The Censorship-Industrial Complex sees Americans and Americans’ speech as squarely within its purview when it comes to fighting supposed mis- or disinformation, Tuesday’s opinion in Missouri v. Biden revealed. And that should terrify everyone. That it doesn’t is a scandal nearly as mammoth as the gross violations of the First Amendment detailed in the court’s 150-plus-page opinion.
Americans dedicated to our constitutional republic celebrated Independence Day with some icing on the cake when news broke that a federal court had enjoined large swaths of the Biden administration from coordinating with social media companies to censor speech. Presiding Judge Terry Doughty’s lengthy opinion proved a veritable treasure trove of details of the behind-the-scenes efforts by our government to silence dissenting voices. And his extensive exposition of First Amendment law and his accompanying analysis of the preliminary facts uncovered through limited discovery provided a solid basis for his ruling that the plaintiffs would likely prevail on their free speech claims that were premised on “the White House and numerous federal agencies, pressure[ing] and encourag[ing] social-media companies to suppress free speech.”
Anyone who bothered to wade through the entirety of the opinion should be left shocked and outraged by what our federal overseers did: They targeted Americans and their speech and demanded censorship based on the content and viewpoints expressed — ones that contradicted the official government position.
Sure, the speech censored was overwhelmingly conservative — a fact the court highlighted — but that should not matter. After all, as Judge Doughty stressed,
