We’ve been learning in recent months about a vast censorship and suppression regime running through academia, the corporate world, and government in the United States.
In the case of Missouri v. Biden, victims of this regime are fighting back, both for themselves and for the sake of all of us.
Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, who’s among the plaintiffs in the case, reports that their lawyers were in court last week “seeking a temporary injunction to halt the government’s censorship-industrial complex.” In their petition, they described this regime’s activities with the following analogy:
Suppose that the Trump White House, backed by Republicans controlling both Houses of Congress, publicly demanded that all libraries in the United States burn books criticizing the President. The President, in turn, made statements implying that the libraries would face ruinous legal consequences if they did not comply, while senior White House officials privately badgered the libraries for detailed lists and reports of such books that they had burned. The libraries, after months of such pressure, complied with those demands and burned the books.
Suppose that, after four years of pressure from senior congressional staffers in secret meetings threatening the libraries with adverse legislation if they did not cooperate, the FBI started sending all libraries in the United States detailed lists of the books the FBI wanted to burn, requesting that the libraries report back to the FBI by identifying the books that they burned and the libraries complied by burning about half of those books.
Suppose that a federal national security agency teamed up with private research institutions, backed by enormous resources and federal funding, to establish a mass-surveillance and mass-censorship program that uses sophisticated techniques to review hundreds of millions of American citizens’ electronic communications in real time, and works closely with tech platforms to covertly censor millions of them.
The first two hypotheticals are directly analogous to the facts of this case. And the third is not hypothetical at all — it is a description of the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project.
(In case the analogy isn’t clear, the libraries represent social media companies, and the books being burned represents posts or accounts being suppressed.)
I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the same thing went on in Australia, as recently uncovered documents reveal. Meanwhile, last year Australia suffered its highest level of excess mortality since World War II. Is anyone in Australia other than the embattled minority of dissidents even bothering to try to figure out what could have caused that?
It’s more important that they censor you than they figure out the excess deaths problem (which was definitely not caused by That Thing You’re Secretly Suspecting).
Tom Woods