Fighting Back: Texas Attorney General Leads Ten-State Coalition To Reign In Tech Oligarchs
Albert Turkington
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In a pleasantly surprising episode of Republican leaders showing backbone, Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas made an announcement on the 20th of September that he will be leading Texas and a group of nine other states to file an amicus brief. The brief will be filed with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that will make an explicit show of support of Florida’s legal attempts to reign in the Stalinesque tendencies of Silicon Valley’s big tech oligarchs.
According to The Epoch Times, Attorney General Paxton will be signing the brief on behalf of the nine other states which are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, and South Carolina, all of whom have separately filed amicus briefs in support of the Sunshine State.
“The regulation of big tech censorship will inevitably suppress the ideas and beliefs of millions of Americans,” Paxton said in a statement. “I will defend the First Amendment and ensure that conservative voices have the right to be heard. Big Tech does not have the authority to police the expressions of people whose political viewpoint they simply disagree with.”
This represents quite a turnaround from the usual Republican response to encroachments on the freedoms of Americans, especially their own grassroots supporters, which is to bleat piously about not doing anything meaningful to reverse America’s decay whenever they are voted into power because of their ‘principles’. Many believe that this latest development may potentially be a positive harbinger for things to come.
Per Florida’s SB 7072, the citizens of Florida are allowed considerable legal recourse against social media and other tech giants should they be found to be censoring the views of Floridians without adhering to an objective and consistently enforced standard. The passage of the law and its accompanying legal protections have garnered ire not only from the usual suspects on the left but also globalists from the mainstream right.
One of the showpiece clauses of the bill is protections for political candidates running for office in local and statewide races in Florida. Social media giants who are found to be subjectively deplatforming candidates and their social media pages will face a fine of $250,000 a day for their wannabe-Stalin behavior for statewide candidates and $25,000 a day if they are running in other races within the state.
Unsurprisingly, judicial activists and big tech lobbying outfits have been working tirelessly to allow big tech platforms to continue to set the political and social agenda for the country and the world. Despite Governor DeSantis signing the protections into law in May, a temporary injunction was issued by District Judge Robert Hinkle in June after lawsuits were filed by two internet trade groups, namely NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association.
The main argument presented by the two lobby groups is that SB 7072 stood in violation of the First Amendment and was illegitimate on those grounds, representing one of the sparingly few times lobby groups have ever cared about the Constitution in any capacity. One of the main purposes of the 10-state coalition was to express their belief that this interpretation of the First Amendment was “riddled with errors.”
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