The debate over censorship is maturing quickly. And the manner in which it is happening sends a clear message: The censors are losing the debate. They cannot defend what they have done over the past four-plus years and now can only resort to forced silencing.
We’ve moved from denial that it was happening at all to full-on defenses of the practice, which implicitly grants precisely what we’ve been pointing out for years. The problem became intense during the COVID-19 wars as true science was blocked from public access by the government and a coalition of private interests working with the government in direct violation of the First Amendment.
These days, the censors are no longer suggesting that it didn’t happen but taking the opposite tact: They are claiming that not enough of it was taking place and that too much “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” got through. That, they say, is the real problem with information controls during the lockdown period.
An example comes from a long interview with Food and Drug Administration-connected vaccine creator Paul Offit and some doctor with a big podcasting platform. The doctor and Mr. Offit were speaking about the dissidents of lockdowns and vaccine mandates and supposedly how they were spreading disinformation.
“What do you think, if any, their punishment should be?” the doctor asked.
Mr. Offit answered that “people should not be allowed to put out information that puts others in harm’s way,” by which he means discourages vaccine acceptance. In other words, he wants to make criticizing vaccines of any sort illegal.
Of course, this presumes that he already knows the answer to the question of what is harmful. From his point of view, it is not lockdowns, closures, rights violations, masks, and vaccines that harm but opposition to them.
He goes on to say that the kinds of critiques offered by Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “should not be allowed.”
This is all pretty shocking since it would mean full censorship of any and all information related to human health. Only government-approved opinions would be allowed. This is despite many decades of dis-, mis-, and malinformation coming from the government itself.
