First Amendment Protected

For John, BLUF:  On the 4th of July a Federal Jusge told the Biden Administrstion to stip colluding with social media companies to suppress free speech.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Poetic Justice for the Biden ‘Ministry of Truth’

From American Greatness, by Opinionator Roger Kimball, 9 July 2023.

Here is the lede plus fourteen:

At some point in this column, I have probably had occasion to quote these famous lines from Walter Scott’s poem “Marmion”:

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave

When first we practice to deceive.”

In another, better world, I like to think, the Bidens and their protectors and puppet masters would ruefully be contemplating Scott’s admonitory observation.

In this world, however, I suspect that—until quite recently, anyway—they had smugly sided with J.R. Pope’s sly amendment to Scott’s moralizing couplet:

“But when we’ve practiced for a while

How vastly we improve our style.”

I note that Pope’s amusing title for his observation is “A Word of Encouragement.”

Many of us feel a great contradiction at the heart of the Biden phenomenon.

On the one hand, he—“Big Guy” Joe—and his entire Snopes-like family—coke-head Hunter, “Dr.” Jill, the litter of grasping, on-the-make siblings—all seem like ciphers, the veritable incarnation of Gertrude Stein’s description of Oakland, CA: “there’s no there there.”

Indeed, from this point of view, Joe’s painful mental and, increasingly, physical vacancy seems to be the objective correlative for the entire Biden enterprise. It’s as if the nasty brother of the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz suddenly came to life and occupied the White House. “If I only had a brain,” he snarls softly to himself, frightening everyone around him.

And that “as if” brings me to the extraordinary “other hand.” Joe Biden is President of the United States, still, if just barely, the most important political office in the world. Amazing. How could that be? Talk about going from zero to one!

Of course, history is littered with the spectacle of destructive lunatics and incompetents in high office, as such names as Caligula, Nero, Commodus, and Elagabalus remind us. (As an aside, I hereby note that Elagabalus is poised for a rerun, so perfectly does that epicene, “gender fluid” freak epitomize some of the central pathologies of our time).

The Bidens have yet to achieve the notoriety of such grimly illustrious predecessors. Nevertheless, these past months have not been kind to the Biden conglomerate.

And here is a seven page summary of the Court Order:

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
WESTERN DISTRICT OF LOUISIANA
MONROE DIVISION

STATE OF MISSOURI, ET AL.		CASE NO. 3:22-CV-01213
VERSUS		JUDGE TERRY A. DOUGHTY
JOSEPH R BIDEN JR., ET AL.		MAG. JUDGE KAYLA D. MCCLUSKY

This is important work.  Important in terms of our right to free speech and important in terms of having a fair and open debate on things that matter to us as Citizens.  Think of the suppressing of the Great Barrington Declaration,  Wikipedia notwithstanding, the Great Barrington Declaration, shunned by the Bureaucracy, turned out to have important points.

If we can't handle free and open debate then we can't claim to have a democracy.  We will have lost our Republic.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff