Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general along with a number of individuals are parties to a federal lawsuit that has already produced evidence that “an army of federal bureaucrats” have been coercing social media platforms to censor free speech. Multiple federal agencies, their evidence shows, colluded with social media giants Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to censor speech, which led to the suppression of truthful information on several matters of critical national importance, including COVID-19.
If you’ve heard nothing about the lawsuit it’s because reporting on it, too, has been suppressed, which is scandalous in itself. The case is State of Missouri ex rel. Schmitt, et al. v. Biden, et al. The complaint and the main court documents are here. We will refer to it as the “Schmitt lawsuit” in this piece.
Headlines appeared recently about Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, vaguely saying that federal authorities had maybe-sort of pressured Facebook into suppressing news about the Hunter Biden laptop.
What a distraction. That’s peanuts compared to evidence already produced in the Schmitt case. The plaintiffs have already put of record nearly a thousand pages of emails and other evidence showing multiple federal officials leaning on tech social media platforms to suppress news that the government didn’t like.
Defendants are the White House, HHS, DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, the Office of the Surgeon General and more.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance, which is assisting in the lawsuit, is what the ACLU used to be – an organization devoted to protecting free speech.
The lawsuit is focused mostly on suppression by the government of evidence and expert opinions that challenged the government narrative on Covid. The private parties who are plaintiffs include Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, a former Professor of Medicine and current Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist, a biostatistician and a former Professor of Medicine at Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
The complaint is about more than Covid, however. It sets forth other examples of suppression of free speech, which include the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 Presidential election and speech about election integrity and the security of voting by mail.
Though the evidence of record is already overwhelming, discovery in the lawsuit has just started. The federal court recently ordered that discovery may be expanded to include, among others, Anthony Faucci and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
Corporate mainstream media has ignored the lawsuit. Press coverage of the lawsuit has been limited to conservative outlets like Fox, The Federalist and Reason.
Ultimately, what may be more important are the parties not subject to the litigation, namely, much of the press.
If there were a legal theory to include them, Exhibit A on the complaint would most be the Illinois media.
They presumably were not directly pressured by federal bureaucrats, but most Illinois media kow-tow to government narrative at least as sheepishly as social media platforms. On the primary subject of the lawsuit, Covid, you will be hard-pressed to find a word of Illinois reporting about any number of bona fide challenges to government narrative.
More alarming is Illinois media’s near total suppression of multiple scandals associated with Hunter Biden and his emails. Those scandals include President Biden’s participation in Hunter’s international influence peddling, multiple crimes by Hunter that have gone unpunished and President Biden’s lie that he knew nothing about Hunter’s business activity.
Most frightening of all is the national security establishment’s participation in the lies by attempting to claim that Hunter’s laptop was part of a Russian conspiracy.
The Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times are among the worst offenders. The Tribune hasn’t covered Hunter or his laptop scandals since October 2020 when it was peddling the discredited story about a Russian conspiracy. Same for the Sun-Times and many others.
In 1783, the complaint in the Schmitt lawsuit starts out saying, George Washington warned that if “the Freedom of Speech may be taken away,” then “dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.”
That’s an entirely appropriate introduction to the lawsuit. Democracy is fiction when the government suppresses free speech in the ways that plain evidence now shows have become routine.
Why hasn’t Attorney General Kwame Raoul joined this lawsuit? That’s a silly, rhetorical question. If you don’t know why, start paying attention to what’s become of your nation.