Court Filings Reveal More Government Lies About Censorship, Seek Deeper Investigation
"Never before in this country's history has a government censorship regime coordinated at the highest levels been exposed through litigation."
Joy Pullman over at The Federalist has written an excellent piece on recent developments in our free speech case and another related case, describing what these reveal about government censorship. The article opens:
Government pressure on national communications monopolies to mute Americans' critiques of government began in Barack Obama's presidency and continues today, say court documents filed Dec. 23.
Federal documents uncovered by separate litigation on Dec. 19 also show censorship of public discussion about prudent Covid policies began at least by February 18, 2020, a month before unprecedented citizen lockdowns. That contradicts Department of Homeland Security claims its censorship efforts began months later.
These documents also highlight that government employees deliberately violated transparency laws such as the Freedom of Information Act to hide their use of public offices. The Dec. 23 filing from Missouri v. Biden plaintiffs cites a May New York Times article showing "some Defendants, particularly at NIH and NIAID, have intentionally misspelled words in order to avoid production pursuant to FOIA requests; deleted emails; and used private emails." Given this, the plaintiffs asked the federal district court to expand discovery to include intentionally misspelled keywords.
The filing also says President Biden senior advisor Andy Slavitt, a former Obama official, "continued using his White House email address even after he left government employment, presumably in an attempt to wield the authority of an office that he no longer held." Slavitt personally "bullied" Twitter into deplatforming journalist Alex Berenson over his skepticism of mRNA injections, the filing notes.
The Missouri plaintiffs are petitioning for greater discovery and depositions in a case the U.S. Supreme Court returned to the district level after declining a preliminary injunction against vast censorship efforts that use taxpayer-funded cutout organizations to mask federal demands. "[T]his case is exceptional," the plaintiffs argue. "Never before in this country's history has a government censorship regime coordinated at the highest levels been exposed through litigation."
Missouri plaintiffs include the states of Missouri and Louisiana, Health Freedom Louisiana co-director Jill Hines and Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft, and internationally recognized research scientists and medical doctors Martin Kulldorff, Aaron Kheriaty, and Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University medical professor who is now President Trump's nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health.
Repeated Pattern of Lies and Hiding Evidence
Pullman goes on to explain how the government's response is characteristic of repeated patterns meant to evade legal responsibility and cover up unconstitutional abuses of government power:
U.S. Department of Justice lawyers claim federal agencies have already disclosed enough information in the case, so further discovery is "duplicative" and unnecessary. The DOJ has a decades-long record of hiding and even tampering with evidence and has never been held fully accountable for it.
Censorship litigation has also revealed federal agency employees have lied to courts and Americans and illegally hidden public information. The Missouri plaintiffs argue in their Dec. 23 filing, "in light of the unsavory conduct in which NIH and NIAID employees already engaged, including covering up evidence of participation in gain-of-function research, lying to the public about the evidence for Covid's origins, and silencing opposing views on the appropriate response to Covid-19, Plaintiffs have every reason to believe such an operation continues."
During initial discovery in Missouri v. Biden, the plaintiffs note on Dec. 23, Twitter claimed it had communicated with just 11 federal officials about online censorship efforts. Yet after tycoon Elon Musk bought Twitter months later, the company then revised that number upward to 84 federal officials.
During his deposition in this case, lockdown enforcer Anthony Fauci claimed "I don't recall" 174 times, "almost certainly an evasion tactic," the filing says. Given "that Dr. Fauci has almost certainly lied," the plaintiffs write, "Defendants' claim that further depositions of NIAID officials are unwarranted is disingenuous." Without further discovery, the plaintiffs argue, it is impossible to know what else government officials who display a pattern of corruption are hiding.
Disagree With Us and You're a Terrorist
The pattern goes beyond just blocking access to information, and includes efforts to vilify any critics of the regime. CISA, a little-know agency that I have written about several times here in relation to our case, coordinated these efforts to silence and slander anyone who opposed the government's actions. Furthermore, not only was the government censoring its critics, it was engaged in age-old propaganda techniques to "flood the zone" of public discussion with lies and falsehoods (propaganda is always the flip-side of censorship):
America First Legal litigation against the State Department and a DHS subagency called Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) uncovered documents released Dec. 19. They show government employees pumped public communications channels with false information while claiming to do the opposite.
The documents show federal agencies pressuring communications monopolies to hide arguments with substantial backing, such as that fabric masks do not stop viruses and Covid-19 bears marks of human engineering….
The documents also show that in the name of combatting "foreign disinformation," the federally activated censorship apparatus spread foreign misinformation — such as that Covid-19 certainly didn't originate in a lab. The documents also claim that a "core narrative[] used by the pro-Kremlin disinformation network" is the concept of "The Elites vs. The People." This archetype has, in fact, existed for thousands of years (see: The 30 Tyrants, Coriolanus, and the Gracchi). The documents also show federal agencies relying on a known purveyor of fake data, a government manipulation operation known as Hamilton 2.0 or Hamilton 68.
The documents reveal DHS personally targeted Bhattacharya for censorship because he conducted an early study that contradicted government claims about Covid's fatality rate. Kheriaty notes that Bhattacharya's data was later replicated "dozens of times." The direct targeting validates Bhattacharya's standing to pursue the lawsuit, his lawyers say, a question the Supreme Court failed to resolve.
The federal documents also claim concerns about internet censorship in the United States emanate from the "Russian disinformation ecosystem" and "undermine the very notion of objective truth." Narratives they label "foreign propaganda" include observing that Covid-19 panic could "financially benefit 'big pharma.'"
The documents note: "Only 17 percent of Americans trust their government to do the right thing either always or most of the time," while also blaming Russian propaganda for this instead of, for example, well-documented evidence of federal corruption….
"The new CISA documents fill out the picture of the Censorship Industrial Complex as a creation of the Obama administration and the Intelligence Community (IC)," say Public journalists Alex Gutentag and Michael Shellenberger, who first reported on the documents. "During his time in office, Obama was instrumental in transforming the IC, including DHS, into highly political institutions. This process married progressive political ideology to one of the core imperatives of the U.S. national security state, which is to maintain public support for the military-industrial complex in general, and to manufacture consent for various foreign interventions in particular."
Laundering Censorship Through Shell Corps
As I have described previously, in an attempt to hide its fingerprints the government suborned quasi-private entities, like the Stanford Internet Observatory, to conduct its censorship work. I describe them as "quasi-private" (i.e., really public) because they are government-organized, government-funded through grants, and staffed by former government officials. Pullman also describes some of the other players who should be deposed in our case for their central role in the government's censorship-industrial complex:
These investigations are revealing how government officials have edited media monopolies' content moderation policies to enable censorship. This is why, the Missouri plaintiffs argue, "It would be valuable to know how Twitter came to adopt the policy that tweets contradicting CDC policies would be censored, who made such determinations, and whether or not such operations were halted during Dr. Walensky's tenure. If they were not, there are reasonable grounds to suppose that CDC's activities have not ceased."
The Missouri plaintiffs seek depositions with officials who can testify to how federal agencies blackhole speech Democrats dislike and who was involved. That includes National Security Council member Lauren Protentis. She was previously director of the State Department's Global Engagement Center (a key funder of censorship algorithms) and a member of CISA's "Mis, Dis, and Mal-Information Team." Protentis has a "unique role at the confluence of so many of the federal government's misinformation programs, which outweighs any interest Defendants have in shielding her," the plaintiffs' lawyers note.
Litigation, investigative reporting, Big Tech disclosures, and House investigations show federal agencies outsource censorship operations because their leaders know it's unconstitutional for the government to silence Americans.
For a century, the federal government has paid states and ostensibly private organizationsto do things that would be unconstitutional for it to do directly. This is the purpose of the administrative state swallowing up what's left of constitutional government.
Laundering unconstitutional actions through shell nonprofits, state and local governments, and private corporations now comprises the majority of federal action. The resulting federal intrusion into every aspect of American life allows the government to erase Americans' constitutional rights via "purchasing submission," as Columbia Law School professor and NCLA founder Philip Hamburger has explained.
The truth about government censorship continues to emerge for those willing to examine the evidence. Regardless of the final legal outcome in our case, we are succeeding through the discovery process in shedding much-needed light on the government's operations. Armed with this information, Americans can decide whether this is the kind of regime they want to live under.
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