17 Jul Personally…
My Very Fine Friends,
This week in an unusual, brazen, and yet apparently unabashed display of honesty, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki announced that the White House monitors social media for narratives and postings about which they “have concern,” or that are dangerous (in their opinion) to public health.
Psaki said the Biden team is “regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans are seeing across all of social and traditional media.” Presumably those social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram etc. will jump to delete those flagged postings, all in the name of course of keeping us “safe” and “healthy.”
In a similar vein, Politico reported that “Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages.”
Let me put this in plain English.
The United States government is admitting that it is conspiring with private businesses to censor free speech by American citizens. They are admitting that they are working with the social media giants to control what Americans can see, and read, every day. It is bad enough that the Big Tech controls speech already via censoring and de-platforming etc. Now the Biden team is aiding and abetting that censoring by offering “tips” about what people should be allowed to say and read.
Team Biden is also working with the phone companies who are apparently amenable to blocking text messages from one private citizen to another if the content is something with which the government disagrees.
It’s not hard to imagine what the Biden cabal would say is dangerous or “of concern” in the healthcare arena. Anything that disagrees with their quest to vaccinate all of America. Anything that suggests that there are many efficacious and inexpensive treatments such as HCQ, budesonide, ivermectin and more, available to aid covid patients, that are not only highly effective, but which carry far fewer risks of side effects than do the vaccines.
At the same time this government censorship is happening, qualified, practicing physicians who actually treat covid patients, are questioning the safety of the covid vaccines AND sharing the growing body of information about other effective treatments.
One of the most prominent of those doctors is Dr. Peter McCullough who has provided a vast amount of information for the public to read and consume, and who recently stated that successful home treatments for covid make experimental vaccines unnecessary, and that his whistleblower friends inside the CDC claim that the death count due to the vaccines is more like 50,000 Americans, rather than the 9,000 or so the government admits. And there are hundreds if not thousands of American doctors offering similar assessments all over the country.
My point here is not to argue about covid vaccine efficacy.
It is to point out how completely far gone the anti-American Left is. The Biden team has proudly announced it is colluding with left-wing social media, and cell phone companies, to silence speech. They act as though they have the right to declare what truth is. And to enforce their truth on America.
It apparently did not occur to Jen Psaki that this idea of colluding with social media to shut down free speech might be at the very least deeply troubling and totally inappropriate, and potentially an unconstitutional infringement on free speech.
In America, the government is not supposed to be the Ministry of Truth. No matter how right government officials think they are on any topic, they can be wrong. Worse, they can have a very bad motive for the “truth” they are pushing. Remember when the government and social media were striving to shut down speech that questioned whether the Wuhan virus came from bats or the fish market, or whether it was generated in a lab? And now the world knows the lab story is true.
This “shut down voices we disagree with” Biden plan is a quintessential freedom of speech issue, and Jen Psaki and the Biden team seem either unaware of that, or worse, fully aware and still willing to push censorship.
This is a learning opportunity for all of us. The issue itself is NOT who is right about covid vaccines, HCQ etc., it is whether all Americans have the freedom of speech to discuss it.
This is also a slippery slope issue. Justifying speech censorship because government labels medical advice by doctors as “dangerous to public health” is actually dangerous to Americans because they are denied informed health care advice. Letting the government establish the standard that it defines truth and can censor those who disagree with their truth, is the end of free speech in America.