Concentration Camps, Transphobia, and Election Denial: Anti-Vaccine Groups Rally Outside Supreme Court In Defense of Misinformation

The groups are hoping the court’s right-wing justices deliver a crippling blow to government efforts to combat online misinformation.

(Brownstone Institute founder Jeffrey Tucker at the “Rally to Reclaim Free Speech.”)

Anti-vaccine groups rallied outside the Supreme Court today as the high court heard arguments in a case that could severely curtail the federal government’s ability to regulate online misinformation. Speakers issued dire warnings about censorship, Big Tech, concentration camps, the ruling class, Bill Gates and his “potions” (the COVID vaccines), and COVID-19 lockdowns.

The “Rally to Reclaim Free Speech” was organized by Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense and sponsored by a number of other anti-vaccine groups including Informed Consent Action Network, activist Del Bigtree’s group, Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, which is known for promoting the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin as a COVID treatment the fact that it is not effective for that purpose, and the Brownstone Institute, a well-funded dark money group serving as a hub pandemic-related misinformation. 

Also sponsoring the rally were two anti-vaccine adjacent organizations, TrialSite News and Liber-Net. The former presents itself as a site dedicated to “independent biomedical research-focused journalism” and an antidote to “mainstream media and government” seeking “to censor scientists, doctors, and health advocates with differing opinions, thus repressing opinions and enforcing a singular narrative on all things related to public health.” The site amplifies research purporting to show ivermectin as an effective COVID treatment. 

Liber-Net is a project of Brownstone Institute fellow Andrew Lowenthal, who has claimed that the “Covid crisis…ushered in a new level of authoritarianism, much of it made possible by digital technologies, but also by a new ‘progressive’ culture that craves the hammer of state power.” Liber-Net’s website warns that “Under the cloak of countering ‘misinformation,’ governments, NGOs, academics, and Big Tech now often collaborate to suppress information, ideas, and opinions expressed by everyday people. Meanwhile biometric ID systems are being built to control people’s movements and access, and digital currencies threaten citizen’s basic right to economic independence.” The site claims to combat “this new authoritarianism in order to reestablish free speech and civil liberties as the default standard for our networked age” with “journalism, research, media-making, events and network building.”

The groups behind the rally are hoping to see the Supreme Court rebuke government efforts to crack down on online misinformation related to COVID-19. The precedent Murthy v. Missouri could set is expansive. Initially filed as Missouri v. Biden in May 2022 by two Republican attorneys general, Eric Schmidt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana, the case deals with questions about the limits of government speech. On the line is the ability of government agencies to even make requests to social media companies that they take steps to regulate misleading content on their platforms.

This potential is not lost on the groups rallying on Monday. On the event page for the rally, Children’s Health Defense answers “WHY THIS CASE? WHY NOW?”

“SCOTUS’s ruling in this case will have far-reaching implications for the free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment that Americans have enjoyed since the Founding Fathers,” it explains. “Justices will hear oral arguments while freedom-loving advocates for free speech and no censorship gather outside to exercise our free speech rights. Let your voice be heard!”

Throughout the COVID pandemic, misinformation has been killer—particularly anti-vaccine misinformation. Widespread vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. has led to a significant amount of preventable suffering. The unvaccinated have consistently been infected, hospitalized, and killed by COVID at far higher rates than the vaccinated. 

For years, the Biden administration has sought to get major social media companies to address misinformation on their platforms about not just the jabs but other topics like the 2020 election and Hunter Biden’s laptop. Those efforts have ultimately consisted of tough public rhetoric—Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” in July 2021 as the Delta wave was taking shape and vaccine uptake slowed—and communicating with the companies behind the scenes, making requests for changes and content moderation. 

The Missouri lawsuit alleged that the administration had coerced social media giants into censoring and suppressing “free speech, including truthful information, related to COVID-19, election integrity, and other topics, under the guise of combating 'misinformation'." 

The suit was later joined by a number of private social media users who claimed they had been the victims of government censorship. The new plaintiffs—individuals who had content been flagged as misinformation like Drs. Jay Bhattacharya of the right-wing Hoover Institution and Martin Kulldorff of the Brownstone Institute—were represented pro bono by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a business-aligned litigation outfit that receives significant funding from petrochemical billionaire and right-wing mega-funder Charles Koch. 

The case gained more attention after December 2022 when Elon Musk’s so-called Twitter Files releases showed how both the Trump and Biden administrations had communicated with Twitter and made requests for certain tweets to be removed. For example, the White House COVID response team emailed Twitter requesting a tweet from Kennedy baselessly suggesting that baseball legend Hank Aaron’s death had been due to vaccination.

Despite the fact that the company only ever acted on a fraction of the government’s requests, that cooperation was painted as proof of censorship by the political right and medical contrarians. Twitter Files COVID edition reporter David Zweig, who, in January 2022, argued against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation that children receive COVID boosters, declared that Twitter and the government had "rigged" the COVID debate, censoring legitimate dissent.

On July 4 last year, the Trump-appointed district court judge, Terry Doughty, ruled against the government, finding that officials in both the Trump and Biden administrations had coerced social media companies to censor content that would fuel anti-vaccine sentiment in violation of the First Amendment. Doughty issued a sweeping preliminary injunction prohibiting the government from communicating with the companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected speech” and from working with non-governmental actors toward those ends. 

The Biden administration appealed and a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ultimately vacated much of Doughty’s order. However, it did agree that the government had been “significantly entangled” in the companies’ moderation decision in violation of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court put a hold on the injunction and agreed to hear the case back in October.

The administration is denying that it ever coerced social media companies, noting that officials never threatened any consequences for refusing requests.

The case has public policy groups like the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School nervous. The center filed an amicus brief with the high court, explaining the importance to American democracy of having accurate election information, and urging the justices “not to adopt a rule that prevents or chills communications between social media companies and local, state, and federal government officials.”

At Monday’s rally, psychiatrist Aaron Kheriaty, a plaintiff in the case who lost his job in December 2021 at the UC Irvine School of Medicine over his refusal to get vaccinated against COVID, told the crowd that the government had “censored” him and his fellow plaintiffs was because “the things we were saying were threatening to their power; were threatening to their interests; were threatening to their preferred policies; were embarrassing because they were wrong and we were right on things like the harms of lockdowns, on things like natural immunity, on things like the risks and benefits and safety issues with the COVID vaccines.”

Kheriaty said the government’s job was not to determine what is true and false, but only what is legal speech and illegal speech, warning that the government’s moderation requests were “the seedbed of totalitarianism.” He suggested that failure to protect speech questioning the safety of COVID vaccines and the integrity of the 2020 election—which he characterized as “speech that challenges the reining ideology”—was the road to “concentration camps.”

“If they can do it on issues related to public health; if they can do it on issues related to the elections, they can do it on anything,” he said, going on to say government was censoring on topics like abortion and “gender ideology,” the right-wing term for recognition of the existence of transgender Americans.

“Take any lightning rod, debated, contested question in American public life, the federal government had its thumb on the scale and was trying to suppress and censor the speech of ordinary Americans,” he said.

Another speaker, Brownstone Institute founder Jeffrey Tucker, a child labor advocate and supporter of youth cigarette smoking, said that government’s goal was total control over public thought.

“Let’s remember today: If we do nothing, the bad guys are certainly going to win regardless of what happens in that court room today,” he warned. “But an unruly public, a public that demands the truth—a public that demands its rights and will accept no compromise—is a public that is difficult to control.”

Tucker, whose dark money outfit is overwhelmingly funded by a handful of opaque donations, closed by declaring that that the ruling class was “a little bit demoralized because they did not expect this level of their “citizen resistance.”

“They had no Plan B,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Let’s control everybody.’ ‘What if that doesn’t work?’ ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’ll work fine. We’ll just be in constant lockdown forever and then Bill Gates will run the world, sell his potions to everybody.’ That seemed to be the plan. Well that didn’t seem to work out too well, did it? I’m telling you my friends, we have to keep this up.”

NOTE: This article has been updated from its email version.