In a bombshell ruling, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has shut down the “nerve center” of federal government-led speech policing, correcting a critical error in its prior jurisprudence and striking a major blow for the First Amendment and against deep-state election interference.
The court’s opinion comes in the landmark free speech case in the digital era, Missouri v. Biden. Before the litigation landed in appellate court, Louisiana District Judge Terry A. Doughty declared in a fitting Independence Day ruling that federal authorities from the Biden White House to the FBI and CDC had likely engaged in “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
They did so, Judge Doughty found, by cajoling and colluding with social media companies to silence wrong-thinking Americans on matters from election integrity to the origins of Covid under the guise of combatting national security or public health-threatening “mis-, dis-, and mal-information.”
The district court therefore disarmed the speech police by ordering a wide-ranging preliminary injunction, prohibiting federal authorities from coercing and coordinating with platforms to suppress ever-growing categories of disfavored speech during the pendency of the case.
This incensed the feds, who proceeded to appeal the decision to the Fifth Circuit, ironically arguing that by being barred from censoring disfavored speech by social media proxy, the government itself was being censored.
The Fifth Circuit wasn’t buying that argument. It upheld the crux of the lower court’s ruling, concurring that the administrative state’s pressuring of and partnering with social media companies
