Biden Administration’s Assault On The First Amendment

I’m always amazed by Americans who believe the First Amendment protects our free speech rights everywhere. It doesn’t, of course. It restrains the government from infringing on our speech.

The First Amendment does not protect us in the workplace or in our neighborhoods or in the backseat of an Uber.

When Donald Trump and others argued that they were deprived of their free speech rights when they were banned from Twitter or Facebook, they were wrong. 

These social media companies may be monopolies, but they’re private companies. The First Amendment does not apply.

Or does it?

On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted that the administration was working with social media platforms to censor messages they claim are spreading “misinformation” about Covid-19 vaccines and the pandemic.

Uh-oh.

This changes everything. Perhaps lawsuits against the powerful, left-leaning social media giants will be successful if it can be shown that they’re doing the bidding of the government.

Here’s what Psaki said:

We are in regular touch with the social media platforms and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff and also members of our COVID-19 team…this is a big issue, of misinformation, specifically on the pandemic.

We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s Office. We are flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”

Here’s the money quote: “It’s important to take faster action against harmful posts … and Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful violative posts.”

If this doesn’t scare the bejabbers out of you, you slept through civics class.

In fact, this sort of government meddling in discourse is exactly what the First Amendment was designed to protect against. The government should not be ferreting out speech it disagrees with and trying to silence it.

And yes, the First Amendment remains in effect, even in a pandemic, although I’m sure there are plenty of blockheads cheering the Biden administration’s attempts to muzzle those who dare question the party line on vaccines.

The new Minister of Information - er, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy - declared  yesterday that “misinformation is a public health threat.”

That’s a curious choice of words. Positively Orwellian.

Hmmm, what should be done with these “public health threats”? 

Stomp them out? Put the perps in gulags? Send them to re-education camps?

America has entered perilous territory. Actually, we entered it 17 months ago when most states suspended civil liberties, and citizens - terrified by hysteria whipped up by the media - meekly acquiesced.

Now the feds are ignoring the First Amendment and openly admitting that they want to control what we are allowed to read about the Covid-19 vaccines. It appears no questions about the safety or efficacy of the drugs will be tolerated by this administration.

That’s chilling.

It was Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who said this about the First Amendment back in 1927:

“If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

In other words, the cure for bad speech is more speech.

Someone remind the brazen Biden administration of this.