How does The New York Times not get the First Amendment?
US District Judge Terry Doughty ruled July 4 that the federal government can’t, in fact, bully social-media platforms like Twitter and Facebook into taking down speech it dislikes.
The Times’ response?
A long “news analysis” framing the decision in purely partisan terms and impugning the judge’s credibility.
The paper’s apparent reasoning: it’s bad for the White House and Democrats, and therefore dangerous and wrongheaded.
Team Biden (and Dems national, state and local) used first Donald Trump and then the pandemic as moral-panic springboards to ramp up government “anti-disinformation” efforts, justifying them on grounds of public health and safety.
And never mind that the First Amendment says the feds can’t restrict speech, nor (by implication) have third parties do that dirty work.
Yet the Times fawningly echoes the “disinfo” rationale, describing the censorship as meant to “prevent the spread of potentially dangerous information, particularly in an election or during emergencies like a pandemic.”
No: As the Twitter Files and other reporting amply show, the hammer came down again and again on true content that the feds (or Democrats) found inconvenient, as well as political opinion.
The Post’s reporting on Hunter’s laptop, for example.
Or our commentary on the likelihood of COVID having originated in a lab.
Both stories have since been utterly vindicated; both were suppressed on the same specious grounds.
It’s clearly censorship by other means.
And it’d be wrong even if we’d been wrong: The First Amendment has no “disinformation” exception, as decades of jurisprudence on speech make clear.
That applies even to RFK Jr.’s bonkers arguments about the dangers of vaccines, which are now getting suppressed by YouTube.
Ah, the disinfo warriors rejoin: It’s private companies doing the suppression of their own free will, so the First Amendment doesn’t apply.
But they only (or mainly, anyway) did it under government pressure, including threats of federal action if they didn’t obey. Hence the close-and-cuddly relationship between Big Tech and Big Government and frequent meetings, phone chats and email updates to coordinate the censorship efforts.
Free speech has to be free for everyone.
Even the wrong and the morally repulsive.
It’s beyond appalling that the Times can no longer see that.
Or that the Grey Lady simply refuses to, which is even sadder.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
