Americans have always been scrappy individuals willing to take enormous risks on something new in order to capitalize on future success. This was in the DNA of our Founding Fathers, and it continues to this day as we live the “American Dream” of building something out of nothing and ensuring prosperity for future generations.
Nowhere in recent history was this more true than during the dawn of the internet, which was built, fueled, and capitalized upon by the very same type of individuals who built our country. Instead of waiting to get picked, asking for instructions, or getting in line, Americans were able to pick themselves. They built businesses, then search engines, then social media platforms. They were widely successful without traditional office spaces, multimillion-dollar deals, or even advertising agencies to sell individual perspectives and innovative ideas.
You were in charge, and you could create and say anything you wanted to by solving problems, adding value, and creating a whole new world of possibility for you and your family. There were no gatekeepers, no dream quashers, and no real barriers to entry. It was an age of the individual, the rise of ideas, and the beginning of radical self-reliance.
But that all came to a screeching halt during the COVID-19 pandemic, when federal agencies positioned themselves as the ultimate gatekeepers—using deception, coercion, and flat-out censorship to stifle your freedom of speech, silence your ideas, shut down your businesses, and quash any ideas of self-reliance or alternative views.
Suddenly, many of us were plunged into Orwell’s dystopian world of Oceania, where people online “simply disappeared ... your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated—vaporized.”
Whether it was reporting or opining on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the lab leak theory, mask efficacy, the Great Barrington Declaration, or just plain common sense, if you shared your personal views on the trending topics of the day, your digital identity (or in too many cases, your actual livelihood) could be destroyed. And what we uncovered in our lawsuit Louisiana and Missouri v. Biden et al. was that the decision to vaporize you went all the way to the top—or as Biden’s director of digital media, Rob Flaherty, emphasized in an email to a major social media platform, it went all the way to “the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the White House.”
That’s why my office, along with the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, was in federal court earlier this month arguing against the federal government’s censorship of Americans via Big Tech. The oral arguments were astonishing.
When Judge Terry Doughty asked the White House lawyer if simple statements made by Americans on social media—such as “the vaccines don’t work” and “masks don’t stop the spread of COVID” and “the 2020 election was stolen”—were considered protected speech, he answered that it depends on whether those statements were spoken by a Russian operative. To quote another senior White House official, “Sigh.”
Of course, the arguments presented by the federal government ranged from (paraphrasing) “this is old news” and “COVID is over” to “nothing we did was illegal” and “if given the opportunity, we’ll do it again.” Like a cancer, this violation of the First Amendment has seeded itself deep within our federal institutions, and these government actors neither believe what they did was wrong nor have any qualms about doing it again.
That’s precisely why the amendments to our Constitution were written: to place strict limitations on the federal government. Make no mistake: If we can’t speak freely without fear of retaliation or censorship, we’ll lose a core aspect of who we are and always have been. Our Founders gave us a clear structure for our continued prosperity through a deep understanding of human nature, enabling us to modernize through technological innovation without sacrificing who we are.
And through this lawsuit, we’ve learned exactly how the federal government usurped social media companies, then used that medium to control what a senior Department of Homeland Security official calls the “cognitive infrastructure” of the American people—at a time when debate was more important than ever.
“Who is the Ministry of Truth?” the judge asked. Yet the federal government had no real response. That is because, as Orwell pointed out, “no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” That’s why the U.S. Constitution is the last thing standing between you and Big Brother.
While June 2’s court hearing was barely covered by the legacy press, you can rest assured that Louisiana and Missouri were defending you. And we will continue to fight for your First Amendment right to be an individual, to speak your mind, and to create the future you envision—both online and off.
