Brownstone Institute
The Deception Is Getting More Brazen
One of the most disappointing aspects of the COVID pandemic has been the willingness of adults to impose untested restrictions and policies on young children, while ignoring any potential negative impacts to their mandates.
Without pushback from the media, supposed “experts” have recommended school closures, remote learning, forced masking and now, universal vaccination for children ages 6 months-<5 years.
The lack of data or evidence suggesting a benefit to these policies has seemingly never been a hindrance to their recommendations. In fact, it often feels as if they dare others to point out that their policy mandates are not based on any high quality research.
Instead of engaging with the mountains of substantive criticism of their methodology or the discrediting flaws of the “studies” they reference, they simply revert back to appeals to authority.
They’re right, because they say so.
This phenomenon has often been applied to “interventions” forced on children, but it’s also easily applicable to the debate over the origins of COVID.
For much of the first year of the pandemic, “experts” and the “fact checking” media colluded to ensure that discussion of the lab leak theory would be censored and users banned for suggesting it as a possibility.
Only after the approved political sources deemed it acceptable to discuss did social media companies relent.
Except one of the world’s supposed leading “experts,” the head of the World Health Organization, has apparently been telling people privately that he believes the lab leak is the most likely explanation for the origin of the virus.
Of course, none involved in the expert approved censorship will apologize or demand changes as a result.
Because whatever they say is right. No matter how many times they’re wrong first.
You’d think that being caught lying, misrepresenting evidence or flouting their own rules would be enough to instill a level of shame in politicians and their ideological allies, but the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade shows there truly is no limit to the hypocrisy they’re capable of.
It’s important to shine a light on these three issues — the lying, the hypocrisy and the purposeful misrepresentations. Holding the “experts” and politicians accountable is the only chance to stop the madness of COVID policy from becoming permanent.
More Embarrassments for the FDA & CDC
Possibly the most important thing to know about the FDA authorizing vaccinations for young children is that there is virtually no evidence to support their decision.
When you review the FDA documents, it’s shocking to see how little data they used to make their decision and how ineffective the trials proved to be.
Unsurprisingly, the CDC joined in by misrepresenting the risks of COVID to children.
The CDC has deservedly been at the forefront of the erosion of “expertise,” beginning with their early flip flop on masks. In spring 2020, the CDC recommended against mask wearing by the general public, in line with pre-COVID evidence. By summer 2020, the director of the organization was claiming that masks would provide better protection than vaccines.
They continued to mislead the public on the effectiveness of masks, collaborated with teacher’s unions to keep schools closed and claimed that vaccinated people did not “carry the virus.” Repeatedly, the CDC has shown that they are willing to mislead in order to achieve their policy goals.
But this latest misstep might be their worst yet.
Seemingly out of a desire to justify authorizing vaccinations for young children, the CDC presented misleading data on the risks of COVID.
At a recent meeting of the Advisory on Immunization Practices group, as chronicled in a post by writer Kelley K, the CDC presented a graphic claiming that COVID was a leading cause of death among kids 0-4.
Except this graphic is completely false.
It came from a preprint posted by researchers in the UK, who reviewed mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics. That dataset includes deaths where COVID was the main contributor as well as those where it was present, but not the underlying cause.
This discrepancy creates a significant issue with accuracy, since the preprint claimed to “only consider Covid-19 as an underlying (and not contributing) cause of death”.
As Kelley points out, there is a noticeable difference between the NCHS statistics and the CDC’s own “WONDER” database, which delineates between contributing and underlying causes.
NCHS, which includes incidental COVID deaths, shows that 1,433 children died with COVID, but the WONDER database shows 1,088 deaths from COVID. That’s a 24% difference and would dramatically alter the graphic.
They used COVID data that included deaths with COVID and compared it to data that includes deaths from an illness.
It’s completely discrediting.
Even worse, the misleading graphic represents COVID deaths cumulatively and compares it to annualized data. Simply, they took two years of COVID related mortality and compared it to one year of data for all other causes.
Kelley re-ran the data using the correct comparisons, which significantly altered the outcome.
While the CDC rankings claimed that COVID was the 4th leading cause of death for children under the age of 1, the corrected annualized ranking was 9th, after using exclusively underlying cause data.
Similarly, the NCHS data used in the preprint and by the CDC claimed 124 deaths in that age group, but COVID was the underlying cause in only 79 deaths.
Rankings for childhood mortality are also overly simplistic, since even the “leading” causes of death pale in comparison to accidents, which caused ~25x more annualized deaths than COVID.
But the worst part about this is that the CDC likely knew that the data they were presenting was wrong and dangerously misleading. And they used it anyway.
They were so desperate to justify their desire to vaccinate young children that they were willing to use inaccurate information and comparisons to do so.
They knew that the media and influential “experts” around the internet would pick up on the graphic, creating unnecessary fear amongst parents and higher demand for the vaccines. And of course, they were right; CNN’s Leana Wen immediately shared the slides:
Instead of accurately informing the public and allowing parents to make a risk-benefit calculation, the CDC is essentially trying to coerce behavior through fear.
Even better, the lead researcher posted on Twitter that they were aware of the issues and would be making corrections.
But of course, it’s too late. The data has now been spread far and wide; the CDC and their allies did their damage. The vaccines were authorized regardless and many parents will make the decision to vaccinate their children based on misrepresented information.
It’s yet another episode in the depressing saga of experts disgracing themselves to achieve their goals and undercutting the public’s trust in the process.
The Lab Leak
A new story from the Daily Mail reports that World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus privately admits that he believes that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a Wuhan laboratory.
Tedros apparently made the remarks to a prominent European politician that a “catastrophic accident” was the “most likely explanation” for the beginning of the pandemic.
The WHO in early 2021 started an investigation into the origins of the pandemic, which concluded that the lab leak hypothesis was “extremely unlikely.” However, the researcher who led that investigation claimed that China “pressured” the team to “dismiss” the lab leak theory.
Scientific journal The Lancet attempted an investigation, which was disbanded over conflicts of interest. Eco Health Alliance head Peter Daszak failed to disclose his close ties to the Wuhan lab, resulting in criticism of the committee’s objectivity.
While privately Tedros is now seemingly admitting that the lab leak is the most likely origin, the official position of the WHO is that “all hypothesis” are still possible.
It’s extremely unlikely that they will ever change their official, public statements given China’s importance to the organization.
In early 2020, for example, China contributed an additional $30 million to the WHOin what was described as a “political power move” to “boost its superficial credentials.”
The true origins of the pandemic are obviously an extremely important issue not just for China and the WHO, but the global political landscape. Beyond officially determining where the virus came from, if it is conclusively determined to have resulted from a lab leak, it would be a crushing blow to “experts” like Dr. Anthony Fauci who tried repeatedly to shut down the theory.
“The science” has been repeatedly referenced by media outlets, public health authorities and politicians as an immutable set of beliefs that are unassailable and infallible.
If a deadly global pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of millions of people, destroyed economies, increased poverty and furthered educational deterioration started in a research lab, it could mark a devastating shift in the public’s view of “science.”
What’s most infuriating about Tedros finally (and privately) giving credence to the lab leak is that for much of 2020, proponents of the hypothesis were decried as “conspiracy theorists.”
The Washington Post famously published an article calling it a “debunked” conspiracy theory and were forced to issue a humiliating correction afterwards.
Media outlets like the Post never had any justification to call the lab leak a “debunked” conspiracy, but it’s obvious they felt safe in describing at as such because it was promoted by the wrong people. Tom Cotton, a Republican Senator, had advanced the hypothesis, therefore it must be “debunked” because Cotton belongs to the wrong ideology.
That myopic, politically motivated thinking has been a common function of most major media outlets who are often desperate to declare their allegiance to the correct set of approved liberal opinions.
Social media companies like Facebook used the media and WHO as authoritative sources of information and as a result, banned users from even discussing the lab leak.
Only in mid-2021 did Facebook reverse course after admitting it was not “debunked.”
This story contains all the infuriating elements of COVID discussion – “experts” lying to the public and bowing to political pressure from China, a fake consensus of opinion created by the media, and social media outlets protecting “science” by censoring opposing viewpoints.
While China’s opposition to an actual investigation will likely prevent any conclusive findings, it’s notable that the head of the WHO admits privately that the “conspiracy theorists” were probably right all along.
Vaccine Mandate Hypocrisy
The Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade has dominated the news cycle since the opinion was released Friday.
Reactions from the pro-abortion side have been ranged from deliberately misleading to woefully inaccurate to offensive, with one comedian labeling half the country as “terrorists.”
But yet another type of hypocrisy has emerged from supposed public health “experts” and politicians.
Best exemplified by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it’s yet another indicator of how the response to Roe v. Wade is about nothing more than maintaining allegiance to the correct political ideology, intellectual consistency be damned.
In 2021, President Joe Biden attempted to mandate COVID vaccination for millions of workers throughout the United States by appealing to OSHA authority. Any employee who worked for a company with more than 100 employees would have had their freedom of choice removed by being forced to take a vaccine that does nothing to protect the safety of others.
The mandate was ultimately deemed to be illegal, but the attempt was celebrated by public health “experts” and many politicians as the correct decision, regardless of its impact on bodily autonomy.
Back in November of 2021, Murthy defended the government mandating a private health decision by saying: “It’s a necessary step to accelerate our pathway out of the pandemic.” He also referred to it as entirely “appropriate:”
“The president and the administration wouldn’t have put these requirements in place if they didn’t think they were appropriate and necessary,” Murthy told host Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.” “And the administration is certainly prepared to defend them.”
Murthy believes that when it comes to COVID vaccination, the “essential principle of maintaining an individual’s autonomy and control over their health decisions” is null and void.
Unsurprisingly, he had the exact opposite reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision:
It’s amazing how flexible the “essential principle” of “individual autonomy and control over their health decisions” apparently is.
When it suits Murthy’s political needs, he’s a staunch defender of individual choice. When he wants to mandate control over other’s bodies and personal health decisions, choice is a meaningless, easily dismissed concept.
Justin Trudeau exemplifies the same remarkable lack of shame.
Less than a year ago, Trudeau mandated vaccines for anyone attempting to travel by plane or train across Canada, as well as for all “federally-regulated” workers.
This decision, of course, removed bodily autonomy and choice for millions who need to travel or didn’t want to lose their government jobs.
Undeterred by the abject hypocrisy, Trudeau on Friday declared that “no government, politician, or man should tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her body.”
It’s hard to imagine a more blatant example of political posturing and virtue signaling.
Trudeau, who is a man, politician, and a representative of the government, told many women in Canada exactly what they had to do with their body.
Get vaccinated or lose your job and stay home.
He had no problem removing the “right to choose” when it suited his needs. Only now when he has an opportunity to signal his ideological virtue is he a champion of individual liberty.
It’s nothing new for politicians and public health authorities to be hypocritical. But their ability to blatantly disregard the principles of bodily autonomy and personal control over health decisions just a few months ago means it’s impossible to take them seriously now.
It’s almost assuredly too much to ask “experts” and politicians to be intellectually consistent, but it’s yet another example of why trust in institutions and those that run them continues to deteriorate.
It’s all part of the same depressing pattern. Experts and politicians are willing to lie or purposefully withhold information to achieve their goals.
They mislead and contradict their previous statements, knowing that the media will protect the hypocrisy and misrepresentations.
The FDA buries the data behind the authorization in documents they know no one will read.
The head of the most powerful international health body hides his true feelings to protect China and his financial partners.
It’s hard to see how this gets fixed without these individuals and the organizations they lead coming to terms with their mistakes, apologizing and changing course.
I wouldn’t hold your breath.
After all, Joe Biden already wants to give them more money for the next pandemic.
Reposted from the author’s Substack
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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
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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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