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. (One site that has been on top of this case is the Hot Air website.)

The case was brought in the Western District of Louisiana, and the judge assigned is Terry Doughty. Counsel for the plaintiffs include the AG’s offices of Missouri and Louisiana, and also the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

Early on in the case (June 14, 2022) the plaintiffs moved for a preliminary injunction, asking to have the court order the government to cease its illegal conduct. Here, from the June 2022 motion, is the gist of the relief that the plaintiffs requested at the outset:

[A] preliminary injunction preventing Defendants, and their agents, officers, employees, contractors and all those acting in concert with them, from taking any steps to demand, urge, encourage, pressure, or otherwise induce any social-media company or platform for online speech, or any employee, officer, or agent of any such company or platform, to censor, suppress, remove, de-platform, suspend, shadow-ban, de-boost, restrict access to content, or take any other adverse action against any speaker, content, or viewpoint expressed on social media.

The plaintiffs also at that time asked for discovery, so that they could uncover the extent of the government’s censorship regime. The court granted broad discovery, and there has been extensive discovery in the intervening year, the results of which have been quite shocking.

During May 2023 the parties completed their briefing on the motion for a preliminary injunction. The plaintiffs’ Reply brief was filed on May 22, and the court then held a hearing for something like 4 hours on May 26. As far as I can determine, no transcript of the court hearing has yet been made publicly available. However, there are some substantial quotes from the hearing available on the Twitter account of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey.

The Plaintiffs’ Reply brief is some 125 pages long, but let me give you a few choice quotes so you can get an idea what was going on between the government and the social media lords. In the early days of the Biden White House, the censorship efforts focused on Covid 19 matters (although it did not take long for the Biden team to branch out into other things, from climate change to claims of election fraud to transgender issues). As to Covid 19, the government tries to justify its conduct on the basis that it was not pressuring platforms to suppress speech, but only trying to “better understand” what was going on. From plaintiffs’ Reply brief, pages 20-21:

No rational reader could interpret [White House functionary] Flaherty’s emails as a mere exercise in armchair philosophy, and the platforms certainly did not do so. They got the clear message: the White House’s demand that they “do more” to censor. . . . The very first email the White House sent [to Facebook], barely two days into the Biden Administration, demanded not to “better understand,” but to remove supposed “misinformation.” Citing a post about Hank Aaron’s death after taking the COVID vaccine, Clarke Humphry wrote at 1:04 a.m. on January 23, 2021: “Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP.” . . .

Shortly thereafter, Flaherty launched his campaign of badgering, harassment, and pressure—all designed toward a single end: to push platforms (especially Facebook) to take more aggressive action against viewpoints disfavored by the White House. When Facebook reported to the White House on steps it was taking to “Combat[] Vaccine Misinformation,” Flaherty responded with a barrage of questions seeking detailed information about Facebook’s censorship practices, including “How are you handling things that are dubious, but not provably false?” Id. ¶¶ 42-43. Like all subsequent questions, the tenor of these questions was not merely to “better understand” Facebook’s practices, but to scrutinize and pressure them to take more aggressive action. Flaherty drove this point home by accusing Facebook of fomenting “political violence” by not censoring enough speech: “especially given the Journal’s reporting on your internal work onpolitical violence spurred by Facebook groups, I am also curious about the new rules as part of the ‘overhaul.’” Id. ¶ 44. Facebook, again, got the message—its response explained to Flaherty that it was removing content that the White House disfavored, and it promised to begin “enforcing this new policy immediately.” Id. ¶ 45.

It goes on and on with dozens and dozens of further examples. Here are a couple more from page 25:

¶ 100 (Facebook assuring the White House, in response to their demands about Tucker Carlson’s content, that it “will continue to be demoted even though it was not ultimately fact checked”); id. ¶ 104 (Twitter suspended Alex Berenson immediately after the President said, “They’re killing people”)

I can’t even keep track of the large number of government agencies and government-funded apparatchiks who have gotten in on the censorship game. Besides the White House itself, there has been everything from CDC, to Fauci’s group (NIAID), to the Surgeon General, to something called CISA, to the Stanford Internet Observatory, to the Virality Project — and I’m sure that I have only scratched the surface.

At the oral argument, the judge reserved more than an hour for himself to ask questions to the parties’ attorneys. Reportedly, most of the questions went to the government. Here are a few, as reported at the Twitter account of the Missouri AG:

The judge . . . asked Biden's lawyers if the First Amendment covered Americans' right to say that Biden is responsible for high gas prices and inflation. Their answer? It depends.

The judge questioned the feds on several hypotheticals, asking if the First Amendment applied. He asked if an American citizen questioning the safety or efficacy of masks or a vaccine was protected under the First Amendment. The feds' answer? "It COULD be" but often won’t be.

With regard to the Covid 19 information that was suppressed at the instance of the White House — things like the inefficacy of lockdowns and masks, the benefits of therapeutic drugs, and the dangers and side effects of vaccines — nearly all of it has proven to be true. The censorship regime is all about only letting one narrative see the light of day. Somehow, hundreds of people get involved in this, and they all are able to convince themselves that they are the good guys.

The judge reserved decision after the hearing, but from the reports on the proceedings, it would appear that a strong order will be issued shortly.