Is free speech facing its Waterloo? The fight’s outcome will be “the nearest-run thing you ever saw,” as the Duke of Wellington said of the original battle.
The Supreme Court dodged the issue recently when Justice Amy Coney Barrett and a 6-3 majority, including three Democratic appointees, dismissed Murthy v. Missouri on a technicality.
Plaintiffs were ruled to lack standing because they didn’t show specific federal arm-twisting led a given social media platform to stanch news on a particular subject. This lack of what Justice Samuel Alito, dissenting, called “a series of ironclad links” means no accountability yet applies to White House officials who bully platforms to censor conservative sites that contradict official propaganda.
It invites Democrats and the Washington bureaucracy to keep shutting down “misinformation,” which to them means any evidence or argument contradicting the official orthodoxies they peddle to the public.
But while the court was failing to draw bright lines against censorship, the House Small Business Committee was doing oversight, following up a Washington Examiner scoop that exposed a State Department grant of $100,000 to the Global Disinformation Index, a malevolent outfit that concocts a blacklist to steer advertisers away from conservative news sites.
Washington financed an effort to inflict financial harm on media companies, including the Washington Examiner, that have the temerity to publish stories the Left dislikes. Our offending “disinformation” was an accurate report on data showing conservative married women are happier than liberal unmarried ones. This truth is dangerous only to the agenda of left-wing forces rushing to wreck civilized norms including marriage. Our reporting is not false or dangerous to the America most people want — quite the reverse.
One line of our reporting that for several years has been dismissed as misinformation is about President Joe Biden’s manifest infirmity, his failing powers, which were brutally exposed in a debate against former President Donald Trump on June 27.
Even before Biden entered the White House in January 2021, it was clear to unbiased viewers that he would be incapable of doing the most demanding job in the world. Honest news organizations said so loudly, lucidly, and repeatedly.
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The truth we spoke to power was denied by White House officials, by the leadership and rank and file of the Democratic Party, by the Left in all its manifestations, and by propagandizing narrators of liberal news and entertainment media. These are the people who employ “fact-checkers” to traduce conservative free speakers and the organizations that employed them. Yet the self-styled champions of democracy and of truth conspired to bury the biggest fact of all — that Biden was in catastrophically feeble condition and could not lead the country except within a conspiracy of deception.
It suited the party of the Left to have a glove puppet at the head of the government because he would not — he could not — resist staffers who supposedly worked for him but who were really radicals who had him surrounded. He gave a supposedly centrist face to a vastly dishonest movement that is changing America for the worse. Now its cynicism, lies, and contempt for America has been revealed for all to see.
