As time passes and the coronavirus pandemic recedes further and further into the past, it's becoming increasingly clear that there is little chance anyone will be held accountable for the colossal blunders, the infringement on our rights, and the incalculable damage done to our children as a result of the government's COVID policies. Yet in a sea of unpunished abuses of power, there was some good news last week, in the form of an injunction issued by a federal judge in Louisiana.
The ruling was handed down by Judge Terry Doughty in a lawsuit brought by the of Louisiana and the attorney general of Missouri, as well as a number of individuals who had questioned the government's handling of the crisis. Judge Doughty said that the evidence before him demonstrated "the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history," and the plaintiffs had proven that "the government has used its power to silence the opposition."
As a result, Judge Doughty has banned the Biden administration—specifically the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—from communicating with social media companies for "the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech."
While we can't know the ultimate outcome of this litigation, Doughty's ruling is nevertheless a signal victory for free speech that should be the start of an effort to roll back the damage done to our freedoms by the government's reaction to COVID.
The lawsuit was a reaction to the way that these government agencies and the White House coordinated with Big Tech companies and social media giants like Facebook and Twitter to silence opinions they viewed as dangerous. These Internet companies effectively banned speech that diverged from the COVID orthodoxies handed down from Washington throughout the pandemic during a period that began in the last months of the Trump administration but reached its height in the first year of President Joe Biden's term.
To justify this censorship, officials claimed that the so-called "misinformation" being spread by critics of government policy presented a danger that could not be tolerated during a public health emergency. Encouraged by federal health authorities like Dr. Anthony Fauci, state and local governments engaged in unparalleled curtailments of individual rights during the lockdowns and throughout their efforts to enforce mask and vaccine mandates. As the extensive reporting in the Twitter Files revealed, the government used its connections to Silicon Valley oligarchs and their underlings to get them to effectively shut down any critiques of its policies.
While presidents and government officials have long sought to use their influence with the media to curry favorable coverage or to prevent security breaches relating to national defense (a justification that Judge Doughty specifically exempted from his injunction), the ability of a few large tech companies to largely control public discourse is unprecedented in history. The people that run Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter aren't comparable to those who operate conventional press outlets. They own the virtual public square and have the ability to influence public discourse in a manner that powerful media magnates of the past could never have dreamed of doing.
That ability was demonstrated during the 2020 election, when a combination of the Hillary Clinton campaign operatives and members of the security establishment helped convince their ideological allies who run Big Tech to silence coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story broken by the New York Post during the last weeks of the campaign.
In a similar abuse of power, Washington officials directly requested censorship of COVID policy skeptics.
As dangerous as this collusion between those who control the information superhighway and government is in principle, it looks even worse from the perspective of 2023: The lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, and school closures that were implemented in 2020 and 2021 were treated as sacrosanct "science" that was only questioned by flat-earthers, lunatics, and those intent on promoting chaos. But we now know that many if not most of these policies were mistaken. Some knew it at the time, like Stanford University's Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, who was among those silenced and is now part of this lawsuit.
At a moment in history when the reach and power of government has grown far beyond anything envisioned by the Founders and Big Tech has a stranglehold on the means by which contemporary Americans consume news and communicate, this combination of factors provides a clear path to the creation of a dictatorial regime that can easily manipulate and control discourse under the guise of protecting the public from opinions arbitrarily designated as beyond the pale.
While not every utterance of every COVID policy skeptic or Biden administration critic is correct or even responsible, the means by which this or any future administration can use its influence to silence dissent must be severely limited. The alternative is to drift into acceptance of a tyrannical policy that will mean the end of free speech.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
