Brownstone Institute
We Landed a Major Blow Against the Censorship Leviathan
From the Brownstone Institute
Courts rarely release rulings on federal holidays, but no doubt to drive home the point about how important this case is for our constitutionally guaranteed liberties, Judge Terry Doughty released on Independence Day his 155-page ruling on our request for a preliminary injunction against the government’s censorship regime.
The entire document is worth reading for those who want to dig into the details, but in short, he granted nearly all the provisions in our request, placing strict limits around any communication between government officials and social media companies. If such communications continue, they will be subject to subpoena in our case and could implicate the actors in criminal liabilities for violating the injunction.
One naturally wants to believe that an issue one is involved in is of world-historical importance. But as the judge himself wrote in the decision, “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” That, my friends, is a strong claim, but as I have previously argued, an entirely accurate one.
As former attorney general of Missouri, now senator Eric Schmitt, told journalist Michael Shellenberger, “It’s shocking. The level of coordination between senior government officials and senior social media executives is astounding. There were direct text messages from the surgeon general of the United States to senior Facebook officials saying, ‘Take this down.’ It’s just un-American.”
According to Shellenberger, Schmitt called on the Department of Homeland Security’s Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Jennifer Easterly, to resign. He also believes that the US Congress should mandate transparency by Big Tech companies. “Jennifer Easterly ought to resign,” he said, “no doubt about that. And I think that the people getting swept up in this now, who were engaged in it, they ought to be exposed, and there ought to be consequences.”
Due to time pressure today with media interviews about this news, I will here quote at length Shellenberger’s report from today quoting me — lazy and kind of weird, I know:
Before Judge Doughty issued his ruling, we also spoke to Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a plaintiff in the case. Kheriaty is the former director of medical ethics at the University of California Irvine but was fired after he challenged the university’s vaccine mandate in court. “You learn who your real friends are when you go through something like that,” he said. “The whole experience was a bit surreal.”
After taking a national stand against vaccine mandates, Kheriaty wrote a book, The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State. Through his research for the book, the government’s vast censorship operation became clear to him. “Part of what made all the bad policies possible was the strict and rigid control of the flow of information,” Kheriaty said.
The information he and his co-plaintiffs discovered through their lawsuit shocked even them, he told us.
“We didn’t know what we would find when we turned over that rock,” said Kheriaty. “And it turns out that censorship was happening not just at the behest of public health agencies, like the CDC and the NIH, but the intelligence agencies were involved—the Department of Justice, FBI, the State Department, Department of Homeland Security. So the whole military intelligence industrial complex is tangled up in the censorship industrial complex.”
In his recent article in Tablet, Kheriaty called the government’s program the “Censorship Leviathan.” Describing this leviathan as part of a totalitarian system, Kheriaty pointed to the work of German-American political philosopher Eric Voegelin. “[Voegelin] said the common feature of all totalitarian systems… is the prohibition of questions,” Kheriaty explained.
We asked Kheriaty about his reaction to the injunction, which is an important step on the road to the Supreme Court. “I know in my bones we are going to win this one: the evidence in our favor is simply overwhelming,” he told us. “Yesterday’s ruling marks the beginning of the end of the censorship leviathan.”
Said Kheriaty, “The United States Constitution is something of a miracle. But unless we defend it, it’s just a piece of paper.”
I also spoke this morning to journalist Matt Taibbi, and will quote generously from his excellent reporting today on the injunction (Side note: Shellenberger’s and Taibbi’sSubstacks are worth subscribing to if you want additional coverage of the censorship issue—both were among the initial journalists to break the Twitter Files stories and are closely following our case):
With this ruling in the Missouri v. Biden censorship case, Doughty went out of his way on the Fourth of July, to issue a stern rebuke at a conga line of government officials, many of them characters in the Twitter Files. Racket readers will recognize names like Elvis Chan and Laura Dehmlow (of the FBI), Jen Easterly and Brian Scully (of the Department of Homeland Security), Laura Rosenberger (Special Assistant to the President, and one of the creators of Hamilton 68) and Daniel Kimmage (of the Global Engagement Center), who were all just ordered to get the hell off the First Amendment’s lawn. Paraphrasing, Doughty enjoined them from:
meeting with social-media companies for the purpose of pressuring or inducing in any manner the removal or suppression of protected free speech;
- flagging posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding to social-media companies urging the same;
- collaborating with the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, the Stanford Internet Observatory, or any “like project” or group for the same purpose;
- threatening or coercing social-media companies to remove protected free speech.
The legacy media, which has been studiously ignoring this case, could not ignore yesterday’s ruling, so there were reports in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and so forth. The Times and the Post disappointingly tried to frame the case as a partisan issue. But of course, it’s not a left/right or liberal/conservative issue at all: it’s a legal/illegal issue. The only question is whether government officials did or did not violate the highest law of the land—namely, the United States Constitution. Yesterday, the court indicated that the answer to this question is likely yes, the government’s actions were probably unconstitutional and the plaintiff’s are likely to succeed on the merits.
The New York Times reporters even wrung their hands worrying that the ruling could “curtail efforts to fight disinformation”—begging the question about who decides what constitutes disinformation. The First Amendment clearly indicates this cannot be the job of the government. More tellingly, the Times and the Post in their framing of the case simply said the quiet part out loud, indicating that these newspapers believe government censorship is good as long as it’s controlling the flow of information in directions that they approve.
Taibbi goes on to comment:
Yesterday’s ruling, which naturally will be dismissed as Republican clickbait, shows at least one federal judge agreed with the argument that a complex system to mass-funnel content recommendations from enforcement agencies and politicians to tech platforms represents what the Attorneys General called a “sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise.’” As one of the plaintiffs, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty wrote, the evidence in the suit revealed a far broader range of topics monitored by government than most people know of even now, from gender ideology to abortion to monetary policy to the war in Ukraine and beyond.
“Take any contentious issue in American public life,” said Kheriaty today, “and it seems like the federal government, once they got this machinery rolling, just thought, ‘Okay, we can combat ‘misinformation’ on all kinds of things.’”
The Missouri v. Biden investigators found the same fact patterns found by Twitter Files reporters like me, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, David Zweig, and Paul Thacker, and then later Andrew Lowenthal, Aaron Mate, Sue Schmidt, Matt Orfalea, Tom Wyatt, Matt Farwell, @Techno_Fog, and many others did. They also echoed descriptions by like Jacob Siegel at Tablet, or Robby Soave at Reason, who wrote about similar issues at Facebook.
Those of us who worked on the Twitter Files story initially experienced the same problem investigators and plaintiffs in the Missouri v. Biden case apparently did, being unsure of what to make of the sheer quantity of agencies and companies involved in what looked like organized censorship schemes. I know I wasn’t alone among Twitter Files reporters in being nervous to report that content moderation “requests” were coming from “agencies across the federal government — from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.” It’s what we were seeing, but seemed too nuts to be true. But as time went on, even more topics, government offices, and state-partnered organizations started popping up, leaving little question of what we were looking at.
Eventually, we found the same plot outlined in Missouri v. Biden: pressure from government in the form of threatened regulation, followed by a stream of recommendations about content from multiple agencies (the investigators in this lawsuit even found meddling by the Census Bureau). This was capped by the construction of quasi-private bureaucracies that in some cases appeared to have been conceived as a way for the government to partner on content moderation without being in direct violation of the First Amendment.
Most of us covering the Twitter Files tried to avoid delving into the constitutionality/legality question, but couldn’t help wondering in some cases, for instance with Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project, which created cross-platform content ticketing systems about the 2020 race and Covid-19. We all thought we were looking at a potentially major problem there, since the principals from places like Stanford weren’t shy about saying they wanted to “fill the gap of the things that the government cannot do themselves” because partners like DHS/CISA lacked “the funding and the legal authorizations” to do the work.
What might happen if judges or juries were presented with that whole picture, including details about the open, ongoing partnerships of these groups with government agencies like CISA and the Surgeon General? We have some idea now.
The dismissal of these complaints as partisan “tinfoil hat” conspiracy by politicians like the ones who interrogated Michael Shellenberger and me in Congress, and by papers like the New York Times and Washington Post, has all along felt like the the same kind of error that led to the mis-call of the 2016 election and the massive loss of audience for traditional media stations in the years that ensued.
These mainstream news observers are trapped in a bubble of their own making and can’t or won’t see that the average American looks at letters from the White House to shut down social media accounts, or piles of “suggestions” on content from the FBI, and feels instinctively that he or she really doesn’t like that, whatever it is. One can hope at least a few censorship advocates will read the ruling and grasp that in a democracy, you can’t have a situation where only half (or less) of the population thinks something as basic as the speech landscape is fairly arranged. That just won’t hold, making rulings like this foreseeable, if not inevitable. No matter what, this can’t be anything but good news for the First Amendment.
“Hopefully,” said Kheriaty, “yesterday was the beginning of the end of the censorship Leviathan.”
I’ll be posting more commentary on the ruling and next steps in the case in the days ahead. Yesterday was the first victory in the long and slow road to the Supreme Court, where observers believe this case will ultimately be decided. For now, I’ll leave you with a few sobering lines from the closing pages of yesterday’s decision (p. 154):
Although this case is still relatively young, and at this stage the Court is only examining it in terms of Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on the merits, the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.”
The Plaintiffs have presented substantial evidence in support of their claims that they were the victims of a far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign. This court finds that they are likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment free speech claim against the Defendants.
I trust that, in the end, we will succeed.
Reposted from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
I’ve seen some crazy things over the last few years but this is off-the-charts insane.
Last week, Michael E. Mann spoke at the EcoHeath Alliance: Green Planet One Health Benefit 2024. Just to recap who each of these players are:
- Michael E. Mann is the creator of the “hockey stick graph” that has driven the global warming debate for the last 25 years.
- EcoHealth Alliance is the CIA cutout led by Peter Daszak that launders money from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create gain-of-function viruses (including SARS-CoV-2 which killed over 7 million people).
- “One Health” is the pretext the World Health Organization (WHO) is using to drive the Pandemic Treaty that will vastly expand the powers of the WHO and create economic incentives for every nation on earth to develop new gain-of-function viruses.
So a leader in the global warming movement spoke at an event to raise money for the organization that just murdered 7 million people and the campaign that intends to launch new pandemics in perpetuity to enrich the biowarfare industrial complex.
And then just for good measure, Peter Hotez reposted all of this information on Twitter, I imagine in solidarity with all of the exciting genociding going on.
Mann’s appearance at this event is emblematic of a disturbing shift that has been years in the making. Serious and thoughtful people in the environmental movement tried to address industrial and military pollution for decades. Now their cause has been co-opted by Big Tech and other corporate actors with malevolent intentions — and the rest of the environmental movement has gone along with this, apparently without objection. So we are witnessing a convergence between the global warming movement, the biowarfare industrial complex, and the WHO pandemic treaty grifters.
I wish it wasn’t true but here we are.
Before I go any further I need to make one thing clear: the notion that pandemics are driven by global warming is complete and total bullsh*t. The evidence is overwhelming that pandemics are created by the biowarfare industrial complex including the 13,000 psychopaths who work at over 400 US bioweapons labs (as described in great detail in The Wuhan Cover-Up).
Unfortunately “global warming” has become a cover for the proliferation of the biowarfare industrial economy.
Mann’s appearance at an event to raise money for people who are clearly guilty of genocide (and planning more carnage) made me realize that this really is World War III. They are straight-up telling us who they are and what they intend to do.
The different sides in this war are not nation-states. Instead, Team Tyranny is a bunch of different business interests pushing what has become a giant multi-trillion dollar grift. And Team Freedom is ordinary people throughout the world just trying to return to the classical economic and political liberalism that drove human progress from 1776 until 2020.
Here’s how I see the battle lines being drawn:
TEAM TYRANNY
Their base: Elites, billionaires, the ruling class, the biowarfare industrial complex, intelligence agencies, and bougie technocrats.
Institutions they control: WEF, WHO, UN, BMGF, World Bank, IMF, most universities, the mainstream media, and liberal governments throughout the developed world.
Economic philosophy: The billionaires should control all wealth on earth. The peasants should only be allowed to exist to serve the billionaires, grow food, and fix the machines when necessary. Robots and Artificial Intelligence will soon be able to replace most of the peasants.
Political philosophy: Centralized control of everything. Elites know best. The 90% should shut up, pay their taxes, take their vaccines, develop chronic disease, and die. High tech global totalitarianism is the best form of government. Billionaires are God.
Philosophy of medicine: Allopathic. Cut, poison, burn, kill. Corporations create all knowledge. Bodies are machines. Transhumanism is ideal. The billionaires will soon live forever in the digital cloud.
Their currency: For now, inflationary Federal Reserve policies. Soon, Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) that will put the peasants in their place once and for all.
Policy vehicles to advance their agenda: One Health; WHO Pandemic Treaty; social credit scores; climate scores; vaccine mandates/passports; lockdowns and quarantine camps; elimination of small farms and livestock; corporate control of all food, land, water, transportation, and the weather; corporate control of social movements; and 15-minute cities for the peasants.
Military strategy: Gain-of-function viruses, propaganda, and vaccines.
TEAM FREEDOM
Our base: The medical freedom movement, Constitutionalists, small “l” libertarians, independent farmers, natural meat and milk producers, pirate parties, natural healers, homeopaths, chiropractors, integrative and functional medicine doctors, and osteopaths.
Aligned institutions: CHD, ICAN, Brownstone Institute, NVIC, SFHF, the RFK, Jr. campaign, the Republican party at the county level…
Economic philosophy: Small “c” capitalism. Competition. Entrepreneurship.
Political philosophy: Classical liberalism. The people, using their own ingenuity, will generally figure out the best way to do things. Decentralize everything including the internet. If the elites would just leave us alone the world would be a much more peaceful, creative, and prosperous place. Human freedom leads to human flourishing.
Philosophy of medicine: Nature is infinite in its wisdom. Listen to the body. Systems have the ability to heal and regenerate.
Our currency: Cash, gold, crypto, and barter. (I don’t love crypto but lots of smart people in our movement do.)
Policy ideas: Exit the WHO. Boycott WEF companies. Repeal the Bayh-Dole Act, NCVIA Act, Patriot Act, and PREP Act. Add medical freedom to the Constitution. Prosecute the Faucistas at Nuremberg 2.0. Overhaul the NIH, FDA, CDC, EPA, USDA, FCC, DoD, and intelligence agencies. Make all publicly-funded scientific data available to the public. Ban insider trading by Congress. Support and protect organic food, farms, and farmers’ markets. Break up monopolies. Cut the size of the federal government in half (or more).
Our preferred tools to create change: Ideas, love for humanity, logic and reason, common sense, art and music, and popular uprising.
What would you add, subtract, or change in each of these lists?
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
We all have a different starting place and journey but each of us has the following in common. We’ve realized that official sources, the ones we’ve trusted in the past, are not going to make any sense of the above for us. We have to seek out alternatives and put the story together ourselves. And this we must do because the only other choice is to accept that all of the above consists of a random series of disconnected and pointless events, which is surely not true.
The last few years can be tracked at two levels: the physical reality around us and the realm of the intellectual, mental, and psychological.
The first level has presented a chaotic narrative of the previously unthinkable. A killer virus that turned out to be what many people said it was in February 2020: a bad flu with a known demographic risk best treated with known therapeutics. But that template and the ensuing campaign of fear and emergency rule gave rise to astonishing changes in our lives.
Social functioning was wholly upended as schools, businesses, churches, and travel were ended by force. The entire population of the world was told to mask up, despite vast evidence that doing so achieved nothing in terms of stopping a respiratory virus.
That was followed by a breathtaking propaganda campaign for a shot that failed to live up to its promise. The cure for the disease itself caused tremendous damage to health including death, a subject about which everyone cared intensely before the shot and then strangely forgot about after.
Protests against the goings-on were met with media smears, shutdowns, and even the cancellation of bank accounts. However, and simultaneously, other forms of protest were encouraged, insofar as they were motivated by a more proper political agenda against structural injustices in the old system of law and order. That was a strange confluence of events, to say the least.
In the midst of this, which was wild enough, came new forms of surveillance, censorship, corporate consolidation, an explosion of government spending and power, rampant and global inflation, and hot wars from long-running border conflicts in two crucial regions.
The old Declarations of rules on the Internet put free speech as a first principle. Today, the hosting website of the most famous one, signed by Amnesty International and the ACLU, is gone, almost as if it never existed. In 2022, it came to be replaced by a White House Declaration on the Future of the Internet, that extols stakeholder control as the central principle.
All the while, once-trusted sources of information – media, academia, think tanks – have steadfastly refused to report and respond in truthful ways, leading to a further loss of public trust not just in government and politics but also in everything else, including corporate tech and all the higher order sectors of the culture.
Also part of this has been a political crisis in many nations, including the use of sketchy election strategies justified by epidemiologic emergency: the only safe way to vote (said the CDC) is absentee via the mails. Here we find one of many overlapping parallels to a scenario hardly ever imagined: infectious disease deployed as a cover for political manipulation.
Crucially and ominously, all of these mind-blowing developments took place in roughly similar ways the world over, and with the same language and model. Everywhere people were told “We are all in this together,” and that social distancing, masking, and vaxxing was the correct way out. Media was also censored everywhere, while anti-lockdown protestors (or even those who simply wanted to worship together in peace) were treated not as dissidents to be tolerated but irresponsible spreaders of disease.
Can we really pretend that all of this is normal, much less justified? The exhortation we receive daily is that we can and must.
Really? At what point did you realize that you had to start thinking for yourself?
We all have a different starting place and journey but each of us has the following in common. We’ve realized that official sources, the ones we’ve trusted in the past, are not going to make any sense of the above for us. We have to seek out alternatives and put the story together ourselves. And this we must do because the only other choice is to accept that all of the above consists of a random series of disconnected and pointless events, which is surely not true.
That leads to the second layer of comprehension; the intellectual, mental, and psychological. Here is where we find the real drama and incalculable difficulties.
At the dawn of lockdowns, what appeared to be a primitive public health error seemed to be taking place. It seemed like some scientists at the top, who gained an implausible amount of influence over government policy, had forgotten about natural immunity and were under the impression that it was good for health to stay home, be personally isolated, avoid exercise, and eat only takeout food. Surely such preposterous advice would be revealed soon as the nonsense it was.
How in the world could they be so stupid? How did they gain so much influence, not just nationally but all over the world? Did the whole of humanity suddenly forget about all known science in every field from virology to economics to psychology?
As time went on, more and more anomalies appeared that made that judgment seem naïve. As it turns out, what was actually taking place had something to do with a move on the part of security and intelligence services. It was they who were given rule-making authority on March 13, 2020, and that’s why so much of what we needed to know was and is considered classified.
There were early initial reports that the virus itself might have been leaked from a US-backed lab in Wuhan, which introduces the entire subject of the US bioweapons program. This is a very deep rabbit hole itself, thoroughly exposed in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s The Wuhan Cover-Up. There was a reason that topic was censored: it was all true. And as it turns out, the vaccine itself was able to bypass the normal approval process by slipping through under the cover of emergency. In effect, it came pre-approved by the military.
As the evidence continues to roll in, more and more rabbit holes appear, thousands of them. Each has a name: Pharma, CCP, WHO, Big Tech, Big Media, CBDCs, WEF, Deep State, Great Reset, Censorship, FTX, CISA, EVs, Climate Change, DEI, BlackRock, and many more besides. Each of these subject areas has threads or thousands of them, each connecting to more and to each other. At this point, it is simply not possible for a single person to follow it all.
To those of us who have been steeped in following the revelations day by day, and trying to keep up with putting them together into a coherent model of what happened to us, and what is still going on, the ominous reality is that the traditional understanding of rights, liberties, law, business, media, and science were dramatically overthrown in the course of just a few months and years.
Nothing operates today as it did in 2019. It’s not just that functioning broke. It was broken and then replaced. And the surreptitious coup d’état with no shots fired is still ongoing, even if that is not the headline.
Of this fact, many of us today are certain. But how common is this knowledge? Is it a vague intuition held by many members of the public or is it known in more detail? There are no reliable polls. We are left to guess. If any of us in 2019 believed we had our finger on the pulse of the national mood or public opinion generally, we certainly do not anymore.
Nor do we have access to the inner workings of government at the highest levels, much less the conversations going on among the winners of our age, the well-connected ruling elites who seemed to have gamed the entire system for their own benefit.
It’s so much easier to regard the whole thing as a giant confusion or accident on grounds that only cranks and crazies believe in conspiracy theories. The trouble with that outlook is that it posits something even more implausible; that something this gigantic, far-reaching, and dramatic could have happened with no real intentionality or purpose or that it all fell together as a huge accident.
Brownstone Institute has published more than 2,000 articles and 10 books exploring all over the above topics. Other venues and friends are out there helping us with this research and discovery, issue by issue. Even so, a great deal of responsibility falls on this one institution, the main work of which is providing support for dissident and displaced voices, which is implausible since it was only founded three years ago. We are deeply grateful for our supporters and would welcome you to join them.
As for the intellectuals we once revered for their curiosity and wisdom, most seem to have gone into hiding, either unable to adapt to the new realities or just unwilling to risk their careers by exploring hard topics. It’s understandable but still tragic. Most are happy to pretend like nothing happened or celebrate the change as nothing but progress. As for journalists, the New York Times publishes daily commentaries dismissing the Constitution as a dated anachronism that has to go and no one thinks much about it.
There is a lot to sort out. So much has changed so quickly. No sooner than the dust seems to be settling from one upheaval, there is another and then another. Keeping up with it all causes a level of psychological brain scramble on a scale we’ve never previously experienced.
It’s easier to wait for the historians to tell the next generation what happened. But maybe, just maybe, by stepping up and telling the story as we see it in real time, we can make a difference in stopping this madness and restoring some sane and normal freedom back to the world.
Author
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