Thank you for the wonderful introduction. I’m listening to these panels; it’s frankly hard to deal with how far we’ve fallen as a society.
I want to echo something that Dr. Scott Atlas said earlier, namely, that young people are our future. We need to support the young people. This is where the future lies.
I’m going to start with the First Amendment. The First Amendment reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The First Amendment emerged in the aftermath of the American Revolution when the framers of the Constitution sought to establish a constitutional order that would guard against the oppressive rule they had fought against.
The framers understood that broad free speech rights meant that untruth would circulate, along with truth. But they recognized that this was a small price to pay in fostering a vibrant and free society, and that the benefits of protecting all speech, even that which was false or offensive, outweighed the risks of stifling ideas.
To this day, there is nothing like the First Amendment anywhere in the world.
Free Speech and Censorship
So what is free speech with restrictions? It’s censorship. Any restriction of free speech is censorship.The word censor derives from the Latin word for the judges in ancient Rome who supervised public morality. And that is really the crux of it. It’s almost always an issue of morality—or power—when someone gives themselves the right to determine what someone else can and cannot say.
Without digressing too much into the legal minutiae, the essence of free speech in the United States is that you can say whatever you like short of shouting fire in a crowded theater and causing a panic.
The exact words used by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Schenck v. United States in 1919 were, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”
The second part of this quote is often overlooked: causing a panic. Thus, saying things that turn out not to be true is OK unless its effects are so immediate as to cause a panic.
Applying this principle to COVID public health measures, it’s difficult to see what one could say that would be so immediate as to cause a panic. Saying something on Facebook is not capable of causing a panic. The immediacy of the crowded cinema is missing. There’s time to reflect, read, and make informed choices. In other words, whatever people say about things like masks or vaccines cannot be in breach of the First Amendment.
And yet all that went out the window when COVID arrived.
In fact, the origin of systematic government censorship efforts predates COVID. Those efforts began in 2017, driven in large part by a dislike of Donald Trump among the ruling elites.
In that sense, the beginnings of the government’s censorship efforts are really rooted in efforts to silence Trump and his MAGA movement.
There are many examples of this that have been documented by Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi over the past few months since Elon Musk opened Twitter’s internal emails late last year.
As we’ll see, understanding pre-COVID censorship efforts is very important for understanding COVID censorship. The two are directly connected.
I’ll discuss two examples here. First, there was a systematic effort to silence Trump supporters that started in 2017 and was driven by quasi-government forces.
Under this effort, entire censorship lists were drawn up to have people thrown off Twitter under the pretense that they were Russian disinformation agents, when in actual fact the people who were targeted were almost exclusively ordinary Americans who were simply sharing their views about this and that—usually people on Trump’s side of the political spectrum.
One of the censorship projects was called Hamilton 68. Its purpose was to supposedly track Russian propaganda efforts on Twitter. It was created in 2017 under the auspices of the German Marshall Fund.
The German Marshall Fund is a group that was set up by the German government as a thank-you to America for the original post-World War II Marshall plan.
So, in a nutshell, the German government’s initiative to foster better relations with America was turned into an initiative to censor Americans.
Twitter Files author Matt Taibbi found that Hamilton 68 had flagged 644 so-called Russian propaganda accounts for removal by Twitter.
But when Matt looked at the list of names Hamilton 68 gave Twitter, he found that almost every single one of those accounts belonged to ordinary Americans. People like the editor in chief of Consortium News, Joe Lauria, or podcast host Dennis Michael Lynch.
Hamilton 68 took real opinions of real Americans and falsely declared those opinions part of a Russian disinformation operation.
Twitter very quickly realized that the purpose of the effort wasn’t to silence Russian disinformation but to silence Trump supporters.
Twitter’s then head of safety, Yoel Roth, emailed colleagues to say, “Real people need to know they’ve been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse, it’s a major problem.”
But Roth didn’t win the argument. He was overruled by Twitter’s director of communications, Emily Horne, who pushed back by saying that Twitter needed to be careful in pushing back against powerful D.C. interests.
Threat of Government Retaliation
The fact is that there is always this cloud hanging over Twitter—and any other company like it—that if they don’t do as they are told, there may be unwelcome repercussions coming out of Washington, D.C.In this vein, the Twitter Files also revealed that the FBI played a big role in pushing social media companies to censor speech—from weekly meetings to directly asking for account takedowns. Social media companies even had to set up hidden web portals where FBI staff could flag accounts for take down.
So why did social media companies go along with this? I’m sure one part of it is ideology—a deep dislike of Trump. But there’s also a lot of evidence in the Twitter Files that Twitter executives were very concerned about being regulated and that that was something they kept a very close eye on. In short, the threat of retaliation from Washington, D.C., strongly influenced Twitter’s interactions with government actors.
The second example I wanted to mention is that in 2021, the Department of Homeland Security approached social media companies to—in their own words—“operationalize public-private partnerships between DHS and [the social media companies].”
This proposed public-private partnership was about policing “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation,” which in government lingo is referred to as “MDM.”
The hook used by the Department of Homeland Security was that something needed to be done about MDM because it threatened homeland security.
This takes us right back to the slippery slope embodied in the European model of free speech, which I talked about earlier, whereby restrictions are allowed where national security, public safety, and so on are threatened.
This second example also illustrates the escalation. In 2017, it was merely Russian disinformation that supposedly gave rise to free speech restrictions. By 2021, it was homeland security in general.
And this takes us right back to COVID. While these censorship efforts preceded COVID, they were certainly spooled up to an industrial scale during COVID.
The justifications for free speech restrictions became “all of the above.” Russian disinformation, foreign actors, homeland security, public safety, public health, and so on.
And because the virus threat was more tangible than a Russian blogger, few people asked questions.
Facebook and Fauci Collaboration
In fact, in some cases, the government did not even have to ask. For instance, it wasn’t Anthony Fauci who reached out to Facebook. It was Facebook that reached out to Fauci.On March 15, 2020, one day before “15 days to slow” the spread was announced, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg emailed Fauci to propose collaboration between Fauci and Facebook on putting out what Zuckerberg called “authoritative information from reliable sources.”
Fauci responded favorably, and so Facebook’s COVID censorship regime in coordination with Fauci was born.
That regime entailed “not allow[ing] false claims about the vaccines or vaccination programs which public health experts have advised us could lead to COVID-19 vaccine rejection.”
And it wasn’t just vaccines. Posts about hydroxychloroquine were also censored by Facebook, not because it was best practice, but because that was the government line supported by Fauci. The same happened with ivermectin.
Recall that getting the mRNA vaccines approved in fast-track mode was only legally possible if there were no other treatments available. It is no wonder then that government actors such as Fauci and social media giants such as Facebook made sure that even just talking about alternative treatments was effectively forbidden.
The censorship regime grew so quickly and so wide that preeminent epidemiologists such as Jay Bhattacharya were not only silenced for their views, but called “fringe epidemiologists”—by the head of the National Institutes of Health, no less.
But the label worked, and Bhattacharya and his colleagues Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta were ostracized from the scientific community and by the media.
Ironically, the Great Barrington Declaration is now widely accepted as the common sense approach to COVID. But when it mattered, the government, the media, and social media censored any mention of it.
We at The Epoch Times strongly rejected this and went in the other direction. We were among the first to give alternative voices a platform to be heard.
We had some experience with this from the Russia collusion saga, where we were also among the first media outlets to pursue the real facts and not the Washington, D.C., narrative. Everything we wrote at that time has now been vindicated by the Durham report, which was published earlier this week.
The same can be said with respect to COVID. We were the first to report on many stories that were being censored by the corporate media—lockdowns, masks, vaccines, and so on. I did not know Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff before COVID. We got to know each other because they resisted the censorship, and Epoch was open to their ideas.
I’ve just rewatched our documentary, and looking back, we got almost everything right about the Wuhan lab. In fact, two days after we first broadcast the documentary, the director of Anthony Fauci’s stateside lab at Galveston, a man called James Le Duc, who also happened to have personally trained Wuhan lab staff, started privately discussing our documentary with colleagues. They were all very much aware that the pandemic likely started at the lab.
So while Epoch was being chastised as a “conspiracy theory outlet,” the people at the center of the affair were privately discussing that Epoch was putting out the facts. It took years of FOIA litigation to obtain the emails of these public health officials, which is how we know that their private views were the opposite of their public views.
Sadly, it was during this time that we were demonetized by YouTube—which is another indicator of the huge toolkit that tech giants have in controlling speech.
While I’m on the topic of YouTube, I can also share with you that we used to upload rough cuts of some of our upcoming shows on YouTube as a convenient way to collect comments from contributors. These videos were unlisted and not public. Only a few people had access. Yet when the videos talked about vaccines or masks, YouTube would take them down.
Agendas and Censorship
Which brings us back to the First Amendment. A hundred years of American jurisprudence has maintained that in a free society, speech must be free, even if it is untruthful.As recently as 2012, Justice Anthony Kennedy—in United States v. Alvarez—affirmed: “The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. ... This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.”
If the Great Barrington Declaration was unreasoned and uninformed, well, then free speech would have exposed its defects.
But there were no defects, which is why it had to be aggressively suppressed instead. That is the lesson here. Speech is not suppressed because it is wrong; it is suppressed because it interferes with someone’s agenda.
So what was the agenda, and why did the government, the media, and social media rally around this one agenda rather than let alternative voices on COVID be heard?
There are, of course, many factors and many theories. Take Fauci, for instance. He had many reasons to push a false narrative on COVID. For one thing, he knew there was a strong likelihood that his funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology had caused the pandemic in the first place.
But he had other reasons, too. Fauci’s entire career had been centered on discovering universal vaccines. This is why he was pushing gain-of-function experiments. COVID was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fast track an entirely new genre of vaccines and to do it on a global scale. Correctly pointing out that COVID was not particularly dangerous for large swaths of the population, or highlighting the existence of alternative remedies, stood in the way of Fauci’s universal vaccine ambitions.
But that’s just Fauci. Why did everyone else jump on the bandwagon, casting aside a hundred years of not only medical science, but also of hard-earned civil liberties?
I think to answer that, we have to go back to Trump. When I talked about the beginnings of the government censorship regime, I did not only do so for historical context, but also to show how Trump—specifically a deep dislike of Trump among the Washington, D.C., Beltway crowd—drove these efforts.
And I think it was that same motivation that drove many of the COVID censorship efforts. That’s not to say that there would have been no COVID censorship without Trump, but dislike of Trump was certainly the glue that allowed all of these various forces to coalesce.
When Trump said the virus came out of the Wuhan lab, there was an instant push toward the opposite narrative. When Trump said to try hydroxychloroquine, there was an instant push to outlaw off-label use of it. When Trump said to reopen the economy, the entire media complex aggressively pushed against that.
Supporting Truth
So how do we stop it from happening again?One of the things that the pandemic starkly exposed is that there is a mechanism that can manufacture perceived consensus in our society, even when nothing near a consensus actually exists. It exposed that as human beings, many of us are susceptible to being influenced by that perceived consensus—journalists, scientists, government leaders, bureaucrats, and lay people alike.
We’re susceptible to this “megaphone,” as I like to call it.
The megaphone can influence us to dislike Trump, or dislike him more, or to dislike the person whom the powers that be anoint as the next Trump. It can influence us to be suspicious of, and even to demonize, so-called “fringe epidemiologists” or “the unvaccinated.” It generates in us emotions that become deeply entrenched.
So what can we do?
We can set up and support parallel, truth-seeking organizations like The Chicago Thinker and The Epoch Times, like Hillsdale’s Academy for Science and Freedom that Drs. [Larry] Arnn, Atlas, Bhattacharya, and Kulldorff started to foster truth seeking in science (it’s amazing that I have to say that!), like the Academic Sanity Consortium that is organizing this event.
But I would argue that it’s the censorship regime that has emerged as of 2017 that has particularly supercharged the megaphone.
The only immediate path is the legal path. Now is the time to set clear boundaries in stone, preferably by the Supreme Court.
That is why the case brought against the government by Missouri and Louisiana is so important. The case seeks a declaration that the government cannot get involved in policing speech. The declaration would block all federal government officials from collaborating, coercing, and colluding with media or social media companies to interfere with First Amendment rights.
Although Missouri and Louisiana have won a string of victories, the case will likely end up in the Supreme Court—which we should welcome.
A strong declaration from the Supreme Court that these public-private censorship efforts we saw during COVID are unlawful is probably the best insurance we can hope for right now to prevent future abuses.
Thank you.
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