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Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Missouri v. Biden

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Aaron KheriatyAARON KHERIATY  

The Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments over the Fifth Circuit’s grant of a preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden. As I mentioned in previous posts, the injunction would bar officials from the White House, CDC, FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Surgeon General’s office from coercing or significantly encouraging social media platforms to censor constitutionally protected speech.

My fellow plaintiffs and I welcome this opportunity to defend the First Amendment rights of all Americans in the U.S. Supreme Court. We expect to hear from the Court soon regarding the hearing dates—it could be in February or March.

The Fifth Circuit panel of judges last month upheld the key components of U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty’s July 4 preliminary injunction order, prohibiting named federal officials from coercing or significantly encouraging social media companies to suppress legal speech.

That decision vindicated our claims that we—and countless other Americans—were blacklisted, shadow-banned, deboosted, throttled, and suspended on social media as part of the government’s years-long censorship campaign orchestrated by the federal government.

The Biden Administration’s censorship regime has successfully suppressed perspectives contradicting government-approved views on hotly disputed topics such as whether natural immunity to covid exists, the safety and efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, the virus’s origins, and mask mandate efficacy.

Beyond covid, the documents we’ve obtained on discovery demonstrate that the government was also censoring critiques of its foreign policy, monetary policy, election infrastructure, and lighting rod social issues from abortion to gender ideology.

The vast, coordinated, and well-documented effort has silenced influential, highly qualified voices including doctors and scientists like my co-plaintiffs Dr. Bhattacharya and Dr. Kulldorff, as well as those like Jill Hines who have tried to raise awareness of issues. Though the US Supreme Court temporarily stayed the Fifth Circuit’s injunction until they make a ruling, I believes the Justices are ultimately unlikely to permit the egregious First Amendment abridgements our case has exposed.

The Fifth Circuit recognized that the Plaintiffs did “not challenge the social-media platforms’ content-moderation policies.” Rather, Plaintiffs challenged the government’s unlawful efforts to influence “enforcement of those policies.” The government gravely harmed the ability of Americans to convey their views to the public, and it deprived Americans of their right to hear opinions that differ from the government’s. Judge Doughty strikingly described the Administration’s conduct as “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history” and “akin to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.” He was right, and the US Supreme Court must not permit it.

Here are some reactions to the news from our lawyers at NCLA:

“NCLA is thrilled to have the opportunity to vindicate the First Amendment rights of our clients, and all Americans, in the nation’s highest court. We are confident that after a thorough review of the disturbing facts in this important case—which involves unprecedented government-imposed, viewpoint-based censorship—the Court will recognize the grievous, unconstitutional nature of the government’s conduct and enjoin it.”
— Jenin Younes, Litigation Counsel, NCLA

“We are disappointed Americans’ First Amendment rights will be vulnerable to government infringement until this case is decided. But we are confident this Court, as strong as it is on First Amendment issues, will rule against the government and uphold our clients’ rights and liberties.”
— John Vecchione, Senior Litigation Counsel, NCLA

“If anything, the Fifth Circuit’s decision did not go far enough in enjoining the reprehensible conduct exposed in this case. The facts of this case show government agencies censored speech in a deliberate effort to control the narrative on several controversial topics ahead of the last election. The First Amendment forbids such censorship, and the Supreme Court must never allow such mischief again, if we are to keep our democracy.”
— Mark Chenoweth, President, NCLA

Republished from the author’s Substack

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  • Aaron Kheriaty

    Aaron Kheriaty, Senior Brownstone Scholar and 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is a psychiatrist working with the Unity Project. He is a former Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, where he was the director of Medical Ethics.

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Elon Musk, DOGE officials reveal ‘astonishing’ government waste, fraud in viral interview

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

Elon Musk said that ‘the sheer amount of waste and fraud’ in federal agencies, is ‘astonishing’ and that DOGE is cutting ‘$4 billion a day’ in misused taxpayer funds.

In a remarkable Fox News interview, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) founder Elon Musk and top officials of the DOGE team offered stunning, often infuriating, insights into how the federal government functions.

The interview, which has garnered well over 10 million online views on X in less than 24 hours, provided one extreme example after another of government mismanagement, excess, waste, and fraud while simultaneously promising a future where the D.C. Leviathan is tamed and restored to its proper, efficient role.

The new Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), former U.S. House Rep. Dan Bishop, averred that the DOGE A-Team interview was the “most amazing and significant half-hour in TV history.” 

Musk was joined by DOGE team members Steve Davis, Joe Gebbia, Aram Moghaddassi, Brad Smith, Anthony Armstrong, Tom Krause, and Tyler Hassen – all successful businessmen and entrepreneurs in their own rights – to describe the widespread systemic weaknesses and failures at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Social Security Administration (SSA), and more.  

Fox host Bret Baier described the group as “Silicon Valley colliding with government.”

“This is a revolution. And I think it might be the biggest revolution in government since the original revolution,” said Musk during the discussion.  

“But at the end of the day, America’s going to be in much better shape,” he promised.

“America will be solvent. The critical programs that people depend upon will work, and it’s going to be a fantastic future.” 

Musk said that the most stunning thing he’s discovered during the early phases of DOGE is “the sheer amount of waste and fraud in government. It is astonishing. It’s mind-blowing.”

Musk cited the example of a simple 10-question National Park online survey for which the government was charged nearly $1 billion and which in the end served no purpose.

“I think we will accomplish most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within [130 days],” he predicted. “Our goal is to reduce the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day, seven days a week. And so far, we are succeeding.”

Billionaire Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, is working to digitize the retirement process for government employees, which is currently stuck using 1950s technology, housed in a Pennsylvania cave.

“It’s an injustice to civil servants who are subjected to these processes that are older than the age of half the people watching the show tonight,” said Gebbia. “We really believe that the government can have an Apple store-like experience, beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems.”  

“The retirement process is all by paper, literally, with people carrying paper and manila envelopes into this gigantic mine,” added Musk, limiting the number of federal employees who can retire to no more than 8,000 per month.

Gebbia expects to have the antiquated system updated and overhauled in a matter of months.  

“The two improvements that we’re trying to make to Social Security are helping people that legitimately get benefits protect them from fraud that they experience every day on a routine basis and also make the experience better,” said DOGE software engineer Aram Moghaddassi.

He offered an amazing statistic: “When you want to change your (direct deposit) bank account, you can call Social Security. We learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters” who are attempting to commandeer retired seniors’ benefit payments.

“What we’re doing will help their benefits,” assured Musk. “As a result of the work of DOGE, legitimate recipients of social security will receive more money, not less money.” 

“There are over 15 million people that are over the age of 120 that are marked as alive in the Social Security system,” said Steve Davis, who has previously worked alongside Musk at SpaceX, the Boring Company, and X

He explained that despite this being discovered by hardworking personnel at the SSA back in 2008, nothing was done. As a result, 15-20 million social security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were just floating around, susceptible to being used for “bad intentions.”

Health care entrepreneur Brad Smith, who has taken charge of auditing HHS and NIH, also cited stunning, troubling statistics displaying the extreme inefficiencies of the nation’s top federal health organizations.

Smith said that at NIH, “Today they have 27 different centers” created by Congress over the years and there are “700 different IT systems,” each using their own IT software.

“They have 27 different CIOs (Chief Information Officers),” added Smith, “so when you think about making great medical discoveries, you have to connect the data.”  

Those discoveries are likely severely hampered by NIH’s communications disconnect.

Anthony Armstrong, a Morgan Stanley banker now working for DOGE at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) talked about “duplicative functions” and “overstaffing” at government agencies. He said that money is “sloshing out the door.”

As an example, he cited the IRS, which has 1,400 employees whose only job is to provision laptops and cell phones to IRS workers.  

“As an ex-CFO of a big public tech company, really what we’re doing is, we’re applying public company standards to the federal government, and it is alarming how the financial operations and financial management is set up today,” said Tom Krause, CEO of Cloud Software Group.  

He explained that there is virtually no accountability or verification protections when it comes to the Treasury Department disbursing funds to various government agencies.

A 94-year-old grandmother is no longer “going to be robbed by forces like she’s getting robbed today, and the solvency of the federal government will ensure that she continues to receive those social security checks,” added Musk.

“The reason we’re doing this is because if we don’t do it, America is going to go insolvent and go bankrupt, and nobody’s going to get anything,” said Musk.

Tyler Hassen, a former oil executive working at the Interior Department for DOGE ​​alleged that there was no departmental oversight at the Interior Department “whatsoever” under the Biden administration.  

Steve Davis talked about the out-of-control issuance and use of federal credit cards. 

“There are in the federal government around 4.6 million credit cards for around 2.3 to 2.4 million employees. This doesn’t make sense. So, one of the things all of the teams have worked on is we’ve worked for the agencies and said, ‘Do you need all of these credit cards? Are they being used? Can you tell us physically where they are?’” recounted Davis.

“Clearly there should not be more credit cards than there are people,” interjected Musk.

Musk later described how the Small Business Administration (SBA) has given out $300 million in loans to people “under the age of 11.” An additional $300 million in loans has been handed out to people “over the age of 120.”

Musk said that these government loans are clearly “fraudulent.”  

“Terrible things are being done,” he exclaimed. “We’re stopping it.” 

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2025 Federal Election

Donald Trump suggests Mark Carney will win Canadian election, touts ‘productive call’ with leader

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From LifeSiteNews

‘It was an extremely productive call, we agree on many things, and will be meeting immediately after Canada’s upcoming Election,’ Trump wrote about Carney on Friday.

U.S. President Donald Trump says he had “an extremely productive call” with Prime Minister Mark Carney and implied that the World Economic Forum-linked politician will win Canada’s upcoming federal election.

“I just finished speaking with Prime Minister Mark Carney, of Canada,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday. “It was an extremely productive call, we agree on many things, and will be meeting immediately after Canada’s upcoming Election to work on elements of Politics, Business, and all other factors, that will end up being great for both the United States of America and Canada. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Reacting to the post, LifeSiteNews editor-in-chief John-Henry Westen wrote on X:

Trump’s comments come just weeks before Canadians head to the polls on April 28 for a federal election. Carney called the snap-election just nine days after taking over for Justin Trudeau as leader of the Liberal Party and prime minister.

Carney, an admitted “globalist” and “elitist,” formerly served as head of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, and has extensive ties to globalist groups like the World Economic Forum and the United Nations.

Trump’s comments regarding Carney may prove significant as much of the debate in the mainstream media ahead of the election has been about how the prospective leaders will handle tariff threats and trade deals with America.

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