Deep State Speech Police Disarmed in Bombshell Court Ruling

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals corrects a grave error by taking CISA -- the 'nerve center' of the fed-led censorship regime -- offline

(U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit)

Fifth Circuit Corrects Critical Error In Prior Ruling To Shut Down Deep-State Censorship Tactic

In a bombshell ruling, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has shut down the “nerve center” of federal government-led speech policing, correcting a critical error in its prior jurisprudence and striking a major blow for the First Amendment and against deep-state election interference.

The court’s opinion comes in the landmark free speech case in the digital era, Missouri v. Biden. Before the litigation landed in appellate court, Louisiana District Judge Terry A. Doughty declared in a fitting Independence Day ruling that federal authorities from the Biden White House to the FBI and CDC had likely engaged in “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

The district court therefore disarmed the speech police by ordering a wide-ranging preliminary injunction, prohibiting federal authorities from coercing and coordinating with platforms to suppress ever-growing categories of disfavored speech during the pendency of the case.

This incensed the feds, who proceeded to appeal the decision to the Fifth Circuit, ironically arguing that by being barred from censoring disfavored speech by social media proxy, the government itself was being censored.

The Fifth Circuit wasn’t buying that argument. It upheld the crux of the lower court’s ruling, concurring that the administrative state’s pressuring of and partnering with social media companies to squelch Americans’ speech on expressly political and subjective matters effectively rendered the platforms state actors and their “content moderation” efforts an assault on the First Amendment.

So the Fifth Circuit upheld a modified form of the injunction and imposed it on the federal authorities fingered by the plaintiffs — with one glaring omission. A Department of Homeland Security sub-agency, CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, would not be subject to the injunction.

This arguably undermined the integrity of the entire opinion.

With a new ruling, the Fifth Circuit has corrected that grave error.

I write about it in a new piece at The Federalist.