What’s wrong with protecting disinformation by blocking a bunch of Biden administration agencies and officials from communicating with social media companies about it?

The answer to that question is found right in the 155-page memo issued last week by federal judge Terry A. Doughty, along with his preliminary injunction.

Doughty’s ruling was in response to a lawsuit brought by Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s appointed attorney general, Andrew Bailey, and Bailey’s Louisiana counterpart, Daniel Cameron.

The suit accuses President Joe Biden and a long list of others of violating the First Amendment’s free speech protections.

Doughty, a Donald Trump appointee in Louisiana whose oeuvre also includes blocking the vaccine mandate for health care workers, says the case “arguably involves the most massive attack against Free Speech in United States’ history.”

His response is arguably a footlong baloney sub of spicy hyperbole and internal contradictions.

As his memo notes again and again, government attempts to fight disinformation about COVID-19 did begin under Trump. (Of course they did, just as they should have, and would have under any president, who after all has a responsibility to try and protect the public during a pandemic.)

Yet Doughty also says again and again that what he sees as government censorship “almost exclusively targeted conservative speech” and so amounts to “viewpoint discrimination.”

Plaintiffs include Jim Hoft of St. Louis, who owns and runs the conspiracy theory website Gateway Pundit. His fake scoops have included debunked theories about everything from the Parkland school shooting to Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul supposedly being attacked by his gay lover.

First, there’s nothing “conservative” about spreading bum information about public health, or about election fraud, either, even if anti-vax and antidemocratic views have now been adopted by many on the right.

Doughty himself notes that one of those supposedly targeted, more than two years ago, was Robert Kennedy, Jr., longtime anti-vax wackadoodle and now Democratic presidential candidate, who despite his support from Steve Bannon and others who hope he’ll help get Trump reelected cannot fairly be described as conservative.

That the plaintiffs are all of the far right could mean that Doughty is correct about viewpoint discrimination, but it could also mean that in this moment, the dangerous anti-vax views that started on the left have migrated to and exploded on the right. Thanks largely to Trump, that’s where antidemocratic views have blown up, too.

Surely government officials are supposed to use their bully pulpits to take on any viewpoint that is getting people killed, yet Doughty notes that in a deposition, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy’s senior adviser Eric Waldo “admitted that Murthy used his ‘bully pulpit’ to talk about health misinformation and to put pressure on social media platforms.”

Is that not the job of a surgeon general? And if it isn’t, what is?

Because the Republican AGs aren’t suing Trump, the judge says that “whether the previous Administration” did the same thing “is not an issue before this Court, and would not be a defense to Defendants even if it were true.”

It would, however, seem to refute what he’s saying about viewpoint discrimination.

The Kansas City Star