Aug. 30, 2022 - Epoch Times
08:03
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| Time | Text |
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| So, I had filed a lawsuit in Ohio in March, and on behalf of three Twitter users, some people may be familiar with, Mark Cengizzi, who's a cognitive theoretical scientist, Michael Sanger, who's a lawyer, and Daniel Coatsen, who was a lawyer and is now a stay-at-home dad. | |
| They had all been highly critical of the government, COVID policies, government-induced COVID policies since the beginning. | |
| But they had not been censored or suspended or anything on Twitter until the Biden administration took over. | |
| And more noticeably, once the Biden administration began a public campaign where it was threatening tech companies with regulation or other legal consequences, they've even talked about criminal liability, which is somewhat absurd. | |
| If they don't censor people for spreading COVID misinformation. | |
| Now, COVID misinformation, this is just a term that's used. | |
| It's kind of insidious. | |
| It's used to sort of discredit points of view that differ from those of the administration or those of the government. | |
| So, you know, they've said things like masks don't work, vaccines don't stop transmission, lockdowns do more harm than good. | |
| Things that are now, you know, The scientific consensus. | |
| So they were all suspended, and it was our contention that this was at the behest of the Biden administration. | |
| Unfortunately, that lawsuit was kicked out. | |
| The judge basically said that we didn't have enough evidence that our plaintiffs were censored because of the government, which I think is the totally wrong analysis for a number of reasons. | |
| But some good came out of it, which is the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana were considering bringing a similar lawsuit Let me just jump in. | |
| What was the evidence that you presented? | |
| You said you think the analysis was wrong. | |
| Right now, obviously, there's a lot more evidence, especially with these new lawsuits. | |
| But what evidence did you have then? | |
| At that time, what we had was a lot of public statements where Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Alejandro Mayarcas, then spokesperson for Biden, Jennifer Saki, We're going out in public and seeing these tech companies are killing people by not censoring them. | |
| If they don't do more, they're going to face legal consequences. | |
| We're working with them. | |
| We're flagging posts that they should be censoring. | |
| When the government gets involved in telling a private company what to do, that is no longer a private company's action. | |
| That's state action. | |
| And that implicates the First Amendment. | |
| So, you know, the argument had been, well, the tech companies are censoring people on their own. | |
| It's not a First Amendment violation. | |
| But we know now that it is. | |
| So part of the problem was when you file a lawsuit like this, you're supposed to be able to get to discovery. | |
| You're supposed to be able to get documents from the government to corroborate what we suspect to be going on based on these public statements. | |
| But when the judge throws it out prematurely at this early stage, we can't get there. | |
| So you're in a catch-22, basically. | |
| No, and this is really fascinating, except that, you know, what you just said, right? | |
| I mean, these are very public, extremely transparent statements kind of telling these companies what they should do, right? | |
| I mean, this is your contention, I guess. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And this is all, you know, this is really new territory. | |
| It's really novel because of the nature of social media. | |
| We've just never been here before. | |
| So this is all going to, whatever happens, and I hope it's good, but this is all going to create sort of new law. | |
| If in the 1950s the government had gone around saying the New York Times can't print X, Y, and Z, or they're going to face legal consequences, that would have been recognized widely as a First Amendment violation. | |
| I have no doubt. | |
| So, you know, a lot of this is just political. | |
| If you draw a judge who You know, thinks that misinformation is killing people then you might not have the outcome that you want. | |
| And then there's also this whole kind of realm of what You know, misinformation and disinformation means. | |
| I'm going to jump to the Missouri and Louisiana lawsuit in a moment, but, you know, you have to deal with this as well, right? | |
| To kind of defining these terms. | |
| Right. | |
| It's really insidious. | |
| It's sort of a, you know, way to get rid of people and ideas without having to engage with them. | |
| And the problem is, you Once you have the government getting involved in deciding what's true and what's not, you run into some real problems. | |
| And I think the framers of the Constitution, the founders of our country, understood that part of the price you pay to live in a free society is that sometimes people will say things that are not true. | |
| Sometimes people will even act on that false information and it'll have bad consequences. | |
| But it's far worse than when the government is deciding who gets to be heard and who's silenced. | |
| So yeah, I noticed, you know, at the top of your Twitter, you have this quote, if the freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter. | |
| Yeah, I believe that was a George Washington quote, although I can't remember exactly when he said it at this moment. | |
| But I think it's really true. | |
| I mean, freedom of speech is fundamental in a free society. | |
| If people don't know what's going on, if people can't openly debate ideas and policies and the science, then you don't live in a free society anymore. | |
| Well, so let's jump to this lawsuit that you've joined now with this Louisiana AG and Missouri AG. So tell me about it. | |
| So it's very similar to the Ohio one, but it's broader. | |
| So this lawsuit alleges that the government is censoring misinformation of various kinds, not just COVID. It's about election, so-called misinformation, the Hunter Biden laptop story, It even goes into abortion and climate change. | |
| The plaintiffs that we're representing who joined the lawsuit are Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kuhldorf, two of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, and then Aaron Cariotti, who was a professor at UC Irvine before he got fired for not getting the vaccine, and he brought a lawsuit that gained him some notoriety. | |
| And then another, a woman named Jill Hines, who runs an organization called Health Freedom Louisiana. | |
| So we're really, we're alleging that their First Amendment rights were violated by the government through the censorship on social media. | |
| And for instance, Bhattacharya and Kuldorf had, their accounts have been censored on numerous occasions. | |
| They had videos taken down from YouTube. | |
| They were having a roundtable discussion with Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, about the harms of masking children. | |
| That video was taken down. | |
| I mean, This is crazy. | |
| You have two of the top epidemiologists in the world talking about their area of expertise, and it doesn't fit with the narrative of the Biden administration. | |
| With the governor. | |
| With the governor, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And, you know, we also have Francis Collins of the NIH and Anthony Fauci, who presumably everyone knows, had made public statements right after they wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, saying the Great Barrington Declaration, for people who don't know, was sort of a A short document saying that the harms of lockdowns were greater than the benefits and we should end them immediately. | |
| It was written in about October of 2020. | |
| So Fauci and Collins immediately jumped on it, called them a danger to society, and I believe are behind quite a bit of, you know, the censorship that happened to them. | |
| There were actually whistleblower documents that kind of, you know, buttress this lawsuit now. | |
| Yeah, we have a lot more evidence than we did when I filed the lawsuit in March. | |
| So, in addition to these public statements, emails came out from DHS through a whistleblower that showed that the DHS had formed this disinformation governance board, that it was clearly working with social media companies. | |
| They make it look like they're working with them, but given the inherent power dynamic and these threats, There's a level of coercion that I think sort of eviscerates the argument that this is voluntary. | |
| This is what the companies want to do. | |
| And that's what defenders of these policies are saying. | |
| The social media companies just, they want to accomplish the government's aim. | |
| They're also lefties. | |
| They like the Biden administration. | |
| They're allowed to work together to do this. | |
| I don't know that I buy that from a First Amendment perspective, but But I don't even think that's true. | |
| I think it's extremely coercive. |
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