These paragraphs are copied directly from the State of Missouri’s official AG Webpage. That means I am paying for this shit.
- Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced today that the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana granted his motion to block top officials in the federal government from continuing to violate the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans.
Judge shopping in Louisiana?
- At least 22 times, the White House engaged in “unrelenting pressure” against tech companies. “White House Defendants engaged in coercion to induce social-media companies to suppress free speech.” “The White House Defendants made it very clear to social-media companies what they wanted suppressed and what they wanted amplified. Faced with unrelenting pressure from the most powerful office in the world, the social-media companies apparently complied.”
Could this have anything to do with wanting the media companies to stop outright lies the Trump and the Republicans?
- “[T]he Hunter Biden laptop story was real, and not mere Russian disinformation,” and the “FBI’s failure to alert social-media companies” to this fact “is particularly troubling” after the FBI had falsely suggested to social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop story was fake.
I think we all know now that this is exactly Russian disinformation.
- “Facebook noted that in response to White House demands, it was censoring, removing, and reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines ‘that does not contain actionable misinformation.’”
- Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki issued a “threat of ‘legal consequences’” to social media companies “if they do not censor misinformation more aggressively.”
Like the information below from an article in Vanity Fair:
- With inoculation rates dropping nationwide and the highly contagious Delta variant driving new infections in nearly every state, the White House faces increased urgency to combat a right-wing misinformation war on COVID-19 vaccines without playing into the hand of Republicans politicizing the vaccination effort. The Biden administration is planning to take a harder line against vaccine-related misinformation propagated by GOP officials and on social media platforms alike, CNN reports, a stance some administration officials have already started to take. “Health misinformation is a serious threat to public health,” U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said in an advisory Thursday, calling it “a moral and civic imperative” for tech companies and others to fight such falsehoods.
Attempting to educate people against such dangerous misinformation is a violation of free speech according to the Missouri AG.
- The “motivation” of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other defendants was specifically “a ‘take down’ of protected free speech.”
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt plans to file another lawsuit against the federal government this week, this time to block a forthcoming federal rule covering COVID-19 vaccines for private employers.
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued an emergency temporary standard requiring companies with 100 employees or more to adopt a policy that employees are fully vaccinated by Jan. 4 or undergo weekly testing. Employers are also required to give workers paid time off to get vaccinated and recover from its side effects, while also requiring unvaccinated workers to wear masks.
Schmitt will argue that the federal government lacks the authority to require private businesses to make employees get vaccinations. Schmitt said the lawsuit will be filed on Friday to coincide with the OSHA standard’s official publication in the Federal Register.
“Missouri will not roll over, we will not back down — we will file suit imminently,” Schmitt said.
The same week, Schmitt announced Missouri would join a lawsuit against the Biden administration that would seek to reinstate a federal rule imposed during the Trump administration regarding abortions. The Biden administration had peeled back a 2019 rule that banned federally funded family planning clinics from referring patients for abortions. It also required family planning clinics receiving federal funds to remain financially and physically separate from abortion providers.
The week before that, Schmitt and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced they would sue the Biden administration to compel it to resume funding for the construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The wall was a priority of President Trump and one the former president initially said Mexico would pay to construct.
In addition to litigation and protestations against the federal government, Schmitt has sued several Missouri cities, counties and school districts over mask orders aimed at slowing the spread of COVID-19.
Well at least those cases were in Missouri /s
Now Senator Eric Schmitt.
The Missouri attorney general, who grew up near the airport and earned a reputation in state government as a courteous, open-minded Republican, now spits rhetorical fire at every opportunity on Fox News, where he often appears to discuss his lawsuits: against China for the COVID-19 outbreak, against schools for mask mandates, against the Biden administration for you name it.
Since announcing in March 2021 that he would seek higher office—a seat in the U.S. Senate—he has posted variations of the word “fight” at least 342 times on his personal Twitter account alone, touting, for example, his fight “against the Democrats who are hell-bent on destroying our country.”
The left is not merely wrong, he now says; they are “obsessed with power and control,” and the stakes could not be higher. “I think that this really is a fight to save America, and I don’t mean that rhetorically,” he said on Glenn Beck’s radio show in August.
All of this from a man whom many Democrats here in town once considered a receptive friend. “I thought he was a more moderate St. Louis Republican out there fighting for the right reasons,” says Democratic strategist Mike Kelley. “To watch him sell his soul to the MAGA [Make America Great Again] crowd has been somewhat sad to watch.” In the op-ed pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Kansas City Star, even in the pleadings filed by opposing counsel in his many lawsuits, the consensus among critics is clear: Schmitt has politicized his office and is just pandering to the base to win more power.