The News Café has been beating the drum against censorship of all types, with much of the focus on book-banning by both conservatives and liberals. The right has targeted books whose content does not represent the political or religious views they espouse, while the left has targeted books whose content was affected by the times in which the authors lived and which some of today’s liberals view as racist or otherwise improper, regardless of the book’s actual focus (I’m thinking of Huckleberry Finn and some of the Dr. Seuss books).
Sadly, book censorship has become so accepted in some quarters that Bristol Selectman Scott Sanschagrin asked whether the board should police books at the Minot-Sleeper Library or ask the trustees to remove “objectionable” books. He was responding to a Facebook post from a parent complaining that their child had brought home a book they found objectionable because it was a child’s cartoon book that concerned a boy who tried on his mother’s clothes.
“Basically, I wouldn’t say [it] promotes that, but kinda, yeah,” Sanschagrin said. “The individual was upset that his three-year-old daughter was able to go into the library, pick up this book, brought it home, thinking perfectly innocent, and then he didn’t agree with the message that the book said.”
Chair Shaun Lagueux provided the proper answer: “As a parent, he can bring it back,” and Vice-Chair Leslie Dion agreed, “In that case, you’re monitoring what kind of books your kids are going to read.”
Selectman Carroll Brown noted that the New Hampshire Legislature has been grappling with such questions as they pertain to obscenity laws, but with the closely divided House, “It’s gonna be tough.”
Aside from book-banning, I have touched upon government censorship efforts, such as the Biden Administration’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board — quickly dubbed his “Ministry of Truth” — that aimed to control information and opinions that did not match the government’s messaging. While that board supposedly shut down, the Twitter Files revealed that the government had continued to engage in efforts to persuade social media platforms to remove or use algorithms to suppress content that the Administration considered likely to sow doubt about some official policies.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, those official policies included masking, universal vaccines, and shutdowns, and the rallying cry became “trust the science” — but the scientific consensus was not as unanimous as Dr. Anthony Fauci claimed it to be. In fact, recently disclosed private communications show that Fauci exerted his influence to suppress the “Proximal Origin” paper that connected the pandemic to “gain-of-function” research being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which his foundation had helped to support. Kristian Andersen, one of the paper’s authors, wrote, “[T]he lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” Instead, Fauci promoted the idea that the disease occurred naturally.
The scientific community also was divided on how to cope with the pandemic, but the government — first under Donald Trump and then under Joe Biden Jr. — came to use strong-arm tactics to promote masking, vaccines, and shutdowns as being the only way to stop the spread of the disease. On September 8, the Fifth Circuit Court ruled that the Biden White House, the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office, and the FBI “engaged in a years-long pressure campaign [on social media outlets] designed to ensure that the censorship aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints.”
The court found a pattern of government officials making “threats of ‘fundamental reforms’ like regulatory changes and increased enforcement actions” against social media platforms that did not comply. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine whose dissenting viewpoints had been suppressed, commented to The Free Press, “The implication was clear. To paraphrase Al Capone: Nice company you have there. It’d be a shame if something were to happen to it.”
Bhattacharya, along with Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, had published the Great Barrington Declaration which called for an end to economic lockdowns, school shutdowns, and other restrictive policies on the grounds that they were disproportionately harming the young and economically disadvantaged while conferring limited benefits to society as a whole. Instead, they endorsed a “focused protection” approach calling for strong measures to protect high-risk populations while allowing lower-risk individuals to return to normal life with reasonable precautions.
“Federal officials immediately targeted the Great Barrington Declaration for suppression because it contradicted the government’s preferred response to Covid. Four days after the Declaration’s publication, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, emailed Fauci to organize a “devastating takedown” of it,” Bhattacharya writes. “I found myself smeared for my supposed political views, and my views about Covid policy and epidemiology were removed from the public square on all manner of social networks.”
He joined other plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Biden Administration in August 2022, and on July 4, 2023, federal Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction, ordering the federal government to immediately stop coercing social media companies to censor protected free speech. It was that case that, last Friday, led to the ruling:
Defendants, and their employees and agents, shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech. That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling the social media companies’ decision-making processes.
Bhattacharya said, “[T]he victory is not just for me but for every American who felt the oppressive force of this censorship industrial complex during the pandemic. It is a vindication for parents who advocated for some semblance of normal life for their children but found their Facebook groups suppressed. It is a vindication for vaccine-injured patients who sought the company and counsel of fellow patients online but found themselves gaslit by social media companies and the government into thinking their personal experience of harm was all in their heads.”
Please note: This is not to say that masking, quarantines, and vaccines do not save lives. For segments of the population, they are necessary and appropriate. However, as with any health matter, one must take into account each individual’s health history and condition.
If we are to “trust the science” we must accept that science is based upon questioning accepted truths and adjusting responses to new evidence. Preventing that questioning invalidates the official position, and when the official facts are proven wrong, leads people to doubt everything that officials say. That is where we are today.
Like banning books, suppressing discourse only makes people more interested in what is not allowed. We always need to be open to the idea that what we “know” may be wrong, and that someone else may be right. It is only in weighing both sides that we can make rational decisions about how to live.
Bhattacharya’s piece is worth reading:
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