🚨BREAKING: The Government Just Admitted It — and Agreed to Stop

A 10-year consent decree in Missouri v. Biden is the first real, court-enforceable restraint on the federal censorship machine. Rational Ground was there for all of it.

For years, if you said the government was colluding with Big Tech to silence you, you were called a conspiracy theorist.

Then the evidence came out. Then came the hearings. Then came the Supreme Court.

And today — March 24, 2026 — the United States government signed a consent decree admitting, in writing, that it did exactly what they said you were crazy for believing.

We’ve been covering this case — and the censorship operation it exposed — since the beginning. Today is the day we get to say: we told you so.

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What Just Happened

The case is Missouri v. Biden, later styled Murthy v. Missouri after the Biden administration appealed to the Supreme Court. Today, the Trump DOJ and the original plaintiffs — then-Missouri AG Eric Schmitt, Louisiana, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, Jill Hines, and Jim Hoft — reached a final settlement: a 10-year, court-enforceable Consent Decree filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.

The Consent Decree directly binds:

• The U.S. Surgeon General

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)

What are they prohibited from doing? Exactly what they did.

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What the Decree Actually Says

This is the federal government writing about itself. Quote it slowly:

“Over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.”

And then it goes further — enshrining a legal principle that should have been obvious but wasn’t treated as such:

“The Parties agree that government, politicians, media, academics, or anyone else applying labels such as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ or ‘malinformation’ to speech does not render it constitutionally unprotected.”

Read that again. Calling something misinformation doesn’t make it unprotected speech. The government just agreed to that in a binding legal document.

The operative prohibitions are sweeping: these agencies cannot — formally or informally, directly or indirectly — threaten social media companies with “legal, regulatory, or economic punishment” to remove or suppress protected speech. They cannot “unilaterally direct or veto” platform content moderation decisions.

Covered platforms: Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube
Duration: 10 years — survives any change of administration

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How We Got Here

This case started in May 2022 when then-Missouri AG Eric Schmitt and Louisiana AG Jeff Landry filed suit after uncovering communications showing federal officials at the White House, DHS, CDC, and the Surgeon General’s office routinely pressuring platforms to take down content. The specific targets:

• COVID-19 posts — questioning vaccine mandates, school closures, mask efficacy

• The Hunter Biden laptop story — suppressed before the 2020 election

• 2020 election claims — even those that later proved accurate

Discovery revealed a systematic “whole of government” censorship operation. The White House flagged posts directly to Meta. The CDC coordinated with YouTube on what qualified as “misinformation.” CISA ran working groups with platforms to identify content for removal. The Surgeon General’s office used the threat of regulatory action as leverage.

On July 4, 2023 — Independence Day, pointedly — Judge Terry Doughty issued a sweeping preliminary injunction. We covered it in real time here at Rational Ground. The judge wrote:

“If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

He was right.

The Fifth Circuit largely upheld the injunction. The Biden administration took it to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Murthy v. Missouri (June 2024) that the plaintiffs lacked standing for a preliminary injunction at that stage — a procedural ruling, not a vindication of the censorship. The case returned to district court, discovery continued, and the evidence kept mounting.

Today, the Trump DOJ settled rather than litigate further — and the terms are a complete vindication of everything the plaintiffs alleged.

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This Is Personal for Rational Ground

When Judge Doughty issued his July 2023 injunction, I was in the middle of media interviews about the case. I wrote about it here, quoting Dr. Aaron Kheriaty — one of the named plaintiffs:

“We didn’t know what we would find when we turned over that rock. And it turns out that censorship was happening not just at the behest of public health agencies, like the CDC and the NIH, but the intelligence agencies were involved — the Department of Justice, FBI, the State Department, Department of Homeland Security. So the whole military intelligence industrial complex is tangled up in the censorship industrial complex.”

We also dug deep into the infrastructure behind the operation. The CTIL Files — US and UK military contractors creating a sweeping global censorship plan in 2018, before COVID, before the 2020 election — laid out how the machinery was pre-built and waiting to be deployed. The Censorship Industrial Complex exposed the network of NGOs, academics, and government agencies that ran it.

And in November 2024, I asked the question: Will Trump Hold True to His Promise to Destroy Government Censorship?

Today we have the answer. He did — or more precisely, the legal machine that Schmitt and the NCLA built forced the answer regardless of politics.

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The Screwtape Connection

Those of you who’ve been reading my COVID Screwtape Letters know that the censorship operation had a spiritual architecture. From Chapter 4:

“What we accomplished between 2020 and 2022 required none of that infrastructure. No dungeons. No trials. No martyrs. The suppression of dissent was nearly total, the mechanism was nearly invisible, and the humans who operated it were nearly all convinced they were doing something noble.”

And in the postscript, Screwtape himself left this warning — written in character but prescient in fact:

“The cases in the courts — Missouri v. Biden, the Bhattacharya complaint, the CTIL whistleblower disclosures — are proceeding through systems that still, imperfectly and slowly, function. Do not assume permanence. One thing we have never been able to do is destroy the Enemy’s habit of placing awkward people in awkward positions with awkward documents at awkward moments in history. The archivist, the whistleblower, the inconvenient plaintiff — these are not random. Watch them.”

Today, the inconvenient plaintiffs won.

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The People Who Won This

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty — Former director of medical ethics at UC Irvine, fired after challenging the university’s vaccine mandate in court. Author of The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State. He knew what they would find when they turned over that rock. He was right about all of it.

Jill Hines — Louisiana health freedom advocate who was directly censored for sharing vaccine safety data. Not a politician, not a pundit. Just a citizen who was silenced by her own government. She and Kheriaty retain the right to personally enforce the consent decree if the government violates it.

Jim Hoft — Gateway Pundit founder. Repeatedly suppressed. Repeatedly correct.

Eric Schmitt — Then-AG of Missouri, now US Senator. He filed the original suit, drove the discovery, and never let go. “The level of coordination between senior government officials and senior social media executives is astounding,” he said in 2023. “There were direct text messages from the Surgeon General of the United States to senior Facebook officials saying, ‘Take this down.’ It’s just un-American.”

Jay Bhattacharya — Co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, placed on Twitter’s “trends blacklist” for questioning lockdowns, whose work was flagged for algorithmic suppression by government officials. Had to withdraw from the case when he was appointed head of the NIH. His presence at the NIH is its own kind of vindication.

REMEMBER OUR WSJ OP-ED?

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The Unsettled Questions

Scope limitations. The decree binds the Surgeon General, CDC, and CISA — but not every agency. The State Department, FBI, and DHS aren’t directly covered. The prohibition applies to content posted by the named plaintiffs on the named platforms. It’s a historic floor, not a complete ceiling.

Future administrations. The decree runs 10 years, which means it survives the next White House transition. Any future administration that attempts to revive the censorship apparatus will be in contempt of a federal court order. That is a genuinely new structural constraint.

Watch the spin. Expect coverage that focuses on Trump settling the case rather than why settlement was necessary — i.e., because the government was caught dead to rights. The same outlets that called this a “right-wing attack on content moderation” now have to decide how to cover the government agreeing with every word of it.

Other fights ongoing. The NCLA still has active suits against the State Department on behalf of The Federalist and The Daily Wire, and a separate suit for vaccine-injured Americans censored on Facebook. Today’s win emboldens both.

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That’s not a settlement.
That’s a confession.

Missouri v. Biden started with an “extraordinary” claim: the federal government was systematically pressuring social media companies to suppress speech it didn’t like, using the coercive threat of regulatory action to do indirectly what the First Amendment bars it from doing directly.

Rational Ground covered it. The plaintiffs proved it. The courts confirmed it. And today, the United States government agreed — in a binding, 10-year court order — that this is exactly what happened.

For everyone who was called a conspiracy theorist for saying the quiet part out loud — who got shadowbanned, deplatformed, fact-checked, suspended, and silenced — the record now says you were right.

We told you so.

Related reading on Rational Ground:

• We Landed a Major Blow Against the Censorship Leviathan (July 4, 2023)

• The Censorship Industrial Complex (Nov 2023)

• CTIL Files #1: US and UK Military Contractors Created Sweeping Plan for Global Censorship in 2018 (Nov 2023)

• The Screwtape Covid Letters — Part 4: A Labyrinth of Censorship (Jan 2025)

• Will Trump Hold True to His Promise to DESTROY Government Censorship? (Nov 2024)

Sources: Consent Decree, W.D. La., March 24, 2026 (CourtListener) | NCLA press release | Reason/Volokh Conspiracy | Eric Schmitt tweet