Tom Basile
Washington Times, Dec. 16, 2022
“The effectiveness and the consequences of lockdowns, masks, treatments and vaccines were all ripe for a robust debate, especially as we all learned from our collective experience.”
The Twitter Files have thus far been truly illuminating. They’ve provided vindication for those who were vilified for even suggesting that the government colluded with social media to manipulate information and suppress political viewpoints.
Elon Musk can give Americans an even greater gift, one that could provide some solace to those whose lives were forever altered by the pandemic. The sunlight needs to reach deeper into the digital abyss than party politics and the battle over former President Donald Trump’s now-silenced, incendiary feed.
Stanford scientist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who was recently reinstated on Twitter, says that “science was harmed” by the behavior of the social media giant during the pandemic. He’s right, of course. The stifling of scientific discourse and the evisceration of physician independence by the cabal of Big Pharma, Big Government and Big Tech was unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this country.
As much as leftist activists want to convince people that this torrid affair against speech doesn’t exist, the science and the mounting evidence provided by Mr. Musk demonstrate the suppression was carried out with brutal efficiency, reminiscent of the authoritarian regimes this nation fought to defeat. Only now, it was digital fascism.
We never thought we’d see a Galileo-Pope Urban VIII situation here, but the Catholic Inquisition of the 17th century came to America in the 21st. COVID-19 gave the deep state enormous power to define facts and persecute dissenters. Galileo spent the last years of his life under house arrest for publishing his support for Copernicus’ heliocentric theory.
But Dr. Bhattacharya is only half right. Far more than science, people — lives — were harmed to a degree that may never be fully understood by government suppression of speech. It is this injustice that Mr. Musk needs to lay bare. SOURCE