We can answer that question, because yesterday the plaintiffs in the massive Big Tech censorship lawsuit released the deposition transcript from their interview of National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease head and COVID-19 czar Dr. Anthony Fauci which took place the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.
And it’s pretty amazing stuff.
According to the transcript, Dr. Fauci said “I don’t recall” 174 times, including when asked about emails that he sent, interviews that he gave, and other important information.
— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 5, 2022
Fauci sent a colleague an email in February of 2020 instructing her not to wear a mask when traveling. Just a couple months later, he was advocating for universal mask mandates. pic.twitter.com/ZNVVyJSFj7
— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 5, 2022
One of Fauci’s deputies joined a WHO delegation to China in February of 2020, and in talking to Fauci afterwards, was impressed with how the Chinese “were handling the isolation, the contact tracing, the building of facilities to take care of people..” pic.twitter.com/6uxlxEpFxX
— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 5, 2022
And here’s something interesting from the deposition…
Q. Do you know anyone who works for a social media platform? A. Do I know somebody who works for a social media platform. Q. Or at this time? A. Well, I’ve had communications with Mark Zuckerberg in the past who was — I’ve done, I believe, three outward FaceTime discussions encouraging people to get vaccinated. Q. Do you know anyone else who works for a social media platform other than Mark Zuckerberg? A. When you say do I know somebody who works? Q. Like, do you have acquaintances, people that you know, who work at social media platforms? A. Well, a person who used to work as a software engineer for Twitter was my daughter. Q. Oh, your daughter worked for Twitter? A. She used to, yes. Q. Did you ever — when she was working at Twitter, did you ever discuss with her the content of stuff posted on social media platforms? A. No. Q. Did you ever discuss with her the origins of the virus or concerns about the origins of the virus? A. No, she has no interest in that. Q. Was she — what was her role in Twitter? A. I believe she was a software engineer. Q. Does she still work at Twitter? A. No. Q. When did she stop? A. Over a year ago.
The reaction to these things by the Fauci fan club is that “science” changed because more information was available and therefore Fauci’s recommendations changed with that new information.
Except that doesn’t really wash, because Fauci didn’t evolve with all the new developments; just the ones which seemed to fit a “more control, more lockdowns, more inconvenience to healthy people” agenda.
“Traveling – should I wear a mask?” A friend asked Fauci this in Feb. 2020. He wrote back: “I do not recommend.” One month later, Fauci forced everyone to wear a mask, when the actual science said they did more harm than good. #hypocrisy #rulesfortheenotforme
— Attorney General Liz Murrill (@AGLizMurrill) December 6, 2022
And of course the most important bit with respect to the lawsuit that Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry filed is Fauci’s role in getting the Big Tech platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to censor people who were following differing views than Fauci with respect to the science of COVID-19. Most of those people, it turns out, had a lot better handle on the virus and how to both treat patients with it and manage the public health aspects of it than Fauci and his fellow government bureaucrats did.
During COVID-19 crisis: social engineering tactics were used against the American public – not to limit your exposure to a virus, but to limit your exposure to information that did not fit within a government sanctioned narrative. #FauciDeposition
— Attorney General Liz Murrill (@AGLizMurrill) December 5, 2022
The Schmitt-Landry lawsuit has uncovered an enormous amount of disturbing information about just how awful the collusion between the government and the Democrat ruling class and the Big Tech platforms has been. Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter documents detailing interference by that platform in the 2020 election – specifically suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story as reported by the New York Post – dovetails perfectly with this as well.
What it comes down to – and we won’t go too far into this, because you already know it – is that the ruling elite in this country who are overwhelmingly Democrat have been actively, unethically suppressing the views of people who differ with their crafted and curated narratives, and they’re using Big Tech platforms as cutouts to do it so that it can’t be considered government censorship – which is patently, bright-line illegal.
It’s somewhat murky when, for example, the Democrat National Committee demands that Twitter deplatform the actor James Woods for his conservative statements on the app. That isn’t government action, though it carries the weight of authority by implication – the DNC is a political arm of Team Biden, and at the time Team Biden was inching toward becoming the Biden administration. We’re talking about the use of political power to shut down constitutionally protected speech.
Of course, in the case of Fauci it’s a lot more obvious problem. He’s a government bureaucrat and thus barred from censoring Americans, and yet his office was involved in active suppression of things labeled as “misinformation” which turned out not to be.
That should be actionable at law. It’s potentially criminal.
Musk’s purchase of Twitter and insistence on sunlight on the back-room activities of the ruling class in corrupting the platform against free speech, together with the Big Tech censorship lawsuit, are opening the door for a full public examination of the relationship between government, politics, social media and the First Amendment. It’s a crucial discussion six or seven years overdue, and to get a good outcome from it we’re going to need a lot more people with the courage of Musk, Landry and Schmitt.
Let’s hope we find them, and quickly. If we don’t, this will merely amount to a dead cat bounce amid the decline of freedom in America.