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Brownstone Institute

Focused Protection: Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Gabrielle BauerGABRIELLE BAUER

If you express any misgivings about the Covid policies, people are quick to retort: OK, so what’s your solution? How do you propose we should have handled the pandemic instead? Three experts came up with an answer, which they put into writing and co-signed in the Massachusetts town of Great Barrington on October 4, 2020.

[This is an excerpt from the author’s new book Blindsight Is 2020, published by Brownstone.]

Nobody could fault their credentials. A public health expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations, Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya doubles as a health economist. Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiology professor at Oxford University, specializes in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases. Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist, ended an 18-year run as a Harvard University professor in 2021.

The strategy they proposed in the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) flowed from a unique feature of the coronavirus: its unusually sharp and well-defined risk gradient. By the end of summer 2020, studies were confirming what the staff in every hospital already knew: “The risk [of dying of Covid] climbs steeply as the years accrue.” The CDC published an infographic that put this sharp gradient into relief: if you contracted the virus at age 75-84, your risk of dying from it was 3,520 times higher than if you caught it at age 5-17. Chronic conditions such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes also bumped up the risk, though not nearly as much as age.

So here we had a virus that posed a significant risk to some people and a very small risk to others. At the same time we had lockdown policies that, for all their egalitarian pretensions, divided people rather neatly along class lines. To the professional couple with a chef’s kitchen and a subscription to four streaming services, lockdowns represented a chance to reconnect and revel in life’s simple pleasures, like home-baked olive bread and Humphrey Bogart movies. To the newly landed foreign student, dizzy with loneliness under his basement ceiling, not so much. Essential workers, for their part, were expected to bear the risks deflected by the laptop class.

This confluence of circumstances made it impossible not to consider the question: Might we give low-risk groups back their freedom while protecting more vulnerable people? That’s exactly what the GBD proposed. I’ve reproduced it here in abbreviated form:

Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.

We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity. 

The most compassionate approach is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals. 

Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.

Outside the context of Covid, there was nothing radical about the proposal. It aligned with pre-Covid pandemic guidance from such organizations as the WHO and CDC, which advised against blanket restrictions and put a premium on minimizing social disruption. It also capped off a growing unrest throughout the summer of 2020, when groups of experts in several countries began calling for a less aggressive approach to Covid—from Balanced Response in Canada to New Zealand’s Covid Plan B—and exhorting their governments to restore a more normal life for the lower-risk majority. The GBD emerged as the culmination of these rumblings, the anti-lockdown appeal that finally got the world’s attention. Quiet academics on the eve of its launch, Bhattacharya, Gupta and Kulldorff now had the global spotlight on their faces.

When the trio posted the document online, they invited supporters to co-sign it. The signature count grew very quickly for a few days—I know, because I watched the changing digits—and then screeched to a halt. The backlash began just four days after the GBD came out, when Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, called it the work of “three fringe epidemiologists” in an email to Fauci and other high-ranking colleagues. Evidently concerned about the media buzz surrounding the Declaration, he requested a “quick and devastating take down [sic] of its premises.”

Collins got his wish when an article by Yale University epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves appeared in The Nation that same day. We’re not going to follow “some notion of the survival of the young and the fittest,” Gonsalves wrote—a rather elastic interpretation of “protect the vulnerable.” A few days later, the Lancet published a GBD rebuttal statement known as the John Snow Memorandum. Fauci himself described the GBD as “nonsense” and “dangerous.”

With Fauci’s blessing to bash the GBD, media pundits and online warriors happily obliged. Outrage flared up in print and on social media: Murderers! Covid deniers! They don’t care about the vulnerable! (Never mind that the whole strategy revolved around shielding the vulnerable.) “I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to ‘let the virus rip,’ when I had proposed nothing of the sort. I was the target of racist attacks and death threats,” Bhattacharya recalls. Rumors that the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) was using the GBD trio to advance a libertarian agenda began to circulate. In fact, “AIER was kind enough to provide the venue for the meeting that led to the Great Barrington Declaration, but played no role in designing its content.”

Jeffrey Tucker, AIER’s senior editor at the time (and founder of the Brownstone Institute), explained to me that the group was “hoping to catalyze a discussion around the Covid policies. We had no idea where it would go or how big it would become.” 

The term “herd immunity” acquired dark undertones, with everyone forgetting that respiratory pandemics have ended with herd immunity throughout history. The misreading of the term as a callous and individualistic concept continues to puzzle Gupta, who notes that “herd immunity is actually a deeply communitarian idea” because broad societal immunity “is what ends up protecting the vulnerable.”

Suddenly personae non gratae, the GBD partners sought vainly to defend themselves to an audience that had already blocked its ears. Gupta, a life-long progressive, was relegated to publishing her thoughts in conservative news outlets. “I would not, it is fair to say, normally align myself with the Daily Mail,” she admitted in an article she wrote for the newspaper shortly after the GBD came out, adding that she was “utterly unprepared for the onslaught of insults, personal criticism, intimidation and threats that met our proposal.”

I had the opportunity to chat with all three members of the GBD team on separate group video calls. For the record, I cannot imagine a more sincere and gracious trio—the types of people my late mother would have called mensches. Had their critics spent an hour with them over nachos and craft beer, I’m confident the smear campaign against them would have fizzled right out.

Sometimes, a single word can make everything fall into place. The word “unpoetic,” which Gupta used to describe the Covid response, had this effect on me. It was the word I had been searching for all along, the key to what the stay-home-save-lives people were missing. It’s probably no coincidence that Gupta wears a second hat as an award-winning novelist, giving her mind a respite from the biomedical world view.

“It’s a crisis of pathos,” she said when I asked her to elaborate. “It’s a one-dimensional response to a multidimensional crisis. I call it an unpoetic response because it misses the soul of life, the things that give life meaning.”

If Gupta found the pandemic response lacking in poetry, she also decried its esthetics. Sitting at a restaurant table, breaking bread with your unmasked friends while the masked server grinds fresh pepper over your linguini…the “unbearable feudal aspect of it” offended her egalitarian sensibilities. “It echoes the caste system, [with] all sorts of rules about who can receive a drink of water from whom—all these completely illogical and highly unesthetic rules that are there to demolish the dignity of individuals.”

That same word, feudal, underpins Tucker’s analysis of the Covid restaurant closures. In one of his numerous essays, he notes that “the tavern, the coffee house, and the restaurant had a huge role in spreading the idea of universal rights.” The restaurant closures represented “a return to a pre-modern age in which only the elites enjoyed access to the finer things”—what Tucker calls a “new feudalism.”

As the pandemic progressed, Gupta continued to delight me with her insights—like the notion of shared responsibility for viral transmission. “It is fruitless to trace the source of infection to a single event,” she reflects in The Telegraph. “In our normal lives, many die of infectious disease but we collectively absorb the guilt of infecting them. We could not function as a society otherwise.”

Such a lovely way of putting it: we collectively absorb the guilt. Nobody has to worry about “killing grandma” because nobody is killing grandma. A pathogen enters our world and we divide its psychic weight among us, the burden made lighter for being shared. (It goes without saying that deliberately infecting someone falls into a different category, though I have yet to hear of anyone who seeks to do that.) But Covid culture “concentrated the blame that should have been dispersed within the community upon an individual,” Gupta says. And for individuals like Gupta, who spoke out publicly against a strategy sold to (and bought by) the public as necessary, the blaming and shaming culture knew no pity.

I had some idea of what Gupta and her GBD collaborators were going through, having received my share of invective when discussing Covid policies online: Go lick a pole and catch the virus. Have fun choking on your own fluids in the ICU. Name three loved ones you’re ready to sacrifice to Covid—do it now, coward. Enjoy your sociopathy.

None of these missives came from anyone who knew me personally, but after receiving enough of them I started to wonder if the shamers knew something I didn’t.

“What if the lockdown lovers are right?” I asked Dr. Zoom on one occasion. “What if I am a sociopath?”

“You’re not a sociopath.”

“How do you know?”

“A sociopath wouldn’t ask the question—plus sociopaths don’t introspect and you do nothing but introspect. You’re the queen of introspection.”

“Why do you think I do that? Is it a defense mechanism or something?

“See? You’re doing it again.”

I wrote an article about my experience with Covid shamers, which prompted people from all over the world to email their own stories to me. Many of them had it a lot worse than I did, their heterodox views having cost them jobs and friendships (and in one case, a marriage). Kulldorff tweeted a link to the article with an accompanying assertion that “shaming never is, never was, and never will be part of good public health practice.”

Also: it doesn’t work. Calling someone a troglodyte for opposing a mask mandate does not bring about a change of heart. It just invites resistance—or drives people underground, as Harvard epidemiologist Julia Marcus points out: “Shaming and blaming people is not the best way to get them to change their behavior and actually can be counterproductive because it makes people want to hide their behavior.”

Amid all the shouting and shaming, some public health experts asked reasonable questions about how the GBD architects proposed to shield the vulnerable from a virus allowed to spread freely in society. Bhattacharya, Gupta and Kulldorff had answers to that, but the time for a fair hearing had come and gone. The window of opportunity to explore a focused protection strategy, pried open for a week or two by the Declaration, slammed shut again. It wasn’t long before Facebook censored mentions of the document.

This was not a healthy state of affairs. As Harry Truman remarked in 1950, “once agovernment is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures.” Likewise, the dismissal of the GBD as a “dangerous idea” would not have impressed Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who wrote that “the essential character of a political community is both revealed and defined by how it responds to the challenge of threatening ideas” and that “fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech.” Is it just me, or were decision makers smarter back then?

With neither a Truman nor a Brandeis to defend them, the GBD creators no longer stood a chance in the public arena. Bhattacharya and Gupta turned their attention to Collateral Global, a UK charity devoted to documenting the harms of the lockdown policies, and Kulldorff joined the Brownstone Institute as a senior scholar. Which doesn’t mean they forgot about what happened. In August 2022, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, along with two other doctors, joined the State of Missouri’s lawsuit against the federal government for quashing debate about Covid policies. In the court document, which begins with George Washington’s warnings against censorship, the plaintiffs accuse the US government of “open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content.” With any luck, the case will rattle some closet doors.

In the early months of the pandemic, scientists concerned about lockdowns feared “coming out” in public. The GBD partners took one for the B team and did the dirty work. They paid a heavy price for it, including the loss of some personal friendships, but they held their ground. In print, on air, and on social media, Bhattacharya continues to describe lockdowns as “the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years,” with catastrophic health and psychological harms that will play out for a generation.

It’s no longer unfashionable to agree with them. A National Post article written by four prominent Canadian doctors in late 2022 maintains that the “draconian Covid measures were a mistake.” A retrospective analysis in The Guardian suggests that, instead of going full bore on the lockdown strategy, we “should have put far more effort into protecting the vulnerable.” Even the sober Nature admits that lockdowns “exacerbate inequalities that already exist in society. Those already living in poverty and insecurity are hit hardest”—exactly the key takeaway from the Australian Fault Lines report released in October 2022.

Kulldorff captures this sea change in one of his tweets: “In 2020 I was a lonely voice in the Twitter wilderness, opposing lockdowns with a few scattered friends. [Now] I am preaching to the choir; a choir with a wonderful, beautiful voice.” The landscape has also become more hospitable for Bhattacharya, who in September 2022 received Loyola Marymount University’s Doshi Bridgebuilder Award, awarded annually to individuals or organizations dedicated to fostering understanding between cultures and disciplines.

Perhaps the concept of focused protection simply arrived too early for a frightened public to metabolize it. But the idea never died down completely, and after the paroxysms of moral indignation ran their course, it slowly grew a second skin. By September 2022, the tally of GBD co-signatories had surpassed 932,000, with over 60,000 of them from doctors and medical/public health experts. Not bad for a dangerous document by a trio of fringe epidemiologists. And would it be churlish to point out that the John Snow Memorandum maxed out at around 7,000 expert signatures?1

The GBD didn’t get every detail right, of course. Nobody could have anticipated, back in the fall of 2020, all the surprises the virus had in store for us. While reasonable at the time, the Declaration’s confidence in herd immunity proved overambitious. We now know that neither infection nor vaccination provides durable immunity against Covid, leaving people vulnerable to second (and fifth) infections. And for all their effect on disease severity, the vaccines don’t stop transmission, pushing herd immunity still further from reach.

Be that as it may, the GBD creators wrote a crucial chapter in the pandemic story. They planted seeds of doubt in a locked-in narrative. After all the insults were thrown, the seeds took root in our collective consciousness and may well have shaped policy indirectly. And as research continues to document the dubious benefits and profound harms of the maximum-suppression strategy, yesterday’s shamers and mockers are inching back toward the question: Could we have done it another way? Might focused protection have worked just as well, or better, and with considerably less damage?

Author

  • Gabrielle Bauer

    Gabrielle Bauer is a Toronto health and medical writer who has won six national awards for her magazine journalism. She has written three books: Tokyo, My Everest, co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Prize, Waltzing The Tango, finalist in the Edna Staebler creative nonfiction award, and most recently, the pandemic book BLINDSIGHT IS 2020, published by the Brownstone Institute in 2023

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Brownstone Institute

The White House Makes Good on Its Antitrust Threats

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Jeffrey A. TuckerJEFFREY A. TUCKER

On May 5, 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki issued a mob-like warning to social-media companies and information distributors generally. They need to get with the program and start censoring critics of Covid policy. They need to amplify government propaganda. After all, it would be a shame if something would happen to these companies.

These were her exact words:

The president’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation and misinformation, especially related to Covid-19 vaccinations and elections. And we’ve seen that over the past several months. Broadly speaking, I’m not placing any blame on any individual or group. We’ve seen it from a number of sources. He also supports better privacy protections and a robust antitrust programSo, his view is that there’s more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life threatening information is not going out to the American public.

On the face of it, the antitrust action against Apple is about their secure communications network. The Justice Department wants the company to share their services with other networks. As with so many other antitrust actions in history, this is really about the government’s taking sides in competitive disputes between companies, in this case Samsung and other smartphone providers. They resent the way Apple products all work together. They want that changed.

The very notion that the government is trying to protect consumers in this case is preposterous. Apple is a success not because they are exploitative but because they make products that users like, and they like them so much that they buy ever more. It’s not uncommon that a person gets an iPhone and then a Macbook, an iPad, and then AirPods. All play well together.

The Justice Department calls this anticompetitive even though competing is exactly the source of Apple’s market strength. That has always been true. Yes, there is every reason to be annoyed at the company’s hammer-and-tongs enforcement of its intellectual property. But their IP is not the driving force of the company’s success. Its products and services are.

Beyond that, there is a darker agenda here. It’s about bringing new media into the government propaganda fold, exactly as Psaki threatened. Apple is a main distributor of podcasts in the country and world, just behind Spotify (which is foreign controlled). There are 120 million podcast listeners in the US, far more than pay attention to regime media in total.

If the ambition is to control the public mind, something must be done to get those under control. It’s not enough just to nationalize Facebook and Google. If the purpose is to end free speech as we know it, they have to go after podcasting too, using every tool that is available.

Antitrust is one tool they have. The other is the implicit threat to take away Section 230 that grants legal liability to social networks that immunize them against what would otherwise be a torrent of litigation. These are the two main guns that government can hold to the head of these private communications companies. Apple is the target in order to make the company more compliant.

All of which gets us to the issue of the First Amendment. There are many ways to violate laws on free speech. It’s not just about sending a direct note with a built-in threat. You can use third parties. You can invoke implicit threats. You can depend on the awareness that, after all, you are the government so it is hardly a level playing field. You can embed employees and pay their salaries (as was the case with Twitter). Or, in the case of Psaki above, you can deploy the mob tactic of reminding companies that bad things may or may not happen if they persist in non-compliance.

Over the last 4 to 6 years, governments have used all these methods to violate free speech rights. We are sitting on tens of thousands of pages of proof of this. What seemed like spotty takedowns of true information has been revealed as a vast machinery now called the Censorship Industrial Complex involving dozens of agencies, nearly one hundred universities, and many foundations and nonprofit organizations directly or indirectly funded by government.

You would have to be willfully blind not to see the long-run ambition. The goal is a mass reversion to the past, a world like we had in the 1970s with three networks and limited information sources about anything going on in government. Back then, people did not know what they did not know. That’s how effective the system was. It came about not entirely because of active censorship but because of technological limitations.

The information age is called that because it blew up the old system, offering hope of a new world of universal distribution of ever more information about everything, and promising to empower billions of users themselves to become distributors. That’s how the company YouTube got its name: everyone could be a TV producer.

That dream was hatched in the 1980s, gained great progress in the 1990s and 2000s, and began fundamentally to upend government structures in the 2010s. Following Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 – two major events that were not supposed to happen – a deep establishment said that’s enough. They scapegoated the new systems of information for disrupting the plans of decades and reversing the planned course of history.

The ambition to control every nook and cranny of the Internet sounds far-flung but what choice do they have? This is why this machinery of censorship has been constructed and why there is such a push to have artificial intelligence take over the job of content curation. In this case, machines alone do the job without human intervention, making litigation nearly impossible.

The Supreme Court has the chance to do something to stop this but it’s not clear that many Justices even understand the scale of the problem or the Constitutional strictures against it. Some seem to think that this is only about the right of government officials to pick up the phone and complain to reporters about their coverage. That is absolutely not the issue: content curation affects hundreds of millions of people, not just those posting but those reading too.

Still, if there is some concern about the supposed rights of government actors, there is a clear solution offered by David Friedman: post all information and exhortations about topics and content in a public forum. If the Biden or Trump administration has a preference for how social media should behave, it is free to file a ticket like everyone else and the recipient can and should make it and the response public.

This is not an unreasonable suggestion, and it should certainly figure into any judgment made by the Supreme Court. The federal government has always put out press releases. That’s a normal part of functioning. Bombarding private companies with secret takedown notices and otherwise deploying a huge plethora of intimidation tactics should not even be permitted.

Is there muscle behind the growing push for censorship? Certainly there is. This reality is underscored by the Justice Department’s antitrust actions against Apple. The mask of such official actions is now removed.

Just as the FDA and CDC became marketing and enforcement arms of Pfizer and Moderna, so too the Justice Department is now revealed as a censor and industrial promoter of Samsung. This is how captured agencies with hegemonic ambitions operate, not in the public interest but in the private interest of some industries over others and always with the goal of reducing the freedom of the people.

Author

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

Journalistic Malpractice at The New York Times

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From the Brownstone Institute

The federal bureaucracy has hijacked our information centers to protect their own interests. They’ve stifled dissent to perpetuate their power, and the mainstream press has bowed to the Leviathan. Supreme Court Justices, perhaps the last line of defense against the tyrants’ aspiration to codify totalitarianism into law, appear primed to abandon the First Amendment.

An obsequious press corps now serves as the mouthpiece for the country’s vast censorship apparatus. Last Sunday, The New York Times ran a front page story “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation.”

The Gray Lady covered the battle for the First Amendment in familiar doublethink. As we’ve covered throughout the Missouri v. Biden (now Murthy v. Missouri) proceedings, the censors deny the censorship exists while insisting we should be thankful that it does.

Government lawyers have argued that plaintiffs manufactured the case, and the allegations of censorship are nothing more than “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.” At the same time, they insist the censorship is necessary “to prevent grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes.”

Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe followed their lead, arguing that the private-public censorship apparatus is a “thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory” but that eliminating it “will make us less secure as a nation and will endanger us all every day.”

Now, The New York Times and other news outlets have joined in supporting the censors. The piece cites Nina Jankowicz, the aspiring tyrant known for her Mary Poppins-themed calls for censorship, who claimed there was “no shred of evidence” behind allegations that the Biden administration called to stifle dissent.

The article describes the censorship apparatus as a farcical right-wing fever dream in which President Trump “casts himself as victim and avenger of a vast plot to muzzle his movement.” At the same time, the authors cite the American Intelligence Community’s leading advocates for restricting the flow of information.

Jankowicz headed the Department of Homeland Security’s board on disinformation until the Biden administration suspended the Domestic Ministry of Truth in response to reports that Jankowicz was a prolific spreader of misinformation, including the Steele Dossier and the Hunter Biden laptop.

Jankowicz complained, without irony, to the Times that the resistance to online censorship created a “chilling effect.” She explained, “Nobody wants to be caught up in it.”

The Times also quoted Katie Starbird, who said that “the people that benefit from the spread of disinformation have effectively silenced many of the people that would try to call them out.” The Gray Lady did not note the irony that Starbird claimed to be “silenced” as the paper of record quoted her on the front page of the Sunday edition, nor did they explain her role at CISA, the Department of Homeland Security agency at the center of the censorship industry.

While serving on CISA’s “Misinformation & Disinformation” subcommittee, Starbird lamented that many Americans seem to “accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms.” Of course, those “norms” have been protected by the First Amendment for over 200 years. 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.

The Times, Starbird, and Jankowicz represent the foundational lie underpinning the entire censorship complex: that the government and its bureaucrats hold a monopoly on truth. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson apparently shared this view in oral arguments for Murthy v. Missouri, as she advocated for the right to abridge free speech provided the government offers a “compelling state interest.”

The First Amendment does not discriminate between true and false ideas; it offers a blanket protection of speech regardless of veracity. But notwithstanding legal protections, the Government has been the most prolific spreader of “misinformation” in the last four years. From natural immunity, to lockdowns, to vaccine efficacy, to mask mandates, to travel restrictions, to fatality rates, the “trust the science” crowd has silenced dissent that has often been more accurate than their government decrees.

In this process, left-wing institutions have abandoned their liberal values in the pursuit of power. As Brownstone outlined in “A Close Look at the Amici Briefs in Murthy v. Missouri,” supposedly liberal groups like Stanford University and Democratic Attorneys General urged the Court to promote censorship while the ACLU remained derelict in silence.

Journalists – once heralded as the Fourth Estate – have joined forces with the regime to disparage its challengers. In Slate, Mark Joseph Stern referred to Murthy v. Missouri as “inane” and “brain-meltingly dumb.” He made no effort to report the hundreds of pages in discovery that revealed the coordinated censorship campaigns directed from the White House, the Intelligence Community, and Big Tech, nor did he grapple with the laundry list of follies that flourished under government-sponsored censorship, including the Iraq War, Covid lockdowns, or Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Instead, he declares definitively that the Biden administration – the same one that proudly ignores the Court’s orders on student loans and demands the censorship of its political enemies – acted within its powers in response to “a once-in-a-century pandemic.”

These conclusory statements, utterly detached from the truth, are nothing new for Stern, whose work reveals him to be little more than a spokesman for the Democratic Party. In the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, he called for increased investigations into Julie Swetnick’s easily-debunked allegation that Kavanaugh was a ring leader for a group of high school gang rapists. He described Christine Blasey Ford, a serial liar who has no evidence she ever met Kavanaugh, as a “folk hero to the left for the rest of time.” He chastised justices for not wearing masks as late as 2022 and derided judicial review of the nonsensical airline mask mandate as evidence of a “power-drunk juristocracy” and “badly broken” system.

Like so much of the authoritarian left, there is no nuance or variety to the power-seeking gambits. From mail-in voting to vaccine mandates to lockdowns to Elon Musk to affirmative action, the Slate author moves in lockstep with the mindless herd.

Stern is in no way remarkable, but he represents the transformation of the American left, which has ushered in a new era of authoritarianism draped in progressive language. Like Justice Jackson, the wolf comes in sheep’s clothing, dressed in politically correct standards of affirmative action and diversity politics. But the rainbow veneer cannot overcome the insidious threat to our republic.

The federal bureaucracy has hijacked our information centers to protect their own interests. They’ve stifled dissent to perpetuate their power, and the mainstream press has bowed to the Leviathan. Supreme Court Justices, perhaps the last line of defense against the tyrants’ aspiration to codify totalitarianism into law, appear primed to abandon the First Amendment.

A ruling for the government in Murthy v. Missouri could permanently transform the nation, the relationship between Government and private businesses, and Americans’ right to information. Even more alarmingly, it would suggest that due process no longer reigns supreme over political favoritism.

In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More asks his son-in-law, William Roper, if he would give the Devil the protection of the law. Roper responds that he’d “cut down every law in England” to get to the Devil.

“Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” More asks. “This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down…do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

Justice Jackson, the Biden Administration, Katie Starbird, and their allies in the media may believe they have a divine mission to censor alleged misinformation, that the Devil’s reincarnation has taken multiple forms in the bodies of RFK Jr., Alex Berenson, Jay Bhattacharya, and others; under our Constitution, however, the self-professed nobility of their missions does not excuse violations of the First Amendment.

Let us hope the Court realizes the graveness of the threat.

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  • Brownstone Institute

    Brownstone Institute is a nonprofit organization conceived of in May 2021 in support of a society that minimizes the role of violence in public life.

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