Judge brands Biden’s Covid social media crackdown ‘Orwellian’

Joe Biden cannot be trusted to protect the American people’s freedom of speech. He needs to be restrained, by law, from interfering with people’s First Amendment right to express themselves as they see fit. That is the implication of an extraordinary preliminary injunction slapped on the Biden administration this week by a federal judge.

The injunction was issued by US District Court judge Terry Doughty. He says Biden officials likely conspired with social media companies to remove content, in particular content on Covid-19, that the government considered undesirable or dangerous. This would represent a flagrant usurping of the First Amendment, he says, which holds that the government shall take no action that might abridge “the freedom of speech.” And so, says Judge Doughty, Biden’s people must cut off contact with the bosses of social media.

The case was brought by the Republican attorney general of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, and the former Republican attorney general of Missouri, Eric Schmitt. Landry and Schmitt, on behalf of various plaintiffs, insist Biden officials used their connections with the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley to do something they themselves are constitutionally forbidden from doing — restrict people’s free expression. In short, they outsourced censorship. They got the social media oligarchs to do their dirty work for them.

Doughty’s 155-page memorandum explaining his reasons for issuing a “preliminary injunction” against the Biden administration is a chilling read. The Landry/Schmitt case against the government is ongoing, but Doughty says the plaintiffs are “likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment free-speech claim.” He says it is likely that, during the Covid pandemic, there was an “almost dystopian scenario” of government/corporate censorship, in which the Biden administration “seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

Online censorship in the Covid era really was sinister. Consider the experience of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, or GBD, the one-page treatise that proposed “focused protection” of the vulnerable rather than blanket lockdowns. Two of the GBD’s authors, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, are plaintiffs in the Landry/Schmitt case. Doughty’s memorandum reminds us how much censorious punishment these dissenting experts suffered for the speechcrime of questioning lockdown.

Google “de-boosted the search results for the GBD so that when Google users googled ‘Great Barrington Declaration,’ they would be diverted to articles critical of the GBD, and not to the GBD itself,” says Doughty’s memorandum. The very window to the world of information ensured users would not stumble across this blasphemous tract. What’s more, Doughty reminds us, Reddit removed links to the GBD and YouTube censored GBD-related content. This was surely the most coordinated instance of corporate censorship of modern times.

And the striking thing, says Doughty’s memo, is that this Silicon Valley onslaught on the right of respected experts to query the wisdom of lockdown seemed to arrive in the wake of government attacks on these people. So on October 8, 2020, just four days after the GBD was published, Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, wrote to Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, saying there should be a “quick and devastating take down” of the GBD. “The result was exactly that,” says Doughty.

Doughty says email chatter between Collins, Fauci and other government health officials suggests their “motivation” was to “have social media companies suppress… alternative medical theories.” If this case is upheld, it will be a mortifying judgment upon Biden officials. They will stand exposed as having used the underhand, slippery method of conniving with unaccountable capitalists in California to undermine the First Amendment rights of two esteemed academics: Bhattacharya and Kulldorff.

There were other victims of the Covid censorship regime. The social media giants suppressed speech about the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins, says Doughty. They also shut down people who questioned the efficacy of masks. Even Louisiana’s own Department of Justice was censored on YouTube when it shared footage critical of mask mandates. Unaccountable corporations censoring government departments? This really is dystopian.

And of course people who queried the efficacy of the Covid vaccine were ruthlessly suppressed. Here, again, there seems to have been a clear line between government demands for censorship and social media’s enactment of censorship. One Biden official wrote to Twitter requesting that it remove an antivax tweet by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He said officials had a duty to “keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre.”

In one weird incident, Rob Flaherty, Biden’s director of digital strategy, wrote to Twitter demanding that it take down a parody account with the name Finnegan Biden — Hunter Biden’s daughter, Joe Biden’s granddaughter. “Please remove this account immediately,” he said. And they did. It was erased within forty-five minutes. Officials regularly requested the obliteration of parody accounts. “PLEASE REMOVE!!!,” demanded one Biden health official in relation to a Twitter account parodying Dr. Fauci. No satire allowed under the Covid regime.

The Doughty memo points to other instances where Biden officials appear to have worked with social media suits to suppress “problematic” information. The Hunter Biden laptop story, for example, which Twitter and Facebook ruthlessly suppressed in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. And posts questioning the “integrity” of that election — they’ve been memory-holed too.

We are starting to get a picture of an incredibly sinister form of censorship, one enacted behind the backs of the people in chats and deals between government officials and corporate agitators. No wonder Doughty describes it as “dystopian,” like an “Orwellian Ministry of Truth.”

Remember when Donald Trump was slammed by liberal observers for his Orwellian penchant for playing fast and loose with the truth? Well, here we have a judge implying genuine Orwellianism on the part of the Biden administration. It remains to be seen if liberals will once again dust down their copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four in order to condemn an administration that is out of control. I won’t be holding my breath.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK site.