Federal Judge Terry Doughty blocking Biden administration officials from pressuring media organizations to censor opposing voices comes as the latest illustration of the contempt for law by the crime wave identifying as a presidential administration.
West Virginia v. EPA, Biden v. Nebraska, and Alabama Association of Realtors v. Department of Health and Human Services shot down the executive branch’s bureaucracy circumventing Congress on matters pertaining to the environment, student loans, and landlord evictions.
Doughty granting a preliminary injunction prohibiting various state agents and agencies from imposing upon social media companies to censor resonates more given the association of freedom of speech with the United States of America. It strikes so many as an essential element of the composition of this country. The Biden administration thinking it otherwise sets it apart as not just alien but hostile to American traditions.
So uncommon does this practice of U.S. government officials censoring opposing voices that it lacks a name — at least until now. May we call it “Flahertyism”?
Rob Flaherty Revealed in Missouri v. Biden
Rob Flaherty, director of the Biden administration’s Office of Digital Strategy, sought to suppress speech almost as soon as his boss took the oath of office.
“On January 23, 2021, three days after President [Joe] Biden took office, Clarke Humphrey (‘Humphrey’), who at the time was the Digital Director for the COVID-19 Response Team, emailed Twitter and requested the removal of an anti-COVID-19 vaccine tweet by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr,” Doughty’s order explains. “Humphrey sent a copy of the email to Rob Flaherty (‘Flaherty’), former Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Digital Strategy, on the email and asked if ‘we can keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre.’ The email read, ‘Hey folks-Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process of having it removed ASAP.’”
Within 45 minutes of Flaherty emailing Twitter, days later, “Please remove this account immediately,” the social media giant removed a parody account purportedly from the grandchild the president does not publicly acknowledge but privately seeks to erase. Twitter complained to Flaherty of being “bombarded” by the White House with censorship requests.
The unrelenting censorship campaign encompassed companies beyond Twitter.
“Are you guys f***ing serious?” Flaherty wrote to Facebook about posts questioning the government’s COVID-19 narrative. “I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”
In what kind of a country do social media companies answer to bullying government officials on the stories they carry? The answer is not a free one.
Just as the anti–First Amendment apparatus engulfed many private organizations, it suppressed opposition on many issues.
As recognized by Scott McKay here yesterday, Doughty cited: “(1) suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 Presidential election; (2) suppressing speech about the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin; (3) suppressing speech about the efficiency of masks and COVID-19 lockdowns: (4) suppressing speech about the efficiency of COVID-19 vaccines; (5) suppressing speech about election integrity in the 2020 presidential election; (6) suppressing speech about the security of voting by mail; (7) suppressing parody content about Defendants; (8) suppressing negative posts about the economy; and (9) suppressing negative posts about President Biden.”
While some of these issues appear subjective, others involve matters of fact. Ironically, the Biden team inveighing against disinformation engaged in it. The Hunter Biden laptop story suppressed by Twitter at the behest of the Biden campaign, for instance, received post-election verification from Politico, CBS News, and the New York Times. The evidence mounts that COVID-19 originated in a lab. It still seems a debatable point, even if “wet market” theories look increasingly implausible, yet social media companies, under pressure from the White House, silenced voices making the lab-origin case that Americans overwhelmingly second.
Flahertyism, this Orwellian notion that powerful people should act as guardians protecting the public from ideas and information (including that they act as guardians protecting the public from ideas and information), ultimately breeds distrust. When the public grasps that agents of the state increasingly control what they can and cannot see online, the public’s trust in authorities drops. For some, it results in a reflexive distrust.
In one message that looks designed to intimidate, Flaherty wrote to YouTube that his concerns over videos he objected to were “shared at the highest (and I mean the highest) levels of the White House.” President Biden did nothing to cast doubt on his underling’s statement by praising Flaherty’s efforts last month in a goodbye to his servant leaving government for his campaign. “Under Rob’s leadership,” he said, “we’ve built the largest Office of Digital Strategy in history, and with it, a digital strategy and culture that brought people together instead of dividing them.”
Bigger than even Millard Fillmore’s Office of Digital Strategy? The bizarre boast, along with the even more bizarre characterization of Flaherty as bringing “people together instead of dividing them,” meshed with the Orwellian quality of the state usurping the role of the Fourth Estate.
“The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition,” Doughty ruled. “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.”
The Constitution affirmed that right. Flahertyism took it away.
