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Sunday, May 26, 2024

Suspended as Biden Special Envoy, now teaching at the Ivies

Imagine this headline: Alec Baldwin, on trial for involuntary manslaughter during film shoot, teaching seminar on Hollywood gun safety.

Ludicrous, right?

The real-life story of Rob Malley — Biden’s ex-Special Envoy to Iran and a lead negotiator in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal — is equally perplexing.

When news spread last weekend of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash, social media exploded with sarcastic sympathy posts to Malley for his long-suspected Tehran ties.

But behind every joke lies a measure of truth.

Last June, Malley (one of Biden’s first appointees) was suspended from the State Department for allegedly transferring classified material to his personal email, where — according to insiders and Republican lawmakers — it was likely intercepted by a “hostile cyber actor,” possibly the Islamic Republic of Iran given Malley’s history with the regime.

Since then, details surrounding Malley’s suspension and subsequent FBI investigation have remained murky.

Answers trickled in from, of all places, Iran’s state-run Tehran Times. Last July, the paper managed to obtain a sensitive government memorandum from April 2023 in which Erin Smart, director of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Office, told Malley that his mishandling of classified information made him a national security risk. Two months later, he was suspended from the State Department.

So, what do public figures do when embroiled in an ongoing investigation for possible national security violations? In Malley’s case, teach — what else? — national security and Middle Eastern foreign policy at the Ivy Leagues.

When Yale and Princeton hired Malley last August, Yale vaguely noted that he was “on leave from the US State Department.”

True, Malley hasn’t been found guilty of a crime and innocent people are often investigated by the FBI, so why can’t he teach? He certainly has the pedigree having served in the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations.

Because despite those hefty bona fides, Malley is a national security risk and a less-than-ideal instructor on the very subjects under which he’s being investigated. At least until his name clears.

Even then, Malley remains an improbable academic — with more worrisome baggage than just his Washington troubles.

First there’s International Crisis Group (ICG), the conflict-resolution NGO Malley helmed before becoming Biden’s Iran envoy. Based in Brussels — but with deep ties to Washington and other Western capitals — ICG entered into a formal research agreement for “scientific and academic interactions” with Iran’s Foreign Ministry in 2016 during a pause in Malley’s leadership. This connection between the ICG and Iran was not publicly disclosed, according to Semafor, before Malley was appointed special envoy — the question is why? No one’s entirely sure because the exact contours of the ICG-Tehran agreement have yet to be revealed.

Meanwhile, last September, Semafor and leading anti-regime outlet Iran International connected Malley’s aides to the “Iran Experts Initiative (IEI),” an informal information platform launched by Iran’s foreign ministry in 2014 to influence US foreign policy in favor of Tehran.

(In an email to The Post, an ICG spokesperson described these allegations as “misleading media characterizations;” ICG’s chief of advocacy has also described the IEI’s work as an independent and “informal platform backed by” Western governments).

Among the Western analysts involved in the IEI was Malley protégé Ali Vaez, whom Malley recruited in 2012 as Iran project director at the ICG, where he remains today. Vaez regularly appears on Western news programs opining on Iran’s nuclear future. Yet there is no indication that he’s revealed his involvement in the Tehran-run IEI and their efforts to manipulate US foreign policy.

In fact, in 2014 — while working under Malley — Vaez emailed then-Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif to reaffirm his fealty to the Islamic Republic. “As an Iranian, based on my national and patriotic duty, I have not hesitated to help you in any way,” Vaez wrote.

Is it any wonder Vaez’s security clearance was later denied when Malley tried to recruit him into the State Department following Biden’s arrival to the Oval Office? Neither Malley nor Vaez responded to multiple requests for comment; it’s unclear whether Vaez’s security clearance was ever approved.

The madness doesn’t end there.

Following the Oct. 7 massacre and subsequent war in Gaza, Malley has been teaching a Yale course called “Contending with Israel-Palestine.”

Yet Malley’s background suggests he’s anything but the impartial academic such coursework demands. While serving as an informal Middle East advisor for then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008, Malley held direct meetings with Hamas — a diplomatic no-no.

Malley says he never hid the Hamas encounters, but according to Politico, he was forced to sever ties with the Obama administration after this news became public. (Curiously, Malley was later brought on by the Obama in 2015 to help with their ISIS strategy.)

Then there’s his father, Simon Malley — a Syrian-Egyptian journalist with equally concerning connections to Israel-Palestine. The elder Malley was a dear comrade to Yasser Arafat, according to his son. “My father felt close to Arafat,” the younger Malley told a crowd at Oxford University in 2008.

Some national security insiders even allege that Arafat was the younger Malley’s unofficial godfather.

Today, Malley is back on campus tasked with delivering a balanced perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while his ties to Tehran, the chief patron of Hamas and Hezbollah, are probed. Huh?

No matter how the federal investigations into Malley ends, the entire process has been woefully opaque. For now, at least, Malley remains suspended from diplomatic duties in Washington. So why then is he teaching diplomacy to America’s future leaders?

Jonathan Harounoff is the author of the forthcoming book “Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomenLifeFreedom Revolt.”

https://nypost.com/2024/05/26/opinion/suspended-as-biden-special-envoy-now-teaching-at-the-ivies/

US May Lift Ban on Some Weapons Sales to Saudi Arabia

Biden banned sales of offensive weapons early in presidency
US, Saudi Arabia in talks over pact to normalize Israeli ties

The US may do away with a ban on the sale of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia within weeks in a further sign of improving relations between the countries, according to the Financial Times.

Saudi Arabia, a top buyer of US weapons, is expected to see the veto lifted in coming weeks, the newspaper reported, citing US officials it didn’t identify.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-26/us-may-lift-ban-on-some-weapons-sales-to-saudi-arabia-ft-says

'Water systems warn of major rate hikes to filter out toxic ‘forever chemicals’'

In exchange for cleaner water, Americans around the nation may soon have to pay hefty prices.

Water systems are starting to warn residents of massive rate hikes as they prepare to install technology to filter out toxic chemicals in a family known as PFAS.

Utilities from South Florida to upstate New York have warned customers that they could see significant price increases after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandated that they remove the substances, which have been linked to a number of cancers and other diseases, from their systems.

Last month, the EPA said it will require utilities whose water systems contain high levels of six types of PFAS to remove them from the water.

PFAS, which stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a group of thousands of chemicals that have been used to make a variety of nonstick and waterproof products and firefighting foam.

The substances have also become ubiquitous in the environment, due in part to the fact that they tend to persist for a long time instead of breaking down.

Exposure to these so-called forever chemicals has been linked to increased risks of prostate, kidney and testicular cancers, weakened immune systems, high cholesterol, and developmental issues in children.

Now, for the first time, utilities around the nation will be required to get them out of their drinking water to prevent customers’ exposure. But that will come at a price.

Last month, officials with Broward County, a populous South Florida locale, warned residents that those on county water could see “double or triple water rates for users.”

Alan Garcia, director of Broward County Water and Wastewater Services, told The Hill an average monthly bill for water is currently around $26. He agreed that amount could “potentially triple” as the county filters out PFAS — though he said it’s not clear whether rates will actually increase by that much.

His utility has 66,000 accounts — representing an estimated 230,000 people.

Fort Worth, Texas, officials also warned of consequences for ratepayers ahead of the EPA setting the rule last month.

“It’s going to be expensive, and it’s going to impact our ratepayers, and we’re going to be doing everything we possibly can to get some federal support in terms of the funding, but we’re going to have to move forward,” Fort Worth Water Director Chris Harder told Fort Worth Report.

In the wake of the rule, water suppliers in the Buffalo, N.Y., area also said PFAS filtration could affect rates, according to The Buffalo News.

And high water bills will not be contained to these few communities in the years ahead.

“A lot of systems are going to be faced with having to increase rates” as a result of the rule, said Chris Moody, regulatory technical manager at the American Water Works Association, a lobby group representing water providers.

It’s not entirely clear yet which water systems will need to filter out PFAS. The rule gives utilities a few years to test their water to determine if their levels of the chemicals fall above federal thresholds. If they do, utilities will then have to install technology to get rid of them.

That means the locales that have informed their consumers of rate increases may only be the first of many. The EPA, in its rule, estimated that about 6 percent to 10 percent of water systems will ultimately be found to contain PFAS at levels requiring action.

Moody said he believes this is an undercount and that more of the nation’s water systems could be contaminated.

He added that much of the expense will come from the cost of installing and maintaining filters capable of eliminating the toxic substances.

Water providers recently settled a major class action lawsuit against manufacturers of PFAS, and chemical giants could have to collectively pay billions of dollars to offset treatment costs.

But, Moody said, the settlements are not expected to be enough to defray the expense.

“If you do get money through it, it’ll likely only help you with maybe a third or a fourth of the costs,” he said.

The added costs do come with the notable benefit of lowering communities’ exposure to the harmful substances: Garcia described PFAS treatment as “probably something important to do.”

But, he said, “we’re sort of paying the price” of companies’ PFAS use.

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4685181-pfas-forever-chemicals-water-systems-rate-hikes-filtration-epa-rule/

New US $275M Munitions Package Only Prolongs Ukraine's Agony, Russia Says

On Friday the Biden administration revealed a new $275 million aid package for Ukraine, to address its "urgent battlefield needs" - and which is said to include a large infusion of desperately needed artillery shells.

US sources have estimated that Russian artillery outpaces Ukraine's at ten to one. The new package comes as Ukraine forces are being driven back in Kharkiv oblast, leading to new desperation on the part of the West. However, Russia has said that the continued flow of new weapons and munitions to Kiev will only prolong the suffering of Ukrainians and the Zelensky government.

Russia’s ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov in fresh remarks has said "It is emblematic" as "the US announces this supply of deadly products from the local defense industry on the very same day when the Russian leadership clearly and unequivocally confirmed its readiness for negotiations."

We detailed earlier that President Putin is newly signaling that he's ready for negotiations if it means 'freezing' current lines, which "must reflect realities on the ground" - according to his Friday words.

Reuters whas written that "Three of the sources, familiar with discussions in Putin's entourage, said the veteran Russian leader had expressed frustration to a small group of advisers about what he views as Western-backed attempts to stymie negotiations and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's decision to rule out talks."

Any scenario which sees current lines frozen would mean Ukraine would have to cede substantial chunks of four Ukrainian regions. And in Kharkiv, for example, where a new Russian offensive is taking place, the border has been moved deeper into Ukrainian territory over the last weeks.

Putin also commented on the fact that the presidential election which was scheduled to be held in Ukraine this month was canceled under martial law. Zelensky will continue as president for as long as the war persists. Putin has as a result decried him as illegitimate.

"But with whom to negotiate? That’s a peculiar question, I agree," Putin told a press briefing, emphasizing that "the legitimacy of the incumbent head of the [Ukrainian] state has expired."

Meanwhile, the US government has not been secret about stating its ultimate long term goal...

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/new-us-275m-munitions-package-only-prolongs-ukraines-suffering-russia-says

Saturday, May 25, 2024

Who Gets To Say What The Rules ARe

Who gets to make the rules in American government? One of the most controversial and important cases before the Supreme Court concerns that crucial question.

Congress makes the rules for the federal government in the form of laws. But federal agencies must enforce the law and often must make rules of their own – regulations – to do so. And courts then sometimes must resolve disputes about whether an agency’s regulations are well-grounded in the statutes that Congress produces.

About 40 years ago, the Supreme Court tried to make things less confusing by setting some ground rules about who gets to make the rules. The Supreme Court decided to create a rule about rules: It said that if an agency’s rule produced a reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute passed by Congress, then courts should defer to the agency. In other words: If an agency’s rule is challenged in court, then a court decides whether the agency’s rule makes for a reasonable interpretation of the statute. If the court decides that the agency’s rule is reasonable, then the agency’s rule – even when challenged in court – always wins.

Perhaps the architects of the Chevron principle thought this was a good way to reduce conflict between various parts of the government. Unfortunately, that solution created a new problem: an avalanche of new federal rulemaking that is increasingly difficult for citizens to challenge in court

Critics of the Chevron principle – including several justices currently sitting on the Supreme Court – have noted that it appears to have a strange and disturbing consequence: Namely, in some circumstances it is agencies, not courts, that have the final word when interpreting the law.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court heard the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo case, a lawsuit that unavoidably put the Chevron principle in the spotlight. The Loper Bright parties challenged a rule that requires professional fishermen to pay the salaries of government observers who are required to tag along aboard commercial fishing boats. It is not hard to see why the lawsuit was brought: Imagine if, one day, some federal bureaucrat told you that, from now on, not only is there going to be a new person at your workplace who will monitor you to ensure that you’re doing your job correctly, but you’re also going to have to pay his salary! (CEI submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in this case.)

There is no statute that expressly requires fishermen to pay for their own federal monitors. Nonetheless, the agency’s regulation (that is supposed to be based on the statute) requires this payment. Whatever is going on here, it looks like the agency isn’t interpreting anything; instead, it looks like the agency is serving as an additional legislature. In short, this case is about two questions: first, whether the regulation genuinely springs from the statute and, second, whether Chevron prevents the court from looking at the first question.

Those who observed the oral argument for Loper Bright a few months ago have good reason to believe that Chevron is in the court’s crosshairs. At the argument, Justice Brett Kavanaugh observed that Chevron “ushers in shocks to the system every four or eight years when a new administration comes in,” bringing “massive change” to regulations regularly. That’s because there are plenty of agencies that take their cues from whoever is president and implement policies that they believe the boss will like.

Justice Neil Gorsuch then noted that Chevron also allows agencies to inject institutional self-interest into their own regulations. For instance, when agencies must deal with veterans’ benefits or Social Security claimants, Chevron encourages agencies to make rules that benefit those agencies but operate to the detriment of “the little guy” – because there is a danger that the agency will interpret the statute in a way that makes it as easy as possible to administer.

At the end of the oral argument, one of the lawyers before the court suggested that the Chevron rule could not be limited or modified; rather, he said, the court should “recognize that the fundamental problem is Chevron itself.” It’s a good bet that in the coming weeks the majority of justices will agree – and decide that it’s time once again to let the courts exercise their traditional function of interpreting the law.

Dan Greenberg is general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington, D.C.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/05/25/who_gets_to_say_what_the_rules_are_151004.html

The joyful, relentless resilience of media renegade Nellie Bowles

BySalena Zito

It took 30 minutes and five seconds to read the introduction of Morning After the Revolution, written by former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles.

It took exactly the same amount of time to listen to the audiobook, which I did because I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss a word Bowles wrote. The mother of one, with the second on the way, narrates it herself in a soothing voice that never betrays an emotion, which makes the words all that more important.

In that very short period of time, my reaction is best described by quoting the late great Selma Diamond in her role as a bailiff on the ’90s sitcom Night Court when Bull asks her after hearing a wild-eyed story play out in court, “Well, that was quite a story. What did you think?”

Diamond’s deadpan, “I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me,” is exactly what I felt just in the introduction. Days later, after doing a combination of both reading and listening to Morning After, my sentiment remained the same.

As the book progressed, I heard and saw a lot of things in our country that often didn’t make sense to many of us. From the takeover of cities by activists to the unquestioned origins of COVID to the normalization of men competing as women in women’s sports, we all sat back and watched once vaunted pillars of journalism in our country, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, and CBS repeatedly telling us there was nothing to see there.

They also told us that if you question any of these narratives, you are racist, transphobic, or a conspiracy theorist.

Or all three.

Bowles writes she was in the thick of it until she wasn’t, even candidly admitting she was part of canceling someone and enjoyed the superiority of it. But Bowles did not leave it because she had an awakening as a right-wing-whatever-negative-name you want to put on it — deplorable, MAGA extremist, bible and gun clinger are favorite pejoratives — but because as a journalist, she was curious.

Once she let that curiosity become known, her liberal media peers slowly ostracized her.

Throughout the book, Bowles weaves a firsthand account, taking readers from her aspiration to work at the New York Times as a young journalist to today. Her dispassionate delivery is pitch-perfect, with zero trace of vengeance or bitterness. It is also wildly funny and sad in a way that makes you mourn for what we lost in the past few years, both in our lives and from institutions we once trusted, but it allows us to bask in the freedom it took her and her spouse Bari Weiss, also a former New York Times journalist, to begin their own publication, the Free Press, in 2021.

Bowles is a nimble writer bursting with curiosity, and her storytelling is that of an old soul, rich in detail and delivery. Meanwhile, the Free Press has flourished wildly beyond both of their expectations.

After reading the book I went to see the reviews from the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post. My first reaction to their reviews was they were clearly given a different book than I was.

They weren’t. They are angry because she betrayed her liberal professional caste. The reviews were scathing. Nonetheless, her book made the New York Times bestseller list on Wednesday.

PITTSBURGH — Former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles chronicles the American progressive movement from within, and her subsequent ouster for questioning it. (Salena Zito/Washington Examiner)

In an interview with me (lightly edited for length), Bowles discussed her ability to find humor in the absurd, and the importance of grace.

Washington Examiner: What stood out to me was your relentless curiosity even when it became clear it was issues your bosses did not want you to be curious about.

Bowles: Curiosity is the core of everything when you’re a writer. It’s the core thing that you want to nurture in yourself. And, for me, it’s maybe the most valuable thing. The hard part about growing up is you start to sometimes become less curious or you start to see things over and over and things don’t seem as fresh, and the challenge is always to hold on to your curiosity.

Curiosity is what got me in trouble with the whole movement. And also, now when I’m thinking about the book, the chapter I keep thinking about is describing canceling a friend and being honest about my role in that and writing about that.

I think part of my curiosity was, first of all, writing about the progressive movement of the last five years and writing about the protests and all of that, but also being curious about myself. … Yeah, curiosity is the be-all and end-all if you’re a journalist. And as soon as you start blunting it, your writing suffers and your reporting suffers.

Washington Examiner: I don’t think acts of courage are all Joan of Arc moments. I think acts of courage are often subtle. They’re done without making a statement that you are brave because you did this. Can you talk about where that part of you came from in writing this book and in general your decision to be noncompliant with the [progressive] movement?

Bowles: There were a lot of the things that are asked of me for a long time and I want to please people for a long time. I want to stay in the good of the movement for a long time, and I manage it for a while, but eventually the movement becomes too demanding for me to accommodate and it wants too much. First, it was blunting my reporting. It was saying you can’t report on the most interesting stories of the day, which was really frustrating and crazy-making a little bit because it was like, “What do you mean we’re not supposed to cover the riots? What do you mean we’re not supposed to talk about” … you name it, hot-button issue of the day. And basically there was a media blackout for a while.

I call it now time wandering, which is all of the most interesting issues. You’re allowed to talk about it in the world of all the Substacks, the conservative media covers it, and the liberal media waits about two or three years and then they’re allowed to touch it.

So COVID origins or medical treatments for gender dysphoric kids or any of the most interesting of the day. Anyways, part of me was being frustrated in that regard, but it was really just that I couldn’t go along. At no point did I do a courageous act. It was just that I stopped being able to go along with the movement’s demands as they got too much.

So another example, when I started dating Bar [Bari Weiss], and don’t write about this in the book, but a friend of mine from college reached out and said, “You can stay in the good of the movement and you can remain friends with me, but you need to publicly disavow Bar.”

I remember just being like, “What?”

And she said, “You need to make clear where you stand apart and how you’re not going along with her and you need to do it in public.” And I was like, “First of all, I’m not even doing it in private or in public.”

Just the idea that I was supposed to do some sort of public repentance for being slightly off message in my writing or being with someone who this bizarre new movement decided was on the bad was so crazy to me.

So I didn’t do it.

When the movement really decided it was done with me and I decided I was done with it, was when we were supposed to all tweet the tweet denouncing the Tom Cotton op-ed.

We were all supposed to tweet, “This puts my black colleagues in danger,” and I just couldn’t tweet it.

I knew Adam Rubenstein, I liked him. I knew James Bennet, I liked him, and I just didn’t believe that that op-ed calling for the National Guard put people in danger. I just didn’t. And it was like, “I’m not tweeting it.”

A bunch of friends and colleagues wrote to me and said, “You have to write this message and if you don’t write this message, I don’t know how to describe what that says about you, but it says really bad things about you.”

And it was just the pressures of the movement got very demanding. So at no point was I like, “I’m going to be a brave truth-teller and step out.” It was just like, “Stop asking me to do stuff that seems like bulls***.”

Washington Examiner: Your first chapter was funny, sad, and in many was a dispassionate chronicle of everything we have all gone through coming from someone in the thick of it. You could have been angry, but then that would have been a different book. How weren’t you?

Bowles: It felt really cathartic. It felt very good to write it. An earlier draft was much angrier. I started writing this book basically as I started reporting it, which was when I left the Times. And at first I was mad and I felt like something had been taken from me that I deserve. Like I had earned this spot in prestige media and how could it have turned on me? I didn’t do anything wrong. I was so indignant.

And then I rewrote it a year or two later because I started to see it as also funny. I started to see it also as sort of petty and small and this world that felt like it was the be-all and end-all, I started to realize it wasn’t the be-all and end-all. So then I could have a little more distance from it, but it felt very cathartic to write it.

And I didn’t want to name names and things because that felt nasty and it felt unnecessary, and I didn’t want to drag random nonpublic figure editors into the public eye and be like, “Look at this guy. He’s a real jerk,” because all of these people just represented the movement. There’s a dozen of each of them. You know what I mean?

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/3015952/joyful-relentless-resilience-of-media-renegade-nellie-bowles/

Free speech is in dire shape

The following are the prepared remarks of Jay Bhattacharya upon receiving the 2024 Bradley Prize, an award to “honor scholars and practitioners whose accomplishments reflect The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation’s mission to restore, strengthen, and protect the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism.”

Thank you! I am so grateful to be honored by the Bradley Foundation today. I am especially thankful
because, in my view, this award is not just to honor me but to acknowledge so many brilliant scientists,
politicians, public servants, teachers, lawyers, firefighters, small business owners, CEOs, and people
from every walk of life who risked their jobs, their reputations, or their family bliss to oppose COVID-19
tyranny. I dedicate this award to each of them.

It’s not hard to see that our pandemic response failed. Official counts attribute more than a million
deaths to COVID in the United States and almost seven million worldwide. By early 2022, about 95% of
Americans had contracted COVID despite the harsh countermeasures in most states, including
confinement of broad populations, business closures, cessation of religious and other gatherings,
school closures, and widespread violation of fundamental civil liberties. Very clearly, these measures
failed to protect Americans from COVID.

Many powerful scientific bureaucrats justified these policies with the idea that all scientists agreed that
the lockdowns would work to suppress or even eliminate the virus. This was known false by spring 2020. For instance, the Swedish experiment with keeping schools open in spring 2020 was a
tremendous success. Lockdowns are inherently leaky because human societies, human health, and
human well-being require physical proximity. It is unhealthy to treat our fellow human beings primarily
as biohazards.

Unfortunately, the pandemic response itself has wrought tremendous collateral harm. There is now
broad agreement that the school closures have set kids — especially poor and minority kids — behind in ways that will lead them to worse outcomes as adults, including shorter, poorer lives. I could go on at length, but suffice it to say that nearly every poor person on the planet was harmed physically and
materially by the economic dislocations caused by the lockdowns. I am dedicating all the prize money
to the U.K. charity Collateral Global, which is dedicated to documenting the collateral damage from
lockdowns and informing government reviews on the topic.

Maybe the most perplexing sin of the public health establishment was that it abandoned an essential
commitment to science. The key to understanding this is that during the COVID era, governments
worldwide — including, I’m sorry to say, in the U.S. — violated the free speech rights of citizens and
scientists to create an illusion of consensus in favor of lockdowns.

Science works when scientists can freely discuss ideas and correct each other. This is especially
important for science at the frontier of knowledge (like when a new viral disease is floating around).
Instead, scientists who harbored dissident thoughts during the COVID consensus faced tremendous
pressure to stay silent.

In October 2020, Martin Kulldorff invited me and Prof. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University to a small
conference in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. We wrote a short one-page document called the Great
Barrington Declaration advocating for focused protection of vulnerable older people from COVID, lifting
lockdowns, and opening schools to avoid the harms of lockdowns on less vulnerable populations. You
know — the old pandemic plan.

We had two aims. One, to shatter the illusion that there was a scientific consensus in favor of
lockdowns when we knew for certain that there was not. And two, to start a conversation among
public health professionals about how to protect older people from COVID better.

The GBD went viral. Tens of thousands of doctors, epidemiologists, and scientists endorsed it and

nearly a million people signed it. But only four days after we wrote it, then NIH director Francis Collins
wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling me, Martin, and Sunetra — Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford
professors — “fringe epidemiologists” and engaged a media campaign to conduct a “devastating
takedown.” Media hit pieces flooded the airwaves alleging that we wanted to let the virus “rip” and kill
people for the crime of wanting to protect older people better and open schools.

This was an abuse of power by Collins. As the head of the NIH, his agency controls the funding and
professional standing of nearly every biomedical scientist of note in the U.S. and many worldwide.
When Collins directed his “devastating takedown” of the GBD, he sent an unmistakable signal to other
scientists and epidemiologists — fall in line with his lockdown policy or else face excommunication from
the scientific community.

I have since discovered that Collins’ devastating takedown was not an anomaly. Under the banner of
combatting “misinformation,” government health agencies used their power to collaborate with social
media companies to control the public conversation about COVID science and policy.

Public health bureaucrats operated more like dictators than scientists, sealing themselves off from
credible outside criticism and smearing scientific dissidents who contradicted public health dogma on topic after topic, including the origin of the virus, immunity after COVID recovery, the harms and
inefficacy of lockdowns, and vaccine efficacy against infection and transmission. Even the existence of
Sweden was under a cloud of doubt!

The censorship of scientific discussion permitted a policy environment where clear scientific truths
were muddled. As a result, ineffective, destructive policies persisted much longer than they would
have otherwise

In 2022, the Missouri and Louisiana AG’s offices filed suit against the Biden administration’s censorship
industrial complex. Discovery document showed the Biden administration induced social media
companies like Facebook to censor content — including true content — that criticized government
pronouncements on COVID policy, elections, and much else.

So, how do governments accomplish these feats of censorship? It is shockingly direct. Government
agencies, including the CDC, the Surgeon General’s office, and the White House itself, develop lists of
who and what to censor, sometimes laundering the task to third-party NGOs and universities in the
guise of funding “research.” Lists in hand, government officials threaten regulatory action to harm
social media companies that do not comply.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in late 2022 and made internal documents available to reporters, I
found out that Twitter 1.0 had placed me on a “blacklist” the day I joined Twitter in August 2021 for
the crime of posting a link to the GBD. Given the evidentiary record found in Missouri v. Biden, it is
nearly certain that the government requested that I be placed on Twitter’s blacklist. Federal judges
hearing the case likened the Biden censorship regime to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth and issued a
preliminary injunction to stop censoring.

As things stand, the situation regarding free speech is dire in the Western world. The Missouri v. Biden
case is currently under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court. It has the promise to limit the
government’s power to censor, but I do not know how the Supreme Court will rule. In any case, it is
not enough. The whole scientific community and the public need to understand the stakes because I do
not believe the suppression of scientific ideas and debate will die with the pandemic. Without a
concerted political program to restore free speech, the American civic religion of free speech and the
very nature of our republic may not survive.

Jay Bhattacharya is professor of health policy at Stanford University, director of the university’s Center
for Economics and Demography of Health and Aging, and research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/3016509/free-speech-is-in-dire-shape/

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