from the censorial-free-speech dept
Over at MSNBC, I have a new piece debunking the false claims from many that Donald Trump’s pick to run the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, is somehow taking over the government agency that he believes coordinated “censorship” of his views on social media. Bhattacharya and his supporters have been making that claim for years, but the evidence is not there.
The irony is that Bhattacharya, who has long portrayed himself as a victim of censorship, now appears poised to use his new position to censor and punish those he disagrees with, all while cynically using the language of “free speech” to justify punishing those whose speech he disagrees with.
As I note in the piece, folks like Bari Weiss at the Free Press have been pushing this lie for a while and then celebrated Bhattacharya’s nomination as a vindication. Except that it’s all bullshit:
The Supreme Court decision, by a Justice appointed by Trump, makes it clear that Bhattacharya’s claims of government censorship are baseless. Despite this, he and his supporters continue to push this false narrative.
There’s a lot more, but I wanted to highlight a couple of related things that didn’t make it into the piece.
First, I went back and reread the Great Barrington Declaration, and beyond the overly pompous title, it struck me as not as bad as the narrative about it had described. As I wrote in my MSNBC piece, in the early months of the pandemic everyone was working off of imperfect information and trying to do their best. That included public health officials like Anthony Fauci as well as tech companies handling moderation decisions. And also Bhattacharya and his co-authors.
The main difference, though, is that I think the others would now admit that, in hindsight, while they did the best they could with the information they had at the time, in retrospect, their ideas were not entirely correct. Bhattacharya, though, seems 100% convinced that (1) the Great Barrington Declaration was exactly right on, and (2) that the government censored him.
As I detail in my piece, neither claim appears to be fully supported by the evidence, and his playing the censored victim act is silly.
It’s made even worse, of course, because now he’s made it clear that in his role as head of NIH, he intends to push censorial policies to silence researchers who disagree with him. Specifically, he’s talking about denying important NIH research funding to schools he judges to be too woke.
So basically, if you support his general views about “campus culture,” he’ll continue to fund your totally unrelated research. That plan is way more censorial than anything that happened to him (again, nothing really happened to him).
If enacted, Bhattacharya’s plan would be a gross abuse of power that would have a chilling effect on scientific discourse. Researchers would be under pressure to conform to his preferred political views or risk losing vital funding. This is the exact opposite of the open inquiry and debate that science depends on.
This is a dangerous plan that threatens to politicize scientific research and undermine the credibility of the NIH. It’s also deeply hypocritical coming from someone who has built his brand on being a martyr for free speech. Apparently, in Bhattacharya’s world, free speech means the freedom to agree with him about how everyone should have responded to his speech.
Something I discovered after the MSNBC piece had been published is that a big part of Bhattacharya’s complaints about Facebook actually were that it was briefly taken down (and then restored!) not because of complaints from the government, but rather from angry anti-vaxxers who brigaded Facebook. That’s according to Lucio Eastman, who created the web page for the Great Barrington Declaration and paid for its hosting:
Seems kind of important, no?
In the end, Bhattacharya’s nomination and stated plans represent a troubling trend of officials using claims of “free speech” to justify actual censorship and punishment of dissenting views.
This is yet another example of the rank hypocrisy we’ve seen from many Trump appointees, who disingenuously invoke free speech principles while actively working to suppress views they dislike. Bhattacharya’s case is particularly egregious given his own false victimhood narrative. He’s the boy who cried censorship wolf, and is now eager to actually devour some dissenting sheep.
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