In times of perceived crisis, who are the most productive stewards of events? If the facts are uncertain, do those administrators have the right to silence those who contradict them? More fundamentally, do they ever have this right?
These were the legal and philosophical questions at the last meeting of the House Judiciary Committee’s special subcommittee on the militarization of the federal government.
Robert Flaherty, Biden’s former virtual White House director, testified before the subcommittee; Andy Slavitt, former senior adviser to the Biden White House’s COVID-19 response team; Matthew Seligman of Stanford Law School; and Todd Zywicki of George Mason University Antonin Scalia School of Law.
Flaherty and Slavitt, like many Democratic members of the subcommittee, described the early days of President Joe Biden’s presidency as an unprecedented time marked by widespread suffering and mass deaths from the disease, with vaccination and evidence-based data provided through the government as the way forward. ahead for our country. towards healing.
Along with Seligman, they emphasized the importance of social media corporations moderating content containing potentially destructive misinformation and the role of the federal government in helping those corporations by offering them content suitable for mass consumption.
However, if the interactions between White House officials and workers at social media corporations were simply polite advice or something more akin to Paulie Walnuts calling you and telling you that Tony has a favor he’d like to ask of you for a point of contention between Republicans and House Democrats.
As Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the committee’s chairman, pointed out, life was much more confusing for Elon Musk once he stopped enforcing the federal government’s favored disinformation policies on X. And, as Zywicki would suggest, considerations have changed. It has been expressed through social media corporations that the federal government, if disobeyed, could simply begin to replace its enforcement of antitrust laws.
In addition, several Republican members, as well as Zywicki, felt that the “factual” data provided through the government was not very objective, while the COVID-19 vaccines were not very effective.
“When Biden’s leadership told Americans that other vaccinated people couldn’t get the virus, were they guessing or lying?” Jordan asked Flaherty at one point.
“When Biden’s leadership said the mask worked, was it incorrect information or misinformation?He continued, and also asked similar questions about the White House’s rejection of herbal immunity and the lab leak hypothesis.
Flaherty’s general reaction can be summed up in his response to one of the questions: he and his colleagues in the White House were “communicating to me the most productive medical studies that could be done at the time on behalf of an organization of some of the most important productive scholars. ” Doctors of the World”, as if answering all questions and justifying all actions.
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This seemed to be the position of the Biden administration’s defenders. The White House had the most productive experts. Sometimes, they may have been wrong. But working with social media corporations to make sure other people had the best access to the ideas the White House gave the go-ahead, even if those ideas were wrong, was preferable to a relaxed discussion. and wild market of concepts.
However, while the executive branch claims the right to this market, it is reducing the main elements of the First Amendment to mere polite fictions. Thus, it legitimizes some of the worst mistakes of the COVID-19 crisis and activates our country to repeat them while continuing its flirtation with totalitarianism.
Daniel Nuccio is a Ph. D. candidate in biology and a collaborator with Fix College and the Brownstone Institute.