What Happened Today: April 28, 2023
ABC censors RFK; A counter protest in Jerusalem; Randi Weingarten backtracks
The Big Story
ABC News censored comments about the COVID-19 vaccines made by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently announced that he is running for the 2024 presidential Democratic nomination. In an interview with Kennedy Jr. that aired yesterday on ABC News Live, ABC’s Linsey Davis said toward the end of the segment that the network used its “editorial judgment” in cutting some of Kennedy’s statements about the vaccines out of the interview. Rather than allowing the presidential candidate to speak for himself and allowing viewers to judge for themselves, Davis read a statement: “Data shows that the COVID-19 vaccine has prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths from the disease. He also made misleading claims about the relationship between vaccination and autism.”
Friday afternoon, RFK Jr., who is an attorney, posted on Twitter that it’s illegal to censor presidential candidates under U.S. statute 47 USC 315. The candidate went on to write that “ABC showed its contempt for the law, democracy, and its audience by cutting most of the content of my interview with host Linsey Davis, leaving only cherry-picked snippets and a defamatory disclaimer,” and he promised that as president, he would “free FCC [the Federal Communications Commission] from its corporate captors and force the agency to follow the law by revoking the licenses of networks that put the mercantile ambitions of advertisers ahead of the public interest.”
You can watch what’s left of the interview, here: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/rfk-jr-presidential-run-feel-country-98922268
In The Back Pages: The U.S. Government’s Vast New Privatized Censorship Regime
The Rest
→ Some 200,000 supporters of the judicial reforms proposed by the Netanyahu-led government in Israel came out for a rally in Jerusalem on Thursday evening. “The time has come for a High Court that does not give rights to the families of terrorists and does not permit fake memorial services together with terror supporters,” Justice Minister Yariv Levin, the primary architect of the reforms, told the crowd. As to be expected, the rally did little to lower the temperature between the warring sides in this existential debate over Israel’s future. On Friday, opposition figurehead and former defense minister Benny Gantz said that “Levin’s false and unrestrained comments against the High Court evoke difficult thoughts about the ability to reach agreements in the talks at the President’s Residence, agreements that are needed for the Israeli people at this time.” On the other hand, in an “only in Israel” story, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, Michael Doran, posted a little story on Twitter about two friends, one for and one against the reforms, who trade off using an Israeli flag at their respective demonstrations.
→ “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open,” American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten told Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) in a hearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Wednesday. “We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.”
Her testimony has caused an uproar because it is in stark contrast to the campaign she led throughout the pandemic to keep schools closed, including directly advising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on its operational strategy for school closures.
On Thursday, CNN’s Scott Jennings told Weingarten he was “stunned” and upset that he’s heard “no remorse whatsoever about the generational damage that’s been done to these kids.”
As The New York Times reported Friday morning, “U.S. communities with closed schools had similar levels of Covid as communities with open schools, be they in the U.S. or Europe.”
That conclusion, which was apparent even relatively early on in the pandemic, has led some to accuse Weingarten and the union of using the crisis to advance other goals, including a temporary suspension of teacher evaluations, cancellation of student loan debt, and the acquisition of a hefty aid package of $190 billion for public schools, meant to help them reopen safely, only 15% of which has been used.
→ Some of the institutions that were most vocally in support of the COVID-19 vaccinations received money from Pfizer without publicly disclosing the relationship, according to a new report by Lee Fang on his Substack. The Chicago Urban League, for example, received $100,000 from Pfizer in 2021 for a project on “vaccine safety and effectiveness,” but Pfizer was not among the financial partners listed on the company’s website. The American College of Emergency Physicians took in $8,000 for a “Vaccine Confidence PSA,” and later signed a letter in support of Biden’s mandate for all companies with more than 100 employees to make vaccination mandatory, and Anthem, one of the biggest health insurance providers in the United States, received $20,250 for an initiative titled “Let’s Vaccinate!” Drew Wallace, a spokesman for the American College of Preventive Medicine, told Fang, “Regarding the specific question about the COVID-19 vaccines, supporting a vaccine mandate does not support one vaccine manufacturer over another.”
Read More: https://www.leefang.com/p/pfizer-quietly-financed-groups-lobbying
→ On Wednesday, Senate Republicans, along with West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, voted to overturn a new Environmental Protection Agency rule tightening the emissions limits on heavy-duty truck manufacturers, which the EPA projected would reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by 48% by 2045. Republican Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska summarized the opposition to the rule as primarily economic, saying it would “drive up costs for consumers, increase vehicle costs, and hurt good-paying jobs.”
→ Meanwhile, in the House, a proposal by Florida Republican Matt Gaetz to pull U.S. troops out of Somalia was shot down 321-101 on Thursday. U.S. forces have been in Somalia since 1992, carrying out various missions, including multiple anti-terrorism campaigns approved by all four of the presidents in office since 9/11. Gaetz argues that the “future of Somalia must be determined by Somalia”—and that may be so, but it’s not what his opponents in the DoD or Congress are concerned about. AFRICOM Commander General Michael Langley wrote recently that “a lodgment in Somalia will … assure freedom of navigation through the Bab Al Mandab sea-lane chokepoint and monitor the expanding Chinese presence in Djibouti.” Rep. John James, a Michigan Republican, also noted in his argument against Gaetz’s proposal that if we’re not there, China will “rush to fill the void.”
→ Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told the Senate on Wednesday that the U.S. military is on track to adopt an all-electric fleet by 2030, five years ahead of the recently released Army plan to go all in on EV vehicles by 2035. “Is Jennifer Granholm insane?” Republican Congressman Ronny Jackson of Texas responded on Twitter. “Or does she want our military completely and utterly DESTROYED!?” Retired Army colonel and Iraq War veteran James Hutton posted that the secretary “knows zero about battlefield realities” and that “such an effort would make the military almost completely dependent on China for its source of fuel.”
→ Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ attempt to wrest back control of a piece of the state from corporate giant Disney may come down to a war of words. Disney is suing the governor for his attempt to retake the special economic district created in 1966 to give Disney near total autonomy in planning its parks. The company alleges that DeSantis only moved to bring the Reedy Creek Improvement District under full state control as retaliation for Disney’s criticism of the governor’s moves to limit the teaching of LGBT concepts in Florida’s schools. Disney is arguing that DeSantis has therefore infringed on its right to free speech, protected under the infamous 2010 Supreme Court ruling Citizens United that gives corporations the same rights as people.
1. As of April 18, 2023, Netflix was streaming only 79 films made before 1990.
2. Among the top 20 actors moviegoers want to see in theaters, the average age is 57.5.
3. Interest in chess has skyrocketed since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with Chess.com apps increasing from 1.5 million daily active users to 4.5 million from February 2020 to 2021.
4. Vacancy rates in San Francisco office buildings are now sitting at 30%, largely due to the new era of remote work and an exodus of tech workers to sunnier locales.
5. A 22-story San Fran office building valued at $300 million in 2019 is now estimated to be worth $60 million.
6. In 2021, the firearms industry sold approximately 6 guns for every 100 Americans.
7. As of October 2019, 1.25 million people had been given top-Secret clearance to U.S. protected information.
8. The median housing price in Wilson, Wyoming, near Jackson Hole, is $5.47 million.
9. Greenland has 18.7 hospital beds per 1,000 people while Mali has only 0.1. The United States checks in at 2.9.
10. Between 2000 and 2019, 623 people have died on a cruise ship. Pass the mai tais.
→ According to Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, legendary rabbi and author Harold Kushner left us today, Friday, April 28, 2023. Baruch da’ayan ha’emet. Kushner was the author of many books on theology, most famously When Bad Things Happen to Good People, which he wrote in the aftermath of his son’s untimely death. We’ll let him say, in his beautiful way, goodbye in his own words:
TODAY IN TABLET:
Sonnets for the Trilingual Family Man by Jake Marmer
Eugene Ostashevsky’s latest collection is a love letter to his wife, his children, and the beauty of language
Ballad of a Redneck Jew by David Meir Grossman
The latest album from North Carolina’s Wednesday is loud, boozy, and very Jewish Southern rock
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
This piece was originally published in Tablet, September 2022
The U.S. Government’s Vast New Privatized Censorship Regime
Censorship of wrongthink by Big Tech at the behest of the government is government censorship, which violates the First Amendment
By Jenin Younes
One warm weekend in October of 2020, three impeccably credentialed epidemiologists—Jayanta Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff, of Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard Universities respectively—gathered with a few journalists, writers, and economists at an estate in the Berkshires where the American Institute for Economic Research had brought together critics of lockdowns and other COVID-related government restrictions. On Sunday morning shortly before the guests departed, the scientists encapsulated their views—that lockdowns do more harm than good, and that resources should be devoted to protecting the vulnerable rather than shutting society down—in a joint communique dubbed the “Great Barrington Declaration,” after the town in which it was written.
The declaration began circulating on social media and rapidly garnered signatures, including from other highly credentialed scientists. Most mainstream news outlets and the scientists they chose to quote denounced the declaration in no uncertain terms. When contacted by reporters, Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins of the NIH publicly and vociferously repudiated the “dangerous” declaration, smearing the scientists—all generally considered to be at the top of their fields—as “fringe epidemiologists.” Over the next several months, the three scientists faced a barrage of condemnation: They were called eugenicists and anti-vaxxers; it was falsely asserted that they were “Koch-funded” and that they had written the declaration for financial gain. Attacks on the Great Barrington signatories proliferated throughout social media and in the pages of The New York Times and Guardian.
Yet emails obtained pursuant to a FOIA request later revealed that these attacks were not the products of an independent objective news-gathering process of the type that publications like the Times and the Guardian still like to advertise. Rather, they were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials whose policies the epidemiologists had criticized. Emails between Fauci and Collins revealed that the two officials had worked together and with media outlets as various as Wired and The Nation to orchestrate a “takedown” of the declaration.
Nor did the targeting of the scientists stop with the bureaucrats they had implicitly criticized. Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff soon learned that their declaration was being heavily censored on social media to prevent their scientific opinions from reaching the public. Kulldorff—then the most active of the three online—soon began to experience censorship of his own social media posts. For example, Twitter censored one of Kulldorff’s tweets asserting that: “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older, higher-risk people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Not children.” Posts on Kulldorff’s Twitter and LinkedIn criticizing mask and vaccine mandates were labeled misleading or removed entirely. In March of 2021, YouTube took down a video depicting a roundtable discussion that Bhattacharya, Gupta, Kulldorff, and Dr. Scott Atlas had with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in which the participants critiqued mask and vaccine mandates.
Because of this censorship, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff are now plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, a case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, as well as the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which is representing them and two other individuals, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Jill Hines. The plaintiffs allege that the Biden administration and a number of federal agencies coerced social media platforms into censoring them and others for criticizing the government’s COVID policies. In doing so, the Biden administration and relevant agencies had turned any ostensible private action by the social media companies into state action, in violation of the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court has long recognized and Justice Thomas explained in a concurring opinion just last year, “[t]he government cannot accomplish through threats of adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly.”
Federal district courts have recently dismissed similar cases on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not prove state action. According to those judges, public admissions by then-White House press secretary Jennifer Psaki that the Biden administration was ordering social media companies to censor certain posts, as well as statements from Psaki, President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threatening them with regulatory or other legal action if they declined to do so, still did not suffice to establish that the plaintiffs were censored on social media due to government action. Put another way, the judges declined to take the government at its word. But the Missouri judge reached a different conclusion, determining there was enough evidence in the record to infer that the government was involved in social media censorship, granting the plaintiffs’ request for discovery at the preliminary injunction stage.
The Missouri documents, along with some obtained through discovery in Berenson v. Twitter and a FOIA request by America First Legal, expose the extent of the administration’s appropriation of big tech to effect a vast and unprecedented regime of viewpoint-based censorship on the information that most Americans see, hear and otherwise consume. At least 11 federal agencies, and around 80 government officials, have been explicitly directing social media companies to take down posts and remove certain accounts that violate the government’s own preferences and guidelines for coverage on topics ranging from COVID restrictions, to the 2020 election, to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
Correspondence publicized in Missouri further corroborates the theory that the companies dramatically increased censorship under duress from the government, strengthening the First Amendment claim. For example, shortly after President Biden asserted in July of 2021 that Facebook (Meta) was “killing people” by permitting “misinformation” about COVID vaccines to percolate, an executive from the company contacted the surgeon general to appease the White House. In a text message to Murthy, the executive acknowledged that the “FB team” was “feeling a little aggrieved” as “it’s not great to be accused of killing people,” while he sought to “de-escalate and work together collaboratively.” These are not the words of a person who is acting freely; to the contrary, they denote the mindset of someone who considers himself subordinate to, and subject to punishment by, a superior. Another text, exchanged between Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and another CISA employee who now works at Microsoft, reads: “Platforms have got to get more comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.” This is another incontrovertible piece of evidence that social media companies are censoring content under duress from the government, and not due to their directors’ own ideas of the corporate or common good.
Further, emails expressly establish that the social media companies intensified censorship efforts and removed particular individuals from their platforms in response to the government’s demands. Just a week after President Biden accused social media companies of “killing people,” the Meta executive mentioned above wrote the surgeon general an email telling him, “I wanted to make sure you saw the steps we took just this past week to adjust policies on what we are removing with respect to misinformation, as well as steps taken further to address the ‘disinfo dozen’: we removed 17 additional Pages, Groups, and Instagram accounts tied to [them].” About a month later, the same executive informed Murthy that Meta intended to expand its COVID policies to “further reduce the spread of potentially harmful content” and that the company was “increasing the strength of our demotions for COVID and vaccine-related content.”
Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter and a prominent critic of government-imposed COVID restrictions, has publicized internal Twitter communications he obtained through discovery in his own lawsuit showing that high-ranking members of the Biden administration, including White House Senior COVID-19 Advisor Andrew Slavitt, had pushed Twitter to permanently suspend him from the platform. In messages from April 2021, a Twitter employee noted that a meeting with the White House had gone relatively well, though the company’s representatives had fielded “one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform,” to which “mercifully we had answers” (emphasis added).
About two months later, days after Dr. Fauci publicly deemed Berenson a danger, and immediately following the president’s statement that social media companies were “killing people,” and despite assurances from high-ups at the company that his account was in no danger, Twitter permanently suspended Berenson’s account. If this does not qualify as government censorship of an individual based on official disapproval of his viewpoints, it would be difficult to say what might. Berenson was reinstated on Twitter in July 2022 as part of the settlement in his lawsuit.
In 1963, the Supreme Court, deciding Bantam Books v. Sullivan, held that “public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against” booksellers who carried materials containing obscenity could constitute a First Amendment violation. The same reasoning should apply to the Biden administration campaign to pressure tech companies into enforcing its preferred viewpoints.
The question of how the Biden administration has succeeded in jawboning big tech into observing its strictures is not particularly difficult to answer. Tech companies, many of which hold monopoly positions in their markets, have long feared and resisted government regulation. Unquestionably—and as explicitly revealed by the text message exchanged between Murthy and the Twitter executive—the prospect of being held liable for COVID deaths is an alarming one. Just like the booksellers in Bantam, social media platforms undoubtedly “do not lightly disregard” such possible consequences, as Twitter’s use of the term “mercifully” indicates.
It remains to be seen whether Bhattacharya and Kulldorff will be able to show that Fauci and Collins explicitly ordered tech companies to censor them and their Great Barrington Declaration. More discovery lies ahead, from top White House officials including Dr. Fauci, that may yield evidence of even more direct involvement by the government in preventing Americans from hearing their views. But Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and countless social media users have had their First Amendment rights violated nonetheless.
The government’s involvement in censorship of specific perspectives, and direct role in escalating such censorship, has what is known in First Amendment law as a chilling effect: Fearing the repercussions of articulating certain views, people self-censor by avoiding controversial topics. Countless Americans, including the Missouri plaintiffs, have attested that they do exactly that for fear of losing influential and sometimes lucrative social media accounts, which can contain and convey significant social and intellectual capital.
Moreover, the Supreme Court recognizes that a corollary of the First Amendment right to speak is the right to receive information because “the right to receive ideas follows ineluctably from the sender’s First Amendment right to send them.” All Americans have been deprived—by the United States government—of their First Amendment rights to hear the views of Alex Berenson, as well as Drs. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, and myriad additional people, like the reporters who broke the Hunter Biden laptop story for the New York Post and found themselves denounced as agents of Russian disinformation, who have been censored by social media platforms at the urging of the U.S. government. That deprivation strangled public debate on multiple issues of undeniably public importance. It allowed Fauci, Collins, and various other government actors and agencies, to mislead the public into believing there was ever a scientific consensus on lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates. It also arguably influenced the 2020 election.
The administration has achieved public acquiescence to its censorship activities by convincing many Americans that the dissemination of “misinformation” and “disinformation” on social media presents a grave threat to public safety and even national security. Over half a century ago, in his notorious concurrence in New York Times v. United States (in which the Nixon administration sought to prevent the newspaper from printing the Pentagon Papers) Justice Hugo Black rejected the view that the government may invoke such concepts to override the First Amendment: “[t]he word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment,” he wrote. Justice Black cited a 1937 opinion by Justice Charles Hughes explaining that this approach was woefully misguided: “The greater the importance of safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve inviolate the constitutional rights of free speech, free press, and free assembly ... that government may be responsive to the will of the people and that changes, if desired, may be obtained by peaceful means. Therein lies the security of the Republic, the very foundation of constitutional government.”
The Founders of our country understood that line-drawing becomes virtually impossible once censorship begins and that the personal views and biases of those doing the censoring will inevitably come into play. Moreover, they recognized that sunlight is the best disinfectant: The cure for bad speech is good speech. The cure for lies, truth. Silencing people does not mean problematic ideas disappear; it only drives their adherents into echo chambers. People who are booted off Twitter, for example, often turn to Gab and Gettr, where they are less likely to encounter challenges to patently false posts claiming, for example, that COVID vaccines are toxic.
Indeed, this case could not illustrate more clearly the First Amendment’s chief purpose, and why the framers of the Constitution did not create an exception for “misinformation.” Government actors are just as prone to bias, hubris, and error as the rest of us. Drs. Fauci and Collins, enamored of newfound fame and basking in self-righteousness, took it upon themselves to suppress debate about the most important subject of the day. Had Americans learned of the Great Barrington Declaration and been given the opportunity to contemplate its ideas, and had scientists like Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff been permitted to speak freely, the history of the pandemic era may have unfolded with far less tragedy—and with far less damage to the institutions that are supposed to protect public health.
Until SOMEONE pays a price, suffers some painful consequences for all the damage this government is guilty of, they will continue apace. They have proven to have zero interest in “upholding the law”, rather only a doubling-down in their dirty dealings - damned be the law - because they get away with it, day in and day out, in every manner, form and function, without consequence.
Someone - a lot of someone’s- have to go to jail for a loong time to stop this lawlessness.
RFK’s role is hilarious though. Like, this is how the Kennedy dynasty ends, with a Beverly Hills resident barking about being censored by ABC and how vaccines are a government plot