Latest

Ted Cruz accuses White House of ‘brazen censorship’ in trying to silence Tucker Carlson over vaccines

January 8, 2023 | | Print Article

Sen. Ted Cruz is helping to bring attention to the latest bombshell about Twitter.

The bombshell comes courtesy newly appointed Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey.

His predecessor, Eric Schmitt, had filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration, and that suit has finally borne some fruit: White House emails showing the Biden administration trying to pressure Twitter into silencing conservatives.

Case in point:

In the email seen above, White House digital director Rob Flaherty pressures Twitter into reducing the reach of posts published by Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Tomi Lahren.

“Since we’ve been on the phone — the top post about vaccines today is tucker Carlson saying they don’t work. Yesterday was Tomi Lehren saying she won’t take one. This is exactly why I want to know what ‘reduction’ actually looks like — if ‘reduction’ means ‘pumping our most vaccine hesitant audience with tucker Carlson saying it doesn’t work’ then … I’m not sure it’s reduction!” the email reads.

The email has predictably been completely ignored by the establishment press.

That’s where Cruz enters the picture.

“This is brazen government censorship. If there are any actual ‘journalists’ remaining in the corrupt corporate media, they should vocally condemn the Biden White House getting their lap dogs in Big Tech to silence major media outlets,” he tweeted Saturday about the email.

Look:

He was right about this being “brazen government censorship.” But he was likely wrong to believe or hope that any establishment media “journalist” would condemn the Biden administration over its censorious behavior.

Remember that these are the same “journalists” who’ve almost completely ignored the “Twitter Files” and their grand significance. Instead, last month these same “journalists” chose to make a big deal out of Musk unilaterally (WITHOUT government intervention) suspending some of their own for violating the platform’s doxxing rules.

“ABC, NBC, and CBS all ignored round six of the Twitter Files on their Saturday morning shows. The revelation that the FBI was working with Twitter to suppress content was not nearly as interesting to them as Elon Musk’s version of Twitter suspending several accounts for sharing information about his private jet and physical location,” NewsBusters reported around mid-December.

“ABC’s Good Morning America was the worst offender with co-host Whit Johnson introducing the matter, ‘Now to the 180 from Elon Musk after his latest Twitter move. International criticism raining down on the billionaire after the social network suspended several journalists. ABC’s Alexis Christoforous is here with more on that,'” the conservative watchdog site added.

What hasn’t really been discussed yet is how to stop the government from colluding with big tech giants like Twitter to silence dissident voices.

According to Jed Rubenfeld, a professor at Yale Law School, the best course of action would be for Twitter users — particularly those targeted for censorship — to file a “class action [suit] against the government agents involved in the censorship.”

“[A]s the Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), it is an ‘axiomatic’ principle of constitutional law that the government ‘may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish,'” he wrote last week for The Wall Street Journal.

“That’s exactly what the Twitter Files show officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies doing—inducing and encouraging Twitter to censor constitutionally protected speech.”

More examples of this attempted censorship can be seen below::

“The plaintiffs wouldn’t have to prove Twitter was a state actor. It wouldn’t even matter if Twitter had rebuffed all the government’s censorship requests (which it didn’t),” Rubenfeld’s op-ed for the Journal continued.

“Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made this point in Backpage.com v. Dart (2015): When a government official unconstitutionally attempts to induce a private company not to carry someone else’s speech, the official’s conduct ‘is actionable and can be enjoined’ even if the company ‘ignores it.'”

Rubenfeld added that a class action suit would also “eliminate another roadblock.”

“Some free-speech cases against social-media companies have been dismissed on the ground that the individual plaintiffs couldn’t show that the government had targeted them or their posts in particular. A class action escapes this difficulty,” he wrote.

“It might target the CDC’s successful effort to get Twitter to adopt policies banning posts arguing that children didn’t need Covid-19 vaccines or observing that the government’s own data show the shots don’t prevent infection or transmission. These policies denied all users important information and opinions and thereby violated the First Amendment rights of listeners as well as speakers regardless of whether the government was involved in a particular individual’s being censored.”

Republished with permission from American Wire News Service

DONATE TO BIZPAC REVIEW

Please help us! If you are fed up with letting radical big tech execs, phony fact-checkers, tyrannical liberals and a lying mainstream media have unprecedented power over your news please consider making a donation to BPR to help us fight them. Now is the time. Truth has never been more critical!

$10
$15
$25
$50
Other
$
Success! Thank you for donating. Please share BPR content to help combat the lies.
Vivek Saxena
Latest posts by Vivek Saxena (see all)

Comment

We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.

BPR INSIDER COMMENTS

Scroll down for non-member comments or join our insider conversations by becoming a member. We'd love to have you!

Latest Articles