A prominent doctor and leading critic of COVID lockdowns addressed the major ramifications of Murthy v. Missouri and discussed the ideal outcome for free speech and the American people.
ReasonTV interviewed with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized lockdowns as a means of protecting public health. Bhattacharya discussed the Supreme Court case Murthy v. Missouri, emphasizing the importance of preventing government censorship.
The case, which partially relied on research conducted by MRC, demanded legal redress over the Biden Administration’s blatant censorship requests to social media companies. Bhattacharya indicated that he found the case compelling and asserted that the government had no prerogative to censor.
“What I really want is that [sic] the government to get out of the business of regulating speech online,” Bhattacharya expressed. “I think that free speech online is a tremendous opportunity for a huge flowering of scientific discussion, of connections that will be made that would never otherwise be made, and the government suppressing that is a really, really bad idea.”
He added, “It’s analogous I think to the Gutenberg press being invented in, you know, 1450 or something, and the governments or the churches trying to say, ‘You can’t print books, and we’re going to need to have the right to censor the books.’”
Bhattacharya pointed out that in 2021, medical professionals like himself were censored as a result of a collusion between Big Tech and the government. He suggested the relationship between the social media companies and government was more of a junior-senior dynamic rather than an equal partnership.
He cited congressionally subpoenaed emails between Facebook staffers, indicating that the Biden White House was in charge and leveraged its powers to coerce social media companies into complying with censorship.
“The House did its own investigation of the Facebook Files, and what they found was that Facebook will have these internal discussions where they’d say, ‘Well, if we don’t cooperate, we’re not going to be able to get some of these legislative priorities that we really need to survive as a company,’” Bhattacharya said. “So, for instance, the EU has these privacy laws that essentially would put Facebook out of existence in the EU, and the threat was the Biden administration won’t represent American companies in trade negotiations with the EU if they don’t comply with the censorship orders.”
Bhattacharya also said that had attended oral arguments for the case and was particularly dismayed by the arguments put forth by the government plaintiffs, who argued that the government should censor to protect people from harm. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson furthered this logic by bringing up the hypothetical example of a viral trend encouraging kids to jump out of windows and expressed that government censorship of said content would be desirable.
“The whole analogy that this hypothetical draws is based on the premise that the government automatically knows what’s good and bad for people,” Bhattacharya said. “Like here you have an example that’s such [sic] obviously bad for kids. Kids should not jump out of windows.”
But Bhattacharya argued that in the real world, harmful and benign become a lot harder to discern and cited COVID policies as a case and proof.
“Well, I mean, what actually happened during the pandemic was that the government suppressed speech that would have criticized government policy that in effect told kids metaphorically to jump out of windows, right? They closed schools, harming kids at scale. They recommended that kids, even kids as young as six months old, take a vaccine that they probably didn’t need.”
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