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House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) chastised a Democratic member after he suggested during a hearing on Thursday that there are “limits” to First Amendment-protected free speech.
During a hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, things got heated after Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) argued the committee is “chilling the federal government” to “undermine” what he described as the severity of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Building riot.
“We all agree with the First Amendment, but the problem is that the First Amendment is not absolute. It does not protect any single thing anyone says, and there are limits, and that’s important,” Goldman said. “And what this committee has been trying to do for the last year and a half is to chill the federal government for monitoring what is going on on social media and otherwise out there so that misinformation and disinformation can run rampant on Elon Musk’s social platform and every other social platform so that they, the Republicans, can benefit from it in the November election.
“That’s why this committee exists, and we have gotten no evidence to support any of these allegations,” Goldman claimed.
That’s when the hearing began to get heated as Jordan vehemently disagreed with Goldman’s claim that the committee’s work was designed to “chill the federal government.”
“I think the gentleman from New York just said that we’re trying to chill the federal government? I don’t know if it’s ever been said that way, it’s always ‘the government trying to chill Americans’ rights and chill Americans. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Jordan said. “But you know who was opposed to how the FBI and the Bank of America did this thing when they asked for this information? You know who was opposed to it? Three FBI agents. The guys on the case…”
“So even the FBI who systematically violated Americans. It was the FBI who said if you’re a pro-life Catholic, you’re an extremist, if you’re a parent going to a school board meeting, you’re a terrorist,” Jordan continued. “Even the FBI said this is ridiculous. And they pulled back. Three agents testified.
“And somehow…the government is the one that chills Americans’ speech when they pressure Big Tech to censor, when they ask banks to give them [customer data], that’s chilling speech, and we’ve seen it first. Dr. [Jordan] Peterson has seen it in his own country [Canada], and now it’s coming here. That’s what we’re concerned about,” Jordan added.
WATCH:
The Daily Caller noted:
Jordan referred to the committee sending a subpoena to Bank of America for allegedly providing customers’ financial information to the FBI. He further noted the FBI’s involvement in targeting Catholics who attend Latin mass and the suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
A redacted memo from the Richmond FBI field office targeted Catholics attending Latin masses over the concern of them being susceptible to “anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and white supremacist ideology.”
According to findings from “The Twitter Files” by journalist Matt Taibbi, the FBI alerted Twitter executives about potential state actors seeking to interfere in the election. Subsequently, The New York Post’s story regarding the laptop was labeled as “Russian disinformation,” resulting in the outlet’s account being locked for several days.
Last fall, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that will decide just how far the U.S. government can go in forcing social media companies to censor or suppress certain information.
The high court announced that it had issued a writ of certiorari in a lawsuit filed against the Biden administration by GOP attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana in which the states sought to limit the federal government’s ability to pressure social media platforms like Facebook, X, and YouTube to stifle certain information without actually telling them to do so.
Both states argued that would be an obvious First Amendment violation against freedom of speech.
