Time for Democrats' Censorship Machine to Pay
Missouri v. Biden ended with a historic settlement. But the people who built the censorship regime that silenced Americans and threatened our Republic should not walk away unscathed.
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by Rod D. Martin
March 31, 2026
The Biden administration built something in America that should never exist in a free country: a government-backed censorship machine.
Federal officials leaned on Big Tech to suppress lawful speech on COVID, vaccines, election integrity, even the Hunter Biden laptop. They did it openly, arrogantly, and at scale. They wrapped it in the language of “misinformation,” as they always do. They said they were protecting “Our Democracy” while they were actively strangling it.
Democracy is impossible apart from the free exchange of ideas, even (and especially) ideas we disagree with. If government can determine the boundaries of debate, or worse, decide what is and isn’t true, it will always decide in favor of itself. Always.
That’s what the Democrats tried to do, and partially achieved.
And now, after years of litigation, the federal government has agreed to a settlement in Missouri v. Biden that bars key agencies from threatening or coercing social media companies to suppress protected speech. The Surgeon General’s office, the CDC, and CISA are now under a 10-year consent decree.
That is a major victory. It is also an indictment.
The government of the United States has now accepted binding limits on its ability to pressure social-media platforms into silencing Americans. The Justice Department says the settlement implements President Trump’s executive order on restoring free speech and ending federal censorship. Missouri and Louisiana’s lawyers call the result historic. Eric Schmitt, who launched the case as Missouri’s attorney general, calls it “the first real, operational restraint on the federal censorship machine.”
This was not some harmless bureaucratic misunderstanding. It was an abuse of power at the heart of the constitutional order.
The First Amendment is not a suggestion. It cannot be suspended because some would-be tyrants or panicked public-health grandees decide the peasants are saying too many incorrect things online. Unlike Canada or the UK (where Keir Starmer’s Socialist government has arrested ten times more people for free speech “violations” as Putin’s Russia), our federal government is forbidden from abridging speech. Period.
Nor does that government get to outsource censorship to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or anyone else and then pretend its hands are clean. If the state cannot lawfully silence you directly, it cannot lawfully do so through a corporate cutout.
And that is exactly what the Biden Democrats did. Judge Terry Doughty described the evidence in the case as an “almost dystopian scenario” and likened the federal role to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill says the conduct was “Orwellian in nature from the beginning.” She is right. The government pressured private platforms to erase disfavored viewpoints while calling the whole operation “public safety.”
The targets were not random. They were the issues most dangerous to Deep State power and Democrats’ electoral chances.
COVID policy. Vaccine dissent. Election security. That Hunter Biden laptop.
The last one matters enormously, because it strips away every excuse. The laptop story was true. Indeed, the FBI knew it was true because they’d had the laptop for nearly a year when the story broke! Yet federal officials had primed platforms to expect a Russian “hack and leak” operation, and when the New York Post published a story deeply damaging to Joe Biden weeks before the 2020 election, the platforms shut it down, even blocking the New York Post itself (much as they later deplatformed the sitting President of the United States).
This is why “mistakes were made” will not do.
As it had in 2016, the Deep State used its immense power to sway the outcome of a presidential election. In 2020, they succeeded. Then the new (and illegitimate) Biden administration tried to control what Americans were allowed to say, what they were allowed to hear, and thus what they were allowed to think, from elections to public health to the transgender agenda to the legitimacy of the regime itself.
As O’Brien tells us in 1984, 2 + 2 = whatever the Party tells you. Xi Jinping would heartily approve.
The Supreme Court, to its shame, refused to decide the merits when the case arrived there as Murthy v. Missouri, holding that the plaintiffs had not shown standing. The justices ducked a generational free-speech question precisely when the country needed clarity. The result was that the censorship apparatus was not constitutionally disarmed by the Court. It had to be checked later, politically and through settlement, by a different administration.
Even now, the settlement is significant but incomplete.
It protects the plaintiffs and limits the covered agencies for ten years. It still allows government officials to communicate with platforms, so long as they do not again cross the line into threats or coercion. Yet who will enforce this, or even know? The censorship machine has hereby been bloodied, but not permanently destroyed. That is why celebration alone is not enough.
What should happen next?
First, there must be full exposure. Every email. Every meeting note. Every demand sent from every federal office that pressured platforms to suppress lawful speech. The American people deserve a complete map of the censorship regime: who built it, who ran it, who justified it, who lied about it, and who benefited politically from it.
Second, there should be institutional penalties. Agencies that participated in this conduct should face aggressive oversight, appropriations restrictions, and statutory barriers making future transgressions far more difficult. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in particular became a key organ of the domestic speech police. It doesn’t need better PR. It needs a smaller budget and a tighter leash.
Third, there should be civil consequences for the people harmed. Call it reparations (as my friend Ben Weingarten does at The Federalist), or anything else that fits: damages, compensation, restitution. If Americans lost accounts, revenue, reach, employment, or reputation because federal officials unlawfully pressured platforms to suppress them, why should those victims alone bear the cost? Why should the people who were silenced pay the bill for the people who did the silencing?
The Left loves reparations when it can weaponize grievance in service of its own power. Fine. Here is a category of victim with a clean causal chain and recent, documentable injury: Americans censored by their own government in violation of the First Amendment. Let’s start there.
Fourth, Congress should codify what this settlement begins. No federal official should be allowed, directly or indirectly, to coerce a platform into suppressing protected speech. No wink-and-nod threats. No heavy-handed regulatory intimidation. No backchannel “recommendations” paired with antitrust menaces or public smears. Congress must create a cause of action with real teeth, fee shifting, and, where appropriate, personal accountability. Make censorship expensive again.
Fifth, the press corps and platforms that enabled and enacted all of this should be humiliated, repeatedly and without mercy.
For years, the Enemedia mocked concerns about censorship as paranoid fantasy. Then legal discovery happened. Then congressional investigations happened. Then a federal judge described a dystopian record. Then the government itself agreed to concrete restraints. The same people who spent years policing “disinformation” and “misinformation” turned out to be its chief purveyors. They were not watchdogs against censorship. They were its praetorian guard.
And yes, this goes straight to Biden himself, or at least his handlers and his autopen.
Joe Biden ran as a restorer of “norms.” In reality, his administration didn’t merely tolerate censorship: it operationalized it. Like their Socialist brethren from Britain to Brussels to Beijing, Biden’s people treated inconvenient facts as public-health threats, dissent as extremism, and criticism as a menace to be suppressed by compliant monopolies.
Biden should not be remembered merely as weak, corrupt, senile or incompetent, though he was undoubtedly all four. He should be remembered as the president under whom the federal government most brazenly attempted to fuse state pressure, corporate power, and narrative control into a functioning American censorship regime on the Communist Chinese model.
That is Biden’s legacy. His party has not repented. It’s doubled down.
The Trump administration’s settlement did not solve the entire problem. But it did what the Supreme Court would not do: it imposed a real operational restraint on the censors. The Justice Department explicitly tied the settlements to Trump’s executive order acknowledging that the previous administration had trampled free-speech rights and exerted unlawful coercive pressure on private parties.
But if conservatives stop at much-deserved applause, they will repeat one of their oldest mistakes. We win an argument, expose a scandal, and then we move on while the other side regroups, relabels, and returns under a new banner. “Misinformation” becomes “trust and safety.” “Content moderation” becomes “platform health.” The euphemisms change. The appetite for coercion and control does not.
The Democrat regime must be remembered — which is to say, we must make sure that it is remembered — as a constitutional warning: this is what the American Left does when it holds power.
They censor. Then they lie about the censorship. Then they call their opponents threats to democracy. Then they cancel them at best, imprison them at worst.
Enough.
Missouri v. Biden is an important victory, but it is not the end. It is the opening breach. The wall still stands. The machinery still exists. The habits of censorship are still deeply embedded in the Deep State, the media, the academy, and the political class that built this system in the first place.
What Democrats attempted was not merely an attack on speech, though it was that. It was an attack on self-government. A free people cannot govern themselves if they are forbidden to speak freely, forbidden to hear dissent, and forbidden to challenge lies imposed by those in power.
The censorship machine must be exposed in full. Its victims must be made whole. Its perpetrators must be named. And the system that made it possible must be broken before it is used again.
That deserves more than just a settlement.
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"The First Amendment is not a suggestion. It cannot be suspended because some would-be tyrants or panicked public-health grandees decide the peasants are saying too many incorrect things online."
How many times have we seen School Board meetings shut down, a speaker arrested, a mic turned off, for reading from a book being pushed of Grade Preschooler's?
narrative über alles!