'Karma is a b****': Trump taps epidemiologist targeted by Biden admin and censored online to run NIH



Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an esteemed epidemiologist and professor of health policy at Stanford University, refused to accept the premise advanced early in the pandemic by medical establishmentarians and lawmakers that lockdowns, vaccine mandates, masking for kids, and other ruinous COVID-19 policies were the best ways to prevent infection and get back to normal.

Although he and other principals behind the Great Barrington Declaration were ultimately vindicated, at the time, he faced incredible abuse. President Joe Biden's former chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins conspired to issue a "quick and devastating takedown" of Bhattacharya's criticism while many of the professor's peers personally attacked him. Adding injury to insult, Bhattacharya was censored online.

This prime target for suppression by the current administration is now the nominee to serve as director of the next administration's National Institutes of Health.

'The hammer of justice is coming.'

"I am thrilled to nominate Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, to serve as Director of the National Institutes of Health," President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday evening. "Dr. Bhattacharya will work in cooperation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to direct the Nation's Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve health, and save lives."

Dr. Bhattacharya said that he was "honored and humbled" by the nomination and vowed to "reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again and will deploy the fruits of excellent science to make America healthy again!"

Trump's selection was widely celebrated, especially by those critical of Democratic censorship as well as the scientific establishment's deadly and credibility-destroying hostility to alternative viewpoints.

"I'm so grateful to President Trump for this spectacular appointment," tweeted Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services. "Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is the ideal leader to restore NIH as the international template for gold-standard science and evidence-based medicine."

Blaze News editor in chief Matthew J. Peterson wrote, "This is what winning looks like right here. @Dr.JBhattacharya in this role is right and just. The hammer of justice is coming. The era of blackpilling is over. We live in a new era — a new @frontier_mag_. Pick up your shield and sword and get ready to rumble."

'It will be a major step forward to have an NIH Director who will fight science fraud and repudiate science fraudsters.'

Matt Kibbe, the BlazeTV host of "Kibbe on Liberty" and "The Coverup," which recently featured Bhattacharya, stated, "Jay Bhattacharya was deemed a 'fringe epidemiologist' by former NIH Director Francis Collins, who demonized him for asking obvious questions about the government's authoritarian response to Covid. Now, Jay will take the helm at NIH, and clean house of all those who corrupted public health and did so much damage to Americans during the pandemic. Karma is a b****."

Molecular biologist Dr. Richard H. Ebright of Rutgers University tweeted, "It will be a major step forward to have an NIH Director who will fight science fraud and repudiate science fraudsters. Rather than an NIH Director — like former NIH Director Francis Collins — who prompted science fraud and rewarded science fraudsters."

Earlier this year, Bhattacharya joined Ebright and other scientists in seeking accountability from those scientific journals that happily published "unsound scientific papers" by Fauci, disgraced EcoHealth Alliance boss Peter Daszak, and elements of their inner circle that downplayed the likely lab-leak origins of COVID-19 during the pandemic.

BlazeTV host Steve Deace, responding to the fact that Bhattacharya is poised to take over the job of a man who recently sought to destroy his reputation, wrote, "Do not be deceived. God will not be mocked. A man will always reap what he sows."

Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which suggested that geriatrics and other higher-risk groups should engage in shielding, whereas healthy individuals should "immediately be allowed to resume life as normal." Healthy individuals, it suggested, would be better off catching the virus and developing natural immunity. This greatly angered elements of the medical establishment who preferred coercive medicine, blanket lockdowns, and school closures.

Fauci called the declaration "total nonsense."

Scores of other so-called experts claimed in a response published in the Lancet, the "John Snow Memorandum," that the call for herd immunity and other proposals raised in the declaration were dangerous and unscientific. The memo was signed by thousands of scientists and endorsed by the Federation of American Scientists.

Extra to facing criticism from his peers, Bhattacharya was censored online. Reporting from Elon Musk's "Twitter Files" revealed that under previous management, the platform put the professor on a "Trends Blacklist," ensuring that his tweets would be suppressed, including his suggestion that pandemic lockdowns were harmful to children.

'All were suppressed.'

Bhattacharya was among the individual plaintiffs who joined the states of Missouri and Louisiana in taking legal action against President Joe Biden, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Anthony Fauci, and various Biden administration officials. The case — Missouri v. Biden,which became Murthy v. Missouri — exposed some of the ways the Democratic administration colluded with social media platforms to suppress dissenting voices and criticism of COVID-19 policies.

U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty noted that the Biden administration

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," wrote Doughty. "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."

While the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately let the Biden administration off the hook, claiming that "the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established Article III standing to seek an injunction against any defendant," the lawsuit helped paved the way for Kennedy v. Biden as well as Dressen, et al. v. Flaherty, et al., a lawsuit filed against the Biden administration by vaccine-injured Americans.

'Make America Healthy Again!'

The ruling also helped emphasize the difference between Biden and Trump.

Bhattacharya noted on X following the court's ruling, "The Supreme Court just ruled in the Murthy v. Missouri case that the Biden Administration can coerce social media companies to censor and shadowban people and posts it doesn't like."

"This now also becomes a key issue in the upcoming election. Where do the presidential candidates stand on social media censorship? We know where Biden stands since his lawyers argue that he has near monarchical power over social media speech," continued Bhattacharya.

The candidate promising to protect free speech and hold censorious tech companies accountable ultimately won the day, putting Bhattacharya in a position where, if confirmed, he is unlikely to again be shut up and shut out.

"Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America's biggest Health challengers, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease," Trump noted in his announcement. "Together, they will work hard to Make America Healthy Again!"

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Bhattacharya will oversee the world's top medical research agency, its $48 billion budget, and 27 institutes and centers.

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Supreme Court lets Biden admin off the hook for suppressing free speech it deemed 'misinformation'



Missouri v. Biden, the case that became known as Murthy v. Missouri before the U.S. Supreme Court, came about in response to the Democratic administration's well-documented efforts to shut down critics and questioners of its COVID-19 policies and preferred narratives during the pandemic — policies and narratives that have largely been demonstrated in the years since to have been unfounded, ruinous, or both.

The states of Missouri and Louisiana were joined by other plaintiffs, including the coauthors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, in taking legal action against President Joe Biden, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Anthony Fauci, and various Biden administration officials.

Last year, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, who heard the case before it was kicked up to the high court, suggested the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits in establishing "that the Government has used is 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.

Three of the so-called conservative justices on the Supreme Court joined Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan in concluding Wednesday that neither "the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established Article III standing to seek an injunction against any defendant."

Barrett penned the majority opinion, noting, "The plaintiffs rely on allegations of past government censorship as evidence that future censorship is likely. But they fail, by and large, to link their past social-media restrictions to the defendants' communications with the platforms."

'The successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.'

Barrett cast doubt on the causal link between the Biden administration's many efforts to have those with dissenting views censored online and social media platforms' ultimate censorship efforts.

The former Notre Dame professor indicated that of all the individual plaintiffs, health care activist Jill Hines of Health Freedom Louisiana made the "best showing of a connection between her social-media restrictions and communications between the relevant platform (Facebook) and specific defendants (CDC and the White House)."

"That said," continued Barrett, "most of the lines she draws are tenuous, particularly given her burden of proof at the preliminary injunction stage — recall that she must show that her restrictions are likely traceable to the White House and the CDC."

"The plaintiffs, without any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants' conduct, ask us to conduct a review of the years-long communications between dozens of federal officials, across different agencies, with different social-media platforms, about different topics," Barrett said in her conclusion. "This Court's standing doctrine prevents us from 'exercis[ing such] general legal oversight' of the other branches of Government."

The majority reversed the injunctions against the Biden administration's various censorious elements.

Justice Samuel Alito filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, in which he stated, "If the lower courts' assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years."

'Free speech in America, for the moment, is dead.'

"Freedom of speech serves many valuable purposes, but its most important role is protection of speech that is essential to democratic self-government ... and speech that advances humanity’s store of knowledge, thought, and expression in fields such as science, medicine, history, the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts," wrote Alito, adding that the speech stifled by the Biden administration fell "squarely into those categories."

Alito acknowledged that private entities are not subject to the First Amendment, but government officials cannot coerce them to suppress speech. He emphasized that there is ample evidence the Biden administration did just that and noted further that the majority shirked the duty to tackle the free speech at issue in Murthy, thus permitting "the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think."

Alito slammed the efforts by Biden's cabal of high-ranking bureaucrats as "dangerous," noting both their censorship was "blatantly unconstitutional" and that the country may come to regret the majority's decision.

Contrary to the liberal justices' understanding, Alito also indicated that in the case of Hines, she had indeed made the requisite showing of traceability, adding that the presence of censorship on the social media platforms prior to direct governmental involvement did not subsequently complicate shows of causality as otherwise suggested.

"For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans' free speech," Alito noted in his conclusion. "Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent."

Bhattacharya noted on X following the court's ruling, "The Supreme Court just ruled in the Murthy v. Missouri case that the Biden Administration can coerce social media companies to censor and shadowban people and posts it doesn't like."

"This now also becomes a key issue in the upcoming election. Where do the presidential candidates stand on social media censorship? We know where Biden stands since his lawyers argue that he has near monarchical power over social media speech," continued Bhattacharya. "The court ruled that the plaintiffs (Missouri and Louisiana, as well as me and other blacklisted individuals) lacked standing to sue. This means that the Administration can censor ideas & no person will have standing to enforce the 1st Amendment. Free speech in America, for the moment, is dead."

Other supporters of free speech denounced the outcome.

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, among them, said, "The Court majority has rubber-stamped a way for the federal government to censor speech that it doesn't like. The Court is telling would be censors: you can't directly censor speech but if you pursue a sophisticated plan with enough subtlety you can get away with doing indirectly what the Constitution clearly ... forbids you from doing directly."

Blaze Media cofounder and nationally syndicated radio host Glenn Beck wrote, "The Supreme Court has ruled that, practically, the government can continue pressuring social media companies to censor Americans. This is an absolute gut punch."

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SCOTUS hears oral arguments on whether the Biden admin's censorship efforts were unconstitutional: Highlights



The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday concerning whether the Biden administration violated the Constitution when it ostensibly leaned on social media companies to censor and suppress Americans' protected free speech in the interest of advancing preferred narratives during the pandemic and in the years since.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed last year with a district court's assessment that there was ample evidence of a "coordinated campaign" of unprecedented "magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life."

Displeased with the courts' characterization of its censorship efforts as both problematic and unlawful, and altogether keen to keep it up, the Biden administration now seeks a favorable result from the high court.

Quick overview

Liberal justices were especially resistant Monday to the notion that the Biden administration had engaged in unlawful coercion.

Justice Elena Kagan expressed skepticism over there being demonstrable causation between the Biden administration's pressure campaign and the clamp-down on speech that ultimately occurred online during the pandemic.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared to regard the administration's actions as a matter of persuasion contra coercion and shared hypothetical situations where censorship resulting from state pressure on private actors might supposedly be in the interest of the public good.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested that Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga, arguing on behalf of the plaintiffs, distorted key facts in his brief.

Even nominally conservative judges did not altogether appear convinced by the arguments against the Biden administration.

On the whole, it does not appear the chances are great that the injunction granted by the Fifth Circuit and stayed by the Supreme Court will be reinstated.

Background

The states of Missouri and Louisiana were joined by other plaintiffs, including the coauthors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, in taking legal action against President Joe Biden, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Anthony Fauci, and various Biden administration officials.

The case, Missouri v. Biden — now called Murthy v. Missouri before the high court — came about in response to the Democratic administration's well-documented efforts to shut down critics and questioners of its COVID-19 policies and preferred narratives during the pandemic.

U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty issued a preliminary injunction in July 2023, barring Biden administration officials from engaging social media companies regarding "the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms."

Blaze News previously reported that Doughty made clear in his ruling that the Biden administration "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," wrote Doughty. "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."

The Biden DOJ filed an appeal but had its hopes dashed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in September, which largely upheld Doughty's ruling.

In October, the Fifth Circuit went a step further, expanding the injunction to include the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, noting that "for many of the same reasons as the FBI and the CDC, CISA also likely violated the First Amendment."

The U.S. Supreme Court stayed the Fifth Circuit's order later that month, allowing the Biden administration to resume its practice of having American citizens' speech online censored and suppressed.

The high court granted a review of the case by writ of certiorari.

The Biden administration maintains that public officials should be able to "inform, to persuade and to criticize" social media platforms.

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) suggested in the amicus brief he and 44 other lawmakers filed with the Supreme Court supporting the plaintiffs that "this official coercion has undermined the marketplace of ideas on issues of public importance ranging from COVID to federal elections to Biden family misdeeds."

Persuasion version coercion

Brian Fletcher, the principal deputy solicitor general for the Biden administration, opened up oral arguments Monday by striking a distinction between governmental coercion and persuasion.

Fletcher suggested the Biden administration, when coordinating with social media companies to cure an approved narrative online and suppress dissenting opinions, was engaging in persuasion, not outright coercion — which he defined as "adverse government action."

Justice Samuel Alito, who appeared uncertain the Biden administration had been on the "persuasion side" of things, alluded to emails, meetings, and the general appearance of collusion between Biden administration officials and social media company personnel, saying, "I cannot imagine federal officials taking that approach to the print media, representatives over there. If you did that to them, what would the reaction be?"

Fletcher maintained that the back-and-forth and "language of partnership" between the Biden administration and social media platforms was not "unusual," insinuating the companies were big enough to resist the government's influence. He further likened the effort by the Biden administration's supposed persuasion efforts during the pandemic to the efforts by lawmakers in recent months to persuade colleges to deal with anti-Semitism on campus after the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks.

Alito suggested that in the case of social media companies, the government has "Section 230 in its pocket," referencing a section of the Title 47 of the United States Code that protects social media companies from lawsuits over the content that appears on its sites.

With "these big clubs available to it," Alito said the government has been "treating Facebook and these other platforms like its subordinates."

Justice Neil Gorsuch similarly noted that potential threats on the part of government officials to reform Section 230, might constitute coercion just as accusations — such as Biden's — that social media companies' failure to change their policies are "killing people" could be interpreted in the absence of desirable outcomes on the platform as threats of imminent adverse government action.

While Justice Brett Kavanaugh indicated it is "not uncommon" for government officials to caution traditional media to run with a story that may put Americans at risk, he added that persuasion becomes "problematic" if the state tacks on, "and if you publish the story we're going to pursue antitrust action against you."

The discussion shifted from whether the government was coercive to whether it had in fact engaged in coercion.

Justice Alito zeroed in on the case of one of the plaintiffs, Jill Hines, co-director of the conservative Health Freedom Louisiana group, whose criticism of mask wearing was suppressed on Facebook. Alito noted that two lower courts found that the injury in this case "was traceable to the government's actions."

Fletcher agreed it amounted to an injury but suggested both courts were wrong in observing traceability to the government.

Justice Elena Kagan later suggested that the case could be axed by saying the plaintiffs were not entitled to an injunction because they could not demonstrate an imminent threat of future harm. Kagan expressed a strong skepticism of causation, suggesting the censorship may have been solely a private decision — that Facebook and Twitter acted on their own volition, despite all of the Biden administration's urging.

Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga countered that it is clear from the communications between the Biden administration and social media platforms that there was "unrelenting government pressure."

After the White House "went nuclear" on social media platforms, Aguiñaga said the companies began reversing course on their own policies — "an example of platforms moving beyond what their own policies require."

"Pressuring platforms in back rooms, shielded from public view, is not using a bully pulpit," said Aguiñaga. "That's just being a bully."

Aguiñaga underscored that while the government is welcome to persuade companies, it "cannot induce, encourage or promote" private parties to do what the Constitution does not permit itself to do directly.

Justice Clarence Thomas asked whether the government working with private actors to remove content would violate the First Amendment in the manner that direct coercion does.

Aguiñaga responded, "Regardless of the means that the government tries to use to pressure the platforms to commit censorship against third parties, the Constitution really doesn't care about that. It's the fact that what the government is trying to accomplish is the suppression of speech."

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested there were various situations in which the government could weigh in and encourage or require censorship. She provided an example of a social media challenge that's getting kids killed — a situation that is a "health emergency."

Aguiñaga made the case that the government can lean on social media companies to amplify its own narrative but cannot lean on them to remove undesirable speech.

"Nothing prohibits the government from going to [a social media] platform and saying, 'We've seen a lot of false information about election activity, and COVID and vaccines and the like,'" said Aguiñaga. "Nothing prohibits the government from saying, 'Here's a list of everything we say is true, [or] that is true in our view. And you should amplify our speech, and anytime that false speech arises, you should put our post right there next to it saying this is the government's view on this issue.'"

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Federal appeals court further curbs Biden administration's ability to police and censor Americans' speech online



The Biden administration suffered another crushing defeat Tuesday in the Missouri v. Biden saga.

A U.S. district judge issued a preliminary injunction against the Biden administration in July, barring its agencies and top officials from leaning on social media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce "content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms."

Like the White House, the Biden Department of Justice expressed its displeasure with the Trump appointee's decision and filed an appeal.

Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit dashed the administration's hopes, upholding the lower court's ruling. However, among the apparent rogue agencies the three-judge panel left unchecked was one of the worst offenders.

On Tuesday, the Fifth Circuit remedied this oversight, expanding the injunction to include the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, noting that "for many of the same reasons as the FBI and the CDC, CISA also likely violated the First Amendment."

The White House appears ready to take this battle to the Supreme Court.

What's the background?

The plaintiffs in the suit included the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff; Jill Hines, the activist behind the "Reopen Louisiana" initiative; and the states of Missouri and Louisiana.

Bhattacharya noted in a recent op-ed that that he joined the suit in August 2022 at the request of the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general with the aim of ending the government's role in running roughshod over the First Amendment rights of critics and questioners of the Biden administration's COVID-19 policies.

President Joe Biden, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Anthony Fauci, and various other Biden administration officials and entities were named as defendants.

In his judgment filed on July 4, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty wrote, "If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history. In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment's right to free speech."

According to Doughty, the plaintiffs were "likely to succeed on the merits on their claim that the United States Government, through the White House and numerous federal agencies, pressured and encouraged social-media companies to suppress free speech."

On the basis of this understanding, Doughty barred Biden administration officials, including in the FBI, DOJ, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from engaging social media companies regarding "the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms."

TheBlaze previously reported that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre similarly indicated the DOJ was "reviewing this" and that the Biden White House disagreed with Doughty's decision.

The DOJ asked Doughty for a stay of the injunction, which he denied.

On July 10, the department asked the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for a stay, suggesting that a failure to stay might — among other things — hinder the Biden administration in fighting "misinformation circulating online [that] could impede relief and response efforts" after a natural disaster.

A partial win

A three-judge panel for the Fifth Circuit issued an opinion on Sept. 8 validating the argument that the Biden administration had been violating Americans' First Amendment Rights by unlawfully censoring them by proxy via social media companies, reported Newsweek.

The panel confirmed that the White House, surgeon general, CDC, and FBI likely had violated the First Amendment. Accordingly, the judges affirmed the district court's judgement with respect to these entities. However, the Appeals Court reversed the injunction as it pertained to all other officials.

This partial victory was bittersweet, noted RealClearInvestigations editor Ben Weingarten, not only because the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the State Department were not subjected to the injunction but because CISA got out unscathed.

Weingarten told lawmakers in May, "CISA has served as a censorship 'switchboard,' collecting purported misinformation from government and non-government actors in the form of tweets, YouTube videos, and even private Facebook messages, and relaying the flagged content to the platforms to squelch it."

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has called CISA "the 'nerve center' of the vast censorship enterprise, the very entity that worked with the FBI to silence the Hunter Biden laptop story."

Going the distance

The Republican attorneys general for Missouri and Louisiana requested a rehearing on Sept. 28. The court obliged them.

The three-judge panel withdrew its previous opinion and extended the injunction to CISA as well.

"We find that, for many of the same reasons as the FBI and the CDC, CISA also likely violated the First Amendment," says the opinion. "First, CISA was the 'primary facilitator' of the FBI's interactions with the social-media platforms and worked in close coordination with the FBI to push the platforms to change their moderation policies to cover 'hack-and-leak' content."

"Second, CISA's 'switchboarding' operations, which, in theory, involved CISA merely relaying flagged social-media posts from state and local election officials to the platforms, was, in reality, '[s]omething more,'" continues the opinion. "CISA used its frequent interactions with social-media platforms to push them to adopt more restrictive policies on censoring election-related speech. And CISA officials affirmatively told the platforms whether the content they had 'switchboarded' was true or false. Thus, when the platforms acted to censor CISA-switchboarded content, they did not do so independently."

The Fifth Circuit judges further bolstered the district court's view that the Biden White House, the FBI, the surgeon general, the CDC, and CISA "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 defendants are barred from coercing or significantly encouraging a social media platform's content moderation decisions. They have less than a week to update their request to the Supreme Court.

In its third supplemental memo to the U.S. Supreme Court regarding an emergency stay application on behalf of the defendants, the DOJ accused the Fifth Circuit on Oct. 5 of having reached its decision on the basis of a "flawed conception of the state-action doctrine," stressing that it will impose "grave harms" on thousands of government employees.

USA Today indicated that the DOJ declined to comment. Brandon Wales, executive director of CISA, has suggested his agency does not censor speech.

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