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SCOTUS Chief Roberts Defended Censorship-Industrial Complex
If John Roberts really wants to protect the Supreme Court's independence, he should start by disarming the administrative state.
thefederalist.com
Over the last decade, America’s ruling class has used the threat of “mis-, dis-, and mal-information” to justify turning the awesome powers of the administrative state against domestic Wrongthinkers from elite orthodoxy. The most insidious and far-reaching manifestation of this phenomenon has been seen in the Censorship-Industrial Complex, which has eroded our First Amendment, thereby imperiling the republic itself.
Alarmingly, a new report indicates that the Supreme Court — which refused to bring the censorship regime to justice — not only shares this regime’s concerns about “disinformation,” but likewise supports robust and widespread action to “combat” it. The report comes from Chief Justice John Roberts himself.
Roberts took to his recently released annual review to elucidate what he sees as the key threats to the independence of his fellow justices, and thereby the rule of law itself. He distinguishes between “strong and passionate reactions” to and “informed criticism” of the court on the one hand, and independence-threatening “illegitimate activity” on the other.
Among the four types of activities that the chief justice identifies as illegitimate is “disinformation,” writing that disinformation includes “distortion of the factual or legal basis for a ruling,” which “can undermine confidence in the court system.” He laments that the court is ill-suited to “combat this problem” since judges are generally silent on their rulings.
“To make matters worse,” the chief justice adds, citing concerns laid out in his 2019 year-end report, “the modern disinformation problem is magnified by social media, which provides a ready channel to ‘instantly spread rumor and false information.’” Then, he endorsed “civic education as the best antidote for combating the epidemic of misinformation.”
Today Roberts asserts that “much more is needed — and on a coordinated, national scale — not only to counter traditional disinformation, but also to confront a new and growing concern from abroad … [whereby] hostile foreign state actors have accelerated their efforts to attack all branches of our government, including the judiciary.” They do so, he argues, through misrepresenting decisions “using fake or exaggerated narratives to foment discord within our democracy,” or other times by hacking sensitive information “in ways that compromise the public’s confidence in our processes and outcomes.”
