A preliminary injunction issued today by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is barred from censoring Americans in an explosive new development in Missouri v. Biden.
The CISA, described as the “nerve center” of federal government censorship, is responsible for censoring the American public, facilitating collusion between the feds and social media companies, and interfering in our elections. Now, CISA, along with the Surgeon General, White House, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), cannot communicate with social media companies for the purpose of policing speech, according to Federalist Contributor and Editor at Large of Real Clear Investigations Benjamin Weingarten. The court’s original opinion, which addressed the White House, FBI, CDC, and Surgeon General, did not include CISA.
The court stated that CISA “shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech,” according to an excerpt provided by Weingarten.
In their original filing, the Missouri v. Biden defendants revealed that CISA both directly and indirectly censored Americans. The agency directly forwarded social media posts to various platforms seeking for them to be censored and facilitated meetings between Big Tech companies and national security and law enforcement agencies to address “mis-, dis-, and mal-information” ahead of the 2020 election. The Hunter Biden laptop story, for instance, was mass-censored and labeled a foreign “hack-and-leak” operation thanks to warnings from CISA.
CISA also funded and collaborated with nongovernmental censorship organizations to outsource censorship and bypass the First Amendment. CISA helped conceive and create the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a private “anti-disinformation” organization that lobbied tech companies to establish oppressive content moderation policies. EIP also flagged offending content and flagged “entire narratives” for social media platforms to address.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of CISA’s censorship is that it admits to censoring the truth while shamelessly expressing a desire to control the minds of Americans. Members of CISA have taken it upon themselves to address “malinformation,” defined by the agency as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” Essentially, CISA suppresses information that it knows is true in order to maintain preferred government narratives.
Current CISA Director Jen Easterly justifies censoring the truth because she believes it is CISA’s job to secure “cognitive infrastructure,” meaning our minds. Easterly claims that Americans’ “cognitive infrastructure” is “the most critical infrastructure” for CISA to “protect,” but what she really means is that the public’s minds are critical to control.
Missouri v. Biden has demonstrated that CISA does not respect the First Amendment and is an immediate threat to freedom in America. The next step is for the agency to be dramatically defunded or, better yet, dismantled. Last week, however, House Democrats and 109 House Republicans voted against an amendment that would strip CISA of 25 percent of its funding.
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
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