By the Brownstone Institute
The convergence of state and corporate power has spawned unexpected bedfellows as Stanford University, the CATO Institute, and New York State Attorney General Letitia James have joined forces to support the censorship regime in Murthy v. Missouri.
The David and Goliath dynamic of the case, which had oral arguments before the Supreme Court on March 18, cannot be overstated. One side carries the combined power of the intelligence community and the federal government colluding with the largest information centers in the history of the world on behalf of the country’s largest lobbying forces.
Against that hegemon stands a series of independent doctors, news outlets, and state attorneys general.
Money Trail to Government
To that point, four federal judges have found that the Biden administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the CIA violated the First Amendment in their ongoing collaboration with Big Tech to censor disapproved narratives, including those related to COVID, crime, and mail-in voting.
During the legal process, third parties can present briefs, called amici curiae, to the courts that explain their interests and offer support for either side of a case.
Brownstone has reviewed the amici curiae in Murthy v. Missouri and found that a coalition of libertarians, academics, and blue states all stand together to support society’s most powerful groups.
Stanford’s Government Benefactor
Stanford University, home of the Stanford Internet Observatory and the Virality Project, is host to some of the chief censorship organizations in the United States. Journalists such as Andrew Lowenthal have documented how these groups worked with Big Tech to censor “stories of true vaccine side-effects” and resisted subpoenas from the U.S. House of Representatives.
After Judge Terry Doughty issued an injunction barring the federal government from working with social media companies to censor “constitutionally protected speech,” Stanford urged the Fifth Circuit to overturn his holding. The injunction “has cast a chill across academia as an example of political targeting of disfavored speech by state government and the federal judiciary,” the university wrote.
Of course, Judge Doughty’s order did not affect Stanford’s First Amendment rights at all; instead, it prevented the university and its subsidiaries from working with the federal government to abridge “constitutionally protected speech” such as political dissent.
So why would the university side with the White House? The federal government is far and away Stanford’s largest and most consistent benefactor, as it siphons taxpayer funding toward the state-sponsored censorship industry. Stanford has over $60 billion in assets, including an endowment of $40 billion. Each year, the ostensibly private university receives more than $1.35 billion in government grants, nearly 20 percent more than the university earns from student tuition.
Blue States’ Concern: Politics
New York Attorney General Letitia James led a coalition of 20 Democratic-controlled states, including Arizona, California, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, in opposing the injunction.
The AGs claimed the absence of censorship would amplify the “dangers of social media in promoting extremist violence.” As support for the Biden administration, they invoked a mass shooting in Buffalo, discussed incidents of “cyberbullying,” and favorably cited Connecticut’s use of taxpayer funds to hire “specialists” to “combat election misinformation.”
Notably, however, the amicus brief does not make a single reference to the text of the injunction or the opinions from the district court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The states that signed onto James’ amicus brief carry a combined 260 electoral votes. If Biden wins those states, he will only need to win Maryland, which he won by 30 points in 2020, to secure a second term.
Letitia James’s brand of “lawfare” is untethered from constitutional concerns. It is blunt-force politics, and its proponents’ primary objective is to control the citizenry. We are now at a crossroads where a group constituting an effective political majority seeks to codify mass censorship into law.
Libertarians’ Dithering
The Cato Institute, D.C.’s leading libertarian think tank, submitted a tepid brief “in support of neither party.” Like a mother asked to choose sides in a fight between her children, Cato could not bring itself to stand against the parties partnered with the world’s largest monopolies. Conveniently, those monopolies happen to be Cato donors.
According to Cato, the Court should “make clear” that First Amendment violations occur only when “interactions between the government and digital services regarding displayed content rise to the level of coercion.”
Coercion, however, is not the standard for unconstitutional government action. The Supreme Court has previously held that the government “may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”
ACLU’s Conspicuous Silence
Not long ago, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) would have championed the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri. The ACLU famously defended neo-Nazis’ right to march through a Jewish suburb, but the organization later became an arm of the Democratic Party, shedding its former principles in the process.
The group has no shortage of amici briefs and opinions on its website; it has petitioned courts to support gun control, abortion, COVID vaccine mandates, and race-based university admissions and to oppose bans on men in women’s sports and efforts to curb illegal immigration. Despite this flurry of opinions and news releases, the ACLU has not made a single mention of Murthy v. Missouri (or Missouri v. Biden) on its website.
Rebel Alliance
There is, however, a coalition resisting the march toward tyranny. The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group representing the plaintiffs in the case, is leading the fight for constitutional freedoms.
Other defenders committed to the foundation of our legal system, precedent, facts, and the rule of law include the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Foundation for Freedom Online, the Thomas More Society, Children’s Health Defense, the Heritage Foundation, and the State of Ohio.
The Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research (tucker@brownstone.org) is a nonprofit organization founded in 2021. An earlier version of this article was published at brownstone.org. Reprinted with permission.