For the TL;DR crowd....a few snippets.

For three years, pandemic public relations mocked nature, generating fear, illness, inflation and excess death beyond what the virus caused. -WSJ

Discovery in Missouri v. Biden exposed relationships among government agencies and social-media firms and revealed an additional layer of university centers and self-styled disinformation watchdogs and fact-checking outfits. -WSJ

Elon Musk's release of some of Twitter's internal files revealed that up to 80 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were embedded with social-media companies. The agents mostly weren't fighting terrorism but flagging wrongthink by American citizens, including eminent scientists who suggested different paths on Covid policy. -WSJ

For those who can still read a great article:

Covid Censorship Proved to Be Deadly
Government and social-media companies colluded to stifle dissenters who turned out to be right.


In the wake of the 1986 Chal-lenger space-shuttle explosion, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman knew that the truth would both fuel progress and soothe the nation's sorrow. "For a successful technology," he said, "reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

For three years, pandemic public relations mocked nature, generating fear, illness, inflation and excess death beyond what the virus caused. Digital censorship supercharged the effort to hide reality, but reality is getting its day in court.

On July 4, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty temporarily blocked numerous federal agencies and the White House from collaborating with social-media companies and third-party groups to censor speech.

Discovery in Missouri v. Biden exposed relationships among government agencies and social-media firms and revealed an additional layer of university centers and self-styled disinformation watchdogs and fact-checking outfits.

Elon Musk's release of some of Twitter's internal files revealed that up to 80 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were embedded with social-media companies. The agents mostly weren't fighting terrorism but flagging wrongthink by American citizens, including eminent scientists who suggested different paths on Covid policy.

The results of these relationships? Twitter blacklisted Stanford physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya for showing Covid almost exclusively threatened the elderly, severely reducing the visibility of his tweets. When Stanford health policy scholar Scott Atlas began advising the White House, YouTube erased his most prominent video opposing lockdowns. Twitter banned Robert Malone, a pioneer of mRNA vaccine technology, for calling attention to the vaccines' dangers. YouTube demonetized evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, who suggested the virus might be engineered and predicted vaccine-evading variants. And those are only a few examples.

Social-media platforms were powerful tools for full-spectrum censorship, but they didn't act alone. Medical schools, medical boards, science journals and legacy media sang from the same hymnal.

Legions of doctors stayed quiet after witnessing the demonization of their peers who challenged the Covid orthodoxy. A little censorship leads people to watch what they say. Millions of patients and citizens were deprived of important insights as a result.

Health authorities and TV doctors insisted young people were vulnerable, demanded toddlers wear masks, closed schools, beaches and parks, and were loath to contemplate crucial cost-benefit analysis. The economy? Mental health? Never heard of them.

These "experts" denied the protective effects of recovered immunity, a phenomenon we've known about since the Plague of Athens in 430 B.C. They effectively prohibited generic drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration, such as

azithromycin and ivermectin, which low-income nations around the world were deploying successfully. They failed to appreciate the evolutionary dynamics of mass vaccination during a pandemic.

The U.S. government spent $6 trillion to buoy its shuttered economy, and most people got Covid anyway. Worst of all, the lockdowns and mandates resulted in unprecedented bad health outcomes for young and middle-aged people in rich countries.

Excess mortality in most high-income nations was worse in 2021 and 2022 than in 2020, the initial pandemic year. Many poorer nations with less government control seemed to fare better. Sweden, which didn't have a lockdown, performed better than nearly every other advanced nation.

After navigating 2020 with relative success, young and middle-age healthy people in rich nations began dying in unprecedented numbers in 2021 and 2022. Health authorities haven't focused enough on this cataclysm of premature death from non-Covid heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary embolisms, kidney failure and cancer.

Hiding these and other realities has become more difficult in the internet age. The information explosion has allowed more people to spot quickly the mistakes of officials and learn the truth. This has changed the relationship between the authorities and those they govern. Those in charge feel threatened.

Digital censorship is their response to this crisis of authority. True, misinformation is rampant online. But it was far worse before the internet, when myths could persist for centuries. New technologies allow us to compile data quickly, correct errors, find facts and dispel falsehoods. Science, supported by an open internet, is the process by which we reduce misinformation and approach the truth.

Artificial intelligence will improve our ability to sift, parse, edit, authenticate and organize information. When you hear calls to license or centralize control of AI, remember the hubris of Covid censorship.

"Attacks on me," Dr. Anthony Fauci famously insisted, "quite frankly, are attacks on science." Feynman would have been appalled. "Science," he wisely noted, "is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

Mr. Swanson is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enter-prise Institute. He writes the Infonomena newsletter on Substack.com.

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. is away.

I wish

It's never going to matter if the focus remains on purse swinging online instead of legislation.  The guys here I see talking about this stuff all the time never want to do anything but have internet arguments about it.

Holy Crap, this is some kind of mental illness to keep hand wringing over COVID.  Give it a f-ing rest.  

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Agreed, more restriction...err, legislation...is needed

I know right. Totally time to forgive those who threatened the livelihoods of vax/lockdown/mask dissidents, advocates for policies that harmed children, and censors of free speech. Can’t we all just be friends?

The line is "At this point in time, what difference does it make"

Are you being serious? After everything that happened and everything coming out? The censorship and control? You want to pretend that wasn't happening and continuing to happen? Seriously?

No.

This could.be proof those that got juiced wi continue to fall in line

Pureblood master race checking in!!!!

As someone who refused to buy into the fear and propaganda of rice rabies I offer this to the sheep who bent the knee:

Attached File

If you don't really want to limit the size and scope of government, well enjoy I guess.  We're not going to stop government run amok by just wishing for it.

It has to be sarcasm. I can’t believe anyone would be so out of touch with reality.

“I’m just doing what I’m told.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

If we gave it a rest, some fool would forget.

So, no.

They will obediently continue to comply and will call those who will not bend the knee mad.

<---- Type O pure blood

I hope it is sarcasm.   If not...well....may your chains rest lightly. I will never forgive those involved and those that bought into the covid nonsense, including  former friends and former family.

There are quite a number of sensitive folks in this thread.

I hope everyone has had their booster shots this week.

Attached File

This post exemplifies why the exact opposite mindset is needed.  Enforcement of government wrongthink killed people.  It cost people their livelihoods.  It permanently damaged children, developmentally.

People need to be going to prison.

It's more than wuflu.  It's the government suppression of free speech, silencing of dissent and the murder of our fellow citizens.  No rest until Nuremburg Trials for Phauxi, Birx, Big Pharma execs, officials of the FDA and most people who promoted the clawt shawt.

Uh oh, someone has buyer's remorse, lol.

And, it also gave the Chinese a twofer; ended their problem with the Hong Kong protests that were spilling over into the mainland, and ended the Trump Presidency.

Posting on arfcom is never going to put anyone in prison.  You're not doing anything.

The past isn't what you saw and know. It's what the media claim it was.

Do you think he only exists on arfcom?

He’s doing the opposite of being silent and raising the issues of the day in the modern market place. Would you prefer we were silent. Are you in agreement with the other poster that we should ‘get over it’?

I'd be glad to be educated about what he's doing, I'm all ears.

old news, nothing happened about it and nothing will.
Buuut and thats important: more and more prople are waking up to it.

Bravo!

He’s talking. It’s how every change in the history of man began. There is no circumventing it.

The pandemic didn’t start Jan 1st 2020.

Who would have guessed there would be more deaths in a full year than 3/4 of a year?

There's no one left that isn't aware.  You're not accomplishing anything.

These people are spineless individuals trying to justify their cynicism and inaction.  The same types of folks abstain from voting.

So nothing, thanks.

lol - welcome.

I will never forgive and never forget. Having some measure of "official" confirmation I was in fact right about everything from the beginning is nice, but I will never "let it go" without trials and executions.

Yeah. The past is in the past. Let's move on.

Our bad. Like the ridicule here in that particular forum from all the pro vaxers.

I'll never forget.

Nothing would be silence, which coincidentally was a prime objective of the state. Would you prefer that?

Attached File

Am I in before "fuck history" smoothbrains? No?

Maybe you guys should make a flag.  

You're forgetting

YouTube
All news outlets
And all the actual groups actively suppressing because .gov told them to

These are huge issues to me. Massive 1st amendment violations.

This isn't my only social media. I don't exist in a vacuum. I voice my opinion on sites that AREN'T republican echo chambers.  I write to my representatives, local, state,  and federal. I vote my conscience.  What should I be doing?  Quitting my 10-hour-a-day job so I can go carry a picket sign on the sidewalk in front of the White House?

Some letter agency folks need a healthy dose of dungeon.

So yes you prefer silence and pretending the situation isn’t what it is.

NY Dept of Health official admits they exaggerated the number of children hospitalized for COVID to motivate parents to get their kids vaccinated. It was all lies. https://t.co/GCgFRcOW71

— Darla Shine \uD83D\uDC51 (@DarlaShine) December 30, 2021

I think that qualifies as actually doing something, good for you.  Well that's one of you guys now I've heard of that's done at least one thing besides posting on arfcom.