The Patriot Post® · Free Speech 1, Deep State 0

Some three years ago, U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty commemorated our nation’s Independence Day holiday by, er, female-dog-slapping the Biden administration for its brazen attacks on our First Amendment.

The court case was Missouri v. Biden, and Doughty’s ruling took specific aim at the systematic COVID-related collusion between Joe Biden’s speech suppressors and the Big Tech behemoths — Google, Facebook, and pre-Musk Twitter — who made it happen.

The censorship was widespread, and it targeted not just the occasional social media post about ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, but also the thoughtful expressions of leading public-health experts like Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya and Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, two of the three authors of The Great Barrington Declaration. It was thus an invigorating ruling for all Americans who cherish the right to say what we want without fear of a Big Brotherly jackboot coming down on us.

Recall that President Joe Biden once said of social media platforms like Facebook, which he didn’t think had sufficiently cracked down on COVID dissidents, “They’re killing people.” That wasn’t a dog whistle to his censors; those were marching orders issued through a bullhorn.

And remember: The Left’s censorship regime wasn’t limited to COVID-related speech. It also included conservative thoughtcrimes about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the rigged 2020 election, and numerous other heresies.

Alas, Judge Doughty’s glorious trip to the woodshed for the Censorship Industrial Complex proved too good to be true. A critical First Amendment case, Missouri v. Biden, has since taken its share of twists and turns, including an affirmation of Doughty’s original ruling by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, followed by a deeply disappointing decision by our “conservative” Supreme Court, which, instead of ruling on the merits of the case, reversed the lower court’s decision by weakly determining that none of the plaintiffs had legal standing to sue.

Justice Samuel Alito, who was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, said that the Biden regime’s speech crackdown was “blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.”

Still, the case, which ultimately became Murthy v. Missouri, finally reached resolution this week in the form of a consent decree that forces the federal government to keep its filthy hands off our free speech. Missouri Republican Senator Eric Schmitt, who first brought the lawsuit against the Biden administration in 2022 while in his role as Missouri attorney general, put it this way: “Today, after years of unrelenting litigation, we [forced the] deep state into a historic 10-year, court-enforceable Consent Decree. It directly binds the Surgeon General, the CDC, and CISA: no more threats of legal, regulatory, or economic punishment. No more coercion. No more unilateral direction or veto of platform decisions to remove, suppress, deplatform, or algorithmically bury protected speech.”

The lead plaintiff in the case was Gateway Pundit founder and publisher Jim Hoft, and he was joined by fellow plaintiffs Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, Aaron Kheriaty, and Jill Hines, in addition to others who filed briefs, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his then-capacity as founder of Children’s Health Defense. (Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and RFK ultimately withdrew their plaintiff status when they took jobs within the Trump administration.)

As Owen Gregorian reports, “In the consent decree, the government admits that ‘Unrelenting pressure from certain government officials likely had the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.’” As for the decree, it states: “The Government cannot take actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly … to threaten Social-Media Companies with some form of punishment … unless they remove, delete, suppress, or reduce … content containing protected free speech.”

Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys in the case, opined, “The consent decree is a spectacular win for the country, for the First Amendment, and for all the plaintiffs who fought so hard and so long in this litigation, including CHD.”

Said another victorious litigant, Louisiana AG Liz Murrill: “George Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning against tyranny, not as a how-to guide by the federal government.” She added, “Yet our case uncovered over 20,000 pages of documents highlighting an extensive censorship campaign stemming directly from the President of the United States and his administration.”

Granted, a consent decree doesn’t have the sex appeal of a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling, but it does have the weight of law, and it’ll therefore keep the government’s censorship dogs on a tight leash for the foreseeable future.