Trump, Congress must protect First Amendment

Following Mark Zuckerberg supposed mea culpa for having made meta complicit in the largest censorship regime in US history, and has vowed to restore free expression on his platforms. The CEO made maybe his most consequential statement of all in an interview with Joe Rogan there after describing the pressure campaign the Biden administration waged against this company to suppress disfavored speech, primarily regarding COVID. Zuck told Rogan quote, I don’t think that the pushing for social media companies to censor stuff was legal. The meta CEO silence as this very issue was being litigated all the way up to the Supreme Court was as deafening then as it is maddening now. But in making this assertion, he has inadvertently highlighted one of the Roberts court’s gravest derelictions of duty, one that has made imperative vigorous executive and legislative action in defense of our rights, of the kind the Trump administration and some in Congress are promising. The dereliction of duty came in the Supreme Court’s punting of Murphy V Missouri. In that case, plaintiffs obtained and marshaled evidence demonstrating that the Biden White House and federal agencies coerced, cajoled and colluded directly and indirectly with social media companies to purge disfavored news and views at mass scale on matters from the Hunter Biden laptop story to election integrity and again, COVID 19, they did so, ostensibly to combat dangerous, missed DIS and Mal information in deputizing nongovernmental actors as speech police, the plaintiffs argued the Feds engaged in a conspiracy to violate the First Amendment by proxy. The case, alongside Congressional investigations and reportage, including the Twitter files, helped expose the size, scope and nature of the censorship industrial complex, and it shook that complex is very foundations. The trial judge, judge Doty, found that authorities had engaged in perhaps the most massive attack against free speech in United States history. So he imposed a preliminary injunction on the Feds barring censorious conduct during the pendency of the case, the defendants appealed. Judge doty’s counterparts in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals largely upheld his ruling. So the Feds took their arguments to the Supreme Court, but shockingly, as I observed when sitting in on oral arguments there, far too many of the justices showed they held a perversely narrow view of the First Amendment and gave substantial deference to the feds, they also seemed ignorant of the critical evidence in the case, and last summer, the Feds dismissed the plaintiff’s concerns and Americans free speech rights on a technicality. In a six to three ruling, the Supremes held that the plaintiffs lacked standing to seek injunctive relief, refusing to rule on the merits of the case. Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the dissenting opinion, joined by justices Thomas and Gorsuch, rebuked the court for straining to create new and heightened standards to find that the plaintiffs lack standing, and warned that the court’s refusal to rule on the merits of the case could result in dire consequences. We are obligated to tackle the free speech issue that the case presents Justice Alito asserted, but the court shirks that duty, and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say Hear and think. The dissent concluded that what transpired in Murthy was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the court’s failure to say so by not ruling that the censorship industrial complexes acts were unconstitutional by avoiding the question entirely, the supreme signal that it was open season on free speech in America, they also gave the green light for the feds to weaponize private sector cutouts to target government dissenters in realms beyond speech. Why not replicate the censorship industrial Complex’s structure and practices to de bank wrong thinkers deny them mortgages or dictate their health insurance options. Why not leverage and perfect the model to impose a total social credit system with American characteristics? Chief Justice John Roberts’s year end report for 2024 indicated that he considers disinformation a key threat to the court and believes there must be widespread national action to combat it. This only further augers poorly for our rights. Consequently, as I recently detailed in a report, the Trump administration’s plans to defund and dismantle the censorship industrial complex and the support of some Republicans in Congress to codify these efforts are crucial. The court simply cannot be seen as a reliable backstop for protecting our First Amendment rights against the censorship regime. What’s more, if Republicans allow the Fed led censorship regime to persist, there will be no deterrent to Democrat efforts to create analogous such regimes going forward targeting rights beyond those enshrined in the First Amendment, Americans may get a reprieve from a government weaponized against political dissenters for the next four, eight or even 12 years, but to make these changes durable, long lasting, the Trump administration and Congress must step in and act where the courts are likely to fail us so.