On Day One, President Donald Trump restored freedom of speech in the United States. If you weren’t aware that it had been removed, that should give you an idea of the scale of the problem. Censorship and its totalitarian cousin, propaganda, combined to control the information that was generally available to the public under the Biden administration.
Some Americans who were censored and deplatformed on social media went to court over it.
“Government officials may not coerce private entities to suppress speech,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito last June, “and that is what happened in this case.”
Alito was writing a dissent in Murthy v. Missouri, the long-running First Amendment case challenging the Biden regime of censorship-by-proxy. The court’s majority let the censorship continue while the victims’ lawsuit proceeded.
Two lower courts had already been convinced that the government was suppressing the constitutionally protected free speech of Americans using high-tech content flagging and government coercion. On July 4, 2023, Judge Terry A. Doughty issued a blistering ruling ordering the Biden administration to stop “urging, encouraging, pressuring or inducing” social media companies to engage in “removal, deletion, suppression or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
Far from denying it, the Biden administration appealed Doughty’s injunction, claiming that government censorship was necessary to keep Americans safe.
That censorship has now been halted by the newly elected president of the United States.
Trump’s executive order on January 20, titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” is a ray of light if you care about freedom in America.
“Under the guise of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate,” the executive order states. “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”
Fact check: True.
Trump’s order declares that “it is the policy of the United States” to “ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” The order also prohibits the use of taxpayer resources for the purpose of abridging free speech, and it says the U.S. will “identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.”
The order directs the attorney general to “investigate the activities of the Federal Government over the last 4 years that are inconsistent with the purposes and policies of this order and prepare a report to be submitted to the President” for “appropriate remedial actions.”
This likely means the individuals suing the government over censorship, “deplatforming” and reputational damage will be able to settle their lawsuits favorably, instead of having to pay attorneys for endless litigation to vindicate their constitutional rights.
The other part of the story, the end of propaganda, appears as a virtual confession written by Joe Biden himself, or whoever wrote those last-minute pardons over Biden’s signature.
Propaganda ran parallel to government suppression of free speech about two topics in particular: COVID-19 and the 2020 election.
Americans were flooded with relentless government messaging that the origin of the COVID virus was something other than a lab leak in Wuhan, China; that the safe and effective vaccines would prevent transmission of the virus; and that lockdowns and six-foot social distancing were essential to protect public health. Those claims were always questionable, but questions were censored.
The Biden administration’s response to questions raised about the integrity of the 2020 election was censorship plus an all-of-government effort to characterize the January 6th protest and riot at the Capitol as a Trump-directed insurrection aimed at overthrowing the U.S. government. This included the made-for-TV January 6th committee hearings.
On January 19, Biden issued sweeping, preemptive pardons to Dr. Anthony Fauci, all the Members of Congress who served on the “House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol,” the entire committee staff, and every D.C. and Capitol Police Department officer who testified before the committee.
Lies went all the way around the world, but the truth has its boots on now.
Write [email protected] and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley
This post was originally published on here
