(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Tech companies are once again colluding with Democrats to push disinformation and censor legitimate conservative opinions, this time with the imprimatur of legitimacy conferred by the U.S. Supreme Court that allows them to do so more shamelessly and aggressively than ever.
Today’s censorship is being made possible by the letters A, C and B—as in Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
While the court’s two other centrists, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts, are equally culpable (along with its leftist bloc) in allowing the atrocity that is Murthy v. Missouri, it was Barrett’s name on the majority opinion.
And, indeed, her support for the wrong side in several of the court’s other recent landmark cases has raised serious red flags.
Pundit Mark Levin speculated recently that Barrrett has already gone the way of Harry Blackmun and David Souter—two Republican-appointed justices who had, by the end of their terms, become some of its most unabashedly left-leaning, likely due to what is sometimes dubbed the “Greenhouse effect” in honor of a former New York Times reporter fond of haranguing the court’s conservatives.
“I’m telling you that Barrett has decided she’s a politician, not a Justice,” Levin noted on a recent podcast, according to Newsweek. By the end of her term, the 52-year-old justice “will have flipped all the way to the left,” he added.
As I pointed out a while ago, Amy Coney Barrett is flipping
The media now owns Amy Coney Barrett. She’s the latest in a long line of formerly conservative justice nominees who is smitten with media adulation. It’ll get worse.https://t.co/k266uA1nDc
— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) July 7, 2024
With Democrats in Congress and the media exerting immense pressure on conservative justices like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, perhaps Barrett, the court’s youngest jurist—who replaced liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsberg—remains in survival mode, opting to pick her battles carefully.
But in the process, she is throwing essential civil liberties, such as First Amendment free-speech rights, under the bus and severely undermining the safeguards that help preserve America’s democratic institutions.
CHILLING IMPLICATIONS
Barrett’s maverick streak made no difference in the recent Fischer and Trump rulings—which sided in favor of conservatives by, respectively, tossing the Justice Department’s overreach on Jan. 6 “obstruction” cases and forcing the D.C. district court to adjudicate whether former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election challenges qualify for presidential immunity.
However, the Murthy decision—which found the court’s “wet noodle” wing delivering a win for Big Tech and the Deep State by deciding that the plaintiffs lacked sufficient standing after years of alarming anti-conservative censorship and government collusion on social-media platforms—will continue to have chilling implications for free speech until the right case comes along to overturn it.
It effectively gave sites like Google (and YouTube), Facebook (and Instagram), LinkedIn and countless other leftist dominated tech companies carte blanche to continue the sort of egregious suppression of views that many noted in the lead-up to the 2020 election, with Hunter Biden’s laptop becoming the most ignominious example.
In addition to the laptop, the case dealt with the aggressive suppression of COVID skepticism—much of which has borne out as valid, but which continues to be mischaracterized due to the stigma attached by government-backed propaganda that was designed to clear the paths for Big Pharma’s mRNA “vaccines” to get their emergency approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
Then there are the questions surrounding the irregularities in the 2020 election—questions that have fueled ongoing suspicions of massive vote fraud and a stolen election, since all of the major public and private institutions colluded to prevent any sort of meaningful presentation of evidence.
‘AN IN-KIND CONTRIBUTION FROM BIG TECH’
The silencing of this pivotal component in democracy emboldened the Biden administration to continue pushing lie after lie, culminating in President Joe Biden’s recent debate performance, when the house of cards came tumbling down.
But luckily for the gaslighting leftist establishment, SCOTUS had come to its rescue just days before.
A three-word post from Biden’s personal account on Tuesday made clear that Democrats are fully aware of the Murthy decision’s implications and have every intention of leveraging them to their fullest advantage.
Google Project 2025.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 9, 2024
Even as the main storyline dominating the news cycle continues to be Biden’s own mental and physical decline, and the existential crisis within his party over whether to replace him or double-down on laying cover for his obvious infirmities, Democrat operatives are hoping to use an otherwise mundane collection of whitepapers from a conservative think-tank as a boogeyman to redirect mainstream media attention toward a shiny new object.
Anybody who heeded the president’s call to “Google” the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 would receive little, if any, substantive information regarding the policies themselves; nor would they learn that its experts developed the proposals independent of—and, indeed, to some extent, in spite of—Trump’s ongoing role as the de-facto party leader.
The main objective of the initiative was to offer expert analysis and research that was “candidate agnostic,” in the words of Project 2025 director Paul Dans.
However, Biden’s campaign appears to have launched and promoted its own fake Project 2025 website—an alarmingly brazen tactic, especially coming from the party that has so frequently panic-mongered about the spread of disinformation interfering with the electoral process.
Meanwhile, the top search results for Google—and other engines, such as Yahoo and Duck Duck Go—are laden with Democrat talking points from sources like Media Matters and the Marc Elias-backed blog “Democracy Docket.”
While Headline USA’s own story debunking some of these lies was prominently featured over the weekend on ZeroHedge, garnering more than 133,000 views, there is no trace of any conservative media coverage of Project 2025 several pages deep into the search engines.
Google was sure to rig the search results to propaganda attacks.
Another in-kind contribution from big tech.
Putting these people in jail should be a Project 2025 priority. pic.twitter.com/loAzLawp4Z
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) July 9, 2024
COMMUNITY DOUBLE-STANDARDS AT LINKEDIN
Search engines like Google are not the only ones likely to relish in their newfound freedom to censor dissenting or disagreeable viewpoints with impunity.
Social-media users can expect platforms traditionally hostile to conservative views to begin ratcheting up those efforts yet again, likely under duress from the federal intelligence apparatus.
LinkedIn, founded by notorious lawfare financier Reid Hoffman, has long been suspected of being one of the worst offenders.
Because the site is oriented toward professional networking, it is understandable that it might have some tightly enforced community standards not found on other sites. Unfortunately, those standards are inconsistently applied and often have appeared to target conservative viewpoints.
And we have the receipts to prove it.
On Tuesday night, this editor responded to a post from Michael Cohen, the former Trump lawyer turned antagonist and key witness in his Manhattan porn-star trial.
Cohen notably referred to former Trump Administration Attorney General William Barr as the “POS [piece of s**t] Attorney General #BillBarr.”
The response simply pointed out the irony over the fact that Trump and his supporters likely shared Cohen’s disdain for Barr, who ultimately revealed himself to be just as disloyal to the president as Cohen.
But unlike Cohen’s original post, the response was promptly flagged as “hate speech” by LinkedIn’s automatic artificial-intelligence thoughtcrime scanners.
An effort to appeal the censorship was, likewise, swiftly shut down.
Although I filed a report on Cohen’s comment, that appears to have gone unaddressed, apart from hiding it from my personal feed.
The complaint over the censorship double-standard has now been escalated to a higher level of LinkedIn’s customer service team and is pending response.
In addition to having any negative marks cleared from my account (which I have long suspected may be causing posts to be suppressed), I demanded a formal apology from LinkedIn and an acknowledgment that its enforcement of its standards were inconsistent and possibly politically motivated.
A PATTERN OF CENSORSHIP
On at least two other occasions I have been suspended for spurious reasons, one of which, in May 2023 appeared to be linked to a post I made about the John Durham report, although LinkedIn subsequently claimed I had used mild profanity in a separate post earlier that day.
Another suspension last fall stemmed from criticism of a British Hamas apologist—purportedly a professor at Cambridge University—whose intellectual acumen I questioned.
In response to the May 2023 censorship incident, Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C.—a member of the House weaponization subcommittee who is currently running for attorney general of North Carolina—said that House Republicans’ efforts to hold social-media companies accountable had been slow but steady.
“Although I am not satisfied with the pace, the staff has a broad swath of subpoenas outstanding to social media operators, INCLUDING LinkedIn,” Bishop told me at the time.
It is unclear how the recent Murthy decision may have impacted legislative efforts to conduct oversight and hold bad actors accountable under statutes such as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
A separate Supreme Court case in the recent session shot down efforts by Florida and Texas to enact their own anti-censorship laws, remanding them back to the lower courts.
It is possible that by gaining control of the White House and Congress, Republicans could enact legislation to hold companies accountable at the federal level. But doing so requires that they first win elections—and the Big Tech censorship industrial complex will be hell bent, once again, on preventing that.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
