The War on 'Misinformation': Outlawing Dissident Data on the Road to Tyranny

Judge Terry A. Doughty's Defense of the Right to be Wrong

Copyright ©2023

Revisionist History.org

“Misinformation” [noun]: Any data that contradicts Establishment dogma

Fittingly, on Independence Day, July 4, U.S. Federal Judge Terry A. Doughty in the Western District of Louisiana, issued a preliminary injunction in the case of Missouri v. Biden, documenting and excoriating the Federal government’s abrogation of the First Amendment with regard to policing social media.

The patricians assigned exalted status as “First Amendment experts” by their cronies in the legacy media, have lied about Judge Doughty’s ruling and presume to explain it to the plebians in the expectation that we will not read the 155 pages of his decision.

Thus, His Eminence Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard University, together with Leah Litman,  professor of law at the University of Michigan, contemptuously dismiss Justice Doughty’s decision as buncombe. They rely on their prestige to convince us of their evidence-free claim that, “The impetus behind the case is the now thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that the government is somehow strong-arming Big Tech into censoring conservative speech and speakers in violation of the First Amendment.”

Words Intended to Trigger our Obeisance

Notice the words intended to trigger our obeisance to the anathema which Tribe and Litman have pronounced: “thoroughly debunked,” and the old reliable put-down, “conspiracy theory.”

No respectable true believer in the stature and renown of the Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus will dare to think otherwise than as prescribed.

Tribe and Litman add to their pejorative-laden rant, stating, “the absurdity of different aspects of the decision…….Each step in the reasoning of the decision manages to be more outlandish than the last…”

“Absurd.” “Outlandish.”

They go further: “There is no shortage of errors in this opinion, which is trying to make the infamous ‘Twitter files’ into constitutional law. Who knows whether the equally infamous U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit will correct any of these mistakes…”

“Infamous.” “Equally infamous.”

A heretical thought occurs to the reader of Tribe and Litman’s invective: prove it. They can’t, so they don’t bother.

Ah, but there’s the rub, fellow plebe. This legal duo need not prove anything. They are famous legal scholars.

Musk’s Twitter file revelations are “infamous” and Justice Doughty is “absurd.” Therefore, predicated on their ad hominem adjudication, Tribe and Litman don’t stoop to offering a refutation because it is unnecessary. Their ipse dixit is sufficient to reduce Doughty to a reactionary troglodyte. We are in the realm of the blind faith required of American people by the secular religion that enforces a fundamentalist intellectual conformity which brooks no dissent.

155 pages of Doughty’s decision are dismissed without a single factual rebuttal concerning the Federal government illegally threatening and pressuring social media to cancel disfavored authors and data on the Internet.

But is misinformation really the crux of the issue?

Witness the misinformation that pours forth daily from the sacrosanct New York Times. We need look no further than Michael Shear and David McCabe’s report on July 5 in the Times on Judge Doughty’s ruling. They reduce the issue of government censorship, which concerns all civil libertarians across the political spectrum, to an “effort by conservatives to document what they contend is a liberal conspiracy.”

That’s not just misinformation, it’s a lie. Two victims of the government crackdown on social media who are plaintiffs in the case of Missouri v. Biden, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, are infectious disease epidemiologists, not conservative Republican politics wonks.

Moreover, the Great Barrington Declaration of October 4, 2020, criticized lockdown policies and expressed concern about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of lockdowns. Shortly after being published, the Great Barrington Declaration, which was signed and endorsed by numerous health science personnel holding a variety of political views, was censored on social media by Google, Facebook and Twitter, under threat of reprisals from the Biden administration.

Jill Hines is Co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana, a consumer and human rights advocacy organization. Hines was censored because she advocated against the use of masks mandates for young children. Health Freedom Louisiana’s social-media page was suspended on Facebook in January 2022 for sharing a display board that contained Pfizer’s preclinical trial data. Facebook did the government’s bidding.

There are dozens of examples like these. The New York Times is misinforming its readers and leading them to believe erroneously that Missouri v. Biden is mainly an issue of Republican partisanship, with no wider significance for all liberty-loving Americans. The Times expects us to think that Justice Doughty ruled in favor of the victims of government-inspired viewpoint censorship because, in the words of Shear and McCable, he is “favorable to right-wing lawsuits.”

The New York Times is determined to engage in misinformation by falsely characterizing the paramount issue, interdiction of freedom of the press by agents of the Federal government, as something of concern to right-wingers who see “liberal conspiracies” under every bed.

As of July 12, in almost every instance of legacy media coverage that we’ve seen related to the judge’s ruling, readers were not provided a link to Justice Doughty’s decision, which is published online, in order to facilitate the now out-of-fashion principle that the people should be encouraged to decide for themselves, rather than being told what to believe.

Instead, the Times referred its readers to Litman and Tribe’s splenetic fulmination, in which censorship becomes “content moderation, ” and judicially ensuring the Biden administration doesn’t threaten social media if they don’t submit to censorship commands, becomes, “a huge blow to vital government efforts to harden U.S. democracy against threats of misinformation.”

We ought to call a thing by its accurate description. In their report, which appeared on New York University’s website, JustSecurity.org, we regret to say that the University of Michigan’s Litman, and Harvard’s Tribe, lied about Judge Doughty’s ruling—as follows:

“…the district court made no effort to identify circumstances where the government came even close to coercing social media companies into doing something they didn’t want to do…”

How does one parse a mendacity that is so transparently false it is beyond chutzpagh? The duo who put forth the preceding statement are insulting the intelligence of their readers on the assumption that they are too lazy to find and study Justice Doughty’s opinion—in which he clearly “identifies” the points at which the Federal government coerced social media companies into censoring scientists, activists and vital alternative information.

Judge for yourself:

Excerpts from Missouri v. Biden documenting Government Coercion of Social Media Companies

“On May 5, 2021, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki (“Psaki”) publicly began pushing Facebook and other social-media platforms to censor COVID-19 misinformation. At a White House Press Conference, Psaki publicly reminded Facebook and other social-media platforms of the threat of ‘legal consequences’ if they do not censor misinformation more aggressively.

“Psaki further stated: ‘The President’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation, and misinformation, especially related to COVID-19 vaccinations and elections.’ Psaki linked the threat of a ‘robust anti-trust program’ with the White House’s censorship demand: ‘He also supports better privacy protections and a robust anti-trust program. So, his view is that there’s more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation; disinformation; damaging, sometime life-threatening information, is not going out to the American public.”

“On January 23, 2021, three days after President Biden took office, Clarke Humphrey (“Humphrey”), who at the time was the Digital Director for the COVID-19 Response Team, emailed Twitter and requested the removal of an anti-COVID-19 vaccine tweet by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.2 Humphrey sent a copy of the email to Rob Flaherty (“Flaherty”), former Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Digital Strategy…

“On February 7, 2021, Twitter sent Flaherty a ‘Twitter’s Partner Support Portal’ for expedited review of flagging content for censorship. Twitter recommended that Flaherty designate a list of authorized White House staff to enroll in Twitter’s Partner Support Portal and explained that when authorized reporters submit a ‘ticket’ using the portal, the requests are ‘prioritized’ automatically. Twitter also stated that it had been ‘recently bombarded’ with censorship requests from the White House and would prefer to have a streamlined process. Twitter noted that ‘[i]n a given day last week for example, we had more than four different people within the White House reaching out for issues…”

“On March 15, 2021, Flaherty…demanded a report from Facebook on a recent Washington Post article that accused Facebook of allowing the spread of information leading to vaccine hesitancy…Flaherty followed up by making clear that the White House was seeking more aggressive action on ‘borderline content.”

“On March 22, 2021, Flaherty responded to this email, demanding more detailed information and a plan from Facebook to censor the spread of ‘vaccine hesitancy’ on Facebook. Flaherty also requested more information about and demanded greater censorship by Facebook of ‘sensational,’ ‘vaccine skeptical’ content.”

“On April 13, 2021, after the temporary halt of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine…Flaherty also requested that Facebook monitor ‘misinformation’ relating to the Johnson & Johnson pause and demanded from Facebook a detailed report within twenty-four hours. Facebook provided the detailed report the same day.”

“On April 14, 2021, Flaherty demanded the censorship of Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Tomi Lahren because the top post about vaccines that day was ‘Tucker Carlson saying vaccines don’t work and Tomi Lahren stating she won’t take a vaccine..”

“Two days later, on April 16, 2021, Flaherty demanded immediate answers from Facebook regarding the Tucker Carlson video…Facebook…gave the video a 50% demotion for seven days and stated that it would continue to demote the video.”

“…examples of posts that did not violate Facebook’s policies but would nonetheless be suppressed included content that originated from the Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit activist group headed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.” (Mr. Kennedy’s group was abeled by the government as one of the “Disinformation Dozen”).

“On April 21, 2021, Flaherty, Slavitt, and other HHS officials, met with Twitter officials about ‘Twitter Vaccine Misinfo Briefing.’…Twitter discovery responses indicated that during the meeting, White House officials wanted to know why Alex Berenson (“Berenson”) had not been ‘kicked off’ Twitter. Slavitt suggested Berenson was ‘the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.’ Berenson was suspended thereafter on July 16, 2021, and was permanently deplatformed on August 28, 2021.”

“On April 23, 2021, Flaherty sent Facebook an email including a document entitled “Facebook COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation Brief” (“the Brief”)…The Brief recommended much more aggressive censorship of Facebook’s enforcement policies and called for progressively severe penalties.”

“From May 28, 2021, to July 10, 2021, a senior Meta (Facebook’s parent) executive reportedly copied Andrew Slavitt (‘Slavitt’), former White House Senior COVID-19 Advisor, on his emails to Surgeon General Murthy (‘Murthy’), alerting them that Meta was engaging in censorship of COVID-19 misinformation according to the White House’s ‘requests’ and indicating ‘expanded penalties’ for individual Facebook accounts that share misinformation…”

“Eric Waldo (‘Waldo’) is the Senior Advisor to the Surgeon General and was formerly Chief Engagement Officer for the Surgeon General’s office…Waldo and the Office of the Surgeon General received a briefing from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (‘CCDH’) about the “Disinformation Dozen.” The Center for Countering Digital Hate gave a presentation about the Disinformation Dozen and how they (CCDH) measured and determined that the Disinformation Dozen were primarily responsible for a significant amount of online misinformation.”

“At the July 15, 2021 press conference, Murthy described health misinformation as one of the biggest obstacles to ending the pandemic; insisted that his advisory was on an urgent public health threat; and stated that misinformation poses an imminent threat to the nation’s health and takes away the freedom to make informed decisions….Murthy also stated that people who question mask mandates and decline vaccinations are following misinformation, which results in illnesses and death. Murthy placed specific blame on social-media platforms for allowing ‘poison’ to spread and further called for an ‘all-of-society approach’ to fight health misinformation. Murthy called upon social-media platforms to operate with greater transparency and accountability, to monitor information more clearly, and to ‘consistently take action against misinformation super-spreaders on their platforms.’ Notably, Waldo agreed in his deposition that the word ‘accountable’ carries with it the threat of consequences.” (Emphasis supplied)

“…on July 20, 2021, at a White House Press Conference, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield (‘Bedingfield’) stated that the White House would be announcing whether social-media platforms are legally liable for misinformation spread on their platforms and examining how misinformation fits into the liability protection granted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which shields social-media platforms from being responsible for posts by third parties on their sites). Bedingfield further stated the administration was reviewing policies that could include amending the Communication Decency Act and that the social-media platforms ‘should be held accountable.’ The public and private pressure from the White House apparently had its intended effect. All twelve members of the ‘Disinformation Dozen’ were censored, and pages, groups, and accounts linked to the Disinformation Dozen were removed…”

“Murthy made statements on the following platforms: a December 21, 2021 podcast threatening to hold social-media platforms accountable for not censoring misinformation; a January 3, 2022 podcast with Alyssa Milano stating that ‘platformers need to step up to be accountable…”

“In addition to ‘misinformation’ regarding COVID-19, the White House also asked social-media companies to censor misinformation regarding climate change, gender discussions, abortion, and economic policy. At an Axios event entitled ‘A Conversation on Battling Misinformation,’ held on June 14, 2022, the White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy (‘McCarthy’) blamed social-media companies for allowing misinformation and disinformation about climate change to spread and explicitly tied these censorship demands with threats of adverse legislation regarding the Communications Decency Act.”

“On June 16, 2022, the White House announced a new task force to target ‘general misinformation’ and disinformation campaigns targeted at women and LBGTQI individuals who are public and political figures, government and civic leaders, activists, and journalists. The June 16, 2022, Memorandum discussed the creation of a task force to reel in ‘online harassment and abuse’ and to develop programs targeting such disinformation campaigns. The Memorandum also called for the Task Force to confer with technology experts and again threatened social-media platforms with adverse legal consequences if the platforms did not censor aggressively enough.”

End quote from Missouri v. Biden, July 4, 2023. This judicial freedom document is worthy of study and publication in its entirety.

The War on “Misinformation” — Outlawing Dissident Data on the Road to Tyranny

The question of who is qualified to arbitrate what constitutes misinformation is seldom discussed and mostly neglected, for obvious reasons. If it were deliberated, the bias of the legacy media’s anointed “misinformation experts” (Stanford Internet Observatory, Virality Project, Center for Countering Digital Hate, etc.) would be apparent, along with a larger question: why is “misinformation” supposedly lethal to the commonweal?

In the claustrophobic corridors of conformity where roost our supposed intellectual superiors, there is little historical memory of ideas once denounced as the vilest heresy having been proved right over the course of time, unless those views were on the “progressive” side of the ideological scale.

A truly non-partisan recollection of the past would lead to tolerance and judicious latitude for ideas which the 21st century consensus considers outside the limits of acceptable belief.

Error Has Rights

The precept that error has rights is as old as the Jeffersonian democracy which the Biden administration hilariously claims to defend. The battle for this principle was successfully fought in the 1780s, and again in the 1960s and ‘70s. It has since been nearly overturned in the new millennium, where it now hangs by a thread.

“Free Press” Smokescreen

The free press debate is mostly a smokescreen for an ideological conflict in which one side of the political spectrum seeks to gain an advantage over the other. Concerning censorship, the Left and the Right are often partners in slime. Trying to find an authentic Jeffersonian on either side is like searching for a Baptist in Mecca. The right of scholars who analyze flaws in the Talmud and the atrocities of the Israeli government, to be free of censorship and cancellation, has zero support among most of the Republican legislators, jurists and pundits who are indignant over the suppression of their viewpoints by Biden’s bureaucrats.

In America, much of the interdiction of ideas and obstruction of free inquiry is perpetrated by private companies, and more specifically, the usury industry, which monopolizes online payment systems. In resistance to their monopoly, dissident writers are paid and sustained by readers rather than corporations, which helps to encourage the widest possible diversity of opinion, as well as independent investigative reporting which is vital to the democracy which Prof. Tribe cynically extols with seigneurial conceit, and simultaneously thwarts.

In 1789 the Catholic idea that the Blessed Virgin Mary was conceived without sin and assumed bodily into heaven was considered a depraved theology in the eyes of the majority of the Protestant population of the United States. Had it not been for the liberty of conscience enshrined in the Bill of Rights that year, those Catholic beliefs may very well have been outlawed.

234 years later, modern science has discovered that babies in the womb share the cells of their mothers: “Mothers around the world say they feel like their children are still a part of them long after they've given birth. As it turns out, that is literally true…Fetomaternal transfer…occurs in all pregnancies and in humans the fetal cells can persist for decades. Microchimeric fetal cells are found in various maternal tissues and organs including blood, bone marrow, skin and liver” (cf. here and here).

Consequently, the Son of God who was of one flesh with the humble Israelite girl we know as His mother Mary, shared his very tissue with her. In light of that discovery by avant-garde science, it seems far less likely that God would have allowed the body that contained within it the flesh of Jesus Christ, to rot on earth. In 1950, when Pius XII declared the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven, it seems he was prescient indeed.

Nowadays, with the desacralization of our society, where the outcome of the colosseum sports game is of infinitely greater interest than the corporeal fate of the human that served as the vessel for the incarnation of God, the once hotly disputed veracity or falsehood of the pontiff’s declaration doesn’t necessitate First Amendment protection. Other controversies however, are ablaze in the white hot fire of zealotry —with the certitude that one side is right and the other is not only wrong—it has no right to be wrong. For example, disputing trans claims and COVID orthodoxies remain subject to intense proscription.

The Left pretends to want libraries free of censorship. Shouting slogans about the right to read, some of them support trans books in children’s libraries because they have faith in the inherent value of that literature as drivers of transformative thinking in children, not due to any allegiance to the civil libertarian tenets of the First Amendment.

Not for a minute would most Leftist activists countenance the introduction of holocaust denial or white supremacist books in a library under their control. For these folks, “freedom of the press” is a pretext for overcoming the censorship demands of one’s adversaries, while practicing it oneself.

The Right meanwhile, wants libraries stocked with writings by Karl Rove, Ludwig von Mises, Glenn Beck, John Bolton, Hannity and O’Reilly. A majority actively oppose the presence of books in public libraries by Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Edward Said, Alexander Cockburn, and Maureen Dowd. Like the Left, the Right mainly operates by a dual standard.

Knowledge of the history of the struggle for intellectual freedom and the life stories of John Lilburne, Michael Servetus, John Tyndale, Edmund Campion, Ignaz Semmelweis, Eugene V. Debs, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Harry Elmer Barnes, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Norman Finkelstein, are instrumental in kindling a commitment to the American Way: •rights of conscience, •the necessity of a free press, and •toleration of opinions designated as “misinformation.”

The debate turns on whether or not a free people require intervention by “expert authorities” like fallible Anthony “I am science” Fauci, who filter what would otherwise be unfettered access to information.

To prove his points in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson stated, “…let Facts be submitted to a candid world.” The Founders of our nation were unequivocal in proclaiming their confidence in the people judging for themselves, without a king, commissar or president preventing them from undertaking this sacred civic responsibility and divine right.

That the interdiction of information online is termed by Lucifer’s lexicographers “a defense of democracy,” is among the most egregious evocations of doublethink since George Orwell first put pen to paper.

Distilled to its first principle, the defense of democracy depends on the defense of the right to be wrong.

The New York Times, Laurence Tribe, Leah Litman, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Bobby Kennedy Jr., Alex Berenson and Tucker Carlson, all have a right to be in error. Without that Constitutional liberty guaranteed to every individual —whether heretic or grandee—Fascism from the Right, or Communism from the Left, will inevitably take control and sift our nation like wheat.

“This country is planted thick with laws…And if you cut them down…do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.” —Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons

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Michael Hoffman is the author of Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare (2001), The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome (2017) , Twilight Language (2021), six other books published in the United States, as well as overseas in Japanese and French translation, and 122 issues of Revisionist History® newsletter, 1997-2022. Since January, twenty-eight of his essays have been published on Substack. He is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press. His podcast, Michael Hoffman’s Revisionist History,® is heard around the world.

Twitter: @HoffmanMichaelA