The “most important free speech case in a generation,” Missouri v. Biden (Murthy v. Missouri), is set to be heard by the Supreme Court on Monday, March 18th.
Missouri v. Biden is the case filed by the courageous Attorneys General from Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden Administration for their First Amendment violations. Specifically, the case complains to the Court that the federal government violated the US Constitution when it specifically directed social media companies to delete and censor comments, articles, accounts, memes, and photos they disliked. The case also alleges the government engaged in a wholesale de-platforming of specific users, specific comments, and specific topics.
The government was purposefully censoring truthful information.
The scale of the censorship regime is massive.
The hearing on March 18th will be for oral arguments, which will likely last one day. The Justices will then decide the case, and if a majority agrees, they will issue an opinion on the last day of the Court’s term, typically in late June or early July. The Supreme Court agrees to hear very few cases each year, normally only 100-150 cases of over 7,000 that usually request review.
The Plaintiffs include three prominent doctors, a news website, a healthcare activist, and two states.
- Dr. Aaron Kheriaty
- Dr. Martin Kulldorff
- Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya
- Jim Hoft
- Jill Hines
- The State of Missouri
- The State of Louisiana
Earlier this week The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft spoke to Dr. Aaron Kheriaty.
Dr. Aaron Kheriaty is a renowned psychiatrist and ethicist. Not that long ago, Aaron was a celebrated scientist, public speaker, and author. Aaron’s work has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Newsweek, The Federalist, Compact, The New Atlantis, City Journal, and First Things. Dr. Kheriaty was fired from the University of California after challenging the University’s covid vaccine mandate in federal court.
On Monday, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty will join four fellow plaintiffs, as well as Missouri and Louisiana, in challenging the Biden administration in the US Supreme Court.
Dr. Kheriaty: It’s great to be with you. Great to finally be chatting with you. The only co-plaintiff that I haven’t had this kind of conversation with yet. So there’s five of us. I’ll be at the Supreme Court with you and some of the others next Monday for the Murthy v. Missouri hearing Supreme Court, also known as Missouri v. Biden, in an earlier phase of this, you know, as you and probably many of your listeners know, this is a case challenging government censorship on social media. And we’re alleging that the government has been pressuring social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech online, including stuff that you publish at the Gateway pundit, including things that I’ve put out there in terms of interviews and other information, particularly during the COVID crisis. And we have so much evidence that we presented to the courts, and we have four federal judges already, the district court judge and a three-judge unanimous panel at the Fifth Circuit who upheld this injunction against the government. I think we’re going to get a favorable ruling at the Supreme Court, so I’m really, I’m really excited to be having this conversation.
I think this you know, it’s not just me that’s saying this, but other court observers are saying this is the most important free speech case of the last generation. It’s the first case of its kind that deals with the social media environment and the sort of massive scope of censorship that can happen when the government starts pressuring social media companies, not just to take down individual accounts or to tag individual accounts like the one that you just saw of me on YouTube, but actually to use their algorithms to manipulate the flow of information online. This is how you get literally hundreds of thousands of Americans being censored tens of millions of times, as we’re arguing in this case. So, the scope and the reach of this censorship apparatus is really unprecedented. And as the district court judge said when he issued the injunction back on July 4, he said, if what plaintiffs allege is true, and by issuing the injunction, he indicated it looks like it’s probably true. This is the worst free speech violation in United States history…
…Just in terms of a little background on me for your listeners, a very long story short, I was, for 16 years, professor in the school of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine, where I also directed the medical ethics program at UCI Health. I was at the UC office of the president, basically helping all of the UC campuses devise their COVID policies up until the vaccine mandate policy was issued by the office of the president.
It seemed very strange to me that there was going to be no public discussion and no even behind-the-scenes sort of private discussion at the university before the university decided to promulgate this policy and to try to get a conversation going. This was back. It would have been late 2021. I published a piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that university vaccine mandates were unethical because they violated the principle of informed consent, which was enshrined in the Nuremberg code following World War II in response to the atrocities of the nazi doctors. And it was instantiated in the common rule, the federal law, basically governing all human subjects research. The federal government had to do some fancy footwork, basically to sort of get around that with the emergency use authorization of these products. And I was disturbed because this is a basic principle that I taught to all the medical students in their required ethics course. The lecture number two, the principle of informed consent, the sort of bedrock of 20th century medical ethics, was being abandoned and thrown overboard. And I just didn’t understand how people could think this was justified even under a sort of emergency situation.
So I published that piece. That piece fell like a lead balloon at the university, failed to get a conversation going, and was projecting ahead to when I was going to teach that ethics course in a couple of months. And I was really troubled because after I went public with my opinion on the policy, the university basically finalized the policy a couple of weeks after that article came out. And then people started reaching out to me because students were losing their scholarships, they were getting kicked out of school. Nurses that I had worked with on the front lines every day during the COVID pandemic had been there for decades, were getting fired. And I just thought, this is so wrong, and it’s just very unjust. And so I made the sort of fateful decision – basically came to the point where I said, I can’t credibly get up in front of these students and talk about these principles and talk about moral courage, talk about doing the right thing under pressure. If I don’t actually try to do something, not only to speak out against the policy and enter my opinion in the public square, but actually try to change the policy.
So I decided to file a lawsuit in federal court challenging the policy on constitutional grounds, on 14th Amendment equal protection grounds. And, Jim, if you want to go sideways very quickly with your employer, one really foolproof way to do that is to sue them in federal court.
Oh, it didn’t take University of California long to respond to that by basically running me through the paces of putting me on what they called investigatory leave, followed by unpaid suspension a month later, followed by termination.
And so I ended up losing my job at the university. The censorship piece came in basically a week or two after I filed the lawsuit. There was not a lot of media attention around the lawsuit. There was quite a bit of media attention when I was fired. You know – university fires director of ethics for challenging the ethics of their vaccine policy was kind of a headline grabber.
Dr. Kheriaty then describes how a female reporter was fired for simply talking to him and posting the video online!
Dr. Kheriaty: My ideas, which seemed to me to be basic bread-and-butter medical ethics, had never before occasioned controversy. I had been teaching this to medical students for years and years without any controversy. And then I go on a public platform and sort of voice these basic ethical concerns about this novel policy. And, not only do I get fired as a result of holding that position, but the first person who publicly talks to me loses her job. I felt, like, really toxic, very strange. Am I that dangerous? Are my ideas that dangerous, that people who talk to me are at risk of actually losing their jobs? So it was surreal. And strange. And a few months after that, I got a call from my friend John Sauer.
Dr. Aaron then told us how he got involved in this case.
John is, as you probably know, has been deeply involved as one of the lawyers in this case. Originally, he was the Solicitor General for Missouri when the case was first filed. And so he was the main litigator on the case that went to court in the district court hearings. And then when the new attorney general in Missouri took over, he was hired by the AG’s office in Louisiana to continue working on Missouri v. Biden. And so before the case got started, John called me. I had known him and worked with him on a couple of previous projects. And he said, hey, you’ve been censored on social media, haven’t you? And I said, yeah. And I gave him a few examples, the Alison Morrow example and a few others. And he said, well, do you know any other doctors and scientists who’ve been censored? And I mentioned Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya, who are now co-plaintiffs with you and I. And he said, because Jim Psaki has been standing at the, you know, podium during her press conferences and bragging about how they are meeting with Twitter and meeting with Facebook and meeting with the other social media companies and telling them what, quote, unquote, disinformation or misinformation to remove from their platforms.
And she’s bragging at the results that they’re getting and the responses that they’re getting. And, hey, the federal government cannot do that. That’s unconstitutional. The federal government cannot, as the First Amendment says, cannot abridge the freedom of speech. And so we’re thinking about filing a lawsuit here in Missouri. And would you be interested in being a plaintiff. I said… Well, I sued my employer. I sued my governor. I might as well; why not bring it on? And so that was sort of the origins of my involvement in Missouri v. Biden.
This was very interesting… Dr. Kheeriaty described how the US and the West could be on the road to totalitarianism.
Dr. Kheriaty: One of my favorite philosophers. Political theorist named Eric Voegelin studied all the totalitarian systems in the 20th century, whether it was soviet communism or Nazism or italian fascism. And he said the common feature of all of these regimes is not concentration camps, barbed wire fences. It’s not men in jack boots. It’s not secret police. It’s not even mass surveillance. As horrifying as all those things are, he said, the common feature of all totalitarian systems is the prohibition of questions.
The regime monopolizes what counts as knowledge, what counts as rationality, what counts as within the pale of reasonable conversation and public discourse. And if you raise your hand and ask any inconvenient questions, like, are vaccine mandates really necessary for everyone? Do they actually achieve their public health purpose? What empirical evidence do we have that would justify the removal of this basic civil liberty? If you ask any inconvenient questions like that, the regime doesn’t sit down and have a reasonable discussion with you about it. They don’t debate you. They just say you’re infected by bourgeois consciousness if they’re a Marxist. You’re infected by Jew consciousness, if they’re a Nazi. You don’t understand sort of the reigning ideology, and therefore, by definition, you’re irrational. And we could just set you outside the realm of polite society and public opinion that’s allowed to be voiced. And if you still don’t shut up, we’ll just steamroll you.
And the greatest bulwark against tyranny, probably, that the world has ever known in a legal or constitutional sense, has been the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, the free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly or association, which was also a bridge during the pandemic lockdowns. And of course, the free press. Right? Which is your realm, right? Seeing so many what I thought were credible journalists or credible journalistic institutions basically abandon their post during the pandemic and embrace a regime of censorship and propaganda was another really disturbing aspect of what we saw sort of explode on the scene starting in 2020. So that’s a long winded answer. No, that’s basically my story and how I landed in this case and why I think it’s so important.
Please watch this entire interview with Dr. Kheriaty. This man has such a gift of seeing and explaining the serious challenges facing this nation:
The post Meet the MO v. Biden Plaintiffs- Celebrated Psychiatrist Aaron Kheriaty Challenged the University of California Irvine’s Vaccine Mandate, Then They Fired Him – Listen to Dr. Kheriaty Descibe the Current Totalitarian Threat Facing This Nation appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.