No one has "standing" in the total state

In Missouri v. Biden (brought before the Supreme Court as Murthy v. Missouri), Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt sued the federal government for working behind the scenes with Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube to “censor and suppress free speech, including truthful information, related to COVID-19, election integrity, and other topics, under the guise of combating ‘misinformation’.”

The lawsuit argued that the federal government had violated Americans’ First Amendment rights, leaning on private companies to perform censorship tasks forbidden to the government itself.

Today, the Supreme Court argued that the plaintiffs lack Article III standing — meaning that they have to have suffered an injury that is “concrete, particularized and actual or imminent; fairly traceable to the challenged action and redressable by a favorable ruling.”

Specifically, the problem is that they are suing the federal government over an action committed by a third party (the social media platforms). Of course, the federal government hiding the ball in this way is precisely the point — and this case is emblematic of the way that “the rule of law” is used to conceal lawlessness in practice.

Virtually all of the control systems of the GAE are like this: diffuse and deniable, with decentralized perpetrators and decentralized targets, so that it’s incredibly easy to bat aside a challenge on the basis of “standing”.

The current structure of the regime is literally built around circumventing the protections of the Constitution — not necessarily as a result of coordination or conspiracy, but because power inevitably adapts to circumvent constraints.

If you build a regulatory agency to rein in the robber barons, the regulatory agency becomes the locus of power. If you anoint journalists and scientists with a special mandate to Speak Truth to Power (i.e. to define consensus reality), they will straightforwardly replace whatever priesthood performed that function before.

Power can change hands — it can be distributed or consolidated — but it is always conserved.

Viewed in this light, Elon’s takeover of Twitter may be remembered as one of the most significant events of the last decade.

Musk’s recent legal difficulties are a more-or-less brazen attempt to claw back the federal government’s absolute dominance in online narrative control — and if he were almost any other billionaire in America, he would probably be sunk already.

Twitter/X is still operational in large part because Elon Musk has insinuated himself into the federal government’s power flows. In any kind of open near-peer conflict, USG would have to rapidly replace sabotaged space assets, and Musk is the only guy in America who can do it.

In other words, your free speech “rights” are not underwritten by the Constitution, but by the ideological cussedness of a single billionaire who would be essential to USG’s command-and-control in a crisis.

The First Amendment matters primarily insofar as it is a religious precept that still lives in the minds of a handful of powerful people. As that cooperative equilibrium evaporates, “liberty” will increasingly become a practical question: what do you want to do, who wants to stop you, and what can they realistically do about it?

Which means that the thing to do is to make our own money, own our own capital, raise our own kids, build our own community. Join us at exitgroup.us.

Cocktail hour RSVP links for Columbus (7/19), Salt Lake City (8/16), and Houston (9/13) below the paywall for subscribers. These are a great opportunity to meet your local guys and see if the full group is a good fit for you. Invites for the members-only portion of the meetup will be sent individually.