Hey, Joe, don't talk to Elon or Mark; Biden, social media, BlueAnon

This is my quick take on District Judge Terry Doughty telling President Joe Biden and top staff last week to not talk to social media companies, and includes Chris Lehmann's column at The Nation.

(Update: Sept. 14: Alito, for SCOTUS, has put a temporary stay on the ruling.)

To me, this is definitely a non-twosider issue. Sadly, The Nation, which is ultimately twosider itself as a duopoly-based opinion mag on elections issues, tries to frame it that way, even though there's plenty of information to the contrary.

No, Biden, NIAID's Anthony Fauci, NIH's Francis Collins et al, did not tell Twitter, Facebook etc., on COVID, "don't publish this or we'll come after you," but browbeat? Yes. And, while I didn't blog about it, I did Tweet about what many leftists, and some liberals as well called Orwellian, no Trumpist prompts needed, Biden's "Disinformation Governance Board" within the Department of Homeland Security. Now, that was focused on foreign policy, namely the Russia-Ukraine war, not COVID, but Counterpunch, long before Judge Doughty, called it "Orwellian." Lehmann should have heard about that. If he didn't, that's another indictment of The Nation, as well as him personally. If he did, and disagreed, ditto.

And, given that Fauci was very publicly bashing against claims there was a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, then later lying by definitional reframing in claiming that Peter Daszak et al weren't doing gain of function research there when they actually apparently were, this browbeating is at minimum, one step short of the moral equivalent of censorship, as in actual, First Amendment, government censorship.

Chronologically, and not limited to these links, I talked about the gain-of-function bullshit here, here, here, here (with Fauci making conspiracy theory dogwhistles), here (with NIH finally admitting that WIV had been doing just that), and here. He doesn't tell you, unlike Zeynep Tufekci saying so early on, that most the signatories of that infamous Lancet letter repudiated it by the middle of 2021. I talked about the lab-leak possibility in depth here (my blogging on Pro Publica's big piece last year), a follow-up here about the refuted bashing of Pro Publica's reporting. And, I noted that Your Local Epidemiologist actually moved her personal needle on the idea. (I also, apropos Lehmann, talked about the BlueMAGA gaslighting "valiant" work of Dr. Peter Hotez here, including his own lies about both gain-of-function and the lab leak.) And, speaking of Tufekci, she called out such tribalism long ago, as discussed here.

Lehmann ignores all of this. He also ignores that Warmonger Joe had initially planned a "ministry of disinformation," albeit one that might be focusing on neocon foreign policy concerns rather than COVID.

That said, Doughty is wrong, with MAGAts-sized hyperbole, that this is the most massive attack on the First Amendment in government history. That would either be the John Adams administration or the Woodrow Wilson administration.

And so, Lehmann might indeed be right that, whether or not this was Doughty's intent, this serves to "platform" the Twitter Files.

But, it's irresponsible to try to pretend this ruling happened in a #BlueAnon vacuum, because it didn't. This may have been a bad ruling but it was

And, this is about reason No. 934 why, even at a buck a week or whatever digitally, I won't subscribe to The Nation.

For more on this issue, see the frequently updated and insightful thoughts of Clinton National Security Council staffer Jaime Metzl.