[FoxNews] The consent decree bars the US surgeon general, CDC and CISA from threatening or coercing social media platforms for 10 years
Republican attorneys general are hailing a First Amendment victory in a censorship lawsuit against the Biden administration after two red states secured a settlement restricting federal government agencies from influencing social media companies’ moderation practices.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told Fox News Digital the settlement, a 10-year consent decree blocking several agencies from pressuring social media companies over their content, was "simply historic in nature."
"Being able to set a precedent like this will help everybody in the future be able to show that this conduct is wrong," Murrill said in a phone interview. "It was Orwellian in nature from the beginning. It still is, and I'm grateful that the government is acknowledging that it shouldn't have been doing it."
Missouri, Louisiana and several individual plaintiffs brought the high-profile jawboning lawsuit in 2022, alleging the Biden administration and officials in the first Trump administration inappropriately pressured social media companies to censor conservative viewpoints about COVID-19, election security and Hunter Biden's laptop.
Under the settlement, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are barred for the next decade from threatening or coercing social media companies to remove or suppress protected speech. The agreement also blocks officials from giving directions on or vetoing platforms' content moderation decisions.
"This is the first real, operational restraint on the federal censorship machine," said Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., who brought the lawsuit when he served as his state's attorney general. "The deep state just got checked."
Murrill and U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer helped with the case when they were solicitors general of Louisiana and Missouri, respectively. Murrill reflected on conversations she had at the time about "the line between coercion and government speech."
"It was so clear to me that what the government was doing went way beyond appropriate boundaries in terms of deliberately throttling people's speech, taking down protected, truthful speech and forcing these corporations to bend to the White House's will," Murrill said. "That was a very scary precedent, and I think that's why this agreement is so important."
The lawsuit alleged that federal government agencies and officials pressured YouTube; Twitter, now X; Facebook, now Meta; and other platforms to censor content, arguing the actions amounted to coercing the companies to remove constitutionally-protected speech.
Republicans' outrage about social media censorship gained momentum in 2020 after Twitter fully restricted and Facebook suppressed the New York Post's bombshell report about the Biden family and Ukraine that was based on contents from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Discovery in the lawsuit and subsequent congressional investigations revealed that FBI officials during the first Trump administration met with social media companies and warned them just before the story was published of a possible Russian "hack and leak" operation designed to interfere with the 2020 election, which the companies later said influenced their decision to block the story.
#3
Why do we still have CUSA? Their entire purpose in adverse to the Constitution.
Cybersecurity is one thing. Censorship is quite another. With government sponsored hackers all over the world probing and proding every minute of every day, it would be nice if we had a powerful government agency fight back. A glance at their web site seems to show an emphasis on defensive measures, warning against malware and phishing attempts. I'd like to see them hacking the Chinese hackers instead of censoring X and Rantburg.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/27/2026 12:20 Comments ||
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🚨 HOLY CRAP. Health Sec. RFK Jr. revealed that the Biden White House ORDERED HHS to ignore fraud — and just focus on enrolling as many people on welfare as possible, legal or illegal
"One of the things that I found out from people in my agency was they were ordered by the Biden… pic.twitter.com/G4K5sGRXEt
#5
^ Rantburgers have long known what Cloward-Piven strategy is, without your Wiki reference. Thanks for playing
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/27/2026 7:32 Comments ||
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#6
B, it's worse than that. They are like drug pushers, giving enough to make as many people as possible dependent forever.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
03/27/2026 7:59 Comments ||
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#7
the antisemitic Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory.
How so, antisemitic?
But absolutely not a conspiracy theory, since it is a real thing, observably used regularly by Democratic politicians at all levels, currently by New York City major Zohran Mamdani.
#12
I’m beginning to think that this is the universe where everyone gets five minutes of fame and everyone interesting is somehow Jewish. I never used to believe either, and yet now it seems to be so.
[FoxNews] Uber co-founder Kalanick joined Musk, Zuckerberg and others leaving blue states as Washington State pushes a millionaire tax
Travis Kalanick chose to ditch California on Dec. 18 for a reason. The Uber co-founder relocated from San Francisco to Austin, Texas, exactly 14 days before California's would-be billionaire wealth tax residency deadline, dodging a potential $180 million hit on his $3.6 billion fortune. He made no secret of the calculation.
"Just to be clear, on Dec. 18, I moved to Texas. I don’t know what’s so specific about December 18, but let’s just say it’s prior to January," Kalanick said in an interview with TPBN.
He joined Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Larry Page, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and PayPal and Founders Fund founder Peter Thiel in a steady procession of wealth abandoning blue states for Florida and Texas. Democrats have been engineering this for years. California, New York and now Washington state are running the same tax-hiking playbook at nearly the same moment, and the results are entirely predictable.
In New York City, socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made taxing the wealthy a centerpiece of his administration. He is pushing an additional 2 percent income tax surcharge on city residents earning over $1 million annually, along with corporate tax hikes he claims would generate billions toward closing a $5.4 billion budget deficit. His ultimatum to Albany is that approving those taxes is the only way to prevent the city from imposing a 9.5% property tax hike on everyone, including the working and middle class he says he represents.
Democrat New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has repeatedly refused to go along, explaining at an event, "I don't want to lose any more people to Palm Beach." That admission does not come from someone who genuinely believes taxing the wealthy carries no consequences. Someone who believed that would not worry about Palm Beach. Even Hochul understands perfectly well what happens to a tax base when people leave. At least in New York, she has enough self-awareness to hold the line. Washington state Democrats do not.
Washington Democrats pushed Senate Bill 6346 through the legislature after an intense 25-hour floor debate. The bill imposes a 9.9% income tax on households earning over $1 million a year. Democrat Gov. Bob Ferguson has pledged to sign it.
Former state Attorney General Rob McKenna issued a legal memo calling the bill unconstitutional, pointing to nearly a century of settled precedent. Democrats already know that. Their strategy depends on it.
In 1933, the Washington Supreme Court ruled in Culliton v. Chase that income is property under the state constitution. Article VII requires property to be taxed at a uniform rate, making a graduated income tax flatly unconstitutional. That ruling has held for 93 years. Washington voters have rejected income tax measures at the ballot box 10 separate times.
Most recently, in 2010, a tax on households above $200,000 went down in 38 of 39 counties. The legislature's 2021 capital gains tax only survived judicial review because the far-left state Supreme Court bent itself into a pretzel to absurdly classify it narrowly as an excise tax on a specific transaction. A broad millionaires' income tax is legally distinct, and Democrats are using it to force the court's hand.
That clean decision is the entire ballgame. Tax supporters are banking on a state Supreme Court now stacked with justices appointed by Democratic governors and backed by liberal interest groups. If Culliton falls, income is formally decoupled from property for the first time in Washington's history. The uniformity requirement disappears.
Once that constitutional wall comes down, nothing prevents the legislature from lowering the threshold from $1 million to $500,000 to $200,000 to everyone who draws a paycheck. The millionaires' tax is not the destination. It is the crowbar to push the income tax on everyone.
The economic fallout is not waiting for any ruling.
Former state Attorney General Rob McKenna issued a legal memo calling the bill unconstitutional, pointing to nearly a century of settled precedent. Democrats already know that. Their strategy depends on it.
Bulwark Capital Management’s principal told The Jason Rantz Show on Seattle Red that he’s leaving the state and bringing his business with him. The CEO of Moment similarly said his business is ditching the state for Wyoming. Starbucks announced it is expanding its corporate footprint in Nashville, Tenn.
Meanwhile, Downtown Seattle's office vacancy rate reached a record high above 30% in the final months of 2025, a figure the Downtown Seattle Association's Jon Scholes tied directly to the city's escalating tax burden. Scholes noted that Amazon has relocated thousands of employees to Bellevue and other King County locations over recent years due to the increasingly aggressive tax environment.
#3
It really shouldn't be that hard to overrule the 1933 Court decision.
Income may have been considered property in Washington State in 1933 but a leftist court can certainly say 'that was then, this is now' if it fits the ideological purpose.
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
03/27/2026 11:52 Comments ||
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#4
Hochul has the benefit of first hand experience. To her credit, she seems to have learned from it but too late for a lot of former New Yorkers and her sincerity is in doubt.
I was watching some stupid TV show last night and they had a segment on Montauk. It looks really, really nice. But you have to wonder how long it can stay that way with a communist in the governor's mansion.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/27/2026 12:28 Comments ||
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#5
38 out of 39 counties. Let me guess which county voted in favor. King?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
