Nice Little Facebook You Have There-Be Ashamed if Anything Happened to it!

Supreme Court in Murthy, opinion by Barrett (!), sanctions these Mafia type threats!

From Justice Alito’s dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday which in effect gave the Government free rein to censor American citizens by pressuring platforms such as Facebook:

… the White House did not believe that Facebook was “trying to solve the problem,” so he informed Facebook that “[i]nternally we have been considering our options on what to do about it.”

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… “You are hiding the ball.” Flaherty [White House Director of Digital Strategy noted that the White House was “gravely concerned that [Facebook] is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy,” and he demanded to know how Facebook was trying to solve the problem. Id., at 9365. In his words, “we want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game with us when we ask you what is going on.”

***

… Flaherty was not fully satisfied. He said that the additional data Facebook offered was not “going to get us the info we’re looking for,” but “it shows to me that you at least understand the ask.”

This would qualify —or should qualify— as the rankest kind of tyrannical treatment of a subject in the best tradition of a Mafia Don but it was not enough for the three “conservatives” (scare quotes very intentionally placed) on the Supreme Court who teamed up with Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson to hold that the plaintiffs in the case, Murthy v. Missouri , had not shown they had standing to sue in an opinion authoried by Justice Amy Coney Barrett (!).

Here is a very brief summary of the Court’s holding from an article in The Federalist entitled The Supreme Court is No Going to Save You:

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Murthy v. Missouri dropped Wednesday, shattering the hopes of conservatives that maybe, just maybe, the Judicial Branch would stand up for the First Amendment rights of ordinary Americans against the egregious abuses of the executive bureaucracy.

But no. The Court instead ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing because the Biden White House allegedly backed off of its censorship campaign after the 2022 midterms (it didn’t). The ruling essentially allows the federal government to continue trampling on the First Amendment rights of ordinary Americans by deputizing social media companies to do what federal agencies cannot do directly: police what Americans are allowed to say online.

He continues with a most unpleasant message none of us would like to entertain but one which we had better start taking seriously in view of how broken our beloved Republic is:

But whatever happens in November, the Court’s failure to protect the free speech rights of Americans against censorship by the government should be a wake-up call for all of us. Our institutions are rotten, they do not function as intended, and we cannot rely on them to protect us or maintain our constitutional system of government. This is as true of the Supreme Court as it is of Congress and the Executive Branch. (Emphasis mine)

I should note here that while The Federalist does lean center-right, it is one the most solid venues I know of for heavily researched investigative reporting and is home to such highly respected commentators as Mollie Hemingway, Joy Pullman, Sean Davis and Margot Cleveland (one of the very best legal analyists writing today in my opinion). Thus while the message is “not a pretty sight” and difficult to process, it is one to be taken very, very seriously.

Justice Alito also noted that then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki (the mere sight of whom makes me psick!) said that the White House “engage[s] with [Facebook] regularly,” she said, and Facebook “certainly understand[s] what our asks are” and she also observed, in the fashion of any self-respecting street thug, “ … that the White House was “reviewing” whether §230 should be amended to open the platforms to suit. …”

More from Justice Alito’s dissent:

The totality of this record—constant haranguing, dozens of demands for compliance, and references to potential consequences— evince “a scheme of state censorship.”

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For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech. Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent.

An author observed that we should also not put our hopes for turning around our country on electing Trump as he might not even have the chance to do anything after this decision which gives almost carte blanche freedom to the gang of hoodlums now running our government. They have been given a free pass to be sure no criticism of the Biden Crime Family sees the light of day. They did it before as in, for just one example, the 51 whores of the intel community who helped drag Joe over the finish line. They will absolutely, positively do it again. And again. And again.

That troubling line bears repeating: Our institutions are rotten.

Is it now open season on the First Amendment? After yesterday, that is no longer a far-fetched conspiracy theory.

God Help us.