Oct. 27, 2022 - Epoch Times
20:16
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| Good evening. | |
| You know that sweet, sweet feeling? | |
| When you upload an absolutely fact-based post to social media that has something to do with either the vaccine or the virus, only to have that post be marked as false. | |
| Now, I myself, just a few days ago, much like millions of Americans, experienced that super sweet feeling. | |
| Here was the post that I uploaded to Instagram. | |
| It showed a picture of a mouse and it said this, quote, Now, if you follow that story, then you know that that statement is 100% technically accurate. | |
| However, within just a few days, I noticed that over at my Instagram feed, that post, my post, was blurred out. | |
| I thought that was strange. | |
| range. | |
| And so I clicked on the post, and then I clicked on the button which said, see why fact checkers say this is false. | |
| And when you do, this is what it says, quote, fact check, Boston University COVID-19 strain killed 20% fewer mice than the wild strain. | |
| The 80% kill rate did not refer to humans. | |
| Now, that was very interesting, given the fact that in the post, I did not say that it referred to humans. | |
| The post clearly said humanized mice, and there was even a big picture of a mouse. | |
| Furthermore, the fact that the synthetic strain of COVID that they created killed less mice than the wild strain is actually irrelevant. | |
| The point of that news story is that Boston-based scientists, scientists here in America, were creating synthetic strains of COVID that were deadly enough to kill 80% of the mice that they were actually testing on. | |
| But you see how this all works. | |
| The fact checkers say that you're wrong, and that's it. | |
| There's no appeal process, no real appeal process, and so your post gets blurred out, and then it gets buried into oblivion by the algorithm. | |
| And then furthermore, because the algorithm says that you are suddenly a purveyor of fake news, they kill the reach of your entire page. | |
| Take a look at my metrics, for instance. | |
| The day that these fact checkers labeled my completely factual post to be fake, well, my page was suddenly no longer visible to about 95% of the people who would normally see it. | |
| Isn't that beautiful? | |
| And you know what? | |
| It coincides perfectly with the midterm elections. | |
| Funny how that works. | |
| And by the way, just as an aside, if you would like to find me on Instagram, my handle is EpicTimesRoman, and I will continue to post there. | |
| Well, until Mark Zuckerberg and his goons, well, I shouldn't say goons, until his censorship regime kicks me off completely. | |
| Regardless, though, setting my case aside, the argument that people typically make in defending this type of censorship is by pointing out the fact that companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are private companies and they can do whatever they want. | |
| The First Amendment doesn't apply to them because they are, after all, not government entities. | |
| However, here is the big question. | |
| What if, what if, behind the scenes, these giant quote-unquote private companies are actually colluding with the government in deciding what information to censor and what information to not censor? | |
| What if officials within the government Are actually working hand in glove with these companies to censor free speech. | |
| Is that a violation of the First Amendment? | |
| Well, that's the exact question that's being worked out right now in a massive lawsuit that was levied against the federal government by two attorney generals from two different states. | |
| Specifically, if you've been following our program for a while now, then you might remember... | |
| Back in May of this year, in May of 2022, the attorney generals from Missouri as well as Louisiana jointly filed a lawsuit against the federal government alleging that high-ranking officials within the Biden administration have been actively colluding with big tech social media companies to censor the free speech of Americans. | |
| And, wouldn't you know it, since filing their lawsuit over the past several months now, during the discovery phase, these two attorney generals have been collecting more and more evidence, in the form of both emails and other types of communications, showing the extent of the deep and, you can say, cozy relationship that these seemingly private companies have with government officials. | |
| As you can see from the highly redacted emails on your screen, there was a lot of communication indeed. | |
| In fact, in summing up their findings, here was how Mr. | |
| Eric Schmidt, the Attorney General of Missouri, here was how he described what they've uncovered in the discovery process so far. | |
| The communications already provided by the Department of Justice to the plaintiffs show a vast censorship enterprise across a multitude of federal agencies. | |
| In response to Missouri and Louisiana's interrogatories, defendants identified 45 federal officials at the DHS, CISA, which we'll get to in a moment, the CDC, the NIAID, and the Office of the Surgeon General that communicate with social media platforms about quote-unquote misinformation and censorship. | |
| Beyond the Department of Justice's production, Meta, which is Facebook's parent company, for example, has disclosed that at least 32 federal officials, including senior officials at the FDA, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and the White House, have communicated with Meta about content moderation on its platforms. | |
| Many of whom were not disclosed in the response to the plaintiff's interrogatories to the defendants. | |
| U2 disclosed 11 federal officials engaged in such communications, including officials at the Census Bureau and the White House, many of whom were also not disclosed by defendants. | |
| And so, here's where things begin to get interesting. | |
| Because after they received all this plethora of communications, well, the attorney generals, they went ahead and they asked the judge in this case to give them permission to depose, under oath, the different high-level government officials who were involved, people like Dr. Fauci, Jen Psaki, the U.S. Attorney General, and so on. | |
| They requested the opportunity to ask these officials direct questions that they wouldn't be able to ignore. | |
| And after some legal back and forth, well, just five days ago, the judge in the case granted their request. | |
| Specifically, Judge Terry Dowdy, who was appointed to the bench by President Trump, he issued a court order which will force people like Dr. Fauci, as well as about nine other people from the Biden administration, to testify, under oath, in regards to the actions that they've taken to collude with big tech in censoring the free speech of Americans. | |
| Meaning that even if Dr. Fauci... | |
| Fauci was going through intermediaries in these conversations, or even if he himself was acting as an intermediary between, let's say, the White House and these social media companies, well, it's still relevant to get him under oath. | |
| The second point that the judge commented on was the question of Dr. | |
| Fauci's credibility, to which he wrote this, quote, Specifically, the plaintiffs state that Dr. | |
| Fauci has made public statements on the efficacy of masks, the percentage of the population needed for herd immunity, the NIAID's funding of gain-of-function virus research in Wuhan, the lab leak theory, and more. | |
| Plaintiffs urge that his comments on these important issues are relevant to the matter at hand and are further reasons why Dr. | |
| Fauci should be deposed. | |
| The plaintiffs assert that they should not be required to simply accept Dr. | |
| Fauci's self-serving blanket denials that were issued from someone other than himself at face value. | |
| And so, using these two points as well as several others as the basis, the judge in the case ruled that the following individuals should be deposed under oath in this particular case. | |
| You have Dr. | |
| Fauci in his official capacity as both the director of the NIAID as well as the White House as chief medical advisor. | |
| You have Mr. Rob Flaherty, who is the deputy assistant to the president as well as the director of the White House's digital strategy. | |
| You have Mr. Andrew Slavitt, who is a former White House senior COVID advisor. | |
| You have Ms. Jen Psaki, who is the former White House press secretary. | |
| You have Mr. Elvis Chan, who is an FBI supervisory special agent. | |
| You have Ms. Jen Easterly, who is the director of the Federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, otherwise known as CISA. | |
| You also have Ms. Lohan, who is the director of the Federal Cybersecurity Lauren Protentis, who is a CISA official. | |
| You have Dr. | |
| Vivek Murthy, who is the Biden Administration Surgeon General. | |
| You have Ms. | |
| Carol Crawford, who is the Chief of the CDC's Digital Media Branch. | |
| And you also have Mr. | |
| Daniel Kimmich, who is the Acting Coordinator of the State Department's Global Engagement Center. | |
| The judge ordered that these 10 individuals must give their testimony on their own. | |
| And as you can imagine, well, the plaintiffs in the case, meaning the two attorney generals, they were quite pleased with the ruling. | |
| For instance, here's what the Missouri Attorney General, Mr. | |
| Eric Schmidt, here's what he said as a part of a statement after this ruling came to light. | |
| Quote, After finding documentation of a collusive relationship between the Biden administration and social media companies to censor free speech, we immediately filed a motion to get these officials under oath. | |
| It is high time we shine a light on the censorship enterprise and force these officials to come clean to the American people, and this ruling will allow us to do just that. | |
| We'll keep pressing for the truth. | |
| Furthermore, I myself actually got a chance to sit down and speak about this case with Mr. | |
| Jeff Landry, the attorney general of Louisiana. | |
| And I'll show you that interview after a quick word from today's sponsor. | |
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| And then let's head on back to the studio. | |
| Now, as I mentioned a moment ago, I actually got a chance to sit down and speak about this case with Mr. | |
| Jeff Landry, the Attorney General of Louisiana. | |
| And he explained to me not only the importance of this lawsuit generally, but also what it means for the future of freedom of speech of Americans in our digital age. | |
| Take a listen. | |
| As I said earlier, here's an interesting part. | |
| You know, our Bill of Rights in America basically are the difference between Americans being citizens or subjects. | |
| And that's an important part because those Bill of Rights protect us from government encroachment. | |
| Whether it's First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, those Bill of Rights, those amendments basically say that the government cannot infringe upon that right. | |
| Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, right to bear arms. | |
| And so what has happened is that what we believe, and that's the suit that we have down in Louisiana, is that the government basically co-opted or colluded or encouraged big tech to censor American speech. | |
| Now, we've heard again and again that companies like Facebook and Google and Twitter have the right, because they are a private company, to determine what's on Google. | |
| Or offer their platform. | |
| But if the government then basically encourages them or says, hey, we want you to suppress this information, then all of a sudden, Twitter and Facebook, they become government actors. | |
| And therefore, the action against those that are being censored is a violation of that person's First Amendment right. | |
| And so that's what the case is. | |
| And so, you know, the subpoenas have gone out. | |
| Fauci and him have gotten the subpoenas. | |
| We're waiting on that discovery to come back. | |
| We're going to sort through that discovery, and we'll see what we find. | |
| I want to take it back one level, which is that the Bill of Rights restricts the federal government from encroaching upon the citizens of this country in those very specific ways. | |
| However, what you appear to have found is that they are taking these private entities, these companies, And having them violate the rights of the citizens in that way, right? | |
| Is that the case? | |
| That's correct. | |
| It turns those companies into government actors. | |
| Let me see if I can explain it to you this way. | |
| So let's say that the police believe that you were involved in some sort of criminal enterprise. | |
| Maybe you were printing money, right? | |
| So maybe you were out there, you were printing money. | |
| And so they wanted to be able to bust you, but they didn't have, they thought you were doing it, but they didn't have enough evidence under which they could get a warrant. | |
| And basically, that's the Fifth Amendment. | |
| The Fifth Amendment protects you from unreasonable searches and seizures. | |
| It's a due process claim. | |
| So instead of gathering more evidence to get probable cause, in other words, to go to a judge and get that warrant, they went and got your neighbor. | |
| To go into your house and to take something or to tell them what they're seeing in there in an unlawful way. | |
| When all of a sudden that neighbor now becomes a state actor and is violating your Fifth Amendment rights. | |
| That's the same concept with the First Amendment and Big Tech. | |
| Yeah, and in that example you gave, is there already case law and precedence on the books that that individual is acting as an actor of the government? | |
| Yes, that's what makes our case so unique, because we believe we're standing on some solid case law, all the way up to the Supreme Court. | |
| Now, most of those, almost all of those cases, to a large extent, were built on Fifth Amendment violations. | |
| This is one that will be built on First Amendment violations. | |
| So, how did this lawsuit actually come about? | |
| Was there some smoking gun piece of evidence that you saw which showed the collusion between government and these big tech actors? | |
| Well, we had a hunch. | |
| We read the Epoch Times, right? | |
| We read periodics out of it. | |
| We listen to what people are saying, what people are hearing. | |
| We saw this. | |
| It became real prevalent. | |
| During the pandemic, we really saw that the government censoring certain speech, trying to push off therapeuticals, only allowing positive stories on certain COVID treatments like vaccines or suppressing other information. | |
| We hear it, especially from doctors and scientists. | |
| That gave us... | |
| The theory that made us believe that there was, that Fauci and them were basically colluding, that basically had co-opted the platforms to amplify certain stories and suppress others. | |
| And then, of course, it was interesting because right after we filed the lawsuit, we saw, not long after, we had those whistleblowers came out and said, this is exactly what they were doing. | |
| And so it's an interesting case. | |
| We've got some great people in both the Missouri Attorney General's Office and the Louisiana Attorney General's Office, smart lawyers, who had built up this theory and put it into action. | |
| And we put it into a petition and filed the suit in Louisiana. | |
| What if, let's say, the government, through one of their agencies, whether it's the CDC, the misinformation governance board that they attempted to erect under the Department of Homeland Security, what if that agency begins to mark certain things false and certain things true, or certain stories false, and then big tech companies begin using that as a reference, like, for instance, they already do with the CDC, right? | |
| A lot of times, if the CDC says something is not true, that's used by, like, Facebook or Twitter to mark something on their own platform to be true or not true. | |
| Is that a form of government collusion? | |
| Or are people just, let's say big tech officials or big tech executives, are they just free to do that and that's not necessarily a form of collusion? | |
| What's your opinion on that? | |
| I don't know. | |
| Those are some things we're going to put before the court. | |
| But you ask very interesting questions. | |
| Having the government, and I said this earlier in an interview, basically having an arm of the federal government, an agency, whose label, whose title is the disinformation board, is prima facie evidence of a First Amendment violation. | |
| The government is not supposed to censor information. | |
| That is the foundation upon which the freedom of speech The First Amendment is built upon that foundation that, hey, the government cannot censor information. | |
| They cannot censor your speech. | |
| And so to have an agency called the Disinformation Board, I think that's why you saw it basically go down as fast as it came up when you saw many attorney generals, including myself, sign a letter to the Biden administration and to the attorney general of the country saying, hey, hey, hey, Nope, that's a violation. | |
| I think that's a problematic area, and we'll sue you on it. | |
| Last question. | |
| If, let's say, somebody watching this feels like they have themselves been censored. | |
| For instance, we at the Epoch Times, we recently got kicked off of Twitter for a day. | |
| They didn't give us a reason. | |
| There was a lot of uproar, and they eventually took that ban down. | |
| They were marking our site as unsafe. | |
| If either we or somebody has a hunch that maybe the government was somehow behind it, is there anything we can do? | |
| Is there any place we can email, any place we can call? | |
| What's your opinion on that? | |
| Well, look, I think in Louisiana... | |
| We encourage our citizens to let us know when they've been placed in Facebook jail or deplatformed. | |
| I think that if you live outside of Louisiana, certainly contacting your attorney general and letting them know and getting documented that that happened is helpful. | |
| Do you think, let's say somebody's watching this and they got some kind of ban or some kind of labels saying, hey, your misinformation that they believe is legitimately not right, emailing their attorney general can actually have a positive effect? | |
| I think it can. | |
| I think it can because it creates a record. | |
| You know, when you email your attorney general, irrespective of whether the attorney general is a Democrat or a Republican, that creates a public record. | |
| And that's a trace. | |
| And that's something that anyone can go back and say, OK, well, you know, in the state of Michigan, how many people may have complained? | |
| And you can get a list of that based upon those emails. | |
| I think at any time you can create a record and memorialize those actions, it's helpful. | |
| Now, in closing, I wanted to leave you with a thought, since this lawsuit raises a very big question. | |
| Because when posts like the one I mentioned earlier, the one post of mine from Instagram, when they're censored, well, a lot of people defend these social media companies by saying that they're private actors, they're private businesses, and so if they censor people, that is not a violation of those people's First Amendment rights, because it's not the government censoring them. | |
| That's been the argument for going on 10 years now. | |
| However, what if behind the scenes, just like what we've been discussing in today's episode, the government is actually not only pressuring these people, but also working hand-in-glove with these social media companies to take down the social media posts of Americans? | |
| What if the government is actually pushing for the censorship? | |
| Does that violate Americans' First Amendment rights? | |
| Well, isn't that an act of actually stripping your right to free speech with just a few extra steps? | |
| And so, you've heard me mention it a few times before on this program, but I'll mention it again. | |
| If you happen to be a truth seeker, then I would highly recommend that you check out EpicTV, our awesome no-censorship video platform. | |
| Because over there, we're able to post content without even having to consider the possibility of some random algorithm or some random latte-sipping 20-year-old in Silicon Valley taking our content down. | |
| Over there, it's pure facts. | |
| It's awesome shows. | |
| It's great programs. | |
| It's phenomenal documentaries. | |
| And in fact, I myself am working on a documentary right now exposing Agenda 2030, not only at the international level, not only in terms of how it's manifesting in other countries, but also how it's manifesting right here in America. | |
| The documentary will be coming out in probably a month and a half. | |
| But even until then, I post somewhere between two to three exclusive episodes of Facts Matter over on Epic TV. | |
| Because, again, those episodes are just as fact-based as any of our other episodes here on YouTube. | |
| But just because of the crazy censorship that we experience, we can only post them over on Epic TV. | |
| And so, again, if you happen to be a truth seeker, if you like access to a bunch of awesome content, and if you'd like to support the work that we do here at the Epic Times, well, then head on over to Epic TV. | |
| The price is super low, but the content you get is great. | |
| and the mission is even greater. | |
| The link to Epic TV will be right there at the very top of the description box. | |
| I hope you check it out. | |
| And until next time, as always, I'm your host Roman from the Epic Times. |
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