Your Federal Government In Action: The SEC

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  • The original idea of the “independent” administrative agencies was to place the details of governing a complex economy in the hands of wise experts. These experts would be removed from tawdry and corrupting political influences, and would straightforwardly apply neutral principles to achieve fairness and justice in our society.

  • In the real world, every federal administrative agency, with especial emphasis on the supposedly “independent” ones, becomes larger, more power-hungry, and more corrupt with every passing year.

  • Somehow, it’s in the nature of the job as federal bureaucrat to believe that you can perfect the world by seizing ever more power unto yourself, imposing more and more rules whether or not authorized by statute, and crushing anyone who gets in your way. Biden’s presidency has accelerated these trends toward infinity.

  • Consider for today the SEC.

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The Revelations Of Government Censorship Keep Coming In Missouri v. Biden

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  • A little over a year ago, on May 5, 2022, two states (Missouri and Louisiana) and several individual plaintiffs filed suit against the federal government for illegally and improperly suppressing free speech on social media platforms, in violation of the First Amendment.

  • The case goes by the name Missouri v. Biden. The individual plaintiffs include, for example, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, prominent medical researchers and epidemiologists who dissented from the government’s Covid response orthodoxy and saw their speech ruthlessly suppressed as a consequence.

  • This case is probably the most important civil rights case proceeding in the federal courts today. If you get your news from such sources as the New York Times, Washington Post, or major television networks, you likely have never heard of it.

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Twitter And Free Speech In The Musk Era: The Manhattan Contrarian Experience

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Twitter And Free Speech In The Musk Era: The Manhattan Contrarian Experience

  • Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022. Prior to Musk’s taking control, there had been many complaints, particularly from the right, of Tweets getting suppressed, down-graded, “shadow-banned,” or the like, but without anyone having detailed information of exactly what Twitter was up to.

  • Then in December 2022 a group of journalists recruited by Musk — e.g., Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald, Alex Berenson — started releasing lengthy Twitter threads documenting exactly how pre-Musk Twitter had “moderated” politically sensitive content to manipulate the public discussion.

  • In early 2022, back when his bid for Twitter was pending, Musk had famously called himself a “free speech absolutist.”

  • So to what degree is Musk living up to his promise to bring free speech to Twitter, including in particular allowing criticism of himself? Readers might be interested in the experience of Manhattan Contrarian on that subject.

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Litigating The Government's Metastasizing Censorship Regime

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  • For years, conservatives have complained of apparent censorship of their voices on the principal social media platforms, like Facebook, Google and Twitter.

  • Posts or tweets get taken down, or de-boosted, or de-monetized, or degraded in search results, or “shadow-banned,” or slapped with content warnings, or otherwise suppressed. But the response from Big Tech has always been, hey, we’re private companies, and we’re not subject to the First Amendment. We can do as we please.

  • Then Elon Musk took over Twitter, and followed by giving several journalists access to Twitter’s electronic archives to investigate any untoward government manipulation.

  • The result has been the Twitter Files, an ongoing series of Twitter threads laying bare the coordination between pre-Musk Twitter and dozens of government actors to suppress disfavored speech. The most recent nineteenth segment of the Twitter Files series was published on March 20 by Matt Taibbi.

  • Now that it is clear that the systematic censorship of conservative voices is very real and has been largely directed and coordinated by the government itself behind the scenes, is there anything that can be done about that through litigation?

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A True Progressive Top Court Takes On Climate Change: The Case Of Germany

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A True Progressive Top Court Takes On Climate Change: The Case Of Germany

  • Two of my recent posts have looked at critiques from the left of the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA — the June 30 decision that held that the Clean Air Act did not clearly give EPA authority to order the phase-out of all fossil-fuel generated electricity in the U.S.

  • My July 5 post, “How To Think Like A Liberal Supreme Court Justice,” summarized Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent in the West Virginia case. My September 12 post, “How The Left Views Administrative Law,” discussed the presentation at the Federalist Society convention by Professor Sally Katzen of NYU Law School, where she stated her belief that EPA did have the authority in question, and criticized the Court for having taken “an extreme action to shut down rule-making.”

  • But the Kagan dissent and Katzen presentation are just critiques of the approach to this matter taken by our constitutionalist-dominated Supreme Court. A separate question is, what would the liberals do if they suddenly found themselves in control of the top court — say, if a new Democrat-controlled Congress decides to create six new justices to be appointed by President Biden?

  • At the lunch following the panel where Professor Katzen spoke, I found myself sitting next to two lawyers who had come from Germany to attend the convention. One of them said to me, in essence, you have no idea what a country’s top court might do when it feels that its powers are unconstrained.

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Surprise! The Biden Administration And Deep State Are Behind Massive Systematic Suppression Of Disfavored Speech On Social Media

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