Here's the News: This Is How They Destroyed Free Speech During The Pandemic
In the week of Anthony Fauci’s appearance at the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, what part did he play in the consolidation of State power and destroying democratic debate by eliminating voices such as Jay Bhattacharya - and how do we dismantle the Censorship Industrial Complex so they can never do it again? --💙Support this channel directly here: https://bit.ly/RussellBrand-SupportWATCH me LIVE weekdays on Rumble: https://bit.ly/russellbrand-rumbleVisit the new merch store: https://bit.ly/Stay-Free-StoreFollow on social media:X: @rustyrocketsINSTAGRAM: @russellbrandFACEBOOK: @russellbrand
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And we're going to need one because we have highly paid public officials lying to us for a living and when it comes to inquiries they take place behind closed doors.
What incredible censorship we endured during the pandemic period with vital voices being shut down.
People that could have been leading the response.
People that could have been protecting your children's education.
People that could have been protecting your health and your business were deliberately silenced and shut down.
A new film explores the censorship that took place during that time.
It's made by public and therefore I guess Matt Taibbi and Michael Schoenberger, people that we certainly admire over on our platform.
Let's have a look at that film and ask once again, why was the truth so vigilantly censored?
Why were falsehoods so aggressively propagated?
The lockdowns hurt every single poor person on earth and for working-class people was a total disaster.
The Great Venture Declaration was a document that I wrote in October 2020 with Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford.
The three of us, Martin, Sunetra, and I could very clearly see that there were lockdowns coming again.
It was a document that was mainstream.
It was reflecting a mainstream position in opposition to the lockdown, even though at the time, if you read the press, it seemed like all scientists agreed that lockdowns were the right way.
I didn't realize it was going to be this like touchstone document that was going to change how people thought about the pandemic.
Because what I thought we were writing was utterly obvious.
We put the Great Bank Declaration on a website and we allowed people to sign it.
And tens of thousands of doctors, epidemiologists, scientists signed it, including Nobel Prize winners, people from top universities around the world signed it.
I put it up a Facebook page and it got taken down.
Google had de-boosted our page.
Many of the scientists and scholars who signed it, some of them lost their jobs.
Many of them wrote to me and told me they lost opportunities to collaborate with colleagues on grant applications, that they were afraid the grant applications were rejected because they signed it.
They lost teaching opportunities.
Signing it came at some professional risk.
Dr. Fauci, there were reports that the White House may favor the so-called Great Barrington Declaration.
Instead of having an honest conversation, again heated but constructive, they decided that we were anathema, that we needed to be excommunicated from the scientific conversation.
Anybody who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that that is nonsense.
Some of the most important professionals in the field decided that they had the answer.
With the exception of the few that you know who we're talking about, they would all vehemently disagree.
They had all the answers, and that anyone that disagreed with them was a threat.
Jay Bhattacharya is the scientist that we needed.
And even here you see that he's talking about his colleagues, the need for debate, for discourse, discussion.
He's not saying, I am science, I am the future, listen to me.
He's precisely the kind of public official or public servant, to give it a better title, that's required.
Let's have a look at this article from Substack that investigates exactly what happened within the censorship industrial complex during that time and why we were denied access to voices like this one that could have created a completely different dynamic and far better outcomes for all of us.
We tend to think of censorship as a violation of the rights of the censored.
And it is that, of course.
But censorship creates other victims we give less consideration to.
The millions who are denied the chance to hear the perspectives of those who are silenced.
In totalitarian societies, censors deny the public the opportunity to hear opinions that diverge from state orthodoxy.
Suppressing dissent allows the government to exercise its power without constraint.
Persuasion is no longer necessary.
Public opinion is shaped through government decree.
Obedience follows.
Notice that beyond the pandemic, remember we always say the pandemic was a window that revealed a template, a paradigm, a manner of behaving.
Your whole life is about that.
Just make it hard for them.
Exhausted, everything's too expensive, I'm tired, I don't feel very well, I'm bored, I'm over this, I've got no connection to nature, no connection to love, no connection to God.
That's how They drain you of your vitality and your ability to reject their ideas.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans watched our political leaders stoop to these despotic measures.
The Department of Homeland Security, the CDC and the FBI pressured and colluded with the big tech platforms to cleanse social media of anyone who dared to object to the directives of the state.
Questioning the efficacy of lockdowns, vaccine mandates and public masking rules was every bit as heretical as doubting dialectical materialism in Soviet Russia.
Yeah, I've been in a lot of trouble for doubting dialectical materialism itself over in Soviet Russia.
Jay Bhattacharya is an epidemiologist at Stanford University.
Along with Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician at Harvard, and Sunetra Gupta, an Oxford epidemiologist, he wrote the Great Barrington Declaration.
No wonder it annoyed people.
I present the Great Barrington Declaration!
Get that thing off the internet!
Which criticised the government's lockdown measures and called for focused protection of vulnerable demographic groups while the rest of the population achieved herd immunity.
This is a really good point.
That idea is at least as good as some of the ideas that became public policy.
This will never be emphasised enough because it's an admission of such a catastrophic failure that not only would you lose the party in government, you'd have to lose the system of government that led you there because there was no opposition.
There was no debate.
So no one, other than someone like Bloody Ram Paul, can say, well, I was all along saying this is crazy.
There isn't anyone that can make those kind of claims, other than, like, you, maybe.
When we reported on the Twitter files, we discovered that the very day that he joined Twitter, Bhattacharya was censored.
His account was put on a trends blacklist, which radically reduced its reach.
Bhattacharya also learned that in private correspondence, NIAID chief Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, then head of the NIH, had maligned the three authors of the declaration as fringe epidemiologists.
So will that come up in Anthony Fauci's private inquiry that he was engaged in orchestrating a devastating takedown?
Bhattacharya and his colleagues were vindicated on just about every one of their views while Fauci's arguments were almost uniformly proved wrong.
How many lockdown-induced deaths of despair could have been avoided?
How many small businesses could have survived?
How many children would have been spared from devastating learning loss had we been allowed a real debate over COVID policies?
We will inevitably have new national emergencies in the future, potentially even more pandemics.
We cannot allow ourselves to forget what the government did to destroy a democratic debate and consolidate its power as COVID-19 turned the world upside down.
We must take steps now to dismantle the censorship industrial complex so they can never do it again.
Plainly, the role of censorship is control.
As long as you control the discourse, you can control the population.
As long as you can prevent dissent, you can prevent opposition, you can consolidate and control populations, you can increase profits, you can govern in exactly the manner that you want to.
The pandemic was a revelation.
Even though in many ways it was a unique event, all it really did was amplify tendencies were there.
As Bhattacharya said, at the beginning, it was the working class that primarily suffered.
That in itself is an indication of how the pandemic was deployed.
Many people were able to handle the stresses of the pandemic.
If you're a member of the laptop class, working from home, no disrespect if you are, it's easier than if you're driving an Amazon truck or if you're cleaning offices.
It was clear from the beginning that as long as they could control the information, they could prevent the pandemic becoming what it could have been.
An opportunity to recognize the corruption of the state, the corruption of pharmaceutical companies, the corruption of the media, and the relationship between all three.
All of that became clear during the pandemic, and it's because of voices like Jay Bhattacharya's that we have a greater understanding of the literal, actual science that could have been discussed and shared more widely at the height of the pandemic, but thank God is being shared now.