As I alluded last week, censorship may be the most burning issue of the day. Matt Taibi is an old school, honest liberal. supportive of civil liberties and suspicious of big business. He was the reporter, writing at Rolling Stone, who coined the term Vampire Squid referring to Goldman Sachs in a series of exposes on the company's questionable business ethics. But now the liberal wing of the American political scene has been captured by Progressives. And Matt Taibi is persona non grata to the left. You see, after he purchased Twitter, Elon Musk hired Taibi and other honest reporters to do some serious reporting on how the former management of Twitter had been genuflecting to the government in its coverage of the pandemic and lockdowns and the alleged corruption of Hunter Biden and by extension Joe Biden.
Acting on the information of Twitter censorship uncovered by Taibi and the other reporters, then Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and then Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry filed Missouri v. Biden to stop the government censorship of social media. They won at the District Court level and got a comprehensive injunction against further Federal Agency censorship. The injunction was later lifted by a 6-3 vote at the Supreme Court and the case decision has been appealed to the Supreme Court which heard arguments last week.
This case should be a slam dunk First Amendment victory case. But it looks like it will be close. The government admits to being regularly in direct contact with all the social media giants, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. They claim they were not giving orders but merely offering advice. But given ongoing efforts in Congress to more severely regulate these companies, offering unsought advice is sort of like a Mafia don suggesting "You sure have a nice business here. You might want to consider taking out some insurance from my cousin Vinnie." In other words, extortion, pure and simple.
The censorship and algorithmic shifting of attention away from anything opposing the government narrative is massive and exacting in detail. This show has been affected. Before censorship, this show, the Libertarian Counterpoint, had its shows, all its shows, nicely filed in order of production on YouTube. Now a search on YouTube brings up a total of 5 random shows from the 33 years we've been on the air and a bunch of other non-relevant links. Likes on my Facebook post have dwindled from dozens to a handful. A post I did on LinkedIn with a headline comparing the COVID lockdowns lies to the weapons of mass destruction lies that got us into war in Iraq was canceled. Respected public health academics Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorf, authors of The Great Barrington Declaration which offered early truthful critiques of the folly of the lockdowns were effectively canceled. Jeffrey Tucker of Brownstone Institute who has done some of the best, most responsible reporting on the pandemic and its Keystone Kops aftermath, is almost impossible to find on any media, social or legacy except for the Epoch Times and now X.
It's disturbing that United States Supreme Court Justice Katanji Brown Jackson said in reply to the Attorney arguing for Missouri, My biggest concern, is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways."
Really? Maybe I'm quaint and old-fashioned but I thought that the whole point of the entire Bill of Rights is to hamstring the government. We'll see in a month or two whether a majority on the Court is OK with hamstringing the government. Given the predilection of the Chief Justice and at least one of the Trump appointees ,we're looking at you Kavanaugh, to splitting the baby, I am not particularly optimistic. I'm Richard Fields and that's this week's Report From the Fields.