Missouri and its co-plaintiffs suing the Biden administration are “erecting a wall of separation between tech and state to protect Americans’ rights to free speech on Big Tech social media platforms,” state Attorney General Andrew Bailey says. 

“The first brick of that wall was laid on July 4th, when the court issued its order. We’re going to continue to build that wall and hold the wrongdoers accountable,” Bailey said Thursday in an exclusive interview with The Heartlander.

Plaintiffs Missouri and Louisiana have “uncovered the worst First Amendment violations in this nation’s history,” Bailey argues.

His comment echoes Tuesday’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, who likewise wrote in an order that, “If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

“This is enormous,” Bailey said of the judge’s preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the feds from policing social media content. “It’s a huge win for the constitutional rights of the people of the state of Missouri and anyone anywhere in the United States that enjoys free speech and appreciates the right to free, fair and open debate, free of government censorship.”

The Biden administration has appealed the injunction, the validity of which will now be argued before a three-judge panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in the coming three to six months.

Bailey told KCMO radio host Pete Mundo on Wednesday that Missouri and and the other plaintiffs in the case have emails from top White House officials in the spring of 2021 demanding that specific social media posts be taken down.

In addition, he said, a U.S. Department of Justice official in San Francisco met with Big Tech social media companies in the months before the 2020 election, planting the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop story might be Russian disinformation.

Moreover, Bailey said, the very night before the New York Post broke the laptop story, the Biden administration “had secret communications with Big Tech,” after which Twitter suspended the news organization’s entire account.

“They were more than happy to de-platform the New York Post and silence that information,” Bailey told Mundo, “despite the fact that the Department of Justice knew of the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop because they were in possession of the laptop for up to a year leading up to the elections.”

In his 155-page ruling, the judge quoted Missourian and former President Harry Truman to underscore the gravity of the case and the government’s alleged insidious actions.

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear,” Truman once warned.

It’s a prophetic message that should resonate throughout the land, Bailey tells The Heartlander.

“We used to live in a country where both sides of the political spectrum respected the right to free, fair, and open debate. It wasn’t until President Biden took over that he began fertilizing this seed of suppression, of censorship, of stifling free, fair and open debate. And so, we’ve entered a dangerous world.”

Indeed, the judge compared the Biden censorship enterprise to George Orwell’s haunting novel 1984, in which “Big Brother” government policed and punished thought and speech.

“When the court is using phrases like this, it’s because the court is alarmed that our fundamental freedoms are at risk if one side is allowed to suppress the core political speech of the other side of the political spectrum,” Bailey noted.

Since the states of Missouri and Louisiana are acting as a de facto special counsel investigating this scandal, they’re arguably acting on behalf of the entire country.

Judging from major media coverage – which seems alarmed at the judge’s ruling – the country may not fully appreciate the historic intervention the two states are providing in the name of free speech.

The New York Times, for instance, lamented that “federal agencies and the tech giants have long worked together to take action against illegal or harmful material” – insinuating that the lawsuit is getting in the way of the government’s noble endeavor of policing and silencing speech.

Meanwhile, the Times would apparently be content to leave it up to the federal government to decide what content is “harmful” – notwithstanding the fact that much of the speech that government-Big Tech collusion silenced was, in retrospect, legitimate commentary that held true.

“You would think that the rest of the country would be appreciative,” Bailey says. “And certainly we’ve received a lot of support from individuals who believe in the First Amendment. But it’s disappointing when you see national legacy media outlets like the New York Times bemoaning the ruling as somehow detrimental to our democratic republic. 

“I wonder if there’d be as much wailing and gnashing of the teeth (about the court injunction) if they were the ones that were suppressed or censored.”

Bailey says the Biden administration – having been nabbed working with Big Tech to censor posts challenging the COVID masks, lockdowns, and origin, as well as the Hunter Biden laptop – has merely begun working through another channel: the Election Integrity Project.

Bailey called it “a quasi-public entity that we believe is being used as a third party for the outsourcing of some of the censorship enterprise. 

“In other words, there were individuals, government officials, that worked at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) – the court has identified CISA as the nerve center of the vast censorship enterprise – and once those individuals realized that their behavior and their activities were running afoul of the First Amendment, decided that it was necessary to outsource the censorship to a third party.

“But the government is prohibited from doing indirectly what it would not be allowed to do directly, and so it’s almost an act of consciousness of guilt to set up this third-party Election Integrity program, outsource the censorship to them, and then try to wash their hands of the First Amendment. 

“This signifies the nature of the censorship has expanded well beyond COVID and mask mandates and vaccine hesitancy, and is now involving such issues as election integrity. … That evinces an unrepentant attitude. Not only can they not acknowledge that they had previously suppressed and censored core political speech, but they’re willing to do it again.”

And, as many on the left warn against doing anything to erode the public’s trust in government institutions, Bailey says the Biden administration’s censorship regime does exactly that.

“It’s not only illegal, it’s counterproductive,” he told Mundo. “We cease to trust the government when the government doesn’t let us question what it’s doing.”