An Extinction-Level Event for Free Speech at the Supreme Court?

A close read of oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri suggests our First Amendment is in great peril

8 Shocking Takeaways From Landmark Murthy v. Missouri Censorship Case

After attending oral arguments at the Supreme Court in the landmark Murthy v. Missouri free speech case on Monday, I shared my initial troubled impressions in a column at the New York Post.

For a sanity check, I then did a close read of the transcript, which I analyzed in a lengthy thread on X.

I build on that thread in a new piece at The Federalist highlighting some of the most critical and often poignant exchanges during oral arguments.

An excerpt:

On multiple occasions, the U.S. government lamented that the plaintiffs in the case — eminent doctors who dissented from the public health establishment’s Covid orthodoxy, Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Aaron Kheriaty; the Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft; and health freedom advocate Jill Hines — were using the courts to “audit” their censorship efforts.

In so doing, the government, which claims it has free speech rights, suggested it believes it too has a right to privacy regarding said censorship efforts.

Officials may no doubt believe they should be able to operate without Americans looking over their shoulders, surely would invoke rationales like national security to justify it, and fearmonger that Murthy will open the floodgates to more such “audits.” “We can’t bog down unimpeachable bureaucrats and the courts,” they would likely say.

But their position raises a question: Are they more concerned about being probed, or that the probe at hand revealed the massive size, pervasive scope, and nefarious nature of the government’s censorship efforts?

Simply put, without Murthy v. Missouri we would have known almost nothing about this brazen conspiracy to kill our First Amendment, and therefore lacked anything remotely resembling a window into the censorship-industrial complex. So again, is the government’s issue with the audit, or with what the audit revealed about its depredations?

Read the whole thing here.