Democrats were once champions of free speech, arguably to the extreme. Yet to reframe Joe Biden’s favorite insult of Republicans, this ain’t your father’s Democrat Party.

Today’s Democrats are no longer liberals; they’re authoritarian leftists who cheer on censorship of ideas they don’t like, and their virtual army of “fact-checkers” and social media moderators happily do their bidding. One component of this racketeering operation is a communication channel for lackeys in the Biden administration and/or Congress to collude with representatives from social media to determine what ideas and statements are permissible speech in today’s public square.

We say so with evidence. We know the administration worked with social media giants to suppress free speech about COVID and other political matters. On July 15, 2021, then-Biden spokesperson Jen Psaki told us so: “We are in regular touch with these social-media platforms” and are “flagging problematic posts for Facebook.”

The Twitter Files uncovered even more, as did the revelation of the administration’s would-be Disinformation Governance Board. As Mark Alexander noted in January 2021, the Big Tech platforms have perfected the “Redlining of Free Speech” to protect Joe Biden and his socialist Democrat Party.

In a big win for free speech against just this systemic censorship, U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty agreed with the plaintiffs in a case alleging that the White House “significantly encourage[d]” speech suppression during the pandemic. In a memorandum ruling, he issued a temporary injunction blocking Biden’s thugs from coordinating with Google, Meta (Facebook), and Twitter regarding political speech.

Doughty’s 155-page rebuke was devastating for Team Jackboot:

If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history. In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.

Doughty added that “the censorship alleged in this case almost exclusively targeted conservative speech,” though he acknowledged it can cross party lines. Ask Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Biden’s rival for the Democrat nomination. We’ve argued this political censorship is a form of redlining, and thus a clear violation of civil rights.

The judge concluded:

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.”

We certainly hope that Doughty eventually rules fully against this suppression and that it’s the beginning of a reckoning that impacts what social media platforms can themselves suppress, with or without government coordination.

“Happy birthday America,” tweeted Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, one of the plaintiffs. “You get your First Amendment back!!!”

Indeed, everyone was celebrating the protection of our Bill of Rights, right?

Wrong.

The Washington Post — whose scribes have never once worried about their freedom of speech — fretted that this is a disaster: “The Donald Trump-appointed judge’s move could undo years of efforts to enhance coordination between the government and social media companies.”

Call us crazy, but there seems to be some remarkable tone-deafness in that statement.

The Post added hand-wringing about the imagined far-reaching effects of this injunction supposedly jeopardizing government work against “child sexual abuse images and terrorism,” as well as “election interference and voter suppression efforts.” That’s just plain misinformation. The Wall Street Journal committed actual journalism in reporting that Doughty’s order “isn’t a blanket ban on government communication with social media” and that the specific things the Post claims will run rampant are still fair game for law enforcement.

Then the Post went on to decry the social media prevalence of “falsehoods about the virus and vaccines.” Many of those “falsehoods” turned out to be true, of course, but the Post doesn’t mention that.

Moreover, Biden and his cadres were far more guilty of falsehoods. Take this one, for example, from July 2021: “They’re killing people,” Biden said of the unvaccinated after being asked about social media content. “The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and they’re killing people.” That was a lie, but neither he nor anyone who espoused it was in any danger of censorship.

Evidently, the Post, with its Trump-era motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” simply wants free speech to be determined by unaccountable government agents and nameless social media thugs in a smoke-filled back room.

For your own good, of course.

Americans who cherish the Bill of Rights will cheer this latest injunction, even if the First Amendment’s Leftmedia beneficiaries don’t share in the celebration.

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Update: Predictably, the Biden administration is preparing an appeal of free speech decision. Biden Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated that Biden “certainly disagree with this decision.”

And they will vigorously oppose the ruling not only because leftists believe they should be the arbiters of free speech, but because the decision could have broader implications for social media platform speech suppression. The Big Tech rebuttal to such restrictions is generally framed around the need to take down child exploitation or terrorist posts — the national security or physical harm rubric. But those issues are already statutorily defined and codified in law, so taking them down is lawful.

However, we at The Patriot Post know well that social media platform speech suppression targets conservative political views in violation of our civil rights to express those views. Our incoming traffic from Facebook has dropped by more than 95% in the last two years because we have been targeted for suppression.