Experts have said that the Missouri v. Biden case is “the most important free speech case in a generation.”
The case involves the federal government wholesale deleting and deplatforming millions of Americans from social media based entirely on their truthful political statements.
Just this past week, the trial court has issued a new order in the case, after an appeal to the Supreme Court was successful for the Biden administration, which sought to undo a preliminary injunction that would have stopped the censorship regime.
Now, the trial court is ordering the two sides to conduct “jurisdictional discovery” so that it can prove one issue critical to the case moving forward: whether the Plaintiffs on the side of free speech have enough legal ‘standing’ to move forward. What this means is that the parties are now going to fight about whether the specific Plaintiffs in the case can prove that they were specifically harmed.
You can read the court order here.
Whereas previously the parties could show the massive censorship regime and show that they were deplatformed, now the parties must show the connection and demonstrate that the specific Biden speech suppression complex deplatformed these specific Plaintiffs.
Thus the court is allowing both parties to issue ‘discovery’ to primarily third parties right now, meaning demand evidence, documents, and depositions from people, organizations, and companies, in order to build the record of evidence both parties need to make their arguments.
The claims in the case cannot rest on mere speculation, the parties need to be able to get tangible evidence to back up their claims. Lawyers involved in the case say the critical issue at this juncture is: proving that the federal government targeted a specific Plaintiff, and that the Plaintiff’s speech was harmed as a result.
This critical free speech case is now entering a challenging phase where they must know what evidence to look for, what to ask for, what to fight for, and what it means.
The government has been claiming that Plaintiffs cannot prove that they were specifically harmed. The only way that a person could prove the government deplatformed them through an illegal request to delete their social media comment or profile would be to have access to sensitive government files, however.
Legal experts say the government’s arguments are in bad faith, meaning that they refuse to confront the obvious facts by using sophistry and deceptive arguments.
One lawyer involved with the case explains, “Getting any kind of discovery against the government is a win, but here we’re dealing with very secretive departments that were cloaking a lot of the illegal things they were doing behind words like ‘disinformation’ and ‘propaganda.’ These are governmental bodies and agents who were likely hiding their tracks, so this phase of things will be very tricky. Thank goodness the states of Louisiana and Missouri have been such leaders on this issue, and are courageously fighting Washington for the free speech rights of their citizens.”
The trial court is in the western district of
Louisiana, in Monroe, Louisiana, for this case filed by the then-Attorney Generals of Missouri and Louisiana against Joe Biden and the federal government. The judge is Judge Terry A. Doughty.
This summer’s decision, issued on June 26th and written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was a huge setback for free speech rights for dissident media outlets and individuals subjected to government censorship.
It later came out that one of Justice Coney Barrett’s clerks is very close to the free speech suppression complex‘s Newsguard organization, among others.
Justice Barrett’s decision was primarily procedural in nature, and prevented the State of Missouri from obtaining a restraining order against the federal government, to stop it from continuing to censor the political speech and opinions of Americans online while the case worked its way through the courts. This motion was known as a “preliminary injunction” and it is a common tactic to get a party to stop the bad conduct while the case is ongoing.
TGP Publisher Jim Hoft is the lead Plaintiff.
Robert F. Kennedy has also filed into the case as a Plaintiff, for being deplatformed related to vaccine information, and the court noted that the nation’s Presidential election results might create a situation where both sides in the case are represented by the same parties.
Said the court in its order, “Especially relevant and equally wild, one of the Kennedy Plaintiffs may soon replace or control Defendants.”
The court’s order did not permit open discovery or set deadlines, it retained the power to approve or deny any discovery requests between the parties.
It has repeatedly emerged that the government was not just interested in suppressing false information, but was also actively suppressing what they knew was truthful information.
What the legal discovery process has revealed in this case is that the federal government in the wake of the COVID plandemic set up a free-speech-suppression industrial complex. Not only could the White House, FBI, and literally dozens of other federal officials and agencies complain about one supposed bit of so-called ‘disinformation’ on a social media platform, but they had, instead, set up an automated system to suppress the thoughts, words, arguments, expressions, comments, of millions of Americans. The discovery process has revealed a massive federal speech suppression system.
These speech suppressions were not on obscure topics or lightly used, the government deleted, deplatformed, suppressed, and banned major current political topics, went after both prominent and obscure individuals, and were working hand-in-hand with third party left-wing non-profits and activist groups.
In just one request for takedowns, the FBI demanded Twitter delete 929,000 tweets they claimed were ‘foreign’ speech they disliked.
In another instance, the FBI demanded the deletion of a pro-Second Amendment post ‘liked’ by nearly 100,000 users on Facebook.
The government tried to create a ‘real-time’ monitoring and flagging of content it disliked which, at its height, was flagging 2.5% of all Tweets on Twitter as ‘potential misinformation.’
The government is even specifically identified as targeting The Gateway Pundit for censorship. Legal filings in the case make clear, “Defendants even appear to be currently involved in an ongoing project that encourages and engages in censorship activities specifically targeting Hoft’s [The Gateway Pundit] website.”
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