The truth about Covid McCarthyism
Source: (
https://bit.ly/3WNDYkN)
There were two viruses that the authorities wanted to control in
2020 and 2021. The first was the virus of Covid-19. The second
was the virus of dissent. Throughout the pandemic, experts referred
to lockdown scepticism and Covid misinformation as their own
kind of disease, as a contagious malady that might sicken the masses'
minds as surely as Covid sickened their bodies. British politicians
referred to a 'pandemic of misinformation'. We must protect people
both from 'physical disease and the "disease of misinformation"',
scientists insisted. 'False information has plagued the Covid
response', said one academic. Plagued - what a striking choice
of verb. And if contrary ideas are an infection in the body politic,
then it's clear what the cure must be: censorship.
Nearly three years on from the start of the pandemic, it's apparent
that censorship was central to lockdown. It wasn't only our everyday
lives that were forcibly put on hold - so was our right to say certain
things and even think certain things. In the US, Anthony Fauci, the
director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
who was fawned over by the liberal media for his handling of Covid,
has been deposed in a lawsuit that accuses him and the Biden
administration more broadly of colluding with Big Tech to undermine
the American people's speech rights during the pandemic. The lawsuit
is brought by the attorney general of Missouri, Eric Schmitt. The
transcript of the questioning of Fauci was released earlier this
month. It's a frustrating read. Fauci continually says he doesn't
recall or doesn't know in response to questions about his alleged
role in suppressing speech in the Covid era. But it seems clear that,
informally at least, he helped to devise and enforce the parameters
of acceptable thought during the pandemic.
Consider the Great Barrington Declaration. Fauci had high-ranking
discussions about how to counteract this open letter that raised
'grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental-health
impacts of the prevailing Covid-19 policies'. Freedom-of-information
requests show that Fauci was asked by officials to engage in a 'quick
and devastating takedown' of the GBD. He hopped to it. He 'jumped
into action to smear and discredit the GBD in the media', as one
account describes it. This included writing off the GBD's
authors - Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya - as
'fringe epidemiologists' who were peddling 'nonsense'. We know
now that Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford, was
subsequently shadow-banned on Twitter and even added to its
McCarthyite 'Trends Blacklist', meaning his tweets would never make
it into 'trending topics'. The algorithm weaponised against
a heretical professor who had been publicly denounced by Fauci.
Was Fauci directly responsible for Twitter's blacklisting of
Bhattacharya? It's not clear. There's certainly no proof of Fauci
putting in a phone call to Vijaya Gadde or any of the other
authoritarians who were in charge of the censorious hellscape that
was pre-Musk Twitter and demanding they silence this
thoughtcriminal. But there does seem to have been a political
trickle-down effect, as one writer describes it. Fauci issues
a decree about what is true and what is false in relation to Covid
and it swiftly becomes gospel among Big Tech overlords - that was
the pattern. In this instance, Fauci engaged in a 'systematic
discrediting' of expert dissenters on lockdown and it 'trickled down
to social media' so that these people's ideas were 'labelled "Covid
misinformation" and censored by content moderators'.
There are email trails that hint at a more causal relationship
between Fauci's hostility towards dissent and Big Tech's censorship
of such dissent. So during the deposition Fauci was shown emails
suggesting that his own officials had tried to contact Google to set
up a conversation about 'misinformation' in relation to the Covid
vaccine. Shortly after, social-media sites started adding warning
labels to posts about the vaccine and even suspended some accounts
for pushing vax misinformation. It's a big deal if these things are
linked, because officials in the US are forbidden by the First
Amendment from curtailing the speech rights of their citizens. If the
state under Biden outsourced censorship to compliant companies,
that's still state censorship.
In some ways, the fact that there doesn't seem to have been any need
for a direct chain of command between the Biden administration and
Big Tech in order for Covid censorship to occur is more chilling. It
confirms how widespread Covid conformism was in the establishment,
and how naturally it comes to the oligarchies of Silicon Valley to do
the bidding of the Democratic elites. Elite consensus opinion is
a powerful beast. Time and again, the government view on Covid
became the only utterable view in the digital public square. So when
officialdom was pro-masks, dissent on masks was ruthlessly censored:
witness YouTube's banning of a video featuring senator Rand Paul
questioning the effectiveness of masks. When officialdom insisted
that lockdown was the right and only way to tackle Covid, all
intellectual bristling against lockdown ran the risk of being
blacklisted, as the GBD folks and others discovered. And when it was
Fauci's belief that the lab-leak theory about Covid was a ridiculous
conspiracy theory, 'all views in conflict' with that take risked
censure online. Strikingly, it was only when the Biden administration
said in May last year that it would look into the lab-leak theory that
Facebook finally lifted its censure of the theory - proof that the
government view ruled supreme on social media in the pandemic.
We need to talk about this. We live in supposedly free societies and
yet anyone who dissented from the state view on Covid faced being
blacklisted and silenced. It kind of doesn't matter whether Fauci
'colluded' with Big Tech. It's still the case that it was very difficult
indeed for citizens in one of the few public spaces they could freely
access during the pandemic - the internet - to dissent from the
state's view. Worse, there was a neo-imperial element to this online
redaction of deviation from Fauci's diktats. Social-media companies
globalised the official US view on Covid so that even poor souls in
London or Paris or Melbourne found themselves suspended - banished
from the public square - for making a comment that holy Anthony
Fauci might disapprove of.
In the UK, where we have no First Amendment, the link between
the state and social-media censure was far clearer. It's now known
that Matt Hancock, health secretary during the pandemic, directly
contacted chiefs of Big Tech and pressured them to shut down
'misinformation'. As early as January 2020 his special adviser was
speaking with Twitter about 'tweaking their algorithms'. Hancock also
'personally texted' Nick Clegg, the former leader of the Liberal
Democrats who was then vice-president of global affairs at Facebook,
to encourage him to control online discussion. Clegg, in the words
of Isabel Oakeshott, was 'happy to oblige'. Hancock wanted Clegg to
clamp down on anti-vax comments in particular. One MP, in July
2020, hysterically referred to vax-bashing as an 'ideological dirty
bomb waiting to go off'. That's how our rulers view the free flow
of ideas - as a nuclear-level danger, liable to kill or infect
thousands.
The Hancock-Clegg love-in over suppressing certain Covid ideas shows
how incestuous the new oligarchy is. Here we had a serving politician
gabbing with a former politician about using his extraordinary power
as an overseer of the global conversation to sideline certain voices.
It all took place beyond the realm of democratic accountability, even
beyond the realm of the state. Instead a public official conspired with
the employee of a private company to curb what millions could see and
hear online. There was no need for a law to suppress dissent: the
state view on all things Covid was just casually, informally enforced
on every gadget we own, thanks to a politician we voted out of office
five years ago. Sinister stuff.
Of course, it wasn't only online speech that was controlled. So was
the right to protest. As Oakeshott reminds us, 'anti-lockdown
protests were quickly banned' in 2020. In September of that year, the
Cabinet Office suggested protests should be exempt from the 'rule
of six', which forbade any outside gathering of more than six people,
but Hancock called in Michael Gove to 'kill it off'. And 'Gove had no
qualms about helping'. So we were prevented from expressing
ourselves freely online and prevented from exercising our right to
dissent in public. It was the most serious clampdown on political
liberty the West has experienced in a very long time.
It will take some time to measure the impact of this empire of Covid
censorship on our societies. To my mind, it didn't only prevent the
expression of certain views, which is a grave enough offence in
itself, arguably the gravest offence a society can commit. It also
left us catastrophically unprepared for the post-lockdown era. The
punishment of dissenting voices that wondered out loud if lockdown
might lead to deadly backlogs in the health system, and to a decline
in people's mental health, and to a regression of children's social
skills, and to an economic downturn that might have severely negative
consequences, meant we never properly talked about those things.
Which means now that all those things are happening - it turns out
some of the dissenters were right - our societies are startled, and
clueless.
There's a lesson here: censorship is an incredibly destructive force.
The suppression of dissent is always, in every single situation,
a bad idea. It reduces a society's ability to explore angles, examine
possibilities, imagine future scenarios. Going forward, we must never
again allow experts to suppress whatever they decree to be
anti-scientific or dangerous thought. On every issue, from pandemics
to the climate to the economy, people's freedom to think and speak
and warn must reign.
