My Pensacola lecture on the First Amendment (part two)

Why a handful of Covid skeptics on Twitter frightened leftist elites so badly they had to censor us

(Second of two parts. Read Part 1 here.)

(Note: Lot to write this week - more absurdity from the Centers for Disease Control, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates reach new heights of self-parody, etc… but having presented Part 1 of the lecture, I wanted to give you the second part before all of that.)

—

…But it was Covid that showed the elites how powerful and dangerous Twitter and Facebook had become to them.

Perhaps you have forgotten, or blocked out, exactly what started almost exactly four years ago today, just how unprecedented and anti-democratic were the lockdown efforts that spread country to country, from Italy to France to the United States.

I’ll remind you, then. What I’ll also remind you is that they had near-universal elite support on the left and the right. Not just the media or academia or the public health establishment, companies spent billions of dollars advertising for them, churches and synagogues rolled over for them and closed, teachers begged to close schools. Trump tried to protest, but he was quickly steamrolled. Every possible lever was pulled.

And for a couple of weeks, the efforts succeeded. But Americans – particularly rural Americans, particularly Southern Americans, particularly small business owners – are an unruly bunch. They don’t like being told what to do. (I don’t fit in those categories, I just don’t like to be told what to do either.)

—

(You probably don’t like being told what to do either. So I’ll ask nicely: please subscribe?)

—

Very rapidly, Twitter became the place the misfits found each other – and with the help of Elon Musk, who definitely does not like being told what to do – began to argue loudly the Covid response was huge overreaction and mistake, as well as probably unconstitutional.

We became what I called Team Reality (as opposed to Team Apocalypse, the people who seemed to think that Covid really was smallpox).

Nationally, Team Reality was a small minority, particularly in March and April 2020. But it wasn’t such a small minority in the South, and we made enough noise to give Ron DeSantis cover to follow the science – the real science – and reopen Florida fast. The non-apocalypse that followed would forever prove that lockdowns were a choice, not a necessity.

—

(Jennifer Rubin, April Fool. She wanted to hold Florida governor Ron DeSantis “morally - if not legally” responsible for his stand against lockdowns.)

SOURCE

--

This loss of control, however minor, infuriated the elites on the left who had pushed lockdowns hardest.

Through 2020, they pushed social media companies to punish the heretics. Facebook complied, somewhat. I leave it to you to judge whether that compliance had anything to do with the fact that Facebook profited from having people stuck at home. Twitter, which had once called itself the “free speech wing of the free speech party,” largely did not.

Thus when Amazon refused at first to publish my first “Unreported Truths” Covid booklet in June 2020, Elon Musk could turn to Twitter to complain – and call Amazon a monopoly that needed to be broken up.

Mere hours later, Amazon – Amazon, a company equal to the name Jeff Bezos had chosen for it, among the world’s wealthiest and most powerful enterprises – backed down and published my booklet. Which hundreds of thousands of people bought, directly, no publishing house needed.

Yes, social media mattered in 2020. The elites dominated Twitter, but they did not control it. Especially as resistance to the lockdowns and school closures grew through the spring, and accelerated after the elite embrace of mass protests over George Floyd’s death made their support for lockdowns seem hypocritical at best.

But Democrats couldn’t really do much more than complain about Twitter.

After all, they didn’t have the White House. Donald Trump did. Whatever anyone wants to say about Trump, there’s no evidence he believes in anything but the freest of speech. In November 2020, however, Joe Biden won. And the left suddenly had new power over social media companies.

—

(Our fearless leader!)

--

Which was handy, because the public health establishment and its media and Democratic handmaidens had a new cause, the mRNAs.

The idea that Covid might simply flame out as a threat, that Americans would get tired of it all on their own and go back to life as they had in much of the south, was unacceptable to public health bureaucrats – both because doing so threatened their authority and because it would call into question whether the lockdowns and other grand gestures of 2020 had been necessary at all.

No, they had started the pandemic, and they would end it, with mRNA vaccines.

Note the crucial adjective there: mRNA. These weren’t just any vaccines. They were American vaccines. American-designed (by and large, though Pfizer’s partner was German), American-manufactured, and, yes, American-paid. Our very own National Institutes of Health had played a crucial role in them.

Did they work better than older, cheaper, simpler, better understood, potentially safer vaccines?

Well, they sure produced a lot more antibodies, didn’t they?

Okay, but were they better?

Did I mention the antibodies?

But, truly, the clinical trials showed the mRNAs were better at one thing. They reduced infections sharply in the short run. Not deaths, overall or from Covid, not serious cases or hospitalizations – many, many people misunderstood this fact, the clinical trials didn’t prove the fewer deaths or even hospitalizations - but infections.

And, in December 2020, so away we went.

With me – and a handful of other people – as flies in the social media ointment.

--

I was called an anti-vaxxer, and worse. I wasn’t, and I’m not. Being against overprescribing of Oxycontin doesn’t make you an “anti-mediciner.” But the more I learned about how the mRNAs had been developed and tested, the less I liked them.

Alas, this position was not highly popular in early 2021.

To say the least.

And now the left was in a position to do something about it.

It was in April 2021 that Andrew M. Slavitt, a healthcare investor and Democrat who worked at the White House with the title “senior advisor to the Covid response” and Robert Flaherty, who at the time was the White House director of digital strategy and is now the Biden campaign’s deputy manager, had a meeting with Twitter at which Slavitt – in the words of a Twitter official who attended - asked  a ”really tough question” about why Twitter was allowing me to post.

—

(The White House did not like me trying to persuade the public.)

—

This, to me, is a First Amendment violation on its face.

The White House did not need to make explicit threats against Twitter. The federal government of the United States is the most powerful institution in the world, and this “question” was the equivalent of a police officer “asking” you whether you will step out of a car.

Somewhat amazingly, Twitter did not immediately buckle by kicking me off. As both the White House and the company no doubt believed it could, without consequence, thanks to the law commonly known as Section 230.

--

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives social media companies enormous power over their users. When it was enacted in February 1996, Section 230 was essentially designed to give Internet companies protection for the sins of their users – like phone companies, they could not be sued for the content they carried.

This protection broadly made sense. It was unreasonable to expect a company to check that its users weren’t committing libel, or worse. (Later, the companies would claim, largely successfully, that 230’s protection even applied if users tried to warn them about or get them to act against libelous or even criminal behavior by other users, but that is a side issue.)

At the same time, 230 gave Internet companies what its text suggests was limited protection to remove posts or otherwise censor users, if they made “good faith” efforts against “lewd… or otherwise objectionable” material. The language in the bill suggests that lawmakers largely wanted to give Websites the ability to remove pornography, especially so children could not see it.

--

(The exact language of Section 230, which as you can see appears to protect bans made in “good faith” against “lewd” material. The courts in their wisdom have gone much further.):

SOURCE

—

But in a series of rulings, courts – particularly the federal 9^th Circuit, which includes California, where most social media companies are based – extended 230’s limits. The courts found the law gave companies such as Facebook the chance to ban or restrict users at any time without consequence.

Essentially, the courts gave the companies the best of both worlds. They were common carriers like phone companies when it came to facing liability for the posts users made, but publishers like newspapers when it came to their own decisions on what to carry.

This blanket protection made Section 230 incredibly valuable to social media companies. It also ensured they would have to take any threats to it very seriously.

So, in 2021, when the Biden White House told Twitter – and other social media companies – they were on thin ice, the companies listened. And responded.

—

(I can’t fight without you. And I hope you will fight with me… Wait, that’s not what I meant! Anyway, please sign up. 20 cents a day never mattered so much.)

—

The pressure escalated in the summer, as the Delta variant - and the rapid decline in mRNA-generated antibodies - suggested that whatever relief the vaccines had provided from Covid might be short-lived indeed. This led the Biden Administration to push the Food and Drug Administration to approve a third “booster” shot, despite very limited evidence of its efficacy.

Even more controversially, the administration demanded “mandates” – essentially compulsory vaccinations – for working-age Americans, despite the fact that Biden had repeatedly promised, from well before his election, that he would not make vaccinations mandatory.

Imagine, if you can, what the media’s response would have been if Donald Trump had reversed himself on such a crucial promise.

No matter. The hospitals were filling, the Biden Administration insisted that the unvaccinated made up nearly all the cases (which even then was an exaggeration) and were a threat to themselves and the vaccinated. How this could possibly be true if the mRNAs actually worked as advertised was a question no one in the media asked.

On July 16, 2021, infamously, President Biden made his infamous comment that social media companies were “killing people” by allowing mRNA vaccine skepticism.

Hours, Twitter began the process of showing me the door – giving me a strike and locking me out of my account for 12 hours.

Seven weeks later, on August 28, 2021, after unrelenting public media and pressure, the process was complete and Twitter had banned me.

--

Four months later, I sued. I knew I faced long odds because of Section 230, but to my great luck, the case was heard by a judge in San Francisco who was willing to take the evidence that Twitter had not followed its own policies in banning me.

He allowed the lawsuit to proceed – and Twitter settled with me, allowed me back on, and gave me the discovery that proved that the White House and senior officials at Pfizer, which has made over $100 billion selling mRNA vaccines and Paxlovid, had conspired to force Twitter to ban me.

But the final chapters in this story are yet to be written. I have now sued the conspirators in federal court in New York for violating my civil rights and interfering with my contract with Twitter; that lawsuit, Berenson v Biden, is at the motion to dismiss stage.

I hope this court, like the San Francisco court, protects my rights and allows Berenson v Biden to move forward.

But no judge and no court can protect the First Amendment if we as Americans are not committed to it.

Thank you.