Censorship Industrial Complex
Kennedy, CHD win injunction in landmark censorship case against Biden administration
From LifeSiteNews
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.
The court recognized that the “right of free speech is a fundamental constitutional right that is vital to the freedom of our nation, and the Kennedy plaintiffs have produced evidence of a massive effort by defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.”
A federal judge on Wednesday handed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Children’s Health Defense (CHD) a partial win in their landmark censorship case alleging the Biden administration colluded with social media platforms to unlawfully censor online content.
Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting key Biden administration officials and agencies from coercing or significantly encouraging social media platforms to suppress or censor online content.
However, Judge Doughty simultaneously issued a stay on the injunction until 10 days after the U.S. Supreme Court rules on a similar case, Murthy v. Missouri.
That case, filed in May 2022 by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and several individual plaintiffs, was originally filed as Missouri v. Biden.
The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on March 18 on a preliminary injunction in Murthy v. Missouri.
Mary Holland, CHD president, told The Defender that the Valentine’s Day ruling was “a welcome Valentine to the Kennedy plaintiffs,” and “an important victory for the U.S. Constitution.”
She added:
“In a thorough decision, Judge Doughty reasoned that the plaintiffs do have ‘standing’ or the right to sue and be heard; that the defendants have engaged in coercion or significant encouragement to censorship and joint action with social media platforms; and that the court is required to issue the preliminary injunction.
“Further, because it is well-established that violations of free speech rights constitute irreparable injury, the Court acted even before an ultimate decision from the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri. Judge Doughty wrote: ‘This Court … finds the balance of equities and the public interest strongly favors the issue of a preliminary injunction.’
“No doubt the Supreme Court will take account of this ruling as it hears oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri on March 18.”
Wednesday’s ruling stems from a class-action lawsuit filed in March 2023 by Kennedy, now CHD chairman on leave, CHD and private citizen Connie Sampognaro against President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top administration officials and federal agencies.
The suit was filed on behalf of the more than 80% of Americans who access news through social media.
Judge Doughty consolidated Kennedy v. Biden and Murthy v. Biden in July 2023. Both cases were being argued in his court and had the same defendants and many common legal and factual issues.
Although the cases were consolidated, Doughty ruled that the District Court continues to have jurisdiction over Kennedy and CHD’s separate motion for a preliminary injunction, underscoring the fact that a delayed ruling would delay Kennedy from vindicating his claims.
The U.S. Department of Justice did not respond to The Defender’s request for comment.
‘The right of free speech is a fundamental constitutional right’
In his 24-page ruling, Judge Doughty found that several of the defendants in the Kennedy et al. v. Biden lawsuit were violating the plaintiffs’ free speech rights under the First Amendment, causing irreparable harm. He ordered them to cease these violations.
The court recognized that the “right of free speech is a fundamental constitutional right that is vital to the freedom of our nation, and the Kennedy plaintiffs have produced evidence of a massive effort by defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.”
Plaintiffs alleged Biden administration officials “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.
The government, the lawsuit alleges, pressured social media platforms to directly suppress or censor Kennedy and CHD from major platforms and to do the same to content containing views about COVID-19 and other issues that contradicted the government narrative.
Kennedy and CHD argued the court should rule on the preliminary injunction now, because the case is different from Murthy v. Missouri, asks for a more specific injunction and because the defendants singled out Kennedy, who is a U.S. presidential candidate, for censorship.
In determining the merits of the plaintiffs’ motion, Doughty first had to rule on whether the plaintiffs had standing. On that issue, “the court provided strong concrete examples of government coercion or encouragement to censor, particularly with respect to Mr. Kennedy and CHD,” said Kim Mack Rosenberg, CHD general counsel.
Doughty cited evidence that defendants labeled Kennedy as part of the “Disinformation Dozen” who were eventually censored from social media and that some of CHD’s social media posts were also censored.
He also noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) worked with the Virality Project to reduce or delete social media posts by people and organizations they believed to be spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19.
The Virality Project explicitly listed Kennedy and CHD in the fifth and second place as the highest performing weekly social-media engagement incidents, he wrote.
“This evidence also was key in the Court’s decision that plaintiffs met all the requirements to support issuing the injunction and that the balance of equities favored plaintiffs here,” Mack Rosenberg added.
Doughty also found the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their claim, writing:
“As in Missouri v. Biden, the White House Defendants and the Surgeon General Defendants both coerced and significantly encouraged social-media platforms to suppress protected free speech.
“This Court further finds the CDC Defendants, the CISA [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] Defendants and the FBI Defendants significantly encouraged social-media platforms to suppress protected free speech.”
Defendants ‘likely’ to use their power to suppress alternative views in the future
The defendants have argued that the actions at stake occurred in the past and cannot be remedied by issuing an injunction prohibiting future actions and that there is no “imminent harm” to the defendants because the COVID-19 pandemic and the election where the alleged conduct occurred are in the past.
However, Doughty ruled that the alleged past actions also indicate there is a substantial risk of likely future harm.
“Defendants apparently continue to have meetings with social-media companies and other contacts,” he wrote, adding:
“Although the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer an emergency, it is likely that in the event of any other real or perceived emergency event, the Defendants likely would once again use their power over social-media companies to suppress alternative views.
“And it is certainly likely that Defendants 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.”
Although Doughty granted a substantial part of Kennedy et al.’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the White House, the surgeon general, the CDC, FBI and the CISA, he also denied the request for an injunction against several other agencies.
The injunction excluded the U.S. Department of State, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and the U.S. Department of Commerce, who were also included in the plaintiffs’ request.
The Defender on occasion posts content related to Children’s Health Defense’s nonprofit mission that features Mr. Kennedy’s views on the issues CHD and The Defender regularly cover. In keeping with Federal Election Commission rules, this content does not represent an endorsement of Mr. Kennedy who is on leave from CHD and is running for president of the U.S. as an independent candidate.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
From the Brownstone Institute
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health”
Didn’t give much thought to freedom until four years ago, at age 63. Freedom was just there, like the water surrounding a goldfish. And then the Covid-19 pandemic blew in, the world locked down, and admonitions to “stay the ‘$^#&’ home” blazed through social media. No freedom was too important to discard in the name of public safety: jobs, family businesses, artistic endeavours, public meetings, social connections that kept despair at bay, all took a backseat to the grim business of saving grandma (who ended up getting Covid anyway). No discussion of moral or practical trade-offs, no pushback from the press, nothing. It felt wrong to me on a cellular level.
Apparently I was the only one in my middle-class liberal circle to harbour misgivings about this astonishing new world. If I tried, ever so timidly, to articulate my concerns on Facebook or Twitter, the online warriors shot back with a string of epithets. “Go lick a pole and catch the virus,” said one. “Crawl back into your cave, troglodyte,” said another. And my all-time favourite: “You’re nothing but a mouth-breathing Trumptard.”
From the get-go, I perceived Covid as more of a philosophical problem than a scientific one. As I wrote on more than one occasion, science can inform our decisions, but not dictate them. What ultimately powers our choices are the values we hold. I saw Covid as a morality play, with freedom and safety cast as the duelling protagonists, and it looked like safety was skipping to an easy victory.
It was a heady time for the health bureaucrats, whose increasingly arcane rules betrayed a naked impulse to control: the Canadian high-school students required to use masks on both their faces and their wind instruments during band practice, the schoolchildren forced (for hygiene reasons) to study on their knees for hours in an Alaska classroom, the “glory-hole” sex advised by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. The lack of public pushback against these absurdities heightened my awareness of the fragility of our freedoms.
One of the earliest memes to surface during the pandemic was “muh freedumb.” The locution became a shorthand for a stock character – a tattooed man wearing camo gear and a baseball cap, spewing viral particles while yelling about his rights. A selfish idiot. The memes kept coming: “Warning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.” “Personal freedom is the preoccupation of adult children.” Freedom, for centuries an aspiration of democratic societies, turned into a laughing stock.
Eventually, pro-freedom voices began trickling into the public arena. I wasn’t alone, after all. There were others who understood, in the words of Telegraph writer Janet Daley, that the institutional response to Covid-19 had steamrolled over “the dimension of human experience which gives meaning and value to private life.” Lionel Shriver decried how “across the Western world, freedoms that citizens took for granted seven months ago have been revoked at a stroke.” And Laura Dodsworth brought tears to my eyes when she wrote, in her 2021 book A State of Fear, that she feared authoritarianism more than death.
Once the vaccines rolled out, the war on freedom of conscience went nuclear. If you breathed a word against the products, or even the mandates, you were “literally killing people.” The hostility towards the “unvaxxed” culminated in a Toronto Star front page showcasing public vitriol, splashed with such sentiments as: “I honestly don’t care if they die from Covid. Not even a little bit.”
This, too, felt viscerally wrong. I knew several people who had refused the vaccine, and they all had well-articulated reasons for their stance. If they didn’t fully trust the “safe and effective” bromide recycled by all government and pharmaceutical industry spokespeople, I could hardly blame them. (And I say this as someone who writes for Big Pharma and got five Covid shots.)
One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture was freedom of expression, a core principle in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing news outlets. By early 2021, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 83 governments worldwide had used the Covid-19 pandemic to violate the lawful exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health,” the group wrote in a media release. “The victims include journalists, activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.”
But what about misinformation? Doesn’t it kill people? Newsflash: misinformation has always existed, even before TikTok. It’s up to each of us to sift the credible folks from the cranks. The best defence against misinformation is better information, and it’s the policy wonks’ job to provide it. Modern science itself depends on this tug-of-war of ideas, which filters out weaker hypotheses and moves stronger ones ahead for further testing.
Besides, misinformation comes not just from cranks, but from “official sources” – especially those tasked with persuading the public, rather than informing it. Remember when Rochelle Walensky, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, asserted that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus?” Or when Anthony Fauci maintained that getting vaccinated makes you a “dead end” in the chain of transmission? I rest my case.
The marketplace of ideas is like a souk, with a lot of hollering and arguing and the odd snatched purse – and that’s exactly how it should be. It’s an ingenious and irreplaceable process for getting to the truth. There are few ideas too sacrosanct to question or too ridiculous to consider. That’s why, unlike just about everyone in my left-leaning circle, I take no issue with Elon Musk’s shakedown of the old Twitter, now the Wild West of X.
Under Musk’s algorithms, my feed has become a true philosophical souk, with wildly disparate views smashing into each other, leaving me to sift through the rubble in search of a gold nugget or two. Love him or hate him, Musk offers a much-needed counterweight to the ideological lockstep in much of the mainstream media. And when it comes to free speech, Musk has put his money where his mouth is: when media personality Keith Olbermann recently hopped on X, where he boasts a million followers, to call for Musk’s arrest and detainment, Musk made no move to censor him. Works for me.
While the “old normal” has thankfully returned to our daily lives, save the odd mask in a shopping mall or subway car, the stench of censorship that blew in with the pandemic has yet to dissipate. An obsession with disinformation permeates the zeitgeist, spurring lawmakers in several Western countries to censor the flow of thoughts and ideas that gives a free society its pulse.
We cannot excise personal freedom from a democratic society, even in the interests of the “public good,” without poisoning the roots of democracy itself. Article 3 of UNESCO’s 2005 Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights states this plainly: “The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.” In our post-pandemic reality, the statement seems almost quaint. Nonetheless, it expresses an enduring truth: that a democracy must never discard the idea of freedom – even in a pandemic.
Freedom desperately needs a comeback from its current incarnation as an expendable frill. In my own small way I’m trying to make this happen: never much of an activist before Covid, I’m now part of a small group preparing to launch a Free Speech Union in Canada, modelled after the highly successful one in the UK. The organisation will offer legal advice to individuals facing censorship, cancellation, or job loss because of their words. I look forward to supporting people caught in this anti-freedom web, including those whose words I heartily disagree with.
My newfound respect for free speech is also what propels me to keep talking about Covid. The response to the pandemic exceeded the bounds of public health, and we need to expose the forces that drove it. Here’s Daley again: “The world went crazy. There is no other way to account for what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.” We can’t let it happen again.
Republished from Perspective Media
Author
Snowden has been indicted as a “spy” and is considered to be one by many, even though the revelations from the leaked documents were not handed to another country, but publicly released to benefit the rights of the citizens of his own.
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