Brownstone Institute
Is Free Speech a Relic in America?
From the Brownstone Institute
A CISA advisory committee last year issued a report that “broadened” what it targeted to include “the spread of false and misleading information because it poses a significant risk to critical function, like elections, public health, financial services and emergency responses.” Thus, any idea that government officials label as “misleading” is a “significant risk” that can be suppressed.
Is the First Amendment becoming a historic relic? On July 4, 2023, federal judge Terry Doughty condemned the Biden administration for potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” That verdict was ratified by a federal appeals court decision in September 2023 that concluded that Biden administration “officials have engaged in a broad pressure campaign designed to coerce social-media companies into suppressing speakers, viewpoints, and content disfavored by the government.”
In earlier times in America, such policies would have faced sweeping condemnation from across the political spectrum. But major media outlets like the Washington Post have rushed to the barricades to defend the Biden war on “misinformation.” Almost half of Democrats surveyed in September 2023 affirmed that free speech should be legal “only under certain circumstances.” Fifty-five percent of American adults support government suppression of “false information” — even though only 20 percent trust the government.
Biden’s War on Free Speech
The broad support for federal censorship is perplexing considering that courts have vividly laid out the government’s First Amendment violations. Doughty delivered 155 pages of damning details of federal browbeating, jawboning, and coercion of social-media companies. Doughty ruled that federal agencies and the White House “engaged in coercion of social media companies” to delete Americans’ comments on Afghanistan, Ukraine, election procedures, and other subjects. He issued an injunction blocking the feds from “encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
Censors reigned from the start of the Biden era. Barely two weeks after Biden’s inauguration, White House Digital Director Rob Flaherty demanded that Twitter “immediately” remove a parody account of Biden’s relatives. Twitter officials suspended the account within 45 minutes but complained they were already “bombarded” by White House censorship requests at that point.
Biden White House officials ordered Facebook to delete humorous memes, including a parody of a future television ad: “Did you or a loved one take the COVID vaccine? You may be entitled….” The White House continually denounced Facebook for failing to suppress more posts and videos that could inspire “vaccine hesitancy” — even if the posts were true. Facebook decided that the word “liberty” was too hazardous in the Biden era; to placate the White House, the company suppressed posts “discussing the choice to vaccinate in terms of personal or civil liberties.”
Flaherty was still unsatisfied and raged at Facebook officials in a July 15, 2021, email: “Are you guys f–king serious?” The following day, President Biden accused social-media companies of “killing people” by failing to suppress all criticism of COVID vaccines.
Federal Censorship
Censorship multiplied thanks to an epic bureaucratic bait-and-switch. After allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Act was created to protect against foreign meddling. Prior to Biden taking office, CISA had a “Countering Foreign Influence Task Force.” In 2021, that was renamed the “Mis-, Dis- and Mal-information Team (‘MDM Team’).”
But almost all the targets of federal censorship during the Biden era have been Americans. Federal censorship tainted the 2020 and 2022 elections, spurring the suppression of millions of social-media posts (almost all from conservatives). During the 2020 election, CISA targeted for suppression assertions such as “mail-in voting is insecure” — despite the long history of absentee ballot fraud.
CISA aims to control Americans’ minds: A CISA advisory committee last year issued a report that “broadened” what it targeted to include “the spread of false and misleading information because it poses a significant risk to critical function, like elections, public health, financial services and emergency responses.” Thus, any idea that government officials label as “misleading” is a “significant risk” that can be suppressed.
Where did CISA find the absolute truths it used to censor American citizens? CISA simply asked government officials and “apparently always assumed the government official was a reliable source,” the court decision noted. Any assertion by officialdom was close enough to a Delphic oracle to use to “debunk postings” by private citizens. Judge Doughty observed that the free-speech clause was enacted to prohibit agencies like CISA from picking “what is true and what is false.”
Covid-Inspired Censorship
“Government = truth” is the premise for the Biden censorship regime. In June 2022, Flaherty declared that he “wanted to monitor Facebook’s suppression of COVID-19 misinformation ‘as we start to ramp up [vaccines for children under the age of 5].’” The FDA had almost zero safety data on COVID vaccines for infants and toddlers. But Biden announced the vaccines were safe for those target groups, so any assertion to the contrary automatically became false or misleading.
Biden policymakers presumed that Americans are idiots who believe whatever they see on Facebook. In an April 5, 2021, phone call with Facebook staffers, White House Strategy Communication chief Courtney Rowe said, “If someone in rural Arkansas sees something on FB [Facebook], it’s the truth.”
In the same call, a Facebook official mentioned nose bleeds as an example of a feared COVID vaccine side effect. Flaherty wanted Facebook to intervene in purportedly private conversations on vaccines and “Direct them to CDC.” A Facebook employee told Flaherty that “an immediate generated message about nose bleeds might give users ‘the Big Brother feel.’” At least the Biden White House didn’t compel Facebook to send form notices every 90 seconds to any private discussion on COVID: “The Department of Homeland Security wishes to remind you that there is no surveillance. Have a nice day.” Flaherty also called for Facebook to crack down on WhatsApp exchanges (private messages) between individuals.
Federal agencies responded to legal challenges by portraying themselves as the same “pitiful, helpless giants” that President Richard Nixon invoked to describe the US government when he started bombing Cambodia. Judge Doughty wrote that federal agencies “blame the Russians, COVID-19 and capitalism for any suppression of free speech by social-media companies.” But that defense fails the laugh test.
Federal agencies pirouetted as a “Ministry of Truth,” according to the court rulings, strong-arming Twitter to arbitrarily suspend 400,000 accounts, including journalists and diplomats.
The Biden administration rushed to sway the appeals court to postpone enforcement of the injunction and then sought to redefine all its closed-door shenanigans as public service. In its briefs to the court, the Justice Department declared, “There is a categorical, well-settled distinction between persuasion and coercion,” and castigated Judge Doughty for having “equated legitimate efforts at persuasion with illicit efforts to coerce.”
Biden’s Justice Department denied that federal agencies bullied social-media companies to suppress any information. Instead, there were simply requests for “content moderation,” especially regarding COVID. Actually, there were tens of thousands of “requests” that resulted in the suppression of millions of posts and comments by Americans.
Team Biden champions a “no corpse, no delicta” definition of censorship. Since federal SWAT teams did not assail the headquarters of social-media firms, the feds are blameless. Or, as Justice Department lawyer Daniel Tenny told the judges, “There was a back and forth. Sometimes it was more friendly, sometimes people got more testy. There were circumstances in which everyone saw eye to eye, there were circumstances in which they disagreed.”
It’s irrelevant that President Joe Biden publicly accused social-media companies of murder for not censoring far more material and that Biden appointees publicly threatened to destroy the companies via legislation or prosecution. Nope: It was just neighborly discussions between good folks.
The Courts Strike Back
At the appeals court hearing, Judge Don Willett, one of the most principled and penetrating judges in the nation, had no problem with federal agencies publicly criticizing what they judged false or dangerous ideas. But that wasn’t how Team Biden compelled submission: “Here you have government in secret, in private, out of the public eye, relying on … subtle strong-arming and veiled or not-so-veiled threats.” Willett vivified how the feds played the game: “That’s a really nice social-media platform you’ve got there, it would be a shame if something happened to it.”
Judge Jennifer Elrod compared the Biden censorship regime to the Mafia: “We see with the mob … they have these ongoing relationships. They never actually say, ‘Go do this or else you’re going to have this consequence.’ But everybody just knows.”
Yet the Biden administration was supposedly innocent because the feds never explicitly spelled out “or else,” according to the Justice Department lawyer. This is on par with redefining armed robbery as a consensual activity unless the robber specifically points his gun at the victim’s head. As economist Joseph Schumpeter aptly observed, “Power wins, not by being used, but by being there.”
In its September decision, the appeals court concluded that the White House, FBI, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the US Surgeon General’s office trampled the First Amendment by coercing social media companies and likely “had the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.”
The court unanimously declared that federal
officials made express threats…. But, beyond express threats, there was always [italic in original] an “unspoken or else.” The officials made clear that the platforms would [italic in original] suffer adverse consequences if they failed to comply, through express or implied threats, and thus the requests were not optional.
The appeals court also took a “real-world” view of the nation’s most feared law enforcement agency: “Although the FBI’s communications did not plainly reference adverse consequences, an actor need not express a threat aloud so long as, given the circumstances, the message intimates that some form of punishment will follow noncompliance.” The federal appeals court upheld part of the injunction while excluding some federal agencies from anticensorship restrictions.
The Biden administration quickly appealed the partial injunction to the Supreme Court, telling the court: “Of course, the government cannot punish people for expressing different views…. But there is a fundamental distinction between persuasion and coercion. And courts must take care to maintain that distinction because of the drastic consequences resulting from a finding of coercion.”
The Biden brief bewailed that the appeals court found that “officials from the White House, the Surgeon General’s office, and the FBI coerced social-media platforms to remove content despite the absence of even a single instance in which an official paired a request to remove content with a threat of adverse action.” But both the federal district court and the appeals court decisions offered plenty of examples of federal threats.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance, one of the plaintiffs, scoffed: “The Government argues that the injunction interferes with the government’s ability to speak. The Government has a wide latitude to speak on matters of public concern, but it cannot stifle the protected speech of ordinary Americans.” And the injunction impedes federal officials from secretly coercing private companies to satisfy White House demands.
As the Biden administration pressured the Supreme Court, the anticensorship lawyers on September 25 secured an en banc rehearing of their case, which consists of a panel of all 17 active Fifth Circuit judges. The plaintiffs were especially concerned that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Act was excluded from the injunction. CISA and its array of federal censorship contractors have sowed far too much mischief in recent years. The appeals court modified the injunction to put a leash on CISA.
Censorship could cast the deciding vote in the 2024 presidential election. Judge Doughty issued his injunction in part because federal agencies “could use their power over millions of people to suppress alternative views or moderate content they do not agree with in the upcoming 2024 national election.”
Much of the mainstream media is horrified at the prospect of reduced federal censorship. The Washington Post article on Doughty’s decision fretted, “For more than a decade, the federal government has attempted to work with social media companies to address criminal activity, including child sexual abuse images and terrorism.” The Post did not mention the Biden crusade to banish cynicism from the Internet. Journalist Glenn Greenwald scoffed, “The most surreal fact of U.S. political life is that the leading advocates for unified state/corporate censorship are large media corporations.”
Fifty years ago, philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote of the “most essential political freedom, the right to unmanipulated factual information without which all freedom of opinion becomes a cruel hoax.” The battle over federal censorship will determine whether Americans can have more than a passing whiff of that political freedom. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost joined the lawsuit against censorship and commented in September: “The federal government doesn’t get to play referee on the field of public discourse. If you let them decide what speech is OK, one day yours might not be.”
On October 20, the Supreme Court announced that it would rule on this case, with a decision expected within a few months. Stay tuned for plenty of legal fireworks and maybe even good news for freedom.
This article was originally published in the December 2023 edition of Future of Freedom.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages.
People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg?
More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned.
The attempt to pillage InfoWars and give it to The Onion has been reversed by a federal judge. That might be a fluke or might not be: maybe the lawfare is dialing back too. The cabinet of the incoming administration is being filled by voices that were fully censored for years. Employees are reportedly packing their bags at the FDA and other agencies.
Mainstream news commentators are sputtering around with less bravado than they have shown in years. CNN is firing major personalities.
Trump is talking about abolishing the income tax and granting $10K in tax credits per homeschooled child, not to mention blowing up college accreditation systems, among other sweeping changes.
The American Bastille day is coming, not only freeing the political prisoners of January 6 but also many of the unjustly persecuted including Ross Ulbricht, Roger Ver, and Ian Freeman, among so many others. That will be a day of rejoicing.
Oh, and peace seems to have broken out in some contentious areas of the world, for now.
What is happening? This is not the usual transfer of the resident of the White House. This is starting to look like an actual transfer of power, not just from Biden to Trump but from the permanent government – ensconced in many sectors – that has been long in hiding to an entirely new form of government responsive to actual voters.
As it turns out, there was no late surge for Kamala Harris. All the polls were wrong, and the rest was media blather. What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop.
There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future.
After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that.
The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement.
The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.
Sylvester Stallone called Trump a second George Washington but another reference point might be Andrew Jackson. The overwhelming victory for Trump is on a scale not seen since 1828 when, four years after the presidency was stolen from Jackson, Old Hickory came back in a wild landslide and cleaned up Washington. Trump arrives in Washington with a mandate for the same, with 81% of the public demanding that the government shrink in size and power.
It has all happened so quickly. We are barely ten days into the realization of what just transpired and the entire lay of the land seems different, like a tectonic shift in politics, culture, mood, and possibilities. We are even seeing blunt and open talk about the horrendous Covid response that so utterly demoralized the country and the world, after years of silence on the topic. We have promised hearings coming, and court cases galore now on fast track.
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages. It provides the beginnings of an answer to the great question on our minds for decades: how precisely does an authentic revolution take root in an industrialized Western democracy? Are elections capable of delivering real results?
For now, the answer seems to be yes. That should thrill any responsible observer of social, cultural, economic, and political affairs. It means that the early architects of the American system were not wrong. The intolerable costs of political upheaval of ages past can be mitigated by planting power firmly in the hands of the people through the plebiscite. This was their view and their gamble. All the evidence of our time points to the wisdom of the idea.
In the darkest days of the last year of the first Trump presidency, the bureaucracy was riding high, in full revenge mode against an elected government it hated and sought to overthrow. The agencies were passing strange edicts that felt like laws but no one knew for sure. You are essential, you are not. You must stay home, unless you have an emergency. Your elective surgery needs to wait. The kids cannot go to school. That European vacation cannot happen. You can eat at a restaurant but only if you are six feet away from other patrons and you must put this China-made cloth on your mouth if you get up to go to the restroom.
The flurry of edicts was mind-boggling. It felt like martial law, because it was some form of exactly that. The best research points to the astonishing reality that this was never really a public-health response but a scheme by security and intelligence sectors to enact some kind of global color revolution, which is why the policies were so similar the world over. It was indeed an awesome display of power, one that invaded all our communities, homes, and families.
No one knows this better than Team Trump, even if there has been near silence on the topic for all these years. They have had time to put the pieces together and figure out what happened and why. And they carefully, and in seclusion worthy of a Cistercian monastery, plotted their return, leaving nothing to chance.
Meanwhile, the past two years have had the Covid insurrectionists quietly stepping away from the spotlight, while leaving as much of their newfound power in place: the censorship, the technology, the mandates, and the propaganda that all of this shock-and-awe was nothing more than “common sense health measures.” It was never tenable, and vast numbers have come to realize that something went very wrong, like a kind of evil settled over the world and burrowed itself within all institutions.
In an instant, the whole scheme seems to be crumbling. The incredible result is that the administration under which this calamity occurred is now coming back, which is probably the strangest irony of our times.
And yet, even though no one has yet been open about precisely what happened in the White House in March 2020 to cause Trump to greenlight the lockdowns, there is a widespread belief that it was never really his choice. It was some kind of coup – egged on even by his closest advisors and the VP – that he either could not stop or lacked the personnel to marshal effective resistance. Regardless, he has been forgiven because, implausibly, the next administration not only owned the worst of it but added even more on top of that, including the wicked combination of mask mandates, forced injections, and continued school closures.
The result has been a continuing economic crisis, one far worse than agencies admit, in addition to a health, education, and cultural crisis. Meanwhile, all those involved in causing this from behind the scenes have been rewarded with professorships, loving interviews in the mainstream media, and lavish security provisions to protect them from legions of what they suppose are angry workers and peasants.
Therefore, among many of the ruling class, the results of this election are certainly not welcome, and nor are many of the early appointments. They represent the coming together of MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE, the fulfillment of decades of cultivation of disparate groups of dissidents who had not previously realized their common interests and common enemies. It was the Covid era and the imposition of top-down rule that brought them all together.
It was like three groups wandering around in a giant maze who suddenly confront each other and then, realizing that they all shared the same predicament, figure the way out together. These new alliances have not only shattered right and left, as traditionally understood, but reshaped the structural basis of political activism for the duration. It turns out that medical freedom, food freedom, free speech, political freedom, and peace all go together. Who knew?
The incumbent world of academia, think tanks, and most media simply finds itself unprepared to deal with the new realities. They had hoped everyone would forget about the last five years as if it was just a thing that happened but is now over; everyone just needs to grapple with the great reset and learn to love our new lives of surveillance, propaganda, censorship, perpetual war, poison food, unaffordable everything, and endless injections of potions for our own health and well-being.
Well, times have changed. How much? Early signs point to a dramatic unfolding of revolutionary change over the coming months. Is believing this the triumph of hope over experience? Absolutely. Then again, no one believed five years ago that most people in the world would be locked in their homes and communities, stuck drinking and streaming movies until biotech could come up with a cure for a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. Then it did not work and made people more sick than ever.
That was nuts but it happened.
If that could happen, with predictable results, the response could be equally implausible and more much thrilling. What’s man made can be unmade by man, and something new built in its place.
Author
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