The Other McCain

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White House Pressured Facebook to Censor Tucker Carlson on COVID-19

Posted on | January 8, 2023 | Comments Off on White House Pressured Facebook to Censor Tucker Carlson on COVID-19

“Since we’ve been on the phone — the top post about vaccines today is Tucker Carlson saying they don’t work. Yesterdaty was Tomi Lehren saying she won’t take one. This is exactly why I want to know what ‘Reduction’ actually looks like — if ‘reduction’ means ‘pumping our most vaccine hesitant audience with Tucker Carlson saying it doesn’t work’ then … I’m not sure it’s reduction!”
— Rob Flaherty
Director of Digital Strategy
The White House

Can you get any clearer example of abuse of power than this? The safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines was, and is, an important matter of public policy. Perhaps you don’t have any concern on this subject — I got vaccinate in September 2021, so its moot to me — but the point is that the White House wanted to stifle all criticism, to silence anyone expressing their concerns, so that the “discussion” became a one-sided propaganda message. And they were muscling Twitter to enforce this.

Furthermore, and I’ve raised this point repeatedly in recent months: Follow the money. The giant pharmaceutical companies producing the vaccines had an obvious motive to maximize the number of people who were getting vaccinated, without regard for their objective risk from COVID-19. Even if you were healthy and under 40, even if you had natural immunity because you’d already had COVID and recovered from it, the message was EVERYBODY MUST GET VACCINATED!

Such a message contradicted what anyone with common sense and a basic familiarity with contagious diseases could see. Even before the vaccines were available, states like Florida and Texas had ended the lockdown-and-mask regimes that were the norm in Democrat-controlled states, and the results were . . . nothing. That is to say, despite the “experts” (e.g., Fauci) predicting disaster, life in the “red” states was just fine. Unless you were elderly or obese or in some other way particularly vulnerable to the virus, COVID-19 was basically the common cold.

It was argued (not very convincingly, in my judgment) that vaccinating healthy young people was necessary because, even though they were at little risk of death or serious illness from the virus, these people could get infected and thereby spread the virus to the vulnerable population. But if (a) the vaccine was effective and (b) the most vulnerable people got the vaccine, then (c) it didn’t matter who else might be carrying the virus.

No, this official urgency about “reduction” of anti-vaccine messages wasn’t about public health. It was about selling the vaccines, and thereby enhancing the profits of Big Pharma. You can’t convince me otherwise.

Ian Miller at Outkick:

It’s yet another example of the federal government using tech companies to violate first amendment rights.
Flaherty’s cozy relationship with Facebook, as he references a phone conversation, meant he could reach out to get unfavorable opinions ”reduced.”
Sure enough, just a couple hours later, he got a response saying Facebook was ”running it down.”
Private companies censoring users at the behest of government is a direct violation of the First Amendment. But Biden and many on his ideological allies on left don’t care much for freedom of speech.

This is not merely about the First Amendment in some abstract, intellectual sense. It is about corruption, and the Biden administration’s secretive behind-the-scenes manipulation of public discussion.



 

Category: Conspiracy Theories

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