Things continue to get worse for the apparatchiks of the ruling regime: now, in addition to losing the abortion battle and much of the mask battle in the courts at the same time that Elon Musk is taking a hammer to the censorship regime by buying Twitter, Fauci and Biden just got rocked by a massive lawsuit.
That lawsuit, filed last Thursday by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, names Biden, Psaki, Dr. Fauci, and Nina Jankowicz (the Disinformation Board woman) as defendants and accuses them of colluding with Big Tech to crush certain messages on platforms like Facebook and YouTube under the guise of fighting “misinformation”.
Fox News, reporting on what specifically the lawsuit alleges that Biden, Fauci, Psaki, and the others named did, said:
The lawsuit alleges that the federal government violated constitutional rights to suppress free speech in “one of its greatest assaults by federal government officials in the Nation’s history.”
The defendants allegedly “coerced, threatened, and pressured social media platforms to censor disfavored speakers and viewpoints by using threats of adverse government action,” according to the filing.
Further, the lawsuit also argues that:
“Having threatened and cajoled social-media platforms for years to censor viewpoints and speakers disfavored by the Left, senior government officials in the Executive Branch have moved into a phase of open collusion with social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms under the Orwellian guise of halting so-called ‘disinformation.’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’”
“Labeling disfavored speech ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ does not strip it of First Amendment Protection … with the common understanding that some false statements are inevitable if there is to be an open and vigorous expression of views in public and private conversation … the First Amendment seeks to guarantee.”
Examples of that, according to the lawsuit, include the Hunter Biden laptop story, arguments about masks, and claims that Covid originated in a Wuhan lab.
If true, that’s likely a big deal, as the First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Though Congress is the entity named in the Amendment, the Executive Branch also is limited in its ability to crack down on speech, as any attempt to regulate protected speech (speech other than true threats, obscenity, incitement, etc.) must pass strict scrutiny, which means the government must show both a compelling interest in the regulation and that the regulation is narrowly tailored to achieve the government’s end.
What the Team Biden officials supposedly did does not appear to meet that hurdle and “misinformation” isn’t unprotected, so there’s a probably a problem if Team Biden has, in fact, been pressuring the companies to censor permissible speech.
By: Gen Z Conservative, editor of GenZConservative.com. Follow me on Parler and Gettr.
This story syndicated with permission from Will, Author at Trending Politics
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