Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. Republics and limited monarchies derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates.
—Benjamin Franklin—
Anytime you push against the grain, you are going to have people who don’t like it.
—Dr. Dan Erickson—
Key point: Even though it is a private company, You Tube has become the “public square” on which people need to stand to get their messages out. Therefore, in the name of freedom and liberty, it and other Big Tech companies must refrain from censoring messages they don’t like.
I’m presenting this post in the form of the following nine-item list.
Item One:
On or around April 22, 2020, two experienced medical professionals produced a video in connection with a local California television station—23ABC News in Bakersfield—explaining their perspective on the coronavirus crisis. In addition to making it available on its own website, the station—not the doctors themselves—uploaded the video on You Tube.
Doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, co-owners of Accelerated Urgent Care, which is headquartered in Bakersfield, California, presented facts and statistics about COVID-19 in Bakersfield, around the country, and around the world. In light of the information they presented, the doctors also shared their conclusions about the approaches governments, especially the US federal government and various state governments, have taken in response to the disease. You can watch the entire video here. Go here to listen to the audio portion of the 23ABC News report on the case the doctors made.
Item Two:
The doctors’ perspective pushes against the prevailing narrative on the coronavirus crisis. Their “pushback” includes, but is not limited to, these five categories.
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- First, speaking strictly from scientific and statistical perspectives, COVID-19 is similar to the flu. In other words, the ratio of the number of cases to the number of deaths caused by the disease largely mirrors the seasonal flu.
- Second, the secondary effects of COVID-19 and the lockdowns governments have imposed are severe and long-lasting, both on individual and relational levels. These effects include alcoholism, child molestation, spousal abuse, and suicide. We will ignore these consequences to our own peril.
- Third, the longer the lockdowns last, the more people’s immune systems will be compromised.
- Fourth, as the coronavirus pandemic has played itself out over time, we have gained much more information that will help us implement ways to address it more effectively. What we did at first was warranted; but taking the same approach now can give rise to many unnecessary negative repercussions.
- Fifth, Dr. Erickson gives his and his partner’s recommendations about how to proceed from this point. He gets very specific about the negative consequences of lockdowns, including the secondary effects of lockdowns and sheltering-in-place. Among other things, Dr. Erickson contends that the secondary effects of widespread sheltering in place are “significantly more detrimental…to society than a virus that has proven similar in nature to the seasonal flu we have every year.” Erickson also says, “We want to make sure we understand that quarantining the sick is what we do, not quarantining the healthy,” and “If you’re going to dance on someone’s constitutional rights,…you better have a really good scientific reason, and not just theory.”
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If you’re going to dance on someone’s constitutional rights,…you better have a really good scientific reason, and not just theory.
—Dr. Dan Erickson—
On this page, you can hear audio clips from the video where the doctors address each of these categories. (The total time for the clips is approximately eleven minutes.) It’s important to note that the substance of some of these points, such as items 2 and 3, are factual and beyond dispute. The degree to which these are true might be debated, but their veracity in a general sense cannot.
Other items on the list can be debated, but debates can be healthy and constructive. In fact, this is a debate that, as a country, we need to have.
Item Three:
The video went viral, garnering over five million views on You Tube.
Item Four:
Citing a violation of community guidelines, You Tube removed the video on Monday, April 27.
Here is a statement that You Tube subsequently released to 23 ABC, the station that worked with the doctors to produce the video:
We quickly remove flagged content that violate our Community Guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.
However, content that provides sufficient educational, documentary, scientific or artistic (EDSA) context is allowed — for example, news coverage of this interview with additional context. From the very beginning of the pandemic, we’ve had clear policies against COVID-19 misinformation and are committed to continue providing timely and helpful information at this critical time.
“Timely and helpful.” Think about that. But what about wrong? As you already know, many of the so-called “experts” have been wrong and proven wrong—repeatedly. They’re all over You Tube!
This is not to say that Erickson and Massihi were 100 percent right in all they said. The errors of the “experts,” however, underscore the necessity of opportunities to dissent.
Item Five:
On Tuesday, April 28, Tucker Carlson took You Tube to task for deleting the video. His main point was not to extol the video (as at least one news outlet appeared to claim). Carlson was emphasizing that You Tube’s action was egregious because it filtered out dissent and squelched debate. The Fox News host interviewed Dave Rubin after the commentary, and a video of the commentary and the interview is available here. I encourage you to watch both the commentary and the interview, but for your convenience, I’m posting here an audio clip of the commentary by itself.
Significantly, in his commentary, Carlson said this:
More informed debate is exactly what we need to make wise decisions going forward. Unfortunately for all of us, informed debate is exactly what the authorities don’t want. They want unquestioned obedience, so they’re cracking down on free expression. Last night, the doctors’ video, the one you just saw, was pulled off of You Tube, the largest video hosting site in the world. It wasn’t an accident; You Tube admitted doing it. The company cited a violation of “community guidelines,” and they did not apologize.
Looking back when all of this is finally over—and it will be—it’s likely we’ll see this moment, what You Tube just did, as a turning point in the way we live in this country, a sharp break with 250 years of law and custom. The two doctors’ video was produced by a local television channel; it was in effect a mainstream news story. The video was not pornographic. It did not violate copyright, or incite violence, or commit libel—it didn’t break any law.
You Tube and its parent company Google have now officially banned dissent.
—Tucker Carlson—
The only justification for taking it down was that the two physicians on screen had reached different conclusions from the people currently in charge. It was a form of dissent from orthodoxy. You Tube and its parent company Google have now officially banned dissent.
Item Six:
Although, as we have said, some of the points the doctors made are beyond dispute, others are debatable. The video has both its supporters and its critics. A great many members of its current and potential audiences, however, simply want to hear, share, and reflect on the side of the issue that Erickson and Massihi present; yet now they have been prevented from doing so. As Frederick Douglass noted, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.
—Frederick Douglass—
There’s more! Another reason these ideas must not be censored is that who disagree with Erickson and Massihi about the nature of COVID-19 must not be allowed to avoid addressing related issues like the devastating economic, personal, and relational consequences of lockdowns. We can’t simply ignore these realities and hope they will disappear. They won’t.
As we indicated earlier, we need a national discussion about these issues—one that centers around substance and facts. Engaging in ad hominem attacks is neither constructive nor helpful. For example, Dr. Carl Bergstrom is a biologist at the University of Washington specializing in infectious disease modeling. He has accused Erickson and Massihi of using “methods that are ludicrous to get results that are completely implausible.” Dr. Bergstrom may be able to build a case for what he contends, but consider that his speciality is “infectious disease modeling,” a field that has proven itself repeatedly wrong during this crisis. My point here is that dissenting opinions in the medical community need to be heard and responded to substantively.
Item Seven:
Is You Tube’s removal of the viral video a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech? The quandary for some is the fact that You Tube and other members of Big Tech are private companies. On that basis, in early March a judge threw out Tulsi Gabbard’s lawsuit against Google. Here are the details. After her presidential campaign had increased its spending on Google ads, a computer “suspected” the increase to be spam and suspended the campaign for a six-hour period. The suspension obviously hurt Gabbard’s political efforts at a time when her campaign was endeavoring to increase her Internet presence. In a BreakPoint commentary, John Stonestreet noted that Google controls so much that “it’s Google’s world and we’re just living in it. Do we really want this amount of sheer power unregulated? [Yet o]n the other hand, of course we don’t want the government coercing private companies into acting a certain way.”
Gabbard’s case wasn’t the first such ruling, either. Prager University earlier had sued You Tube, which is part of Google, over censorship of its videos. The case was dismissed 2018, but in 2019, it filed a new lawsuit. In this PragerU video, attorney Eric George explains the importance of the non-profit’s legal action. This video is available at the PragerU website here, and the transcript for it is available here. It was released on August 19, 2019.
Despite the censorship that PragerU received—the same kind of censorship we saw a few days ago when You Tube removed the Erickson/Massihi video—PragerU has lost in court repeatedly (go here and here). PragerU’s Marissa Streit said of PragerU’s most recent loss, “As we feared, the Ninth circuit got this one wrong, and the important issue of online censorship did not get a fair shake in court. Sadly, it appears as if even the Ninth Circuit is afraid of Goliath — Google. We’re not done fighting for free speech and we will keep pushing forward.” One writer at The Federalist, Ramsey Ramerman, has offered an alternative strategy for PragerU. Regardless of the approach it takes, PragerU and other censored individuals and groups must keep fighting.
Item Eight:
It’s quite clear that You Tube and Google are not alone in their censorship practices among Big Tech companies. Amazon is engaged in censorship practices as well. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins declared, “If Amazon wants to sell books, maybe it ought to stop banning them!” The online bookseller had caved to the militant homosexual lobby’s demand that it stop selling books that help people overcome unwanted same-sex attraction and homosexuality. Of course, the demand wasn’t framed that way; instead, activists made it all about so-called “conversion therapy,” which is misleading at best. As we said in part 2 of our series on Amazon’s censorship,
It’s true Amazon is a private company, but it and a few other players in Big Tech, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, have effectively become the “public square” from which people present and receive information.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter have shown that they are willing to filter and even censor ideas they don’t like (also go here, here, and here). Not coincidentally, these 
ideas almost always are conservative and/or politically incorrect. Amazon now is getting in on this act in a big way, and the actions of all these companies threaten the very liberty that fueled their own growth.
This is the way of tyrants, and if these tyrants are not stopped, American liberty will be crushed. [Hear] Benjamin Franklin on this point. “[T]here can be no such thing as…public liberty without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another; and this is the only check it ought to suffer and the only bounds it ought to know. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech….”
Item Nine:
Without question, You Tube’s wins in court over PragerU and others have and will embolden it and other Big Tech companies to continue their censorship unabated. A video report at Yahoo! news dated December 2, 2019 declares, “YouTube removes 300 ads for Trump’s reelection campaign.” Folks, this really is tyranny!
We must keep fighting back—for the sake of liberty and the America our Founders established.
Soon, we’ll explore some specific things, however small, that you and I might be able to do to push back.
Stay tuned!
Copyright © 2020 by B. Nathaniel Sullivan. All rights reserved.
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