WE ARE STARTING TO BE CENSORED WHETHER OR NOT WHAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT IS ACCURATE OR NOT

Stephen Harrod Buhner

Some months ago, I posted a link on Facebook to a Bloomberg article which headlined the Thai government’s official recognition of andrographis (an herb) for use in the treatment of Covid-19. Facebook almost immediately took it down and warned me that any further, similiar posts would be taken down as well and that they would ban me if I kept it up. I was rather shocked considering that all I had done was post a headline from a somewhat conservative, middle of the road, media site.

It turns out that the censoring of material on the internet is becoming more common at both YouTube and Facebook. I believe that the articles I am including in this post are important; that the information in them is very important and that it should not be censored. Note: the last article (most of which is behind a paywall unfortunately, but only $5 to read) is enraging to anyone who believes in open discussion about health and healing in our culture.

As many people know, I have spent some 35 years as an herbalist and my work is deeply grounded in human, historical, and scientific understandings and uses of plant medicines. And that knowledge is very, very deep compared to the work of most phytorationalists (which I am not, I am a phyto-non-rationalist). When Covid-19 hit I was one of the few herbalists in the U.S. to offer a grounded, sophisticated protocol to address the disease; I am also the only one I am aware of who has created sophisticated protocols for treating Long Haul Covid symptoms in those who have not been able to get well.

As many of you know, some herbal companies (without my consent) began using my name to sell products based on my protocols. The FDA came down on them heavily and regrettably my name is now linked to quackery because as all sensible people know the herbal treatment of Covid-19 can only be quackery. It is really irritating. This is why when I have a Covid-19 article, I post it on my blog, not on Facebook. Thus, I am unable to directly post the following material on Facebook (or even link to the articles themselves due to the word in the most important one) because the posts will be taken down.

These are the three articles I read today that show how much more serious censorship is becoming on the internet; I think each are important to read, so I am posting excerpts and a link to each of them.

In the Spirit of the Plants, Stephen What If We’re Wrong? Heather E. Heying

What if the Earth isn’t the centre of everything? What if the ancestors of humans once looked like monkeys, or were single-celled organisms? What if the continents move?

These questions were once beyond the pale. They were not to be discussed in polite society, were outside the frame of the Overton window. None of that made them untrue, however, or unimportant.

Every idea that we now understand to be true was first realized by a human mind, unknown to anyone else. Before that moment, nobody in our species had had the thought. Our lack of knowledge limited us. And yet before any human had the thought, it was nevertheless true. Some person first conceived the idea, thought on it for a while, honed it, shaped it, and then shared it. Maybe the first person they shared it with thought it was a terrific idea. More likely, they thought the originator was wrong, maybe engaged in crazy talk. For a while, the idea may have even been considered dangerous, worthy of contempt and scorn. And for a long time thereafter, that idea—one that, in retrospect, we understand to be fundamental—was at the very least considered outside the range of acceptable and accepted thought. It was heterodox.

Galileo might have had a few things to say about that.

Orthodoxy and heterodoxy—apparent opposites pulling against one another from across a gap that can seem impassable—in fact rely on and thrive with one another. Orthodoxy is effective at times of stasis, when what is to come looks very much like what came before, and when what we believe to be true is in fact true. Too much orthodoxy, though, and we become stale and stagnant. Heterodoxy injects new ideas into a system, and is necessary any time the world is changing, and the future has little chance of looking like the past. Too much heterodoxy, however, and we become frenzied and chaotic.

Regardless of what is most needed in the world at any given moment—regardless of whether the conditions call for more orthodoxy or more heterodoxy—there always needs to be an avenue for discussion. Both orthodox and heterodox ideas always need to be publicly discussable. Otherwise, whoever holds the most power when censorship begins—at the point at which people begin hiding their thoughts and conversations—will gain ever more power. The powerful will shape the governing orthodoxy—and it will always be an orthodoxy, even if its central ideas were heterodox just yesterday—and will crack down ever harder on those who dissent.

The argument, of course, is not that all instances of dissent are necessary, or valuable, or reasonable. Angry, deceitful and dangerous words, actions and regimes have emerged from dissent countless times throughout history. But dissent in and of itself is utterly necessary. Instances of ill-considered dissent are too often trotted out as proof that dissent itself is dangerous, but this is poor logic, and often obscures other motives. It is naïve to imagine that—living as we do within the constraints of the moment—we can see into the future with such clarity that those who would decide what speech is and is not acceptable are in a good position to know what is actually true. Many of Galileo’s interlocutors did not know what was true, yet they certainly believed that they did. (Some of his interlocutors—like many of those who would tamp down dissent—were presumably not driven by belief, but merely by a wish to shore up their power.) Too many would make themselves judge, jury and executioner of certain concepts and conversations, while claiming to be the sole proprietors of truth. They are engaging in a grand narcissism: they imagine themselves as, for the first time in history, able to see everything. It is akin to declaring themselves God.

What if SARS-CoV2 leaked from a lab? What if there are long-term effects of mRNA vaccines? What if Ivermectin is a safe and effective prophylaxis against, and treatment for, COVID-19?

To read the rest of the article go here: https://areomagazine.com/2021/05/19/what-if-were-wrong/

Meet the Censored: Bret Weinstein Canceled on campus for speaking his mind, he's now going through a sequel at the hands of Silicon Valley

On May 23, 2017, not so long ago in real time but seemingly an eternity given the extraordinary history we’ve lived through since, a group of 50-odd students at arrived at the classroom of a biology professor named Bret Weinstein, demanding his resignation. He stepped into the hall to talk, believing he could work things out.

He was wrong. Weinstein’s offense had been to come to work during an event called the “Days of Absence,” in which white students, staff, and faculty were asked to stay home. This was an inverted version of a longstanding Evergreen event of the same name that, based on a Douglas Turner Ward play, invited students of color to stay home voluntarily, to underscore their value to the community. As he would later explain in the Wall Street Journal, Weinstein thought this was a different and more negative message, and refused to comply. When that group of 50 students he’d never met arrived at his door and accused him of being a racist, he assumed he could find common ground, especially when his own students (including students of color) spoke on his behalf.

“I was one of Evergreen’s most popular professors,” he later testified to the House of Representatives. “I had Evergreen’s version of tenure. Did they really think they could force my resignation based on a meritless accusation? They did think that, and they were right.”

Weinstein was a Bernie Sanders supporter who described his politics as unabashedly liberal, even leftist. Like many, he’d grown up steeped in the imagery of sixties protest culture, probably imagined himself on its side, and therefore thought he could find solidarity with protesters. He didn’t realize was that he was the canary in a coal mine for a new movement that understood free speech as a stalking horse for the exercise of institutional power. When Weinstein opened his mouth to defend himself, what the crowd heard was him attempting to exercise authority, and they exercised theirs back.

They’d won over Evergreen’s new president, George Bridges, who refused to intercede in Weinstein’s behalf and later even asked college police to stand down, when protesters began stopping traffic and searching cars for someone, presumably Weinstein. The police told Weinstein they couldn’t guarantee his safety, and ultimately he was, in fact, forced to resign.

Frequently portrayed as the involuntary protagonist of the first of a series of campus free speech crises, in fact Weinstein was one of the first to understand that a rollback of “free speech” in cases like his was incidental to the larger aims of the movement.

“What is occurring on college campuses is about power and control. Speech is impeded as a last resort,” he told the House Oversight Committee.

He described the new movement as like a cult, in which members sincerely believed they were acting to stop oppression, but leaders understood they were simply “turning the tables” on oppression. They were exercising authority to achieve what may be presented as social justice goals, while the actual end is the authority itself, with the teardown of due process and other protections a critical part of the picture. “This committee,” he said, “should take my tale as cautionary.”

Fast forward three years. Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying have become prominent figures in independent media, co-hosting a popular podcast called DarkHorse. Identified in the New York Times as one of the main dramatis personae of the so-called “,” a group of heterodox intellectuals not aligned with the traditional right or left, he appeared for a time to find a home on YouTube. Maybe he would never go back to academia, but this seemed a more secure replacement. After all it’s one thing to be dependent on the whims of a college president or even a faculty board, but surely there’s safety in subscriber numbers?

Not so fast. As detailed in “Why Has ‘Ivermectin’ Become a Dirty Word?”, Weinstein is on the verge of becoming one of the more prominent casualties to a censorship movement that it’s hard not to see as part of a wider Evergreening of America. He and Heying’s two YouTube channels have been hit with multiple warnings for two brands of speech offenses, and are on the verge of having their business shut down entirely as a result (YouTube has a “three strikes and you’re out” policy). One offense involves interviews with the likes of Dr. Pierre Kory about the potential benefits of the repurposed drug ivermectin, and the other involves interviews with guests like Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology used in the Covid-19 vaccines. One video with Malone this week had 587,331 views before it was shut down.

To read the rest of the article, go here: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-bret-weinstein? Why Has "Ivermectin" Become a Dirty Word? At the worst moment, Internet censorship has driven scientific debate itself underground Matt Taibbi

On December 8, 2020, when most of America was consumed with what The Guardian called Donald Trump’s “desperate, mendacious, frenzied and sometimes farcical” attempt to remain president, the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on the “Medical Response to Covid-19.” One of the witnesses, a pulmonologist named Dr. Pierre Kory, insisted he had great news.

“We have a solution to this crisis,” he said unequivocally. “There is a drug that is proving to have a miraculous impact.”

Kory was referring to an FDA-approved medicine called ivermectin. A genuine wonder drug in other realms, ivermectin has all but eliminated parasitic diseases like river blindness and elephantiasis, helping discoverer Satoshi Oðmura win the Nobel Prize in 2015. As far as its uses in the pandemic went, however, research was still scant. Could it really be a magic Covid-19 bullet?

Kory had been trying to make such a case, but complained to the Senate that public efforts had been stifled, because “every time we mention ivermectin, we get put in Facebook jail.” A Catch-22 seemed to be ensnaring science. With the world desperate for news about an unprecedented disaster, Silicon Valley had essentially decided to disallow discussion of a potential solution — disallow calls for more research and more study — because not enough research and study had been done. Once, people weren’t allowed to take drugs before they got FDA approval. Now, they can’t talk about them.

“I want to try to be respectful because I think the intention is correct,” Kory told the committee. “They want to cut down on misinformation, and many doctors are claiming X, Y, and Z work in this disease. The challenge is, you’re also silencing those of us who are expert, reasoned, researched, and extremely knowledgeable.”

Eight million people watched Kory say that on the C-SPAN video of the hearing posted to YouTube, but YouTube, in what appears to be a first, removed video of the hearing, as even Senate testimony was now deemed too dangerous for public consumption. YouTube later suspended the Wisconsin Senator who’d invited Kory to the hearing, and when Kory went on podcasts to tell his story, YouTube took down those videos, too. Kory was like a ghost who floated through the Internet, leaving suspensions and blackened warning screens everywhere he went.

One of the challenges of the pandemic period is the degree to which science has become intertwined with politics. Arguments about the efficacy of mask use or ventilators, or the viability of repurposed drugs like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, or even the pandemic’s origins, were quashed from the jump in the American commercial press, which committed itself to a regime of simplified insta-takes made opposite to Donald Trump’s comments. With a few exceptions, Internet censors generally tracked with this conventional wisdom, which had the effect of moving conspiracy theories and real scientific debates alike far underground.

A consequence is that issues like the ivermectin question have ended up in the same public bucket as debates over foreign misinformation, hate speech, and even incitement. The same Republican Senator YouTube suspended for making statements in support of ivermectin, Ron Johnson, has also been denounced in the press for failing to call the January 6th riots an insurrection, resulting in headlines that blend the two putative offenses.

“You have these ideas about the need to censor hate speech, calls for violence, and falsity,” Kory says, “and they’ve put science on the same shelf.”

As a result, doctors and organizations that may have little to do with politics but have advocated for ivermectin, from Dr. Tess Lawrie’s British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) to pulmonologist Roger Seheult to many others, have been shut down online with the same unilateral abruptness platforms apply to hate speech or threats. Dr. Sabine Hazan, a gastroenterologist and CEO of a genetic sequencing laboratory called ProGenaBiome in Ventura, California, was blindsided. She got involved with ivermectin when she was pulling out the stops for Covid-19 patients.

“I’m a doctor. My job isn’t to do nothing. If I wanted to do nothing, I’d be selling shampoo,” Hazan says. When patients got really sick, she tried everything, treating off-label with a number of drugs in combination, including ivermectin. Eventually, she ended up taking it upon herself to run clinical trials with repurposed, off-patent drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, fearing that the lack of a profit angle would prevent a major corporate effort in that direction.

“I felt, no one is going to be investigating a cheap solution, so I did it myself,” she says.

Some weeks ago, Hazan got up early on a Sunday to present findings to a group of physicians that included Dr. Kylie Wagstaff, one of the physicians in the first in vitro ivermectin study, a family doctor in Zimbabwe named Jackie Stone, and others.

She uploaded the talk on YouTube, and “lo and behold, it got taken down. It’s amazing. These are doctors talking. It’s not anyone selling anything.”

This is an excerpt from today’s subscriber-only post. To read the entire article and get full access to the archives, you can subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/why-has-ivermectin-become-a-dirty