A trio of prominent Republican senators zeroed in on the plot by Big Tech companies and the government to violate the First Amendment.
GOP Sens. Bill Hagerty (TN), Eric Schmitt (MO) and J.D. Vance (OH) held a press conference on Wednesday in which the trio commented on a recent preliminary injunction in the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit which banned the Biden administration from colluding with Big Tech platforms to censor free speech.
The fired-up Republican trio delivered scathing responses to the Federal government's involvement in censoring the American people online and rallied behind legislation to permanently prohibit the federal government from violating First Amendment in censorship of online free speech.
Sen. Hagerty started the presser blasting the federal government. “We have, I think, the deepest concern that our federal government not be [sic] in a position to do anything to trample on our First Amendment rights,” he said. “Yet what we found is that there has been collusion between this Administration and Big Tech to censor American speech.”
Hagerty also promoted his bill, Disclose Government Censorship Act, which does not bar censorship but provides transparency demands on potential collusion. Hagerty later passed the podium to Sen. Schmitt, who as the Attorney General of Missouri first introduced the lawsuit against the Biden administration.
In his speech, Schmitt echoed Hagerty’s concerns. “This is a fundamental right that has been under attack by this administration in a shocking way in what has been uncovered as a mass censorship enterprise the scope of which we’ve never seen before in American history,” Schmitt said, before highlighting the evidence unleashed by the Andrew Bailey and Jeff Landry, the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana in Missouri v. Biden.
Sen. Vance chimed in to circulate concerns about the negative effects of censorship on children, primarily when social media platforms prohibited debates on government-mandated lockdowns. “I know people in Ohio, I know people in my own social circle whose children saw increases in depression because they couldn’t go to school and learn, they couldn’t go to school and see their friends,” the Ohio senator said. “And why weren’t they allowed to do it? Because we weren’t having the debate that we should have been having in this country because Big Tech was preventing that from happening.”
The injunction by U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty of Louisiana and the subsequent denial of the Biden administration’s ask for a stay of the injunction marked massive victories for free speech advocates. The lawsuit cited over 20,000 pages of censorship cases, including some recorded exclusively by MRC Free Speech America’s censorship database, CensorTrack.org.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representative 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 using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable
