Contrary to the repeated mantra of leftist censors, legal scholar Jonathan Turley debunked the claim that the Supreme Court vindicated the government in a lawsuit about censorship collusion.
In an April 9 article, Turley challenged the leftist claim that the U.S. Supreme Court’s punting on Murthy v. Missouri proved the Biden administration and Big Tech did not collude to silence free speech. “That is entirely untrue,” Turley clarified. He said the Supreme Court merely made the disappointing decision to reject the standing of the states of Missouri and Louisiana. The justices specifically noted it was not a ruling on the censorship allegations.
Turley’s written remarks came in response to NPR host Leila Fadel, who during a Monday interview with Turley claimed, “Last year, the Supreme Court rejected the claim that social media companies were pressured to take down posts about COVID-19 and the 2020 election.” Turley, however, wrote that “the justices went out of their way to expressly refute the notion that they were ruling on the merits of the coordination with the social media companies.”
For example, the Court’s Murthy opinion states in one footnote, “Because we do not reach the merits, we express no view as to whether the Fifth Circuit correctly articulated the standard for when the Government transforms private conduct into state action.” The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had previously ruled that the government was banned from pressuring social media companies to censor speech.
“The effort to portray evidence of collaboration between the government and social media companies as a ‘conspiracy theory’ or ‘myth’ is all too familiar,” Turley wrote. “It attempts to portray free speech advocates as unhinged or fringe figures to avoid answering the troubling questions raised by the Twitter Files, the Facebook Files, and thousands of pages of documentation produced in litigation and Congress.” Meanwhile, leftists blacklist, target, and censor Americans.
Turley argued this narrative is a rejection of hard evidence: “It is obvious that few of these anti-free speech figures want to address the thousands of pages on coordination and pressure exercised by the government. They also do not want to address the express statements from social media executives” to that effect.
Yet the denial is still repeated. In fact, on Tuesday, Nina Jankowicz, the former head of the defunct federal censorship entity the Disinformation Governance Board, wrote a piece for leftist outlet The Bulwark insanely denying the Biden-era government censorship cartel of which she was briefly part of. Jankowicz, who once called herself the “Mary Poppins of disinformation,” even accused President Donald Trump, who prioritized free speech from the first day of his executive orders, of constituting a bigger threat to free speech than the Biden administration. She based this crazed accusation on the fact that the Trump administration revoked the green card of an accused pro-Hamas foreign student activist.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment and provide an equal platform for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using MRC Free Speech America’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
