Conservative commentator Wayne Allyn Root has launched a sweeping legal battle against the institutions that worked together to silence millions of Americans — himself included — during the COVID era.
His newly filed $100 million lawsuit targets Stanford University, its board of trustees, and numerous major social media platforms, alleging coordinated censorship and serious violations of his civil rights.
In his late October announcement of the lawsuit, Root said he began raising early concerns about the vaccine rollout and sharing data that he believed warranted public discussion.
He argues that instead of debate, he was met with bans, shadow bans, and a near-total collapse of the online audience he had spent years building.
Root described how his posts suddenly stopped reaching viewers. Engagement vanished. His media appearances dried up, and he found himself labeled a disinformation peddler, simply because he shared his opinions.
To his point, despite a decades-long career in media and politics, Root’s Wikipedia page entry currently him a “conspiracy theorist” in its opening line.
Root, of course, is much more than that. He’s a major conservative talk radio show and podcast host, author and personality who doesn’t pull punches when it comes to controversial opinions.
According to Root, his positions about COVID and the vaccine were accurate, but accuracy isn’t the point.
“I turned out to be 100% correct,” he wrote. “But whether I was right, or wrong isn’t the issue. The crux of the issue is what happened to me was clearly a violation of my civil rights, and a violation of my right to free speech in America — where free speech is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.”
Should a class-action suit be launched that every single person who was censored during COVID can sign on to for damages from Big Tech?
To Root, the issue is the suppression of speech in a country where the First Amendment is supposed to protect exactly the kind of public disagreement he engaged in.
He also highlights the imbalance. Government agencies, health authorities, and major media outlets were never punished for information they later revised, contradicted, or walked back.
Meanwhile, voices of dissent were silenced for years during and after COVID, or chose not to say anything at all.
Root said this system amounted to a “Censorship Industrial Complex” that operated during the pandemic — one that he argues inflicted real damage not just on him but on the trust Americans once placed in powerful institutions.
Root wrote that his lawsuit aims to expose the network that coordinated the suppression of views like his. He names Meta (parent company of Facebook), Google, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok as defendants who allegedly played active roles in burying his commentary and cutting off public discussions about his stances on issues that affected the country.
For now, the suit does not include federal agencies, but Root wrote that he expects the lawsuit’s discovery process to reveal that government officials in the Biden administration colluded with Big Tech in censoring Americans. Evidence of that has already become public.
Root’s argument is simple: Censorship happened, and it had consequences. Institutions that insisted they alone held the truth ended up creating one of the most profound crises of public trust in modern history.
“I will fight the battle. But my hope is my courage in the face of tyranny will inspire millions of others to follow suit,” he wrote
The real point is this:
“It’s time to establish forever more that free speech is the ultimate American right that can never again be violated- for any reason,” Roof wrote.
And he’s not wrong.
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