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Court Ruling on Murthy Misses Point Entirely

Published

12 months ago

16 minute read

From the Brownstone Institute

By Thomas Buckley

The United States Supreme Court ruled, in a 6 to 3 decision, that the plaintiffs in the most important free speech case in decades did not have standing to ask for preliminary injunctive relief.

That is wrong.

In her majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett bent over sideways to avoid judging the case on its merits – the allegation is that various and sundry government agencies coerced private social media companies to remove posts and tweets and such they did not like – and focused instead on whether or not the plaintiffs had the right, or standing, to ask for and be granted such relief.

The plaintiffs, essentially, had their content throttled or removed from social media platforms at the behest of the government because they did not follow the government line on the pandemic response and election security, daring to question things like social distancing – even Dr. Anthony Fauci has admitted they just made that up – and how secure – or unsecure – a “vote-by-mail” election could possibly be.

The request before the court was to allow an injunction against a number of government agencies that barred improper communication with the social media platforms. The question of whether those agencies did in fact do that – essentially violating the First Amendment rights of the plaintiffs – does not appear at issue. As Justice Samuel Alito (joined in opposition to the ruling by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch) said in his blistering dissent, that unquestionably happened.

The case, known as Murthy V. Missouri, involves two states and a number of private plaintiffs, all claiming that they were improperly censored – and thus damaged – by federal agencies and/or the dubious “cut out” front groups they created. Alito focused on one plaintiff – Jill Hines, who ran a Louisiana health-related (read pandemic response criticism) that was consistently degraded by Facebook after calls and pronouncements from the White House – in his dissent, noting that she unquestionably had standing (even Barrett admitted that plaintiff was closest, as it were), especially in light of the fact the government itself admitted the plaintiff had been damaged.

In today’s ruling, “The Court, however, shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think,” wrote Alito. “That is regrettable. What the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional (in a separate case), but it was no less coercive. And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even more dangerous. It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so. Officials who read today’s decision…will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send.”

Barrett wrote that, while she was not opining on the merits of the case, the plaintiffs could not show standing to receive a preliminary injunction. Such an injunction would have immediately barred government abuse going forward, but Barrett held, basically, that just because it did happen doesn’t mean it will happen again and therefore the plaintiffs are not entitled to preliminary (or prospective) relief.

As part of her reasoning, Barrett said that social media platforms did act on their own, at least on occasion, as part of their standard “content moderation” efforts and there was little or no “traceability” back to specific government individuals showing an immediate and direct correlation between a government compliant and a private company action.

Wrong.

First, in the Hines matter, even Barrett noted there was an element of traceability (that was enough for Alito to say she unquestionably had standing to seek relief and, therefore, the case should have been decided on its merits).

Second, companies like Facebook, which in the past have paid huge fines to the government, are in a very precarious position vis-a-vis federal regulation. From “Section 230” protections – a government code that limits their exposure to civil liability when deciding to drop content – to ever-growing threats of further government intervention and potential anti-trust actions, social media companies are internally incentivized to comply with government requests.

In other words, it is not at all a coincidence that a very large percentage of social media execs are “former” government employees and elected officials.

“In sum, the officials wielded potent authority. Their communications with Facebook were virtual demands,” Alito wrote. “And Facebook’s quavering responses to those demands show that it felt a strong need to yield. For these reasons, I would hold that Hines is likely to prevail on her claim that the White House coerced Facebook into censoring her speech.”

In her ruling, Barrett made other significant errors. First, she referred to the “Election Integrity Partnership” (EIP) as a “private entity,” and therefore able to make requests of social media companies.

In fact, the EIP (a group of academic “misinformation specialists”) was morphed into existence by the Department of Homeland Security, specifically its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, typically known as CISA. The EIP was funded by the government, many of its workers were former (though for many, ‘former’ may be a stretch) federal security agency employees, and the EIP specifically and consistently did the bidding of CISA when asked.

For Barrett to call the EIP a “private entity” shows a complete (intentional?) misunderstanding of the legal landscape and the reality of censorship-industrial complex.

The EIP and other government-sponsored cutout groups that make up the censorship-industrial complex are as independent from the government and the deep state as a foot is independent from a leg.

Barrett also claimed that similar government activities seemed to have lessened in the recent past, making the need for the going-forward injunction unnecessary.

Such a statement is impossible to prove as being true or false – especially after today – but making the assumption that it is even vaguely true, Barrett again misses the mark. If the government is censoring less now than it did two years ago it is because of the massive amount of public attention that has been drawn to the despicable practice by the press and, to be blunt, this very lawsuit.

CISA, etc. did not wake up one morning 18 months ago and say ‘Hey, we better cool it on this” because they suddenly realized they were most likely violating the Constitution; they did so because of the public – and Congressional – pressure.

And now with at least the legal pressure lessened (and an election coming up), to believe that the activities will not increase is naïve to the point of childish – that’s why this future, going forward, prospective injunction was so important.

That didn’t stop the Biden administration from crowing and, presumably, figuring out to ramp up the program for November.

Critics of the decision were loud and voluminous. Appearing on Fox News, legal commentator Jonathan Turley said that “standing issues” are often “used to block meritorious claims” and that the government’s “censorship by surrogate makes a mockery of the First Amendment.”

“The Supreme Court’s decision,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, “helps ensure the Biden administration can continue our important work with technology companies to protect the safety and security of the American people.”

Matt Taibbi, one of the reporters behind the outing of the “Twitter files,” noted that KJP’s statement is astonishingly egregious, but also very telling. She essentially admits government censorship is occurring and claims it is good:

That “important work,” of course, includes White House officials sending emails to companies like Facebook, with notes saying things like ‘Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on having it removed ASAP.’ The Supreme Court sidestepped ruling on the constitutionality of this kind of behavior in the Murthy v. Missouri case with one blunt sentence: “Neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established Article III standing to seek an injunction against any defendant.”

“The great War on Terror cop-out, standing — which killed cases like Clapper v. Amnesty International and ACLU v. NSA — reared its head again. In the last two decades, we’ve gotten used to the problem of legal challenges to new government programs being shot down precisely because their secret nature makes collecting evidence or showing standing or injury difficult, and Murthy proved no different.”

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an internationally recognized Stanford medical professor, is one of the private plaintiffs in the suit. Bhattacharya is one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for a more targeted and rational response to the pandemic response. When it comes to standing, he points directly to an email from then-National Institutes of Health Chief (Tony Fauci’s sort-of boss) Francis Collins, calling on his fellow government employees to engage in a “devastating takedown” of Bhattacharya and the Declaration itself.

Barrett wrote that “Enjoining the Government defendants, therefore, is unlikely to affect the platforms’ content-moderation decisions,” an opinion Bhattacharya was having none of.

“Unlikely to continue to be damaged?” asked Bhattacharya. “How do we know that? And now because of this ruling we have no legal protection from it happening. The court ruled that you can censor until you get caught and even then there will be no penalty.”

Because of the focus on standing, Bhattacharya likened today’s ruling to giving the go-ahead to “broadly censor ideas” as long as you make sure not to traceably censor a specific individual.

A disappointed Bhattacharya has hopes for the future – the case was, again, not decided on its merits and is simply remanded without the injunction back to federal district court in Louisiana – but thinks electeds need to pass laws to stop the censorship.

“At this point, Congress has to act and this needs to be an election issue,” Bhattacharya said.

John Vecchione, New Civil Liberties Alliance Senior Litigation Counsel and the lawyer for four of the five private individuals (including Hines and Bhattacharya) said today’s ruling was “not in accordance with the facts” of the situation.

“There is a level of unreality about this opinion,” Said Vecchione, adding that it reads like a “roadmap for government censors.”

While some in the media have tried to identify this case as having “right-wing” support, Vecchione noted it was originally filed while Donald Trump was president and therefore goes far beyond partisan politics to the heart of the rights of American citizens.

The suit, as noted, goes back to district court and Vecchione says they will continue to gather facts and depositions and even more specific instances of “traceability” – he says they already have enough, but Barrett did not agree – and keep working it through the courts. He said he expects to be back at the Supreme Court sometime in – hopefully – the near future.

“Meanwhile, any government agency, any administration can censor any message they don’t like,” Vecchione said.

And no matter a person’s politics, that is just plain wrong.

Or as Justice Alito wrote:

“For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech. Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent.”

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Thomas Buckley

Thomas Buckley is the former mayor of Lake Elsinore, Cal. a Senior Fellow at the California Policy Center, and a former newspaper reporter.  He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy and can be reached directly at [email protected]. You can read more of his work at his Substack page.

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Alberta announces citizens will have to pay for their COVID shots

Published on June 16, 2025

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From LifeSite News

By Anthony Murdoch

The government said that it has decided to stop ‘waste’ by not making the shots free starting this fall.

Beginning this fall, COVID shots in the province will have to be pre-ordered at the full price, about $110, to receive them.  (This will roll out in four ‘phases’. In the first phases COVID shots will still be free for those with pre-existing medical conditions, people on social programs, and seniors.)

The UCP government in a press release late last week noted due to new “federal COVID-19 vaccine procurement” rules, which place provinces and territories as being responsible for purchasing the jabs for residents, it has decided to stop “waste” by not making the jab free anymore.

“Now that Alberta’s government is responsible for procuring vaccines, it’s important to better determine how many vaccines are needed to support efforts to minimize waste and control costs,” the government stated.

“This new approach will ensure Alberta’s government is able to better determine its overall COVID-19 vaccine needs in the coming years, preventing significant waste.”

The New Democratic Party (NDP) took issue with the move to stop giving out the COVID shots for free, claiming it was “cruel” and would place a “financial burden” on people wanting the shots.

NDP health critic Sarah Hoffman claimed the move by the UCP is health “privatization” and the government should promote the abortion-tainted shots instead.

The UCP said that in 2023-2024, about 54 percent of the COVID shots were wasted, with Health Minister Adriana LaGrange saying, “In previous years, we’ve seen significant vaccine wastage.”

“By shifting to a targeted approach and introducing pre-ordering, we aim to better align supply with demand – ensuring we remain fiscally responsible while continuing to protect those at highest risk,” she said.

The jabs will only be available through public health clinics, with pharmacies no longer giving them out.

The UCP also noted that is change in policy comes as a result of the Federal Drug Administration in the United States recommending the jabs be stopped for young children and pregnant women.

The opposite happened in Canada, with the nation’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) continuing to say that pregnant women should still regularly get COVID shots as part of their regular vaccine schedule.

The change in COVID jab policy is no surprise given Smith’s opposition to mandatory shots.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, early this year, Smith’s UCP government said it would consider halting COVID vaccines for healthy children.

Smith’s reasoning was in response to the Alberta COVID-19 Pandemic Data Review Task Force’s “COVID Pandemic Response” 269-page final report. The report was commissioned by Smith last year, giving the task force a sweeping mandate to investigate her predecessor’s COVID-era mandates and policies.

The task force’s final report recommended halting “the use of COVID-19 vaccines without full disclosure of their potential risks” as well as outright ending their use “for healthy children and teenagers as other jurisdictions have done,” mentioning countries like “Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and the U.K.”

The mRNA shots have also been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children and all have connections to cell lines derived from aborted babies.

Many Canadian doctors who spoke out against COVID mandates and the experimental mRNA injections were censured by their medical boards.

LifeSiteNews has published an extensive amount of research on the dangers of the experimental COVID mRNA jabs that include heart damage and blood clots.

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International

Pentagon agency to simulate lockdowns, mass vaccinations, public compliance messaging

Published on June 12, 2025

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From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

DARPA is getting into the business of simulating disease outbreaks, including modeling interventions such as mass vaccination campaigns, lockdowns, and communication strategies.

At the end of May, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) put out a Request for Information (RFI) seeking information regarding “state-of-the-art capabilities in the simulation of disease outbreaks.”

The Pentagon’s research and development funding arm wants to hear from academic, industry, commercial, and startup communities on how to develop “advanced capabilities that drive technical innovation and identify critical gaps in bio-surveillance, diagnostics, and medical countermeasures” in order to “improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.”

As if masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates under the unscientific guise of slowing the spread and preventing the transmission of COVID weren’t harmful enough, the U.S. military wants to model the effects of these exact same countermeasures for future outbreaks.

The RFI also asks participants “Fatality Rate & Immune Status: How are fatality rates and varying levels of population immunity (natural or vaccine-induced) incorporated into your simulations?“

Does “natural or vaccine-induced” relate to “population immunity” or “fatality rates” or both?

Moving on, the RFI gets into modeling lockdowns, social distancing, and mass vaccination campaigns, along with communication strategies:

Intervention Strategies: Detail the range of intervention strategies that can be modeled, including (but not limited to) vaccination campaigns, social distancing measures, quarantine protocols, treatments, and public health communication strategies. Specifically, describe the ability to model early intervention and its impact on outbreak trajectory.

The fact that DARPA wants to model these so-called intervention strategies just after the entire world experienced them suggests that these exact same measures will most likely be used again in the future:

“We are committed to developing advanced modeling capabilities to optimize response strategies and inform the next generation of (bio)technology innovations to protect the population from biological threats. We are particularly focused on understanding the complex interplay of factors that drive outbreak spread and evaluating the effectiveness of potential interventions.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

“Identification of optimal timelines and capabilities to detect, identify, attribute, and respond to disease outbreaks, including but not limited to biosensor density deployment achieving optimal detection timelines, are of interest.” ­— DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

For future innovation, the DARPA RFI asks applicants to: “Please describe any novel technical approaches – or applications of diverse technical fields (e.g., machine learning, artificial intelligence, complex systems theory, behavioral science) – that you believe would significantly enhance the state-of-the-art capabilities in this field or simulation of biological systems wholistically.”

Instead of putting a Dr. Fauci, a Dr. Birx, a replaceable CDC director, a TV doctor, a big pharma CEO, or a Cuomo brother out there to lie to your face about how they were all just following The ScienceTM, why not use AI and ML and combine them with behavioral sciences in order to concoct your “public health communications strategies?”

When you look at recently announced DARPA programs like Kallisti and MAGICS, which are aimed at creating an algorithmic Theory of Mind to model, predict, and influence collective human behavior, you start to get a sense of how all these programs can interweave:

“The MAGICS ARC calls for paradigm-shifting approaches for modeling complex, dynamic systems for predicting collective human behaviour.” — DARPA, MAGICS ARC, April 2025

On April 8, DARPA issued an Advanced Research Concepts (ARC) opportunity for a new program called “Methodological Advancements for Generalizable Insights into Complex Systems (MAGICS)” that seeks “new methods and paradigms for modeling collective human behavior.”

Nowhere in the MAGICS description does it mention modeling or predicting the behavior of “adversaries,” as is DARPA’s custom.

Instead, it talks at length about “modeling human systems,” along with anticipating, predicting, understanding, and forecasting “collective human behavior” and “complex social phenomena” derived from “sociotechnical data sets.”

Could DARPA’s MAGICS program be applied to simulating collective human behavior when it comes to the next public health emergency, be it real or perceived?

“The goal of an upcoming program will be to develop an algorithmic theory of mind to model adversaries’ situational awareness and predict future behaviour.” — DARPA, Theory of Mind Special Notice, December 2024.

In December 2024, DARPA launched a similar program called Theory of Mind, which was renamed Kallisti a month later.

The goal of Theory of Mind is to develop “new capabilities to enable national security decisionmakers to optimize strategies for deterring or incentivizing actions by adversaries,” according to a very brief special announcement.

DARPA never mentions who those “adversaries” are. In the case of a public health emergency, an adversary could be anyone who questions authoritative messaging.

The Theory of Mind program will also:

… seek to combine algorithms with human expertise to explore, in a modeling and simulation environment, potential courses of action in national security scenarios with far greater breadth and efficiency than is currently possible.

This would provide decisionmakers with more options for incentive frameworks while preventing unwanted escalation.

We are interested in a comprehensive overview of current and emerging technologies for disease outbreak simulation, how simulation approaches could be extended beyond standard modeling methods, and to understand how diseases spread within and between individuals including population level dynamics.

They say that all the modeling and simulating across programs is for “national security,” but that is a very broad term.

DARPA is in the business of research and development for national security purposes, so why is the Pentagon modeling disease outbreaks and intervention strategies while simultaneously looking to predict and manipulate collective human behavior?

If and when the next outbreak occurs, the same draconian and Orwellian measures that governments and corporations deployed in the name of combating COVID are still on the table.

And AI, Machine Learning, and the military will play an even bigger role than the last time around.

From analyzing wastewater to learning about disease spread; from developing pharmaceuticals to measuring the effects of lockdowns and vaccine passports, from modeling and predicting human behavior to coming up with messaging strategies to keep everyone in compliance – “improving preparedness for future public health emergencies” is becoming more militaristically algorithmic by the day.

“We are exploring innovative solutions to enhance our understanding of outbreak dynamics and to improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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