☕️ WEBS AND TANGLES ☙ Thursday, June 27, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

The Supremes disappoint in Missouri, but we scrape up the silver lining and connect it to a truly mind-blowing story of epic 2024 proportions. Wait till you grasp the DOD's newest limited hangout.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! One story dominated the news yesterday, and our roundup orbits around it, even though all the real energy comes from an astonishing related story: the Supreme Court’s disappointing decision in Missouri v. Biden does not yet mean the body-image-positive opera lady has sung her last number; a telling comparison of headlines, three years apart; and the biggest 2024 story that you probably never heard of or at least haven’t fully appreciated.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 The Supreme Court let rip one of its biggest decisions yesterday in the Missouri v. Biden case. In the World Series of Big Decisions, the Court swung its giant judicial whiffle bat and struck out.  USA Today ran the story with the triumphant, self-hating headline, “Supreme Court says Biden admin can combat social media misinformation in free speech case.”

I suppose it was inevitable. Now we have self-hating reporters. One struggles in vain to understand why media platforms like USA Today would celebrate a Supreme Court decision that allows the federal government to pressure media platforms like USA Today about what to say, or be sued into the regulatory Lake of Fire.

Maybe it’s because USA Today is already a wholly-owned government subsidiary and a good little doggie. But I digress.

On the other hand, conservative media was understandably outraged. But the apocalyptic hot takes are, as usual, slightly overwrought. I disagree that the Court’s decision yesterday was any sign we need to head for the lifeboats or get the band up on deck playing classical hits to calm the passengers.

Do not panic until I give the signal.

Remember the Superman fallacy. The Supreme Court will never ‘save us.’ It is not a savior. Occasionally, it does something miraculous, like the Dobbs decision, and other times, it does something awful, like the Roe decision that Dobbs overturned. That is how the legal system works. And it’s also how it sometimes doesn’t work, if you follow the logic.

That said, yesterday’s decision is perhaps better described as a woeful missed opportunity, destined to become a footnote in the great postmillennial freedom wars, rather than any Constitutional setback like Roe. The six Justices in the majority, which included all the liberals, did not actually endorse government censorship.

Instead, using a hyper-skeptical lens, they denied a preliminary injunction on technical grounds.

The underlying case, Missouri v. Biden, is not over. Justice Amy Coney Barret wrote the 6-3 Majority opinion. Justices Thomas and Gorsuch joined the excoriating dissent written by Justice Alito.

I’ll begin with the majority’s conclusion. They didn’t approve of —or even deny— the government’s pressure on social media companies to hogtie citizens who were “spreading misinformation.” Instead, the Majority found that the plaintiffs, all of whom had been somehow censored by social media during the pandemic, failed to completely connect their individual censorship to a specific government action. Plus, it was too much reading:

My legal mentor, a legit legal genius, always says that appellate courts have a big dusty tool shed out back. They can root around in the shed whenever they need some archaic doctrine or other to do a particular job. And that’s just what the Majority did here. They pulled out the old push mower of nitpicky literalism and cropped the lawn of facts down to just under the minimum grass height for an injunction.

The problem was too much evidence. Judges, the Court soberly noted, are not like pigs:

To be sure, the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices. But it is especially important to hold the plaintiffs to their burden in a case like this one, where the record spans over 26,000 pages and the lower courts did not make any specific causation findings. As the Seventh Circuit has memorably put it, “judges are not like pigs, hunting for truffles buried in the record.”

Or maybe judges are more like blind pigs. One might fairly ask how the Majority managed not to discover any direct evidence of government censorship in that voluminous, 26,000-page record. The Minority found it easily. In its second footnote, the Dissent cited the House Judiciary Committee’s Interim Staff Report, titled “The Censorship-Industrial Complex: How Top Biden White House Officials Coerced Big Tech To Censor Americans, True Information, and Critics of the Biden Administration.”

That House report, which included all the evidence any judge could possibly have wanted, must have been one of the buried truffles in the appellate record. It was there, but it was just too much work for the average pig to root out.

Unlike the Majority, the Dissent found the “voluminous record” to be a help and not a hindrance:

Purely private entities like newspapers are not subject to the First Amendment. They may publish or decline to publish whatever they wish. But government officials may not coerce private entities to suppress speech, and that is what happened in this case. The record before us is vast.

Relying on the vast record, the Minority clearly and compellingly described what the evidence actually amounted to: the most important free speech case in a generation:

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.

We are obligated to tackle that free speech issue. The Court, however, shirks that duty and thus permits 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.

That is regrettable.

What the officials did in this case was subtle, but it was no less coercive. And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even more dangerous. It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so. Officials who read today’s decision will get the message: If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by.

That is not a message this Court should send.

And so we see the hinge between the two sides. The government’s efforts to manipulate the social media platforms into censoring everyday Americans were “subtle” and “sophisticated.” They were cunning. They worked behind the scenes. They innocently claimed the mantle of good government, just simple (but well-paid) bureaucrats working tirelessly for the safety and welfare of average citizens during a tragic pandemic.

The good news was that even the Majority seemed skeptical of the government’s pathological lies. But the Majority strategically wondered whether these particular plaintiffs had proved it was government threats and coercion, rather than civic-minded, independent volunteerism, that produced the social media platforms’ ever-tightening censorship policies.

Like the rest of us, the Dissent was clear about the government’s  so-called subtlety. The Dissent thought it was not subtle, or maybe subtle by obvious, and accurately described how the whole sordid scheme worked:

What these events show is that top federal officials continuously and persistently hectored Facebook to crack down on what the officials saw as unhelpful social media posts, including not only posts that they thought were false or misleading but also stories that they did not even claim to be literally false, but nevertheless wanted obscured. And Facebook’s reactions to these efforts were not what one would expect from an independent news source or a journalistic entity dedicated to holding the Government accountable for its actions.

Instead, Facebook’s responses resembled that of a subservient entity determined to stay in the good graces of a powerful taskmaster. Facebook told White House officials that it would “work . . . to gain your trust.” When criticized, Facebook representatives whimpered that they “thought we were doing a better job” but promised to do more going forward. They pleaded to know how they could “get back to a good place” with the White House. And when denounced as “killing people,” Facebook responded by expressing a desire to “work together collaboratively” with its accuser.

The picture is clear.

It’s worth repeating that the Majority’s decision did not make any new law that could rule out future lawsuits. Nor did it endorse censorship-by-proxy. We’re rightly frustrated because the Majority had in its porcine grasp a perfect chance to shut down this government overreach — but didn’t take it.

Michelle doesn’t like truffles either. She thinks truffle oil tastes like soap. Keep them french truffles away from the freedom fries, she always says.* (*or words to that effect.)

Contrary to USA Today’s frantic headline, the unfortunate decision still was not any “win” for Biden. Although the injunction has been “dismissed,” the lawsuit itself continues, for now.  USA Today acknowledged the Court did not rule on the Constitutional issues:

And now the Administration is under an even more powerful microscope. Congressional investigations will only increase. For example, USA Today quoted Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who heads the House Committee on Weaponization of the Federal Government, and he says it’s full steam ahead:

Here’s the whole order, if you’re interested. (It’s curiously short, with fewer than 30 pages each for the Majority and the Dissent.)

Finally, I’ll say this about the always popular but never-knowable question of why? Why did the conservative justices flush this opportunity like a rotten truffle? We’ll never know. But I wonder whether the gravity of the Trump Immunity Decision is so strong that it’s warping the other decisions.

In other words, the Court desperately wants to avoid appearing like a political arm of the Republican party. Consciously or even unconsciously, if they know they are about to set the democrats on fire with a favorable Trump opinion, they might be tempted to pull back, just a little, from the other decisions. Give the dems a win, so it all looks even.

This case would have been a terrific candidate for being the sacrificial goat, since the democrats just loved it, even though it settled nothing. Who knows, but ever since King Solomon, there’s nothing judges love better than a little judicial baby-splitting.

It’s also possible the Justices have their eyes set on a better case winding its way through the appellate pipeline. Don’t ask me how better, I’m not a pig rooting around for lost car keys. Finding stuff is Michelle’s job anyway.

The bottom line is we still have work to do. It’s not over, not by a long shot. But this story segues nicely with the next two stories.

💉💉 If not for censorship of “misinformation,” maybe some people who are now pushing up wildflowers would still be alive. I present these next two headlines without further comment. First, fully appreciate this enthusiastic headline from EuroNews, in September 2021:

Now consider the potential relevance to the first story of this recent headline from the Portugal Resident (from January):

So. It’s murky, but there are a couple dots that need connecting. Any ideas?

Now, to cap it all off, let’s dig into another critically important, 2024 classic, limited hangout disclosure. In 2024’s serial disclosures and conspiracy confirmations, this might be June’s real story.

🔥🔥 Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive! — Sir Walter Scott, 1808. While the Supreme Court was wrestling with the limits of the government’s good faith efforts to combat online “misinformation,” Reuters quietly ran an explosive story bearing all the hallmarks of being ghost-written by the deep-state under the unlikely headline, “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to incite fear of China vaccines.”

Make more room on the 2024 bingo card. I bet all you anti-vaxxers never saw that headline coming.

In a wide-ranging article supported only by dozens more anonymous government sources, Reuters’ story confirmed yet another conspiracy theory about the breadth of U.S. psychological operations. Here’s the nut graf, the real disclosure, tucked away amidst the limited hangout:

Bribed influencers. False front groups. Fake social media accounts. Deceitful digital ads. Lies, dissembling, and deceit.

Sounds legit.

It’s not just that, at very the same time it was censoring Americans who criticized U.S. vaccines, the government was simultaneously spreading anti-vaxx misinformation about competing Chinese vaccines. More importantly, the program is much bigger than that.

In its penultimate paragraph, Reuters conceded that deceitful disinformation is now an official U.S. policy. Despite generalized attempts to blame President Trump for a Pentagon program established in 2010, Reuters conceded the military is not only still doing it, but it is doing it even more:

That paragraph referred to a de-classified Pentagon strategy paper from February 2023, which described nothing less than forever war with anyone and everyone opposing U.S. policy. And that’s just the part they’ve declassified.

Look, dummies. I don’t blame you for being confused, since you always thought disinformation was a bad thing. But it’s good when the government is doing it.

In secret. Reuters also reported that in 2019, the Secretary of Defense signed a secret order — more secrets! — essentially declaring war on the entire world. It authorized the Pentagon to use military-grade psyops on any “other countries,” even if they aren’t engaged in any active hostilities towards the US, or even if they’re an alleged ally, like the Philippines:

I’m not sure what “elevated the competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat” means, but it doesn’t sound good. Does that mean the Pentagon secretly declared war on Russia and China without a Congressional declaration?

Does “active combat” mean they can kill folks who post a meme they don’t like?

To limit the hangout, and to distract readers from the article’s terrible significance, Reuters’ narrative was framed around a single egregious example of Pentagon disinformation in the Philippines. But, and this is critical, neither Reuters nor its invisible sources claimed that was the only example. And despite repeatedly highlighting Russia and China as examples, it never said the Pentagon isn’t using psyops against allies, neutral countries, or even Americans.

This official strategy of lying explains why China and Russia have developed their own social media platforms. It also explains why the U.S. is so hell-bent on neutralizing Chinese TikTok — the only platform it doesn’t occupy like termites.

Turning now to Reuter’s lone, unalarming example, safely far away in the far-off Philippines. Reuters’ anonymous government sources described the Pentagon’s 2021 psyop designed to undermine the safety and efficacy of China’s non-mRNA vaccines:

To be clear, it was not just the Philippines. Headlines from around the world also show the telltale signs of the Pentagon’s deceitful fingerprints, like this 2021 headline from the South China Morning Post:

Protestors — get this — demanded Thailand buy Pfizer and Moderna shots instead of China’s traditional vaccine. I’m guessing they were totally fake astroturf protestors. But even if not, how did protestors get the idea China’s vaccine was so terrible they had to go on the march?

However, Reuters (or whoever wrote the article for Reuters) only reported the Philippino example. Still, Reuters conceded that all other vaccines were collateral damage of the Pentagon’s anti-vaxx campaign: “When individuals develop skepticism toward a single vaccine, those doubts often lead to uncertainty about other inoculations.”

So at the same time they were deleting your Facebook account for posting a meme of Dr. Fauci with a Hitler mustache, the Pentagon was busily fueling anti-vaxx theories from their non-suspended accounts.

Far beyond the Missouri v. Biden argument over whether Biden officials illegally threatened social media to stop Americans from spreading vaccine misinformation, the U.S. government was doing that very same thing on purpose. It was spreading anti-vaxx conspiracy theories for national security.

And it’s not sorry. Military News, June 14th:

This is a colossal self-own. In trying to undermine our strategic adversaries, the Pentagon has undermined us.

When accused of disinformation, our adversaries can effectively point out U.S. psyops, invoking a “whataboutism” defense. Relationships with allies built over years of patient diplomacy are now likely damaged, potentially pushing those countries toward U.S. rivals. And it massively fuels American citizens’ distrust of the government, military, public health infrastructure, and the media, which destabilizes our government.

This is how stupid all of this is: Reuters’ own story describes a sophisticated government psy-operation that includes planting fake news stories. Why shouldn’t we conclude this anonymously-sourced story is just part of a Pentagon operation?

They’re literally telling us they are doing it while they are doing it. You can’t make this stuff up.

The government’s flexible, amoral ethics, which green-lit official lying as policy, have created a profound epistemological crisis. Who knows what to believe? We citizens used to have some kind of social compact with the government, but I think one of the generals spilled coffee on it while pulling on his pantyhose.

What a tangled web the government has woven while it practiced deceit! It is difficult to overestimate the rank stupidity of our top (but diverse!) generals, who are ever fretful about the optics of their racial and gender composition. But they seem inexplicably unconcerned about things they (should have) learned in Kindergarten. Like the story of the boy who cried wolf.

So, pay attention. Don’t be distracted. It’s all coming out.

Finally, I’m sorry about how the Missouri v. Biden decision turned out. I was hoping for a better decision. But you know what they say: when life gives you lemons, stick them up the nearest vaccine bus’s tailpipe. Or Dr. Fauci’s. You choose.

Have a terrific Thursday! I can’t promise that tomorrow’s roundup won’t be dominated by another Supreme Court opinion dump, but we’ll shoot for as normal of a roundup as the overtaking events allow. See you then.

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