Joe Biden's Ministry of Truth

It would still be ominous, but less annoying, if it actually told the truth.

Columbia Law Professor Phil Hamburger has an excellent piece in today’s WSJ about a federal district court ruling, published appropriately enough on Independence Day, granting a preliminary injunction against the federal government’s use of social-media platforms to shape and censor speech. Prof. Hamburger thinks it “stands to become one of the most important free-speech cases in the nation’s history.”

At stake is the federal government’s use of social-media platforms to censor Americans. Officials kept most of their censorship regime secret through two election cycles. Discovery in Missouri v. Biden, however, revealed extensive evidence of government coercion and encouragement of censorship. It is the most massive assault on free speech in the nation’s history.

I can’t quite remember if it was Joe Biden who promised that his administration would be “the most open and transparent” in history. (For different reasons, Joe can’t remember either).

Holding that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their First Amendment claims, [US District Judge Terry] Doughty issued a preliminary injunction against eight federal agencies—including the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Also enjoined were many officials, including the surgeon general and a host of White House staffers. The judge barred them from (among other things) “threatening, pressuring, or coercing social-media companies in any manner to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content of postings containing protected free speech.”

This is what the agencies and White House operatives were doing:

The government-orchestrated censorship involves monitoring billions of posts and suppressing millions. It targets speech about electoral politics, medical and scientific debates, foreign policy and more.

Judge Doughty observes that “the censorship alleged in this case almost exclusively targeted conservative speech.” That reveals “viewpoint discrimination,” which is distinctively suspect in First Amendment jurisprudence.

“The United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’ ” the judge writes. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has expanded its understanding of “infrastructure” to include “the spread of false and misleading information”—judged, naturally, by CISA. The agency asserts that the “most critical” infrastructure “is our ‘cognitive infrastructure.’ ” It views our minds as public property, to be protected through censorship.

You would have to have been living in a cave for the last two years not to understand that “false and misleading information” means “information not conforming to the Administration’s line.” Or to be more succinct, if Karine Jean-Pierre hasn’t approved, shut up.

Prof. Hamburger cites one particularly egregious episode of government censorship:

Epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff are among the individual plaintiffs represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, where I am the CEO. They were co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized Covid lockdowns. Four days after it was issued, Anthony Fauci and other government officials proposed a “take down” of it.

There several reasons this episode is particularly both ominous and revealing. For one, it illustrates how the Left, this time armed with the cudgel of government authority, used COVID as cover for expanding its power over citizens (and not coincidentally, why the government was so slow to let go of COVID scaremongering). For another, it shows why preserving the First Amendment in full force is so vital; if there is any subject about which the free flow of ideas is essential, it would have to be how to cope with a new, communicable disease with potentially quite serious, but not at the time well-understood, consequences both for public health and the exercise of everyday freedom of movement and commerce. When only one side is allowed to be heard, the chances for error — for an over-reaction in one direction or the other — increase. And as we now know, there was over-reaction that had a severe impact on our wealth, the education of our children, and our freedom. It was so bad, and became so undeniable, that the COVID banshees took to the the pages of the Atlantic to ask for amnesty.

But that, important though it be, is not the main point. I was in the Justice Department (and its branch office, the US Attorney’s Office) for 25 years, mostly as a career attorney but at one time as a reasonably high level political appointee, and never once did I feel the need to call up the media to tweak or massage, much less to suppress, a story. Indeed the idea never occurred to me. From the time I was a middle school kid and first understood what American governance is supposed to be, and supposed not to be, it was clear to me that it was up to citizens to decide for themselves what the truth is. Before I ever heard of George Orwell, I knew that government-shaded truth is a contradiction in terms. I fear for America’s future if we forget that lesson or, more tragically, remember it but are afraid to act to secure it.