Imagine a radical law organization financed by George Soros lurching so far to the left on the free speech issue that it ends up bastardizing the very philosophy of the liberal U.S. Supreme Court associate justice it's named after. Enter the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Brennan Center — which has espoused insane ideas like abolishing the Electoral College because of its so-called “racist origins” and defunding the police — published a nutty take on the ongoing case Murthy v. Missouri, currently before the Supreme Court. The case involves the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana suing the Biden administration for colluding with Big Tech companies to censor free speech. “Supreme Court Case Could Be Disastrous for Detecting Election Misinformation,” read the Brennan Center’s headline, shilling for the government forces seeking to erect a dystopian speech control cabal with Silicon Valley. Tellingly, Soros funneled at least $4,800,000 into the Brennan Center’s coffers between 2016 and 2021 alone.
The Brennan Center panned the lawsuit seeking to halt the back-channel collusion between federal entities and Big Tech platforms as part of a “larger legal and political effort to silence those working to detect or counter election rumors and falsehoods.” [Emphasis added.] Yes, the Soros-funded organization attempted to make it seem like the federal government — not the American public — was the victim of censorship in this case; never mind how the Biden administration has already been repeatedly exposed for targeting Christians and conservatives who don’t toe the line on approved left-wing talking points.
The organization ended up saying the quiet part out loud by specifically advocating for the federal government to focus its efforts on “domestic” speech on elections — meaning by American citizens — in addition to foreign “interference operations,” because voters could potentially be too stupid to tell fact from fiction on their own:
The United States needs to be on alert and ready to protect the 2024 election against foreign interference and domestic election falsehoods — both of which can confuse voters or contribute to threats and harassment of election officials,” [emphasis added].
The Brennan Center bemoaned how the initial lawsuit has effectively “stood in the way” of the Orwellian goals of the leftist speech police. Uh, good? “[F]ederal agencies and others with expert knowledge should be sharing relevant information with social media companies for them to use as they apply and update their policies on how to handle falsehoods,” the Soros-funded group continued.
The so-called “wrong” ruling in Murthy, at least according to the Brennan Center’s view, “could deal a crippling blow to the ability of the government to identify election disinformation campaigns for social media companies, or even provide them with accurate election information.” How terrible that government officials with a political axe to grind could potentially not have the ability to pressure Big Tech platforms to suppress speech.
On the contrary, the Brennan Center claimed the federal government was just being benevolent in grooming tech platforms to nix information that it despised:
None of the communications related to voting, election processes, or election security cited by the lower courts were coercive communications that should have converted the platforms into state actors under the law. They were almost entirely informative and did not include attempts to dictate decisions about how to handle users’ posts.
Naivete or straight-up propaganda? Take your pick. The Brennan Center’s argument is the very kind of justification that the late Justice William J. Brennan Jr. himself repudiated when he wrote the Court’s opinion for the landmark case Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan (1963). That case wrestled with the question of whether government entities could strongly urge — not directly ban — bookstores from housing certain titles due to their objectionable content. Whether through jawboning — which is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “the use of public appeals (as by a president) to influence the actions especially of business and labor leaders” — or through explicit coercion, Brennan found that both the suggestive and coercive means carried the same end, which was chilling, illegal government censorship:
It is true that appellants’ books have not been seized or banned by the State, and that no one has been prosecuted for their possession or sale. But though the [Rhode Island Commission) is limited to informal sanctions -- the threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion, persuasion, and intimidation -- the record amply demonstrates that the Commission deliberately set about to achieve the suppression of publications deemed 'objectionable,' and succeeded in its aim. We are not the first court to look through forms to the substance and recognize that informal censorship may sufficiently inhibit the circulation of publications to warrant injunctive relief.
Justice Brennan would be rolling over in his grave if he saw the organization named after him supporting the very kind of censorship in Murthy that he opposed in Bantam Books. The Brennan Center is effectively taking the complete opposite approach to the censorship issue, which is ridiculous given that the group itself was founded by Justice Brennan’s former law clerks. It would appear then that the Brennan Center is now more keen on taking its cues from one of its most notorious leftist financiers in Soros — who’s been on a multimillion-dollar vendetta against so-called mis- and disinformation for years — than the philosophy of the very liberal judicial icon whose name it carries with gusto.
Go figure.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
