On Pandemic Censorship, part 1

EMERGENCE IN 2020

Dear fellow Uncensored Citizens,

This is my first post as guest writer on this substack, or on ANY substack, though I am not new to social media posts. Since spring 2020, I have been documenting the events of the past four years on Facebook with observations, analyses, and news briefs. I've been put in “Facebook jail” multiple times, regularly shadowbanned, but still going. My nuggets of truth have contributed to Mathew Crawford's data analysis and to FLCCC’s book research, but thanks to Facebook censorship, I have managed to remain relatively unknown.

We are starting to see events of the pandemic being memory-holed if not erased. Time has come to become more retrospective, and to weave all those past tidbits into longer stories that reach wider audiences -- not only to document current events but to connect them to previous ones. I thank the awesome team at The Uncensored Citizen substack for giving me this platform for my endeavor.

The Facebook posts I share here are a drop in the bucket. Practically anything I touch has a story of its own, and is fair game for expanding into its own substack post with many related Facebook posts, if there is interest. Please use the COMMENTS section to ask questions and make requests for further stories. I look forward to interacting with my readers. I aim to serve my audience, my fellow Uncensored Citizens.

ON CENSORSHIP

Given the name of this substack, my first post is about pandemic censorship and related lawsuits. One of these lawsuits, Biden vs. Missouri, will be in front of the Supreme Court in March, so it helps to be aware. But we will start from the beginning...

Censorship is not about keeping out false information, but about suppressing true information that constitutes a threat to the powers-that-be. When the threatening information is actually false, one can counter it with proof of the truth, or stop the spreaders of falsehoods with legal action. But when it's true, and the facts support it, that's when we get suppression of the facts and censorship of the truth spreaders. Here is my FB post about it:

Having spent my childhood in the Soviet Union, I was no stranger to Censorship, though I always thought that it could never happen in the United States — as most of us did. While most of us were aware of the excesses of the Red Scare in the 1950's, it had been assumed that this aberration to the “normal” was behind us, all in the past.

It was a shock to learn in the summer of 2020 that it was back, but we should not have been so surprised. In fact, censorship has repeatedly reared its ugly head throughout American History, starting only 7 years after the First Amendment enshrined our right to free speech in 1791. Here is a short and informative history, by the President of the Brownstone Institute, Jeffery Tucker.

The “covid pandemic” has turned out to be the most egregious assault on human rights and civil liberties in modern history, and it’s not over. Here is a powerful video from Robert Malone summarizing it.

2020: THE EMERGENCE OF PANDEMIC CENSORSHIP

Once the pandemic hit in March 2020, I went into research mode, to figure out how to best keep the new virus from harming us. This quickly led me to discover early treatments – first hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), and then ivermectin (IVM). I shared my research with the world via my FB feed, and eagerly awaited the day when US would come to its senses, implement early treatments, and end the pandemic.

My initial optimistic forecast was that it would happen by the end of May 2020 – another instance of naive optimism which turned out to be very very wrong. Instead, I watched us descent into an Orwellian world of censorship… Below, I have assembled related Facebook posts from summer and fall of 2020.

Here is the first post that documents censorship, from July 3. This was during a short transition period when the reins were not yet so tight as to prevent the truth from being published in mainstream media… So a very optimistic CNN article came out about a trial of Hydroxychloroquine… But the editors got their marching orders, and “corrected” the article half a day after publication, to insert doubts from “experts” — a move that contradicts the rules of newspaper publishing, where corrections, if any, should be published separately. At this point, I did not yet realize that I was witnessing the beginning of censorship.

Here is the original article, as it was published by CNN on July 2 (thank god for the Wayback Machine). And here is the official “corrected” version from July 3.

Within a month, by August 4, censorship came to Facebook. Groups started being suppressed. My eyes were opened.

Five weeks after the CNN article got “edited”, I saw a journal article get a similar edit, which is totally outside the bounds of ethical academic practice. We are talking about an article from May 27, 2020 endorsing early treatment, by Yale epidemiologist Prof. Harvey Risch. The edit in question, which took place 2 months after publication, was to reclassify it as an OPINION rather than a journal article. The goal was to keep the public from taking Risch’s views seriously, and it worked.

NOTE: this change has since been undone, but only much later, so the official article at the link no longer says that it’s “an opinion”.

One of the questions weighing on my mind was the source of the censorship — was it coming from political actors or from Pharma interests? I concluded that it was the latter, here is my logic:

NOTE: That Beck-Gold interview is no longer on Vimeo, but amazingly enough, there is a YouTube copy from August 3, 2020 that has survived! It even has time stamps to help you find different contents…

By August 19, YouTube started censoring too. (Unfortunately, both links in this post no longer work.)

By late August 2020, there was enough censorship in place to prompt RFK Jr’s organization Children’s Health Defense to file this lawsuit (PDF):

By this point, I was expecting to see ALL platforms engage in censorship, including Twitter. If not yet, then soon… So when I posted a link to a Twitter video about the benefits of Hydroxychloroquine, I did not expect to last long. But that short video is still there, in February 2024! THANK YOU, ELON!

By September 18, our mainstream media was captured, and substack was not around yet. I was getting much of my news from abroad, from places like India. This article documents how Uttar Pradesh (240 million people!) switched from Hydroxychloroquine to Ivermectin in early August, 2020 — for both prophylaxis and treatment. Around the same time, I too started taking Ivermectin prophylactically, in preparation for returning to teach the Fall 2020 semester in person.

By October 20, we were seeing Amazon ban books, such as this book by James Perloff. You’ll find it at Barnes & Noble but not on Amazon… And the fact checkers were very busy… Meanwhile, I was wide AWAKE and taking deliberate steps to stay ahead of the censors.

LAWSUITS TO THE RESCUE

As that Jeffery Tucker article shows, the remedy for censorship has historically been in the courts. Since censorship violates the guarantee of free speech that's enshrined in the first amendment, the courts will eventually rule against it, and the present day is no exception. However, sometimes it took decades before it happened, so being too optimistic may result in a disappointment...

(CONTINUED in part 2 of this post….)