Online Speech Now Protected Against Big Tech Censorship! – Texas HB20 Ruling – 5th Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals

Have you heard of a little bill in Texas called HB20 that was signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott on September 2, 2021? Do you know how greatly this law will positively affect you lives? Did you know that the Left fought hard to overturn this law? Did you know the Left lost this battle? Probably not, because we live in a country that is almost fully censored by the Left’s minions in the Main Stream News Media and Big Tech. Read on…

Have you or anyone you know been censored by a Big Tech company like FACEBOOK, TWITTER, and others for attempting to provide truthful information to the online public? Has a Big Tech company denied your 1st amendment right to speak in the modern “Town Hall”? Have these or other Big Tech company not only blocked your comments, but figuratively sent you to the online gulag by deleting you from an online existence? If so, then you like us at REMEMBERTHESTEAL have been forced to join a not so exclusive, ever expanding club. We at REMEMBERTHESTEAL are oh so well aware of the insidious power of Big Tech to stifle free speech.

In December 2020, during the startup of REMEMBERTHESTEAL.COM, we created a FACEBOOK account.

On December 5, 2020, FACEBOOK shut down our REMEMBERTHESTEAL account. Did FACEBOOK do this for any valid reason? No. In fact, FACEBOOK deleted our account before anything was ever posted. The only explanation we can offer is that FACEBOOK deleted our account just for registering the account under our name “REMEMBERTHESTEAL” to shut down what was likely to be the content of our account. FACEBOOK was so polite as to inform us that we had violated FACEBOOK’s “Community Standards”, with no right to appeal FACEBOOKs decision. But not after claiming that it was necessary for a driver’s license photo of the person controlling the account (yours truly) was uploaded to verify the legal existence of the account owner.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our TWITTER account was shut down in May 2022 after TWITTER notified us that we violated specific TWITTER policies. None of their stated violations ever occurred. In reality, TWITTER deleted our account because REMEMBERTHESTEAL was posting and responding to comments relating to the Australian Leftist government’s draconian COVID related lockdowns and anti-free speech measures, and the CDCs illegal unscrupulous March 24, 2020 change to its viral mortality statistical methodology, which were generating a lot of discussion on TWITTER and resulting in an increase in the number of TWITTER users who were choosing to follow us at REMEMBERTHESTEAL. We had made the Left’s radar. Here is TWITTER’s untruthful notice to REMEMBERTHESTEAL…

The Left has made it quite clear that any truth related to the COVID and the use of COVID to take away the rights of individuals will not be tolerated by the Left. It doesn’t fit the Left’s goal of State Control. In fact, anything that conflicts with the Left’s goal of State Control will not be tolerated. So is it any surprise that attempts to speak the truth about the CDC’s insidious, illegal March 24, 2020 decision to produce manipulated COVID mortality statistics which resulting in COVID deaths being reported at 15 times actual number would be shut down?

As we have shown before at REMEMBERTHESTEAL, this one illegal event was used to produce severely inflated COVID mortality statistics to manipulate YOU through fear to support the implementation of draconian lockdowns and rules that took away your freedoms. And, more importantly for the Left, to manipulate President Trump into signing Nancy Pelosi’s unprecedented $2.2 Trillion Corona, Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) which funded the shut down of the United States economy and removal of freedoms which allowed for the implementation of “Emergency” rules to change election laws relating to allowing mail-in voting, a method of voting that is well known to be ripe with fraud. Even France figured this out in the 1970s. All done to put measures in place to negatively affect President Trump’s reelection. You can read about this on our Evidence Page under the section titled, THE GREATEST CRIME EVER PERPETRATED AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

Well if you are part of this “club” like we are, your Constitutional right of online free speech (for now only if you live in Texas, until this decision is used in litigation in other States as precedent) has just been restored by the 5th Circuit Court of the United States Court of Appeals.

On September 16, 2022, the 5th Circuit ruled that,

A social media platform may not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s ability to receive the expression of another person based on:

(1) the viewpoint of the user or another person;

(2) the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression or another person’s expression; or

(3) a user’s geographic location in this state or any part of this state.

In summarizing the Court’s decision, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s response linked below stated, “…the First Amendment doesn’t allow platforms the “editorial discretion” to arbitrarily censor different viewpoints. The Court upheld the state’s authority to prevent discrimination on social platforms and further ruled that anti-censorship laws like HB 20 are consistent with the First Amendment because they regulate the company’s conduct, not their speech.”

You can read the response from the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton here and can read the 5th Circuit’s legal decision and dissent here.

For context, on September 2, 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed Texas House Bill HB20 into law. HB20 was authored by Texas State Representative Briscoe Cain and sponsored by Texas State Senator Bryan Hughes, and fought for by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. REMEMBERTHESTEAL.COM congratulates these free speech freedom fighters!

The Left, as represented by this article, came out guns a blazing (defined as, “with forceful effort” for the lily white snowflake crowd) appealed the law and took its case to the Supreme Court in order to stop the implementation of this law because the Left understood this law provides far reaching protections of the 1st Amendment free speech rights of individuals and sets an unsurmountable precedence for litigation against Big Tech censorship. Insidiously, like everything the Left does, the Left tried to argue that HB20 was unconstitutional because, Section 7 of HB20 violated a company’s 1st Amendment free speech rights over an individuals free speech rights. The Supreme Court temporarily stayed the implementation of the law until it reviewed the case. At the end of the day the Supreme Court  did not agree with the Left’s legal arguments and returned the case to the 5th Circuit for a final decision. In its decision, the 5th Circuit, among other things, stated:

“The Platforms contend that Section 7 of HB 20 is facially unconstitutional. We disagree. We (A) first reject the Platforms’ facial overbreadth challenge because Section 7 does not chill speech; if anything, it chills censorship. Then we (B) turn to the First Amendment’s text and history, which offer no support for the Platforms’ claimed right to censor. Next, applying Supreme Court precedent, we (C) hold that Section 7 does not regulate the Platforms’ speech at all; it protects other people’s speech and regulates the Platforms’ conduct. Our decision (D) is reinforced by 47 U.S.C. § 230, which reflects Congress’s judgment that the Platforms are not “speaking” when they host other people’s speech…”

Thankfully, there are judges at the 5th Circuit Court of the United States Court of Appeals that truly understand that their job is to uphold our Constitutionally protected rights. REMEMBERTHESTEAL.COM truly thanks those judges and justices who fight daily to protect the United States Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

The fight for the freedom to speak and think, a fight many of us never expected to be needed in the United States, continues. REMEMBERTHESTEAL.COM will continue to be a leader in this fight! Join us. And,

REMEMBER THE STEAL!