Posted on 09/06/2025 2:56:16 PM PDT by Jacquerie
Director of the National Institutes of Health Jay Bhattacharya yesterday claimed that the First Amendment is a “dead letter”.
Speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington DC, the former Stanford professor warned that America’s constitutional protections for free expression dissolved during the Covid pandemic and remain unenforceable even today. “The First Amendment still doesn’t apply in practice,” he said. “Free speech rights exist right now only because the administration has chosen to allow them, not because the First Amendment is protecting us.”
Bhattacharya, best known for co-authoring the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, said his own experience during the pandemic showed how dissenting views on Covid-19 policy were systematically suppressed through government pressure on social media companies. “Why would I be put on a blacklist by Twitter?” he asked. “Why would a private company, whose money is made by people communicating with each other, decide to put me on a blacklist? It turns out the answer is the government forced them to do it.”
This censorship debate peaked during Covid in 2021. By then, White House officials mobilised federal agencies to pressure platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to block dissenting opinions. The coercion became the centrepiece of the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, in which Bhattacharya and other censored commentators were plaintiffs.
Yet when the case reached the Supreme Court, justices dismissed it on standing grounds, ruling there was no evidence Bhattacharya himself had been directly targeted by government orders. That reasoning, he argued, creates a loophole: so long as officials pressure companies to suppress categories of ideas rather than named individuals, victims cannot sue. “The First Amendment, in that sense, is unenforceable,” he said.
“Right now, free speech in America depends on who is in power,” he told the audience. “That’s a perilous place to be.”
(Excerpt) Read more at unherd.com ...
Indeed.
Due to Roberts’ shiftiness—”no standing????”
maybe they should go class action
The court's ruling is absurd.
Yeah, I’m gonna have to re-examine the ruling, because what you said seems logical.
bump
Clearly our rights under the First Amendment were usurped duringCOVID especially by power mad state Governors. In Minnesota not only businesses and schools were shut down, but so were churches. Catholic and Lutheran leaders were incensed and threatened legal action against Tampon Tim Walz until he relented. Walz’s COVID storm troopers even wanted to ban singing in church once they were opened. How quickly our compliance to the lie of “two weeks to flatten the curve” became a dictatorial power grab leaving many of us living in a totalitarian state
Agree. Not enough people resisted and flouted the restrictions.
I was especially disappointed with church leaders; far too few told the gov’t to shove off.
Perhaps on the bright side we won’t be so easily fooled again by Big Pharma and HHS.
Unheard has an interesting history.
None of which I was able to learn for its website.
Nuff said to my mind.
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