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Another major news outlet joins Team Reality, with the Wall Street Journal decrying Covid Censorship.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a bold opinion column critiquing the hypochondria that swept the United States and other nations during the Covid era.

Penned by Bret Swanson of the American Enterprise Institute, the piece, simply titled Covid Censorship Proved to Be Deadly, reflected on a recent legal ruling issued against the Biden administration for its Covid-era online censorship.

Those implicated in the ruling were guilty of “flagging wrongthink by American citizens, including eminent scientists who suggested different paths on Covid policy,” writes Swanson.

Missouri v. Biden: An Historic Case

The ruling to which he refers took place in Missouri v. Biden, a federal free speech case that has reverberated globally.

The presiding judge, Terry A. Doughty, heard that a swathe of federal agencies, in collusion with the Biden White House, spent years pressuring social media platforms to deprive Americans of their right to speak freely, particularly on issues surrounding COVID-19.

The states of Missouri and Louisiana, led by Missouri’s former attorney general and current US Senator Eric Schmitt, took the US government to court and secured a historic victory against the forces of censorship.

The judge used July 4th — the national holiday of the United States, and a day when federal rulings are rarely issued — to fire a shot across the bow of the Biden White House. In his 155-page ruling, Doughty wrote that “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” He added:

The evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’.

More developments are expected in the case but the result thus far is promising: Doughty issued a preliminary injunction preventing the US government from ordering Big Tech to police speech on their platforms.

In the days since, the judge has denied Biden’s team their request for a stay against that injunction, writing that his original order “prohibits something the Defendants have no legal right to do”.

The Wall Street Journal’s Exposé

It is in this context — following revelations about the extensive, unethical and anti-democratic behaviour of the Biden administration and the spy apparatus of the United States — that the Wall Street Journal published Swanson’s analysis.

Available in its entirety at the WSJ website, an excerpt appears below:

For three years, pandemic public relations mocked nature, generating fear, illness, inflation and excess death beyond what the virus caused. Digital censorship supercharged the effort to hide reality, but reality is getting its day in court…

Discovery in Missouri v. Biden exposed relationships among government agencies and social-media firms and revealed an additional layer of university centers and self-styled disinformation watchdogs and fact-checking outfits.

Elon Musk’s release of some of Twitter’s internal files revealed that up to 80 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were embedded with social-media companies. The agents mostly weren’t fighting terrorism but flagging wrongthink by American citizens, including eminent scientists who suggested different paths on Covid policy…

Social-media platforms were powerful tools for full-spectrum censorship, but they didn’t act alone. Medical schools, medical boards, science journals and legacy media sang from the same hymnal.

Legions of doctors stayed quiet after witnessing the demonization of their peers who challenged the Covid orthodoxy. A little censorship leads people to watch what they say. Millions of patients and citizens were deprived of important insights as a result.

Health authorities and TV doctors insisted young people were vulnerable, demanded toddlers wear masks, closed schools, beaches and parks, and were loath to contemplate crucial cost-benefit analysis. The economy? Mental health? Never heard of them.

These “experts” denied the protective effects of recovered immunity, a phenomenon we’ve known about since the Plague of Athens in 430 B.C. They effectively prohibited generic drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration, such as azithromycin and ivermectin, which low-income nations around the world were deploying successfully. They failed to appreciate the evolutionary dynamics of mass vaccination during a pandemic.

The U.S. government spent $6 trillion to buoy its shuttered economy, and most people got Covid anyway. Worst of all, the lockdowns and mandates resulted in unprecedented bad health outcomes for young and middle-aged people in rich countries.

Excess mortality in most high-income nations was worse in 2021 and 2022 than in 2020, the initial pandemic year. Many poorer nations with less government control seemed to fare better. Sweden, which didn’t have a lockdown, performed better than nearly every other advanced nation.

After navigating 2020 with relative success, young and middle-age healthy people in rich nations began dying in unprecedented numbers in 2021 and 2022. Health authorities haven’t focused enough on this cataclysm of premature death from non-Covid heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary embolisms, kidney failure and cancer.

Hiding these and other realities has become more difficult in the internet age. The information explosion has allowed more people to spot quickly the mistakes of officials and learn the truth. This has changed the relationship between the authorities and those they govern. Those in charge feel threatened.

Digital censorship is their response to this crisis of authority. True, misinformation is rampant online. But it was far worse before the internet, when myths could persist for centuries. New technologies allow us to compile data quickly, correct errors, find facts and dispel falsehoods. Science, supported by an open internet, is the process by which we reduce misinformation and approach the truth.

Artificial intelligence will improve our ability to sift, parse, edit, authenticate and organize information. When you hear calls to license or centralize control of AI, remember the hubris of Covid censorship.

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