EXCLUSIVE: Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the most prominent health experts who came out against the government’s indiscriminate COVID-19 policies, minced no words when discussing rampant censorship targeting Americans.
During an interview on Friday’s installment of the MRC UnCensored podcast, Bhattacharya delivered a categorical rebuke of censorship, telling host and MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider: “It's so fundamentally un-American to censor speech.”
Bhattacharya, one of the architects of the Great Barrington Declaration, hinted that pulling back the curtain on the Censorship Industrial Complex “will lead to the death of it” and highlighted the urgent need for legislation to tackle the assault on free speech. “We need legislation, I think, to fix that. … I think there's there's work to do. But the forces of censorship in the United States are on the backheel, and we need to keep pushing really hard on it,” he said.
This response came after Schneider asked Bhattacharya about his thoughts on the global crackdown on free speech, including a Canadian law regulating speech online and Brazilian court orders threatening X’s operation in the country.
Drawing a parallel from the Cold War-era Iron Curtain, Bhattacharya warned of a global “silicon curtain” between free speech and censorship. “The basic civil right of free speech has been essentially, by design, curtailed,” he lamented, rebuking social media platforms efforts to silence its users under the guise of fighting so-called misinformation. This, Bhattacharya warned, constituted a “dystopian” plan.
Expanding on this topic, Bhattacharya described the United States as the “bulwark” against foreign-led censorship schemes. “It's very difficult for a country to impose restrictions on speech … if the United States doesn't cooperate,” he said. “I mean, imagine if we had, an American president that actually spoke in that way, it would be very difficult for all these countries to like to act in the way that they have.”
Bhattacharya can confidently speak on censorship as he and his ideas were targeted by social media platforms. According to MRC’s CensorTrack database, Bhattacharya was shadowed-banned by Twitter (now called X). Similarly, Facebook disabled the Great Barrington Declaration’s page, which exposed the imminent dangers of pandemic-related lockdowns.
“It was pretty terrible. It was like the entire sort of Censorship Industrial Complex machine was aimed at defaming me and anyone who agreed with me on, for instance, keeping schools open,” he recalled during the podcast.
MRC UnCensored has previously hosted some of the most influential figures in the free speech movement, including Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA), Mike Benz, and journalists David Marcus, Miranda Devine and Emma Jo-Morris.
Watch Bhattacharya’s interview and others here:
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