The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals added the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to an existing injunction that keeps President Joe Biden and the administration from conspiring with Big Tech social media companies to diminish or silence opposing voices.
In Missouri v. Biden, the Fifth Circuit previously ruled that some federal government entities "coerced or significantly encouraged" platforms to restrict certain user speech. The original ruling applied to the White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC and the FBI.
CISA, a relative newcomer in the government acronym game, was formed in November 2018. It's a component of the Department of Homeland Security with the stated goal of protecting cybersecurity and infrastructure across all levels of government.
"We connect our stakeholders in industry and government to each other and to resources, analyses and tools to help them build their own cyber, communications and physical security resilience," its website states.
That connection between government and the private sector made it a natural bridge between Biden and Big Tech.
"The score right now is Missouri 3, Biden 0," Bailey said on American Family Radio Thursday. "We are going to keep racking up wins because the right to free speech is worth fighting for. It's a cornerstone of our democratic republic, and it's under attack."
"CISA likely significantly encouraged the Big Tech platforms to actually 'moderate' content moderate – or, in other words, censor content on their platforms. It is the entity that worked with the FBI to silence the Hunter Biden laptop story, for example." "This needs to go before the Supreme Court and a decision needs to be made about whether they can do any sort of thing like this going forward in the future. It's possible that this could reach the Supreme Court – but will it reach before the 2024 election? That remains to be seen." Michael Morris |
The case most likely will be judged by the Supreme Court eventually.
Bailey told show host Jenna Ellis that the DHS was created in the wake of 9-11 to protect Americans from foreign attack, but through CISA has been weaponized to attack constitutional rights. According to the Missouri AG, Joe Biden took office and "empowered the DC swamp to coerce and collude" with Big Tech to suppress exclusively conservative voices on social media platforms.
"Remember those algorithms that caused people to be deplatformed or kicked off Twitter, kicked off of Facebook, or deemphasized?" Bailey asked. "Those security algorithms were changed at the demand of CISA. CISA was the primary facilitator of censorship demands from the federal government, from the FBI to Big Tech social media."
Bailey has traced the censorship of free speech back to the early stages of the Hunter Biden laptop story. He contends CISA and the FBI colluded to pressure social media companies into quashing that story.
"That's election interference. That's information that Americans needed to have to make decisions at the ballot box," he emphasized. "[Voters] were deprived of that information by federal officials in the deep state swamp."
Pressuring Big Tech extended to opinions of COVID-19 vaccines and government practices.
Bailey: 'COVID was the Trojan horse'
The Fifth Circuit found that many Americans, having seen themselves or others booted from social media platforms, began to get the message – and some began to "self-censor." If they wanted to post pictures of their children or talk in chat groups with friends and family, they couldn't stray into politics if they leaned conservative.
"What the court found is that the harm is ongoing because those people who saw the censorship happening back in 2020, 2021 and 2022 are now self-censoring to avoid being deplatformed and kicked off the Big Tech social media companies. So, the self-censoring harm is ongoing – and it's not just the speakers who were harmed, it's the listeners," Bailey said.
The state attorney general shares that his attorneys have only "scratched the surface" of government-directed censorship of free speech.
"We've only done preliminary discovery to get a preliminary injunction. We're going to get into the merits discovery and root out this censorship enterprise," he vowed. "We're going to hunt down every single DC swamp rat that is going to crawl out of the administrative state sewer and gnaw away at our First Amendment protections – and we're going to erect the wall of separation between them and Big Tech as well," he added.
And such a wall is warranted because "we know that this has expanded, it has grown," Bailey stated. "COVID was the Trojan horse that got the enemy behind the gates. There are new agencies and new operatives that are continuing to coerce and collude with Big Tech social media."
Editor's note: Sidebar added after story originally posted.
