A Trump-appointed judge imposed limits on the Biden administration’s contact with online platforms, potentially opening the floodgates for unregulated misinformation.
With the recent torrent of repugnant and oligarchic rulings from the US Supreme Court, it’s easy to overlook another ghastly ruling from the federal bench: US District Judge Terence Doughty’s sweeping, incoherent injunction holding that most federal government officials cannot contact employees at key social media platforms and Internet companies. Doughty’s diktat takes hold as he prepares to rule on the outcome of a broader case brought by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri claiming that the Biden administration improperly pressured digital concerns to tamp down on misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic. The complaint, which also included Gateway Pundit impresario Jim Hoft as a plaintiff, also laments the alleged crackdowns on the now-infamous Hunter Biden laptop story and on false claims about the 2020 election’s fraudulence.
Doughty was appointed to the federal bench by President Donald Trump in 2017, and his lengthy opinion supporting the injunction is a work of pure MAGA delirium. He announces at the outset that, should the plaintiffs prove their claims, “the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” How likely is Doughty to find said case to be proven? Well, this likely: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”
Doughty clearly is unacquainted both with the history of free-speech suppression in the United States and the contents of 1984. Threats to core First Amendment freedoms have everything to do with the stifling of expression deemed hostile to state power, whereas the right-wing hyperbole around the debunking of false Covid claims and election lies dishonestly targets the opposite phenomenon—preserving good-faith discourse in the name of public health and the preservation of democracy. For a sample of the real abuse of First Amendment rights at the behest of the state, the judge could begin with the Alien and Sedition acts, carry on through to the Palmer Raids and the McCarran-Walter Act, on through to the present manias of book-banning and curricular inquisitions to stamp out LGBQT+ content and any material suggestive of the dread bacillus of critical race theory. As for the Ministry of Truth, Doughty, like many right-wing apparatchiks, seems to understand it as an all-purpose symbol of meddlesome government overreach; in reality, it was devoted to propagating manifest lies as authoritarian organizing slogans: “War Is Peace,” “Freedom Is Slavery,” and “Ignorance Is Strength.”
In this regard, it’s Doughty’s court, not the Biden administration, that’s functioning as the Ministry of Truth. “Here you have a federal judge issuing prior restraint on speech for government employees in the name of the First Amendment,” says Siva Vaidyanathan, Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia.
