I just finished watching "Can We Take a Joke: When Outrage and Comedy Collide" (2016). Awesome documentary for those who understand the importance of free speech and who are concerned about the future of comedy.
To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful or who is the harmful speaker? Or determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be, that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom are you going to award the job of being the censor?[...]
To whom you would give the job of deciding for you, relieve you of the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear?
Do you know anyone — hands up — do you know anyone to whom you’d give this job? Does anyone have a nominee? You mean there’s no one ... good enough to decide what I can read? Or hear?
I'm catching up with an important court decision from September that I've been meaning to post. Here's the key quote from Missouri versus Biden, decided by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals September 8, 2023:
[T]he Supreme Court has rarely been faced with a coordinated campaign of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life. Therefore, the district court was correct in its assessment—“unrelenting pressure” from certain government officials likely “had the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.” We see no error or abuse of discretion in that finding.Page 61 of the Opinion
This case, will be heard by the United States Supreme Court, where it has been renamed Murthy v. Missouri (Cause No. 23A243 (23-411).
Glenn Greenwald discussed the decision of the Fifth Circuit. Here's an excerpt from his video transcript at Locals:
Tonight: One of the most significant First Amendment victories in years. In July, we reported (you can read or watch it here! https://rumble.com/v2ybni6-system-update-show-110.html) on an extraordinary ruling from a federal district court in Louisiana which ruled that the Biden administration and several key components of it, including the White House, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Center for Disease Control, had engaged in a massive and grave violation of the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech by threatening and coercing Big Tech platforms to censor the speech of American citizens those government agencies and officials disliked. The district court enjoined – barred – all officials in those agencies from communicating threats or coercion of any further kind to tech platforms with the intent to have speech censored. The case is brought by several American citizens who had their speech prohibited or their accounts banned by Big Tech at the behest of their own government. Among them was Stanford School of Medicine, Doctor J. Jay Bhattacharya, who dissented from several of the most important COVID pronouncements of the health policy establishment and for that reason alone was barred by his own government from being heard on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.
The Biden DOJ, which has made clear that, like Democrats generally, they regard their ability to have the Internet censored as a top priority, immediately announced they would appeal this ruling. And they did. But on Friday, a three-judge appellate court composed of two Bush nominees and one Trump nominee upheld not all, but most of the ruling, including its most foundational parts. The appellate panel emphasized what a grave and unusually invasive free speech violation this was: “The Supreme Court has rarely been faced with a coordinated campaign” of censorship code “of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials.” The result said the court was, “suppressing millions of protected free speech postings.” The ruling was based on the long-standing principle that the First Amendment free speech guarantee not only bars the state from directly censoring but also forcing or otherwise coercing private actors to censor for them.
The appellate court found that four agencies in particular were guilty of using threats to all but force social media platforms to censor at their command – the White House the FBI, the CDC and the surgeon general – and, as a result, ban them from engaging in such communications or threats going forward. We will discuss the broad and very significant implications of this decision. We'll also speak to one of the lead lawyers who represented the plaintiffs in this case: Jenin Younes.
Compare this bleak assessment by Robert Malone to the fairy tale version of how government works that many of us learned in grade school. I wish I could disagree with Malone. I see no reason that any of these things are going to get any better, despite the fact that many intelligent and good-hearted people are out there fighting for free speech and government accountability.
Functionally, unlike either industry (market forces) or the military (failed wars), there are no external forces currently limiting the expansion of the dysfunctional, counterproductive and (frankly) parasitic behavior of today’s Executive branch. Legislative branch oversight has been emasculated by consent with lobbyists collectively clamping down the Burdizzo, and in 1984 the Judicial branch conceded its authority to serve as a functional check on Executive/administrative branch arrogance via the Supreme Court Chevron Deference decision. And like the Federal Reserve, the informal “fourth estate” (corporate media), which historically provided a separate and semi-autonomous oversight function, has also been captured by this permanent bureaucracy.The administrative and deep state has been so successful in capturing and manipulating media and related communication (largely via CIA, FBI, CISA and intelligence community infiltration) that they are able to seamlessly deploy advanced modern propaganda, PsyWar technologies and financial giveaways to control all narratives and information which might otherwise cause the majority of the electorate to check their actions, and in this way they completely avoid accountability. The CIA, FBI, CISA and intelligence community have become enablers of administrative and deep state excesses and overreach. With this corrupted information ecosystem, there cannot be any accountability of the administrative and deep state. In cooperation with a variety of corporate and NGO partners via “public-private partnerships”, the executive branch has completely captured and co-opted all oversight mechanisms which could enable or enforce checks and balances. The “ballot box” is well on its way to being a mere inconvenience, because for the majority of voters the synthetic false reality projected by captured media is the only political “reality” they encounter.
This is how modern nation-states abruptly collapse. As one recent example, recall the history of the USSR and most of the former communist Eastern European states. Modern nation-states fail by suffocating under the weight of bloated unaccountable bureaucracies whose primary objectives are to serve and sustain themselves rather than to promote and defend the general welfare and security of the citizenry. The social contract is stomped into dust by the boot of an uncontrollably arrogant, authoritarian, self-serving bureaucracy...
I highly recommend this video if you'd like to get up to speed on many of the new and sophisticated ways your government is trying to regulate how you communicate with your fellow citizens. Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have been intensely covering the "censorship industrial complex" for years. This is merely the latest chapter of a disturbing series of stories they have broken.
