Recently, I sat down with my legal team to discuss the impact of Missouri vs. Biden on my current lawsuit against the Biden administration, the CDC, and everyone else.
Take a listen.
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TRANSCRIPT
Randan Steinhauser: [00:00:00] Hello again, and welcome to another weekly case update with Liberty Justice Center. I'm Brandon Steinhauser. Joined this week by two guests. We have Buck Daughty, one of the senior attorneys here with the Liberty Justice Center, as well as one of our plaintiffs at Liberty Justice Center is proud to represent Justin Hart.
This week we're gonna be talking about the ongoing insight of big government collusion as it relates. To censoring free speech on social media. So if you haven't been following Justin Hart's case, we have him here this week to give us an update on the backstory of how he was actually censored himself.
So Justin, thanks for joining us. Why don't you start by telling us what exactly happened to
Justin Hart: you? Well, what a crazy last three years. I never would've anticipated three years ago that I would be in this position filing a lawsuit against the federal government and numerous other entities on behalf of myself and many others who were censored over these last three years [00:01:00] again.
I'm a, I'm a data guy by trade and when my clients all fell out of existence in the beginning of 2020, I took that time I had on my hands. I formed a ragtag group of analysts, experts, moms and dads and activists, and we started a group to counter the information that we saw out there that was really harming our kids and also the data that we knew deep down was wrong.
And when we got into the analysis with credentialed experts from Stanford, From governments like Governor DeSantis in Florida, and otherwise we knew we were onto something. Well fast forward a little bit in time July, 2015, I'm sorry, July 15th, 2021. That was the infamous date that Jen Psaki. And Vivec Murthy, the then Surgeon General, the still Surgeon General had made a press conference in which they said that they were cracking down on misinformation across social media companies for people that didn't tow the [00:02:00] line on the specific narrative that they wanted, including my account.
So previous to those weeks, My account on Facebook was suspended. Shortly after that, my account on Twitter was suspended. And then I got together with the great folks, Bucky, here at the Liberty Justice Center, and we filed that lawsuit. And it's ongoing. But what we're seeing right now is a real new uptick in interest in this case because of other things that are happening around the country.
And so my accounts are back up and running. We like to think that Covid is in the rear view mirror but in truth, The tactics that were used to silence Americans and silence. Just individual citizens like myself are still on the books and the Biden administration and others across the country are still vying to get our accounts basically suppress and taken down if we don't tow the right narrative.
We think that's an infringement on my First Amendment rights and buck. You've been a great ally in this [00:03:00] whole thing. What's, what's the update on this, on this case now?
Buck Dougherty: Yeah. And Justin, you did a great job of explaining to everyone kind of where we are and, and you're exactly right. It all started with that initial press conference by the former press secretary, Jen Psaki, and we filed that lawsuit on your behalf against Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General, as well as President Biden in their official capacities along with Twitter.
And Facebook. And along the way, fortunately, some great things happened that we were able to, to use to bolster your initial lawsuit. One of those being of course Twitter's c e o, Elon Musk, who released a lot of the the information and the communication by, in between Twitter executives and.
Federal government officials once Musk purchased Twitter that was a great boost to our case and we were able to put a lot of that information before the court there in the district court in in, in the Northern District of California. [00:04:00] Another Thing that was great and, and fortuitous for your case is the Missouri v Biden case that's ongoing in Louisiana.
And there was of course, a recent decision by Judge Dowdy in that case where he issued a preliminary injunction against a number of federal officials, inclu, including mur and, and Biden and so forth, and some other executive officials. And basically the, your argument and your lawsuit is very simple.
It's that the federal government. They're not supposed to be intervening and colluding with social media companies. Of course, Facebook and Twitter are also defendants in your lawsuit, and we have those emails. We have, we have the receipts as they like to say, and we were able to use the Missouri v Biden case to put those exhibits before the court and say, Hey, we have this other additional information.
Mr. Hart would like to amend his complaint. Unfortunately the judge in the district court in California [00:05:00] was not as as positive to that information, let's say as Judge Dowdy was in the Missouri, the Biden case. So your case is currently on appeal before the ninth Circuit, but we think all of these rulings that are coming out in Missouri v Biden, in, in the Louisiana case are.
Of course very similar and will be impactful and hopefully will resonate with the ninth circuit. And, and, you know, again, to kind of go into the weeds, so to speak on your case, we, we uncovered evidence where it, it was clear that. Facebook, for example, admitted in emails to the federal government that they had adjusted their policies, their so-called misinformation policies, and that they really weren't the social media's misinformation policies.
They were taking marching orders, as you alluded to from, from Murphy and, and some executive level officials and they were censoring people. There was even a email that. Admitted that the 20 million pieces of content had [00:06:00] been deleted from Facebook's platform. And ironically, that was only about three or four weeks that email to Mur Surgeon General Murphy after your post.
So we thought that was pretty plausible ev evidence to put forth to the court. And, but the court declined to consider that information. So we've moved on to the ninth circuit and we hope to to, to keep fighting for you.
Justin Hart: Yeah, it's a, it's a difficult venue when your court case gets moved up to a, a, a, a a bench like the one in Northern California, which is my hometown.
And justice Brier there, God bless him. Not the Justice Brier we know from scotus, but his brother who's actually one of the better justices as far as actual. Justice goes on the court there, which is saying something. But even he couldn't quite see the light. We hope to convince him otherwise.
Look even my good friend Alex Berenson who has his lawsuits against Twitter and was able to settle that and I think one against the government as well. He d dmd me right before [00:07:00] he got his. Take at the Twitter files, these exposes on what Elon Musk had uncovered in the archives there. He noted, Justin, you are in here.
And what he described was Scott Gotley, the former commissioner of the F D A, who's now on the board of Pfizer, had actually used his contacts at the White House at the time to try to get my account. Are some of my tweets taken down? And so if that isn't evidence enough of these sort of. Collusions that go on behind the scenes.
I don't know what is. Of course, what we just understand today is that the Biden administration and others on behalf of the dozens of. Institutions and individuals that were cited in the Missouri v Biden preliminary injunction have actually appealed the case. So they, they are hell bent on, on keeping us censored and keeping that power to themselves.
And I think that's really what this is about, is even though covid seems to be in our rear view mirror, those same tactics, whether it's face masks for climate change or censorship for any [00:08:00] other topic, are things that we think are worth fighting
Randan Steinhauser: for. Absolutely, and it's such an important reminder to the folks who are watching this that, you know, Justin was not already on some target list of crazy, you know, con conspiracy theorist.
He was the same type of individual as moms and dads all across the country who were simply asking questions and were doing their own research and were independent thinkers. And he got. Red flagged, right? You got put on a list by the government. All of a sudden your free speech rights were, were put on front and center by the government to say no more.
You were censored by collusion between the government and social media, these private companies. So I am so interested, Justin, for you to just share a little bit about what has the response been from other individuals who say, Hey, I kind of noticed that my information was. Being blocked or people weren't seeing my post or I got a menacing email.
Like what has the response been as you've been more forward with telling folks about your experience?
Justin Hart: Well, people were on [00:09:00] fire about this. I think we logged about 60 of my colleagues, both my very personal friends who were part of this fight on the internal group that we had called Rational Ground, and also extended friends that we knew were on the broader, what we used to call.
Team reality, right? The, the folks that were trying to tell it like it was during the Covid pandemic, their accounts were flat out, taken down. They didn't have quite the luxury I did of, of sending a lawsuit across the bow and getting my account reinstated. And so for almost a year, I had several friends.
Who had no venue to share their voice, their opinions or otherwise. My good friend Jay Aria professor up at Stanford and author, one of the co-founders of the Great Barrington Declaration, he was one of the first exposes on the Twitter files and they, when they showed the dashboard that they use internally to track these things at Twitter, he literally had a tiny little tag on there called, Blacklist, they used the term blacklist, right?
So here is [00:10:00] this professor at Stanford who is blacklisted from his account, getting even promoted anywhere. Once he got in, he was actually able to meet one-on-one with Elon Musk. I shared with Jay the, the, the many dozens of accounts that we felt were unfairly taken down within days. Elon had restored those counts.
So that puts a fire under people to know, hey, This is admission by these social media companies that they were doing the will of the government there, and we see kind of mob tactics in the FOIAs that we received. One of the interesting of elements that came back there was Facebook trying to make good with the c d C, with the surgeon general's office.
With the government in general by offering 15 million in free advertising, it almost seemed like protection money that they wanted there because they were taking so much heat over the bully pulpit for their tactics in, in either not acting quick enough to take down accounts or, or [00:11:00] not sharing enough gov information with the government.
Those are scary things when a private company has to placate your government because the government wants to censor its users as a proxy. I, I, I, it still fats my mind, so people are up in arms. I think this has got some legs. The Missouri v Biden case is something that I think we're gonna find a lot of traction on.
The judge there has no gumption. I mean, he, he laid out the receipts one by one for the White House, for the surgeon general, for the cdc, on and on and on. And I think part of our efforts and our FOIAs have demonstrated that. This is something that goes far and wide and hopefully it will will give us some type of recompense, some type of at least validation that, you know, you cannot censor Americans by the hand of the government.
Randan Steinhauser: Absolutely. Well Justin, thanks for working with the Liberty Justice Center and Buck. I'm gonna give you the last word here. If there's someone who's watching this right now that feels like their First Amendment rights are being infringed [00:12:00] upon, whether it is through censorship, by big government or social media, or many of the other types of First Amendment cases that we know, Liberty Justice Center is taking on right now, tell us how they can get in touch with the Liberty Justice team and, and how we can work together.
Buck Dougherty: Yeah. Well thank you Brandon, obviously. Www w liberty justice center.org is the way to reach us. We, you can find us on the website Liberty Justice Center. Going back, actually this is the five year anniversary of its historic win at the Supreme Court on behalf of Mark Janus, which was the first Amendment.
Case and we're very involved in cases like Justin's. We know that social media companies are private companies. We're, we're fine with that. We, we would like for them to act like private companies and for the federal government to stay out. But in, in this particular situation, and in Justin's case, you know, we've seen this this collusion.
We have the receipts and we look forward to, to moving this case forward.
Randan Steinhauser: Excellent. Well, thank you both so much for joining us on this week's [00:13:00] case update with Liberty Justice Center. We'll be back next week with an important update on another case that you're not gonna wanna miss. So thanks Justin.
Thanks Buck. We'll see you guys next
Justin Hart: week. Thanks, Brandon.
Buck Dougherty: Thank you, Brandon.
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