Monday’s oral arguments in the case of Murthy v. Missouri seemed like both the Justices and the lawyers arguing before them were in some kind of alternative universe, like they had gone through the looking glass. One Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, sitting on this nation’s highest court, even made statements indicating that she must have cheated on her law school and bar exams concerning Constitutional law, in particular, the meaning and application of the First Amendment. She appeared as grossly ignorant of that as she was in her confirmation hearing where she said she could not define what a woman is.

The case involves the mass censorship regime imposed by Silicon Valley, and the defense industrial government complex Washington insiders call The Blob, upon the People. It has matured and grown from the 2016 Russiagate hoax forward, through COVID, and then with respect to the rigged election of 2020, and the government-controlled riot of January 6, 2021. In their lawsuit against the Biden Administration the Attorney Generals of Missouri and Louisiana had demonstrated that government agencies, both directly, and through a host of newly minted and government funded “disinformation” monitoring companies had convinced social media companies to comply with their demand to censor and deplatform critics of the regime. Emblematic was the prior orchestration by the FBI of censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop (which they had in their possession) as planted Russian disinformation ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

During COVID, to cite another example, the result was that many of the nation’s premier epidemiologists were censored and deplatformed for reporting facts about the virus which were true, but did not support mask or vaccine mandates, lockdowns, or widespread vaccination of children and young adults with experimental vaccines. U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty in the Western District of Louisiana granted a preliminary injunction against the government pressuring social media companies to censor protected speech. That is what the First Amendment says emphatically the government cannot do. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld Judge Doughty’s injunction but narrowed its scope.

Part of the problem is that the lawsuit portrayed Silicon Valley’s companies as “private” actors. That is an error at the center of all efforts, be they through the Courts or Congress, to attack what has become the censorship industrial complex. Silicon Valley was invented by the government. Government contracts are what keep these companies alive financially. Government immunity, in the form of antitrust protection and Section 230 content immunity from suits, are also central to their financial life. These companies, since 2016 have been staffed by CIA, FBI, and Pentagon veterans along with former high officials of the British government like Nick Clegg. In reality, they are fully witting coconspirators in the censorship scheme. The classified nature of these relationships is what needs to be attacked and put in the public sunlight.

So, the argument in the court became one about whether the government had truly coerced private actors to censor speech or whether they were just jawboning and complaining about certain speech. It was, thus, an argument occurring within a completely fictional reality which never existed.

That’s the environment in which Justice Jackson chastised the Solicitor General of Louisiana by opining: "Your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the federal government in significant ways in the most important time periods . . . The government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country... by encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information." Ah, the Patriot Act and other forms of totalitarian dictatorship as embraced and articulated by the modern Democratic Party hack. The First Amendment is there to hamstring the government even in cases of national security or public health emergencies as our courts have previously held until now. In prior times, other Justices would have recognized and chastised this outrageous statement because it would be seen as implicating the legitimacy of the court. Instead, there was polite silence.

The continued ability to censor speech and promote propaganda is a vital weapon in the attempt to rig the 2024 election. It seems clear we can’t depend on the Supreme Court to neutralize this weapon. A vast educational campaign and mobilization aimed at turning out a vote that is too big to rig must begin now.