America Isn’t Dead Yet
The Constitution has survived far greater threats than Biden and Big Tech.
by David Catron
July 25, 2021, 11:28 PM
It’s easy to understand the dejection that prompted Ben Stein’s recent American Spectator column, “Goodbye, America.” But despair is a dark and distorted lens through which the future always appears bleak. The Biden administration is indeed colluding with Big Tech to crush dissent. But like all previous Democratic attempts to suppress free speech, such as the Sedition Act of 1918, they will ultimately fail. SCOTUS moves at an excruciatingly glacial pace. Yet the Roberts Court, for all its faults, has issued an impressive series of rulings that have bolstered the First Amendment. Republicans in Congress and the state legislatures have been dilatory in responding to the threat, but they are taking action.
Moreover, the Biden administration’s collaboration with Big Tech has been so inept that it has itself already doomed that unholy alliance. When White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted, “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation,” she discredited the specious argument that social media platforms aren’t bound by the First Amendment because they are private corporations. Their cooperation with the Biden administration to censor inconvenient viewpoints places them squarely in the category of “state actors” and thus subject to the same First Amendment restraints that bind the government. As Vivek Ramaswamy writes in the Wall Street Journal:
Social-media companies are privately owned, but when they collude with officials to block disfavored content, they are serving as the government’s censorship bureau and must answer to the First Amendment.… A growing body of evidence suggests that social media companies have voluntarily worked with Democratic officials to censor content the latter disfavor.… The Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison (1973) that the government “may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”
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https://spectator.org/biden-first-amendment-america-isnt-dead/
