Christian charged with 'hate crime' for sharing Bible passage is headed to Finnish Supreme Court for final showdown



The Finnish state spent years trying to punish a Christian parliamentarian for publicly expressing her biblically informed views on marriage and sexuality. Dr. Päivi Räsänen stood firm, fought back, and won.

Despite three judges admitting that the hate crime charges leveled against her were baseless and an appeals court later concurring, the state prosecutor appealed the latest unanimous acquittal, desperate to make an example out of the high-profile dissenter.

Räsänen is now headed for a showdown before the Nordic nation's supreme court — to find out whether inconvenient scriptural passages and Christian belief are still legal in Finland.

Bible on trial

Dr. Päivi Räsänen is a devout Christian, a medical doctor, a grandmother, and a Finnish parliamentarian. She previously served as the country's minister of the interior.

Throughout her career, Räsänen has been open and unapologetic about her orthodox religious views concerning life and morality, especially with regards to marriage, sex, and abortion. Her outlook and intellectual consistency have made her a popular target for leftists in and outside the government.

On June 17, 2019, Räsänen drew the ire of LGBT activists by posting a photo of Romans 1:24-27 online in reference to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland's official participation in the Helsinki Pride event.

The offending passage the parliamentarian shared from the New Testament states in English, "Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet."

The parliamentarian accompanied the photo with the following note, "How does the doctrine of the church, #raamattu agree with the fact that shame and sin are raised as a matter of pride?"

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Police subsequently launched an investigation into the Christian lawmaker.

Räsänen was charged under a section of the Finnish criminal code titled "war crimes and crimes against humanity" and slapped with three counts of incitement against a minority group, reported Yle.

"I do not consider myself guilty of threatening, slandering or insulting any group of people. These are all based on the Bible's teachings on marriage and sexuality," she said shortly after being indicted.

Extra to charging Räsänen for quoting Scripture online and elsewhere expressing traditional views, prosecutors charged the parliamentarian along with Bishop Juhana Pohjola of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission over a 2004 pamphlet they collaborated on entitled, "Male and Female He Created Them."

In March 2022, three judges in the District Court of Helsinki reportedly ruled that all of the charges against Räsänen were baseless, noting the "speeches were partly offensive, but not hate speech."

State prosecutor Anu Mantila clearly had failed to win over the court with the argument that the parliamentarian is permitted to "believe in her mind whatever about the Bible, but it is illegal to express it outwardly."

The state appealed the decision, this time landing Räsänen in the Helsinki Court of Appeal in August 2023.

The heresiarch of Helsinki

This time around, Mantila argued, "You can cite the Bible, but it is Räsänen's interpretation and opinion about the Bible verses that are criminal," reported the Christian advocacy group ADF International, which aided in the parliamentarian's legal defense.

Mantila also asked Räsänen multiple times during her cross-examination whether she would now be willing to update or alter her comments about marriage and sexuality, particularly those in her 2004 church pamphlet.

ADF International executive director Paul Coleman noted, "At the heart of the prosecutor's examination of Räsänen was this: would she recant her beliefs? The answer was no — she would not deny the teachings of her faith. The cross-examination bore all the resemblance of a 'heresy' trial of the middle ages; it was implied that Räsänen had 'blasphemed' against the dominant orthodoxies of the day."

The appellate court ruled unanimously in November to uphold the district court's unanimous acquittal, finding that it had "no reason, on the basis of the evidence received at the main hearing, to assess the case in any respect differently from the District Court. There is therefore no reason to alter the final result of the District Court's judgment."

The appellate court ordered the prosecution to cover the legal costs incurred by Räsänen and Pohjola. The court gave the prosecution until January 2024 to exhaust the last of its options — an appeal to the Finnish Supreme Court.

The final showdown

The Finnish Supreme Court granted the state prosecutor permission Friday to appeal the unanimous judgment of the Helsinki Court of Appeal, meaning Räsänen will now stand trial a third time.

AFD International indicated the state prosecutor only appealed the lesser courts' decisions on two of the previous three charges, namely those regarding the scriptural tweet and the pro-marriage 2004 pamphlet. Bishop Juhana Pohjola will similarly be standing trial for publishing the pamphlet.

Räsänen said in a statement that she has a "peaceful mind" and is "ready to continue to defend free speech and freedom of religion before the Supreme Court, and if need be, also before the European Court of Human Rights."

"In my case the investigation has lasted almost five years, has involved untrue accusations, several long police interrogations totaling more than 13 hours, preparations for court hearings, the District Court hearing, and a hearing in the Court of Appeal," said the Christian parliamentarian. "This was not just about my opinions, but about everyone's freedom of expression. I hope that with the ruling of the Supreme Court, others would not have to undergo the same ordeal. I have considered it a privilege and an honor to defend freedom of expression, which is a fundamental right in a democratic state."

The prosecution wants to hammer the defendants with massive fines and order the censorship of the bishop's publications.

Coleman, who recently took part in the National Conservatism conference, which socialist Belgian officials tried to forcefully shut down, said, "The state's insistence on continuing this prosecution after almost five long years, despite such clear and unanimous rulings from the lower courts is alarming. The process is the punishment in such instances, resulting in a chill on free speech for all citizens observing."

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Biden White House successfully pressured Amazon to censor and suppress books: Emails



Newly released documents indicate the same Biden White House that routinely bemoans perceived threats to freedom and democracy hasn't just pressured social media companies to censor speech and hide conservative news — it has also gone after literature that contains disfavored views.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) revealed Monday that documents subpoenaed by congressional investigators indicate Amazon "bowed down to Biden White House pressure to censor BOOKS."

An internal Amazon email sent on March 9, 2021, regarding a meeting with the White House includes the question of whether the Biden administration was asking the company "to remove books, or are they more concerned about search results/order (or both)?"

Jordan indicated this question was a priority at Amazon because "Andy Slavitt — the senior Biden White House official who demanded that Facebook censor a meme and true information — was pressuring Amazon at the same time."

Slavitt is the senior Biden adviser who helped steer COVID-19 policy, told Americans they "could have all done a little bit better" during the pandemic, and pressured Facebook to censor Tucker Carlson videos and memes about vaccine side effects.

Jordan indicated that Slavitt and other people in the Biden White House "ran keyword searches for controversial topics, such as 'vaccine,' and emailed Amazon when [they] didn't like how the search results appeared."

In an email sent on March 2, 2021, Slavitt pressed Amazon on who the White House could "talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon?"

— (@)

Slavitt wrote in another email, "If you search for 'vaccines' under books, I see what comes up. I haven't looked beyond that but if that's what's on the surface, it's concerning."

Zach Butterworth, Biden's former public sector liaison, similarly hectored Amazon employees about books on the site, expressing concern in one instance that there was no Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warning label on the sales page.

Amazon initially refused to manually censor books for fear of drawing too much heat from the public.

The company's exchange administrative group noted in a March 2, 2021, email, "We will not be doing a manual intervention today. The team/PR feels very strongly that it is too visible, and will further compound the Harry/Sally narrative (which is getting the Fox News treatment today apparently), and won't fix the problem long-term problem [sic] because of customer behavior associations."

"If we completely remove customer behavior associations it will break the search," continued the email.

Rather than censor outright, the company decided — at least at first — to "widen the search light flag for COVID-19 CDC website re-direct so that it comes to the top of the page on more search keys."

Despite these efforts, the Amazon group conceded that "it won't be satisfactory. The WH will probably ask why we don't take the content like FB/Twitter do if we aren't taking it down. That is an option being explored by [sic] that we don't want to disclose to avoid boxing in."

On account of the Biden White House's pressure campaign to censor wrongthink, Amazon generated canned excuses, including:

  • "Our guidelines address content that is illegal or infringing, generates a poor customer experience, or that we otherwise prohibit, such as pornography. Our guidelines do not specifically address content about vaccines";
  • "We believe that retailers are different than social media communities which means we review the content we make available, where we make it available in our store, and how we address content that customers find disappointing"; and
  • "As a retailer, we provide our customers with access to a variety of viewpoints, including books that some customers may find objectionable. All booksellers make decisions about what selection they choose to offer and we do not take selection decisions lightly."

Amazon's canned responses evidently failed to satisfy the ruling power.

One week later, Amazon representatives "feeling pressure from the White House" met with members of President Joe Biden's cadre "to take a closer look at books related to vaccine misinformation and debating additional steps Amazon might want to take to reduce the visibility of these titles."

It appears the White House got what it wanted: more censorship.

"Starting March 9—the same day as its meeting with the White House — Amazon enabled 'Do Not Promote' for books that expressed the view that vaccines were not effective," said Chairman Jordan.

A March 12, 2021, internal Amazon email indicated that the company had "CRM review all titles mentioned and have worked with the teams who specialize on Search, Reviews, and Personalization tools."

"One book (out of 9) was found to violate our COVID policy and was removed," continued the damning update. "As a reminder, we did enable Do Not Promote for anti-vax books whose primary purpose is to persuade readers vaccines are unsafe or ineffective on 3/9, and will review additional handling options with these books."

Jordan denounced the Biden White House's coercive efforts during a committee hearing Tuesday, stating, "I've been thinking about it. Government pressuring Amazon to ban books. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube — all this big combination to impact [an] election and now we find the same thing was happening, the same dynamic was happening at Amazon."

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Concerning the new revelations about the state-driven censorship push at Amazon, Aaron Kheriaty, director of the Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, tweeted, "More evidence of the reach of the federal censorship leviathan — not just social media but also books on Amazon."

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education noted, "If accurate, these new documents are yet another disturbing example of government pressure on private actors to suppress disfavored views."

Allum Bokhari, a journalist who has exposed various censorship efforts in the digital space, wrote, "The people who call their critics 'fascists' and enjoy cringe catchphrases like 'democracy dies in darkness' spent early 2021 using government pressure to ban books."

Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford School of Medicine and co-author of the "Great Barrington Declaration," wrote, "At this point, if the Supreme Court doesn't stop this Biden administration censorship nonsense (perhaps in the Missouri v. Biden case), the United States may as well apologize for its revolution, close up shop, and give itself back to the British Crown."

In August 2022, Bhattacharya joined Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Reopen Louisiana activist Jill Hines, and the states of Missouri and Louisiana in their legal effort to hold the Biden administration responsible for running roughshod over the First Amendment rights of critics and questioners of government COVID-19 policies.

U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty wrote in a July 4 ruling in their case that "if the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history."

Doughty issued a preliminary injunction against the Biden administration, 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."

However, a three-judge panel for the Fifth Circuit reversed the injunction for all officials save for the CDC, the White House, the surgeon general, and FBI.

The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently stayed the Fifth Circuit's order and is set to hear the case in the 2023-2024 term.

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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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Taxpayer-funded researchers are perfecting schemes to stealthily regulate speech and control sensitive narratives online: Report



Under the Biden administration, federally funded researchers are using millions of social media posts they claimed amounted to "misinformation" during the 2020 election in order to develop better ways of regulating speech, according to a digital free-speech watchdog.

Just the News reported that work by a research group at the University of Washington in Seattle, executed in part with taxpayer grants and previewed in an article last year in Nature Human Behavior, points to how various existing censorship strategies could be combined to create an invisible administrative hand with which to better throttle ideas in the cradle and crush undesirable content without leaving easy-to-see fingerprints.

In June 2023, the research group comprising members of the university's Center for an Informed Public detailed possible "solutions" to the purported threats that so-called "misinformation" poses — to democratic processes and public health measures in particular.

The researchers derived a "generative model of viral misinformation spread, inspired by research on infectious disease," then applied that model to 10.5 million tweets "of misinformation events that occurred during the 2020 US election."

They subsequently determined that "commonly proposed interventions are unlikely to be effective in isolation."

To achieve a "substantial reduction in the prevalence of misinformation" — which at one time or another has been a label assigned by big tech and big government to legitimate claims about the Hunter Biden laptop, COVID-19 vaccine side effects, and the Wuhan lab-leak theory — the researchers recommended that censorship and narrative controls be used in combination.

Some of the tactics they noted could be used effectively in combination include:

  • the removal or obfuscation of "all content matching search terms related to an emerging misinformation incident";
  • labeling content as "misinformation";
  • account banning and a strict adherence to a "three-strikes" rule;
  • hard-to-detect "'virality circuit breakers', which seek to reduce the spread of a trending misinformation topic without explicitly removing content," in part by suspending algorithmic amplification; and
  • "nudge-based approaches," whereby users are prompted to doubt a post's accuracy even if it has not been proven to be false or misleading.

The researchers claimed that "we urgently need a path forward that goes beyond trial and error or inaction," recognizing their proposals might serve as practical short-term alternatives to "large-scale censorship or major advances in cognitive psychology and machine learning."

Two of the researchers on the projected penned a piece in Nature Medicine last month calling for the use of "every point of leverage available" to combat "misinformation and disinformation."

Mike Benz, executive director at censorship watchdog Foundation for Freedom Online, told the "Just the News, No Noise" show Monday that the researchers' 2022 study is a road map on "how to censor people using secret methods so that they wouldn't know they're being censored, so that it wouldn't generate an outrage cycle, and so that it'd be more palatable for the tech platforms who wouldn't get blowback because people wouldn't know they're being censored."

Jevin West, a researcher on the project, contends that concerns like Benz's are much ado about nothing, telling Just the News that the fears about his research possibly impacting free speech relied upon a "fundamental misunderstanding of the paper that appears to be based on non-factual distortion and falsehoods."

Just the News took this to mean that "he considered criticism of the work to be disinformation."

"The paper made no policy or tactical recommendation to social media platforms or the federal government," added West. "There was no follow-up from them and we have no idea what, if anything, any of those entities did with the learnings from our paper."

Although West's suggested that this work is theoretical and apolitical, the censorship researchers nevertheless appear eager to see their work put into practice, having noted in their 2022 paper, "Our results highlight a practical path forward as misinformation online continues to threaten vaccination efforts, equity and democratic processes around the globe."

The FFO previously indicated that this censorship study is just the tip of the iceberg.

TheBlaze previously detailed the FFO's findings that in the first two years of the Biden administration, the National Science Foundation had spent nearly $40 million on government grants and contracts primarily through its Convergence Accelerator to combat "misinformation."

Over 64 censorship grants made their way to 42 colleges and universities, with some grants "explicitly target[ting] 'populist politicians' and 'populist communications' to scientifically determine 'how best to counter populist narratives,'" according to the FFO.

West's center at the University of Washington was among the recipients, nabbing a five-year, $2.25 million grant from the NSF for "Rapid-Response Frameworks for Mitigating Online Disinformation."

Benz insists that the purpose of these efforts to disguise censorship amid congressional probes and court challenges is to produce an "information purgatory to place largely conservative, populist or heterodox opinions and to stop them from going viral."

Responding to the researchers' stated ambitions, the FFO director said, "So they want to be able to control and prevent all opposition to election procedures that they want in place, to vaccination campaigns and to what appears to be racial and climate equity initiatives."

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Emails reveal that Biden White House pressured Facebook to censor vaccine memes, Tucker Carlson videos: 'Worse than anyone could ever have thought'



Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) provided new damning insights into the lengths to which the Biden White House has gone to suppress speech and views online that it has found undesirable or threatening.

The internal Facebook documents shared to Twitter Thursday were obtained via subpoena by the House Judiciary Committee, which Jordan chairs. They reveal Facebook and Instagram censored content online following "unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House."

Among the damning documents was an April 2021 email circulated by a Facebook employee, ostensibly on behalf of company CEO Mark Zuckerberg and then-COO Sheryl Sandberg.

The email stated, "We are seeking your guidance on whether to take more aggressive action against certain vaccine discouraging content. We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content."

The email specifies that the Biden White House took issue with a "vaccine discouraging humorous meme," which it told the social media company to delete.

The verboten meme in question used the "Pointing Rick Dalton" template, borrowing a still from the 2019 film "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," where Leonardo DiCaprio's character points out something on television.

This meme, which the Biden White House wanted erased from the platform, was captioned, "10 years from now you will be watching TV and hear .... 'Did you or a loved one take the covid vaccine? You may be entitled ...'" and apparently shared over 385,000 times.

— (@)

Jordan noted that another April 2021 email sent by former British politician and Facebook president of global affairs Nick Clegg had captured the Biden administration's apoplexy over the company's tardiness in censoring this meme.

Clegg told his team that Andy Slavitt, who served as a senior adviser to Biden and helped steer COVID-19 policy, "was outraged — not too strong a word to describe his reaction — that we did not remove this post which was third most highly ranked post in the data set we sent to him."

Slavitt, who stepped down in June 2021, was the Biden official who enraged many Americans after telling them they "could have all done a little bit better" and sacrificed more during the pandemic, reported the New York Post.

Despite his company's apparent censorious reflex, Clegg indicated he "countered" the Biden administration's demands, suggesting that "removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US."

However, Clegg noted that Slavitt "replied that the post was directly comparing Covid vaccines to asbestos poisoning in a way which demonstrably inhibits confidence in Covid vaccines amongst those the Biden Administration is trying to reach."

Memes related to vaccines were not the only information the Biden administration was actively downplaying at the time.

TheBlaze previously reported that emails recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request revealed the Biden administration knew as early as January 2021 — one month after the Food and Drug Administration first granted emergency use authorization for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines — that there were "breakthrough" infections despite COVID-19 vaccination. The administration indicated otherwise and imposed mandates anyway.

The Biden administration apparently wasn't just intolerant of humorous memes but also of the free press.

Jordan noted that internal documents also revealed that the Biden White House pressured Facebook to censor a video from former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. The company appeared willing to at least meet the regime halfway.

One document marked "confidential treatment requested[,] not for distribution" contains talking points apparently drafted for Clegg to "appease the Biden White House," according to Jordan.

The document states that if Slavitt asks "How was this [Tucker Carlson] post not violative?" Clegg could answer, "While we remove content that explicitly directs people not to get the vaccine, as well as content that contains explicit misrepresentations about vaccines, we reviewed this content in detail and it does not violate those policies."

Despite this acknowledgment that Carlson had not violated the platform's policies, the talking points note that his content was nevertheless being suppressed.

"The video is receiving 50% demotion for seven days as it is in the queue to be fact checked," said the document.

Following Biden's July 2021 accusation that Facebook was "killing people" by carrying so-called COVID misinformation, a Facebook document from Aug. 2, 2021, indicates the company got to work brainstorming new rules and policies to impose on users "to be more aggressive against Covid and vaccine misinformation," admitting that "this is stemming from the continued criticism of our approach from the US administration."

Jordan concluded from these and other documents that "the Biden Admin abused its powers to coerce Facebook into censoring Americans, preventing free and open discourse on issues of critical public importance."

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone confirmed to Forbes that the company had provided these documents to the House Judiciary Committee.

This late bout of cooperation appears to have been what temporarily dissuaded Jordan from calling a vote to hold Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress after he had allegedly evaded a congressional subpoena.

Stone indicated the company "will continue to comply, as we have thus far, with good faith requests from the committee."

The New York Post reported that in the wake of these insights into the Biden White House's apparent clampdown on American free speech, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended the apparent censorship campaign, saying, "We have promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections."

Jean-Pierre added, "We have consistently made clear that we believe social media companies have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects of their platforms that they have on the American people."

Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted, "Dem spent years denying there is a system of the US Security State and WH to coerce Big Tech to censor political content they disliked, calling those of us who denounced it 'conspiracy theorists.' Now the evidence is dispositive - more here - so now they explicitly defend it."

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Biden's top Democratic rival going into the 2024 presidential primary, said, "These new documents obtained under Congressional subpoena show the shocking extent of Biden White House's contempt for the First Amendment."

Twitter CEO Elon Musk wrote, "Extremely concerning!"

Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, suggested the documents reveal "impeachable censorship violations of our civil rights by Joe Biden."

The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government tweeted, "It was worse than anyone could ever have thought."

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