If you read Reason magazine as often as I do—and I read it a lot, because it has lots of excellent articles—you’ve probably noticed a distinct fly in the ointment—the compulsive need of Reason folk to “explain” to you that everything “bad” that Trump does, well, the Democrats did it too—though I don’t remember Barack Obama summoning a mob on January 6, 2017 to bully Joe Biden into declaring that Hillary Clinton “really” won the election, nor do I remember the mob that Barack did not summon sacking the U. S. Capitol, nor do I remember Joe Biden pardoning nearly 1,600 rioters. But, hey, that’s just me.
I write all this as a bit of an overwrought intro to my most specific beef, viz., an article by long-time Reasonette Jacob Sullum titled A Lawsuit Settlement Highlights Trump's Hypocrisy on Government Meddling With Social Media, which accuses the Trump administration as being—wait for it—just as “bad” as the Biden administration when it comes to free speech. Wow!
The “lawsuit settlement” Jake’s headline refers to was entered into by the Trump administration with a variety of plaintiffs1 who claimed, in a case originally known Missouri v. Biden but then ultimately decided by the Supreme Court as Murthy v. Missouri, that, as Jake tells it, “they had suffered from government-inspired restrictions on speech related to the COVID-19 pandemic.” According to Jake,
The plaintiffs complained that government bullying [by the Biden administration] of social media platforms had transformed what were ostensibly private content moderation decisions into censorship by proxy. By pressuring the platforms to suppress disfavored speech, they argued, the Biden administration had sought to achieve results it could not directly mandate’
But here’s the deal: the Trump administration should not have provided a settlement to the plaintiffs because the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision that had three Republican justices joining with the three Democratic justices, concluded that the plaintiffs had no “standing” to sue because they hadn’t shown that they had suffered any injury at the hands of the federal government! And thus were “entitled” to bupkis! And the majority opinion for the Court was written by Trump-appointed Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was joined by Trump-appointed Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Bush-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts! The “settlement” the Trump administration gave to the plaintiffs, “promising” that the federal government would not do in the future what it hadn’t done in the past, which Jake praises, was kabuki kayfabe pretense and show, utterly unnecessary and a complete waste of government time and money, something that Reasonettes like Jake supposedly detest!
In what I would call “suspiciously Trump-friendly” opinions, both the district court that first heard the case and the fifth circuit court of appeals found for a number of plaintiffs concluding that platforms like Twitter (the old Twitter) and Facebook/Meta succumbed to government pressure and did censor their users in keeping with the “Biden line”. “But,” Jake tells us, “the Supreme Court never resolved the central question in the case, instead ruling in Murthy v. Missouri the following year that the plaintiffs had failed to ‘demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury’ as a result of the government's actions.”
Well, that’s “true”, but it omits the kicker: the plaintiffs failed to do so because they also failed to demonstrate that they had suffered an injury from government action in the past! And thus were entitled to bupkis! Which Jake would have known if he had bothered to read Amy’s excellent opinion!
In her dense, 29-page opinion, Barrett goes through all of the plaintiffs’ claims that the Twitter, Facebook, et al. censored themselves due to administration pressure and picks each and every one apart, concluding over and over again that the platforms were acting on the basis of internal policies adopted before the supposed “government pressure”. The “causal link” is lacking— “clearly lacking”, one might say, to the extent that Amy, in her footnote 4, takes a rather sour crack at the lower courts’ opinions, remarking that “The Fifth Circuit relied on the District Court’s factual findings, many of which unfortunately appear to be clearly erroneous.” Mean! Since the plaintiffs haven’t proved that the “social media” censored themselves in response to government pressure in the past, there’s no reason to believe this will happen in the future, and thus no reason for the Court to offer relief. And certainly no reason for the federal government to “promise”, in an elaborate consent decree, not to do again something they had never done in the first place!
Okay, but what about information that came out too late to be included in the Murthy case? Writes Jake
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg would later acknowledge that Facebook had caved to official pressure. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee in 2024. “We're ready to push back if something like this happens again.” Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube, also eventually confirmed that the Biden administration had pressed it to remove content that did not violate the company's rules.
First of all, in the language that Jake quotes, both Mark and Alphabet say they were “pressured”, but they don’t say that they succumbed to that pressure. That’s Jake’s language. He’s putting words in their mouths. But what about Zuckerberg’s August 24, 2024 letter to House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, in which, Jake claims, Mark repeatedly said that the government pressured Facebook/Meta to censor its content? Well, despite Jake’s “summary”, Mark carefully avoided saying that Meta acted in response to government pressure. “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including Covid-19 changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this [government] pressure.” In other words, the feds didn’t make us do it. Mark’s clearly telling Jordan some of what he wants to hear—that if Meta had to do it over again, they would have done it differently, and that they would have pushed back against government pressure more strongly. What he doesn’t tell Jordan is “Yes, we caved”. But he didn’t need to. Because “the man” hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
The same, sad to say, can be said of Jake and just about all the rest of the Reason crew, who cite the supposed “lessons” of Murthy v. Missouri and other supposed enormities over and over again to demonstrate the wickedness of the Biden regime, and the Obama regime, and the Clinton regime, all the way back to the original Great Satans,2 Woodrow Wilson and FDR, even though the real lesson of Murthy is that the lower courts’ “decisions” were neo-Trumpian crap and none of the other supposed “enormities” were all that enormous, at least in comparison to Jan. 6, 2021 (and that $400 million freebie 747 ain’t nothin’ to sneeze at neither).
It’s a bit of a mystery why the Reason folks are so “misguided” when it comes to Trump. Virtually every day, Reason runs sharp, accurate takedowns of the Trump administration’s misdeeds, but they furiously refuse to face the “real” issue. The Trump administration is not a case of “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Trump himself and his entire administration are corrupt as no presidency in history has ever been corrupt and he has corrupted the entire Republican establishment as well, with the partial exception of, yes, the Supreme Court, which does stand up to him on occasion, at least on alternate Wednesdays when the moon is full, despite also handing down the two very worst Supreme Court decisions in American history, Trump v. United States and Trump v. Anderson, trashing the U. S. Constitution in order to allow our Seditionist in Chief to get a chance to return to the White House despite blatantly attempting to overturn our system of government and remain in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election.3
The “reason”, I think, that so many Reasonettes insist on pretending not to notice Trump’s corruption is that they kind of like Trump. Despite all their palaver about the “rule of law”—by which they really mean “rule of property”—a great many libertarians have a hankering for anarchy, and Trump is pretty much like Ayn Rand’s hero John Galt if he had the mob behind him instead of against him. They’re even both great architects!
Afterwords
Over at “MS Now”, former Reasonette Anthony L. Fisher offers a more substantial take on the decline of, well, “Reason”, as does former Reasonette Shikha Dalmia at the Dispatch.
1. For some reason, Jake implies the settlement only involved two of the plaintiffs, Jill Hines and Aaron Kheriaty, but he’s wrong.
2. Word tells me that “Satans” is a misspelling, presumably on the grounds that there is, and can be, only one Satan. Who knew the Ruler of the Underworld was so fussy about precedence?
3. Sadly, Trump would be impossible except for the fact that a good 40% of the American people want a dictator, one who will smash their enemies—chiefly foreigners and lazy black people (and sometimes Jews)—without any regard for “the law”.
