Brownstone Institute
How Government and Big Tech Colluded to Usurp Constitutional rights
From the Brownstone Institute
“It is also axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” ~ Norwood v. Harrison (1973).
Fifty years ago, the Supreme Court held that the U.S. Government cannot coerce private parties to violate citizens’ constitutionally protected liberties. Under the guise of Covid responses, government officials defied this principle to strip Americans of their rights.
Behind Covid’s public spectacles – the memorable headlines of forced church closings, house arrest edicts, playground prohibitions, and bans on “unnecessary walking” – there was a coordinated effort to overthrow constitutional liberties.
Bureaucrats, federal officers, and elected officials colluded with Big Tech firms to accomplish unconstitutional aims. In doing so, they augmented government power and enriched Silicon Valley companies.
A federal-corporate collusion supplanted the American system of separation of powers and individual rights. This coup d’état usurped the Constitution and created a new ruling order of suppression and surveillance.
Suppression, Censorship, and the First Amendment
“Government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter or its content,” the Supreme Court decided in Ashcroft v. ACLU (2002). Yet, the Biden White House and the federal government seized that power under the shadow of Covid. They coerced, colluded, and encouraged social media companies to suppress speech that deviated from their preferred messaging.
The White House’s conduct in July 2021 exemplified this behavior. Publicly, officials launched a pressure campaign; privately, they conducted a direct censorship operation.
On July 15, 2021, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki discussed social media “disinformation” related to Covid-19 at her press briefing. “Facebook needs to move more quicky to remove harmful, violative posts,” she told reporters.
Her boss, President Joe Biden, spoke with the press the following day. Discussing social media companies, he remarked, “They’re killing people.”
Biden later clarified his remarks, explaining that he was advocating for censorship, not making personal attacks. “My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally that somehow I’m saying ‘Facebook is killing people,’ that they would do something about the misinformation,” he explained.
That week, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield appeared on MSNBC and said that social media “should be held accountable” and reiterated President Biden’s support for private actors to restrict the speech of journalists, advocates, and citizens.
Privately, government officials called for direct censorship of American citizens and journalists.
Twitter worked with the government to stifle criticism of the Biden administration related to Covid. For example, White House officials met with Twitter content moderators in April 2021 to coordinate censorship initiatives. White House officials specifically pressed Twitter on “why Alex Berenson [a journalist] hasn’t been kicked off from the platform.”
White House senior adviser Andy Slavitt continued to encourage Twitter to remove Berenson from the platform, and his efforts succeeded when Berenson received a “permanent ban” in August 2021, just weeks after the White House’s public pressure campaign.
White House officials encouraged Big Tech groups to censor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tucker Carlson for questioning vaccine efficacy. White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty demanded to know why Facebook had not removed a video of Carlson reporting the announcement that Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was linked to blood clots.
In January 2023, Reason revealed internal Facebook emails concerning the federal government’s campaign to censor users that deviated from Covid orthodoxy.
Robby Soave explains:
Facebook routinely asked the government to vet specific claims, including whether the virus was “man-made” rather than zoonotic in origin. (The CDC responded that a man-made origin was “technically possible” but “extremely unlikely.”) In other emails, Facebook asked: “For each of the following claims, which we’ve recently identified on the platform, can you please tell us if: the claim is false; and, if believed, could this claim contribute to vaccine refusals?”
These initiatives stifled dissent by infringing on American citizens’ speech; in doing so, they stripped millions of Americans of their First Amendment right to receive information.
In Martin v. City of Struthers (1941), Justice Hugo Black wrote that the First Amendment “embraces the right to distribute literature, and necessarily protects the right to receive it.” Nearly thirty years later, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote, “it is now well established that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas” in Stanley v. Georgia.
In defiance of this precedent, bureaucrats specifically sought to interfere with citizens’ right to hear criticism of government Covid policy. In his demands to Facebook regarding Carlson’s coverage of the J&J vaccine, Flaherty wrote, “There’s 40,000 shares on the video. Who is seeing it now? How many?”
Flaherty’s censorship pressure continued, “How was this not violative… What exactly is the rule for removal vs. demoting?”
Republican state attorneys general have sued the Biden administration for allegedly violating the First Amendment in its censorship promotion. Their case – Schmitt v. Biden – has uncovered communications between the Biden White House and social media companies.
The emails discovered in the case reveal an ongoing collusion to stifle dissent. Over fifty government bureaucrats, twelve federal agencies, and representatives from companies including Google, Twitter, and Facebook worked together to coordinate censorship efforts.
For example, Facebook employees met with officials at the Department of Health and Human Services the week after President Biden accused the company of “killing people.” A Facebook executive followed up with the HHS officials after the meeting:
“I wanted to make sure you saw the steps we took just this past week to adjust policies on what we are removing with respect to misinformation, as well as steps taken to further address the ‘disinfo dozen’: we removed 17 additional Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts tied to the disinfo dozen (so a total of 39 Profiles, Pages, Groups and IG accounts deleted thus far, resulting in every member of the disinfo dozen having had at least one such entity removed).”
In Bantam Books v. Sullivan (1963), the Court ruled that Rhode Island violated the First Amendment when a state commission advised book distributors against publishing certain content. In a concurring opinion, Justice Douglas wrote, “the censor and First Amendment rights are incompatible.”
Despite this constitutional incompatibility, the government deliberately and repeatedly encouraged and coerced private companies into censoring Americans’ speech.
Meanwhile, the fourth estate actively participated and profited from the censorship regime.
Amidst its efforts to censor dissent, the federal government siphoned tax dollars to media networks – including CNN, Fox News, and The Washington Post – to promote its official narrative. The US Department of Health and Human Services paid media outlets $1 billion to “strengthen vaccine confidence” in 2021 as part of a “comprehensive media campaign.”
At the same time, legacy media outlets like The Washington Post, The BBC, Reuters, and ABC partnered with Google, YouTube, Meta, and Twitter in the “Trusted News Initiative” to coordinate censorship initiatives. In “The Twitter Files,” journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that these tech firms held “regular meetings” – often with government officials – to discuss efforts to suppress speech critical of government narratives.
In summary, the government cannot restrict speech based on content, cannot decide what information a citizen can obtain, cannot advise private companies against publishing speech, and cannot use private entities to encourage unconstitutional aims. Yet our government launched a coordinated campaign, publicly and privately, to augment its powers and suppress citizens’ speech.
Surveillance. General Warrants, and the Fourth Amendment
In addition to suppressing dissent, the federal government’s Covid response usurped the protections of the Fourth Amendment in its partnership with Big Tech data brokers.
The Fourth Amendment guarantees citizens the right to be free from unreasonable government searches and seizures. Designed in response to the British practice of “general warrants,” the Framers sought to end a police system that provided the government nearly unrestrained access to searching colonists, their homes, and their belongings.
Since its ratification in 1791, the Supreme Court has maintained that technological advancements do not diminish the right of citizens to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures.
For example, in Kyllo v. United States (2001), the Court ruled that the use of thermal imagery to search a home violated the Fourth Amendment. Chief Justice Roberts later explained that Government – absent a warrant – “could not capitalize” on new technology to strip citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights.
In 2012, a unanimous Court ruled that warrantless GPS tracking violated the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights in United States v. Jones.
Six years later, the Court again ruled that the Government violated a defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights when it tracked a suspect by acquiring his cell phone location data from his wireless carrier.
In that case – Carpenter v. United States – Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Fourth Amendment’s “basic purpose” is to “safeguard the privacy and security of individuals against arbitrary invasions by government officials.”
During Covid, however, the United States government violated these legal holdings. Despite repeated rulings that the Government cannot use new technologies to infringe Fourth Amendment rights and clear precedent regarding the use of GPS and cell phone location data, the CDC used taxpayer funds to purchase Americans’ cell phone data from data broker SafeGraph.
In May 2022, Vice revealed that the CDC used cell phone data to track the location of tens of millions of Americans during Covid.
At first, the agency used this data to track compliance with lockdown orders, vaccine promotions, attendance at churches, and other Covid-related initiatives. Additionally, the agency explained that the “mobility data” will be available for further “agency-wide use” and “numerous CDC priorities.”
SafeGraph sold this information to federal bureaucrats, who then used the data to spy on millions of Americans’ behavior, including where they visited and whether they complied with house arrest orders. This created a digital “general warrant” unshackled from Constitutional restraints.
In other words, big tech firms profited from surreptitious schemes in which the U.S. Government used taxpayer dollars to violate the Fourth Amendment rights of the citizens that fund their operations. Unelected officials at the CDC then tracked Americans’ movements, religious observances, and medical activity.
A similar process occurred at the state level.
In Massachusetts, the state Department of Public Health worked with Google to secretly install Covid-tracing software on citizens’ smartphones. The public-private partnership created “MassNotify,” an app that tracks and traces people’s locations. The program appeared on citizens’ phones without their consent.
Robert Wright, a Massachusetts resident, and Johnny Kula, a New Hampshire resident who commutes to Massachusetts to work every day, have brought a legal action against the state. “Conspiring with a private company to hijack residents’ smartphones without the owners’ knowledge or consent is not a tool that the Massachusetts Department of Public Health may lawfully employ in its efforts to combat COVID-19,” they say in their complaint.
Public officials also used citizens’ GPS data to support their election campaigns in 2020. Voter analytics firm PredictWise boasted that it used “nearly 2 billion GPS pings” from Americans’ cell phones to assign citizens a “COVID-19 decree violation” score and a “COVID-19 concern” score.
PredictWise explained that the Arizona Democratic Party used these “scores” and collections of personal data to influence voters to support US Senator Mark Kelly. The firm’s clients include the Democratic parties of Florida, Ohio, and South Carolina.
Politicians and government agencies repeatedly and deliberately augmented their power by tracking their citizens and thus depriving them of their Fourth Amendment rights. They then analyzed that information, assigned citizens compliance “scores,” and used the spyware to manipulate voters to maintain their positions of authority.
In effect, government forces used Covid as a pretext to return to the system of general warrants that the Framers designed the Fourth Amendment to abolish. Government officials gained access to citizens’ movements, locations, and travel patterns, and they used the citizens’ tax dollars to do it.
The collusion of government and corporate power siphoned millions of dollars from taxpayers while abolishing the Fourth Amendment safeguards that protect citizens against arbitrary invasions by government officials.
In 1975, Senator Frank Church led a government investigation into intelligence agencies’ domestic spy programs that targeted groups including anti-war protestors and civil rights leaders. Senator Church, speaking of the agencies’ covert capability nearly 50 years ago, warned, “That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”
Not only did the government turn its capability on the American people, but it recruited the most powerful information companies in the history of the world to advance its agenda, leaving American citizens poorer, stripped of their rights, and left with no place to hide.
How did it happen here?
Most of these Constitutional violations will never have their day in court. In addition to stripping Americans of their rights, the ruling class has insulated Covid’s hegemonic forces from legal liability.
No matter the result of the ongoing cases, including Schmidt v. Biden and Wright v. Mass. Department of Public Health – the questions loom: How did we lose our Bill of Rights so quickly? How did it happen here?
Justice Antonin Scalia noted that the Bill of Rights cannot serve as a safeguard against tyranny on its own. “If you think a bill of rights is what sets us apart, you’re crazy,” he said. “Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights.”
The key to safeguarding liberty, according to Scalia, is the separation of powers.
Commenting on the Constitution of the Soviet Union’s extensive guarantees of freedoms of speech, assembly, political affiliation, religion, and conscience, Scalia wrote:
“They were not worth the paper they were printed on, as are the human rights guarantees of a large number of still-extant countries governed by Presidents-for-life. They are what the Framers of our Constitution called ‘parchment guarantees,’ because the real constitutions of those countries—the provisions that establish the institutions of government—do not prevent the centralization of power in one man or one party, thus enabling the guarantees to be ignored. Structure is everything.”
Our Constitution created a structure of government with multiple levels of separation of powers. But, to the detriment of Americans’ liberties, the federal government and Big Tech supplanted that structure with a federal-corporate partnership devoid of constitutional restraints.
Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett describes the Constitution as “the law that governs those who govern us.” But those who govern us deliberately disregarded constraints on their own authority and led a coup against their citizens in partnership with Big Tech.
Covid served a pretext for a convergence of power that left our Bill of Rights as little more than a “parchment guarantee.”
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
How many genuine, shocking – and unexposed – scandals actually occurred in the last four years? To partially answer this question, I composed another of my List Columns.
The Most Epic of Scandals Might Be…
The world’s most epic scandal might be the massive number of citizens who’ve died prematurely in the last four years. This scandal could also be expressed as the vast number of people whose deaths were falsely attributed to Covid.
My main areas of focus – “early spread” – informed my thinking when I reached this stunning conclusion: Almost every former living person said to have died “from Covid” probably did not die from Covid.
The scandal is that (unreported) “democide” occurred, meaning that government policies and deadly healthcare “guidance” more plausibly explain the millions of excess deaths that have occurred since late March 2020.
My research into early spread suggests that the real Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of Covid should have already been known by the lockdowns of mid-March 2020.
If, as I believe, many millions of world citizens had already contracted this virus and had not died, the Covid IFR would be the same, or perhaps even lower, than the IFR for the common flu – said to be 1 death per 1,000 infections (0.1 percent).
Expressed differently, almost 100 percent of people who contracted this virus did not die from it – a fact which could and should have been known early in the “pandemic.” The fact this information was concealed from the public qualifies as a massive scandal.
Evidence That Would ‘Prove’ This Scandal
Furthermore, one does not need early spread “conjecture” to reach the conclusion that only a minute number of people who were infected by this virus later died from Covid.
After April 2020, a researcher could pick any large group or organization and simply ascertain how many people in these groups later died “from Covid.”
For example, more than 10,000 employees work for the CDC. About 10 months ago, I sent an email to the CDC and asked their media affairs department how many of the CDC’s own employees have died from Covid in the past three-plus years.
This question – which would be easy to answer – was never answered. This example of non-transparency is, to me, a massive “tell” and should be “scandalous.”
To be more precise, if the CDC could document that, say, 10 of their employees had died from Covid, this would equate to a disease with a mortality risk identical to the flu.
My strong suspicion is that fewer than 10 CDC employees have died from Covid in the last four years, which would mean the CDC knows from its own large sample group that Covid is/was not more deadly than influenza.
I’ve performed the same extrapolations with other groups made up of citizens whose Covid deaths would have made headlines.
For example, hundreds of thousands if not millions of high school, college, and pro athletes must have contracted Covid by today’s date. However, it is a challenge to find one definitive case of a college or pro athlete who died from Covid.
For young athletes – roughly ages 14 to 40 – the Covid IFR is either 0.0000 percent or very close to this microscopic fraction.
One question that should be obvious given the “athlete” example is why would any athlete want or need an experimental new mRNA “vaccine” when there’s a zero-percent chance this disease would ever kill this person?
The scandal is that sports authorities – uncritically accepting “guidance” from public health officials – either mandated or strongly encouraged (via coercion) that every athlete in the world receive Covid shots and then, later, booster shots.
Of course, the fact these shots would be far more likely to produce death or serious adverse events than a bout with Covid should be a massive scandal.
More Scandals
Needless to say, all the major pediatrician groups issued the same guidance for children.
In Pike County, Alabama, I can report that in four years no child/student between the ages of 5 and 18 has died from Covid.
I also recognize that the authorized “fact” is that millions of Americans have now “died from Covid.” However, I believe this figure is a scandalous lie, one supported by PCR test results that would be questioned in a world where investigating certain scandals was not taboo.
Yet another scandal is that officials and the press de-emphasized the fact the vast majority of alleged victims were over the age of 79, had multiple comorbid conditions, were often nursing home residents, and, among the non-elderly, came from the poorest sections of society.
These revelations – which would not advance the desired narrative that everyone should be very afraid – are similar to many great scandals that have been exposed from time to time in history.
Namely, officials in positions of power and trust clearly conspired to cover up or conceal information that would have exposed their own malfeasance, professional incompetence, and/or graft.
This Might Be the No. 1 Scandal of Our Times
As I’ve written ad nauseam, perhaps the most stunning scandal of our times is that all-important “truth-seeking” organizations have become completely captured.
At the top of this list are members of the so-called Fourth Estate or “watchdog” press (at least in the corporate or “mainstream” media).
In previous articles, I’ve estimated that at least 40,000 Americans work as full-time journalists or editors for mainstream “news organizations.” Hundreds of MSM news-gathering organizations “serve” their readers and viewers.
In this very large group, I can’t think of one journalist, editor, publisher, or news organization who endeavored to expose any of the dubious claims of the public health establishment.
When 100 percent of professionals charged with exposing scandals are themselves working to conceal shocking revelations…this too should qualify as a massive scandal.
To the above “captured classes” one could add college professors and administrators, 99 percent of plaintiffs’ trial lawyers, 100 percent of CEOs of major corporations, almost all elected politicians, and, with the exception of perhaps Sweden, every one of the public health agencies in the world, plus all major medical groups and prestigious science journals.
Or This Might Be Our Greatest Scandal
Yet another scandal – perhaps the most sinister of them all – would be the coordinated conspiracy to silence, muffle, intimidate, bully, cancel, demonetize, and stigmatize the classes of brave and intelligent dissidents who have attempted to reveal a litany of shocking truths.
The Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC) is not a figment of a conspiracy theorist’s imagination.
The CIC is as real as Media Matters, News Guard, The Trusted News Initiative, the Stanford Virality Project, and the 15,000-plus “content moderators” who probably still work for Facebook.
Government officials in myriad agencies of “President” Joe Biden’s administration constantly pressured social media companies to censor content that didn’t fit the authorized narrative (although these bullying projects didn’t require much arm-twisting).
Here, the scandal is that the country’s “adults in the room” were identified as grave threats to the agenda of the Powers that Be and were targeted for extreme censorship and punishment.
When people and organizations principled enough to try to expose scandals are targeted by the State and the State’s crony partners, this guarantees future scandals are unlikely to be exposed…which means the same unexposed leaders are going to continue to inflict even greater harm on the world population.
This Scandal Is Hard to Quantify
Other scandals are more difficult to quantify. For example, it’s impossible to know how many citizens now “self-censor” because they know the topics they should not discuss outside of conversations with close friends.
This point perhaps illustrates the state of the world’s “New Normal” – a now-accepted term that is scandalous if one simply thinks about the predicates of this modifier.
It should be a scandal that the vast majority of world citizens now eagerly submit to or comply with the dictates and speech parameters imposed on them by the world’s leadership classes.
The “New Normal” connotes that one should accept increasing assaults on previously sacrosanct civil liberties.
What is considered “normal” – and should now be accepted without protest – was, somehow, changed.
As I routinely write, what the world has lived through the past four-plus years is, in fact, a New Abnormal.
This Orwellian change of definition would qualify as a shocking scandal except for the fact most people now self-censor to remain in the perceived safety of their social and workplace herds.
The bottom line – a sad one – might be that none of the above scandals would have been possible if more members of the public had been capable of critical thinking and exhibited a modicum of civic courage.
As it turns out, the exposure of scandals would require large numbers of citizens to look into the mirror (or their souls) and perform self-analysis, an exercise in introspection that would not be pain-free.
It’s also a scandal our leaders knew they could manipulate the masses so easily.
Considering all of these points, it seems to me that the captured leadership classes must have known that the vast majority of the population would trust the veracity of their claims and policy prescriptions.
That is, they knew there would be no great pushback from “the masses.”
If the above observation isn’t a scandal, it’s depressing to admit or acknowledge this is what happened.
To End on a Hopeful Note
What gives millions of citizens hope is that, belatedly, more citizens might be growing weary of living in a world where every scandal cannot be exposed.
Donald Trump winning a presidential election by margins “too big to steal” is a sign of national hope.
Mr. Trump nominating RFK, Jr. to supervise the CDC, NIH, and FDA is definitely a sign of hope, an appointment that must outrage and terrify the world’s previous leadership classes.
For far too long, America’s greatest scandal has been that no important scandals can be exposed. Today, however, it seems possible this state of affairs might not remain our New Normal forever.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health”
Didn’t give much thought to freedom until four years ago, at age 63. Freedom was just there, like the water surrounding a goldfish. And then the Covid-19 pandemic blew in, the world locked down, and admonitions to “stay the ‘$^#&’ home” blazed through social media. No freedom was too important to discard in the name of public safety: jobs, family businesses, artistic endeavours, public meetings, social connections that kept despair at bay, all took a backseat to the grim business of saving grandma (who ended up getting Covid anyway). No discussion of moral or practical trade-offs, no pushback from the press, nothing. It felt wrong to me on a cellular level.
Apparently I was the only one in my middle-class liberal circle to harbour misgivings about this astonishing new world. If I tried, ever so timidly, to articulate my concerns on Facebook or Twitter, the online warriors shot back with a string of epithets. “Go lick a pole and catch the virus,” said one. “Crawl back into your cave, troglodyte,” said another. And my all-time favourite: “You’re nothing but a mouth-breathing Trumptard.”
From the get-go, I perceived Covid as more of a philosophical problem than a scientific one. As I wrote on more than one occasion, science can inform our decisions, but not dictate them. What ultimately powers our choices are the values we hold. I saw Covid as a morality play, with freedom and safety cast as the duelling protagonists, and it looked like safety was skipping to an easy victory.
It was a heady time for the health bureaucrats, whose increasingly arcane rules betrayed a naked impulse to control: the Canadian high-school students required to use masks on both their faces and their wind instruments during band practice, the schoolchildren forced (for hygiene reasons) to study on their knees for hours in an Alaska classroom, the “glory-hole” sex advised by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. The lack of public pushback against these absurdities heightened my awareness of the fragility of our freedoms.
One of the earliest memes to surface during the pandemic was “muh freedumb.” The locution became a shorthand for a stock character – a tattooed man wearing camo gear and a baseball cap, spewing viral particles while yelling about his rights. A selfish idiot. The memes kept coming: “Warning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.” “Personal freedom is the preoccupation of adult children.” Freedom, for centuries an aspiration of democratic societies, turned into a laughing stock.
Eventually, pro-freedom voices began trickling into the public arena. I wasn’t alone, after all. There were others who understood, in the words of Telegraph writer Janet Daley, that the institutional response to Covid-19 had steamrolled over “the dimension of human experience which gives meaning and value to private life.” Lionel Shriver decried how “across the Western world, freedoms that citizens took for granted seven months ago have been revoked at a stroke.” And Laura Dodsworth brought tears to my eyes when she wrote, in her 2021 book A State of Fear, that she feared authoritarianism more than death.
Once the vaccines rolled out, the war on freedom of conscience went nuclear. If you breathed a word against the products, or even the mandates, you were “literally killing people.” The hostility towards the “unvaxxed” culminated in a Toronto Star front page showcasing public vitriol, splashed with such sentiments as: “I honestly don’t care if they die from Covid. Not even a little bit.”
This, too, felt viscerally wrong. I knew several people who had refused the vaccine, and they all had well-articulated reasons for their stance. If they didn’t fully trust the “safe and effective” bromide recycled by all government and pharmaceutical industry spokespeople, I could hardly blame them. (And I say this as someone who writes for Big Pharma and got five Covid shots.)
One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture was freedom of expression, a core principle in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing news outlets. By early 2021, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 83 governments worldwide had used the Covid-19 pandemic to violate the lawful exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health,” the group wrote in a media release. “The victims include journalists, activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.”
But what about misinformation? Doesn’t it kill people? Newsflash: misinformation has always existed, even before TikTok. It’s up to each of us to sift the credible folks from the cranks. The best defence against misinformation is better information, and it’s the policy wonks’ job to provide it. Modern science itself depends on this tug-of-war of ideas, which filters out weaker hypotheses and moves stronger ones ahead for further testing.
Besides, misinformation comes not just from cranks, but from “official sources” – especially those tasked with persuading the public, rather than informing it. Remember when Rochelle Walensky, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, asserted that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus?” Or when Anthony Fauci maintained that getting vaccinated makes you a “dead end” in the chain of transmission? I rest my case.
The marketplace of ideas is like a souk, with a lot of hollering and arguing and the odd snatched purse – and that’s exactly how it should be. It’s an ingenious and irreplaceable process for getting to the truth. There are few ideas too sacrosanct to question or too ridiculous to consider. That’s why, unlike just about everyone in my left-leaning circle, I take no issue with Elon Musk’s shakedown of the old Twitter, now the Wild West of X.
Under Musk’s algorithms, my feed has become a true philosophical souk, with wildly disparate views smashing into each other, leaving me to sift through the rubble in search of a gold nugget or two. Love him or hate him, Musk offers a much-needed counterweight to the ideological lockstep in much of the mainstream media. And when it comes to free speech, Musk has put his money where his mouth is: when media personality Keith Olbermann recently hopped on X, where he boasts a million followers, to call for Musk’s arrest and detainment, Musk made no move to censor him. Works for me.
While the “old normal” has thankfully returned to our daily lives, save the odd mask in a shopping mall or subway car, the stench of censorship that blew in with the pandemic has yet to dissipate. An obsession with disinformation permeates the zeitgeist, spurring lawmakers in several Western countries to censor the flow of thoughts and ideas that gives a free society its pulse.
We cannot excise personal freedom from a democratic society, even in the interests of the “public good,” without poisoning the roots of democracy itself. Article 3 of UNESCO’s 2005 Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights states this plainly: “The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.” In our post-pandemic reality, the statement seems almost quaint. Nonetheless, it expresses an enduring truth: that a democracy must never discard the idea of freedom – even in a pandemic.
Freedom desperately needs a comeback from its current incarnation as an expendable frill. In my own small way I’m trying to make this happen: never much of an activist before Covid, I’m now part of a small group preparing to launch a Free Speech Union in Canada, modelled after the highly successful one in the UK. The organisation will offer legal advice to individuals facing censorship, cancellation, or job loss because of their words. I look forward to supporting people caught in this anti-freedom web, including those whose words I heartily disagree with.
My newfound respect for free speech is also what propels me to keep talking about Covid. The response to the pandemic exceeded the bounds of public health, and we need to expose the forces that drove it. Here’s Daley again: “The world went crazy. There is no other way to account for what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.” We can’t let it happen again.
Republished from Perspective Media
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