We’re probably overdue here at The American Spectator to give due recognition to Trump-appointed federal Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana. It’s Doughty’s courtroom from which come a disproportionate number of rulings that breathe life into the myriad of multi-state lawsuits filed by state attorneys general against the Biden administration.
As an example, Doughty multiple times issued national injunctions sparing Americans from being coerced into submitting to COVID vaccines as job requirements. He also stopped the Biden administration’s moratorium on oil and gas leases on federal lands last year.
There have been numerous other Doughty rulings that have confounded Team Biden and the Deep State in their efforts to centralize political, economic, and cultural power. The ruling elite do not like Terry Doughty.
And boy, they really won’t like him now.
Because, on Tuesday, fittingly enough, Doughty issued a nationwide injunction against the Biden administration in the case of Missouri v. Biden, a lawsuit filed over the federal government’s forced collusion with Big Tech companies to censor and suppress public discussion of several key issues of interest to vast swaths of the population. From the opinion:
Plaintiffs allege that Defendants suppressed conservative-leaning free speech, such as: (1) suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 Presidential election; (2) suppressing speech about the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin; (3) suppressing speech about the efficiency of masks and COVID-19 lockdowns; (4) suppressing speech about the efficiency of COVID-19 vaccines; (5) suppressing speech about election integrity in the 2020 presidential election; (6) suppressing speech about the security of voting by mail; (7) suppressing parody content about Defendants; (8) suppressing negative posts about the economy; and (9) suppressing negative posts about President Biden.
Nobody who didn’t live under a rock in America was unaware that these actions were happening. Those discussions were without question suppressed. If you’re a regular listener to The Spectacle podcast, which The American Spectator publisher Melissa Mackenzie and I produce weekly, you’ll know that we’re now banned from uploading to YouTube because a few weeks ago we had the temerity to discuss the infirmities in how the 2020 presidential election was conducted. That’s why the podcast is based on Twitter now.
The suppression and censorship is blatantly, infuriatingly real. The issue was whether it originates from the actions of the federal government.
And Doughty believes they were. Also from the opinion:
The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden’s policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech. American citizens have the right to engage in free debate about the significant issues affecting the country.
Although this case is still relatively young, and at this state the Court is only examining it in terms of Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on the merits, the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.”
That bit set the Left into orbit on Twitter:
Lol, so a Federal Judge just limited the 1A rights of the government to protect the 1A rights of citizens to post BS that could harm the public? Absurd injunction that will be overturned on appeal, setting a precedent.
— August V (@AugustCohen4) July 4, 2023
Censoring a broad swath of vital communications between government and social media platforms in the name of combating censorship makes a mockery of the first amendmenthttps://t.co/PQC17Mko11
— Laurence Tribe ???????? ⚖️ (@tribelaw) July 5, 2023
The Washington Post article linked by the lunatic leftist law professor Laurence Tribe (as well as the New York Times piece in the tweet above it) is itself an exercise in misinformation. The injunction isn’t about “contacts” between Team Biden and, for example, Facebook. It’s about demands made for censorship, which in well-established law makes Big Tech companies arms of the state and, therefore, subjects them to the same constitutional strictures the government must fall within.
Tribe knows this, and so do the propagandists of the Washington Post and New York Times, who will probably demand a dollar from you for the privilege of reading their slanted articles. But they don’t care, for the same reason Team Biden didn’t care that what they were doing in suppressing dissent on questions of COVID, Jan. 6, the 2020 election, and other things we’re not allowed to speak publicly about anymore.
Namely, that the elite and ruling class in this country hate the principles of the nation’s founding and are doing everything they can to sever them from the reality of modern American life.
This isn’t good enough for the attorneys general of a host of red states, led by Missouri’s Eric Schmitt — who last year won election to the U.S. Senate and has since been replaced by Andrew Bailey — and Louisiana’s Jeff Landry. Upon scoring the victory with Doughty’s injunction yesterday, Landry summed up the situation quite well:
The evidence of illegal censorship in this case is both shocking and overwhelming. In fact, as Judge Terry Doughty stated in his ruling, “if the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
Our evidence shows systematic political bias across this federal “Censorship Enterprise,” which overwhelmingly targeted conservative political speech, especially speech criticizing the Biden Administration and its policies. For example, senior federal officials ultimately decided what Americans could and could not say on platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others regarding COVID-19, elections, government officials, and more. Such actions made these federal officials self-appointed arbiters of truth for all Americans under the guise of fighting “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
This was done, as claimed by senior national-security official Jen Easterly, the director of [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency], to protect America’s “cognitive infrastructure,” because it was “dangerous” to let Americans “pick their own facts.” In order to control this process, officials from the White House on down pressured, threatened, and berated social media platforms to stifle the speech of their political opponents, as well as everyday Americans on issues related to the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and vaccine injuries, the now-widely accepted lab leak theory, and even the Hunter Biden laptop story.
And also:
Yesterday’s historic ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana is meant to stop this unconstitutional censorship in its tracks. As Judge Doughty observed, “the question does not concern whether speech is conservative, moderate, liberal, progressive, or somewhere in-between. What matters is that Americans, despite their views, will not be censored or suppressed by the Government.” That is why we look forward to litigating this very important case to conclusion on behalf of all Louisianans and Americans injured by this shocking abuse of federal power.
Consider reading the entire ruling.
It's a devastating indictment of US government censorship, and a frightening peek into how close we have come to totalitaranism.https://t.co/yHN4xf6nXP
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) July 4, 2023
It’s a good bet that Doughty will rule for the plaintiffs at trial. It’s also a good bet that the Fifth Circuit is going to uphold his ruling.
And we’ve now seen that the Supreme Court is likely to uphold it as well.
This is big. It could well be a turning point in the battle to maintain free speech in the face of the corrupt oligopoly that “mainstream” media has become. As Glenn Greenwald said on Twitter Tuesday, “The most surreal fact of US political life is that the leading advocates for unified state/corporate censorship are large media corporations.”
That advocacy deserves investigation because it appears that it’s driven not simply by partisan politics but perhaps also by government intimidation, tracing back to Biden’s predecessor Barack Obama.
Which is another column altogether.
For today, we’ll simply salute Judge Doughty and the courage of his 155-page masterpiece in defense of free speech that issued forth on the Fourth of July. Perhaps the principles we purport to celebrate on that day are not yet dead; if so, it’s courageous, sober patriots like Doughty who we can thank for continuing the fight.