Covid Censorship

The United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana recently blocked numerous federal agencies and the White House from collaborating with social-media companies and third-party groups to censor speech. The judge noted that this is “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” that the Biden administration has “blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech,” and that the Biden administration “almost exclusively targeted conservative speech.” Attorney General Bailey’s motion for preliminary injunction highlighted over 1,400 facts from more than 20,000 pages of evidence exposing the vast censorship enterprise coordinated across multiples agencies within the federal government.

The Court judge specifically found: 

• At least 22 times, the White House engaged in “unrelenting pressure” against tech companies. “White House Defendants engaged in coercion to induce social-media companies to suppress free speech.” “The White House Defendants made it very clear to social-media companies what they wanted suppressed and what they wanted amplified. Faced with unrelenting pressure from the most powerful office in the world, the social-media companies apparently complied.”
• “[T]he Hunter Biden laptop story was real, and not mere Russian disinformation,” and the “FBI’s failure to alert social-media companies” to this fact “is particularly troubling” after the FBI had falsely suggested to social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop story was fake.
• Facebook suppressed information at the demand of the White House, the FBI, and other federal agents even though the information “did not violate Facebook’s policies” and thus ordinarily would not have been suppressed.
• Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki issued a “threat of ‘legal consequences’” to social media companies “if they do not censor misinformation more aggressively.”
• The “motivation” of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other defendants was specifically “a ‘take down’ of protected free speech.” 
• The Department of Homeland Security “met with social-media companies to both inform and pressure them to censor content protected by the First Amendment.” It then “expanded the word ‘infrastructure’ in its terminology to include ‘cognitive’ infrastructure, so as to create authority to monitor and suppress protected free speech posted on social media.”
• DHS “Defendants believe they had a mandate to control the process of acquiring knowledge.” 
• DHS helped create a pseudo-private organization “to get around unclear legal authorities, including very real First Amendment questions.”
• Although much of the past suppression involved COVID and elections, federal officials “have also shown a willingness to do it with regard to other issues, such as gas prices, parody speech, calling the President a liar, climate change, gender, and abortion” as well as political criticism about “the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the return of U.S. Support of Ukraine.” 

The judge ordered the Biden administration to stop this “almost dystopian scenario” of “us[ing] its power to silence the opposition.”

Elon Musk’s release of some of Twitter’s internal files revealed that up to 80 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were embedded with social-media companies. The agents were primarily flagging opinions not favored by the government, including eminent scientists who suggested different paths on Covid policy and helping to suppress them.

Medical schools, medical boards, science journals and legacy pursued the same policy of censorship. Many doctors stayed quiet after witnessing the demonization of their peers who challenged the Covid orthodoxy and millions of patients were deprived of important insights as a result. The “experts” denied the protective effects of recovered immunity, a settled fact know about for centuries. They effectively prohibited generic drugs approved by the FDA, such as azithromycin and ivermectin, which low-income nations around the world were deploying successfully. Young and middle-age healthy people began dying in unprecedented numbers from non-covid heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary embolisms, kidney failure and cancer possibly as a result of taking an under-tested vaccine.

The fascist censorship by the government, media and medical establishment, related to Covid, appears to have contributed to many deaths and bad health outcomes. Excess mortality in most high-income nations was worse in 2021 and 2022 than in 2020, the initial pandemic year. Mental health problems have abounded for those forced to stay isolated at home. We must consistently stand for free speech, including the tolerance of different opinions, even in the medical field. Science is properly deployed by allowing questioning and testing of formerly accepted conclusions. As Nobel price physicist Richard Feynman has stated “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”