The sweeping censorship case has been moving right along for several months now, with a three-judge panel in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals having recently heard oral arguments from both sides about the matter. In a nutshell, it is really not looking good for Biden's Department of Justice (DOJ), which bumbled around and failed to present a valid defense as part of its appeal.
In case you missed it, a preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden placed new restrictions on the Biden regime that said regime is now trying to challenge with an appeal. The problem is that the Biden regime has no ground upon which to stand.
One of the judges in the appeals case has already come out with guns blazing to declare that the Biden regime "strongarms" social media companies to do its bidding using "veiled and not-so-veiled threats." Another described Big Tech's relationship with the Biden regime as being one where the government yells "Jump!" and the companies respond with, "How high?"
"That's a really nice social media company you've got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it," said another judge, describing the nature of the government's unhealthy and unconstitutional relationship with the social media tech giants.
In a masterful argument, attorney John Sauer, representing the state of Louisiana, successfully argued that the Biden regime repeatedly violated the First Amendment with its egregious, strong-arming tactics of coercion against Big Tech, citing evidence riddled throughout the Facebook Files.
"You have a really interesting snapshot into what Facebook C-suite is saying," Sauer said during the hearing.
"They're emailing Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg and saying things like ... 'Why were we taking out speech about the origins of covid and the lab leak theory?'" The response, Sauer added, was, "'Well, we shouldn't have done it, but we're under pressure from the administration.
(Related: This past May, the U.S. government finally admitted that it looks at Americans as cattle to be mind-controlled as part of the globalists' "cognitive infrastructure.")
Biden White House blackmailed Facebook to impose censorship or else lose deal with European Union
One big source of leverage for the Biden regime was the fact that Facebook, one of its targets, needed the Biden regime's help to negotiate a deal for the social media to remain available throughout the European Union (EU).
At one point, Nick Clegg, Facebook's President of Global Affairs, wrote in an email that there were "bigger fish to fry with the Administration – data flows, etc." What Clegg was referring to in this instance are data flows that Facebook needed the Biden regime to negotiate for on its behalf to maintain its $1.2 billion annual European business.
Put another way, the Biden regime threatened to not fight for Facebook's EU deal unless the social media platform agreed to censor certain targets on demand. This is a form of treasonous blackmail that is both unconstitutional and criminal.
Beyond this, Sauer further argued that the joint activity taking place between the Biden regime and Big Tech is also unconstitutional, amounting to little more than an online book burning session.
"Imagine a scenario where senior White House staffers contact book publishers ... and tell them, 'We want to have a book burning program, and we want to help you implement this program ... We want to identify for you the books that we want burned, and by the way, the books that we want burned are the books that criticize the administration and its policies," Sauer explained.
With no defense, DOJ attorney Daniel Tenny resorted to "nitpicking and misrepresenting" the record
Sauer's arguments in the case have been so bulletproof that DOJ attorney Daniel Tenny is now left with nothing to argue in the Biden regime's defense. According to the Brownstone Institute, which has been closely tracking and documenting the case, Tenny "was left nitpicking and misrepresenting the record."
At one point, Tenny tried to deny that Tony Fauci and Francis Collins ever hatched a planned "takedown" of the Great Barrington Declaration. According to Tenny, the two career criminals instead had planned a takedown of "the premises of the Great Barrington Declaration."
Tenny also tried, but failed, to argue that no social media companies were ever instructed by the Biden regime to remove any "true" content from their platforms. We know from the Facebook Files that Tenny's claim is patently false, but this is what he presented to the court as an argument.
Internal research and email evidence clearly shows that Facebook was bullied by the Biden regime into taking down "often-true content" that stood to discourage some people from getting "vaccinated" for the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19).
Sauer quite easily eviscerated every incompetent argument put forth by Tenny, including the DOJ's claim that state-sponsored censorship was somehow justified in this case because of the "public health emergency" nature of the covid "pandemic."
"You can say this earthquake-related speech that's disinformation is false, it's wrong?" Sauer asked of Tenny. "The government can say it's bad, but the government can't say, 'social media platforms, you need to take it down.'"
"Just like a government can't stand at the podium and say, 'Barnes and Noble, you need to burn the bad books, burn the communist books, whatever it is.' They can't say take down speech on the basis of content."
Will the case of Missouri v. Biden be a success in the end? Stay tuned at Censorship.news.
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