The Clash of Truth and Power: Exposing the Underbelly of COVID-19 Censorship

While Twitter’s Yoel Roth was reluctant to shut down accounts on the basis of a false Russian disinformation narrative, those kinds of hurdles were no longer a problem when COVID arrived. If it was in the name of COVID, anything went, no questions asked.

In fact, in some cases, the government did not even have to ask. For instance, it wasn’t Anthony Fauci who reached out to Facebook. It was Facebook that reached out to Fauci.

On March 15, 2020, one day before “15 days to slow” the spread was announced, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg emailed Fauci to propose collaboration between Fauci and Facebook on putting out what Zuckerberg called “authoritative information from reliable sources.”

Fauci responded favorably and so Facebook’s COVID censorship regime in coordination with Fauci was born.

That regime entailed “not allow[ing] false claims about the vaccines or vaccination programs which public health experts have advised us could lead to COVID-19 vaccine rejection”

And it wasn’t just vaccines. Posts about hydroxychloroquine were also censored by Facebook, not because it was best practice but because that was the government line supported by Fauci. The same happened with Ivermectin.

Recall that getting the mRNA vaccines approved in fast track mode was only legally possible if there were no other treatments available. It is no wonder then that government actors such as Fauci and social media giants such as Facebook made sure that even just talking about alternative treatments was effectively forbidden.

The censorship regime grew so quickly and so wide that preeminent epidemiologists such as Jay Bhattacharya were not only silenced for their views but called “fringe epidemiologists”– by the head of the National Institutes of Health no less.

What was it that Bhattacharya said that got him and his colleagues that label? It was the Great Barrington Declaration which, as we know now—and many knew back then—merely stated mainstream epidemiological doctrine. There was nothing fringe about it whatsoever.

But the label worked and Bhattacharya and his colleagues Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta were ostracized from the scientific community and by the media.

Ironically, the Great Barrington Declaration is now widely accepted as the common sense approach to COVID. But when it mattered, the government, the media, and social media censored any mention of it.

We at The Epoch Times strongly rejected this and went in the other direction. We were among the first to give alternative voices a platform to be heard.

We had some experience with this from the Russia collusion saga where we were also among the first media outlets to pursue the real facts and not the Washington, D.C. narrative. Everything we wrote at that time has now been vindicated by the Durham Report which was published earlier this week.

The same can be said with respect to COVID. We were the first to report on many stories that were being censored by the corporate media. Lockdowns, masks, vaccines, and so on. I did not know Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff before COVID. We got to know each other because they resisted the censorship and Epoch was open to their ideas.

The Epoch Times also produced a documentary on the origin of COVID which was first broadcast on April 7, 2020, just as Anthony Fauci had started pushing his natural origin narrative.

I’ve just rewatched our documentary and looking back, we got almost everything right about the Wuhan lab. In fact two days after we first broadcast the documentary, the director of Anthony Fauci’s stateside lab at Galveston, a man called James Le Duc, who also happened to have personally trained Wuhan lab staff, started privately discussing our documentary with colleagues. They were all very much aware that the pandemic likely started at the lab.

So while Epoch was being chastised as a conspiracy theory outlet, the people at the center of the affair were privately discussing that Epoch was putting out the facts. It took years of FOIA litigation to obtain the emails of these public health officials which is how we know that their private views were the opposite of their public views.

Sadly, it was during this time that we were demonetized by YouTube—which is another indicator of the huge toolkit that tech giants have in controlling speech.

While I’m on the topic of YouTube, I can also share with you that we used to upload rough cuts of some of our upcoming shows on YouTube as a convenient way to collect comments from contributors. These videos were unlisted and not public. Only a few people had access. Yet when the videos talked about vaccines or masks, YouTube would take them down.

I don’t think we had a personal censor, it’s just that the algorithm scanned these videos, found that it contained certain forbidden words and so they were taken down. That’s the pernicious impact of technology.

Which brings us back to the First Amendment. A hundred years of American jurisprudence has maintained that in a free society speech must be free, even if it is untruthful.

As recently as 2012, Justice Anthony Kennedy—in United States v. Alvarez—affirmed that “The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true …. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.”

If the Great Barrington Declaration was unreasoned and uninformed, well, then free speech would have exposed its defects.

But there were no defects, which is why it had to be aggressively suppressed instead. That is the lesson here. Speech is not suppressed because it is wrong, it is suppressed because it interferes with someone’s agenda.

So what was the agenda and why did the government, the media, and social media rally around this one agenda rather than let alternative voices on COVID be heard?

There are of course many factors and many theories. Take Fauci for instance. He had many reasons to push a false narrative on COVID. For one thing, he knew there was a strong likelihood that his funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology had caused the pandemic in the first place.

But he had other reasons too. Fauci’s entire career had been centered on discovering universal vaccines. This is why he was pushing gain-of-function experiments. COVID was a once in a lifetime opportunity to fast track an entirely new genre of vaccines and to do it on a global scale. Correctly pointing out that COVID was not particularly dangerous for large swathes of the population, or highlighting the existence of alternative remedies, stood in the way of Fauci’s universal vaccine ambitions.

But that’s just Fauci. Why did everyone else jump on the bandwagon, casting aside a hundred years of not only medical science but also of hard earned civil liberties?

I think to answer that, we have to go back to Trump. When I talked about the beginnings of the government censorship regime, I did not only do so for historical context but also to show how Trump—specifically a deep dislike of Trump among the Washington, D.C. Beltway crowd—drove these efforts.

And I think it was that same motivation that drove many of the COVID censorship efforts. That’s not to say that there would have been no COVID censorship without Trump but dislike of Trump was certainly the glue that allowed all these various forces to coalesce.

When Trump said the virus came out of the Wuhan lab, there was an instant push toward the opposite narrative. When Trump said to try hydroxychloroquine, there was an instant push to outlaw off-label use of it. When Trump said to reopen the economy, the entire media complex aggressively pushed against that.

You get the point. Again and again, the forces of censorship were united by their dislike of Trump.

So how do we stop it from happening again?

One of the things that the pandemic starkly exposed is that there is a mechanism that can manufacture perceived consensus in our society, even when nothing near a consensus actually exists. It exposed that as human beings, many of us are susceptible to being influenced by that perceived consensus, journalists, scientists, government leaders, bureaucrats, and lay people alike.

We’re susceptible to this “megaphone,” as I like to call it.

The megaphone can influence us to dislike Trump, or dislike him more, or to dislike the person the powers that be anoint as the next Trump. It can influence us to be suspicious of, and even to demonize so-called “fringe epidemiologists” or “the unvaccinated.” It generates in us emotions that become deeply entrenched.

So what can we do?

We can set up and support parallel, truth-seeking organizations like The Chicago Thinker and The Epoch Times, like Hillsdale’s Academy for Science and Freedom that Drs. Arnn, Atlas, Bhattacharya & Kulldorff started to foster truth seeking in science (amazing that I have to say that!), like the Academic Sanity Consortium that is organizing this event.

But I would argue that it’s the censorship regime that has emerged as of 2017 that has particularly supercharged the megaphone.

The only immediate path is the legal path. Now is the time to set clear boundaries in stone, preferably by the Supreme Court.

That is why the case brought against the government by Missouri and Louisiana is so important. The case seeks a declaration that the government cannot get involved in policing speech. The declaration would block all federal government officials from collaborating, coercing, and colluding with media or social media companies to interfere with First Amendment rights.

Although Missouri and Louisiana have won a string of victories, the case will likely end up in the Supreme Court—which we should welcome.

A strong declaration from the Supreme Court that these public-private censorship efforts we saw during COVID are unlawful is probably the best insurance we can hope for right now to prevent future abuses

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-clash-of-truth-and-power-exposing-the-underbelly-of-covid-19-censorship_5310698.html ?

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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