“It’s shocking. The level of coordination between senior government officials and senior social media executives is astounding.“

The title of the post is quite a statement against the US government, coming from US District Court Judge Terry Doughty and it was wonderfully appropriate that it landed on the Fourth of July.

There is no doubt that the government will appeal this decision and I expect it’s going to end up in front of the Supreme Court as early as next year.

But in the meantime the injunction will stand and nobody from the FBI, CIA, Pentagon, CDC or the rest of the ratbags, is permitted to even talk to employees of Big Tech. Given the attitude of the Administrative State I’ve no doubt that will be breached in quiet, undocumented ways (no more emails, texts or phonecalls) because they are a law unto themselves.

But it’s a start.

The complete sentence, lest I be accused of taking things out of context, is as follows:

“If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

So as always there is an “if true” component. The problem for the Federal government is that the volume and detail of evidence is huge, hence the Judge’s almost astonished tone.

It arises from a lawsuit taken, not by individuals but by State Attorney Generals, against the Federal Administrations of both Trump and Biden and is actually going after numerous Federal Agencies rather than the Administration of the day. (See also The Twitter Files, where journalists like Lefty Matt Taibbi and others documented a lot of this. That link is also on the No Minister Home Page):

The Missouri v. Biden investigators found the same fact patterns found by Twitter Files reporters like me, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, David Zweig, and Paul Thacker, and then later Andrew Lowenthal, Aaron Mate, Sue Schmidt, Matt Orfalea, Tom Wyatt, Matt Farwell, @Techno_Fog, and many others did. They also echoed descriptions by like Jacob Siegel at Tablet, or Robby Soave at Reason, who wrote about similar issues at Facebook.

Here’s what the former Attorney General of Missouri, now senator Eric Schmitt, told journalist Michael Shellenberger:

“It’s shocking. The level of coordination between senior government officials and senior social media executives is astounding. There were direct text messages from the surgeon general of the United States to senior Facebook officials saying, ‘Take this down.’ It’s just un-American.”

The decision runs to 150 pages, mainly because of the huge list of specific breaches that are documented. There’s an excellent summary of those here, but the best part is this:

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 stage 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.”

The Plaintiffs have presented substantial evidence in support of their claims that they were the victims of a far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign. This court finds that they are likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment free speech claim against the Defendants. Therefore, a preliminary injunction should issue immediately against the Defendants as set out.

The Plaintiffs Motion for Preliminary Injunction [Doc. No. 10] is GRANTED IN PART and DENIED IN PART.

The Plaintiffs’ request to certify this matter as a class action pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. Article 23(b)(2) is DENIED.

Of course, these Federal bureaucracies would not have got as far as they did with the Social Media giants had it not been that they were whispering (and sometimes shouting) into sympathetic ears.