Screaming in......VICTORY

Free Speech is safe once again!

(Note: This post is too long for some email programs. Sorry about that — you know how I get sometimes. Check the webpage to ensure you get the full story!)

---

We spend a lot of time here Screaming about the persistent threats to free speech faced by people around the globe. And since those who threaten free speech around the world have been winning an alarming number of battles, this discussion often takes a negative undertone.

Therefore, I think it’s important to celebrate when WE THE PEOPLE strike back against LITERALLY HITLER and get free speech warrior Jimmy Kimmel back on TV after an unbearable 4 days off the air.

The silencing of one of our most treasured comedians has galvanized America in defense of free speech like no other event in our lifetimes. This is the beginning of a MASSIVE free speech movement all across America! LA Times writer Stephen Battaglio explains the historic significance of this moment:

But the problem with being a latecomer to a movement is that you don’t know what you don’t know. To prove it, Jake Tapper sat down with Seth Meyers and called the Kimmel situation “the most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime.”

No, seriously, he did.

This makes Jake Tapper a generous 0 for 2 when it comes to catching the most important stories of the day as they’re actually happening, because in a hilarious coincidence, Google yesterday admitted the Biden administration demanded censorship of the legal speech of Americans using YouTube. (Something we already knew but didn’t KNOW. The only reason Rumble really exists is because of Youtube’s censorship.)

In a five-page letter you can also click to download at the end of the article, Google attorney Daniel Donovan outlined how the Biden administration leaned on them to censor by attacking “Terms of Service” violations and “misinformation” policies. (Sound familiar?) Here’s the highlight:

Knowing all that, it’s kind of weird that Tapper didn’t mention the massive coordinated censorship of Americans during covid. However, Jake Tapper’s strategy of simply pretending none of that ever happened was MILES ahead of Rep. James Clyburn’s strategy of going on TV and speaking:

This statement is so ridiculous I have to re-quote it so I can properly rip it apart:

“Biden, if any of this took place, these weren’t jokes. This wasn’t a TV show. This was a pandemic. And we didn’t need to have misinformation going out about this pandemic. There was enough coming from the president at the time. What, put Clorox in your veins?”

First, the government-directed censorship absolutely happened. Facebook has admitted it. We all watched Matt Taibbi dump The Twitter Files in realtime. Now Google/YouTube is admitting it, too. Secondly, the Biden government ABSOLUTELY DID censor jokes and TV shows. (Remember Kim Iversen?)

Here’s one of the dangerous jokes in question.

Two comments, two shares, ten likes.

Additionally, the government censorship extended FAR beyond covid “misinformation.” People were banned for talking about the inherent insecurity of (then brand new to most) mail-in ballots. Hell, people were banned for simply badmouthing Biden with a completely true story!

(The explanation: Whoops. Just a mistake. These things happen, ya know?)

Of course, James Clyburn is right that there was an ASTOUNDING amount of misinformation circulating regarding the pandemic. One of the most worrisome items is the oft-repeated (even by then-President Joe Biden) claim that Trump said “put Clorox in your veins.”

What the “experts” in the CDC and related agencies did — even during the first Trump administration — was classify their own information as The Science and everything else as “misinformation.” Here’s an amazing video from Matt Orfalea showing exactly how this worked in practice:

This “with us or against us” strategy led to thousands of people being banned for pointing out basic facts that undermined the current political narrative. Many people ended up on Substack in the first place because of Twitter bans for “Team Reality” stars Alex Berenson and el gato malo. (Far fewer ended up here because of my ban.)

But all we were doing was asking basic questions. Here’s a perfect example from early in the pandemic that (as far as I know) has never been addressed. In March/April 2020, New York was the epicenter of the pandemic. The media, if not the health officials themselves, were treating New York City like it was the future for the rest of the country — we were just waiting for the virus to sweep across America and leave a hollow shell in its place.

After all, according to official NYC covid data, by April 27th the city had seen 167,386 cases of covid and there had already been 18,534 deaths. This was a crude case fatality rate of 11% — far higher than even the 3.4% being bandied about by the WHO! (Turns out shoving covid patients into nursing homes and infecting all the at-risk is a bad idea. Who knew?)

Then I read this article:

Well, wait a minute. The April 2020 population of New York City is 8.8 million people. If 24.7% of them have covid antibodies, haven’t we missed roughly 2,175,000 “cases” of covid IN NEW YORK CITY ALONE?

And those missed cases DRASTICALLY change the math. Since the hospitals are testing everybody who goes to the hospital (or dies), they’re likely to be catching the SEVERE cases of covid, but not the mild ones. With this rough estimate, New York City was missing roughly 12 cases of covid for every one they caught — roughly in line with early CDC estimates.

That puts the actual infection fatality rate — even for an area that threw covid patients into nursing homes — at about 0.8%.

And it’s not like Fauci and the other “experts” were clueless about this issue. In the very article Orf mentions in the video above, Fauci declares the REASON the IFR may be considerably less than 1% was that officials miss the asymptomatic and minimally symptomatic cases. (This was especially true back then when testing was generally limited to hospitals and severe cases.)

But since none of the “journalists” ever asked the “experts” questions like these, the “experts” never had to answer them. Therefore, even talking about the questions was spreading dangerous misinformation that could get you banned.

And this censorship REALLY took off once the vaccines were on the market. Anybody (correctly) stating that the vaccine doesn’t stop transmission — banned. (“Protecting others” was the main justification of the mandates, and the mandates were a HUGE driver in vaccine uptake.)

Anybody pointing out the immediate and obvious side effects of the vaccine — banned. Facebook banned groups full of people sharing their true vaccine injury stories. Joe Biden said social media sites were killing people by hosting the “disinformation dozen” (one of which was RFK Jr!) — and all the while we got glowing articles in Forbes about “de-platforming” the anti-science rubes.

Of course, my ban was insignificant in the long term. Alex Berenson’s, a little less so. But the censorship complex didn’t just silence the little people — it also went after ACTUAL scientists that wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, which posited that we should focus protection on the vulnerable instead of pretending everybody is at equal risk. One of those banned scientists is current head of NIH Jay Bhattacharya, who almost immediately had the actual IFR of covid-19 nailed down.

Rand Paul was banned from YouTube for saying masks don’t protect you from covid — a statement that was literally on the box. (Rand complained that in its justification, YouTube used two studies that showed cloth masks didn’t actually work.) The censorship affected people in the highest levels of government — and eventually President Trump himself!

So it’s great news that people are getting their accounts back (as if those people will ever trust YouTube again). At the same time, I have to point out this shift in attitude from Google is also politically advantageous for the company. How stunning and brave they are to stand against government censorship NOW THAT TRUMP RUNS THE GOVERNMENT. Welcome to the movement, Google!

🙄

So tonight when Jimmy’s back on the air posing as a gallant warrior for free speech, I’ll be in the back of the room laughing my ass off. It’s the funniest thing Kimmel’s said in years.

Feeling generous? Buy me a coffee on Ko-fi — no subscription required!

---

Google Letter

1.25MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download