State AG: Biden’s Big Tech Collusion ‘Worst First Amendment Violation in Nation’s History’

Attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana have uncovered a “vast censorship enterprise” in the federal government that they say is suppressing the speech of Americans who dare oppose federal policies and actions.

Appearing on Family Research Council’s “Washington Watch” Tuesday, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) said, as part of a lawsuit accusing the government of working hand-in-hand with leading social media sites, they have uncovered such evidence during the discovery process in State of Missouri, et al v. Joseph R. Biden Jr. 

He said upwards of 20,000 pieces of federal internal documents have been secured that show the government engaged in a systematic operation to push and pressure social media companies to shut down voices that disagreed with the Biden administration, particularly in matters related to the COVID pandemic and the 2020 election.

“This is not speculation,” emphasized Tony Perkins, FRC president and host of “Washington Watch.” “This is information that you have in hand that shows that there was this collusion between the Biden administration, the federal government, and Big Tech to silence certain voices in America,” he continued.

In a June 1 tweet, Bailey wrote of the U.S. District Court’s willingness to allow the plaintiff’s to gather evidence from the government and to depose high-ranking government actors: “The federal government had a hard time convincing a judge last week that it hasn’t been working with and coercing social media companies to censor free speech.”

The lawsuit alleges that agencies within the federal government “have colluded with and/or coerced social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social media platforms by labeling the content ‘disinformation,’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’”

The suit alleges Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, among others, moderated the content on their platforms in response to communications from government agencies, particularly the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the United States Census Bureau, among others.

“This is the worst First Amendment violation in this nation’s history,” Bailey stressed, vowing to continue to fight to ensure the Constitution’s commitment to free speech is protected. The Wall Street Journal said the case is “among the most potentially consequential First Amendment battles pending in the courts …”

“My fear is that that censorship enterprise has actually grown since we initiated this lawsuit,” Bailey said. “We’ve most recently been to court to ask for a preliminary injunction and class certification to put a stop to it,” he continued.

Bailey told Perkins he and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (R) are demanding the court issue a nationwide injunction to stop the collusion, explaining there is a need “to erect that wall between the state and Big Tech” to protect Americans’ First Amendment rights to free speech.

“It erodes trust and confidence in our governmental institutions when the government lies to us and suppresses our free, fair, and open debate,” Bailey stated.

Bailey said the administration has centralized the speech-suppressing efforts within the Department of Homeland Security, noting the irony of the agency being created in the wake of the attacks on America on 9/11, ostensibly to protect Americans from foreign attack.

“It’s now been weaponized against Americans to suppress our speech. [It is] a betrayal of our trust and values,” he said. “There was so much censorship going on across Big Tech social media at the behest of the federal government that the federal government actually had to consolidate that authority and that power in one agency to act as the nerve center for the censorship enterprise,” Bailey went on to say.

Yet suppression efforts appear to go all the way to the Oval Office. He explained how his legal teams have uncovered “email traffic from the White House digital director that indicates that President Biden himself is involved.”

In the research supporting their lawsuit, Bailey said the vast majority of incidents have been the government seeking to silence “conservative voices.” “The government was hard-pressed in court when asked by the judge to identify a single liberal voice that was suppressed,” he explained, noting the only example offered was a political opponent of the president.

In a press release from the Missouri Attorney General’s office, Bailey and Landry argue the actions of the federal government “[have] stifled debate and criticism of government policy on social media about some of the most pressing issues of our time.” The release details what they termed “unconscionable federal censorship activities” their offices have uncovered, including:

• [Dr. Anthony] Fauci’s involvement in laundering lies into medical journals in an attempt to bury the lab-leak theory.
• White House officials like Rob Flaherty, Andrew Slavitt, and Jennifer Psaki engaging in a relentless pressure campaign, both in public and in private, to coerce platforms into censoring disfavored viewpoints on social media.
• Surgeon General Murthy and his staff coordinating closely with the White House in this pressure campaign, causing social media platforms to scramble and assure federal officials that “we hear your call to do more” to censor disfavored viewpoints.
• The CDC flagging specific social media posts for censorship, organizing “BOLO” (“Be On the Lookout”) meetings to tell platforms what should be censored, and serving as the definitive fact-checker with final authority to dictate exactly what speech will be removed from social media.
• The FBI, CISA, and the GEC colluding with social media platforms in hundreds of meetings about misinformation, and those agencies repeatedly flagging huge quantities of First Amendment-protected speech to compliant platforms for censorship.
• Federal health officials in the Surgeon General’s Office, the CDC, and HHS collaborating in a similar censorship enterprise called the Virality Project, which procures the censorship of enormous quantities of First Amendment-protected speech.

Bailey told Perkins that in the United States, the “remedy for disfavored speech has always been counter-speech, not government censorship.” That Americans can have differences of opinion, but also have the freedom to express them is “fundamental to the United States of America being the exceptional country it is,” he said.