Jay Bhattacharya: Is There Still a First Amendment?
September 5 | Posted by mrossol | 1st Amendment, Big Govt, Censorship, Disinformation, Transparency[non]This is a scary situation. Dr. Bhattacharya has lived it; he knows. And the Left is fully in support of censorship. mrossol
Source: Jay Bhattacharya: the First Amendment is unenforceable – UnHerd
Director of the National Institutes of Health Jay Bhattacharya yesterday claimed that the First Amendment is a “dead letter”.
Speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington DC, the former Stanford professor warned that America’s constitutional protections for free expression dissolved during the Covid pandemic and remain unenforceable even today. “The First Amendment still doesn’t apply in practice,” he said. “Free speech rights exist right now only because the administration has chosen to allow them, not because the First Amendment is protecting us.”
Bhattacharya, best known for co-authoring the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, said his own experience during the pandemic showed how dissenting views on Covid-19 policy were systematically suppressed through government pressure on social media companies. “Why would I be put on a blacklist by Twitter?” he asked. “Why would a private company, whose money is made by people communicating with each other, decide to put me on a blacklist? It turns out the answer is the government forced them to do it.”
The declaration, signed by nearly one million people worldwide, argued that older people should have been shielded while schools and workplaces stayed open. What seemed obvious to him, Bhattacharya recalled, was treated as dangerous heresy. He said that soon after publication, Google delisted the document, hostile media coverage branded it “fringe”, and senior health officials including Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci privately plotted a “devastating takedown”. “The whole thing was just surreal,” he said. “The idea was that the scientific community wanted to tell you that there was no debate — it was only fringe figures who believed something as outrageous as protecting older people.”
This censorship debate reached its apex during Covid in 2021. By then, Bhattacharya claimed, White House officials had mobilised federal agencies to pressure platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to block or demote dissenting opinions. The alleged coercion became the centrepiece of the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, in which Bhattacharya and other censored commentators were plaintiffs. Depositions revealed a pattern, he said, of officials threatening social media firms with reputational or regulatory harm if they failed to curb “misinformation”. Academic institutions, often funded by federal grants, provided research that was then used to justify takedowns. A lower court judge described the campaign as “Orwellian”.
Yet when the case reached the Supreme Court, justices dismissed it on standing grounds, ruling there was no evidence Bhattacharya himself had been directly targeted by government orders. That reasoning, he argued, creates a loophole: so long as officials pressure companies to suppress categories of ideas rather than named individuals, victims cannot sue. “The First Amendment, in that sense, is unenforceable,” he said.
During yesterday’s talk, Bhattacharya welcomed the Trump administration’s January 2025 executive order dismantling the federal censorship apparatus, though he acknowledged that the underlying legal problem remains. “Right now, free speech in America depends on who is in power,” he told the audience. “That’s a perilous place to be.”
He called for new legislation that would grant citizens standing to challenge government-driven censorship, even when it targets ideas more broadly. Without such reform, Bhattacharya warned, the conditions of 2020 could be repeated in the next crisis. “Science depends on free speech,” he said. “If we silence debate, we silence discovery. And if the First Amendment cannot be enforced, then it is still a dead letter.”
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