Democrats want free speech, but only for themselves, analysis warns

‘They invented mal-information to justify going after censorship’

Democrats want free speech … for themselves. But not for their opponents and critics, an analysis published at the Federalist reveals.

The column by Joy Pullman reviews the agenda in the Joe Biden administration to keep censoring Americans online.

One of the takeaways, the commentary explains, is that, “Democrats want free speech for themselves while banning it for their enemies.”

It explained, “Court documents also revealed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a federal agency, set up a private entity to ban and throttle election-related online speech Democrats dislike. Much of the information choked by this algorithmic censorship operation is true, such as the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s laptop, investigations and members of Congress have noted,”

“They invented a whole new word, ‘mal-information,’ to justify going after the censorship of true speech and ideas,” explained John Sauer, a lawyer for plaintiffs suing the government over its censorship. That case was argued before an appeals court recently.

Court arguments “got into the FBI’s 2020 election interference in telling online monopolies that The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was foreign disinformation,” the column said.

“This was false, and the FBI knew it. The lower court ruled this deception constituted coercion because it caused people to act on false information,” the commentary said.

Such lies “benefited Joe Biden in the 2020 election,” it said.

It noted, “If the First Amendment protects the FBI’s lies that Hunter Biden’s laptop was disinformation, for which not one federal employee has been disciplined, how can it allow for criminalizing the same behavior by average Americans by labeling their views ‘disinformation’ and ‘mal-information’?”

Pullman explained, “On Thursday afternoon, three Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges heard Biden administration arguments to let government keep pressuring social media monopolies to ban ideas they don’t like from the internet.”

A lower court had ordered that to stop, calling it “arguably … the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

The fight probably will end up at the Supreme Court.

“It’s far beyond the scope of what people realize,” explained a plaintiffs’ lawyer, Zhonette Brown.

The commentary pointed out other factors to watch, including that by the government’s own definition, it is censoring people.

And, government officials treated internet monopolies, to whom they were giving censorship instructions, like subordinates.

There even were threats to “the business model of all online communications monopolies,” the column warned.

The result was that judges have likened the government to mobsters.

“This is an analogy, probably an inapt analogy, so if you’ll excuse me — like if somebody is in these movies we see with the mob or something. They don’t spell out things but they have these ongoing relationships and they never actually say, ‘Go do this or else you’re going to have this consequence,’ but everybody just knows,” Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod said.

And the plaintiffs are charging that such government censorship simply is election interference.

Also, the column concluded, the internet is “massively rigged.”

“It’s clear from the case documents and other disclosures such as the ‘Twitter Files’ and ‘Facebook Files’ that the algorithms controlling what Americans see online are now deeply, massively rigged. That rigging is multilayered. It includes all this government coercion of entities including Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Meta, Snapchat, Tiktok, and Twitter going back to at least 2017, as well as pressure operations from corporate media and internal employee groups.”