Brownstone Institute
How an Occupied Twitter Ruined Countless Lives
From the Brownstone Institute
From the beginning of the Covid panic, it felt that something was very wrong. Never had a pandemic, much less a seasonal pathogenic wave, been treated as a quasi-military emergency requiring the upending of all freedoms and rights.
What made it more bizarre was how alone those of us who objected felt until very recently when Elon Musk finally bought the platform Twitter, fired all the embedded federal agents, and has started to release the files.
As Elon said, every conspiracy theory about Twitter was true and then some. And what applies at Twitter pertains equally to Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all platforms associated with those companies (YouTube, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp).
The proof is all there. These platforms colluded with the federal government’s administrative arm to craft a particular Covid narrative, throttling and censoring dissidents and boosting any credentialled expert who was willing to toe the line.
At this point, it is wise to trust no one and nothing but those who fought against this nonsense. As the crisis began, I was blessed with an unusually large reach on most platforms. But I sat by and watched it dwindle to nothingness as the months went on. Yes, I had posts pulled but I was never banned. It’s just that my channels of communication shrunk dramatically by the months and weeks.
This was tragic for me simply because I watched the population gradually fall into a medieval-style disease panic that tore families apart, kept loved ones from traveling, wrecked businesses and churches, and even violated the sanctity of the homes. This “invisible enemy” about which everyone in government was going on about shredded the whole social fabric.
I had been writing about pandemics and interventions for 16 years, warning repeatedly that this was possible. Knowing about this history, and having a platform to speak, I felt a very strong moral obligation to share my knowledge if only to make some contribution to calm people down and perhaps relax some of the impositions on liberty. But at that very moment, my voice was nearly silenced. And I was hardly alone. Hundreds and thousands of others were in the same position but we had a very difficult time even finding each other.
There was one exception early on. I wrote a piece on Woodstock and the 1968-69 flu season. A fact-checker rated it as true and the Facebook algorithms really screwed up. Facebook pushed it out for about two weeks before someone figured out what was happening and then throttled it back heavily. Or perhaps there was one employee there who made it so. I really do not know. In the meantime, this one article garnered millions of views and shares.
It was my first experience with the astounding power of these venues to shape the public mind. People innocently use all these tools without the slightest understanding that there is a reason why they are seeing what they are seeing. Every word or picture you see on your apps is there for a reason, a choice of this or that, and the driving force here is what powerful people what you to see and not see.
We know now that the stream of information is carefully curated by algorithms and human intervention, not to fit with your interests as they once claimed, but to fit with regime interests.
In other words, what people used to say about the CCP role in the management of TikTok applies fully in the US today with all the main tech companies. And please keep in mind, we only know this because of the dump of Twitter files. All of this is still happening at Google, Meta, and LinkedIn. The latter removes posts by Brownstone often. And the rest throttle our reach.
This has been going on for years, but Covid intensified it all. Even from the beginning, something was very off. For example, on March 19 – the day after the Fauci/Birx/Trump press conference and the day before CISA seized control of all labor markets – an obscure digital education entrepreneur named Thomas Pueyo came out with an implausibly documented and comprehensively argued piece called The Hammer and the Dance.
It was an elaborate argument for locking down to flatten the curve, complete with fancy graphs and pseudo-scientific blather of every sort. The author was essentially unknown but within 24 hours, the piece was garnering many millions of shares and being spread everywhere by all the big tech platforms, as if it were some kind of canonical treatise. I doubt seriously that he wrote it – no way in one day; it had to be planned for weeks – but rather that he volunteered his name to be attached to it. It became the most important framing of the lockdown that appeared that month.
Watching that one preposterous article take over so aggressively, even as dissidents’ writings slipped into nothingness, including my own, was quite a bit of digital magic to behold. But we know now it was not magic. It was a policy. It was an intention. It was a propaganda ploy. Again, we must understand that this is still going on right now, with the only real exception among the larger players being Twitter.
There is one solace. We know now that we were not all going crazy. It was all deliberate. Matt Taibbi puts it well:
Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define. Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the crazy one?
I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm. This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight years.
So far, thanks to the great work of David Zweig, who has somehow managed to elude the censors all along (he was in attendance at the original Great Barrington Declaration event, god bless him), we have a better accounting of what happened. Names we all recognize as friends are listed, including Martin Kulldorff and Andrew Bostom, but there are thousands more. There is no question in my mind that my own accounts were targeted.
This is about much more than free speech and the operation of media channels without government intervention. The Covid controls utterly smashed American liberty and social functioning, resulting in mass suffering, educational losses, shattered communities, and a precipitous collapse in public health that has shaved off years in life expectancy and caused an explosion of excess deaths.
It might have been stopped or at least lessened in duration with some open discussion. This is not just of interest to tech and legal geeks. The closing down of opinion and debate resulted in unspeakable human carnage. And even as I write, the largest sources of the mainstream media are still refusing to report on this.
Ask yourself: why might this be? I think we all know the answer.
As a final note, I can assure you that this is only the beginning. The full story ropes in the whole of the administrative state, FTX, huge nonprofit organizations, and many back channels of power, money, and truly evil collaboration. We may never get the full story, and justice as always will be elusive, but we cannot let this moment in history slip by without as much accountability as we can provide.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
This article was co-authored with Mary Beth Pfieffer.
In a seismic political shift, Republicans have laid claim to an issue that Democrats left in the gutter—the declining health of Americans. True, it took a Democrat with a famous name to ask why so many people are chronically ill, disabled, and dying younger than in 47 other countries. But the message resonated with the GOP.
We have a proposal in this unfolding milieu. Let’s have a serious, nuanced discussion. Let’s retire labels that have been weaponized against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, and many people like him.
Start with discarding threadbare words like “conspiracy theory,” “anti-vax,” and the ever-changing “misinformation.”
These linguistic sleights of hand have been deployed—by government, media, and vested interests—to dismiss policy critics and thwart debate. If post-election developments tell us anything, it is that such scorn may no longer work for a population skeptical of government overreach.
Although RFK has been lambasted for months in the press, he just scored a 47 percent approval rating in a CBS poll.
Americans are asking: Is RFK on to something?
Perhaps, as he contends, a 1986 law that all but absolved vaccine manufacturers from liability has spawned an industry driven more by profit than protection.
Maybe Americans agree with RFK that the FDA, which gets 69 percent of its budget from pharmaceutical companies, is potentially compromised. Maybe Big Pharma, similarly, gets a free pass from the television news media that it generously supports. The US and New Zealand, incidentally, are the only nations on earth that allow “direct-to-consumer” TV ads.
Finally, just maybe there’s a straight line from this unhealthy alliance to the growing list of 80 childhood shots, inevitably approved after cursory industry studies with no placebo controls. The Hepatitis B vaccine trial, for one, monitored the effects on newborns for just five days. Babies are given three doses of this questionably necessary product—intended to prevent a disease spread through sex and drug use.
Pointing out such conflicts and flaws earns critics a label: “anti-vaxxer.”
Misinformation?
If RFK is accused of being extreme or misdirected, consider the Covid-19 axioms that Americans were told by their government.
The first: The pandemic started in animals in Wuhan, China. To think otherwise, Wikipedia states, is a “conspiracy theory,” fueled by “misplaced suspicion” and “anti-Chinese racism.”
Not so fast. In a new 520-page report, a Congressional subcommittee linked the outbreak to risky US-supported virus research at a Wuhan lab at the pandemic epicenter. After 25 hearings, the subcommittee found no evidence of “natural origin.”
Is the report a slam dunk? Maybe not. But neither is an outright dismissal of a lab leak.
The same goes for other pandemic dogma, including the utility of (ineffective) masks, (harmful) lockdowns, (arbitrary) six-foot spacing, and, most prominently, vaccines that millions were coerced to take and that harmed some.
Americans were told, wrongly, that two shots would prevent Covid and stop the spread. Natural immunity from previous infection was ignored to maximize vaccine uptake.
Yet there was scant scientific support for vaccinating babies with little risk, which few other countries did; pregnant women (whose deaths soared 40 percent after the rollout), and healthy adolescents, including some who suffered a heart injury called myocarditis. The CDC calls the condition “rare;” but a new study found 223 times more cases in 2021 than the average for all vaccines in the previous 30 years.
Truth Muzzled?
Beyond this, pandemic decrees were not open to question. Millions of social media posts were removed at the behest of the White House. The ranks grew both of well-funded fact-checkers and retractions of countervailing science.
The FDA, meantime, created a popular and false storyline that the Nobel Prize-winning early-treatment drug ivermectin was for horses, not people, and might cause coma and death. Under pressure from a federal court, the FDA removed its infamous webpage, but not before it cleared the way for unapproved vaccines, possible under the law only if no alternative was available.
An emergency situation can spawn official missteps. But they become insidious when dissent is suppressed and truth is molded to fit a narrative.
The government’s failures of transparency and oversight are why we are at this juncture today. RFK—should he overcome powerful opposition—may have the last word.
The conversation he proposes won’t mean the end of vaccines or of respect for science. It will mean accountability for what happened in Covid and reform of a dysfunctional system that made it possible.
Republished from RealClearHealth
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The only way to restore public trust in vaccination – which has taken a big hit since the lies attending the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine – is to put a well-known vaccine skeptic in charge of the vaccine research agenda. The ideal person for this is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
At the same time, we must put rigorous scientists with a proven track record of evidence-based medicine in charge of determining the type of study designs to use. Two ideal scientists for this are Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Marty Makary, who have been nominated to lead the NIH and FDA, respectively.
Vaccines are – along with antibiotics, anesthesia, and sanitation – one of the most significant health inventions in history. First conceived in 1774 by Benjamin Jesty, a farmer in Dorsetshire, England, the smallpox vaccine alone has saved millions of lives. Operation Warp Speed, which rapidly developed the Covid vaccines, saved many older Americans. Despite this, we have seen a sharp increase in general vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine scientists and public health officials who did not conduct properly randomized trials made false claims about vaccine efficacy and safety and established vaccine mandates for people who did not need the vaccines, sowing suspicion and damaging public trust in vaccination.
What went wrong? The purpose of the Covid vaccines was to reduce mortality and hospitalization, but the randomized trials were only designed to demonstrate short-term reduction in Covid symptoms, which is not of great public health importance. Since the placebo groups were promptly vaccinated after the emergency approval, they also failed to provide reliable information about adverse reactions. Despite these flaws, it was falsely claimed that vaccine-induced immunity is superior to natural infection-acquired immunity and that the vaccines would prevent infection and transmission.
Governments and universities then mandated the vaccines for people with superior natural immunity and for young people with very low mortality risk. These mandates were not only unscientific but with a limited vaccine supply, it was unethical to vaccinate low-mortality-risk people when the vaccines were needed by older high-risk people around the world.
Since government and pharmaceutical companies lied about the Covid vaccine, are they also lying about other vaccines? Skepticism has now spread to tried-and-true vaccines that are proven to work.
And there are real, unanswered vaccine safety questions. Seminal work from Denmark has shown that vaccines can have both positive and negative non-specific effects on non-targeted diseases, and that is something that must be explored in greater depth. Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) scientists studying asthma and aluminum-containing vaccines concluded that while their “findings do not constitute strong evidence for questioning the safety of aluminum in vaccines…additional examination of this hypothesis appears warranted.”
While VSD and other scientists should continue to do observational studies, we should also conduct randomized placebo-controlled vaccine trials, as RFK has advocated. Since we have herd immunity for many diseases, such as measles, trials can be ethically conducted by randomizing the age of vaccination to, for example, one versus three years old, while spreading the trial over a large geographical area so that the unvaccinated are not all living close to each other.
I am confident that most vaccines will continue to be found safe and effective. While some problems may be found, that is more likely to increase rather than decrease vaccine confidence. For instance, it was found that the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV) vaccine causes excess febrile seizures in 12- to 23-month-old children. MMRV is now only given as a second dose to older children, while the younger kids get separate MMR and varicella vaccines, resulting in fewer vaccine-induced seizures that scare parents. Although safety studies were inconclusive, it was also wise to remove mercury from vaccines. Even if we end up with fewer vaccines in the recommended vaccine schedule, that’s not necessarily a terrible thing. Scandinavia has a very healthy population with fewer vaccines in their schedules.
We won’t restore vaccine confidence by preaching to the choir. After the Covid debacle, Kennedy’s stated goal is to return to evidence-based medicine free from conflicts of interest. Letting him do that is the only way that skeptics will trust vaccines again, and those of us who trust vaccines have no reason to be afraid of that.
Attempts by the public health and pharma establishments to derail the nominations of RFK, Bhattacharya, and Makary are the surest way to further increase vaccine hesitancy in America. The choice is stark. We cannot let lopsided “pro-vaccine scientists” who clamp their hands over their ears at the mildest questions do any more harm to vaccine confidence. As a pro-vaccine scientist, and in fact, the only person ever being fired by the CDC for being too pro-vaccine, the choice is clear in my mind. To restore vaccine confidence to previous levels, we must support the nominations of Kennedy, Bhattacharya, and Makary.
Republished from RealClearPolitics
Author
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