The current Wuhan flu “lockdowns” were sold to Americans with the idea that if we didn’t “flatten the curve,” virus-related hospitalizations would overwhelm the healthcare system. Since then, even the “models” factoring in mitigation measures have been revealed as flawed, as having greatly exaggerated the hospitalization rate; this has collapsed the lockdown rationale.
So it’s not surprising that protests against the economy-killing shutdowns have erupted. What may be surprising to some, however, is that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has nonetheless said that posts and pages relating to the organization of protests against stay-at-home orders will be banned — as “misinformation.”
As Breitbart reports:
The Facebook CEO confirmed that the posts would be banned to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on a segment of Good Morning America.
Stephanopoulos asked Zuckerberg how the company deals “with the fact that Facebook is now being used to organize a lot of these protests to defy social distancing guidelines in states. If somebody [is] trying to organize something like that, does that qualify as harmful misinformation?”
“We do classify that as harmful misinformation and we take that down,” confirmed Zuckerberg, while at the same time saying that it’s important “that people can debate policies.”
A Facebook spokesman confirmed to CNN that planned protests in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska were having their pages removed from Facebook at the request of state authorities.
Just yesterday, I again cited Professor Knut Wittkowski, the former long-time head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at the Rockefeller University in New York City, who stated that lifting the lockdowns would cause the Wuhan virus to be “exterminated” in weeks via herd immunity. Yet I also wrote that politicians “don’t even dare consider Wittkowski’s thesis because, if it’s valid, it means they’ve ravaged our economy and destroyed lives for nothing.”
“Such a revelation would destroy them,” I continued. “So they have great incentive to dissemble, rationalize, and throw ‘good money after bad’ as they follow the only path they consider politically feasible: to keep us in our hole — and keep on digging.”
Now Facebook is helping them dig.
Note, this isn’t the first time during The Virus scare that Facebook has become Fakebook while claiming Ministry of Truth status. The New York Post ran a February 3 opinion piece by Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, that “was widely read online — until Facebook stepped in,” as the paper put it Friday.
“The social media giant’s ‘fact checkers’ decided this [the article’s thesis] was not a valid opinion,” the Post continued. “If you tried to share Mosher’s column on Facebook, the social network stuck a ‘False Information’ alert on top, saying that finding was ‘checked by independent fact-checkers’ and preventing your friends from clicking to connect to the original article to see for themselves.”
Oh, what was the “false information” the Post had the temerity to opine on?
That the Wuhan virus originated in a lab in Wuhan.
Yeah, that’s right — the very thesis that authorities now say is a likely scenario.
To be clear, Mosher’s opinion was a “fringe” view in February, and there was nothing stupid about doubting it and embracing the then-dominant “wet market” thesis. What is stupid is confusing popularity with perspicacity, or thinking that Truth is determined by majority vote.
History is replete with stories of demeaned, supposedly deluded lone scientists who bucked consensus but were later proven right. Examples are Nicolaus Copernicus and heliocentrism, Alexander Gordon and fevers being infectious processes, Ignaz Semmelweis and disinfection standards, and Dr. Joseph Goldberger and pellagra. Had Facebook been around in their times, would it have censored them and labeled their discoveries “false information”?
The current lockdown debate — if something in which one side is mostly suppressed can be thus labeled — may very well be one of the most important controversies in our nation’s history. After all, as I pointed out in the provocatively titled “Why Accepting Two Million COVID-19 Deaths May be Better Than a National Lockdown,” the consequences of getting this policy wrong could mean our civilization’s unnecessary destruction. So needed currently is honest and deep analysis, not the deep-sixing of “unfashionable” voices.
Note here that Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, just announced that his nation’s herd immunity strategy, which doesn’t involve a lockdown, appears to be working. In fact, Bloomberg news reported Sunday that the number of virus-related deaths in Sweden is “much less than in italy [sic], Spain and the U.K. [which are locked down], both in absolute and relative terms.”
Also consider that our lockdowns have enabled imperious governors to trample rights and mandate wrongs. For example:
• Religious worship and free assembly are often banned while prenatal-infanticide mills and liquor stores are kept open.
• Statist politicians are using the virus scare to advance a hard-left agenda via trillion-dollar “stimulus” packages.
• Governors are applying the same virus-driven lockdown rules to relatively unaffected rural areas that they do to big-city hot spots because they’re afraid of being called “racist.”
• While a report found that midday sunlight destroys the Wuhan virus after just three minutes, politicians have nonetheless closed parks, arrested people for using them, and encourage everyone to stay indoors.
Perhaps the above is as irrational as it seems, or maybe there’s “method to the madness.” But we won’t know when intelligent debate is squelched and the idea of herd immunity is unheard because a herd mentality is enforced. And that Facebook is part of this evidences how Deep Tech imperils our civilization more than The Virus ever could.
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
