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Good evening. It's Monday, March 18. Tonight: choosing the most overlooked and under-discussed story of 2023 is not a difficult task, at least not for me. Last year, a federal district court judge ruled that the Biden administration committed one of the gravest attacks on the First Amendment right to free speech in decades, if not in history, by systematically coercing Big Tech platforms to censor dissent online and to silence various American dissidents, the government has singled out. This unconstitutional censorship regime, said the court, was accomplished with many of the key agencies of the United States government, including the FBI, the CIA, the CDC, and the highest levels of the White House itself. Though the case was at a preliminary stage, the court ordered these coercive efforts to cease immediately. The Biden Justice Department then appealed that decision to the Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the level of the federal judiciary immediately below the U.S. Supreme Court, and at the appellate court, a three-judge panel unanimously upheld the findings of that lower court judge. In large part, they did narrow the decision somewhat—they found that there was insufficient evidence of the CIA's involvement, for instance—but they did affirm the court finding that the Biden White House, the FBI, the CDC and other agencies abused its power in a systematic way to coerce and force compliance with its censorship orders by Big Tech.
These decisions were covered by corporate media, but they were radically downplayed. As Elon Musk pointed out over the weekend, in response to my statement that this series of court rulings was the most under-covered story of 2023, most Americans have no idea that any of this even happened. And we know why that is: it's because the U.S. corporate media in the United States affirmatively supports the Biden censorship regime that was declared unconstitutional. Indeed, one of the most surreal and destructive facts of American political life is that it is our country's media outlets – who traditionally took the lead in defending the values of free speech and a free press – that are now the leading agitators and activists for censorship of dissent carried out through the union of state and corporate power, which is what happened here, the U.S. government and Big Tech uniting to censor dissent. The media outlets that are supposed to defend free speech have been the leading activists demanding that now. To know that, one can look at all the different means these media outlets use to try to use their coercion to induce Big Tech to censor. But perhaps nothing revealed this grim reality more vividly than their reaction to the so-called Twitter Files. That was when Elon Musk, shortly after purchasing Twitter, opened up the company's corporate files to journalists such as Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Lee Fang and others to allow them to show Americans in great detail how aggressively and extensively the Biden administration was engaged in the systematic effort of online suppression. And when that tsunami of censorship evidence was reported and revealed, most of the corporate media united to implore Americans to look away, to ignore the reporting. They did everything they could to convince Americans that that reporting did not matter. In behavior that was as revealing as it was creepy. They read from the same verbatim script, pronouncing in unison that all of this reporting was a “nothing burger.”
Part of that, to be sure, was standard petty professional jealousy. There is nothing that enrages employees of media corporations more than journalists who break major stories without submitting to the constraints of the corporate masters for whom they work. That, for example, is why they're more than happy to see Julian Assange rotting away in prison because he has broken more major stories than all of them combined, without working within the constraints of corporate media. They hate him for it and that was also part of the reaction to the Twitter Files. But much of it was ideological. These media outlets and their employees favor this censorship regime. In fact, they work to implement it and so, the last thing they wanted was its exposure and its denunciation. Therefore, in the face of one of the most important leaks of court date corporate documents shedding light, ample light on this relationship between the state, on the one hand, the Big Tech on the other, they actually instructed their flock that it was not even worth paying attention to these people who call themselves, journalists, and ignore these documents. They mean nothing.
After the Biden DOJ again lost on the appellate level, it appealed to the Supreme Court, which decided to hear the case. This morning, the High Court heard an Oral Argument in which a lawyer for the government and a lawyer for the plaintiffs, those who were censored, presented their case. It is often the case – though not always – that it is foolish to try to predict the outcome of a court's ruling from what they say and do during Oral Argument. But there was no question that many of the justices on the Supreme Court, if not a majority, were quite sympathetic to several arguments that the Biden administration was making to defend its conduct. In particular, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson offered one of the most explicitly pro-censorship arguments I've ever heard a Supreme Court justice make. And while her colleagues may not have gone as far as she did, many of them, including some of the conservative justices, seemed quite comfortable, more comfortable than they should be with the role the Biden White House has been playing in systematically censoring online dissent. This is one of the most important free speech cases the Supreme Court has held in years. Far beyond the Twitter Files, there has been ample reporting, some of which we have done of ourselves, some of which have been done by others, that proves that it is one of the U.S. government's highest priorities to control and influence the flow of information and opinion online. The boundaries and the limits that they will have to face when doing so, if any, are of great importance. And today's oral arguments shed a lot of light on whether they will have any limits at all. We will examine that oral argument for you in detail.
Then, speaking of the surreal fact that the U.S. corporate media has become the leading agitators and activists for online censorship, The New York Times this weekend published what can only be described as a prose censorship manifesto, an opus of liberal ideology that justifies censorship as something for which we ought to be grateful. Over and over, this article immense the fact that the cause of free speech and the restraints that it imposes on the government somehow are preventing the government from doing all these important things to keep us safe from disinformation. That's the same argument—that we can't afford free speech in the era of disinformation—that has led Democrats repeatedly to defend the FBI and the CIA from censoring online. And it's the same argument that was made repeatedly this morning by Justice Brown Jackson, in her defense of censorship and the contempt that she heaped on the First Amendment. One of the reporters that the New York Times article discusses happens to be the same reporter who was the lead journalist in exposing much of this censorship regime, to begin with. He is Matt Taibbi, who, among other things, is the editor of Racket News at Substack and he will join us in just a little bit to discuss both this New York Times article that makes the effort to justify the censorship regime, as well as today's oral argument in front of the Supreme Court.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
