This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
The Supreme Court formally has taken up a major challenge to Joe Biden's scheming to censor ideas and opinions he dislikes by using social media to do the work for him.
The trial judge in the case, U.S. District Terry A. Doughty, had issued a July 4 ruling that the government, in fact, was playing the Orwellian role of a "Ministry of Truth" and ordered a halt.
That halt has been pending at a mid-level appellate court.
Essentially, the program set up by the Biden administration worked like this: Since the government cannot directly censor speech, Biden's bureaucrats would work with various sympathetic foundations or other organizations.
Biden's officials would tell the foundations what they wanted tech and social media corporations to censor, and those organizations then would lobby the companies to do that.
The case is Missouri v. Biden. Republican attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana sued the Biden administration over its communications with social media companies concerning the censorship of various ideas.
They charged that the indirect route to censorship was equally a violation of the First Amendment.
Doughty agreed and ordered government agencies to stop, but the Biden administration, wanting to keep the censorship plan alive, appealed.
A report from the Daily Caller News Foundation reported Justice Samuel Alito said, "Government censorship of private speech is antithetical to our democratic form of government, and therefore today’s decision is highly disturbing."
He referenced the majority's decision to halt Doughty's injunction until the case is fully reviewed. It means Biden can continue his censorship lobbying until then.
That lower court found Biden's officials likely breached the First Amendment and explained government actors cannot be "collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working with" groups that lobby for censorship.
WND previously reported, "It was confirmed during Biden's administration, and especially during election periods, that Biden's bureaucrats had multiple channels to various foundations. They would complain to those foundations about ideas he refused to tolerate, and then those foundations would complain to social media corporations until those comments were censored."
Doughty's original order found Biden's plan akin to an "Orwellian Ministry of Truth."
The lawsuit accused federal officials of unlawfully helping suppress conservative-leaning speech on major social media platforms, such as Meta's Facebook, Alphabet's YouTube, and X, formerly called Twitter.
Democrats repeatedly have called for more censorship of speech with which they disagree. They claim to be opposing "misinformation," "disinformation" and "misinformation," but essentially their targets are ideas that do not align with their party's talking points.
The subjects of that "information" have ranged from election fraud and faulty COVID "vaccines" to Biden family corruption and more.
