The Supreme Court has ruled for the Biden Administration in a major social media censorship case; Berenson v Biden now stands alone.
But crucial details of the Murthy v Missouri ruling may actually HELP my suit.
The Supreme Court has swept aside a legal effort to stop the Biden Administration’s social media censorship schemes.
By a 6-3 vote, the court found Wednesday that two states and five private plaintiffs had not shown they were personally damaged by federal efforts to make companies like Facebook suppress Covid skeptics. Because they could not show government contacts caused specific censorship acts, the plaintiffs lacked the “standing” for a suit.
“We begin—and end—with standing,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority, which included the court’s three liberal justices and three centrist conservatives.
The decision technically only applies to an injunction a lower federal court has issued for the plaintiffs. But it effectively ends the lawsuit, once known as Missouri v Biden and now called Murthy v Missouri.
The ruling leaves Berenson v Biden, my own lawsuit against White House and Pfizer officials over their 2021 conspiracy to force me off Twitter, as the only serious remaining challenge to the Biden administration’s censorship.
For Berenson v Biden, which I filed last year in federal court in Manhattan, the ruling is far more positive than it may first seem.
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(It’s about to get heavy. And I need your help.)
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Why?
The court ruled against the Missouri plaintiffs only on standing. It did not judge the underlying constitutional issues that arise when government officials push social media companies to censor Americans.
And the way the Supreme Court considered and reviewed standing show that my position is far stronger than the Missouri plaintiffs. The court demanded
A certain threshold showing: namely, that a particular defendant pressured a particular platform to censor a particular topic before that platform suppressed a particular plaintiff ’s speech on that topic.
The evidence James Lawrence, my lawyer, and I have presented in Berenson v Biden easily surpasses that bar.
In fact, we have shown Andy Slavitt targeted me by name while he was at the White House beginning in April 2021 and Twitter’s escalating bans on my account began only after that targeting began, in sharp contrast to its attitude before the White House named me.
Further, new emails and other messages that Elon Musk and X - the former Twitter - have turned over to us in the last few days show that Slavitt extended his efforts in mid-July 2021, as the White House censorship campaign took on new urgency. On July 18, 2021, he introduced Dr. Scott Gottlieb - a Pfizer director - to his Twitter White House contact, Todd O’Boyle.
The new messages also show O’Boyle and his boss, the head of Twitter’s United States public policy, viewed Gottlieb and Slavitt as speaking for the White House - and that they wanted to keep the White House happy and Twitter out of the firestorm that Facebook faced.
Within days of their approach, Twitter escalated the pressure on my account - and barely a month later, it had banned me, for a tweet it later admitted did not violate its rules.
In other words, even before being allowed to conduct discovery on Slavitt, Gottlieb, and other defendants, I have already shown specific targeting efforts from them that occurred as Twitter took action against me - and that I suffered an account bann as a result.
I will have more to say about Berenson v Biden soon. The case has been relatively quiet since last fall but is about to enter a far more active phase.
We plan to amend our complaint to include the many new facts we have discovered since our initial filing. At the same time, the rulings in Murthy v Missouri and another Supreme Court case called NRA v Vullo have created new legal issues for us and the defense to spar over.
Things are going to get interesting.
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By the way, if you wish to support Berenson v Biden, you can do so here:
https://www.givesendgo.com/G9X98
https://www.gofundme.com/f/berenson-v-biden-and-pfizers-albert-bourla
Or Venmo: Alex-Berenson-3 - last four digits of my phone are 1745.
Or send a check to Envisage Law, 2601 Oberlin Rd #100, Raleigh, NC 27608
Working GiveSendGo link here - not sure what is wrong with the link:
https://www.givesendgo.com/G9X98
View it as an opportunity. Get the word out ASAP. I have fired off several emails and text to colleagues, friends and family.
Most didn't even know...but have a sense of how important this is.
It's so important that you have ZERO rights without 1A. They'll use the dilution of 1A to come after our other rights.
WE ARE SLAVES WITHOUT FREE SPEECH.
It's that simple