Each revelation of the Biden administration’s censorship regime tells a familiar story: government authorities, inextricably intertwined with corporate interests, bludgeoned social media companies into purging dissent. They used regulatory code (Section 230), the power of the Intelligence Community, and financial incentives to demand subservience from ostensibly independent corporations.
So far, Elon Musk and his purchase of Twitter have been the one formidable resistance to this regime. Mark Zuckerberg’s recent letter to Congress denouncing the Biden administration’s censorship campaign may suggest a turn of the tide, as he vowed, “We’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
On Tuesday, Alex Berenson published an article detailing how the Biden administration, through lobbyists and threats to repeal Section 230, successfully banned him from Twitter for his skepticism toward the Covid vaccines.
The report suggests that Dr. Scott Gottlieb – a Pfizer Board Member and former FDA Commissioner – coordinated censorship efforts with the White House and its medical advisor Andy Slavitt. Gottlieb and Slavitt repeatedly forwarded links to Berenson’s tweets and articles to Twitter executives demanding they censor the inconvenient reporting.
On August 27, 2021, Twitter had a call with Gottlieb to discuss a tweet in which Berenson said that the Covid vaccine “doesn’t stop infection.” A Twitter lobbyist passed along the tweet to company officials, writing “I escalated the violative tweet based on a report by former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, with whom [a co-worker] and I spoke yesterday afternoon.”
Berenson then received a “permanent ban” from Twitter (though it was later reversed after a judge denied Twitter’s motion to dismiss his subsequent lawsuit).
This evidence will be of great use for Berenson, who is suing the White House, President Biden, Gottlieb, Slavitt, and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla for orchestrating a public-private censorship campaign against him. While the Supreme Court held that the plaintiffs lacked standing to pursue their case in Murthy v. Missouri, Berenson has emails proving that he was the focus of the censors’ campaign.
At this point, however, the story is not surprising to anyone who has followed the censorship industrial complex. It is now clear that this campaign was led and orchestrated by a small group of unelected bureaucrats who determined that free speech and the First Amendment were subordinate to their ideological and corporate pursuits.
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But the shadowy figures who launched this campaign still maintain great influence. The ongoing reports, most of which have only come to light through litigation and Mr. Musk, reveal the same censors repeatedly working to stifle the free flow of information. More importantly, they demonstrate why it is imperative that these censors be kept away from the levers of power going forward.
La Cosa Nostra Approach to Free Speech
Rob Flaherty: Biden’s Consigliere
The public is generally unfamiliar with the government officials responsible for carrying out assaults on the First Amendment. Like soldiers in The Sopranos, they demand compliance with threats of retribution from their boss.
Perhaps no figure has been as central or brazen in this approach to civil liberties as Rob Flaherty, the former White House Director of Digital Strategy and Kamala Harris’s current deputy campaign manager.
As a Biden consigliere, he repeatedly worked with Big Tech companies to suppress political opponents’ speech. “Are you guys fucking serious?” Flaherty asked Facebook after the company failed to censor critics of the Covid vaccine. “I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.” At other times, Flaherty was more direct. “Please remove this account immediately,” he told Twitter about a Biden family parody account. The company compiled within an hour.
Flaherty made it clear that he was concerned with political power, not veracity or disinformation. He demanded Facebook stifle “often-true content” that could be considered “sensational.” He asked company executives if they could interfere with private messages containing “misinformation” on WhatsApp.
His desire to control Americans’ access to information meant eliminating critical media sources. He demanded Facebook reduce the spread of Tucker Carlson’s report on the Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine’s link to blood clots. “There’s 40,000 shares on the video. Who is seeing it now? How many?” He later called for Facebook to censor the New York Post, writing, “Intellectually my bias is to kick people off.”
In April 2021, Flaherty worked to strong-arm Google into ramping up its censorship operations. He told executives that his concerns were “shared at the highest (and I mean the highest) levels of the WH.” There’s “more work to be done,” he instructed. He had the same talking points with Facebook that month, telling executives that he would have to explain to President Biden and Chief of Staff Ron Klain “why there is misinfo on the internet.”
In nearly every case, the social media companies caved to the pressure of the White House.
Protecting the government-provided Covid narratives was Flaherty’s primary focus. “We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy—period,” he wrote to a Facebook executive. “We want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game. . . .This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.”
The impatience revealed the inner mobster in Flaherty. We can do this the easy way or the hard way- it’d all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us. Nice company you have here – would be a shame if something happened to it.
In March 2023, Flaherty participated in an hour-long discussion at Georgetown University on “how governments use social media to communicate with the public.” An audience member asked Flaherty about his emails encouraging Facebook to censor private WhatsApp messages, asking: “How do you justify legally telling a private messaging app what they can and cannot send?”
Flaherty declined to answer. “I can’t really comment on the specifics. I think the President has sort of made clear that one of the key parts of our Covid strategy is making sure the American people have access to reliable information as soon as they could get it, and, uh, you know, that’s all part and parcel to that, but unfortunately I can’t go too far into the litigation.”
Scott Gottlieb: Pfizer’s Underboss
Berenson’s recent report highlighted the censorious power of Pfizer Board Member Scott Gottlieb. Gottlieb’s malign influence dates back to the first days of the Covid response, and at each step, he has advocated for Pfizer’s profit margins to trample American liberty.
As an ally of Jared Kushner, Gottlieb was instrumental in convincing President Trump to lock down in March 2020. On March 11, President Trump announced travel restrictions but resisted calls for social distancing, school closures, and lockdowns. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and others advocated for Trump to keep the country open, but then Gottlieb visited the Oval Office at the urging of Kushner and lobbied for a complete lockdown.
He later coordinated with Kushner to develop lockdown guidelines, telling the President’s son-in-law, “They should go a little bit further than you are comfortable with. When you feel like you are doing more than you should, that is a sign that you are doing them right.”
Gottlieb was subsequently instrumental in masking, PCR testing, and calling for the creation of a new intelligence apparatus designed to combat dissident speech.
In 2021, he advocated for the censorship of his successor at the FDA, Brett Giror, because he published the reports of a study in Israel that demonstrated that natural immunity was superior to Covid vaccines. “This is the kind of stuff that’s corrosive,” he wrote to a Twitter lobbyist. He complained that the tweet would “end up going viral and driving news coverage” that would be inconvenient to his employer’s most lucrative product.
Gottlieb later admitted that Pfizer did not know if its vaccine prevented transmission, but he insisted that social media companies had an “obligation” and an “affirmative responsibility” to prevent the spread of Covid vaccine misinformation, which he declined to define.
Andy Slavitt: The Newly Made Man
Andy Slavitt, a particularly sycophantic creature, has managed to transform his identity from a no-name McKinsey alumnus to a self-assured “outsider’s insider” charging $40,000 for public appearances despite a demonstrable track record of incompetence and destruction.
Slavitt proudly claimed to have “run the agency that oversaw nursing home safety” in New York in 2020. New York, under Slavitt’s guidance, required nursing homes to accept Covid patients, leading to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, which the State then deliberately undercounted to avoid political criticism.
Slavitt then joined the Biden White House, where in March 2021 he led the administration’s unconstitutional crusade to prevent Americans from buying politically unfavorable books on Amazon. The effort, assisted by Flaherty, began on March 2, 2021, when Slavitt emailed the company demanding to speak to executives about the site’s “high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation.”
The following month, Slavitt targeted Facebook, demanding that the company remove memes lampooning the Covid vaccine. In an April 2021 email, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president for global affairs, informed his team at Facebook that Andy Slavitt, a Senior Advisor to President Biden, was “outraged. . .that [Facebook] did not remove” a particular post.
When Clegg “countered that removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US,” Slavitt disregarded the warning and the First Amendment, complaining that the posts “demonstrably inhibit[ed] confidence” in the Covid vaccines.
The platforms caved to Slavitt’s requests, eventually removing content critical of the Biden administration and all claims related to the lab-leak theory. Flaherty routinely copied Slavitt on his emails demanding social media companies censor journalists, and the duo largely succeeded in curbing dissent so that Gottlieb’s company would enjoy lucrative windfalls from Covid treatments.
This was censorship in the raw. Slavitt and his gang of bureaucratic thugs weaponized the federal government to suppress information that they found politically inconvenient. They hid behind the innocuous language of “public health” and “public-private partnerships,” but the goal was simple: to silence those who threatened their ascent to power.
Conclusion
In June 2023, Flaherty stepped down from his position at the White House. President Biden honored his departing henchman, remarking, “The way Americans get their information is changing, and since Day 1, Rob has helped us meet people where they are.”
President Biden was right – Americans’ access to information changed. The internet promised a liberating free exchange of ideas, but bureaucrats like Flaherty, Slavitt, and Gottlieb worked to implement informational tyranny. In Flaherty’s words, this was all “part and parcel” to the White House strategy. On behalf of the administration, they demanded companies remove true content; they called on social media groups to remove journalists’ accounts; they suggested censoring citizens’ private messages; they institutionalized the abuse of the First Amendment.
The government effectively nationalized the main social media portals and converted them to become propaganda vehicles for bureaucrats while demoting or completely blocking contrary views. Now, Flaherty looks to perpetuate his power through the vessel of Kamala Harris. Unsurprisingly, Slavitt has expressed his support for the Harris campaign, and Slavitt maintains his perch on Sunday morning talk shows and the Pfizer Board of Directors.
There is a reason that censors mostly prefer to work in secret. The practice is not generally popular. If it remains mostly invisible, the public might not ever discover that it is going on. But with all these new court documents, and intrepid researchers so heavily focused on the case, we are more aware than ever of the multitude of ways that government and its partners are curating public culture for political ends.
They have been enormously successful so far, effectively blotting any serious reckoning for the largest violations of human rights and liberties in modern history. What might have brought about a political revolution against the elites in most Western democracies has instead been reduced to an eccentric interest of specialists. The saying is true: democracy dies in darkness. What happens when we turn on the lights?
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