OPINION:
The Twitter Files have thus far been truly illuminating. They’ve provided vindication for those who were vilified for even suggesting that the government colluded with social media to manipulate information and suppress political viewpoints.
Elon Musk can give Americans an even greater gift, one that could provide some solace to those whose lives were forever altered by the pandemic. The sunlight needs to reach deeper into the digital abyss than party politics and the battle over former President Donald Trump’s now-silenced, incendiary feed.
Stanford scientist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who was recently reinstated on Twitter, says that “science was harmed” by the behavior of the social media giant during the pandemic. He’s right, of course. The stifling of scientific discourse and the evisceration of physician independence by the cabal of Big Pharma, Big Government and Big Tech was unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this country.
As much as leftist activists want to convince people that this torrid affair against speech doesn’t exist, the science and the mounting evidence provided by Mr. Musk demonstrate the suppression was carried out with brutal efficiency, reminiscent of the authoritarian regimes this nation fought to defeat. Only now, it was digital fascism.
We never thought we’d see a Galileo-Pope Urban VIII situation here, but the Catholic Inquisition of the 17th century came to America in the 21st. COVID-19 gave the deep state enormous power to define facts and persecute dissenters. Galileo spent the last years of his life under house arrest for publishing his support for Copernicus’ heliocentric theory.
But Dr. Bhattacharya is only half right. Far more than science, people — lives — were harmed to a degree that may never be fully understood by government suppression of speech. It is this injustice that Mr. Musk needs to lay bare.
The Constitution clearly states that “Congress shall make no law … abridging freedom of speech.” Time, place, and manner nuance has been added to that bold foundational statement, but the ability of legislative bodies to directly censor debate continues to be extremely limited.
That’s why the government needed a private sector intermediary like Twitter to control the population regardless of the science and the legitimacy of the dissent. We now know what was branded misinformation and dangerous was, in many cases, anything but.
The effectiveness and the consequences of lockdowns, masks, treatments and vaccines were all ripe for a robust debate, especially as we all learned from our collective experience. All contrary viewpoints were suppressed by the government using social media as cover for blatantly unconstitutional restrictions on speech.
But it wasn’t just about censorship. Authoritarians use punitive measures as well.
Doctors who forecast that the so-called vaccine would neither prevent infection nor transmission of COVID-19 were de-platformed. They were proved right.
Parents and officials who predicted the massive negative consequences of school lockdowns, extended masking, and vaccine mandates on children, were identified as threats. They, too, were ridiculed and silenced. They were proved right.
Those who believed in risk stratification strategy, natural immunity and the existence of alternative prophylactic treatments like ivermectin — even some of the most accomplished physicians in their fields — were punished for countering Dr. Anthony Fauci and the left-wing inquisitors at Twitter. The science proved them right as well.
Those physicians, coroners, morticians, psychologists and others who raised concerns about the negative consequences of the government’s prescriptions were called conspiracy theorists. They were threatened and punished.
Now, a condition few had ever heard of before the administration of COVID-19 vaccines, myocarditis, is on the rise. There are even television commercials about screening and treatments.
The left and even some Beltway Republicans ignore all of this. They cling to their masks, booster shots and the lie that the government can eradicate a coronavirus through forced behavioral changes. It can no more do than change the global climate through massive spending programs.
They refuse to acknowledge that such intimidation tactics were even possible, let alone happened on a scale that destroyed lives, businesses and reputations, and emotionally hobbled millions now dealing with some form of COVID-19 anxiety disorder.
Even hundreds of years ago, there were those who knew that the sun was just one light in the firmament and the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe. Who knows how the suppression of their views affected the development of humanity. Similarly, at the hands of latter-day secular popes, we may never know the extent to which the suppression of thought and debate impacted the lives and health of billions of people.
More sunlight from Mr. Musk will help. It will help safeguard the American experiment. That experiment will fail if free speech falls under the wheels of the of government and Big Tech oppression.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax TV, an author and a former Bush administration official.
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