Covid Response at Five Years: The First Amendment Versus the U.S. Security State
The Covid regime’s assault on the First Amendment reads like a plotline out of a Robert Ludlum novel. A virus emerged from the shores of a foreign adversary and spawned a domestic crisis. Government bureaucrats seized the opportunity to expand their power. They launched interagency campaigns to coerce private actors to carry out their orders. They nationalized the country’s private information centers, dictating what their citizens could read or write about the emergency that triggered their newfound authority.
Later, their true interests became clear: the chief censors were implicated in the creation of the virus, and they orchestrated a cover-up to hide their culpability. Working with the Intelligence Community, they bribed scientists to alter their published opinions. They targeted journalists for deviating from their party line. Their colleagues bought “burner phones” to delete any record of communication. They held secret meetings at the CIA and the State Department. They avoided government emails to keep their leader’s “fingerprints” off the incriminating evidence. Their cabal created an international shadow government, dictating policy designed to evade accountability for their past misdeeds.
If that sounds like a conspiracy, it’s because it was. The public health apparatus, the White House, and the Intelligence Community spearheaded a coordinated attack on free expression in the United States. They launched coercive campaigns to nationalize our news sources, and they stripped Americans of their First Amendment rights to augment their power. This informational stranglehold required technological power that sparked, as Justice Neil Gorsuch later wrote, possibly “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”
The advent of the internet promised a liberation. The free flow of information appeared inevitable. Connectivity seemed emancipatory. Autocracies would be unable to control the emerging swell of information. Social media would create a digital community where users could interact without government interference.
“There’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet,” President Clinton remarked in 2000. “Good luck. That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”
In the second half of the 20th century, the First Amendment had ascended to a status of secular scripture in the United States. Hollywood deified journalists, and the ACLU defended free speech for all citizens, especially those with the least popular views. In 1989, the Supreme Court wrote: “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”
The internet became the frontier of free expression in the ensuing decades. Americans thought the First Amendment separated them from autocracies’ digital book burning. In China, the state curated citizens’ newsfeeds to ensure compliance with government orthodoxy. The “Great Firewall” denied users access to websites outside the CCP’s control. Westerners joined President Clinton’s optimism that authoritarianism would cave to the force of the internet. The 2012 Democratic National Platform declared, “President Obama is strongly committed to protecting an open Internet that fosters investment, innovation, creativity, consumer choice, and free speech, unfettered by censorship or undue violations of privacy.”
That optimism soon disappeared; the U.S. Security State and D.C. bureaucrats weaponized technological advances against the First Amendment after transgressive cyber actors like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange exposed the vastness of their crimes. Now, online censorship is an unavoidable reality rather than an abstract analogy. The internet did not secure free speech rights; it augmented governments’ ability to crack down on dissidents. Technology did not liberate the oppressed; it created a global panopticon that captured citizens’ information and implemented unprecedented surveillance. Connectivity did not unleash a flourishment of freedom; it centralized power more than ever before. The powers of the web did not lead to an Enlightenment-inspired Westernization of the Orient; the United States adopted the most totalitarian pillars of the Chinese regime.
In just eight years, the Democratic Party’s official platform shifted from vowing to protect an internet “unfettered by censorship” to announcing that it would take action to combat “disinformation” and technology that helped “spread hate,” however party officials defined those terms.
In the response to Covid, the federal government overturned the First Amendment’s “bedrock principle.” The United States, in tandem with its partners in Silicon Valley, censored dissent, targeted inconvenient journalists, and worked toward a Chinese system of state-curated newsfeeds. Doctors faced gag orders and career-threatening punishment for treating their patients. The Covid regime reframed discourse as a threat, rather than a prerequisite, to democracy. The promise of the internet had died, and the United States had abandoned its founding principles.
The institutions and individuals who championed the crackdown on free speech acted in self-interest. They hijacked the scientific method and subordinated the First Amendment to the interests of federal bureaucrats and campaign donors. In brazen disregard for the concept of self-government, they funneled taxpayer funds to bribe parties into toeing the line of government-sponsored propaganda. The origin of this process can be traced to an email from January 2020.
The Proximal Origin of Pandemic Censorship – 01/27/2020 – 6:24 pm
January 27, 2020 was a Monday. Most news coverage focused on the death of Kobe Bryant the previous day in a helicopter accident. John Bolton appeared on morning shows to speak against President Trump as the Senate considered his first impeachment trial. The CDC confirmed the fifth case of Covid-19 in the United States, and the New York Times featured two front-page stories on the rise of the Chinese coronavirus.
Below the fold, a photograph showed men in hazmat suits exiting a medical facility. “Hospitals in Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, remain intensely crowded,” the caption read. Viral videos circulated the internet showing men and women collapsing in the streets. Though later proven false, they were the center of an ominous news cycle. The victims suddenly fell to the ground as masked paramedics rushed to their aid. “It is an image that captures the chilling reality of the coronavirus outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan,” the Guardian reported. “A grey-haired man wearing a face mask lies dead on the pavement, a plastic shopping bag in one hand, as police and medical staff in full protective suits and masks prepare to take him away.”
More responsible figures explained that the virus appeared to only affect the elderly and those with severe comorbidities, but the headlines induced panic-stricken Americans to stock up on household supplies and canned goods.
Anthony Fauci’s panic that day was more personal. At 6:24 pm, he received an email warning that he could be implicated in the origin of the virus sweeping through China. His assistant at the NIAID, Greg Folkers, relayed concerns that the agency had funded research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through grants it made to EcoHealth Alliance, an American nonprofit group led by Peter Daszak. That research, Folkers warned, could be the source of Covid. The email included a study from virologist Ralph Baric warning that gain-of-function research on coronaviruses could create “SARS 2.0.”
Folkers suggested that the United States government, through Anthony Fauci’s grants, had funded what came to be known as the “lab-leak” hypothesis. If true, it threatened political ruin and legal exposure for Fauci. Folkers wrote: “NIAID has funded Peter [Daszak]’s group for coronavirus work in China for the past 5 years…Collaborators include Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
After four decades in government, Fauci had reached the apex of his power. He was the highest paid government official in the United States, drawing a salary 20% higher than the President’s, and he controlled billions of dollars in federal grants. He was a newly minted media celebrity and the face of American public health. That week, he began advertising to journalists that a new vaccine for the coronavirus was in development. Now, Folkers warned that he may be responsible for funding the creation of the virus that would define his career.
Fauci risked more than mere embarrassment. Six years earlier, President Obama had suspended all funding for “gain-of-function research” (a process whereby scientists genetically alter viruses) after critics warned that the engineered viruses could escape laboratories. The Obama White House issued a moratorium in response to concerns regarding “biosafety incidents at federal research facilities.” But Fauci’s public health bureaucracy had not heeded President Obama’s ban; instead, they helped groups continue their forbidden research.
Fauci had been a longtime advocate for gain-of-function research. In 2012, he published an eerily prescient article in its defense. He wrote that even if a “scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic,” the “benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge [would still] outweigh the risks.”
Fauci’s chief ally at the New York Times, Donald McNeil (one of the most ardent advocates for extreme lockdowns beginning in February 2020), later defended U.S. funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology even if it sparked the pandemic. “Let me say this bluntly,” he wrote in April 2023. “Supporting the bat research done by EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the right thing to do.”
As head of the NIAID, Fauci issued grants to coronavirus researchers like EcoHealth Alliance despite the Obama prohibition. In May 2016, two NIH staff members alerted Peter Daszak that his group’s experiments “appear to involve research covered under the pause,” referring to President Obama’s gain-of-function moratorium. Instead of enforcing the government order, the NIH helped Daszak evade the restrictions of the ban, rewriting EcoHealth Alliance’s grant requests and safety documentation. EcoHealth continued its gain-of-function research on coronaviruses and entered ongoing partnerships with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Upon receiving a grant that year, Daszak emailed NIH officials: “This is terrific! We are very happy to hear that our Gain of Function research funding pause has been lifted.”
In a February 2020 New York Times article, Daszak explained how his group began research in 2018 on “an unknown, novel pathogen that hadn’t yet entered the human population.” He wrote that this disease “would probably be confused with other diseases early in the outbreak and would spread quickly and silently; exploiting networks of human travel and trade, it would reach multiple countries and thwart containment.” He continued, “[it] would have a mortality rate higher than a seasonal flu but would spread as easily as the flu.” Government documents later revealed that Daszak requested $14 million from the Pentagon to make viruses with unique features of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan in 2018.
By January 27, 2020, that novel pathogen appeared to have arrived. At 6:24 pm, Folkers warned that Fauci could be implicated in the most widespread public health scandal in world history. The email detailed how Fauci provided Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance with millions of taxpayer dollars, and that their “collaborators include Wuhan Institute of Virology.” A government audit later concluded: “Despite identifying potential risks associated with research being performed under the EcoHealth awards…NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth’s compliance with some requirements.”
The panic circled the global public health apparatus that day. Fauci’s British counterpart – Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar – started his own cover-up campaign. Farrar ordered a “burner phone” on January 27 when he realized that the Western health community may be implicated in the origins of the virus. “I now had a burner phone, which I would use only for this purpose and then get rid of,” he wrote in his memoir. He told his wife, “We should use different phones; avoid putting things in emails; and ditch our normal email addresses and phone contacts.”
By early that evening, Fauci and Farrar both knew they could be implicated in the emergence of the virus. They shared a defensive reaction. They issued no mea culpa, no explanation to the public on the dangers of gain-of-function research, no call to investigate the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Instead, they launched a coordinated censorship campaign to ostracize anyone questioning the origins of the virus or lending credence to the lab-leak hypothesis. The proximal origin of Covid censorship was a primal instinct of self-preservation. Their careers depended on its success.
Fauci and Farrar recruited virologists Kristian Andersen and Eddie Holmes to join their efforts. On January 29, Andersen warned Farrar that the coronavirus may have emerged from gain-of-function research. Andersen focused on a paper that he described as a “how-to manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory.” It outlined how scientists could engineer a bat coronavirus to infect humans.
“Andersen found a scientific paper where exactly this technique had been used to modify the spike protein of the original SARS-CoV-1 virus, the one that had caused the SARS outbreak of 2002/3,” Farrar wrote in his memoir. “The pair knew of a laboratory where researchers had been experimenting on coronaviruses for years: the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the city at the heart of the outbreak.”
Farrar then emailed Fauci requesting to speak to him privately over the phone. Andersen joined their call, and they organized a series of secret teleconferences that week. After Andersen raised his concerns surrounding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Dr. Fauci prompted “Proximal Origin,” an initiative to disprove the lab-leak theory before it reached the public. They had inverted the scientific method; their predetermined conclusion would guide their research. Virologists repeatedly warned Fauci that the virus was “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory,” but their job evolved into a mission to reverse engineer a zoonotic thesis.
Dr. Robert Redfield, who served as head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2018 to 2021, later testified that he warned Fauci and colleagues as early as January 2020 that the virus appeared to have emerged from a laboratory rather than jumping from animals to humans. He argued that the virus’s “furin-cleavage” site – a spot in which the virus’s proteins can make it infect human cells more easily – suggested human manipulation. For voicing these concerns, Dr. Fauci excluded Redfield from all discussions concerning the origin of the virus.
Redfield was not alone in his concerns. In late January, Kristian Andersen texted colleague Eddie Holmes, “Eddie, can we talk? I need to be pulled off a ledge here,” after he discovered the furin-cleavage site and worried that it was evidence of gain-of-function research.
As Fauci received ongoing warnings that the virus appeared to be engineered, the pressure mounted. Investigators would not have to look far to find the publicly available information: Fauci’s institute had funded gain-of-function research at a laboratory in the epicenter of the outbreak of a virus with unnatural characteristics. The secret teleconferences lasted late into the night. “It’s hard to come off nocturnal calls about the possibility of a lab leak and go back to bed,” Farrar wrote about the clandestine communications from that period. “Just a few of us – Eddie [Holmes], Kristian [Anderson], Tony [Fauci] and I – were now privy to sensitive information that, if proved to be true, might set off a whole series of events that would be far bigger than any of us. It felt as if a storm was gathering.”
The storm continued along its path the following day. On February 1, Science Magazine published an article questioning the origins of the virus. The piece cited Andersen and colleagues who expressed concerns about the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci read the article and forwarded it to Andersen, saying it was “of interest to the current discussion.”
Within an hour, Farrar and Fauci organized another emergency teleconference. Andersen presented evidence suggesting that the virus emerged from a lab leak. He referenced five studies on gain-of-function research and coronaviruses, all co-authored by Ralph Baric. Baric, however, was excluded from the discussions because they thought he was “too close” to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
After the call, Fauci requested more information on which projects his agency had funded in Wuhan. Virologists said that they were up to 80 percent certain that the coronavirus came from a lab. Andersen said he agreed with 60 to 70 percent confidence. “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the 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,” he wrote to colleagues in February.
But there were political concerns that were incompatible with their scientific analysis. “Given the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to [a] natural process,” Andersen’s colleague, Dr. Andrew Rambaut, wrote in their Slack group in February 2020. Fauci worked to cover his tracks, searching through projects he had funded that could be responsible.
Andersen and a team of virologists worked with Fauci to draft a paper in response to the Science Magazine article. Emails later exposed the deliberate cover-up behind the paper. One Fauci advisor revealed that they worked to evade the Freedom of Information Act by avoiding government email accounts. “Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories…Don’t worry…I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”
Andersen and his team thanked Farrar and Fauci for their “advice and leadership,” and they pushed forward with their cover-up. They bypassed traditional review periods to publish their article one month later in Nature Journal. Their finished product – “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” – became the basis for the regime’s talking points and censorship efforts. Its thesis was irreconcilable with the authors’ conclusions from four weeks earlier.
“We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” the article concluded. While Andersen had presented Fauci with extensive evidence that the virus was “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory,” his new paper made no mention of his earlier concerns. Later reports revealed that the article underwent significant changes during the drafting period. In February, the authors referenced concerns about the Wuhan Institute of Virology and calls with Ralph Baric and Peter Daszak. Between January 31 and February 28, Andersen and his colleagues made over 50 direct statements that expressed their belief that a lab leak was the likely origin of the virus.
“The main issue is that accidental escape [from a lab] is in fact highly likely – it’s not some fringe theory,” Andersen told colleagues on February 2. Two days later, however, Andersen told the group that Fauci had called another meeting and that “a statement about this not being engineering should be coming out” from their work product.
After three weeks of compiling arguments to assure the public that the virus had natural origins, Andersen emailed his colleagues, “None of this helps refute a lab origin.” The final publication, however, removed all references to sources that lent support to the lab-leak hypothesis. Even four weeks after the publication of the “Proximal Origin” paper, Andersen remarked privately over text that the scientists “can’t fully rule out engineering (for basic research)” as the cause of the virus. Behind closed doors, the scientists repeatedly contradicted their professed belief that they did “not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
The CIA, Mass Media, and Academia Back the Coverup
In just one month, the authors reversed their conclusions and produced a paper that shielded the public health apparatus from blame for the outbreak of the disease. On February 6, Andersen changed the name of the Slack channel from “Project-Wuhan Engineering” to “Project-Wuhan Pangolin” as the World Health Organization declared that the virus emerged from bats or pangolins (mammals resembling anteaters). Andersen admitted to his colleagues, “For all I know, people could have infected the pangolin, not the other way,” but that they had a political narrative to protect.
At the time, Fauci acknowledged the gain-of-function research taking place in China. In February 2020, he wrote to NIH officials, “Scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain of function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.” Within weeks, however, scientists abandoned their research into the common-sense link between the virus and gain-of-function research.
What could have prompted their change of heart? A whistleblower later revealed that the CIA offered payments to scientists to bury findings supporting the lab-leak hypothesis. The House Oversight Committee explained: “According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.” Then, however, the whistleblower reported that the “six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position.”
Subsequent reports suggest that the Intelligence Community had strong interests in deploying assets to protect the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Seymour Hersh revealed that the CIA had a spy at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who warned in late 2019 that “China was doing both offensive and defensive work” with pathogens, and that there had been a laboratory accident that resulted in the infection of a researcher.
The Intelligence Community then became central to the cover-up. A whistleblower revealed that Fauci entered CIA headquarters “without a record of entry” to “influence its Covid-19 origins investigation” early in the pandemic. America’s leading public health official was holding clandestine meetings at Langley to steer its investigations away from implicating him in the origin of the virus, and they used taxpayer funding to bribe scientists into subservience. He later held similar meetings with the State Department and the White House.
“Fauci came to our building, to promote the natural origin of the virus,” the CIA whistleblower said. “He knew what was going on…He was covering his ass and he was trying to do it with the Intel community…He came multiple times and he was treated like a rock star by the Weapons and Counter Proliferation Mission Center.”
It had all the hallmarks of a cover-up. They bought “burner phones” and made sure to limit what they put in writing. They worked to publicize a theory that contradicted everything they discussed behind closed doors. They bribed scientists to purchase their subservience. The Intelligence Community used taxpayer funds to deceive the American public. Then, the cabal worked to silence all dissent on the issue.
Beginning in April, Dr. Fauci told reporters that Covid was “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” He emailed journalists the “Proximal Origin” paper as the basis for his statement. The CIA-funded article became a cudgel to attack anyone who questioned Fauci’s authority.
In February 2020, Senator Tom Cotton noticed that the pandemic originated in the same city where a virology lab conducted experiments on coronaviruses. The official narrative didn’t add up, he explained on Fox News. There was no evidence linking the original Covid patients to local “wet markets,” and Beijing was unwilling to cooperate with investigators. “We don’t know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that,” Cotton said. “We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”
The Washington Post told readers that Cotton had espoused a “fringe” conspiracy theory and quoted a Rutgers Professor Richard Ebright, who assured the audience that there was “absolutely nothing in the genome sequence of this virus that indicates the virus was engineered.” A group of Democratic Congressmen accused him of perpetuating “racist stereotypes.”
But Cotton’s statement was entirely consistent with Andersen’s message to Fauci that the “lab escape” was “so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work.” Andersen even sent a Slack message to the Proximal Origin authors on February 17 saying that Cotton’s theory wasn’t “totally wrong.” Jeremy Farrar later admitted: “my starting bias was that it was odd for a spillover event, from animals to humans, to take off in people so immediately and spectacularly – in a city with a biolab…This novel virus, spreading like wildfire, seemed almost designed to infect human cells.”
CDC Director Robert Redfield had the same instinct. “When Redfield saw the breakdown of early cases, some of which were family clusters, the market explanation made less sense. Had multiple family members gotten sick via contact with the same animal?” Vanity Fair reported. “Redfield immediately thought of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Yet, that discourse was suddenly impermissible in public in the United States under Fauci’s leadership. Internal Facebook messages revealed that the federal government worked with social media companies to silence any concerns, reports, or questions like those that Senator Cotton raised. They sought to end the discussion before it led to investigations. Meta, the corporate parent of Instagram and Facebook, banned all posts suggesting that the virus came from a lab. China joined the crackdown on speech. Beijing jailed journalists for challenging the government’s narrative of the emergence of the virus. In Wuhan and Washington, discussing the origin of the virus was off-limits.
On April 16, 2020, NIH Director Francis Collins emailed Fauci a report by Fox News host Bret Baier stating that multiple sources believed Covid-19 emerged from the Wuhan Lab. “Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy, with what seems to be growing momentum,” wrote Collins. “I hoped the Nature Medicine article on the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 would settle this…” Collins didn’t specify that the “conspiracy” was only “very destructive” for those that it implicated.
The Wall Street Journal later reported that Defense Department experts conducted a genomic analysis in Spring 2020 that found evidence of human manipulation of the virus, which was conducted with the specific techniques utilized at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. These experts, however, were directed by their bosses at the Pentagon to cease sharing their findings. In May 2020, the Defense Department experts wrote an unclassified paper detailing their findings, but they were promptly banned from participating in any briefings with the White House.
Despite clear intelligence pointing to the lab leak (all of which was known by Andersen, Farrar, and Fauci), the Government ramped up its censorship efforts, using the “Proximal Origin” paper from Nature Medicine to quash dissent. At the government’s behest, billions of users of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were prohibited from mentioning a lab leak online. The information centers banned news accounts, political activists, and virologists from challenging their preferred narrative.
The U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic summarized the censorship of the origins of the virus as “the anatomy of a cover-up.”
“On January 31, 2020, Dr. Fauci prompted Proximal Origin, which’s goal was to ‘disprove’ the lab leak theory to avoid blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic. Proximal Origin employed fatally flawed science to achieve its goal. And, finally, Dr. Collins and Dr. Fauci used Proximal Origin to attempt to kill the lab leak theory. This is the anatomy of a cover-up.”
The email from 6:24 pm on January 27 sparked a chain of events that led to the censorship of hundreds of millions of Americans. Citizens lost their right to question, investigate, or discuss the cause of the most disruptive political event in world history. There was no public health basis for the assault on free inquiry; Fauci and his cohorts launched their attack on the lab-leak hypothesis to protect themselves. They used their credentials to bully the press corps and the scientific community into submission. Through their allies in the media, they derided dissent as “fringe theories” that threatened a “dangerous” “infodemic” of “debunked claims.”
On MSNBC, Joy Reid called the lab-leak theory “debunked bunkum.” CNN reporters referred to it as “widely debunked.” Glenn Kessler, a “fact checker” at the Washington Post, claimed it was “virtually impossible for this virus to escape from the lab…We deal in facts.”
The “Proximal Origin” paper deliberately skewed its findings to support Dr. Fauci’s pronouncement that the virus originated in bats. Fauci hid his involvement in the drafting of the paper and the financial offers that the authors received from the CIA. He later testified that he “did not recall” specifics on Covid origins over 100 times in one day of closed-door testimony. In July 2023, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing on “Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover Up” to examine the “suppression of scientific discourse” surrounding the March 2020 paper. The Committee found that the co-authors of the paper – including Andersen and Holmes – abandoned scientific integrity “in favor of political expediency.” Rep. Ronny Jackson confronted Andersen about his capitulation to Fauci’s interests.
“You completely changed your hypothesis. You collaborated with your coauthors and you wrote the Proximal Origins paper all in that period of time….I just want you to know that sounds completely ridiculous to the American people. And it’s completely in step with what a lot of people think is going on here, is that Dr. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins realized that they had been implicated in the production or in the creation of this virus. And they were doing everything they could, including getting both of you to come on board as tools or vehicles to undermine that theory.”
The censors’ driving purpose was to protect their self-interest. They usurped citizens’ rights to participate in their government, and their benevolent excuses of “public health” were facades for their tyrannical aspirations. The proximal origin of pandemic censorship revealed the central tenets of the censorship regime: suppression, collusion, and deception designed to evade accountability and augment power. Perhaps more alarmingly, it laid the groundwork for the interagency censorship from the American Intelligence Community.
“The Most Massive Attack Against Free Speech in United States’ History”
The scope of the ensuing attack on the First Amendment was unprecedented. President Woodrow Wilson jailed socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs and had his Postmaster General halt the mailing of dissident political magazines. President John Adams led the crusade of the Sedition Act against his political opponents. No previous challenge to free expression, however, had the technological reach or the sophistication of the Security State in the Covid response.
In 2023, a group of doctors, journalists, and states sued the Biden administration for alleged violations of their First Amendment rights in Missouri v. Biden, later named Murthy v. Missouri on appeal. The plaintiffs in the case included doctors Aaron Kheriaty, Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, state attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana, and independent news outlets. Dr. Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration (which criticized the United States’ lockdown policies), swore under oath that he and his colleagues faced a “relentless covert campaign of social-media censorship of our dissenting view from the government’s preferred message” during the Covid response.
Defendants included the Biden White House, the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security. On July 4, 2023, the District Court granted a preliminary injunction in the case that barred defendants from colluding with social media companies to abridge constitutionally protected speech.
“The present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” wrote U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty. He continued, “The evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario…The United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”
The Government appealed, but the Fifth Circuit largely affirmed Judge Doughty’s decision. “The Supreme Court has rarely been faced with a coordinated campaign of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life,” the Circuit Court held. The Government, the Court found, “engaged in a years-long pressure campaign designed to ensure that the censorship [on social media] aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoint.”
The campaign was not limited to rogue government actors; it was a coordinated interagency conspiracy that could be traced to the U.S. Security State and the top of the Biden administration.
“The highest (and I mean the highest) levels of the White House.”
The Biden White House, led by Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty, demanded Big Tech suppress political opponents’ speech and used the threat of government retaliation to strip citizens of their First Amendment rights.
“Are you guys fucking serious?” Flaherty asked Facebook after the company failed to censor critics of the Covid vaccine. “I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.” At other times, Flaherty was more direct. “Please remove this account immediately,” he told Twitter about a Biden family parody account. The company compiled within an hour.
Flaherty made it clear that he was concerned with political power, not veracity or disinformation. He demanded Facebook stifle malinformation, “often-true content” that could be considered “sensational.” He asked company executives if they could interfere with private messages containing “misinformation” on WhatsApp.
Flaherty later demanded to know how Facebook would address “things that are dubious, but not provably false.” In February 2021, he accused the company of fomenting “political violence” by allowing “vaccine skeptical” content on its platform.
His desire to control Americans’ access to information meant eliminating critical media sources. He demanded Facebook reduce the spread of Tucker Carlson’s report on the Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine’s link to blood clots. “There’s 40,000 shares on the video. Who is seeing it now? How many?” Flaherty’s attack on the First Amendment was not directed at the speaker – the objective was to protect political power by denying citizens the right to access information.
“I’m curious – NY Post churning out articles every day about people dying,” he wrote to Facebook. “Does that article get a reduction, labels?” He suggested that Facebook “change the algorithm so that people were more likely to see NYT, WSJ…over Daily Wire, Tomi Lahren, polarizing people.” Flaherty was not subtle in his objective. “Intellectually my bias is to kick people off,” he told the company executive.
In April 2021, Flaherty worked to strong-arm Google into ramping up its censorship operations. He told executives that his concerns were “shared at the highest (and I mean the highest) levels of the WH.” There’s “more work to be done,” he instructed. He had the same talking points with Facebook that month, telling executives that he would have to explain to President Biden and Chief of Staff Ron Klain “why there is misinfo on the internet.”
In nearly every case, the social media companies caved to the pressure of the White House.
Jenin Younes, litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
“These emails establish a clear pattern: Mr. Flaherty, representing the White House, expresses anger at the companies’ failure to censor Covid-related content to his satisfaction. The companies change their policies to address his demands. As a result, thousands of Americans were silenced for questioning government-approved Covid narratives.”
The Biden administration’s censorship operations ramped up in July 2021 as Americans realized that the Covid vaccines were not as effective as advertised. President Biden called publicly for social media companies to censor critics of Covid vaccines, telling the press that Big Tech was “killing people” by tolerating dissent. Biden later clarified that his comment was an attack on free speech, not tech CEOs. “My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally that somehow I’m saying ‘Facebook is killing people,’ that they would do something about the misinformation,” he explained.
Facebook heeded the call, and its employees updated the Biden White House the following week on their ramped-up censorship initiatives. A Facebook executive emailed government officials to say that they were working to censor pages that the administration found inconvenient. “I wanted to make sure you saw the steps we took just this past week to adjust policies on what we are removing with respect to misinformation, as well as steps taken to further address the ‘disinfo dozen [vaccine critics including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.].’” the executive wrote to the White House.
The following month, White House Covid Advisor Andy Slavitt successfully lobbied Twitter to remove journalist Alex Berenson from its platform after Berenson posted that the mRNA vaccines don’t “stop infection. Or transmission.” Berenson, who had his account reinstated following a lawsuit against Twitter, later uncovered emails that showed that Todd O’Boyle, a top Twitter lobbyist, circumvented company protocol to have junior Twitter employees ban his account. O’Boyle devised this pressure strategy through a coordinated campaign with White House advisor Andy Slavitt and Pfizer Board Member Scott Gottlieb.
Flaherty continued to spearhead the Biden White House’s censorship efforts. “We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy — period,” he wrote to a Facebook executive. “We want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game…This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.”
Of course, the mobster approach to free speech — this would be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us, or else – violates the First Amendment. Flaherty sought to control who could have a Facebook account, determine what they could post, and influence what they see. He didn’t own the company or work for the CEO – he used the threat of government retribution to impose censorship.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg later told Joe Rogan that “Biden administration officials used to call and scream at us demanding that we remove Covid-related content, even things that were facts, or memes and humor…When we refused, we found ourselves under investigation by several agencies.”
He continued:
“During the Biden administration, when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program…while they were trying to push that program they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it. And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly, were true. They basically pushed us and said, you know, that ‘anything saying that says vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.’”
That week, Zuckerberg released a statement admitting: “The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government. And that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past 4 years when even the US government has pushed for censorship. By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.” The confessions in January 2025 merely confirmed the strategy revealed through years of litigation and press leaks.
White House official Andy Slavitt joined Flaherty’s efforts to crack down on dissent. In March 2021, he led the administration’s unconstitutional crusade to prevent Americans from buying politically unfavorable books on Amazon. The effort, assisted by Flaherty, began on March 2, 2021, when Slavitt emailed the company demanding to speak to executives about the site’s “high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation.”
The following month, Slavitt targeted Facebook, demanding that the company remove memes lampooning the Covid vaccine. In an April 2021 email, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president for global affairs, informed his team at Facebook that Slavitt, a Senior Advisor to President Biden, was “outraged . . that [Facebook] did not remove” a particular post.
When Clegg “countered that removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US,” Slavitt disregarded the warning and the First Amendment, complaining that the posts “demonstrably inhibit[ed] confidence” in the Covid vaccines.
It is “axiomatic” under American law that the state cannot “induce, encourage, or promote” private companies to pursue unconstitutional aims. “Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea,” the Supreme Court held in Gertz v. Welch. “However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries, but on the competition of other ideas.”
There is no misinformation carve-out to the First Amendment or pandemic exception to Constitutional Law, but the Biden administration, led by Flaherty, remains unremorseful for its leadership in the censorship apparatus.
In March 2023, Flaherty participated in an hour-long discussion at Georgetown University on his role in “how governments use social media to communicate with the public.” An audience member asked Flaherty about his emails encouraging Facebook to censor private WhatsApp messages. “How do you justify legally telling a private messaging app what they can and cannot send?” Flaherty declined to answer. “I can’t really comment on the specifics. I think the President has sort of made clear that one of the key parts of our Covid strategy is making sure the American people have access to reliable information as soon as they could get it, and, uh, you know, that’s all part and parcel to that, but unfortunately I can’t go too far into the litigation.”
Three months later, Flaherty stepped down from his position at the White House. President Biden remarked, “The way Americans get their information is changing, and since Day 1, Rob has helped us meet people where they are.” President Biden was right – Americans’ access to information changed. The internet promised a liberating free exchange of ideas, but bureaucrats like Flaherty worked to implement informational tyranny. In Flaherty’s words, this was all “part and parcel” to the White House strategy. On behalf of the administration, he demanded that companies remove true content; he called on social media groups to remove journalists’ accounts, suggested censoring citizens’ private messages, and institutionalized the abuse of the First Amendment.
For his role in stifling Americans’ access to information, the Democratic National Committee rewarded him by making him Deputy Campaign Manager for President Biden’s (and later Kamala Harris’s) 2024 presidential bids. Following President Trump’s 2024 victory, Flaherty lamented that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the popularity of independent podcasters contributed to his party “losing hold of culture;” a culture that he had dedicated his career to controlling for the benefit of his cabal.
The Security State Turns Inward
The censorship operations were not limited to select politically appointed ideologues. The US Security State has been engaged in a decades-long war against free expression. At first, the targets appeared to be limited to transgressive cyber actors. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden looked like socially awkward hackers, not harbingers for what was to come. Following the 2001 terrorist attacks and Anthrax scare, the American Intelligence Community gained immense power through the PATRIOT Act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. But the powers designed to combat Islamic extremism developed into a weapon to purge domestic dissent. The leading government agency in the Covid response wasn’t the CDC or the NIH; it was the Department of Homeland Security.
The censors adopted national security fear-mongering language to justify their assaults on civil liberties. The Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security described “misinformation” as a “terrorism threat to the United States.” The DHS identified the informational terrorists as those who published information that would “undermine public trust in government institutions,” specifically mentioning “false or misleading narratives” regarding Covid.
The encroachment of the U.S. Security State on the pillars of American society was suddenly a civilizational struggle in 2020. As the Covid regime overturned the Bill of Rights, the Security State shut down American society, eradicated due process, and captured the public health apparatus. This was not limited to CIA bribes or FBI interference in the Hunter Biden laptop. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), an agency within the DHS, took center stage in the Covid Coup.
On March 18, 2020 DHS replaced Health and Human Services as the Lead Federal Agency responding to Covid. FEMA, another DHS subsidiary, assumed control of vast swaths of government operations. CISA then hijacked the country’s labor market and “cognitive infrastructure,” a dystopian phrase for thoughts and opinions. That week, CISA divided the American workforce into categories of “essential” and “nonessential.” Within hours, California became the first state to issue a “stay-at-home” edict. This began a previously unimaginable assault on Americans’ civil liberties.
In Missouri v. Biden, the Fifth Circuit explained how CISA then transitioned to usurping the First Amendment. CISA held ongoing meetings with social media platforms to “push them to adopt more restrictive policies on censoring election-related speech.” This broad category included everything relevant to an American voter, and the right to criticize lockdowns, vaccines, or the Hunter Biden laptop was suddenly subject to approval from the Department of Homeland Security.
Through a process known as “switchboarding,” CISA officials dictated to Big Tech platforms what content was “true” or “false,” which became Orwellian euphemisms for acceptable and prohibited speech. CISA’s leaders reveled in their attacks on the First Amendment. They overturned hundreds of years of free speech protections, appointing themselves the arbiters of truth.
They were not subtle on this point. CISA Director Jen Easterly testified in Missouri v. Biden, “I think [it] is really, really dangerous if people get to pick their own facts.” Instead, CISA would pick their facts and curate their newsfeeds for them. Easterly proudly claimed her agency concerned “cognitive infrastructure,” meaning the thoughts in Americans’ minds. CISA’s Advisory Committee issued a 2022 Draft Report for Easterly that broadened “infrastructure” to include “the spread of false and misleading information because it poses a significant risk to critical function, like elections, public health, financial services and emergency responses.”
The First Amendment presented an obstacle to their pursuit of thought control. Dr. Katie Starbird, a leader of CISA’s censorship operations, lamented that Americans seemed to “accept malinformation as speech and within democratic norms.” By “malinformation,” Dr. Starbird meant true but politically inconvenient stories that emerged online. For example, CISA helped stifle a report on a Loudon County government official because “it was posted as part of a larger campaign to discredit the word of that official.” There was nothing deceptive about the video, but it was part of a parents’ group’s opposition to Critical Race Theory, so CISA had the post removed. Similar stories emerged concerning reporting on vaccines, school closures, and lockdowns.
In 2024, America First Legal exposed more severe censorship directives from CISA and the Department of Homeland Security. According to internal documents, the Department of Homeland Security specifically targeted posts from Dr. Jay Bhattacharya that contradicted the government’s inflated claims regarding the fatality rate of Covid. CISA then coordinated with left-wing censorship apparati like Media Matters, the Atlantic Council, and the Stanford Internet Observatory to suppress unapproved reports challenging the efficacy of masking, lockdowns, and vaccines. CISA determined that posts criticizing lockdown measures and mask mandates as consistent with “pro-Kremlin media.” And they justified their censorship by claiming that “Anti-migrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Asian, racist, and xenophobic tropes have been at the forefront of Covid-19 related conspiracies.”
Of course, the program explicitly violated the Constitution. The First Amendment does not discriminate based on the veracity of a statement. “Some false statements are inevitable if there is to be an open and vigorous expression of views in public and private conversation,” the Supreme Court held in United States v. Alvarez. But CISA – led by zealots like Dr. Starbird – appointed themselves the arbiters of truth and worked with the most powerful information companies in the world to purge dissent.
CISA then launched nonprofits and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that served as subsidiaries to continue their censorship. The government boasted that it “leveraged CISA’s relationships with social media organizations to ensure priority treatment of misinformation reports.” This process institutionalized the weaponization of information in direct defiance of the First Amendment.
In a draft copy of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Quadrennial Homeland Security Review,” the agency announced that CISA would target alleged mis- or mal-information on issues including the origins of Covid, the efficacy of Covid mRNA vaccines, racial justice, the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, and support for Ukraine. According to CISA Agent Brian Scully’s testimony in Missouri v. Biden, Homeland Security coordinated its efforts with the CDC and the Intelligence Community.
In April 2022, the Department of Homeland Security announced the formation of the “Disinformation Governance Board,” which was to be headed by Democratic activist Nina Jankowicz. According to Politico, Biden’s Ministry of Truth was charged with “countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia.” Jankowicz was particularly familiar with disinformation – prior to her appointment, she was a staunch supporter of the Russiagate conspiracy and later worked to suppress coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
In 2022, as rumors circulated that Elon Musk was considering purchasing Twitter, Jankowicz told National Public Radio: “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms.” James Bovard responded in the New York Post: “That line is the Rosetta Stone for understanding the new Disinformation Governance Board. The goal is not ‘truth’ — which could arise from the clash of competing opinions. Instead, political overlords need power to exert pressure and pull to shape Americans’ beliefs by discrediting, if not totally suppressing, disapproved opinions.”
Fortunately, the absurdity of Jankowicz caused significant blowback from the public, as well as the news media, and the Biden administration was forced to scrap the Disinformation Governance Board later that year.
Other government agencies joined in the efforts. The National Science Foundation delivered grants to use artificial intelligence to “track locations, people, and organizational affiliations of dubious COVID-19 information” based on whether they questioned CDC guidance. “That’s not research, that’s a government surveillance and censorship program laundered through academia,” commented Andrew Lowenthal, CEO of liber-net, a digital civil liberties non-profit.
Lowenthal also reported that Meedan, one of Twitter’s “anti-disinformation partners” during the Covid response, received U.S. Government funding to develop a program “called CryptoChat that advocated peering into private, encrypted messages to weed out ‘misinformation.’” This grant was consistent with the aims of the White House and Rob Flaherty, who sought to impose government censorship on private WhatsApp messages.
The Security State’s war against free expression continued until Judge Terry Doughty issued an injunction prohibiting the agency from colluding with Big Tech companies to censor Americans’ speech. Doughty wrote: “The Free Speech Clause was enacted to prohibit just what [CISA] Director Easterly is wanting to do: allow the government to pick what is true and what is false.”
Until Judge Doughty’s injunction, the censors relied on anonymity to advance their agendas. Suzanne Spaulding, a member of CISA’s “Misinformation & Disinformation Subcommittee,” warned that it was “only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.” She was right, and the Plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden brought their questions about CISA’s work to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. After initially wavering on the issue, the Court reinstated Judge Doughty’s injunction against CISA. The Court held that CISA’s switchboarding practice “likely coerced or significantly encouraged social-media platforms to moderate content…In doing so, the officials likely violated the First Amendment.”
The Covid Regime, led by the Biden administration, responded with Orwellian doublethink: denying the censorship existed while arguing that it must continue. In a Missouri v. Biden hearing before the Fifth Circuit, the Biden Department of Justice argued that the allegations of censorship were merely “an assortment of out-of-context quotes and select portions of documents that distort the record to build a narrative that the bare facts simply do not support.” Harvard Law Professor and former Biden advisor Larry Tribe called allegations of censorship a “thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory,” in July 2023.
But as Orwell describes, the tyrants “hold simultaneously two opinions which cancel out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.” In its appeal of Missouri v. Biden, the government argued that stopping its censorship operations would cause “grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes.” In court, DOJ attorneys defended the “efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation.”
Tribe echoed the DOJ’s position that the censorship is both illusory and beneficial to society. Without social media censorship, Tribe argued, the United States will be “less secure as a nation” and its citizens will be subjected to a “cesspool of disinformation about election denialism and COVID.” Put simply, the regime insisted the censorship didn’t exist, and it was good that it did.
Public security has long been tyrants’ excuse to criminalize free expression. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., compared handing out leaflets opposing World War I to “shouting fire in a crowded theater” in an opinion jailing President Wilson’s political opponents. The Bush administration eroded civil liberties in the War on Terror through the false dichotomy that Americans were either “with us or with the terrorists.” And the demands for obedience reached new heights in the Covid response, as safety from an invisible enemy was invoked to silence critics of the regime.
Just as the Supreme Court failed to uphold civil liberties following World War I, the Roberts Court was woefully derelict in its duty to protect the First Amendment rights of Americans in the Covid response.
In June 2024, the Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s injunction in Murthy v. Missouri on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing. The opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, rested on omitted facts, skewed perceptions, and absurd conclusory statements. The dissent, issued by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, masterfully recounted the facts of the case and the inconsistency of the majority.
The majority opinion was bereft of references to the perpetrators of the censorship regime or their statements of coercion. Justice Barrett did not mention Rob Flaherty or Andy Slavitt – the two main henchmen behind the Biden administration’s efforts – a single time in her holding. She did not address CISA or “switchboarding,” nor did she discuss emails demonstrating the hijacking of social media companies. The dissent, however, devoted pages to recounting the White House’s censorship crusade.
In dissent, Justice Alito cited how “the White House’s emails were phrased virtually as orders and the officials’ frequent follow-ups ensured that they were understood as such.” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg later confirmed this finding in his confessions on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Within hours of taking office for his second term, however, President Trump took the action that the Roberts Court failed to do. On January 20, 2025, he signed an executive order “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship,” which declared it the policy of the United States to “secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech” and to “ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”
Just three months earlier, John Kerry derided the “major block” of the First Amendment in a speech on climate change at the World Economic Forum. He lamented that the United States had insufficient resources to quash “disinformation” and called on his allies to “win the ground, win the right to govern” in order to be “free to be able to implement change.” But with President Trump’s initial actions against federal censorship, it appears that free speech has won the ground and the right to govern. It remains to be seen how the Intelligence Community, CISA, and other actors will respond.
Censoring the Doctors
While the Intelligence Community and the federal bureaucracy worked behind the scenes to quash dissent in the public sphere, California took the next logical step in the censorship crusade by banning non-approved Covid narratives from the medical profession.
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 2098 into law in September 2022 after the state legislature passed the measure without holding public discussion or debate. The law authorized the California Medical Board to punish doctors who shared Covid “misinformation,” defined as any statement that “is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus.”
The law targeted three categories of Covid-related speech. First, it threatened doctors who deviated from orthodoxy on the nature of the virus, including the danger it posed to healthy young adults. Second, it regulated how doctors could treat patients. Third, it focused on controlling medical narratives surrounding mask mandates and mRNA shots. The legislative record revealed that its proponents hoped to address the “problem” of doctors who “call into question public health efforts such as masking and vaccination.” Their proposed solution was to end the debate in the professional sphere.
The law’s broad definition of “misinformation,” subject to change at any moment based on the capricious whims of bureaucrats, was a deliberate attack on free speech. It stood athwart two centuries of First Amendment jurisprudence and American tradition. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein,” the Supreme Court held in 1943. Under the façade of “public health,” censors sought to overturn the core foundation of American free speech.
Jacob Sullum explained in the New York Post:
“The new law… makes physicians subject to discipline for sharing their honest opinions regarding COVID-19 if the medical board thinks they deviate from the ‘scientific consensus,’ a term the law does not define. That nebulous standard poses a due process problem, since the law does not give doctors fair notice of which conduct it reaches. It also poses a free speech problem, since it encourages self-censorship.”
The bill’s primary author was State Senator Richard Pan, a Democrat doctor from Sacramento with a longstanding disregard for the First Amendment. Though he appears to be little more than an empty vessel steered toward political opportunism, Dr. Pan is the archetype of the Covid authoritarians. While Americans surrendered to lockdowns and mandates, he demonstrated an ongoing disdain for constitutional freedoms and disregard for human suffering.
He spouted untruths while accusing his opponents of misinformation, and he used the cudgel of “public health” to justify his attacks on the American way of life. All the while, he appeared obtuse to the profound damage his policies had on children and championed the fundamental tenets of the Covid regime: censorship, lockdowns, school closures, mask mania, vaccine mandates, and a corrupt relationship with the pharmaceutical industry.
In an op-ed for the Washington Post, he called the anti-vaccine movement “akin to domestic terrorism,” and demanded social media companies ban users and groups that challenged government-approved Covid narratives. Pan accused vaccine skeptics of having “a financial interest” in their initiatives but notably ignored his own potential conflicts of interest, as he received more campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry than any other California state representative after he introduced legislation to heighten vaccine requirements. Pan is less critical of his own misinformation; he has insisted that “puberty blockers” are “reversible” and that “natural immunity is clearly rubbish.”
When Governor Newsom signed Dr. Pan’s censorship regime into law, free speech advocates warned that punishing doctors who challenged “contemporary scientific consensus” jeopardized the scientific method and ran afoul of the First Amendment. The Liberty Justice Center explained:
“The scientific consensus has been evolving throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and other public health authorities have constantly shifted their public presentation of scientific data. At the beginning of the pandemic, health authorities insisted the public not wear masks, then soon reversed that decision. Governor Newsom himself closed schools and even outdoor spaces — policies now widely acknowledged as unscientific and harmful.”
California doctors objected to the Newsom-Pan Ministry of Truth and filed suit. In court, they argued that the facts indicated that the “true goal of AB 2098” was to “suppress unpopular ideas or information,” which is in stark violation of the First Amendment. They continued, “there could hardly be a clearer example of a viewpoint-discriminatory law, because AB 2098 privileges speech that is consistent with the ‘scientific consensus’ (however ill-defined that phrase may be) and punishes speech that diverges from it.”
In January 2023, U.S. District Judge William Shubb issued a preliminary injunction that prevented the law from taking effect, holding that the law was “unconstitutionally vague.” Shubb continued, “COVID-19 is a quickly evolving area of science that in many aspects eludes consensus.” Greg Dolin, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, agreed. “This Act is a blatant attempt to silence doctors whose views, though based on thorough scientific research, deviate from the government-approved ‘party line,’” he said after the release of the injunction. “At no point has the State of California been able to articulate the line between permissible and impermissible speech.”
In October 2023, California Democrats quietly repealed A.B. 2098 as coronamania waned and the courts refuted the attack on First Amendment rights. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed challenges to the law as moot after Governor Newsom’s efforts to silence dissident doctors failed under judicial review.
The campaign against free speech in California was representative of the censorious cabal that took power in 2020. The perpetrators spread widely debunked falsehoods and threatened to ruin the careers of those who dissented. They weaponized the state against their political opponents and assumed their self-appointed moral authority transcended any legal limitation to their powers. The attack on our First Amendment was deliberate, and it was launched by those who sought to acquire political authority and shield personal liability.
From the outset, the Covid censors’ focus was self-interest, not public health. They smeared their critics as anti-science, pro-Kremlin, grandma-killing racists who drank bleach and ate horse dewormer. Their incompetence and wrongdoing hid behind their shameless impatience for dissent.
Anthony Fauci infamously remarked, “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki blamed vaccine hesitancy on “Russian disinformation efforts,” which she vowed to “fight with every tool we have.” Justin Trudeau said of the unvaccinated: “They are extremists who don’t believe in science, they’re often misogynists, also often racists.” CNN and the FDA referred to ivermectin as “horse dewormer,” deliberately omitting that the drug’s inventors received a 2015 Nobel Prize for its use in humans.
The censors claimed that their critics were so irredeemable that they should be stripped of their most basic rights as citizens. Covid law and the regime’s infallible leaders denied dissidents their First Amendment freedoms. All the while, the censors replaced free speech with carefully calculated misinformation concerning the virus, vaccines, masks, natural immunity, and lockdowns. While public officials touted party lines to a sycophantic press corps, a more insidious censorship operation worked to eradicate dissent from the marketplace of ideas. As Judge Terry Doughty wrote, Covid censorship sparked arguably “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
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