The mega lawsuit that threatens to decapitate Joe Biden's iron grip on Big Tech content
Missouri and Louisiana file massive lawsuit to end the White House suppression of free speech rights
Remember Winston Smith, the fictional protagonist of George Orwell’s 1984 novel?
He lived in the fictional country of Oceania, where he was hounded into believing that working, eating, drinking, sleeping, talking, thinking, procreating … all are controlled by “Big Brother,” the state.
Today, that Big Brother is the Biden Administration, and the poor hapless, brainwashed Winston – who spends most of the book trying to run from Big Brother and exert his individualism – is the American populace.
I’m not the only one who sees the parallels.
A massive lawsuit has been filed against the Biden Administration by the states of Missouri and Louisiana, along with a group of other plaintiffs, charging that both officials and agencies of the Biden Administration have colluded with Big Tech to censor the free speech of Americans.
The suit actually makes reference to George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth as analogous to our own government’s censorship of free speech.
They have a good case. Last month the lawsuit (downloadable here) advanced when a judge granted the plaintiff's motion for expedited discovery.
To add some fuel to the suit, a former science writer for the New York Times, Alex Berenson, recently won a suit against Twitter after they banned him for expressing valid concerns over the safety of the Covid vaccines, lockdowns and masking policies.
Berenson had his Twitter account reinstated NOT because Twitter finally acknowledged the truth of his commentary, but because he had evidence that the Biden Administration colluded with Twitter to remove his account.
Berenson is also promising a separate lawsuit against the Biden Administration.
White House Accused of Violating the First Amendment
It is a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution “if the government coerces or induces (a private entity, such as Twitter or Facebook) to take action the government itself would not be permitted to do, such as censor expression of a lawful viewpoint,” the lawsuit states.
Also named in the suit is Dr. Anthony Fauci, who, among other offenses, colluded with Big Tech to censor the expression of the “lab leak theory” of Covid, that he directly coordinated with Facebook and other tech platforms to ensure that public messaging of Covid 19 information conformed to State standards and that he coordinated with Big Tech to censor and suppress speech about Covid 19 that he/Biden/the State didn’t agree with, among many other offenses, the suit claims.
We admit to a sense of deep satisfaction upon seeing Dr. Fauci’s name on the list of defendants.
No one was more responsible for the appalling response to the Covid 19 pandemic than Dr. Fauci, which resulted in thousands of deaths from the untested vaccines, potentially permanent side effects from the vaccines, loss of jobs and businesses, nationwide economic devastation, demonization and outright banning of good, inexpensive treatments in favor of vaccines only, and a dizzying panoply of contradictory recommendations and mandates that continues to this day.
What a slobbering suck-up Fauci is to his Big Tech and Pharma cronies.
Others named include President Joe Biden, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, the Surgeon General of the United States, the national health institutes, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Census Bureau, and Nina Janowicz, the director of the State’s Disinformation Governance Board (yes, Mary Poppins herself), among numerous others.
Interestingly, the Census Bureau is charged with playing “an important, active and ongoing role in colluding with social-media platforms to censor disfavored speech.” Why on earth would the Census Bureau be involved in online censorship? The scope and magnitude of government collusion with Big Tech to censor speech online is truly staggering, and involves nearly every major department in the Biden Administration.
The Censored Stories, Opinions and Political Beliefs
So, what were/are these agencies, departments and individuals in the Biden Administration censoring with the help of Big Tech? Here’s an abbreviated list:
The Hunter Biden laptop story. On Oct. 14, 2020, the New York Post exposed the lurid and depraved contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, but both Twitter and Facebook quickly labeled the story “disinformation” and “hacked information” and almost immediately locked the Post’s account. This censorship, the suit alleges, may have impacted the presidential election results. Nearly a year and a half later, major news outlets and Big Tech quietly admitted the laptop story was valid, but the damage was already done.
In a new shocking revelation, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan on his podcast last week that as the Hunter Biden laptop story was about to break, he was approached by the FBI, who warned him that the story was Russian disinformation – admitting that Facebook censored the story at the behest of an anti-Trump FBI and more evidence that the FBI dramatically interfered in the 2020 election.
The lab-leak theory of the origins of Covid. To this day, a dishonest Dr. Fauci continues to assert that the most likely origin for Covid is natural, even though most scientists examining the makeup of the virus say it looks like Frankenstein’s monster, not a naturally occurring virus. If Fauci was forced to admit that the lab-leak theory was legitimate, then he could be implicated in funding the gain-of-function research that led to the creation of the virus. Fauci also denies he gave money to the Wuhan lab for gain-of-function research, so it’s unlikely he’ll ever admit to any of his sins.
Mask Mandates and lockdowns. All of the Big Tech platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube and others) “aggressively censored speech questioning the efficacy of masks and lockdowns,” the suit alleges. But anyone with two eyes can see how useless – and even damaging – these measures were. Since the discovery of the microscope in 1931 we’ve known that a virus can pass through a cloth mask with room to spare. Dr. Fauci originally said masks don’t work (the truth), then said masks do work (the lie), then admitted he only said masks don’t work to ensure they would be available to health care workers (admitting the lie), then in private conversations with co-workers admitted that masks really don’t work (lying about the lie). At this point, we’ve just lost count of all the lies. Talk about disinformation!
Any and all speech questioning election integrity and the safety of mail-in voting. The suit states that this censorship continues to this day. Questioning the results of the 2020 elections is verboten for all time immemorial.
And any other unfavorable speech that the Biden Administration disapproves of. Such as speech against Critical Race Theory, BLM, the gay agenda, transgenderism, and indoctrinating children into transgenderism. (A group called Gays Against Groomers, which opposes the sexualization and indoctrination of children into homosexuality and/or transgenderism, was recently kicked off Twitter for saying exactly that. It is a sad commentary on the utter depravity of our times that homosexuals are condemned for speaking out against the grooming of little children.). And on and on it goes.
White House Threatens Big Tech’s Liability Protections
One interesting tidbit has emerged from this lawsuit. Big Tech has been under pressure from the Biden Administration to enact these censorship guidelines. This is the thrust of the plaintiff’s argument. But what has not been evident is that the pressure has been in the form of threats against Big Tech that if they don’t comply with the State Speech and Proper Beliefs Guidelines of the Biden Administration, they will lose their protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This effectively immunizes most of the censorship on social media from liability – unless, of course, it is in collaboration with the federal government.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t feel sorry that Big Tech has been squeezed this way. To the contrary, as developers of massive public speech forums like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, they should never bow down to their government masters but should be catering to the needs of their users. Yet it’s a bit of a shock to see how much strong-arming has been going on by State actors, to the extent they have threatened the demise of Big Tech as we know it if Big Tech doesn’t do the government’s bidding.
The big, unanswerable question is: What’s the end game of all this censorship, language control, thought control, and attempts to re-educate the masses? Money? Power? Blind adherence to State policy? All of the above?
At the end of 1984, poor Winston is captured and tortured. Big Brother (readers, your cell phones are tracking your every move!), knows what his worst fear is – rats. They torture Winston with a cage of hungry, frenzied rats, and he finally capitulates. After insisting that two plus two equals four throughout his torture and re-education, Winston accepts that two plus two equals five (an equation culled from a Russian communist party slogan that encouraged fulfillment of a five-year plan in four years).
And finally, Winston accepts that he loves Big Brother.