- Vaccine deniers. Legitimate concerns by the public concerning vaccinations have proven to be accurate. Vaccines helped some high-risk individuals, but the vaccines were forced on nearly everyone, not just those at high risk. By and large, the deniers had it right. Hundreds of thousands of adverse reactions have been reported due to the jab veritably forced on everyone over 12 months old. “As of Dec. 24, 2021, there were 709,085 reports of adverse reactions after COVID-19 vaccination in VAERS,” Martha Sharan, a CDC spokesperson, told USA Today in an email. We can believe that number is much higher now, three years later.
- Origin of COVID-19. The government denied vociferously that the virus originated from the Wuhan lab, for three years. This was a political decision by the Biden administration not to push China into a corner. It is worth noting that China has not been forthcoming and blocked foreign access to its labs and data for years. FBI chief Christopher Wray assesses the lab leak theory as the most credible.
- Hunter Biden’s laptop is real. The FBI has had little appetite to extract and investigate evidence of corruption by not just Hunter but other Biden family members. The laptop is Hunter Biden’s and corroborates many of the most salacious issues in the public spotlight for years. We now know who tamped down on the veracity of the information. It was the FBI, among others.
- Election irregularities. Millions of Americans believe the last presidential election was like no other. Early elections, millions of ballots mailed out to people who never requested them, relaxed signature verification, and other accommodations allowed, despite laws that would have prohibited such behavior, all gave many of us a belief that the election was not free and fair.
- January 6th reporting – 58% of Americans believe January 6 reporting was highly biased, according to a Harvard, Capps Harris poll. The FBI, to this day, has dozens of agents still working to find even more than the 1,000-plus individuals already arrested for charges like “parading” and “unlawful entry.” People’s lives are ruined through government fiat as they refuse to go after actual criminals who burned down and looted entire cities in 2020.
In a July 4 court order last year, U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty imposed a temporary injunction preventing White House and executive agency officials from meeting with tech companies about moderating content, arguing that such actions in the past were “likely” First Amendment violations.
“It’s got these big clubs available to it, and so it’s treating Facebook and these other platforms like their subordinates,” Justice Samuel Alito said. However, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson took a different approach.
“Your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the federal government in significant ways in the most important time periods,” she told the lawyer representing Louisiana, Missouri and private plaintiffs.
“The government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country … by encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information,” she said.
The heart of the case revolves around where the differentiating line between persuasion and coercion exists.
John Shu, a constitutional attorney who served in both Bush administrations, noted that the First Amendment “prevents government officials from coercing, whether explicitly or implicitly, publishers to remove posts or articles because the government disagrees with or doesn’t like that viewpoint, even if it is under the guise of ‘national security’ or ‘public health.’ In this case, they did do so multiple times.”
The Justice Department argued that “a central dimension of presidential power is the use of the Office’s bully pulpit to seek to persuade Americans – and American companies – to act in ways that the President believes would advance the public interest.”
I believe that the deep state, in close coordination with the Biden administration, has taken advantage of the power of social media and has used it with malign intent to stifle free speech and to advantage itself in a world of ever more important social media access.
When Josef Stalin had an enemy, he “disappeared” that person. The ability to effectively erase someone from communicating his beliefs rises to that same level.
Sometime in June, we will hear the Supreme Court’s decision on the case. I don’t envy the justices’ tough journey to protect free speech while ensuring the valid needs of free people. In understanding and trusting the government, I must keep in mind that President Biden is “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” according to the Hur Report recently released. We should all remember that!
God bless America.
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