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The official account of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey.

Jul 5, 2023, 22 tweets

Yesterday, we obtained an order to HALT what the court described as the Biden administration’s "massive attack against free speech” unseen before in United States history.

Some notable points from the judge’s order in our landmark free speech case, Missouri v. Biden:

The judge noted the censorship emanating from the federal government looks a lot like George Orwell’s “1984,” that “the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario” and that the feds appear to have “assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.”

The Court points out that the 20,000+ pages of evidence my office uncovered display the frightening coercion and collusion occurring between the feds and social media companies.

The Court found that this evidence showed “unrelenting pressure” by federal officials and “had the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.”

The Court also found that the evidence shows the feds targeted almost exclusively conservative speech—except when they decided to target the President’s political opponent who is running against him in the Democratic primary.

Here are just a couple disturbing facts that the Court found:

At least 22 times “White House Defendants engaged in coercion to induce social-media companies to suppress free speech.” They “made it very clear to social-media companies what they wanted suppressed.”

“Faced with unrelenting pressure from the most powerful office in the world, the social-media companies apparently complied.”

Here, the Court finds that the feds didn’t just force content takedowns. They also coerced “social-media platforms to change their policies.”

The feds have been trying to defend their acts by saying tech companies just censored according to their terms of service. Not so. Tech companies were forced to CHANGE their terms of service.

One policy that companies were pressured to adopt or change was their “hacked materials” policies. Here, the Court noted that the FBI “repeatedly” pushed tech companies to adopt a new policy prohibiting posting hacked materials.

That mattered because the FBI told tech companies to expect “a hack-and-leak operation [that] would involve Hunter Biden.” But the Court specifically found that the FBI “knew” that the Hunter Biden information “was not Russian disinformation.”

The FBI’s deception led to censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Here, the Court finds that federal officials also pressured Facebook to censor information that “did not violate Facebook’s policies.” In other words, content was taken down that would not have been but for pressure from the feds.

Here, the Court finds that former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki issued a “threat of ‘legal consequences’” to social media companies “if they do not censor misinformation more aggressively.”

Here, the Court finds that the “motivation” of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other defendants was specifically “a ‘take down’ of protected free speech.”

Here, the Court finds that defendants in the Department of Homeland Security—which was created to stop threats of terrorism—wrongly “believe they had a mandate to control the process of acquiring knowledge”

Here the judge notes that the feds want to censor “with regard to other issues, such as gas prices, parody speech, calling the President a liar, climate change, gender, and abortion” and criticism about “U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the return of U.S. support of Ukraine”

COVID was merely the Trojan horse, the beginning of this vast censorship enterprise, to see how far they could take this thing.

Last, and perhaps most importantly, the Court warned that there is nothing stopping the feds from continuing to censor political speech without its injunction.

This injunction is a huge win in our court battle against the largest First Amendment violation in American history.

The fight for our freedoms is just beginning. Stay tuned.

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