Friday, 28 June 2024

Supreme Court deals crushing blow to American liberty

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 American liberty took a crushing blow earlier today at the hands of Amy Coney Barrett, Chief Justice John Roberts, and the three liberals on the court. The case is called Murthy v. Missouri.

 

USA Today:

WASHINGTON?The Supreme Court on Wednesday handed the Biden administration an election-year victory, throwing out a conservative challenge to the administration’s push to get social media companies to remove posts it considered misinformation.

The 6-3 decision, led by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was a response to a suit that came during a hot-button period on social media when people were posting about COVID-19, vaccines, Fauci, and other emotional topics. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas dissented.

Barrett, writing for the 6-3 majority, said the challengers argued that unfettered speech on social media is critical to their work as scientists, pundits and activists.

“But they do not point to any specific instance of content moderation that caused them identifiable harm,” Barrett wrote. “They have therefore failed to establish an injury that is sufficiently ‘concrete and particularized.’”

Justice Alito minced no words in describing what a crushing blow this is for our freedoms. USA Today continues:

In the dissent, Alito complained that the majority “unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment.”

“For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech,” Alito wrote in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.

By dismissing the case without deciding the underlying First Amendment issue, the justices avoided saying when governments go too far in interacting with media platforms about their content.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett has now handed the Biden regime a license to censor so-called “disinformation” with impunity. USA Today continues:

The Justice Department said government agencies weren’t improperly threatening social media companies, but instead, were encouraging them to remove harmful or false information, including about vaccines. There was no retaliation when the platforms did not do what the government requested, the Justice Department said.

[…]

Experts had called the case, Murthy v. Missouri, a unique chance for the court to define how far governments may go to protect against online distribution of harmful content.

The court also heard another case this year about content moderation, examining the constitutionality of laws passed by Florida and Texas to limit the ability of social media giants to regulate user content.

Both cases grew out of concern from conservatives that their views were being suppressed, including about claims of 2020 election fraud, the origin of and treatments for COVID-19.

The Gateway Pundit explains what all of this means for the layman:

In a stunning 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Biden Administration’s policy of deleting, suppressing, and deplatforming specific people, topics, and ideas, is immune from suit leaving no one able to challenge it in court.

In addition, Justice Coney Barrett let the government off the hook for the censorship regime the government created and maintained. Here’s the key passage:

“platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment. To be sure, the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices. But the Fifth Circuit, by attributing every platform decision at least in part to the defendants, glossed over complexities in the evidence.”

There were no “complexities in the evidence” – the evidence was clear: the FBI, White House, and other officials were specifically directing, demanding, and coercing social media companies to take down posts that related to topics they wanted suppressed.

Here are some of the key topics brought out in discovery that the government was most interested in suppressing, generally:

  • Hunter Biden’s laptop

  • Vaccines

  • Voter fraud in the 2020 election

  • COVID policy, masking, lockdowns, vaccine mandates

[…]

The Supreme Court is making it procedurally impossible for a citizen or a state to challenge the government’s ability to silence your digital speech. The practical consequence of this decision is to re-open the floodgates of social media censorship and speech suppression.

Jonathan Turley went on Fox News to break it down:

Justice Alito minced absolutely no words, explaining that the Court shirked its duty and proclaiming that “the country may come to regret the Court’s failure” to declare the Biden regime’s lawless behavior unconstitutional.

Here’s a closeup:

This says it all:

Lost in the shuffle is that the Court punted on one of the most important underlying issues, which means that the decision wasn’t a total loss. Still, this could be considered dereliction of duty, which could be worse.

Benjamin Weingarten:

Murthy v. Missouri

Perhaps the most significant statement in the otherwise disappointing but predictable majority opinion comes in a footnote.

“Because we do not reach the merits, we express no view as to whether the Fifth Circuit correctly articulated the standard for when the Government transforms private conduct into state action.”

It was disappointing, but not at all surprising, that not a single left-wing justice stood up for free speech. The liberal left has completely wasted away and given way to the speech-suppressing, proto-communist left.

Libt*rds are doing victory laps.

The New Republic:

The Supreme Court delivered a surprising opinion on Wednesday, siding with the Biden administration and giving a kick in the face to conspiracy theorists and purveyors of disinformation.

[…]

The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 vote, found the plaintiff’s complaints lacked standing, reversing the opinion delivered by the Fifth Circuit. The Supreme Court ruled that they failed to produce any tangible harm (egos don’t count) from the government communicating with social media companies to moderate a firehose of garbage spewing out from conservative quacks.

Former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark took to X to explain the coming repercussions of this grave blow to liberty (emphasis ours):

The Supreme Court wrongly booted the most significant First Amendment case in U.S. history on standing grounds today, Murthy v Missouri.

And I say that as a true maven of standing doctrine.

In effect, the Supreme Court majority is requiring government-private partnerships aimed at censorship to overlap entirely. If there are situations where private censorship predates and or postdates government calls for censorship, then the majority is saying the actions should be treated as independent and therefore to frustrate satisfaction of the causation and redressability prongs of standing analysis.

And the Supreme Court majority did this even where they simultaneously acknowledged there was evidence of government collusion with Big Tech to censor COVID-related and 2020 election-related speech.

We need President Trump to be reelected not just to put in place bans on federal government censorship activity using Nig Tech as their cat’s paw, but to bring enforcement actions against those violating the First Amendment.

The Judicial Branch checking out of this issue as it is postured in Murthy cannot be the final word or else censorship to maintain leftist orthodoxies about important matters like COVID and elections will continue and expand.

Note as well that this decision could not be more poorly timed. It took til 2024 to tee up the 2020 censorship for Supreme Court review. As a result, Joe Biden and his minions now have carte blanche to censor right on through the 2024 election and those violations of law could only be conceivably redressed if Trump gets back into the White House. There is an inherent lag from First Amendment injury, lawsuits, and winning lawsuits sustainable through appeal.

Finally, for all these reasons, we should be able to put to rest forever the nonsense position that the Supreme Court does Trump’s bidding.

It doesn’t. But watch MSM continue their relentless attacks on the Supreme Court and its independence nonetheless.

Alex Berenson took to X to declare his free speech lawsuit that last one standing.

The full Supreme Court decision can be accessed here in PDF form.

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