All efforts must be made to fight the Biden administration's repeated violation of the First Amendment, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey told Newsmax on Wednesday.
Bailey, a Republican, spoke to "Newsline" in response to a federal appeals court that ruled last Friday that the Biden administration likely violated Americans' First Amendment rights when it worked to censor speech during the COVID-19 pandemic by threatening social media companies to remove what it deemed to be false or misleading COVID content.
In the decision, the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the White House, surgeon general, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Federal Bureau of Investigation improperly commandeered speech.
The three-judge panel wrote that "we find that the White House, acting in concert with the Surgeon General's office, likely coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions ... and significantly encouraged the platforms' decisions."
Bailey emphasized that "we got to continue to fight to build a wall of separation between tech and state," adding that this lawsuit is the best method I have to do that."
He stressed that "what we know is that Joe Biden used the power of the presidency to threaten big tech into censuring truthful speech in an orchestrated campaign of a magnitude never seen before in this country."
Bailey said that "we assume that the Department of Justice will appeal all the way to the United States Supreme Court."
But the Missouri attorney general vowed "to root out this censorship enterprise and hold anybody accountable who violates it."
He emphasized that "the Constitution exists to protect us from the government, but here the White House has violated the First Amendment repeatedly, which undermines confidence in the system."
Bailey said that "this is an Orwellian Ministry of Truth where not only are they silencing conservative voices on big tech social media platforms. They are silencing truthful information that American need to make individual health care decisions."
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Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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