Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s pending court case is America's only hope to reverse it for future elections
Can you handle the truth? Can you handle a lie? Or do you, an adult who can vote, take up arms, enter into contracts, etc., need government to decide for you what you can and cannot hear, see, or know, and where information is allowed to come from?
Do you need to be protected so you don’t have to do the work of deciding what’s true? Or worse, do you need to be fed an unbalanced diet of heaping helpings of propaganda? Your government thinks you do.
You may not have heard of Murthy vs Missouri. It was a case decided by the Supreme Court in June and reported with barely a whisper, though it affects every American just as much, if not more, than the cases the media shouted about.
It's a startling example of government's fight to censor speech, and the Supreme Court's ruling allows the Biden-Harris administration and its agents to continue to ask or threaten social media companies to censor information it doesn't want its citizens to know.
Because of that decision, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has brought a new case that may be our last best hope to keep government out of the censorship business. Since he's one of what the U.S. Governement calls "The Disinformation Dozen," a group frequently targeted for censorship by the Biden-Harris administration, he may have a better chance of prevailing. (The fact that our government has such a name for any group of Americans based upon their excercise of their First Amendment rights should scare all of us.)
In a nutshell, the Biden-Harris administration (plaintiff Surgeon General Vivek Murthy's name was used) was fighting to continue to censor online "misinformation, disinformation" in matters ranging from COVID 19, the Afghanistan withdrawal, Ukraine funding, to elections. Attorneys General from Missouri, Louisiana, and five citizens who claimed they'd been censored, were fighting to stop them.
Though the Court decided against the plaintiffs, they didn't dispute the facts cited in the lower court case that the Biden Administration and its agents engaged in censorship via threats to and coersion of social media companies. This is real, it happened, and thanks to the Court's ruling, it continues.
The case began its life as Missouri v Biden. The Fifth Circuit court ruled against Biden et al. The ruling reads like a distopian movie script in which the FBI and other agencies dangled threats that included inacting Section 230 restrictions to get companies like Facebook to play along. Section 230 protects online media companies from being held liable for what people post on their platforms. Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg said revoking it would be an "extential threat" to his platforms.
In Missouri v Biden, the judge wrote, "...the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United
States’ history." Joe Biden, DHS, CDC, FBI, DOJ, and CISA were just a few of the many defendants. The resulting injunction required many defendants to immediately cease their censorship activities as regards social media platforms.
Then the Supreme Court took the case. When doing so, they stayed the lower court's injunction until they could hear the case, therefore allowing the Biden et al. to continue "coercing" social media companies to censor whatever or whomever they choose.
I've read the ruling, which was a 6-3 decision penned by Justice Coney Barrett, and the dissenting opinion, penned by Justice Alito, as well. It's a lot.
To be clear, the Court doesn't reject the facts that the government and its agents engaged in "coersion and significant encouragement" to censor. They merely found that it was a poorly-constructed case and therefore lacked "standing" to bring it. Some reasons they lost the case were:
- Because online media were busy little censorship bees prior to government threats (even if the threats broadened and extended censorship), they didn't prove that government was the first and only censorship entity. If the plaintiffs had sued the social media platforms as well, the Court may have been able to rule differently.
- The Court said the plaintiffs had built their case not just on past harm due to government-required censorship, but that their case required a threat of "substantial future harm." They couldn't prove that the government would do it again. It's hard to prove a future action, so the case shouldn't have been built on this speculative requirement. It helped them lose.
- They sued too many people. The list of defendants is so sweeping (41 individuals and 13 agencies/departments) that the Court found it hard to rule that they all had equal responsibility or outcomes. The Court didn't like that the case treated such a large group of defendants "as a monolith" and suggested the case was flawed by this grouping and justice would be better served had plaintiffs sued fewer entities and individuals or brought suit against each of them separately.
The ruling in Murthy v Missouri has left a road map for for others who can prove government censorship has harmed them, leading to RFK Jr's pending case, Kennedy v Biden. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has already ruled that Kennedy has standing. We can only hope that RFK Jr. has excellent representation and a case built on solid arguments. This case includes a large number of defendants as well (23 individuals in 7 agencies/departments).
When asked if government cyber censorship of election speech established in 2020 is ongoing, FBI Agent Elvis Chan testified, "we've never stopped."After election day 2024, there may be court cases or charges of fraud. Because government is allowed to censor, will people be able to speak freely about it? Not likely.
Sometimes the truth hurts. It can be shocking. I think we can handle it. It should be a call to action to vote against censorship and for our right to speak freely. All of our other rights depend on it.
