Yesterday’s SCOTUS Murthy Decision: Coney Barrett Enables Biden’s Mass Censorship Regime
Yesterday, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court rendered its decision in Murthy v. Missouri where Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, “Neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established Article III standing to seek an injunction against any defendant” meaning that, there is no stopping the government’s censorship regime while the case proceeds at the lower court in Louisiana.
Many legal scholars are of the opinion that the high court is broadcasting its overall views by ruling on procedure here, and that they are not interested in hearing the merits of the rest of this case. Meaning that the Supreme Court justices are signaling to the lower courts to keep the censorship regime in full swing.
On the surface, this case was primarily about the legal standards by which a nationwide injunction can be sought to stop government conduct as a case proceeds.
For background, the Attorney Generals of Missouri and Louisiana filed suit in the Western District of Louisiana against a wide array of defendants, including Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci, among others. The record of censorship provided to the court was extensive.
Experts said this was the “Free Speech Showdown” of the digital age, where the massive and sprawling government censorship regime would be reviewed by the nation’s highest court. Gateway Pundit Publisher Jim Hoft is the lead Plaintiff in the case.
The decision yesterday denied the nationwide injunction stopping the ongoing censorship because, Justice Barrett said, Plaintiffs failed to:
1) Demonstrate ‘traceability’ for their past injuries showing a likely future injury, meaning that just because you were censored in the past, what’s to prove that you were going to be censored in the future.2) Link their past social-media restrictions and the defendants’ communications with the platforms, meaning that the Plaintiffs needed to prove to the Court that each specific comment that was censored, was censored as a result of coercion from a specific federal agent, and that the communication with the federal agent was the reason for the censorship, not just a contributing factor.3) Show a ‘substantial risk of future injury’ that is traceable to the Government defendants, meaning that Plaintiffs had to show that the government would be censoring them on specific topics, on specific social media platforms, in the future. Plaintiffs needed to be able to show what the government would censor of your future speech, which agents would do it, and on what platforms.
The opinion is described by some attorneys already as one of the worst Supreme Court opinions of all time.
Here’s how some of the mainstream outlets treated the decision:
CBS News: refers to the government coercion in the case as “contacts” with social media companies, and praises the decision.
NPR: says the case is about the government “talking” to social media companies, and praises the decision
Reason Magazine: calls this decision “dangerous.” Noting the decision will make challenging censorship much more difficult.
Washington Post: refers to the government coercion as mere “contacts” with social media, and praises the decision.
The mainstream media is lying about what this case is even about: coercive government demands for social media to delete, deplatform, and suppress political speech and topics.
The opinion seems to reflect that the Supreme Court would rather punt on this issue than have to deal with the massive censorship regime being deployed against American citizens.
Just like with the open and obvious fraud in the 2020 election, the Courts are once again taking the coward’s way out and running away from the criminality and Constitutional violations obviously in front of them.
Lead Plaintiff Jim Hoft, The Gateway Pundit publisher is specifically discussed on pages 22-23 of the brief by Justice Coney Barrett in this key passage related to standing:
Take Hoft, the only plaintiff who has expressed interest in speaking about elections (and thus the only plaintiff with potential standing to sue the FBI and CISA). The FBI’s challenged conduct was ongoing at the time of the complaint, as the agency worked with the platforms during the 2022 midterm election season. Still, Hoft must rely on a “speculative chain of possibilities” to establish a likelihood of future harm traceable to the FBI. Id., at 414. Hoft’s future posts (presumably about the 2024 Presidential election) must contain content that falls within a misinformation trend that the FBI has identified or will identify in the future. The FBI must pressure the platforms to remove content within that category. The platform must then suppress Hoft’s post, and it must do so at least partly in response to the FBI, rather than in keeping with its own content-moderation policy. Hoft cannot satisfy his burden with such conjecture. CISA, meanwhile, stopped switchboarding in mid-2022, and the Government has represented that it will not resume operations for the 2024 election. Especially in light of his poor showing of traceability in the past, Hoft has failed to demonstrate likely future injury at the hands of the FBI or CISA—so the injunction against those entities cannot survive.
What Coney Barrett is saying is that, for Jim Hoft to continue as a Plaintiff, he must show:
- “Future Harm” meaning that he will be censored in the future in the same way he’s being censored at present
- On similar topics and content that the government is likely to censor
- Which is going to be censored by the same government agency
- On a specific social media platform, and that the specific government agency censoring him is the one doing the censoring
- And it is not based on the social media company’s policies, but because of the government coercion
This is a nonsense standard of ‘proving future traceability’ for: a) content, b) who is doing the censoring, c) what actually caused the censorship.
Coney Barrett is asking Jim Hoft to correctly identify the ways in which a specific federal agency is going to suppress his political speech in the future.
This requirement for someone to be a prophet of the future federal censorship over them in order to have a life controversy insane.
“Hello Mr. FBI Agent, could you please tell me in writing if you’re going to censor me questioning the results of voter fraud in the 2026 elections by emailing Twitter and demanding that I be deleted and deplatformed?”
This opinion is the crazed rantings of a Justice who doesn’t care about Justice.
It creates a requirement that you figure out which federal department is censoring you, on which topics, in the future, on which specific platforms.
Which is also impossible because the federal government openly and notoriously flaunts the Freedom of Information Act. There’s no real way for citizens to get information out of their government because they refuse to follow FOIA law, they redact and censor much of what they do release, and then they can lie and call it part of an ‘ongoing law enforcement investigation’ to stop any release of information.
The current backlog on FOIA.gov for a FOIA to the Federal Bureau of Investigation is 304 days for what they call ‘complex’ requests, a designation they self-apply. By law they’re supposed to do so within 20 days, but the government knows it doesn’t have to follow the law. Some FOIA requests are over 25 years old.
The Supreme Court grants standing in cases where they like the results. When pro-life laws stand in the way of child murder, the Supreme Court regularly grants standing to abortionists as third-parties to the dispute to sue on behalf of their own future patients. Abortionists get standing on behalf of the future moms who might kill their unborn kids, originally outlined in the 1976 case Singleton v. Wulff.
In those cases, the Court lets third parties sue on behalf of other people to protect the ‘right’ to murder the unborn if these three tests are met: (1) the litigant has “suffered an ‘injury in fact,’ thus giving [them] a ‘sufficiently concrete interest’ in the outcome of the issue in dispute;” (2) the litigant has a “close relation to the third party;” and (3) there is “some hindrance” to the third-party’s ability to assert their own rights.
But apparently, an Attorney General of a state of the United States, suing alongside litigants who have suffered injuries, who have a close relation to the parties, who have obvious hindrances to asserting their rights because there’s virtually no way to find out details of the federal censorship regime, is different.
One allows the Supreme Court to kill the unborn, and one is your ability to speak freely online about politics and campaigns. The Supreme Court will fall over itself to protect child murder, but six Justices don’t think you have standing to stand up for your First Amendment rights.
Coney Barrett dismissed any potential third party standing for States in this respect by quoting Haaland v. Brackeen, which is a 2023 case about mandatory placement in adoptions:
States do not have third-party “standing as parens patriae to bring an action against the Federal Government” on behalf of their citizens who have faced social-media restrictions.
Justice Samuel Alito recognizes that this is the most important First Amendment case in the history of the country, because the government has never been caught censoring Americans, on political topics, on this scale ever before.
Coney Barrett’s response is to erect procedural barriers to the case so that more people cannot sue to stop Biden’s Industrial Censorship Complex.
One attorney involved in the case said that this decision represents a “50-year setback to the First Amendment, it’s that bad.
Some news outlets are reporting that this case represented a court loathe to engage in what are called ‘nationwide injunctions’ where one federal district trial court, of which there are 94, can issue a nationwide injunction or court order to stop whatever conduct is being alleged.
Yet, when it came to Trump’s policies, the courts were not only happy to use nationwide injunctions, they were also reluctant to narrow them. Here are a few nationwide injunctions that were filed against Trump’s policies:
- In 2017, the courts issued a nationwide injunction to stop Trump’s policies limiting funding to cities and states that openly violated U.S. immigration law, places calling themselves ‘sanctuary cities’ for criminal immigrants.
- In 2019, the courts enjoined Trump’s ban on asylum seekers who were using third party countries to come to America.
- In 2020, the courts enjoined Trump’s attempt to stop transgender operations being funded by military healthcare.
In just two years of Trump’s term, there were more than twice the number of nationwide injunctions as there were under eight years of Obama. In total, Trump’s policies were subject to 64 nationwide injunctions. Biden, by contrast, has had to deal with 14 as of April.
Nationwide injunctions happen frequently, but the court uses them selectively to stop policies supported by vast majorities of the population, and refuse to apply them when, in cases such as this, they are widely supported as measures to protect free speech in a major election year.
These double standards and hypocrisies, and the lengths to which Justice Amy Coney Barrett goes in order to justify this decision, is an exercise in raw political power.
During oral arguments in Murthy, the questions and revealed prejudices of Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson was in extreme in favor of the government.
Justice Brown-Jackson’s almost every word at the oral arguments for Murthy v. Missouri was extreme in favor of government suppression of free speech and even suggested that suppressing whistleblowers like Julian Assange, Daniel Ellsberg, and Edward Snowden was permissible:
- That she didn’t necessarily believe that “…if there was coercion [by the government], then we automatically have a First Amendment violation.”
- “So, in certain situations, you know, the government can actually require that speech be suppressed if there’s a compelling interest, right?”
-
“So I think — I think that part of the reason why you might be running into all of these difficulties with respect to the different factual circumstances is because you’re not focusing on the fact that there are times in which the government can, depending on the circumstances, encourage, perhaps even coerce, because they have a compelling interest in doing so. And so that’s why I keep coming back to the actual underlying First Amendment issue, which we can isolate in this case and just talk about — about coercion, but I think there — that you have to admit that there are certain circumstances in which the government can provide information, encourage the platforms to take it down, tell them to take it down. I mean, what about —what about the hypo of someone posting classified information? They say it’s my free speech right, I believe that I — you know, I got access to this information and I want to post it. Are you suggesting that the government couldn’t say to the platforms, we need to take that down?“
This is the side of the free speech battle in front of the court that Justice Amy Coney Barrett finds herself on: in league with far-left zealots like Justice Brown-Jackson, who would throw the switch on Assange, Ellsberg and Snowden with a smile on her face.
The Supreme Court had a choice to side with the censorship complex or dissidents seeking to evade censorship. Amy Coney Barrett chose the censors.
This is the side that Justice Amy Coney Barrett finds herself on: in league with the farthest left members of the Court in history. Coney Barrett’s opinion is joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Brown-Jackson. It’s certainly odd that these Justices, who supposedly share little legal or political similarities, would find themselves on the same side of this issue. The side of Supreme Court Justices who have zero moral qualms or quandaries with ending the digital free speech rights of hundreds of millions of Americans by erecting impossible-to-overcome procedural barriers.
In truth, Justice Coney Barrett probably didn’t even write this opinion, she probably left it to her four 20-something law clerks to decide the digital free speech rights for the country. Those four clerks, from elite law schools, researched, drafted, and wrote the worst First Amendment legal opinion in history.
The post Yesterday’s SCOTUS Murthy Decision: Coney Barrett Enables Biden’s Mass Censorship Regime appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.