Facebook is killing people, misinformation is rampant, and the only people who can save us from ourselves are the all-wise executives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue whose judgment is infallible and whose motives are pure. That’s the message emanating from the White House and the corporate press.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced last week that, due to 12 unnamed people on social media posting what the Biden administration considers to be misinformation, the White House is actively “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation” and “helping” to “boost trusted content.” Going even further, Psaki said nothing is “off the table” for using Big Tech to quiet opposing views.
Not only is the Biden administration effectively deputizing Facebook to be an extension of the federal government’s communications office, but it also insists that if you’re banned from one Big Tech site for questioning conventional wisdom, you should be banned from all of them.
Psaki maintains the government has “a responsibility, as a public health matter, to raise that issue” of people allegedly dying en masse because of uncensored Facebook posts that don’t comport with the White House’s vaccine messaging. This isn’t a caricature of the White House’s position either. When a reporter asked President Joe Biden directly last week what his message is to sites like Facebook, Biden replied, serious as a heart attack, “They’re killing people.”
This push for censorship is interesting for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the same political stripe that ridiculously cried “fascism” for four years under Donald Trump is now taking concrete steps to suppress political opposition, one of the hallmarks of true fascism. It’s also interesting because information changes so rapidly, as Psaki herself admitted.
“Science evolves, information evolves,” Psaki said during the same press conference in which she pledged her commitment to silencing vaccine dissidents online. If anyone should understand the reality of information evolving, it’s the Biden administration.
Everything Is ‘Misinformation’ — Until It’s Not
Last fall when the bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story broke, then-candidate Joe Biden insisted it was Russian “disinformation” and a “smear campaign.” When Fox News’s Peter Doocy later asked Biden about the stories of his son, the then-president-elect hurled one of his bizarre insults at the reporter, saying, “God love ya man. You are a one-horse pony.” Psaki piled on in October, sharing a story to Twitter that claimed, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo.”
Tech giants Twitter and Facebook waged a war on the narrative, with one site spiking the stories about the Biden son’s laptop from orbit and the other severely hamstringing them, under the guise of an unsubstantiated hunch that the materials were “hacked” and on the grounds that the stories might have been disinformation. In other words, based on Democrats’ narrative, tech monopolies throttled a timely story in the runup to the highly contested 2020 election, a story that directly applied to one of the candidate’s familial affairs and might have changed the outcome of the race — and they did this with absolute impunity.
When U.S. intelligence agencies determined the Hunter Biden stories were not Russian disinformation, Big Tech shrugged. A week later, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg both admitted they had no evidence that The New York Post’s reporting on Joe Biden’s knowledge of his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals was Russian disinformation. Whoops. The conventional wisdom on “misinformation” changed, but the story had already been conveniently censored.
Psaki likewise spread misinformation online just two months before the election when she pushed a fake tale about Trump calling fallen troops “losers” and “suckers” and the Russian bounties story, two narratives the media ran with that turned out to be misinformation. In fact, her misinformation-peddling goes back further. Psaki was a frequent promoter of the Russia collusion hoax in 2017 and throughout the Trump presidency.
taking a moment to re-up the fact that @realDonaldTrump knew about Russia offering bounties to Taliban to take out US troops in Afghanistan and still defends Putin. his undervaluing contribution of US troops not just horrific–but also dangerous https://t.co/iqylqMyvqA
— Jen Psaki (@jrpsaki) September 4, 2020
Wow look at all this misinformation about Russian collusion. Ban Psaki immediately. pic.twitter.com/nUYDYe5goY
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 17, 2021
But even on the Wuhan virus, Biden’s administration and the so-called public health experts he now demands we trust have a terribly tarnished track record. Note how readily Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris undermined the vaccine during their 2020 presidential campaign:
Here’s a mashup of VACCINE MISINFORMATION from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Does Jen Psaki want Big Tech to CENSOR this?pic.twitter.com/vqnucmZjnj
— Kyle Martinsen (@KyleMartinsen_) July 16, 2021
And what about flip-flopper-in-chief Anthony Fauci, who not only knew that COVID-19 likely came from the Wuhan lab and that it potentially “looked engineered” and tried to cover those things up, according to his released emails (which Facebook also censored and erroneously “fact-checked”), but knowingly spread misinformation about masks at the start of the pandemic?
Big Tech censored posts about the Wuhan lab leak theory, which Democrats and the corrupt media called a “conspiracy theory,” yet Fauci’s mask misinformation is still online. Doocy used this line of questioning with Psaki last week with regard to the administration’s collusion with Big Tech to crack down on so-called “misinformation.” The exchange went like this:
“There are videos of Dr. Fauci from 2020, before anybody had a vaccine, and he is out there saying there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” Doocy said. “So is the administration going to contact Facebook and ask them to take that down?”
“Well, first, I think what Dr. Fauci has said himself, who’s been quite public out there, is that science evolves, information evolves — and we make that available in a public way to the American people,” Psaki replied. “I have never seen any data to suggest that the vaccines cause infertility. That is information that is irresponsibly traveling.”
“About the science evolving,” Doocy pushed back. “Facebook used to block people from posting that COVID may have originated from a lab. That is something this president now admits is a possibility. So is there any concern that things you are trying to block or have taken down might someday turn out to be—”
“We don’t take anything down. We don’t block anything,” Psaki snapped back, ignoring the fact that she admits the administration is using Big Tech to do its bidding to feign clean hands. “Facebook and any private-sector company makes decisions about what information should be on their platform.”
‘I’m Here to Help’
Doocy is right, and the White House knows it. Today’s “misinformation” is tomorrow’s undeniable fact; it happens all the time, and that reality isn’t lost on the Biden administration.
What’s going on here isn’t really an attempt to save Americans from disease. It’s a desperate attempt by the ruling class to save their own rear ends from information that threatens their ideological goals.
Democrats at the helm of the executive and legislative branches aren’t looking to squash so-called misinformation because it’s the only way to keep people from dying (which still wouldn’t justify their authoritarianism, by the way). Biden, Psaki, and their friends in Congress and Silicon Valley are working to snuff out their opponents’ speech because not only do they think it will help them politically, as it likely did in the 2020 election, but because they believe they can get away with it — again, as they did in the 2020 election.
President Ronald Reagan was right when he said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” The Biden administration has gotten disturbingly more specific: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help Facebook silence you.”
