The MAGA/QAnon crowd celebrated Independence Day with one of their own, a federal district court judge in Louisiana who issued a broad injunction against President Joe Biden and a bunch of his administration officials from working with social media companies to combat disinformation. Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, ruled that the administration likely violated the First Amendment by censoring online free speech about the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 election, and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Doughty spared no hyperbole in his opinion: “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history. In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.” That’s a hell of a lot of work “if” is doing there.
“Although this case is still relatively young, and at this stage the Court is only examining it in terms of Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on the merits, the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario,” Doughty writes. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.'” Many, perhaps even most, would consider the pandemic a time of mass death.
