Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; Jessica Reed Kraus, an independent journalist and social media influencer; and American Values 2024 (AV24), the Kennedy-supporting super PAC, filed a preliminary injunction that, if approved, would force Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta to cease and desist ongoing censorship of Kennedy-related content.

Evidence presented in the United States District Court, Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, demonstrates that Meta’s censorship of Kennedy has accelerated and become more intrusive and extreme since Instagram and Facebook censored links to the documentary Who Is Bobby Kennedy? across its platforms following the film’s May 3 debut. 

Meta’s censorship caught the attention of X owner Elon Musk, who promoted the film to his 191.4 million followers. Still, Meta continues to censor Kennedy-related content, including the following phrases: 

“Kennedy all the way!”

“VOTE KENNEDY”

“Time to add Kennedy to the mix”

“#letbobbydebate” 

Meta has also censored multiple links to Kennedy events, according to evidence gathered by the plaintiffs. Among them are links directing social media users to “The Real Debate,” a live broadcast hosted by respected journalist John Stossel held concurrently to CNN’s June 27 debate. Kennedy responded to the same questions asked of President Biden and former president Trump, in real time. Meta also allegedly prevented users from organizing social media “watch parties” for the event. 

Most worryingly, private communications in the form of direct messages (DMs) have been censored by Meta, leaving many Kennedy supporters fearful that Meta will follow through with threats to ban individual social media users sharing legally protected political advocacy through DMs. 

Reed Kraus, a new plaintiff with an Instagram following of 1.2 million and more than 330,000 paid subscribers to her Substack blog, House Inhabit, informed the court that she has been widely censored by Meta. As recently as June 27, she posted the results of a poll with 300,000 respondents on Instagram showing that 90% agree that Kennedy should be allowed to debate. Within minutes her Instagram account was blocked, and she was warned that further posts would lead to account restriction or termination.

Such threats of censorship not only have a chilling effect on free speech in America’s digital public square but represent blatant election interference, according to the plaintiffs. They further argue that censorship not only affects individuals and organizations directly, but also injures voters who are thereby deprived of their rights to information about the most important election in decades. 

The Biden administration can no longer force social media companies to censor speech it finds objectionable, according to a new legal decision delivered in the context of the Kennedy v. Biden  lawsuit. 

Chief United States  District Judge Terry A. Doughty, of the Western district of Louisiana, denied the administration’s motions to get legal permission to continue censoring constitutionally protected speech. 

Doughty’s decision, handed down on July 9, is a major legal victory for independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Responding to the court’s ruling, on July 10 Kennedy wrote on X: 

Big victory in the Kennedy v. Biden censorship case. A live injunction is in place preventing the Biden Administration from coercing or colluding with social media to censor me. You’d think that a President who has sworn to protect the Constitution wouldn’t need a court injunction to respect free speech. But such are the times we live in.

Kennedy is the lead plaintiff in a suit against the Biden administration in which the president and federal agencies under the administration’s control are accused of violating the First Amendment by coercing privately-owned social media companies into censoring user-generated content. 

The merits of the Kennedy v. Biden are similar to those of the Murthy v. Missouri case, which the Supreme Court recently returned to a lower court after finding that the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana did not have standing – that is, they felt that the plaintiffs in that case could not prove direct harm from the censorship alleged in the lawsuit. 

Kennedy’s separate but similar lawsuit likely will have no such problems, as public evidence demonstrates clear harm: within the first 72 hours of the Biden administration’s term, in January 2021, the administration demanded that social media companies censor Kennedy’s posts, as reported in The Kennedy Beacon. 

Kennedy is in a unique position as both a presidential candidate and a litigant in a case that includes massive evidence that he was directly censored by the Biden administration. 

Mary Holland, CEO of Children's Health Defense (CHD), a co-plaintiff in the Kennedy v. Biden lawsuit, said, “CHD and Kennedy are at the front of the pack here on the First Amendment. We'll have to see what’s going to happen at the 5th Circuit, but the case is moving in our direction.”

The Biden administration has appealed Judge Doughty’s ruling to the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, following a similar legal path that the administration took in fighting the Murthy case. 

The fact that the administration moved to seek a court order allowing the resumption of online censorship in the midst of President Biden’s fight for political survival underscores the high priority the administration places on suppressing speech it finds inconvenient. 

Have you posted material about presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and later discovered it’s been removed from a social media platform?

Have you tried to post a link to the film Who Is Bobby Kennedy? and noticed that the link was removed?

Are you being “shadow banned”? 

According to Wikipedia, “‘Shadow banning,’ also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning, and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user’s content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of whether the action is taken by an individual or an algorithm. For example, shadow-banned comments posted to a blog or media website would be visible to the sender, but not to other users accessing the site.”

If you’re being shadow banned or in any way censored, our funders, American Values 2024 (www.av24.org), would like you to share examples by sending screen grabs to censorship@av24.org.

Thank you for helping us follow the subtle and pernicious ways Big Tech continues to censor Kennedy.

AV24 launched the film on May 3, using YouTube as its host, on the website https://whoisbobbykennedy.com/

But as Facebook users tried to share the film link, many discovered they couldn’t.

In addition, Internet and social media czars have quickly slapped the video on YouTube and other platforms with a COVID-19 Vaccine disclaimer, referring users to the World Health Organization (WHO) website.

On Instagram, users tried to share the film link and received a notice that there was a problem with the link, which isn’t the case.

Other users were notified that the link to the film was removed because it goes against Instagram’s “Community Guidelines” due to one of the following transgressions: “spam”; “support or praise of terrorism, organized crime or hate groups”; “solicitation of sexual services”; and “sale of firearms and drugs.”

The film is clearly none of the above.

In addition, the film’s reach on Facebook and Instagram has been minimal, which appears to be “shadow banning,” a method that platforms use (relying on algorithms) to suppress the organic reach of a piece of content they don’t want to spread.

“When social media companies censor a presidential candidate, the public can’t learn what that candidate actually believes and what policies they would pursue if elected,” said Tony Lyons, co-founder of AV24. “We are left with the propaganda and lies from the most powerful and most corrupt groups and individuals. This is the hallmark of an oligarchy—not a democracy.”

About AMERICAN VALUES 2024 (AV24)

American Values 2024 (AV24) is a super PAC committed to educating and mobilizing voters to elect candidates who will restore and protect the soul of democracy in the United States. Our long-term vision is to build a movement starting at the local level to create a national groundswell to address the critical issues our country faces. Today, AV24 supports Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign.

AV24 is co-founded by Mark Gorton (Chairman of Tower Research Capital) and Tony Lyons (President of Skyhorse Publishing).

AV24 funds The Kennedy Beacon.

The highly anticipated Supreme Court oral arguments for the Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden) were presented on Monday, March 18. This seminal free speech case challenges the Biden administration for coercing social media platforms such as Facebook and X (then Twitter) to remove information that contradicted the government’s narrative about COVID-19 vaccines, lockdowns, health freedom, election fraud, and other topics.

Just outside the Supreme Court, in Washington, as the arguments were being presented inside, a rally to reclaim free speech was hosted by Children’s Health Defense (CHD), which had filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in advance of the March 18 hearing. Braving the chilly DC weather, protesters held signs proclaiming “Censorship is the tool of tyrants.” The rally featured a number of speakers, including CHD president and attorney Mary Holland, who, as a member of the Supreme Court bar, was privy to the oral arguments. 

“The answer to free speech is more speech,” said Holland. In her view, the government has consistently tried to force social media platforms to take down speech that it disagrees with, which is a direct violation of the First Amendment. 

Reflecting on the oral arguments, Holland said, “I was surprised there wasn’t greater outrage at what the government has been doing to censor people on the internet, including Children’s Health Defense and including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” 

On March 19, our colleague Michael Kane at Honest Media covered the slanted way the mainstream media reported on the case, titling his analysis “Mainstream Media Paints a Biased and Narrow View of SCOTUS Hearing on Social Media Censorship.” He enumerated how outlets such as Associated Press, The Washington Post, and ABC News wrote that the SCOTUS decision (which likely won’t be announced until June) will almost certainly come down in the government’s favor – empowering an unfettered collaboration to censor in coordination with social media platforms.

But SCOTUS’s ruling ultimately lies in the hands of the nine Supreme Court justices, not with the press or the hundreds of free speech protesters who gathered in front of the court.

Inside the Supreme Court, conversation was intense. All judges offered passionate opinions, demonstrating the contentiousness of the issue. 

Much of the discussion in the hearing centered around the plaintiff Jill Hines, the co-director of Health Freedom Louisiana, who had her tweets removed after re-tweeting a Kennedy tweet that mentioned Tucker Carlson. Shortly thereafter, health groups under Hines’ direction in Louisiana were blocked by Facebook. Hines, speaking at a press conference in front of the Supreme Court, said that she was there “representing the hundreds of millions of Americans who knew what was happening was wrong, and they went to social media to express their concerns.”

“The greatest arbiter of misinformation is our federal government, and we have rights as Americans to question it every single day,” said Hines, closing her speech at the rally. 

The Supreme Court heard the oral arguments at 10 a.m. and the hearing lasted for nearly two hours. Representing the Biden administration was principal deputy solicitor general Brian Fletcher. Arguing on behalf of the states was the solicitor general of Louisiana, Benjamin Aguiñaga. 

Fletcher’s argument attempted to make a distinction between government coercion and government persuasion. While government coercion is unlawful, Fletcher maintained that the government has merely been persuasive to social media companies. Additionally, he claimed Hines did not have “standing” as a plaintiff as she cannot prove harm. Thus far, the courts have ruled otherwise, which is why this case made it to the Supreme Court.

Justice Samuel Alito commented on the email communications and the overall relationship between federal agencies and social media platforms like Facebook and X (then Twitter), saying that there is

[c]onstant pestering of Facebook and other platforms and they want regular meetings and they suggest rules that should be applied … and I look at that and thought, wow, I cannot imagine federal officials taking that approach to the print media.

Alito continued, mentioning that the federal government can threaten to remove Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 provides immunity to media sites; they are not responsible for the content posted by users. “It’s got these big clubs available to it,” said Alito, “so it’s treating Facebook and these other platforms like its subordinates.”

Kennedy commented on X about how the Biden administration’s “suggestions” to social media companies were in fact more than that: 

Biden admin is arguing its censorship directives were just suggestions. But when they come from someone with the power to destroy your company with regulatory or anti-trust action, they are more than just ‘suggestions.’

Fletcher responded to Justice Alito by arguing that such correspondence between the federal government and social media platforms isn’t uncommon. He said that the government’s main priority during the pandemic was to prevent media sites from “promoting bad information” that might discourage Americans from getting vaccinated.

Advocating for free speech in the oral arguments, Aguiñaga argued that the badgering by the federal government can not be perceived as anything but coercion. 

“The government has no right to persuade platforms to violate Americans’ constitutional rights. Pressuring platforms in back rooms, shielded from public view, is not using the bully pulpit at all. That is just being a bully,” said Aguiñaga in his opening statement. He claimed that the government has been secretly coercing social media platforms in an attempt to indirectly achieve what is expressly prohibited by the Constitution: censorship.

Throughout Aguiñaga’s oral argument, he stressed that he is not advocating for the government to stop communicating. He said that these communications must be done in line with the First Amendment. And they must be done without coercion disguised as “suggestions.” 

The notion that the First Amendment constrains the government seemed to ruffle the feathers of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson, who declared, “The government actually has a duty” to censor speech it deems harmful.

Jackson’s dismissal of the First Amendment was reposted on X by an account named End Wokeness. 

It remains to be seen how the Justices will rule in the coming months. 

The Murthy v. Missouri case specifically addresses censorship in the digital age. But the promotion of censorship doesn’t seem to be limited to social media platforms. 

On March 18, John Leake published on his Courageous Disclosure Substack a commentary on a New York Times piece, “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation.” Leake’s commentary follows the transformation of The New York Times into a publication that “fram[es] most of its propaganda as serving the righteous fight against the evil Donald Trump and his evil ‘far right’ followers.” According to Leake, The New York Times’ piece “sets out to convince formerly good liberals that censorship is a good thing, all it has to do is frame today’s free speech advocates as people who are in league with Donald Trump.”

The Supreme Court’s decision is expected in June of this year. It will have a ripple effect on other cases, such as Kennedy v. Biden. It will also undoubtedly have an effect on the course of the 2024 election, for all political parties.

On Monday, March 18, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) will begin hearing arguments in an epochal free speech appeal. At stake is whether the government can direct social media companies to censor and suppress speech and expression that is protected by the First Amendment. 

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Concurrent with the SCOTUS hearing, beginning at 9 a.m. (EST), Children’s Health Defense (CHD) will hold a rally outside the Supreme Court Building at One First Street, NE, in Washington, DC. Free speech advocates are invited to attend this free public event to send a clear message to jurists and policymakers that your right to free speech should not be infringed by the whims of any administration.

For those unable to attend in person, the event will be streamed live on a number of platforms, including CHD TV, X and Rumble. CHD TV and CHD’s X account will also broadcast live audio of the oral arguments before the Supreme Court. 

Freedom of speech and expression is a multi-generational issue that crosses traditional political and cultural divides due to censorship’s universally chilling effect on all citizens. 

Monday's rally becomes more urgent given President Biden’s strong support of legislation that aims to ban TikTok, a platform that encourages young people of America to exchange information, ideas, art and culture. Organizers of the rally want all Americans to demonstrate their outrage in defense of the First Amendment by raising their voices in  the heart of Washington D.C. 

Confirmed rally speakers include Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) founder, filmmaker, and individual-liberties activist Del Bigtree; CHD founder and president Mary Holland; Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance founders Pierre Kory, MD, and Paul Marik, MD; Aaron Kheriaty, MD, director of the Program in Bioethics and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center; and libertarian author and publisher Jeffrey Tucker, president of the Brownstone Institute. In the days leading up to the rally, CHD will announce further speakers.

Although censorship of information on COVID-19 from medical doctors, scientists, and researchers was the primary impetus behind the Murthy v. Missouri appeal (formerly known as Missouri v. Biden), evidence presented to court goes far beyond public health issues.

Many forms of speech have been censored and risk further censorship under the Biden administration, including political support for candidates for public office; satire; commentary on foreign policy; antiwar activism; free speech advocacy; children’s rights advocacy; and criticism of public officials.

SCOTUS will hear arguments on why this is a violation of the First Amendment.

Adam Garrie is a writer, speaker, and consultant on a wide range of current affairs as well as political risk. He is also the co-founder of HiCyrus, a data-driven tech startup that aims to fully democratize information access.

In the weeks leading up to the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy last November, Mark Gorton, co-chair of American Values 2024 and executive producer of the new documentary series Four Died Trying, purchased an advertisement slot in The New York Times. The ad, in part intended to promote the release of the series, read, “Today, on the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s murder, it is time for The New York Times to thoroughly investigate this epic crime.” 

Despite initial acceptance by the Times, and several rounds of editing, Gorton’s ad was eventually killed. 

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[Note: The Kennedy Beacon is funded by American Values 2024, a super PAC supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential campaign.]

The New York Times has a long-standing Kennedy problem – and not just its refusal to investigate the defining crime of the last century, which the majority of Americans reject as an act of a lone gunman, according to polling by Gallup. Today, the “newspaper of record” routinely censors information published by JFK’s nephew, the presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and those aligned with him. 

In November 2021, Skyhorse Publishing released The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, written by RFK Jr. A robust critique of America’s biosecurity-industrial complex, the book sold over a million copies and earned a spot on the coveted Times Bestseller List for 17 weeks. 

Despite its sales success, The Real Anthony Fauci was never reviewed in the Times, or in any mainstream paper, as Matthew Scully noted in National Review. It also never reached number one, despite far outselling its competition.

According to Skyhorse president and publisher Tony Lyons, co-chair with Gorton of American Values 2024, the Times manipulated the book’s ranking on its influential list. In January 2022, Lyons penned an article for The Defender explaining that the Times employs a “proprietary algorithm” to determine where a given release winds up in its rankings – an algorithm that appears to heavily favor pro-government narratives. 

Furthermore, the Times flagged the book with a “dagger” symbol (†) indicating “Institutional, special interest, group or bulk purchases.” According to the paper, this is an arbitrary notation decided by Times editors “based on standards for inclusion that encompass proprietary vetting and audit protocols, corroborative reporting and other statistical determinations.”

In a December 9, 2022, article in Esquire, Sophie Vershbow cites multiple industry sources to explain that the Times most likely uses a service called NPD BookScan “to flag books with a large percentage of bulk orders.” Despite being “one of publishing’s main data providers,” BookScan’s data, she writes, “often did not correspond to the position on the list” published by the Times.

Given the fact that 90% of The Real Anthony Fauci’s sales came through individual customers on Amazon, Lyons called BookScan to attempt to reconcile data. According to Lyons, a representative informed him that “they would flag things as bulk sales when most of the sales came from a particular ZIP code” – and in their system, Amazon sales are treated as coming from a single ZIP code.

“Let’s say that you have a controversial book that independent bookstores decide not to carry or that Barnes and Noble decides not to carry,” Lyons told me during a phone interview. “And then you get almost all of the sales going through Amazon. That’s not saying that it’s not a best seller … it’s not saying that there’s bulk sales. It’s just saying that there’s censorship.”

This pattern of intentional misrepresentation and omission by the Times and others continues with Kennedy’s most recent book, The Wuhan Cover-Up. As of this writing, the only major coverage of its December 5, 2023, release appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, both of which reported that independent bookstores opted not to carry the book.

Given its history, it’s unsurprising that The New York Times continues to silence dissenting voices within the Kennedy dynasty. Had the Times run Gorton’s advertisement as planned, readers would have been treated to a history of the outlet’s complicity in the cover-up of JFK’s assassination. That history is buried in the Times’ archives, preserved for all to see how the paper drifted from trusted news source to propagandist. 

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Intelligence at the Times

The New York Times has been controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family since 1896. From 1935 to 1961, the paper was led by A. G. Sulzberger’s great-grandfather, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who oversaw the outlet’s massive growth “in size and prestige,” according to biographical information published by Columbia University. 

The years leading up to Kennedy’s assassination saw Sulzberger rubbing elbows with the originators of the current military-industrial complex, who were nudging The New York Times into its ranks. He joined the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1939, retiring as chairman in 1957. In February of that year, Sulzberger reportedly attended the prestigious St. Simons Island Conference held by the secretive and influential Bilderberg Group, according to records housed at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Archive. Also in attendance were McGeorge Bundy, who would go on to become JFK’s national security advisor; Henry Kissinger, future secretary of state under presidents Nixon and Reagan; Paul Nitze, Kennedy’s assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs; David Rockefeller, a director of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Dean Rusk, Kennedy’s future secretary of state. 

During Sulzberger’s tenure, the Times also developed a close relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency. In addition to being a friend of CIA director Allen Dulles, Sulzberger signed secrecy agreements with the agency, as reported in a 1977 Rolling Stone piece by award-winning reporter Carl Bernstein. This allowed CIA agents to work within the Times itself, providing the paper with “tips” that advanced narratives favorable to the agency’s objectives. This working relationship was strengthened under Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, who took over the paper in the months before Kennedy’s assassination. 

As reported by Bernstein, “the New York Times provided cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966,” including Punch’s cousin C. L. Sulzberger. 

Within hours of Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, the Times led the charge in establishing the false version of events later immortalized in the Warren Commission Report. In a September 1964 edition of the Times, C. L. Sulzberger wrote, “It was essential in these restless days … to remove unfounded suspicions that could excite latent jingo spirit.” C. L. was described in CIA files as an “active asset” of the agency. It was later revealed during hearings of the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations that the CIA intentionally suppressed the release of information related to the JFK assassination.

Facing Past Mistakes

Throughout the ensuing decades, this unholy merger between the NYT and the US intelligence apparatus continued to compromise the paper’s reporting and mislead the American public on issues of global significance. 

The paper played a leading role in raising fear over the “Communist threat” of North Vietnam, starting with its first editorial on the Vietnam war in January 1955. As described by William M. Hammond in Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War, it was later revealed that the US government had issued a directive to “achieve ‘maximum cooperation’” with the press, suppressing stories of the true activities of the American military in the region and the tremendous loss of life on both sides of the conflict.

Similarly, the Times aggressively championed the story that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) – a threat supposedly so great that it justified the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US and its “coalition of the willing.” As recently summarized by Jon Schwarz in The Intercept, “The Times coverage of Iraq and its purported weapons of mass destruction was so atrocious in the lead-up to war in 2003 that the paper eventually had to issue an extensive mea culpa.”

Today, Americans are witnessing a new era of disinformation operations and censorship resulting from the direct collusion of news media and the federal government. In a March 10, 2023, article in the New York Post, Michael Shellenberger described the federally funded “censorship-industrial complex” that seeks to silence everyday Americans by disallowing any discussion of “conspiracy theories” that undermine the institutional narrative on topics from COVID-19 to election integrity. 

The Post – the oldest newspaper in the country – itself experienced the power of this complex when it was removed from Twitter after breaking the now widely known “Hunter Biden laptop” story. Emma-Jo Morris, who coauthored the Post’s article on the subject, appeared alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a House Judiciary Subcommittee Hearing on Censorship and Free Speech last July. Despite the ever-increasing understanding among the general public of the government’s role in sponsoring projects such as the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Times continues to cite its “Disinformation Dozen” report – a defamatory list in which Kennedy appears – as recently as September 2023.

To its credit, the Times has also demonstrated an ability to admit mistakes. The 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers served as a powerful, if implicit, acknowledgment that the Vietnam War was based on false premises the paper itself had advanced. As early as 2004, the Times admitted it had not always been correct in its coverage of 9/11 and the Iraq War, its editors having “found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been.”

While the 60th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination has come and gone, it is not too late for the Times to follow its own precedent and re-embrace journalistic curiosity and integrity. As detailed in David Talbot’s November 20, 2023, column in The Kennedy Beacon, presidents “Trump and Biden repeatedly delayed declassification of nearly 4,000 documents, in direct violation of the 1992 JFK Records Collection Act, which sought to release all government documents related to the Kennedy assassination,” while the country’s media organizations “remain largely wedded to the official version of Dallas.” But the true account of 1963 is already well documented and swiftly becoming common knowledge. All the Times needs to do is decide to dig deeper into its own manipulated coverage and set the record straight. 

Should the Times make such a decision, it couldn’t come at a more opportune time. Despite the fact that both his uncle and father were assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to be denied Secret Service protection by the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security – even in light of recent death threats – and many of his ideas are censored by the Times.

In his March 7 State of the Union address, President Biden acknowledged the impact that the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had on him. He understands the weight of the Kennedy name. Now he and the Times owe it to the American people to let go of old prejudices, investigate the truth, and fulfill their oaths to the American people. 

Liam Sturgess is an investigative reporter for The Kennedy Beacon. He is also a writer for the Canadian Covid Care Alliance and founder of White Rose Intelligence. He was the founding co-host and producer of the Rounding the Earth podcast, and publishes a Substack series called Microjourneys.

On March 18, 2024, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, formerly known as Missouri v. Biden. The ruling could be one of the most consequential in US history. At stake is the fundamental question of whether the executive branch and the agencies under its purview have a constitutional right to tell private companies to censor the speech of American citizens. 

According to the First Amendment, Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” 

Noticeably absent from this text is any qualification on the nature of the protected free speech. 

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the Biden administration, the possession of rights and freedoms that previous generations of Americans always assumed were constitutionally protected, without caveat, could end. 

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What Was Censored? 

The censored speech that led to the filing of Missouri v. Biden is most remarkable for its thematic diversity. Among the content censored were scholarly opinions from medical doctors at globally renowned universities; the opinions of celebrities; online satire from social media accounts with few followers; the work of journalists from respected publications; reporting from a major publication owned by a publicly traded company; public policy statements of a current presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; the personal account of a serving president, Donald Trump; citizens’ expressions of concern over COVID-19 mandates; and other forms of public advocacy and information sharing. 

Prior to the release of the Twitter Files in December 2022, the official explanation was that social media companies were acting autonomously. However, under Elon Musk’s new ownership of Twitter, now called X, journalists were given unprecedented access to communications between the company’s executives and White House officials, as well as officials from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies. Elements of the Twitter Files formed a substantial portion of the evidence presented by plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, which now, as Murthy v. Missouri, awaits a final decision by the Supreme Court.

How the Government Censors Citizens

Although most closely associated with COVID-19, the “censorship industrial complex” predates the pandemic. As The Kennedy Beacon reported, in January 2017, weeks before the inauguration of President Trump, a “former” British intelligence officer was in President Obama’s White House when orders were given to form a “counter-disinformation project” aimed at stopping a “repeat” of the 2016 election in which Donald Trump, a populist political outsider, secured victory over the establishment’s favored candidate, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. 

This led to the formation of a supposedly independent group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL). The group worked closely with federal agencies to “recommend” online content worthy of censorship. Federal agencies then “dutifully” instructed and/or coerced social media companies to censor, blacklist, or suppress the content deemed a “danger” by CTIL. 

Thereafter, a template was established:

Step 1: A nonprofit, volunteer, or academic body is formed with the connivance and approval of federal officials. 

Step 2: Said group publicly labels individuals, social media accounts, and independent media organizations “dangerous” insofar as they spread “disinformation” or “misinformation.” These groups discuss lists of “undesirables” with decision makers at federal agencies and, after 2021, with the White House directly. 

Step 3: Federal officials contact social media companies to request or demand that they censor the content proscribed by the “independent” group. 

Step 4: The condemned content and its creators are censored from major social media platforms. 

This pipeline of censorship appears designed to hide the fact that censorship is coming from the government.

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Plausible Deniability

Earlier attempts to stop censorship by social media companies had relied on the fact that such companies are classed as operators of “platforms” rather than as publishers. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 gives a liability shield to social media companies that could otherwise be subject to defamation or obscenity lawsuits. Thus, it was argued that such platforms cannot act as publishers that pick and choose what otherwise legally protected content to display. On these terms, the Trump administration argued that Section 230 should be invoked to stop the censorship of lawful free speech by social media companies. 

Although arguments over the application of Section 230 continue, much of the impetus behind such arguments was made moot by Missouri v. Biden. This is because the evidence presented by plaintiffs demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that social media companies did not act independently as publishers when engaging in noted examples of censorship in recent years. Instead, the censorship was directed by the federal government while social media companies acquiesced. 

The “independent” groups were designed to provide plausible deniability to accusations that federal agencies and the executive branch were directly responsible for the censorship. In this sense, the groups acted as adjuncts of federal agencies.

During the Trump administration, these groups colluded with federal agencies that are theoretically answerable to the White House. This collusion, however, demonstrated a unique phenomenon of “independent” pro-censorship groups and federal agencies directly conspiring not only against the free speech of ordinary citizens, but against that of President Trump himself. No evidence so far presented suggests that Trump had any direct knowledge of the censorship pipeline operating under his nose, even while he complained about censorship with increased frequency. 

Following the inauguration of President Biden, the White House went from a largely oblivious victim of censorship to an active participant in censorship. It is set to defend the censorship pipeline before the Supreme Court. 

Uncontested Facts 

In appealing to the Supreme Court to uphold its censorship practices, the Biden administration does not contest the fact that it directly contacts social media companies to demand the censorship of user-generated content. Therefore, the myth that independent companies and advisory bodies made decisions to censor speech – independent of government interference – has been shattered by the very people who once gaslighted their victims by denying government involvement. 

Likewise, the Biden administration does not seek to excuse, let alone condemn, the fact that many members of “independent” groups calling for censorship, as well as many executives in social media company boardrooms, are former officials from federal intelligence agencies, as reported by Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi. For the Biden administration, these apparent conflicts of interest are “business as usual.” 

What It Means to You

The letter, spirit, and traditional understanding of the First Amendment holds that government requires no shield from criticism and opposition. One of the many purposes of the First Amendment is to protect people from the whims of political leaders terrified of such criticism. It is therefore a perversion of the Constitution to suggest that censorship of engaging, provocative, or dissident content is a good thing that “protects people from themselves.” 

The Justices of the Supreme Court have been entrusted with a generationally important responsibility when they rule on Murthy v. Missouri in March. Their decision will impact the consumers of free speech as much as it will the speakers, writers, and content creators who serve them.

Adam Garrie is a writer, speaker, and consultant on a wide range of current affairs as well as political risk. He is also the co-founder of HiCyrus, a data-driven tech startup that aims to fully democratize information access.

Award-winning journalist Lara Logan spoke out against censorship on Monday during Senator Ron Johnson’s roundtable discussion, “Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supported her on X.

Journalist Lara Logan testifying before Senator Ron Johnson’s committee on Monday.

Logan called out NGOs (non-governmental organizations) such as Media Matters for America, Facts First USA, and Defeat Disinfo – which receive taxpayer dollars to attack and censor journalists, scientists, and researchers who question the favored government narratives.

“In the name of preventing the spread of disinformation, they censor, silence, intimidate and punish,” Logan said. “This is a death sentence for journalists. It’s how you murder a journalist without killing them. It’s how you murder a scientist without killing them. It’s how you murder a doctor, without killing them. It’s how you murder the vaccine injured when they haven’t died yet. It’s how you finish them off, and everyone else in their family.”

Within two days of taking office, the Biden administration began censoring Kennedy.

The US Supreme Court will hear Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden), a key censorship case in which Kennedy is a plaintiff, in March.

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Paid for by American Values 2024 (307 W. 36th St., 11th floor, New York, NY 10018) and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Independent presidential candidate and public health activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was handed a major legal victory on February 14, in his historic class action against the Biden administration. 

US District Judge Terry A. Doughty of the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued an injunction prohibiting the White House and multiple federal agencies from contacting social media companies to censor or suppress constitutionally protected free speech. Judge Doughty’s injunction also prohibits social media companies from altering their visibility algorithms at the direct or indirect behest of public agencies. 

The injunction will provide relief for Americans whose views on a wide range of public issues have been censored by companies including but not limited to Facebook and Instagram parent Meta, Google-owned YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter). 

In issuing his injunction, the judge found: “The Kennedy Plaintiffs demonstrated that not only have the Defendants shown willingness to coerce and/or to give significant encouragement to social-media platforms to suppress free speech with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic and national elections, but they have also shown a willingness to do it with regard to other issues, such as gas prices, parody speech, calling the President a liar, climate change, gender, and abortion."

This is a significant victory for free speech advocates like Kennedy.

Doughty added that Kennedy and his co-plaintiffs “are likely to succeed on the merits of their claims that the White House Defendants, the Surgeon General Defendants, the CDC Defendants, the FBI Defendants, and the CISA Defendants jointly participated with social-media platforms to suppress protected free speech.”

Doughty’s injunction further cited defendants as placing Kennedy on an Orwellian list known as the “Disinformation Dozen.” The people on this list were smeared by a non-US group known as the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which itself is the subject of ongoing litigation from social media company X, as reported by The New York Times. 

Shortly after the Center for Countering Digital Hate made a presentation to the Surgeon General’s Office about the supposed need to censor the so-called Disinformation Dozen, “The Surgeon General’s office thereafter ensured Facebook was censoring the ‘Disinformation Dozen,’” according to Doughty’s injunction. 

Although Doughty recognized the urgency of the matter, the injunction will be stayed (paused) until the Supreme Court rules on a similar case, Murthy v. Missouri (previously filed as Missouri v. Biden), set to be heard in the nation’s highest court beginning in March 2024. In this case, the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana sued the president, his administration, and multiple federal agencies, accusing them of colluding with social media and streaming platforms for the purposes of censoring speech protected by the First Amendment.

When announcing his candidacy for president in 2023, Kennedy explained he was motivated to fight government and Big Tech censorship, which targeted him. In July, he testified before the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, revealing details of the Biden administration’s suppression of his speech.

Most disturbingly, at the start of Kennedy’s appearance in front of the House Select Subcommittee, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida) attempted to censor Kennedy’s public testimony by demanding a closed-door session. In the end, Kennedy made his case to congressional representatives, drawing from evidence presented to Judge Doughty. 

Due to the similarities between Kennedy’s case and the Missouri case, a final decision on the merits of the matter of online speech will likely be made in the coming months. This precedent will not only affect Kennedy but also impact anyone who has been or is likely to be censored by social media companies at the behest of a government whose responsibility is to protect and uphold constitutional rights to speak, assemble, inquire, and worship freely.

The principles Kennedy is fighting for in the courts are identical to those that would form the core of his policies as president. Throughout his campaign, Kennedy has quoted his uncle, who as president said, “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

This quote helps clarify the spirit of the First Amendment as a piece of law that defines the United States as a nation unafraid of its citizens expressing themselves with peace, confidence, and passion. 

Adam Garrie is a writer, speaker, and consultant on a wide range of current affairs as well as political risk. He is also the co-founder of HiCyrus, a data-driven tech startup that aims to fully democratize information access.

On January 5, YouTube removed a video uploaded to the American Values 2024 channel. The video was a recording of an event hosted by the Hon. Dion J. Powell, MPA, on behalf of American Values 2024, a super PAC that supports the presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [American Values 2024 funds The Kennedy Beacon].

The video of the informal Q&A session featured activist and author John Gilmore, who spoke about public health issues and medical ethics, particularly in relation to COVID-19 vaccine mandates and how they impacted the Black community. At no time in the video did any speaker offer medical advice. Instead, the discussion was focused on matters of public policy, labor rights, and community activism. 

Gilmore's comments were made partly to address the financial and social problems inflicted on members of the Black community following the Biden administration's decision to impose the largest vaccine mandate in American history. While many aspects of this mandate were subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court, many people remain jobless after being terminated during the period in which mandates were in force. 

According to YouTube, the video was removed for violating the platform’s policies on “medical misinformation.” 

AV24 appealed YouTube’s censorship of the video. While YouTube stated that it could take up to 72 hours for a decision to be delivered, the appeal was rejected within less than four hours, according to a source with direct knowledge of the situation. 

Google-owned YouTube became notorious for removing commentary on public health policy worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. As reported in The Kennedy Beacon, Google was not alone in stifling free speech. All major social media platforms, including those owned by Meta and the company formerly known as Twitter, were named by journalists Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi as entities that collaborated with the federal government to censor public health related content, including truthful statements from medical professionals. 

In August of 2023, YouTube updated its “medical misinformation” policies to include the censorship of content discussing public health and other medical matters whose viewpoints contradict the policies of “local health authorities or the World Health Organization (WHO).” YouTube’s description of “medical misinformation” is as broad as it is vague, and it remains unclear which statements in the American Values 2024 video “violated” the policy. 

Objectively, the video proved that this policy is enforced in an arbitrary manner. The video was originally uploaded to the African American Values 2024 YouTube channel on September 15, 2023. As of January 5, 2024, the video remains available for the public to view on that channel. However, within 15 minutes of the same video being uploaded to the American Values 2024 channel this week, it was removed. Following the removal of the video, the American Values 2024 channel was given a “YouTube strike,” which means that no fresh content can be uploaded to the channel for a week. 

Because the video was over 28 minutes in length, it would be unreasonable to suggest that the removal and accompanying “medical misinformation” strike was the result of a human reviewing the video. It would consequently be reasonable to surmise that the video’s censorship was the result of an algorithmic tool. Therefore, either by design or through a glitch, the censorship of videos on YouTube is arbitrary, given the fact that identical postings of the same video were treated differently on two different YouTube channels. 

In the video, Gilmore briefly discusses Kennedy’s ongoing litigation against Google. In a lawsuit filed in the summer of 2023, Kennedy accuses Google of violating his First Amendment rights when it censored a number of his videos discussing vaccine safety. According to Bloomberg Law, Kennedy asserts that Google’s censorship policies are “impermissibly vague.” Shortly after Kennedy filed his lawsuit against Google, a video posted to the American Values 2024 YouTube channel was removed by the platform, as reported for the Beacon. In the video, Kennedy spoke about his opposition to Big Tech and government censorship. 

Because Kennedy is a presidential candidate, censoring videos in which he discusses matters of public policy could be reasonably interpreted as election interference. Google has proven links to the White House, as journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before a congressional committee last year. This makes the censorship of Kennedy and Kennedy-related content all the more dubious. 

In a further twist, a December 2020 video of President-elect Biden stating that COVID-19 vaccines should not be mandatory remains on YouTube. It appears that while videos of Biden advocating for a policy he ultimately betrayed are deemed suitable by YouTube, Kennedy’s consistent advocacy against mandates and the discussion thereof, are worthy of capricious censorship. 

Google’s arbitrary censorship of peaceful political speech has a negative impact on the wider political discourse and on voters seeking accurate information about the policies of a major presidential candidate. 

Adam Garrie is a writer, speaker, and consultant on a wide range of current affairs as well as political risk. He is also the cofounder of HiCyrus, a data-driven tech startup that aims to fully democratize information access. 

On December 11, the Supreme Court refused to grant Robert F. Kennedy Jr. his Motion to Intervene in the matter of Murthy v. Missouri, a cause often referred to by the name under which it was originally filed, Missouri v. Biden. While the landmark free speech case will still be heard by the Supreme Court in 2024, Kennedy will not be included as a party in the appeal. 

What The Case is About

The lawsuit alleges that the the Biden administration actively coerced and colluded with major social media companies to suppress the online speech of Americans that is protected by the First Amendment. In a significant Independence Day ruling, District Judge Terry A. Doughty found that the Biden administration violated the First Amendment by coercing social media companies into censoring the speech of Americans, including that of Kennedy whose name features heavily in the evidence brought before the court. Doughty issued a wide ranging injunction prohibiting the Biden administration from any further contact with social media companies regarding user content, with the exceptions of content relating to criminal allegations, threats to national security and content that constitutes potential foreign originated attempts at election interference. 

The Biden administration appealed Judge Doughty’s ruling to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Here, judges upheld the majority of Doughty’s ruling while narrowing the scope of Doughty’s injunction due to fears that it could restrict legally permitted government communications on social media. Crucially, the Fifth Circuit judges wrote: 

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Ultimately, we find the district court did not err in determining that several officials - namely the White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC, and the FBI - likely coerced or significantly encouraged social-media platforms to moderate content, rendering those decisions state actions In doing so, the officials likely violated the First Amendment. 

The Biden Administration appealed the Fifth Circuit’s decision to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the matter and stayed (paused) enforcement of the injunction prohibiting federally coerced censorship, pending its decision in the matter which is expected in 2024. This means that the Biden administration is not currently restricted from contacting social media companies with coercive censorship requests. 

Why Kennedy Sought to Intervene 

Kennedy formally filed a Motion to Intervene in October. In doing so, Kennedy sought to be officially included as a party in the case. This is relevant for reasons pertaining to legal technicalities, election integrity and Kennedy’s publicly stated allegations that he has been harmed by the White House directed censorship detailed as evidence in Murthy v. Missouri. 

Legal representatives of the Biden administration will argue before the Supreme Court, that the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana have no standing in a case involving matters of federal government directed censorship of American citizens on social media platforms. Typically, in order to have ‘standing’ in a legal matter, a litigant must convince a court that he, she or it has been harmed by the alleged behavior of a defendant. The Biden administration contends that this does not apply to the states of Missouri or Louisiana. 

Mr. Kennedy contends that he has been actually harmed through the unambiguous censorship of his content across multiple social media platforms including Google-owned YouTube, Meta’s social media platforms as well as on the platform formerly known as Twitter and now known as X (prior to its acquisition by Tesla CEO Elon Musk in October of 2022). Thus Kennedy’s inclusion to the case would add a party with clear standing in the matter, as argued by Kennedy in his briefs to the court. 

Kennedy has further argued that the harm caused to him by government directed censorship of his social media pages and profiles constitutes a specific harm to his constitutional right to run in the 2024 presidential election. According to Kennedy’s legal representatives, the candidate’s speeches and interviews continue to be subject to censorship. His counsel added “Mr. Kennedy’s unique interests as a presidential candidate - and the interests of millions of Americans who wish to hear his views - are of vital importance to the constitutionality of the Government’s censorship campaign.” 

Thus, Kennedy sought to intervene in the case to give it a better chance of defeating a technical argument to be advanced by the Biden administration and also to ensure the integrity of the 2024 presidential election, which would be infringed if the free expression of a candidate is restricted through government ordered censorship. 

Justice Alito’s Dissent 

Although the majority of Supreme Court Justices who ruled against Kennedy’s Motion to Intervene did not explain their rationale, Justice Samuel Alito offered a dissenting opinion. Alito agreed that Kennedy’s intervention in the case is vital to his presidential campaign receiving fair treatment in the digital public square. According to Alito, “the denial of intervention is likely to prevent Mr. Kennedy from vindicating the rights he claims until the spring of 2024 and perhaps as late as June of that year. And by that time, several months of the Presidential campaign will have passed.” 

Alito also agreed that Kennedy’s intervention in the case would assure that the litigants have standing, thereby rendering moot the major technical argument to be advanced by the Biden administration. Alito further stated, 

Our democratic form of government is undermined if Government officials prevent a candidate for high office from communicating with voters, and such efforts are especially dangerous when the officials engaging in such conduct are answerable to a rival candidate. I would allow him to intervene to ensure that we can reach the merits of respondents’ claims and to prevent the irreparable loss of his First Amendment rights.

Supreme Court’s Historic Decision

Although Kennedy will not be a party to the case, the Supreme Court will nevertheless render a final decision on the important question of whether the Biden administration's coercion of and collusion with social media companies constituted a violation of the First Amendment. Prior to the filing of the lawsuit and the information from the Twitter Files which inspired the legal action, advocates for the suppression of free speech often advanced the argument that because social media platforms are privately owned, they have no obligation to protect free speech in accordance with the First Amendment. 

The evidence in Murthy v. Missouri, however, demonstrates that the Biden administration was actively involved in the decisions to censor the free speech of Americans, often against the will of some social media executives. This is at the heart of the matter that will be decided by the Supreme Court. Will the court agree with Judge Doughty and find that government coercion of private companies in the pursuit of censorship is a violation of the First Amendment, or will it agree with the Biden administration that it is legally allowed to pursue censorship as a matter of public policy? 

Freedom on Trial 

There is a great deal at stake in the Supreme Court’s forthcoming decision which transcends the specifics of the case. The Kennedy Beacon recently published a piece detailing how the advent of the “censorship industrial complex” predates the phenomenon of COVID-19 and that its earliest partisans were concerned with suppressing populist politics, rather than supposedly promoting public health.This means that if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the Biden administration’s appeal, censorship is likely to become much more pervasive. 

Election integrity is also at stake. If a candidate in a presidential election continues to be censored, this would constitute a matter of election interference far more profound than the censorship of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 election. This is the case because while that involved the censorship of information relating to the contents of one man’s hard drive and cloud, Kennedy faces the prospect of being made persona non grata in an election that will likely see him running directly against a sitting president whose administration is accused of masterminding these censorship efforts. 

Finally, there is a question of America’s identity. Is America still a country where people can say whatever they wish so long as it is peaceful in intent and implication? Or alternatively, will America succumb to the tyrannical tendencies of governments around the world that silence dissent as a matter of routine policy? These questions will have to be answered by both the Supreme Court and more poignantly, by the American electorate in November of 2024. 

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Adam Garrie is a writer, speaker and consultant on a wide range of current affairs as well as political risk. He is also the co-founder of HiCyrus, a data-driven tech start-up that aims to fully democratize information access.

The Censorship Pandemic of 2020

Shortly after Tesla CEO Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October of 2022, Musk allowed independent journalists to review company documents that detailed both direct and indirect government instigation of the censorship of unambiguously legal social media content. The people censored included prestigious medical doctors and researchers such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Peter McCullough, and many others. Journalists were also censored, including former New York Times writer Alex Berenson and independent journalist Kim Iversen. Among those censored under the direct request of the Biden administration was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a matter referenced in documents filed with the Supreme Court. 

During the height of what Dr. Malone referred to on the Joe Rogan podcast as the “mass formation psychosis” of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy was a practicing attorney whose advocacy included public health matters, environmental issues, and cases of severe personal injury as the result of corporate malfeasance. 

In April of 2023, Kennedy made the decision to run for president. During the speech in which he declared his candidacy, Kennedy explained that one of the reasons he decided to run was that he was tired of being “shut up” by government-directed censorship and wanted to fight for the restoration of free speech to all Americans.

Kennedy was one of many erudite figures “shut up” due to state-directed censorship beginning in 2020. This notwithstanding, the reality of state-sponsored censorship that became omnipresent during COVID-19 was set in motion long before the pandemic. 

A new report by some of the most important authors of the Twitter Files has uncovered new information about vectors of the censorship industrial complex, that provides answers to previously open-ended questions relating to the pre-COVID-19 origins of mass censorship in the United States and beyond. 

A War against Populism 

Writing in Public, Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi explore the question as to why none of the architecture of what would become the censorship industrial complex appeared to exist in 2019, yet somehow was effectively deployed in early 2020. 

The answer comes in the form of a previously little-known group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL). According to a whistleblower whose documents form the basis of the Public report, “A leader of CTI League, a ‘former’ British intelligence analyst, was ‘in the room’ at the Obama White House in 2017 [prior to President Trump’s inauguration] when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a ‘repeat of 2016.’”

What this means is that the scope of the censorship industrial complex is far wider than the self-appointed “mandate” of fighting so-called “medical misinformation.” The founding goal of CTIL was to prevent populist and anti-establishment political and social movements from forming in the digital public square and influencing electoral outcomes. In this sense, the censorship industrial complex can be described as undemocratic, opposed to the letter and spirit of the Bill of Rights, and entirely lacking in transparency. 

Tellingly, none of the documents reviewed in the report from Public mention any concern among CTIL’s members about the public being in any danger from COVID-19. Their obsession centered on censorship and censorship alone. If CTIL’s members had any private thoughts of altruism, they kept such thoughts to themselves. 

A Military-Intelligence War on Free Speech

CTIL’s leadership was composed of figures with direct links to the military-intelligence sector of the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel. According to the report’s authors, CTIL’s leading figure during its inception in 2018 was Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp, a former UK defense researcher. 

Although CTIL represented itself as a non-governmental body, it worked closely with multiple federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, and had equally close and apparently cordial relations with executives at major social media companies. The whistleblower told the report’s authors that a number of CTIL’s members were FBI and CIA agents. 

In a familiar modus operandi to those who have read the Twitter files and the contents of Missouri v. Biden, a case whose discovery is a treasure trove of information relating to government encroachment on the First Amendment, CTIL directed social media companies to suppress content that was found to dissent from government-approved narratives. This included objectively harmless phrases used on social media at the beginning of COVID-19 shutdowns, including “all jobs are essential.” 

From Censorship to Struggle Sessions

CTIL not only suppressed online speech, it actively propagandized specific government narratives. It did this by manipulating trending topics on social media, as well as through the creation of so-called “sock puppet” social media accounts, which were centrally coordinated to promote pro-government COVID-19 narratives under the guise of “authentic social media users” who did not exist. 

According to the report’s authors, 

The documents also show that Terp and her colleagues, through a group called MisinfoSec Working Group, which included DiResta, created a censorship, influence, and anti-disinformation strategy called Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT).

The tactical aspects of AMITT were directly based on the methods intelligence agencies previously used to manipulate foreign populations and governments, including across the Middle East and North Africa. This time, the target was the American people. 

According to the whistleblower who spoke with the report’s authors, Terp “expressed her own apparent surprise that she would ever use such tactics, developed for foreign nationals, against American citizens.” 

Perhaps even more frightening than the group’s aim of propagandizing government narratives under the guise of authentic discourse was its mission to discredit otherwise respectable public figures. The report explained how CTIL organized social media attacks on figures with opinions that dissented from the political establishment. Such attacks were the calculated preamble to repeated calls for the censorship of the individuals who had just been subjected to the deeply un-American phenomenon of public humiliation rituals. 

These methods recall those of Roland Freisler, the head of Germany’s People’s Court between 1942 and 1945. Freisler infamously made defendants appear before the court in tattered and ill-fitting clothes before screaming invectives at them as they hunched over in pain due to intentionally poor prison conditions. 

To Hell with the Constitution 

The report’s authors further reveal that in addition to working with members of the formal military-intelligence apparatus, putative civilian members of CTIL appeared to revel in their militaristic role as public censors. 

Private discussions exposed by the whistleblower documents reveal an incredible zeal for censorship in which some members of the group spoke of their censorious mission as though it were on par with a great scientific breakthrough or supremely altruistic activity. Members of the group likewise spoke of the First Amendment as though it were a nuisance and discussed the best methods they could use in order to evade legal scrutiny from free speech activists invoking constitutional protections. A reasonable reader of the report is likely to be taken aback by this zealous attitude that has more in common with the language of communist revolutionaries than with that of responsible American public servants who are legally bound to obey the Constitution and ethically bound to protect the rights of citizens, rather than to censor and insult them. Perhaps this is not surprising given the fact that while members of CTIL enforced government policy, their official status remained clouded in subterfuge, thus allowing the group to act like a secret police tasked with enforcing unwritten laws which clearly violated the written ones. 

Despite the group’s cavalier attitude toward the First Amendment, CTIL’s members went to great lengths to remain anonymous, according to the report’s authors. Nonetheless, the group’s activities, while hardly discussed, did not go fully unnoticed. The report’s authors talk of “press release”-like “reportage” about the group’s mission from 2020 articles in Wired, Bloomberg, and The Washington Post. The group’s direct links with the military-intelligence community were notably absent from these reports. 

What It Means to “We the People”

CTIL is yet another supposedly independent organization of “volunteers” which in reality was an entity that acted as the go-between and facilitated censorship of privately run social media platforms, through its direct links to the military, intelligence community, and powerful government agencies. 

At its most fundamental level, censorship is the elimination from public view of words and images. There has never been any scientific study that suggests reading certain words or seeing certain images can cause any harm to a person’s health. 

Why, then, was so much effort and money expended on censoring doctors, people afraid of losing their income, people attempting to educate their children, and peaceful activists like Kennedy? The only logical conclusion one can draw is that while the fear of words and images is a scientifically irrational concept, powerful people were afraid certain words and images would challenge their power.

This is why Kennedy compared his campaign to a peasant revolt in which patriots scale the castle walls sheltering elite rulers, so that ordinary people can share the wealth and freedom enjoyed by a select few, as reported in The Kennedy Beacon. 

CTIL’s origins had nothing to do with any viral pandemic. The group was formed due to a desire of its founders to stop populist politics from becoming an electoral factor in the United States. It was, however, quickly mobilized against the very freedoms that populists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seek to protect, and in doing so it became virulently antagonistic to people like Kennedy and many others who exercise their First Amendment rights to hold government to account by speaking truth to power.

The report by Shellenberger, Gutentag, and Taibbi exposes yet another terrifying chapter in America’s undemocratic separation from the Constitution. As one of CTIL’s main figures privately admitted, the techniques employed by the censorship industrial complex are those honed in wars and espionage operations overseas. To say that the war against the First Amendment is hypothetical or exaggerated negates the importance that America’s founders placed on this lodestone of constitutional law.

The CIA and other intelligence agencies have extensively infiltrated social media companies, such as Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), to moderate and censor content, including that of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Should former intelligence agents have such an outsized role in deciding what content we can see on some of the world’s biggest social media platforms, especially as the 2024 presidential election approaches?

The Department of Homeland Security’s 2022 Analytic Exchange Program (AEP) featured a workshop titled “Foreign Malign Influence – Observations & Recommendations.” The document from this workshop contains several noteworthy disclosures from an official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

You can access the full document here.

On page 10, the document states that the FBI and CIA have been engaging with private companies, specifically concerning disinformation and foreign malign influence. It has been well documented that the FBI was already doing this, but what makes this disclosure significant is the unprecedented revelation that the CIA has “mission centers” that have developed positive relationships with these private companies, such as Meta. To date, there has been no public disclosure of the CIA’s extensive involvement with social media firms in relation to disinformation.

Even more disturbing is the disclosure regarding who in the private sector is engaging with the Intelligence Community. The document highlights that often it is former US Intelligence Community (USIC) employees who have transitioned to the private sector, including Meta. This revelation underscores the complex and intertwined relationships between the Intelligence Community and social media platforms.

These revelations expose previously undisclosed information, suggesting undisclosed ties between the CIA and social media platforms like Meta. This document carries significant implications, necessitating investigations into specific interactions, individuals involved, topics discussed, and the duration of these engagements.

This disclosure is substantial and would typically result in a protracted battle between Congressional Oversight Committees and the Intelligence Community. One would also expect it to be headline news across mainstream media outlets such as Fox News. However, although several major media outlets have this document, including outlets to which I have personally provided it, they have chosen not to report on it. This raises serious journalistic integrity questions.

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Who, then, are these former IC colleagues that the CIA and FBI are in contact with at Meta? My research has revealed that since 2018, Meta has hired more than 160 individuals from the Intelligence Community. Among them, there is one standout who occupies a pivotal role at Meta, especially in the context of content moderation and censorship. His name is Aaron Berman.

The DHS document highlights the challenge of determining who in the private sector engages with the Intelligence Community, noting that former USIC employees, like those at Meta, often play a role in these interactions. While it acknowledges that not all individuals in the private sector hold leadership positions within the investigative bureaucracy, it implies that some certainly do. In this regard, Aaron Berman emerges as a prominent figure who aligns with the criteria of individuals in positions of influence. His pivotal role in crafting content policies and leading the Misinformation Policy team at Meta positions him as a key player in decisions related to content moderation and censorship, emphasizing that he holds a leadership role within the organization. Given Berman’s role at Meta, he would certainly be the type of person with whom the CIA and the FBI would want to engage.

Berman, with over two decades of experience at the CIA before joining Meta in July 2019, was instrumental in building the Misinformation Policy department and crafting content policies that held significant sway over content moderation and censorship on Meta’s platforms. Notably, he actively oversaw censorship during critical events, such as the 2020 US presidential election, the COVID-19 pandemic, and 2022 US midterms. Furthermore, he collaborates with foreign fact-checkers to counter what was considered “misinformation” in foreign elections.

In a revealing YouTube interview, Berman openly expressed his disagreement with the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s report on the “disinformation dozen,” a list that notably includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

However, what’s particularly noteworthy is that despite his disagreement with the report’s findings, Berman acknowledged that he took decisive action. He personally oversaw the banning of over three dozen pages, groups, and accounts associated with individuals from the “disinformation dozen,” including Kennedy, across Meta’s platforms, which encompass Facebook and Instagram.

As of May 2023, Berman holds the crucial position of Lead for Elections Policy content at Meta, granting him substantial influence over policy decisions related to content moderation for the upcoming 2024 US elections. Berman now spearheads all aspects of election-related content at Meta. The question naturally arises: Should we feel comfortable with an 18-year CIA operative in charge of policy and content moderation on the world’s largest social media platform?

As the DHS document unveils the CIA’s positive relationships with private companies like Meta, it’s essential to delve deeper into the individuals holding influential positions over content moderation. Let’s now examine other key figures within Meta, akin to Aaron Berman, who would be prime candidates for engagement with the CIA and FBI.

Scott Stern, who served as Chief of Targeting for the CIA for over seven years, joined Meta in 2020 as Senior Manager of Trust & Safety. In his current role, where he holds a position of authority in content policy, Stern is responsible for developing AI/ML algorithms that address multiple issues, including “misinformation.”

Mike Bradow, who spent a decade at USAID, an organization widely viewed as a CIA cutout, now serves as the Product Policy Manager at Meta. He is also Head of Fact-Checking Policy.

Bradow leads a global team responsible for shaping Meta’s fact-checking program, which includes developing content, product, and operational guidelines. He provides crucial counsel to Meta’s leadership on complex and sensitive matters, particularly those related to combating misinformation. This encompasses crafting responses to integrity risks during pivotal events, such as elections and crises, including instances like COVID-19, the Ukraine conflict, the 2022 elections in Brazil, the US elections in 2020, and the 2022 midterms. Given his position and background, Bradow is precisely the type of person that the CIA would likely be engaging with at Meta.

Mike Torrey, with nine years of experience at the CIA, is a standout candidate for potential engagement with the CIA. His background includes countering cyber threats and shaping national policies to address foreign cyber threats. Currently serving as the Principal Security Engineer Investigator, Threat Intelligence at Meta, Torrey leads efforts to identify, understand, and disrupt influence operations, espionage, and threats to the Meta community. Given his extensive experience, Torrey is a prime candidate for collaboration with the CIA in the context of Meta’s content policies and security efforts.

Susan M. is the current Manager of Threat Intelligence at Meta. Her only prior work experience is two decades at the FBI and two years at the CIA Targeting Counterterrorism Center; she is thus another example of someone the CIA and FBI would want to engage with.

I can go on and on listing examples, as Meta currently employs 14 people from the CIA who work in Trust & Safety. Deborah Berman spent nine years at the CIA and is project manager in Trust & Safety. Maddison Lucier spent seven years at the CIA and four years at the State Department in Tunisia. She is a Risk Intelligence Investigator at Meta.

It’s not just former CIA who work at Meta. I have documented over 160 individuals hired just since 2018 from the following agencies: CIA-14, FBI-26, NSA-16, DHS-29, State Department-32, and DOD-49. Most of these roles are senior management and many are in content moderation departments.

Michael Marando, with eight years of experience at DOJ and involvement in the Mueller special counsel where he prosecuted Roger Stone, joined Meta in 2020 as the Director of Content Policy. He collaborates closely with Aaron Berman in shaping content policies. As Director of Content Policy, he plays a pivotal role in addressing misinformation and AI-related matters. Marando largely contributed to the development of Meta’s COVID-19 misinformation policy, further emphasizing his significance in Meta’s content moderation efforts.

As many are aware, Meta acquired the WhatsApp messaging platform in 2014. Now, let’s delve into the top three leaders of Public Policy at WhatsApp.

Jonathan Lee, who has held significant positions in various government agencies, including the Department of Defense (DOD), the National Security Council, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), serves as the Head of Global Public Policy at WhatsApp. His role involves shaping WhatsApp’s public policy initiatives at the messaging platform.

Courtney Cooper, the Director of Global Public Policy for WhatsApp since 2022, brings a wealth of experience from her time at the CIA, where she served for a substantial portion of her 16-year federal career. She is also currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Cooper’s background and her pivotal role at WhatsApp make her a compelling figure for potential engagement with the CIA and FBI, given her ability to influence content policies and regulations.

Rounding out the top three leaders at WhatsApp is Joseph Schadler, who prior to joining WhatsApp, as Trust & Safety Manager, spent 24 years at the FBI.

As I’ve previously stated, these are just a handful of examples of top executives currently at Meta (Facebook and WhatsApp) who wield immense power over content moderation. We know for a fact that the FBI and CIA have positive relationships with their former colleagues who currently work at Meta. The question is who are they engaging with, what are they discussing, and how long have these relationships been going on?

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Everything you have read here is not being discussed in the wider censorship conversation. The hiring of former intelligence operatives, in fact, seems to be purposely left out of that conversation, yet everyone is aware of it. The fact this is being ignored is more concerning than I can ever articulate.

We are on the cusp of a major election in 2024. The people I have listed here oversee content moderation and policy on the world’s largest social media platform, and some of them may be actively engaging with the CIA and FBI. If we want free speech and fair elections, this issue must be addressed globally.

For a more in-depth list of Meta’s hires from the Intelligence Community, please refer to my thread on Twitter/X. There, you’ll find additional information about individuals with backgrounds in intelligence agencies who now hold influential positions within Meta: https://x.com/NameRedacted247/status/1687358111235932161?s=20.

Yesterday, YouTube informed our social media team that it had removed a video we posted titled, “RFK Jr. Roundtable on Censorship—Democrats taking money from Pharma.” Why? Because they believed it violated their “medical misinformation policy.”

The clip, which can still be viewed on Twitter, came from the Roundtable on Censorship hosted by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on August 17th. Alongside the oft-censored Kennedy was an impressive panel which included journalists Glenn Greenwald and Sharyl Attkisson, attorney Jenin Younes and former New Jersey Assemblyman, Jamel Holley. Read V.N. Alexander’s full coverage of the event here.

Despite facing multiple lawsuits for this exact activity, YouTube continues to exercise arbitrary authority to violate Americans’ constitutionally-protected free speech. The Kennedy Beacon posted several clips to YouTube the day after the roundtable, including discussions about the Trusted News Initiative and the failure of most contemporary journalists to speak truth to power. Those remain up.

But the clip that YouTube took down and took issue with was one in which Kennedy explained when and how Democratic politicians began accepting money from the pharmaceutical industry. Kennedy highlighted efforts to pass President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (also known as ObamaCare) in 2014/15:

In the latter half of the clip, Kennedy recalled that then-candidate Donald Trump had said on three occasions during his 2016 campaign “that he believed that he knew people, women whose children had gotten autism from vaccines.” According to Kennedy, Trump’s invocation of this highly sensitive topic led Democrats to “put that vaccine issue into the same anti-science dumpster” as Trump’s skepticism of man-made climate change.

According to YouTube, Kennedy’s summary “poses a serious risk of egregious harm by spreading medical misinformation about currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and by the World Health Organization.” Note that the World Health Organization does not have any regulatory jurisdiction whatsoever in the United States, with its mandate limited to conducting research and developing public health guidance. YouTube’s deference to “local health authorities” is also ambiguous and unspecific, given that there are just shy of 3,500 such agencies across the United States alone. 

While the platform failed to identify a specific statement within our video which violated their policies, it seems likely that YouTube flagged the video based on Kennedy’s quoting of former President Trump’s statements on vaccines and autism. In other words, The Kennedy Beacon allegedly violated YouTube’s terms of service by highlighting Kennedy’s summary of a political opponent’s prior (and possibly current) position on an issue relevant to voters in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

Earlier this month, Kennedy filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, for – as summarized by our columnist, John Leake –  “colluding with the Biden Administration to violate Kennedy’s First Amendment right to speak freely in the public forum—both as a U.S. citizen and as a presidential candidate.”

The Kennedy Beacon submitted a formal appeal within hours of our video’s removal, which YouTube promptly rejected. We will continue to update our readers on any further censorship of The Kennedy Beacon, American Values 2024, and of course, presidential candidate Kennedy.

As one who enjoys reading history, I found myself wondering if there is a historical precedent of a figure who was as enterprising and energetic in his pursuit of truth and justice in public affairs. The Roman lawyer and statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, came to mind. In 69 BC, he made the bold and dangerous decision to prosecute the Sicilian Governor, Gaius Verres, for multiple acts of corruption. Cicero was the clear underdog in the contest. His friends thought he was crazy for taking on Verres—a powerful patrician who counted multiple friends on the jury. Nevertheless, Cicero’s true grit as an investigator, lawyer, and orator carried the day.

The Wuhan Cover-Up is an extraordinary illumination of the singularly dark and terrible enterprise of bio-weapons research that unleashed SARS-CoV-2 on mankind, inflicting untold death, suffering, and incalculable economic damage. Despite the mountains of evidence that the causative agent of COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, the United States government continues to avoid conducting a full and proper investigation of the catastrophe. And so RFK, Jr. did the investigation himself. The Wuhan Cover-Up is a meticulous work of scholarship that reads like a thrilling crime story. I suspect the book is destined to be one of the most significant in history. 

The legal complaint—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. v. Google & YouTube—filed on August 2, 2023 in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, is another magisterial work of investigation and civic-minded scholarship. At the heart of the complaint is the abundance of evidence that Google and YouTube are colluding with the Biden Administration to violate Kennedy’s First Amendment right to speak freely in the public forum—both as a U.S. citizen and as a presidential candidate.

The matters of fact and law presented in the complaint are clear. YouTube (and its parent company, Google) flagrantly censored RFK, Jr.’s political speech by removing recordings of his full address at Saint Anselm College and his interviews with popular podcasters Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan.

Since it was founded in 2005, YouTube has become the most popular video sharing platform in the world. As we learned in the 2016 election, a large portion of the electorate goes to YouTube to obtain information about political candidates and their communications with the public. As Kennedy’s complaint correctly points out:

YouTube has become an important platform for political discourse in America, a digital town square that voters trust as a place to get news and opinions about the issues of the day, a place where people can communicate about matters of public concern.

Because it’s now been almost twenty years since popular internet platforms such as YouTube and Facebook were founded, it’s easy to forget that the companies explicitly promoted their services as offering ordinary citizens a means of communicating without having to go through TV network newsrooms. During the Arab Spring uprisings of 2010-13, social media was hailed for its vast democratic, political utility in providing citizens a collective means of circumventing state-operated media channels.

With this in mind, I was shocked the first time that YouTube censored me after I spent an entire day filming and editing an in-studio interview with Dr. Peter McCullough in which he spoke about his efforts to treat COVID-19 patients. I posted the interview on YouTube in May 2021 and it quickly went viral. Just a few hours later, YouTube removed it for purportedly violating the company’s “Community Guidelines.”

My friends were sympathetic to my frustration, but a few pointed out that YouTube is a private company and should therefore retain the right to redact material that its directors and shareholders regard as undesirable. The trouble with this reasoning is the significant evidence that the U.S. government has, in recent years, played a decisive role in crafting “Community Guidelines” and directing censorship operations.

As the Epoch Times reported at the beginning of this year, White House COVID-19 Digital Director, Clarke E. Humphrey, and White House Director of Digital Strategy, Rob Flaherty, sent e-mails to Twitter and Facebook executives. These messages directed them to censor content posted by RFK, Jr., Tucker Carlson, and others whose voices the Biden Administration has targeted for elimination from the public forum.

Such revelations of the Executive Branch’s violation of the First Amendment emerged during discovery in the lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden. As co-plaintiff, Aaron Kheriaty, MD, told me in a recent interview for the Kennedy Beacon, the lawsuit has uncovered evidence of extensive collusion between U.S. government agencies and big tech to censor any opinion or content that displeases the government.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. v. Google & YouTube is, like Missouri v. Biden, a legal action for stopping the U.S. government from violating the constitutional protection of free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court has explicitly stated that “the right to think is the beginning of freedom” and that “speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.”

No one should be more sympathetic to Kennedy’s lawsuit than writers and journalists. I was therefore appalled to peruse the so-called reporting in popular outlets such as the Daily Beast and Rolling Stone. In plainly editorial tones, both reporters expressed shocking bias against the plaintiff. The Rolling Stone report, written by Kory Grow, was especially egregious. According to the author’s bio posted on the magazine’s site and Amazon page, Grow is a hard rock and heavy metal reporter. His article on Kennedy’s lawsuit is little more than series of assertions and stated assumptions that the plaintiff is wrong about everything.

One wonders what Mr. Grow thinks about the daily drumroll of information confirming that SARS-CoV-2 did come out of a lab. Back in 2020, the U.S. mainstream media adopted lockstep conformity in its insistence that anyone who even pointed out the grounds for suspecting a lab leak was a “conspiracy theorist.”

And what happened to Rolling Stone? The magazine that was once home to hard-hitting investigative journalists such as Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Loder, Tom Wolfe, and Matt Taibbi now seems scarcely distinguishable from an organ of propaganda.

In 69 B.C., when Cicero won his judicial triumph over the plundering Sicilian Governor, Gaius Verres, he also won the enduring gratitude of the Sicilian people. I hope that someday the American people will feel gratitude to RFK, Jr. for his tireless efforts to defend their constitutional liberties. 

On January 23, 2021, days after President Joe Biden took office, the now former Digital Director for the Covid-19 Response Team, Clarke Humphrey, sent Twitter an email asking them to “flag” one of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s anti-vaccine tweets and have it “removed ASAP.” She also sent a copy of the same email to the former Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Digital Strategy, Robert Flaherty, requesting that he “keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre.” 

It was just one instance of government pressure on social media platforms. There have been many others.

Facebook, along with other companies, was asked to submit a detailed report about its policy on censorship, explaining what kind of content it does or does not censor. In its report, among other things, Facebook included a list of items that do not violate its policies but that might lead to vaccine hesitancy, including encouraging others not to be vaccinated, misrepresenting vaccine data, the posting of shocking vaccine anecdotes, showing mistrust and concern about individuals and institutions who favor vaccines, and merely discussing one’s choice to get vaccinated or not. As it turns out, neither Kennedy’s nonprofit activist group Children’s Health Defense nor their online content had violated Facebook’s policies. Nonetheless, both Facebook and Instagram removed CHD from their platforms for allegedly violating their internal guidelines and propagating “misinformation.” 

The latest conflict over free speech in America has not only been playing out quietly within government and big tech offices. It’s now a high-profile federal lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden, that reflects Kennedy’s own struggles—and could impact them going forward. That lawsuit is further polarizing the country and putting the First Amendment to one of its most withering tests.

Missouri v. Biden: Key Dates

On July 10, 2023, the federal government defendants in the U.S. federal court case, Missouri v. Biden, requested a stay of the preliminary injunction issued by Judge Terry A. Doughty on July 4 against several administration officials and agencies under President Joe Biden that had asked for the removal or blocking of social media posts that are either illegal or threaten national security. 

On July 14, the Fifth Circuit granted a temporary administrative stay on the injunction in the Western District Court of Louisiana Monroe Division, and expedited the appeal to the next available “Oral Argument Calendar,” or “court date.”

A few days later, on July 17, 2023, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, along with others, filed a brief urging the Fifth Circuit to let Judge Doughty’s injunction stand in order to protect the right of Americans to freedom of speech on social media platforms. 

Initially filed in Missouri and Louisiana by former Missouri attorney general, Senator Eric Schmitt, and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, respectively, the lawsuit alleges that the Biden administration contacted social media platforms to convince them to remove ‘misinformation’ in gross violation of the principle of free speech. 

In a 155-page document written by the court, Doughty predicts a likely victory for free speech. A key statement in it reads: “The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden’s policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech. American citizens have the right to engage in free debate about the significant issues affecting the country.”

So, what role has RFK Jr. played in this issue?

On July 5, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an intent to appeal in the Fifth Circuit. The appeal sought a stay of the injunction that, in the view of the DOJ, would prevent it from working with social media platforms to protect American democracy ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

Presidential candidate Kennedy has been one of the high-profile voices flagged, suppressed, and censored. For instance, the Virality Project, a coalition of research entities seeking to mitigate the impact of false and misleading narratives related to COVID-19 vaccines, had flagged Kennedy as one of the key spreaders of ‘misinformation,’ along with Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and others. 

Kennedy has long been a proponent of free speech. He has spoken out against being censored and removed from social media platforms. In a recent interview with The New Yorker’s David Remnick, he expressed the desire to build a country where censorship does not exist. He emphasized that he’d be happy to bring people who have opposing values “to his tent” and have a discussion. 

“If I can get them to support a vision of the idealistic America that I believe in,” he said, “the same America that my father and my uncle believed in—an America without censorship, an America that fights for our Constitution, an America that is a moral authority around the world, that projects economic power around the globe rather than military violence—if I can get people to support that, I don’t care if they’re Republican or independent, or what they are.”

According to the Missouri v. Biden court document, Kennedy was one of the many people targeted by the administration in its social media witch hunt to suppress the spread of misinformation. 

The press, led by The New York Times, delights in labeling Kennedy a “fringe” candidate and an anti-vaxxer. But Kennedy is a fighter.

As we track the rising debate about free speech, misinformation, and censorship, check back with us here at The Kennedy Beacon for updates on the Missouri v. Biden case. 

Voters get information about prospective candidates from a variety of sources, loosely grouped into news media, social media, and friends and family. Where people find that information often depends on what side of the political spectrum they fall. 

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According to Political Polarization and Media Habits, an overview of a year-long study of the political divide in America by Pew Research, those who fall to the extreme end of either side—roughly 20% of the public—are more likely to turn to ideologically-aligned news sources. They are also the people with a greater impact on elections than those in the political center.

But what information are such voters actually getting? Media watchdog groups such as conservative-leaning Media Research Center (MRC) examined that question. One recent study, commissioned by MRC and conducted by McLaughlin and Associates from June 15 through June 19, looked at how liberal and conservative media covered eleven news reports related to the Biden Administration. 

Answers in the study came from 1,000 eligible voters, 49% who get their news primarily from cable news networks. The poll showed significant lack of awareness both from left and right leaning voters watching CNN and MSNBC on the one hand and Fox and Newsmax on the other. 

MRC’s poll revealed that people more likely to vote in Democratic primaries are significantly less aware about serious issues like economic conditions, impact on households and finances, border and national security, political maneuvers, Biden family scandals and proven corruption.

The 11 news reports used in the study were: the high number of border crossing under the Biden Administration; the estimated rise in gas prices (52%); the entrance into the U.S. of one hundred proven or suspected terrorists during his term; the average reported drop in household spending ($7,100); a consistent decline in median real wages and salaries under Biden; the lack of concrete proof of Russian collusion in the Durham Report, despite significant investment of time and resources; public outcry over Biden headlines and family scandals; FBI whistleblower disclosing protection of Hunter Biden’s contacts with Russian oligarchs; interference with the FBI whistleblower working on the Hunter Biden probe; a reporter by the House Oversight Committee on $10 million funneled from 20-plus foreign sources to Biden and his family; and investigations by the House and Senate of possible bribes during Biden’s time as Vice President, with the FBI accused of withholding proof.

MRC’s conservative bent notwithstanding, the poll shows how voters on the left lack a full understanding of some of Biden’s failures. For example, 38% of those who watch CNN/MSNBC are aware that household spending dropped by $7,100; 34% are aware that 100 suspected terrorists entered the country; and only 40% of those who will be faced with the option to keep Biden in office are aware that Congress uncovered a reported $10 million from foreign nationals that went directly to the Biden and his family.

MRC President L. Brent Bozell III did not shy away from taking a strong position: “This poll is just more evidence of the leftist media’s corrupt election interference,: he said. “It’s no surprise that voters who rely on these leftist cable networks for their news are vastly less aware of Joe Biden’s multiple scandals and policy disasters. CNN and MSNBC know exactly what they’re doing, which is to bury the truth of Biden’s failures in order to save Joe Biden from himself.”

Robert Hauptman in Media Bias and Censorship in the Journal of Information Ethics takes a more measured approach: “Some media at least attempt to offer unsullied, that is, politically untainted news reports,” he writes. “Others, owned by a person or group of people who have a very pointed agenda, tender ideologically slanted reports or fail to include news that may reflect badly on their perspective.”

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The Democratic Party has long snubbed challengers. But there is a special vitriol to the relentless attacks on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  

That vitriol was on full display last week. Over 100 Democratic members of Congress signed an outraged ––and outrageous––letter calling on Republican Congressional leaders to censor RFK Jr. from a censorship hearing. Among the Democratic signatories were such stalwarts of the left as Reps. Pramila Jayapal, Ayanna Pressley, Jamie Raskin, Katie Porter and Rashida Tlaib. 

As the understandably exasperated Kennedy told the Congressional hearing, he knows many of these members. They know he is not anti-Semitic or racist. In fact, as he reminded the panel, his whole career has been dedicated to stamping out these noxious prejudices. 

We live in “upside-down” times, as RFK Jr. put it last week. It is the Democrats who tried to silence Kennedy during the hearing who will go down in infamy for their intolerance of free speech. 

But it was Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, who gave Kennedy a platform to air his views on censorship last Thursday. Yes, that Jim Jordan—the fire-breathing Trump supporter and January 6 rioters’ defender. It was Fox News hosts and other conservative voices who argued that RFK Jr. had a right to speak. Of course, Jordan and the GOP are trying to cause commotion and chaos in the Democratic ranks. But Democrats are doing a wonderful job of encouraging this divide-and-conquer tactic by trying to silence anyone whose views are not considered acceptable by the liberal establishment.

As Kennedy said during his impassioned, spontaneous opening remarks before the subcommittee, he has spent his entire life in the arms of the Democratic Party—it’s part of his family’s political DNA. And censorship was “antithetical” to his uncles John and Edward Kennedy, the “lion of the Senate” who reached across the aisle to Republicans like Orrin Hatch to forge legislation, as well as his father, Robert, and other luminaries of the party.

“Toxic polarization is destroying our country today,” Kennedy told the subcommittee. “This kind of division is more dangerous for our country than any time since the American Civil War. And how do we deal with that? Every Democrat on this committee thinks we need to end that polarization. Do you think you can do that by censoring people? I tell you that you cannot. That only amplifies and aggravates the problem. We need to start being kind to each other, to start being respectful to each other. We need to restore comity to this chamber and to America ––but it has to start here.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, however, failed to heed RFK Jr.’s plea. On Sunday, Pelosi—the Democratic representative from San Francisco, a woman whom I’ve voted for numerous times—ridiculed the hearing, telling CNN’s Dana Bash, “What a ridiculous clown show, again, (staged by) the Republicans. What do they do, bring in Kennedy talking about censorship, that he’s being censored—as he’s talking to the world in a Congressional hearing.”

So much for Pelosi’s heralded “San Francisco values”— the values of tolerance and dissent.

Democratic leaders like Pelosi are spearheading an obvious, concerted effort to “silence” Kennedy, as he charged, to use “pejoratives” and “smears” and “lies” to drive him from the presidential race, instead of engaging with him on the fundamental issues he’s raised. Among those issues: corporate capture of the federal regulatory system, the U.S. addiction to permanent war, the crushing of the middle class under the weight of military spending, the profit-driven destruction of our planet—and, yes, the campaign to censor prominent critics of the status quo.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has even ruled, in dictatorial fashion, that there will be no Democratic presidential debates this primary season, even though Kennedy has polled at 20 percent in one survey and in the teens in others. In contrast, the Republican Party has decided that one percent is the polling cutoff for candidates to participate in the first debate next month in Milwaukee.

There is nothing new about this corporate Democratic campaign to condemn and shut up party dissidents. Florida’s Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, one of the ringleaders of the RFK Jr. censorship effort, was forced to resign as DNC chair on the eve of the 2016 Democratic Convention, after leaked DNC emails revealed that the party establishment heavily favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. The Democratic elite and big media also targeted Jesse Jackson and RFK Jr.’s father when they challenged party leaders’ picks for the presidential nomination.

Why attack RFK Jr. so ruthlessly? Perhaps it’s because he’s a renegade from a hallowed family. Nearly all of his relatives have remained safely in the political fold, and some have even earned extra points by publicly attacking him, even though his father and uncle, President Kennedy, showed the same courage in confronting the conventional political wisdom of their day.

The liberal punditocracy likes to denounce conservatives for their book banning crusades across the country, which generally target titles that grapple with racial and gender issues. (Some targets of book bans, like Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece Maus, apparently offend by forthrightly depicting the horrors of Hitler’s rule.) These and similar efforts to sanitize our nation’s past — like Florida’s overhaul of African American history standards in schools and universities throughout the states—should be scorned by all free-thinking people, “woke” or not.

But it’s the liberal war on free speech that has become equally worrisome in recent years. The frenzy to drive RFK Jr. and other political renegades from social media platforms. The lynch mob mentality that makes it impossible to distribute movies by Woody Allen in the United States, even though he has been cleared of legal charges and ranks as one of the great filmmakers of his generation. The book industry censors who cleanse literary classics of “offensive” language and seek politically correct conformity. These are some of the sorry examples of liberal intolerance.

Even though RFK Jr. sustains multiple attacks each day, there’s some evidence this character assassination is not working.. American Values 2024, the super PAC that supports Kennedy’s presidential bid (and publishes The Kennedy Beacon), reported that his Congressional testimony last Thursday prompted an impressive $5 million worth of donations. “The censorship, vilification, and targeted propaganda playbook that the DNC used so effectively against Bernie Sanders won’t work against Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” Tony Lyons, the superPAC’s co-chairman, said.

Perhaps Kennedy is right. Americans are tired of the bitterness and division. They want to hear something different from their leaders. The truth.

                                          #

David Talbot is the author of the New York Times-bestselling The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government and Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years.

The hearing continues a months-long examination of the federal government’s role in censoring Americans —a subject about which Kennedy is all too familiar. He’s been routinely censored, long before he announced his run for president in April.

In fact, ironically, House Democrats earlier this week had hoped to censor Kennedy from discussing censorship.

Hearings on the alleged weaponization of the federal government began in February, under House Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio. This is the first time Kennedy has been called to testify.

Failed Attempt to Silence Kennedy

On Monday, a group of House Democrats urged House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R - Calif.) and Committee Chairman Jordan to revoke Kennedy’s invite to serve as a witness due to statements he allegedly made about ethnically-targeted bioweapons. 

The mainstream press, disinterested in the fact that Kennedy was quoting a peer-reviewed paper on bio-weapons, not espousing views of his own, gobbled and distorted the story, painting Kennedy as antisemitic and anti-Asian. 

As Kennedy explained on Twitter on July 16: 

The insinuation by @nypost and others that, as as result of my quoting a peer-reviewed paper on bio-weapons, I am somehow antisemitic, is a disgusting fabrication. I understand the emotional pain that these inaccurate distortions and fabrications have caused to many Jews who recall the blood libels of poison wells and the deliberate spread of disease as the pretext for genocidal programs against their ancestors. My father and my uncles, John F. Kennedy and Senator Edward Kennedy, devoted enormous political energies during their careers to supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism. I intend to spend my political career making those family causes my priority. 

Without any evidence that he knew what Kennedy had actually said, McCarthy on July 17 told reporters: “I disagree with everything he said.”

But the Speaker continued in a vein that his erstwhile First Amendment devotees across the aisle would not: “The hearing that we have this week is about censorship,” he said. “I don’t think censoring somebody is actually the answer here.”

Censoring Kennedy is Backfiring 

Since Kennedy announced his candidacy in April, he’s been routinely censored by social media and legacy press. 

The Kennedy Beacon has been watching. And will continue to watch.

Even though the big social media platforms want to silence Kennedy, their actions might be having the opposite effect. Kennedy continues scoring well in recent polls; it appears people want to hear what he has to say.

So far, YouTube has been Kennedy’s biggest censor—a trend that began even before he announced his candidacy. During a March speech at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire, Kennedy discussed vaccines. A video filmed by Manchester Public TV never made it to YouTube; the platform blocked it as the TV station was trying to upload it. You can read more about the case here.

In late April, days after Kennedy’s April 18 announcement about his presidential bid, ABC News censored its exclusive interview with Kennedy, excising the candidates’ skepticism about the efficacy and rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine.

After the interview aired, ABC News anchor Linsey Davis explained the network’s decision, stating, "during our conversation, Kennedy made false claims about the Covid-19 vaccines.” She continued, “Data shows that the Covid-19 vaccines prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths from the disease…We used our editorial judgment in not including extended portions of that exchange in our interview. We thank Mr. Kennedy for the conversation.”

Kennedy is a vocal advocate for free speech. “To silence a major political candidate is profoundly undemocratic,” he wrote on Twitter. “Social media is the modern equivalent of the town square. How can democracy function if only some candidates have access to it?”

In June, YouTube removed a video of Kennedy and Canadian psychologist and podcast host Jordan Peterson.

“We removed a video from the Jordan Peterson channel for violating YouTube’s general vaccine misinformation policy, which prohibits content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities,” YouTube said in a statement.

The ninety-five-minute video was recorded when Peterson interviewed Kennedy for his podcast.

After YouTube took the video down, Kennedy asked on Twitter whether social media platforms should censor presidential candidates. It is a valid question. Especially considering that the photo-sharing social media platform Instagram banned Kennedy in February 2021. However, Instagram reinstated Kennedy’s account on June 4, because of he had become a candidate. 

“As he is now an active candidate for president of the United States, we have restored access to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s, Instagram account,” Meta said in a statement.

“Censoring Fuels Distrust”

Later in June, YouTube deleted yet another of Kennedy’s interviews, this time with former New York Post reporter Al Guart, because the video allegedly breached the platform’s “community standards.”

Again, Kennedy raised concerns about censorship on Twitter: ”People made a big deal about Russia supposedly manipulating internet information to influence a Presidential election,” he wrote. “Shouldn’t we be worried when giant tech corporations do the same?"

New York Post journalist Rikki Schlott pointed out in a recent opinion piece that YouTube’s attempt to silence Kennedy has “backfired spectacularly” since the deleted interview with Petersen has close to five million views on Twitter. People are naturally interested in things that they are not supposed to watch. Kennedy’s videos are extremely popular.

“Censoring controversial figures — whether they’re speaking unspoken truths or spewing complete nonsense — fuels distrust,” wrote Schlott toward the end of her editorial. “And that distrust will ultimately fuel RFK, Jr.’s campaign. Censoring a political candidate is a fundamentally undemocratic instinct.”