President-elect Donald Trump has announced his nominees for the most visible positions at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Each is a staunch free-speech advocate, except for one, his pick for Surgeon General.
Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance and nearly every person chosen to lead HHS have experienced censorship themselves and become outspoken champions for free speech. This includes Trump’s HHS Secretary pick Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s choice for the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and the president’s pick to lead the FDA Dr. Marty Makary. Trump’s selection for the Deputy Secretary for HHS Jim O’Neil, has also been highly critical of censorship.
As MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider has described it, “Never before in recent memory has there been a more pro-free speech administration.”
But Nesheiwat has publicly called for social media companies to censor so-called vaccine “misinformation” even before the COVID-19 pandemic. So many are asking why Trump tapped her to be his Surgeon General.
Trump has said unequivocally that he will end government censorship efforts once in office. In a video describing his free speech policy plan, Trump said he would “begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship, directly or indirectly.”
Vance has made similarly strong statements calling free speech a “sacred right” and censorship a “threat to our democracy,” at the vice presidential debate in October.
Kennedy staunchly condemned censorship at the Libertarian National Convention when he said that in America “We greet censorship with outrage. We greet it with indignation. We greet it with contempt. We furiously reject it.” O’Neil, who Nesheiwat would directly report to, has echoed these statements in his X posts, calling censorship “the biggest threat to democracy” and calling for Americans to “reject censorship,”
In contrast, Nesheiwat openly supported the censorship of health discussions on social media. In March of 2019 she weighed in on a controversy about the spread of so-called vaccine misinformation during a segment of Fox News’s Mornings With Maria. At the time she enthusiastically praised Facebook for censoring discussion about health and safety risks of vaccines.
“I am so excited and I thank and I applaud Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg for taking action because this affects everyone,” Nesheiwat said. She went on, later referring to a then-recent measles outbreak. “That’s no joke. Measles can cause brain inflammation and pneumonia, and ear infections and hearing loss and death. So it's about time that [Facebook is] taking action and I hope and pray other social media platforms will follow suit and do the same thing.” [Emphasis added.]
During her Senate confirmation hearing, Nesheiwat must explain whether her views on censorship have evolved over the last six years or whether she will be a dutiful soldier and embrace the anti-censorship policy mandates of her superiors and department peers.
It will have to be one or the other if she truly wants to be the Surgeon General. And free speech-loving Americans will want to know: which is it?
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
