Attorney General Ken Paxton announced an important victory in an ongoing lawsuit against the Biden administration in which it was alleged officials funded the censorship of speech that is not left-wing.
Paxton announced Wednesday that a federal appeals court agreed with Texas and denied a request by the Biden administration to have the case dismissed and moved to a Washington, D.C. court.
As the decision penned by Judge Jeremy Kernodle from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Taylor explained, the complaint had “standing to challenge Defendants’ actions and venue is proper.”
“The Biden Administration made a reprehensible attempt to censor the American press with funding intended to monitor foreign propaganda, aiming to repress viewpoints the federal government disagreed with,” said Paxton, according to a press release. “Abusing taxpayer money, Biden repurposed a government agency into a censorship apparatus. It must stop, and I am proud to lead the Nation’s fight to save the First Amendment.”
The censorship case was brought by two media companies, The Federalist and The Daily Wire, together with the State of Texas in December 2023, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
The lawsuit filed by the parties alleges that the Biden administration provided technology and tools to media marketing companies that then sold the tools to social media organizations to drive down right-leaning speech and make media companies hosting such content unprofitable.
“Here, Texas alleges that its injury is the predictable result of Defendants’ deliberate efforts to market and promote the censorship tools and technologies to social media platforms,” Kernodle wrote. “The Court agrees.”
The Biden administration is said to have used the Global Engagement Center (GEC), an interagency group funded with taxpayer dollars through the State Department, “to support federal agency communications in targeting ‘violent extremism and terrorist organizations,’” according to the complaint.
GEC was initially created by executive order in 2011 to combat foreign propaganda. However, it has also allegedly been used to fund a company that created an online cloud storage system to store tools and technologies used for censoring purported disinformation.
Both The Federalist and The Daily Wire claim they were blacklisted by social media companies using the tools funded by GEC in violation of its mandate.
By dismissing claims that the plaintiffs did not have standing, the court will allow the case to continue in Texas.
“I am proud to lead the fight to save American’s precious constitutional rights from Joe Biden’s tyrannical federal government,” Paxton said in an earlier statement. “The State Department’s mission to obliterate the First Amendment is completely un-American. This agency will not get away with their illegal campaign to silence citizens and publications they disagree with.”