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The First Amendment Takes a Beating in the Supreme Court
re: gears of the machine
re: Matt Taibbi
re: Unamimous Appellate Court Decision Finds that Feds Colluded with Big Tech to Violate 1st Amendment
Are you seeing how the gears of the machine work yet?
See also: Why Government is Always the Most Dangerous Source of Misinformation
The First Amendment Takes a Beating in the Supreme Court
2024-03-19, by Matt Taibbi
A brief recap of oral arguments in the long-awaited Supreme Court case on state-sponsored censorship
Late in oral arguments yesterday during the Murthy v Missouri censorship case before the Supreme Court, newest Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson interrogated J. Benjamin Aguinaga, Solicitor General of Louisiana:
JACKSON: So my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods…
Can you help me? Because I’m really — I’m really worried about that because you’ve got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances from the government’s perspective, and you’re saying that the government can’t interact with the
source of those problems.
“Can you help me?” Yes, I would love to help you, Justice Jackson, to a less challenging line of work… Hamstringing the government, Good God!
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WIND: the 1st Amendment is first for a reason. It exists to protect citizens from a tyrannical government. Look at the intellectual reversal of that idea by the batshit crazy latest addition to the court.
The foul stench of mendacity + selective prosecution is one of the hydra heads along with contempt for the Constitution even as the flood of 10-12 million illegals threatens to permanenly alter the balance of power to a single-party fascist state. Now we have the rot extending all the way up to where it matters.
Why Government is Always the Most Dangerous Source of Misinformation
2034-03-19, by Matt Taibbi
The government just begged the Supreme Court to let it fight "misinformation," but the plaintiffs were citizens suppressed for exposing official error. Why state lies are the most dangerous
CNN opened its coverage of Murthy v. Missouri, the historic censorship case argued in the Supreme Court yesterday, as follows:
CNN — For doctors like Eileen Barrett, a pending Supreme Court case challenging the government’s ability to communicate with social media companies isn’t principally a fight about the fraught politics of online speech.
Instead, they say, it’s a matter of life and death.
“I have seen countless statements that are at best problematic and at worst flat-out disinformation that I’m terribly fearful are causing harm to patients,” said Barrett…
If CNN’s line about “a matter of life or death” sounds a bit dramatic, it’s at least a perfect echo of the original defendant in the case, President Joe Biden. In July of 2021, Biden said Internet companies were “killing people” when they refused to remove content his White House deemed “problematic.” However, the White House itself contributed to enormous problems during the pandemic by wildly overestimating both the impact of the disease, and the effectiveness of vaccines. Somehow, this form of “misinformation” never gets proper billing.
The government’s performance in oral arguments in the Supreme Court yesterday has already led to huge success on this front, from a public relations perspective. Instead of hearing about a broad, military-scale operation spanning multiple agencies to address social media posts about everything from Ukraine to Gaza to immigration to schools and gender issues, the public heard the case was about “the government’s ability… to combat misinformation,” and stop “posts that officials said spread falsehoods.” Instead of a case about the state attempting to enforce uniform narratives on huge ranges of subjects, and being consistently wrong when doing so, the public will hear yesterday’s case was about occasional, gentle efforts to offer input about one or two emergencies.
Here’s the answer to both CNN and Biden, and a snapshot of why this case went to the heart of the First Amendment:
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WIND: ugghh.
