Joy Pullman over at The Federalist has written an excellent piece on recent developments in our free speech case and another related case, describing what these reveal about government censorship. The article opens:

Government pressure on national communications monopolies to mute Americans’ critiques of government began in Barack Obama’s presidency and continues today, say court documents filed Dec. 23.

Federal documents uncovered by separate litigation on Dec. 19 also show censorship of public discussion about prudent Covid policies began at least by February 18, 2020, a month before unprecedented citizen lockdowns. That contradicts Department of Homeland Security claims its censorship efforts began months later.

These documents also highlight that government employees deliberately violated transparency laws such as the Freedom of Information Act to hide their use of public offices. The Dec. 23 filing from Missouri v. Biden plaintiffs cites a May New York Times article showing “some Defendants, particularly at NIH and NIAID, have intentionally misspelled words in order to avoid production pursuant to FOIA requests; deleted emails; and used private emails.” Given this, the plaintiffs asked the federal district court to expand discovery to include intentionally misspelled keywords.

The filing also says President Biden senior advisor Andy Slavitt, a former Obama official, “continued using his White House email address even after he left government employment, presumably in an attempt to wield the authority of an office that he no longer held.” Slavitt personally “bullied” Twitter into deplatforming journalist Alex Berenson over his skepticism of mRNA injections, the filing notes.

The Missouri plaintiffs are petitioning for greater discovery and depositions in a case the U.S. Supreme Court returned to the district level after declining a preliminary injunction against vast censorship efforts that use taxpayer-funded cutout organizations to mask federal demands. “[T]his case is exceptional,” the plaintiffs argue. “Never before in this country’s history has a government censorship regime coordinated at the highest levels been exposed through litigation.”

Missouri plaintiffs include the states of Missouri and Louisiana, Health Freedom Louisiana co-director Jill Hines and Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft, and internationally recognized research scientists and medical doctors Martin Kulldorff, Aaron Kheriaty, and Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University medical professor who is now President Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health.

Repeated Pattern of Lies and Hiding Evidence

Pullman goes on to explain how the government’s response is characteristic of repeated patterns meant to evade legal responsibility and cover up unconstitutional abuses of government power:

U.S. Department of Justice lawyers claim federal agencies have already disclosed enough information in the case, so further discovery is “duplicative” and unnecessary. The DOJ has a decades-long record of hiding and even tampering with evidence and has never been held fully accountable for it.

Censorship litigation has also revealed federal agency employees have lied to courts and Americans and illegally hidden public information. The Missouri plaintiffs argue in their Dec. 23 filing, “in light of the unsavory conduct in which NIH and NIAID employees already engaged, including covering up evidence of participation in gain-of-function research, lying to the public about the evidence for Covid’s origins, and silencing opposing views on the appropriate response to Covid-19, Plaintiffs have every reason to believe such an operation continues.”

During initial discovery in Missouri v. Biden, the plaintiffs note on Dec. 23, Twitter claimed it had communicated with just 11 federal officials about online censorship efforts. Yet after tycoon Elon Musk bought Twitter months later, the company then revised that number upward to 84 federal officials.

During his deposition in this case, lockdown enforcer Anthony Fauci claimed “I don’t recall” 174 times, “almost certainly an evasion tactic,” the filing says. Given “that Dr. Fauci has almost certainly lied,” the plaintiffs write, “Defendants’ claim that further depositions of NIAID officials are unwarranted is disingenuous.” Without further discovery, the plaintiffs argue, it is impossible to know what else government officials who display a pattern of corruption are hiding.

Disagree With Us and You’re a Terrorist

The pattern goes beyond just blocking access to information, and includes efforts to vilify any critics of the regime. CISA, a little-know agency that I have written about several times here in relation to our case, coordinated these efforts to silence and slander anyone who opposed the government’s actions. Furthermore, not only was the government censoring its critics, it was engaged in age-old propaganda techniques to “flood the zone” of public discussion with lies and falsehoods (propaganda is always the flip-side of censorship):

America First Legal litigation against the State Department and a DHS subagency called Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) uncovered documents released Dec. 19. They show government employees pumped public communications channels with false information while claiming to do the opposite.

The documents show federal agencies pressuring communications monopolies to hide arguments with substantial backing, such as that fabric masks do not stop viruses and Covid-19 bears marks of human engineering….

The documents also show that in the name of combatting “foreign disinformation,” the federally activated censorship apparatus spread foreign misinformation — such as that Covid-19 certainly didn’t originate in a lab. The documents also claim that a “core narrative[] used by the pro-Kremlin disinformation network” is the concept of “The Elites vs. The People.” This archetype has, in fact, existed for thousands of years (see: The 30 Tyrants, Coriolanus, and the Gracchi). The documents also show federal agencies relying on a known purveyor of fake data, a government manipulation operation known as Hamilton 2.0 or Hamilton 68.

The documents reveal DHS personally targeted Bhattacharya for censorship because he conducted an early study that contradicted government claims about Covid’s fatality rate. Kheriaty notes that Bhattacharya’s data was later replicated “dozens of times.” The direct targeting validates Bhattacharya’s standing to pursue the lawsuit, his lawyers say, a question the Supreme Court failed to resolve.

The federal documents also claim concerns about internet censorship in the United States emanate from the “Russian disinformation ecosystem” and “undermine the very notion of objective truth.” Narratives they label “foreign propaganda” include observing that Covid-19 panic could “financially benefit ‘big pharma.’”

The documents note: “Only 17 percent of Americans trust their government to do the right thing either always or most of the time,” while also blaming Russian propaganda for this instead of, for example, well-documented evidence of federal corruption….

“The new CISA documents fill out the picture of the Censorship Industrial Complex as a creation of the Obama administration and the Intelligence Community (IC),” say Public journalists Alex Gutentag and Michael Shellenberger, who first reported on the documents. “During his time in office, Obama was instrumental in transforming the IC, including DHS, into highly political institutions. This process married progressive political ideology to one of the core imperatives of the U.S. national security state, which is to maintain public support for the military-industrial complex in general, and to manufacture consent for various foreign interventions in particular.”

Laundering Censorship Through Shell Corps

As I have described previously, in an attempt to hide its fingerprints the government suborned quasi-private entities, like the Stanford Internet Observatory, to conduct its censorship work. I describe them as “quasi-private” (i.e., really public) because they are government-organized, government-funded through grants, and staffed by former government officials. Pullman also describes some of the other players who should be deposed in our case for their central role in the government’s censorship-industrial complex:

These investigations are revealing how government officials have edited media monopolies’ content moderation policies to enable censorship. This is why, the Missouri plaintiffs argue, “It would be valuable to know how Twitter came to adopt the policy that tweets contradicting CDC policies would be censored, who made such determinations, and whether or not such operations were halted during Dr. Walensky’s tenure. If they were not, there are reasonable grounds to suppose that CDC’s activities have not ceased.”

The Missouri plaintiffs seek depositions with officials who can testify to how federal agencies blackhole speech Democrats dislike and who was involved. That includes National Security Council member Lauren Protentis. She was previously director of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (a key funder of censorship algorithms) and a member of CISA’s “Mis, Dis, and Mal-Information Team.” Protentis has a “unique role at the confluence of so many of the federal government’s misinformation programs, which outweighs any interest Defendants have in shielding her,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers note.

Litigation, investigative reporting, Big Tech disclosures, and House investigations show federal agencies outsource censorship operations because their leaders know it’s unconstitutional for the government to silence Americans.

For a century, the federal government has paid states and ostensibly private organizationsto do things that would be unconstitutional for it to do directly. This is the purpose of the administrative state swallowing up what’s left of constitutional government.

Laundering unconstitutional actions through shell nonprofits, state and local governments, and private corporations now comprises the majority of federal action. The resulting federal intrusion into every aspect of American life allows the government to erase Americans’ constitutional rights via “purchasing submission,” as Columbia Law School professor and NCLA founder Philip Hamburger has explained.

The truth about government censorship continues to emerge for those willing to examine the evidence. Regardless of the final legal outcome in our case, we are succeeding through the discovery process in shedding much-needed light on the government’s operations. Armed with this information, Americans can decide whether this is the kind of regime they want to live under.

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This link will take you to Zuckerberg’s astonishing five-minute video, which is worth watching. He admits, “We’ve reached a point where there are too many mistakes and too much censorship.” The company is changing course on this because of a “cultural tipping point of once again prioritizing speech.”

As he explains, “We are going to get back to our roots and focus on… restoring free expression one our platform.” This includes getting rid of “fact checkers” and replacing them with Community Notes, similar to X—a crowdsourced open system that works remarkably well for skeptics to challenge posted claims, without blocking people from seeing those posts. He admits, “the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created, especially in the U.S.”

Furthermore, he explains, “We’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.”

He explains that filters will not longer automatically censor low priority violations, focusing instead on illegal content that is not constitutionally protected speech. The company has been getting feedback that people want to see more civic-political content, which Facebook had previously deprioritized. Facebook is also moving its content moderation teams from California to Texas, probably a wise business decision but also one that might change the cultural context and bias of those teams.

Zuckerberg says here that they are also going to work with President Trump on pushing back against foreign countries that are trying to strong-arm American social media companies into censoring on behest of those regimes. As he explains:

The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries [like Brazil] have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take content down. China has prevented our apps from even working in their Country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. government. That’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship. By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other countries to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression and I am excited to take it.

We are witnessing a major shift here in the right direction. Facebook was among the worst offenders when it came to caving into government-sponsored censorship. We are now winning on this issue.

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Here is my latest interview, pairing up again with my friend Mattias Desmet, to discuss the societal and political implications of our current crisis of loneliness.

America is facing an epidemic of loneliness, and it’s as bad for people’s health as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, says U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy.

In the past two decades, there’s been a marked rise in suicides and “deaths of despair.”

What’s fueling these trends of social fragmentation, isolation, and atomization? And how are they linked to broader political and social trends?

In this episode, two of the world’s leading thinkers on bioethics and group psychology join together with me for the first time.

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty is a former psychiatry professor and director of the medical ethics program at the University of California Irvine Medical School. He’s the author of “The New Abnormal.”

Mattias Desmet is a professor of psychology at Ghent University and author of “The Psychology of Totalitarianism.”

I hope you find the conversation informative.

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Monitoring of social media by CISA—a branch of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—for disfavored narratives began in February 2020, a month before most lockdown orders and school and business closures began. My co-plaintiff and the man recently tapped to direct the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, was specifically targeted by the government for censorship. In the weeks that followed, CISA used “social listening” reports from FEMA to track public opinion flag dissenting speech. The government tracked public sentiment to ensure compliance with Covid restrictions. “This included analyzing emotions expressed online,” as Alex Gutentag and Michael Shellenberger at Public recently reported. As the government’s creepy Big-Brother-is-always-watching minions documented in April 2020, “Sadness continues to be the most commonly expressed emotion.” Disgust was also commonly expressed, according to FEMA reports.

Gutentag and Shellenberger explain:

It has been a mystery about when exactly CISA began its push for censorship. Ostensibly, CISA didn’t ask the four censorship NGOs to create the “Election Integrity Partnership” until mid-2020, and those NGOs did not come up with the idea to create the “Virality Project” on Covid until late 2020, after the elections.

Now, newly obtained documents provided to Public by the America First Legal reveal that CISA began its hunt for disfavored speech about Covid-19 as early as the week of February 18, 2020. The new documents, obtained from litigation by American First Legal against the State Department and CISA, show that the latter agency had Covid censorship on its mind long before it decided to focus on election censorship. The documents thus provide the missing link in CISA’s operation to chill disfavored speech.

“Incredibly, the evidence is that CISA relied on a dangerous, anti-American blob of ‘authorities’ to closely monitor what the American people were saying,” said Reed D. Rubinstein, America First Legal’s Senior Vice President. “CISA was created to protect the homeland from terrorists, not to protect incompetent federal bureaucrats.” While the monitoring of social media narratives may seem innocent, it is the crucial first step in the process of demanding censorship.

These new documents expose the early extent to which the US government repurposed the homeland security apparatus, including DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for domestic control. The documents show that CISA may have sought to counter information from [Jay] Bhattacharya, despite claims by the mainstream media recently that the government never tried to censor him. And the new documents come at a time when the in-coming Trump administration has its eyes set on defunding government censorship activities, including by CISA and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC).

CISA’s early monitoring of Covid narratives may constitute a violation of what’s known as the Supreme Court’s “major questions” doctrine, argues America First Legal, which holds that government agencies must not stray from the specific legal authorities given to them by Congress. The Supreme Court has rejected claims by government agencies to have authority over issues of “vast economic and political significance” without clear congressional authorization. And CISA arguably had no congressional authorization to monitor such Covid-related speech, which was unrelated to cybersecurity, infrastructure security, or election security. As such, CISA may have indeed broken the law.

The authors go on to note, “As is typical for censorship agencies, CISA defined misinformation to include accurate information that might lead people to engage in disfavored behaviors.” How does this work, exactly? Try to follow this twisted logic if you can…

“Once Accurate COVID 19 Data Can Become Misinformation With Age,” explained the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, which is one of the Big Four censorship NGOs, in a report cited by CISA, “Given the rapidly changing nature of the pandemic,” explained DFRLab, “even valid data might be misused simply by being published or amplified several days or weeks after its initial release date.”

Got that? True information that is no longer convenient is “misinformation” in this Orwellian world of government information-control. The Public article goes on to explain the specific censorship of Bhattacharya and our other co-plaintiff, Martin Kulldorff:

CISA tracked public sentiment about a study Bhattacharya had conducted in Santa Clara County, California in April 2020, which showed that the prevalence of COVID-19 antibodies in the population was significantly higher than previously thought. “News outlets and public health experts are raising the concerns about the validity of recent California antibody studies,” CISA noted in its analysis. “Statisticians are questioning the accuracy of the studies, saying the sample was unreliable.”

A few months later, Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Francis Collins, then Director of the NIH, would discuss plans for a “devastating published take down” of the Great Barrington Declaration, an anti-lockdown open letter organized by Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford.

Ultimately, CISA, through the Virality Project, would successfully get Twitter to censor a post by Kulldorff, Bhattacharya’s GBD co-author. CISA’s initial scrutiny of Bhattacharya’s Santa Clara study, Fauci and Collins’ planned “take down,” and the eventual censorship of Kulldorff show the phases through which the federal government scrutinized dissent and shaped public opinion with disinformation and censorship. Under the deceptive pretexts of foreign threats, cybersecurity, and “public-private” partnerships, DHS and other agencies worked to manipulate the public while undermining First Amendment protections.

It’s worth mentioning, the case=fatality and infection-fatality rate numbers in Bhattacharya’s Santa Clara study have since been replicated dozens of times and are widely accepted as accurate. These government bureaucrats had zero competence and no business questioning the accuracy validity of his study. Likewise with Kulldorff’s age-gradient covid risk numbers, which have also been widely replicated by other scientists. CISA and FEMA were totally out of their depth engaging in these epidemiological questions. But for them it was not about science; it was about silencing dissent.

The Public article goes on to explain the ideological origins of the government’s censorship machinery:

The new CISA documents fill out the picture of the Censorship Industrial Complex as a creation of the Obama administration and the Intelligence Community (IC). During his time in office, Obama was instrumental in transforming the IC, including DHS, into highly political institutions. This process married progressive political ideology to one of the core imperatives of the U.S. national security state, which is to to maintain public support for the military-industrial complex in general, and to manufacture consent for various foreign interventions in particular.

The marriage was institutional in addition to being ideological. The Democratic Party and various government agencies merged. The people who staffed CISA were as aggressively partisan and political as the people who worked in the Biden White House. Following the election of Trump in 2016, IC operatives who had cut their teeth learning and doing information operations through social media in the Middle East and Eastern Europe sought to apply their tools in the US, repurposing these tools against the domestic population.

[…]

For both Democrats and the IC, controlling social media platforms was essential to their vision for governance. Starting in 2016, censorship advocates were opportunistic, seizing upon various justifications for censorship, starting with alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election through to Covid and election misinformation in 2020. CISA’s decision to get involved in monitoring public sentiment about Covid as early as February 2020 thus paints a picture of an agency actively seeking justifications to demand censorship, starting with recasting politically and ideologically motivated censorship demands as politically neutral and technocratic.

Confirming this, the recently released 17,019-page final report from the U.S. House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government described “numerous instances of the federal government being weaponized against the American people.” Among the issues examined, the committee accused multiple federal agencies, including the White House, of engaging in a “vast censorship campaign against so-called mis-, dis-, or malinformation.” It specifically mentioned government efforts to censor true information, government censorship partnerships with universities and foreign intelligence agencies, government efforts to “harass Elon Musk’s Twitter,” and the government’s “attempt to control artificial intelligence to suppress free speech.” According to this report, Americans faced a “two-tiered system of government—one of favorable treatment for the politically-favored class, and one of intimidation and unfairness for the rest of American citizens.” A house so divided cannot stand.

The evidence of lawless and unconstitutional censorship is now overwhelming, regardless of whether the courts act on it or not. It’s time for Congress to “defund the thought police” in the federal government. Voters have indicated clear support for this, as polling data revealed that opposition to government censorship was a major issue in the recent election.

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Twenty minutes into Terrence Malik’s film, The Tree of Life, there is a striking and visually stunning sequence that sweeps the viewer through the creation of the cosmos and life on earth. The sequence contains no dialogue, only occasional questions from the female lead given on voiceover: “Lord, why?… Where were you?… Did you know?… Who are we to you? Answer me…. We cry to you. My soul. Hear us… Light of my life. I search for you. My hope.” The astonishing sequence proceeds for a full sixteen minutes. You can watch the first three minutes in the above video, but need to watch the film to see the whole thing—from the creation of stars and planets to single-celled organisms to dinosaurs. It artistically evokes the awesome creative power and mind of God, the infinite ground of all being and the unfathomable source of the entire vast universe.

When we consider creation, we may be tempted to think that God forgets about little old me or that he does not care. “What is man, that You are mindful of him or the son of man that You care for him?” we might ask with the Psalmist (8:4). But in fact He is mindful of us and He does care for us—each of us alone and individually. Yes, God’s creative power undergirds the vast cosmos, but God is also in the minutiae—in the little details of your life and mine.

The sequence from Malik’s film—which seamlessly transitions back into the ordinary lives of a husband and wife—can remind us that God conceived each of us in His mind before the creation of the entire universe. Each of us was made with the same devotion, care, and attention to detail as any sculpture by Michelangelo or painting by DaVinci. Indeed, even more so because these artists only had to make something static and stationary, while God creates you and me to withstand the dynamics of human life—with all its suffering—from the beginning to eternity. We simply cannot fathom all of the love and care and thought He put into making each of us. He knew what you would suffer in life, and He made you such that you could suffer these things and have Him as your prize. You matter to him.

We know Our Lord says in the Gospel of Luke (12:7) that even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Yet we still assume He is too busy to care about the details and difficulties of our everyday lives. But God not only knows every hair on our heads, He knows every second of our lives from before our birth to beyond the end of time. He knew all of this about you and me from the moment He conceived us, long before the Earth even existed. Even to the great mystics, He does not show a crystal ball with every second of their life displayed; neither should we desire to know this before the events of our lives unfold.

Just knowing that God, the King of the Universe, knew and planned out every second of your life since before time began tells you everything you could ever hope to know. God is in the minutia of our lives; there is no detail He has spared. He has taken account of everything from our highest of highs to our lowest of lows and everything in between. It is this knowledge that should enable each of us to boldly proclaim, as Evangelicals like to put it, “God is good, all of the time.” Knowing we have a God who knows every second of our lives, and is a good and loving God who works all things for our good (cf. Rom 8:28), leads us in the times that are the hardest to boldly proclaim, “God is good, all of the time.”

We have a God who turned that which is most barbaric—the Crucifixion of the Son of God—into that which is most beautiful, most good, most clearly a manifestation of His love. If He could turn the Crucifixion into the Resurrection, the hope of eternal life for all mankind, surely He can take the suffering of our lives—even those which seem almost as horrible as the Crucifixion—and make them our path to the Resurrection.

The Gospel of Matthew begins with the genealogy of Jesus Christ, which is read at Mass every December 17th. This tends to be a Gospel reading that makes our eyes glaze over; it can seem boring, and the point of it all is not immediately apparent:

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ,
the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Abraham became the father of Isaac,
Isaac the father of Jacob,
Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers.
Judah became the father of Perez and Zerah,
whose mother was Tamar.
Perez became the father of Hezron,
Hezron the father of Ram,
Ram the father of Amminadab.
Amminadab became the father of Nahshon,
Nahshon the father of Salmon,
Salmon the father of Boaz,
whose mother was Rahab.
Boaz became the father of Obed,
whose mother was Ruth.
Obed became the father of Jesse,
Jesse the father of David the king.

This goes on for another 28 generations until we finally get to “Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary. Of her was born Jesus who is called the Christ.” Part of the point here is that Jesus’ family history (probably like our family history) was actually very messy—and included, among other undesirables, prostitutes and murderers—and yet God brings out of this mess the Savior of the World. But the lengthy genealogy also indicates that Jesus was the fulfillment of the prophesies of the Old Testament, the endpoint of the working of God in history from Abraham through King David to the promised Messiah, whose arrival on the scene we celebrate at Christmas.

But it’s not only Jesus who was the fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament. We are each the fulfillment of a prophecy, lovingly planned and designed by Our Lord, the King of Heaven and Earth, since before the beginning of time. This is true even if we don’t realize it. Knowing this should give each of our lives purpose, should give each moment meaning, each suffering value—a sign of love worth embracing. Contemplating this fact should change how we view not only our lives but the lives of everyone we interact and cross paths with. Because every life, each one of us, is the fulfillment of God’s prophecy. We are all characters in a great drama that God is masterfully directing. There are no bit parts and no insignificant roles.

This is true not just for Moses or Elijah or St. John the Baptist or Our Lady or St. Joseph or the twelve Apostles. Each of us, each life, was lovingly created and designed by the Master Artist from before the beginning of time. God didn’t just make the Heavens and the Earth and Adam and Eve, then clock out and leave the rest of the human race to chance and the random accidents of biology. He created the Heavens and the Earth, and He also created you and me with the very same attention to detail. He made each of us perfectly for each of the moments of our lives, both the hard and the easy, and through it all, He is good all of the time. After all, the Cross led to the Resurrection, and His mercy freed us from the chains of original sin.

Because He is good all of the time, we seek Him in all things. We can do so by repeating the simple prayer, “doce me passionem Tuam” — teach me Your Suffering.

Merry Christmas, my friends.

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Here’s the link to my recent interview with Dr. Drew and my friend and colleague Mattias Desmet, who rose to prominence during the pandemic with his controversial theory of mass formation.

Within hours of being identified as the assassin of a UnitedHealthcare CEO, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione gained hundreds of thousands of followers and was catapulted into fame by a fandom who believes that his murder of a father was justified violence – akin to a modern guillotine in the hands of the oppressed.

Mattias Desmet, renowned worldwide as the leading expert on ‘mass formation’ and the madness of crowd behavior, joins psychiatrist Dr. Aaron Kheriaty to examine the shocking public support for a suspected murderer and why people react differently to a crime if it’s supported by a crowd who believes they are oppressed – even when their hero turns out to be an Ivy League heir to a multimillion dollar fortune who doesn’t follow gun control laws.

Mattias Desmet is professor of psychology at the University of Ghent in Belgium and author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism. Desmet is the author of over one hundred peer-reviewed academic papers. In 2018 he received the Evidence-Based Psychoanalytic Case Study Prize of the Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and in 2019 he received the Wim Trijsburg Prize of the Dutch Association of Psychotherapy. Follow him at https://x.com/desmetmattias and learn more at https://mattiasdesmet.org

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty is a psychiatrist, the director of the program in Bioethics and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and author of The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State. He formerly taught psychiatry at the UCI School of Medicine, was the director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health, and was the chairman of the ethics committee at the California Department of State Hospitals. He is also the author of “The Catholic Guide to Depression: How the Saints, the Sacraments, and Psychiatry Can Help You Break Its Grip and Find Happiness Again.”

While I have not typically posted on religious topics here, I was edified by the positive response to my previous post on the Christian meaning of suffering and the Cross. I am grateful for your encouraging feedback, which convinced me to continue posting on this theme from time to time. As we prepare for Christ’s coming at Christmas, Advent is a suitable time to reflect on Jesus’ hidden life prior to his public ministry.

All roads lead to Nazareth: that is where Jesus spent most of His earthly life, hidden away in obscurity. Christians must look there to enter deeply into His life and to understand Mary and Joseph, and the models they provide for our lives. St. Josemaria Escriva and other saints often recommended that we meditate on the hidden life of the Holy Family in Nazareth—the thirty years Jesus spent in obscurity prior to starting his public ministry. This hidden life constituted the majority of His time on earth. (His public ministry only lasted three years by comparison.)

We might mistakenly believe those hidden years were unimportant, because the Gospel’s say almost nothing about them. We might assume that Jesus’ “real” work was His later preaching, teaching, and miracles—that prior to his public ministry He was merely “biding his time.” But this would be mistaken: the silence of the Gospels in this regard is an eloquent silence; it actually speaks volumes. The Son of God did not waste time; every one of his actions on earth had redemptive value. We can be encouraged by the fact that His ordinary life was, in many respects, much like our ordinary lives: the Gospels record little precisely because there was nothing extraordinary to report. And yet, each of Christ’s actions on earth, from the simplest to the most sublime, were offered to God his Father for our salvation. The way of the Cross began at his conception.

With a few details from the Gospels, some knowledge of history, and clues from the writings of Christian mystics, we can imagine how God, who became man, would have lived. Perhaps at his birth there was an older woman from Bethlehem who served as the local midwife; maybe she was assisted by her young daughter of 8 or 9-years-old, who helped during the birth of Jesus. These two would have had no idea that they helped bring Christ into the world. Likewise, the priest in the Temple who circumcised Jesus eight days later would not have known this baby was the Son of God. But by doing their duty they served him and his family with kindness and care.

We can picture little details of their domestic life in Nazareth. We can imagine the cradle that St. Joseph lovingly made for the infant Jesus to sleep in. Perhaps Mary tended a small garden of vegetables that the little boy, Jesus, helped her to cultivate. They woke up very early and ate a simple meal, mostly of whatever remained from their meal the night before, and then began the obligations of the day. The young boy, Jesus, would help His Mother to carry water from the well. He would help gather the wood that Joseph used as a carpenter. Joseph would have taught Jesus how to identify the right trees and cut the branches to bring to him. They probably kept a small number of animals that Jesus learned to tend.

Hot water would have been hard to come by as it was costly and time-consuming to heat. Jesus and Joseph would have taken cold baths outside, while the limited supply of warmer water would have been reserved for Mary to bathe with in the privacy of the house. Like most people of that time and place they did not enjoy the luxury of bathing daily. As was customary for poor and simple people at that time, their “plumbing” would have been an outhouse that was no more than a hole in the ground, probably without even a bench for Mary. She would have spent her days cooking and doing household chores. By today’s standards, to say their house was simple would be an understatement. They each only had a few garments to wear. They had a simple table to eat at that Joseph would have made, but probably no beds and slept on the floor. They would have owned just a few small clay pots to store food, oil, and water in.

They ate a very simple diet with very little meat because they were poor—mostly bread, some vegetables, and gruel or lentils for their large mid-day meal. As was customary, they ate a smaller meal in the evening as their nights were short. Oil to light lamps with was a precious commodity. When they ate fish, it was cooked on sticks over the fire. The freshwater fish from the nearby Lake of Gennesaret were small and each of them would have their own. They would have used their fingers to remove the scales and to pick the fish off the bones, since forks were not available at the time. Like most people of their day, prior to the use of refined sugar, they did not have our concept of dessert; fruit was eaten only on occasions when it was in season and could be obtained. Walnuts were a staple but they needed to crack open the hard shells each time themselves.

Jesus’ Mother probably did not know how to read or write, as women at that time were not taught to do so; written manuscripts were rare and not available in most people’s homes. We can imagine their evenings in prayer. We can imagine the tears of Mary and the concern of Joseph as they looked for and then found the child Jesus in the Temple when he was twelve years old, and the tears and embraces that first night back, reunited with each other. The child Jesus, while he never needing to be corrected or rebuked for moral failures, still needed to be taught how to live and navigate this world—while he possessed the virtues he still needed to learn life’s skills.

Although it is not recorded in Scripture, tradition suggests that Joseph had peaceful death when Jesus was a young man. Jesus was no longer a child when St. Joseph died, and he had the skills and ability to take care of Mary. Imagine how dearly Jesus and His Mother would have loved Joseph. After Mary, no human has loved God more perfectly and fully than St. Joseph. He lived with and held God in the flesh. No person, other than Mary, lived in such proximity to Our Lord. When Joseph died, there were tears, but not of sorrow, for they knew where he was going and that his life and death had been filled with a level of peace and love that is beyond the comprehension of those of us who are incapable of such purity of love, faith, and devotion.

Imagine if Mary had not said yes, had not given her fiat, to God at the Annunciation. Imagine if Joseph had not said yes to God, even though he didn’t fully understand what he was saying yes to or what it would mean for his life, and even when prudence would have advised a quiet divorce. He said yes not knowing he would have to flee to Egypt, or be married but live in perfect chastity, or raise the boy Jesus that he knew was not of his flesh. Joseph the silent, who utters no words for the history books, was not only the holiest person who ever lived other than Mary, but in a sense, St. Joseph underwent a kind of martyrdom for Christ. While He did not physically die for Christ, Joseph gave his entire life for the living Christ and Mary. While his sacrifice was hidden and interior, by giving his whole life entirely Joseph was in a real sense the first martyr for Our Lord.

These reflections on Our Lord’s hidden life can help us cultivate we might call “holy gratitude”. We can be appreciative or grateful when someone does something nice or helpful for us, or when we appreciate our life circumstances. But then there is a form of spiritual gratitude that transcends our circumstance or anything that has been done or given to us. It means being grateful to God for all of our circumstances, no matter how difficult they may sometimes be.

It is found in Mary and Joseph’s gratitude for the women who assisted at Jesus’ birth. It is found in their gratitude for the humble stable where Our Lord was born, even though it was hardly fit for a king. It is found in Joseph’s gratitude for the opportunity to father the child Jesus and protect Him and Our Lady. It is found in Our Lord’s own gratitude for His simple life in Nazareth.

As I suggested in my previous post on Christ’s death, it is found when we contemplate Our Lord’s beaten and bloodied body being prepared for burial, lovingly anointed with olive oil and wrapped with herbs. It’s the feeling we have when we look at His bloodied face and see a face as beautiful, and perhaps more so, than when it was unmarked before His Passion. It’s the feeling we have when He lets us rest inside His wounds and listen to the beat of His heart.

In the hidden life of Jesus and the Holy Family we can more fully comprehend the Eucharist—Jesus coming to us today, hidden, under the appearance of bread and wine. Unless we understand the humility of Jesus’ entire life, from conception until death, we cannot fully comprehend the magnitude of God becoming man, dying on the Cross, and then being willing to give himself to us in Holy Communion.

The Cross shaped the entire life of Christ from beginning to end. Jesus was laid in the wood of the manger at Christmas. Later, as a carpenter, He plied his trade with wood. Finally, in the end, he was outstretched on a rough piece of wood—the very material of His trade as a carpenter—in a gesture of love; and with hammer and nails—the very tools of His trade—He was fastened to the Cross. He was affixed to this Most Holy Cross not only by nails, but more by His love for you and for me—for each of us alone and individually.

We can enter more deeply into this by repeating this simple prayer many times daily: Doce me passionem Tuam—teach me Your suffering.

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Here’s my ten-minute conversation with Jesse Kelly regarding Trump’s new medical cabinet picks. This post may sound like shameless name-dropping, but I’m pleased that friends and colleagues I have worked closely with over the past few years will be assuming leadership positions in the federal government, particularly our public health agencies.

There has been a lot of talk about Robert F. Kennedy, and my own view is that Bobby is the right person to take the helm as Secretary of Health and Human Services. I tell a brief personal anecdote about Bobby in the interview above that illustrates his attention to details and his penetrating mind.

My friend, colleague, and co-plaintiff in the Missouri v. Biden case, Jay Bhattacharya, has been tapped as the next NIH Director. If I was President, I would have picked Jay for this role. He is not only a brilliant and brave scientist, he is a man of enormous integrity, fundamental decency, and sincere humility—one of the finest people I know. The former NIH Director, Francis Collins, covered himself in shame during the pandemic: we have an internal email from Collins to Fauci calling for a “swift and devastating takedown” of the premises of the Great Barrington Declaration, which Bhattacharya and our co-plaintiff, Martin Kulldorff, authored. The previous NIH Director called not for an open scientific debate about the Declaration, mind you, but a character assassination and attempt at censorship of competing ideas. Collins topped it off by calling Bhattacharya (of Stanford), Kulldorff (of Harvard), and Sunetra Gupta (of Oxford) “fringe epidemiologists”. I therefore see poetic justice in the fact that Bhattacharya will soon be taking over Collins’ job at the NIH. I am working closely with Jay and his chief of staff on policies to reform this agency, which funds 85% of biomedical research in the United States.

I’m also delighted that my friend Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins will be the next FDA Commissioner. As I have written about here in the past, this agency has largely been captured by the very industry it is meant to regulate. Marty proved during covid to be an independent thinker not beholden to the interests of big Pharma. He has also authored some excellent books on reforming our healthcare system which I recommend.

Finally, in an appointment that has received less attention, a key attorney and legal mastermind in our Missouri v. Biden free speech case, John Sauer, has been tapped as the next Solicitor General of the United States—the lead litigator in the Attorney General’s office. Full disclosure: I like to joke that John is my “second brother in law once removed” because he’s married to my brother’s wife’s sister (not actually sure what that makes us). More importantly, he’s a brilliant litigator with a photographic memory and the rhetorical skills to make: a real tornado in the courtroom. (See my previous post on John’s congressional testimony regarding government censorship based upon information obtained in our case.) And most importantly, John is a good family man who understands and believes in the Constitution and loves this Country—just the sort of person you want serving in a leadership role. If I may suggest it, John would also make a superb Supreme Court justice when the next vacancy opens up.

Given that several of my friends and colleagues are moving to Washington to take up positions in the next Administration, many of you have asked me if I plan to do the same. The transition team has spoken to me about taking a position at the NIH, but I have decided to remain in a purely advisory capacity, working with friends and colleagues on the inside but without moving inside the Beltway myself. I’m not built to be a government bureaucrat, and can do more damage remaining as an independent writer, thinker, and consultant. Fresh winds are blowing in DC and I look forward to helping them in whatever way I can to move in the right direction.

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Most readers of Human Flourishing are aware that I am Catholic, though the focus of my writings here tends to be secular rather than spiritual themes. However, today I feel compelled to share with you some thoughts on suffering—and a prayer that the world should learn, to help us endure difficult times ahead and overcome our adversaries. I ask that my non-Christian readers consider this post with an open mind and heart. In another recent post, I introduced these themes by sharing my remarks on the occasion of receiving an award from the Tepeyac Leadership Institute. Consider listening to that 9-minute talk if you have not yet heard it.

In those remarks, I predicted that—regardless of recent political developments in the United States—there are challenges in store for us that will lead to suffering. “But that is good,” I said on that occasion, “for in suffering we can find the Cross, and in the Cross we find God’s love for us. Suffering with Christ is co-redemptive.” We will only overcome these challenges, individually and collectively, by means of prayer and union with God.

We tend to flee suffering, to avoid the cross at all costs. But at the center of the Christian claim is God who became man, and as a man suffered all that could be suffered—for you and for me, for each of us alone and individually. And he taught us not to seek a life of comfort and ease, but to deny ourselves, take up our cross daily and follow him (Luke 9:23). The American “prosperity gospel”—a distortion that infects so many of our parishes, both Catholic and Protestant—is false because it ignores the cross of Christ, which is at the center of our redemption. It’s not that Jesus suffered so we don’t have to; on the contrary, Jesus suffered so that our suffering can unite us to him. We cannot shun the crosses he sends us daily if we want to follow him.

Christians tend to sanitize Christ’s passion. That is why I chose the image above of the bloody crucifixion, which shocks contemporary sensibilities: the corpus on the cross there is a bit closer to what the actual scourging, the crowing with thorns, and the crucifixion would have looked like, as depicted, for example, in the film, The Passion of the Christ. This image is meant to arrest us, to shock, for Christ’s sufferings involved every pain, every agony, every horror—physical and psychological—that any of us have or could possibly experience. In addition to the Gospels, Gibson’s realistic passion film drew upon the mystic Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich’s book, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which I commend to you for spiritual reading. Henri-Marie Boudon’s classic, The Holy Ways of the Cross, can also help you understand this.

To go deeper into Our Lord’s passion and death, I recommend to you a brief prayer, an aspiration consisting of four simple words, which you can repeat a hundred times every day: Doce me passionem Tuam— “teach me Your suffering,” or literally, “teach me Your passion.” (For those of you who are not Latin proficient, the first two words are pronounced “doe-chay may”.)As I said on that occasion to my fellow Catholics, “We have all read the Gospels, but perhaps we do not yet really know Christ’s passion. We must learn it. He must teach us. We must live it more deeply in order to find him.” As I explained:

Paradoxically, it is in suffering that we find freedom. It is in Christ’s passion—with all its horrors, all the blood, the dirt, the grit, the sweat, the tears—it is there that we find peace. Interior freedom and interior peace are not found in politics. They are not found in elections, as important as these things are. Freedom and peace are found only in the Cross of Christ. There is no Easter Sunday without Good Friday. Doce me passionem Tuam, “Teach me Your suffering.”

Try this simple prayer and see what happens in your life when you begin to pray it. If this aspiration begins to change you for the better—and I think that it will—then consider sharing this post with others.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you.

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Click here for the video. My brilliant co-panelist, Mattias Desmet, popularized the concept of mass formation to explain what happened during the pandemic, when we uncritically embraced a slew of massively harmful policies without asking critical questions. It’s worth watching at least to hear Mattias’ insights.

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This is the film I reference in the talk…

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Dan Frieth over at Reclaim the Net reports:

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) is pushing forward in Missouri v. Biden, aiming to uncover the depth of government-led censorship on social media. This legal action follows a June Supreme Court ruling that vacated a preliminary injunction in the case, previously known as Murthy v. Missouri, which barred officials from the White House, CDC, FBI, CISA, and the Surgeon General’s office from pressuring social media platforms to censor constitutionally protected speech.

NCLA’s clients, including prominent figures such as Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Aaron Kheriaty, as well as free speech advocate Jill Hines, allege that they were systematically blacklisted, shadow-banned, de-boosted, throttled, and even suspended across major social media platforms due to their viewpoints on Covid-19, public health, and government policies. NCLA claims this censorship campaign was orchestrated as part of a “whole-of-government” initiative that saw coordinated efforts across a dozen federal agencies, with direction from top White House officials.

We obtained a copy of this new filing for you here.

While the Supreme Court ruled that NCLA’s clients lacked the standing needed to sustain the preliminary injunction, the organization argues that this ruling does not spell an end to the lawsuit. According to NCLA, the standard for standing at the injunction stage is higher than what’s required to advance a case through its initial pleadings. The Alliance is seeking further discovery to show that government actions indeed stifled speech and violated the First Amendment—an assertion that Supreme Court Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch echoed in their partial dissent, in which they warned that the government’s actions raised “serious First Amendment concerns.”

Digging Deeper: NCLA Calls for More Discovery

NCLA’s clients argue that, despite limited preliminary discovery, they have already uncovered evidence pointing to a vast and well-coordinated censorship apparatus involving dozens of high-ranking officials and well over a hundred government actors. Emails and internal communications have revealed direct pressures on social media platforms to censor content, particularly on topics related to COVID-19 and elections, where government messaging was at odds with some of the censored viewpoints.

Now, NCLA is requesting more extensive discovery to investigate additional actors and confirm the full extent of this censorship effort, believing this will further support their claims against the government. Should the court approve, NCLA expects to reveal a clearer picture of an “assault” on free speech by government agencies using social media companies as intermediaries to suppress certain viewpoints.

Seeking a Fourth Amended Complaint

In addition to calling for more discovery, NCLA’s clients are also seeking permission from the District Court to amend their Complaint. This amendment would bring new voices into the case, including members of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen”—a group the Biden Administration singled out for removal from platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Meta. The plaintiffs argue that the Administration’s targeted pressure on social media platforms to censor these individuals underscores their right to participate in the case and adds further evidence of standing.

In June, the District Court highlighted that the Administration’s direct campaign against specific users strengthened the plaintiffs’ case for standing. A refusal to allow these individuals into the case would, according to NCLA, effectively reward the government’s covert strategy of pressuring social media companies to censor speech without facing legal consequences.

NCLA’s Fight to Protect Free Speech

NCLA’s clients are optimistic that with adequate discovery, they can meet the Supreme Court’s clarified standards for standing and ultimately prevail on the merits of their claims. They contend that without such legal recourse, government actors could continue suppressing Americans’ speech in secrecy, circumventing the Constitution in ways that escape public scrutiny.

“Our plaintiffs, who have been censored extensively on social media and targeted for suppression by government actors, deserve to know the extent of the government’s involvement in silencing them,” said Jenin Younes, Litigation Counsel at the NCLA, in a statement to Reclaim The Net.

We anticipate a response from the court in the next few weeks, possibly longer. Stay tuned here for updates.

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According to a recent report (see page 13) from the Chief Coroner’s office of Ontario, a patient with mental health conditions, including severe depression and PTSD, and a covid vaccine injury was euthanized in Canada, instead of receiving treatment for his physical and mental disorders. This case report shows how the Canadian healthcare system abandoned a suicidal patient in need of real medical and psychiatric care (in Canada, euthanasia is euphemistically termed Medical Assistance in Dying [MAiD]):

Mr. A was a male in his late 40s who experienced suffering and functional decline following three vaccinations for SARS-Cov-2. He received multiple expert consultations, with extensive clinical testing completed without determinate diagnostic results. Amongst his multiple specialists, no unifying diagnosis was confirmed. He had a significant mental health history, including depression and trauma experiences.

While navigating his physical symptoms, Mr. A was admitted to hospital with intrusive thoughts of dying. Psychiatrists presented concerns of an adjustment disorder, depression with possible psychotic symptoms, and illness anxiety/somatic symptom disorder. During a second occurrence of suicidal ideation, Mr. A was involuntarily hospitalized. During this hospitalization, post-traumatic stress disorder was thought to be significantly contributing to his symptoms. He received inpatient psychiatric treatment and care through a specialist team. He was also diagnosed with cluster B and C personality traits.

The MAiD assessors opined that the most reasonable diagnosis for Mr. A’s clinical presentation (severe functional decline) was a post-vaccine syndrome, in keeping with chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis. No pathological findings were found at the time of post-mortem examination. The cause of death following post-mortem examination was provided as post COVID-19 vaccination.

This case report was brought to my attention by my colleague Alexander Raikin at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who is carefully documenting the concerning developments of the euthanasia regime in Canada. As he explains, “In just six years, the number of deaths from euthanasia or MAiD increased thirteenfold, from 1,018 deaths in 2016 to over 13,200 deaths in 2022. More Canadians die by euthanasia than from liver disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, or pneumonia. In fact, MAiD is now effectively tied as the fifth leading cause of death in the country.” Nearly one in twenty deaths in Canada is now by Euthanasia. If you are interested in more on this topic I recommend this recent interview and this article by Raikin (or this longer report for those who want a deeper dive).

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Longtime readers of Human Flourishing may recall that Alison Morrow, an Emmy Award winning journalist, was the first person to interview me after I filed my lawsuit challenging the University of California’s vaccine mandate in court. YouTube censored this interview, as I explained in a post at the time. This instance of censorship, among others, was cited in my Missouri v. Biden testimony.

Beyond being censored by YouTube (likely under pressure from the Federal government), Morrow was instructed by her employer at the time, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, to remove the interview with me from all other podcast and video platforms where she had posted it. When she refused to do so, the State fired her—a clear violation by a government employer of an employee’s First Amendment free speech rights. Now she is fighting back in court.

Dan Frith over at Reclaim the Net recently reported the following on Morrow’s case:

Alison Morrow (formally Westover), an accomplished journalist, found herself in the throes of a legal battle over her right to free speech. Represented by the Silent Majority Foundation, Morrow has filed a lawsuit against the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and its top officials, citing wrongful termination after she was dismissed for airing an interview on her YouTube channel. The channel, a personal project crafted during her tenure as an environmental reporter at KING 5 in Seattle, became the subject of controversy following her post featuring a highly censored doctor, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, and his views on COVID-19.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

Morrow’s career at KING 5, which spanned from 2013 to 2019, was marked by significant accolades, including two Emmy awards. Recognized for her independent journalism, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) was fully aware of her YouTube activities when they recruited her as a communications specialist. Initially, her independent media pursuits were supported by DNR, but the tide turned with her decision to feature Dr. Kheriaty. DNR’s leadership warned Morrow that her continued interviews could lead to termination, a threat she met with a staunch refusal to abandon her First Amendment protections.

Determined to uphold her freedoms of speech, press, and association, Morrow chose to defy DNR’s directive to adhere to approved narratives. This act of resistance ultimately led to her dismissal, prompting her to seek legal assistance from the Silent Majority Foundation, which took up her case to safeguard these fundamental rights.

“The 1st Amendment is one of the most sacred rights of Americans. It is what differentiates our country from most others, that we have the freedom to question our government. It is also central to a free press. I was willing to lose my job—and all that it provided for our family—in order to stand up against the encroaching erosion of this right that I was witnessing at the time, not just in my case but in thousands of others across the country during the pandemic,” Morrow stated. “There was no way to do science or journalism, in the culture of censorship that was driven by our government at the time. That meant millions of people made decisions without informed consent. Given my commitment to seeking truth wherever it leads, I was unwilling to acquiesce to a demand that I remain silent.”

You can support Morrow’s legal efforts by contributing here, as I have done. Note that a case like this is important not just for one individual to seek just restitution (a worthy enough cause), but also to establish a legal precedent in court to prevent future instances of the same kinds of harm.

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My friend Matt Taibbi, whose Substack Racket News features some of the best journalism out there, published a piece today entitled, “The University of California: At War With Its Own Proud Speech Tradition.” While the second half of the article is behind a paywall (worth subscribing, in my opinion), I’m sharing here the portion that is available on the free preview, which makes reference to my history with the University of California. Taibbi writes:

In his new “FOIA Files” writeup of the 1,400 pages of Freedom of Information documents Racket received from the University of California, Irvine, James Rushmore highlights an extraordinary Academic Advisory Board meeting, convened at the height of the pandemic in December, 2020.

In it, UC faculty members are so angry about academics defying Covid-19 consensus, they start to re-think academic freedom. They single out Hoover Institute fellow Scott Atlas at Stanford for questioning consensus on lockdowns, social distancing, masking, and other policies. Atlas was described as someone who’d “hit us very hard… in the area of public health,” being on the “wrong” side of a “clear ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’” One UC San Francisco medical professor raised a question pitting “‘academic freedom’ vs. institutions passing on their obligation to deal with faculty who say and do things with significant chance to harm the public,” asking, “What is freedom of speech in this context?” In other words, how much can freedom can we really tolerate?

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, [one of] the Murthy plaintiffs, was the director of UC-Irvine’s medical ethics program and a professor of psychiatry and human behavior who also worked in person with COVID patients every day at the UCI Medical Center. He was fired roughly a year after the meeting referenced in this FOIA document for opposing vaccine mandates, guilty of the identical crime Atlas is charged with in the docs: being a “threat to the health and safety of the community.” The Los Angeles Times used scare quotes to describe Kheriaty as someone who “refused to get vaccinated, citing ‘natural immunity,’” so the following comment about the UC docs is apt:

“Even the excerpt you sent referencing Scott Atlas has ‘academic freedom’ in scare quotes, opposing it to the need to protect people from the harms of wrongthink and the establishment’s own infallible right-thinking on public health,” Kheriaty says. “These people live in an ideological bubble and can’t see their way out of it, even for the sake of protecting free speech and academic freedom.”

Kheriaty notes that the University of California has a terrific academic freedom policy passed in 1970 based on a “free exchange of ideas, and of pursuit of the truth wherever it may lead — popular or unpopular though that may be.” It bars bureaucratic interference in speech in the strongest of terms:

It is the Regents’ policy that no campus, no academic college, no department, and no instructor distort the instructional process in a manner which deviates from the responsibilities inherent in academic freedom. This includes introducing subject matter foreign to the regular course content, using classroom facilities and supplies, or other nonfree speech areas for political purposes.

That policy was introduced back when “liberals actually cared about [academic freedom] and understood its importance,” Kheriaty says. “They now see this institutional policy as an obstacle to their goals but can’t come out and attack it directly, so we end up with the kind of indirect attacks you uncovered in these FOIA documents.”

Kheriaty’s own case was a more direct attack, and it’s described in an enraging account he wrote on his Human Flourishing site shortly after his dismissal. In the new documents go, the Atlas episode wasn’t the only unnerving one. The materials show ongoing tension between the UC’s strong tradition, which grew out of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964, and its infantilizing present, in which professors and administrators alike are seen applying pressure to their own policies through constant questions seeking more of a “balance” between freedom and safety.

The article goes on to discuss some comments from UC President Michael Drake, who was responsible for my firing, on the need to “balance” free speech with safetyism. Taibbi rightly notes in this context that “balance” functions as a “rights-chiseling watchword of the day,” which Drake repeated three times like a mantra. Taibbi notes this same pattern elsewhere, including in the ironically named UC Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement:

Throughout the FOIA docs, the UC’s Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement engages in discussions that posit academic or speech freedom as half of a rhetorical pairing. Academic freedom vs. “abuse and harm,” “free expression and social justice,” or any of a number of debates about weighing inquiry/speech and the “commitment to diversity and inclusion,” “preservation of public health,” “rising disbelief in institutions,” or a dozen other concerns.

Questions about “balance” or “accountability” would inevitably be followed by a proposition about a new restriction.

Taibbi goes on to explain that this trend is global: “Europe’s Digital Services Act, based on the same “balance” concept, became law last February.” The entire piece, and the linked “FOIA Files” article by James Rushmore are worth a read if you’re a Racket News subscriber.

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As I explored in two recent posts (The Managerialist Revolution in Medicine and Why We Are Sick), our medical institutions—from hospitals and licensing boards to medical schools and professional societies—are failing us. The complex of problems in many of these institutions makes reform or repair, in the short term at least, impractical and perhaps impossible. Too many vested financial or other interests will not readily relinquish their territory.

Still, I want to suggest here a rough blueprint for a way forward. Any short-term hopes for the medical system’s fundamental reform or even moderation appear futile. I believe a better strategy involves, to the extent possible, ignoring the medical regime’s official structures and building new ones—small-scale initiatives where decentralized medical care can be restored and patients can be empowered to take responsibility for their own health. We need a what the Czech dissidents of the 1970s called a “parallel polis” for medical institutions.^[i]

These would supplement the beneficial and necessary functions that are missing in the existing structures, and wherever possible, would use those existing structures, to humanize them. These initiatives need not lead to a direct conflict with mainstream medical institutions. At the same time, this strategy harbors no illusions that cosmetic changes to mainstream medicine can make any meaningful difference.

This involves occupying the spaces that medicine has temporarily abandoned or which it never occupied in the first place. These parallel institutions need not constitute a ghetto or an underground; they are not a black-market system hiding in the shadows. The purpose of these institutions is to eventually renew the entire healthcare system, not to retreat from it entirely.^[ii]

Admittedly, every institution of the parallel polis will be a David facing the Goliath of a massively powerful and totalizing medical system. Any one or another of these institutions could be crushed by the state machinery, working as the enforcement arm of institutional and corporate medicine, if the state specifically targeted it for liquidation. Our task, therefore, is to create so many of these parallel structures and institutions that the captured state would finally be limited in its reach: while it could crush any one institution at any time, there would eventually be too many such institutions for the state to target them all simultaneously.

At the behest of governments, medical institutions during covid demanded we become disempowered and isolated. People globally ceded their sovereignty and abandoned social solidarity. By contrast, the new parallel institutions of medicine must return sovereignty to individuals, families, and communities and strengthen social solidarity. These institutions must help people take responsibility for their health and must always support the doctor-patient relationship, minimizing external intrusions on this relationship.

In these new medical models, physicians need to be able to exercise individualized clinical judgment and appropriate discretionary latitude. Doctors should work primarily for patients and only secondarily for institutions. During covid, governments weaponized fear to coerce individuals, families, and communities to cede their sovereignty and even make them forget they once had it. To help individuals, families, and small communities reclaim their ability to self-govern we must help people overcome their fear and find their courage.

Markets, communications, and governing structures within medicine have become increasingly centralized at a national and global level, robbing individuals, families, and local communities of legitimate authority, privacy, and medical freedom. Thus, the new medical institutions must be grounded in technologies and models of decentralized communications and information sharing, dispersed authority, and localized markets. To name just one example among many, subscription-based models of direct primary care, which bypass Medicare and other third-party payers, are springing up around the country and in many cases proving financially viable—delivering better health outcomes at lower costs by eliminating the expensive and superfluous bureaucratic middlemen.

Individuals, families, and local communities have been robbed of their legitimate authority. To rectify this, the new medical institutions must support the principle of subsidiarity and empower practical efforts at the local level. New cooperatives as an alternative to traditional health insurance are one example of recent creative thinking in the domain of healthcare reimbursements that respect this principle of subsidiarity and help individuals and families maintain legitimate authority over healthcare payments.

The Homeschooling Parallel

We need to plant seeds that might not fully germinate in our lifetimes, thinking in 50 to 100-year increments. Consider the homeschooling movement in the United States. In 1973, just over fifty years ago, there were 13,000 homeschoolers; today there are 5 million. A generation ago parents would get a visit from social services for not sending their children to “approved” public or private schools. It was considered déclassé, if not borderline criminal, to attempt to educate one’s children oneself.

Undeterred by suspicion and outright persecution, the homeschool movement created a parallel polis, reappropriating the idea of self-education and autonomous learning that had been monopolized by those with advanced degrees in education. While not every homeschooler succeeded, many thrived, demonstrating that their children could get a superior education—winning the spelling bees, acing standardized exams, and earning admission to prestigious universities—for a fraction of the cost of other schools. These pioneers formed co-ops, and often later founded private or charter schools, thereby influencing directly or indirectly the mainstream educational landscape. This movement eventually changed the face of institutional education. Homeschooling is now part of the mainstream and the resources to facilitate it have multiplied.

Medicine today needs its own equivalent of the homeschool movement. Ordinary people need to reappropriate the idea of self-care and autonomous healing that has been monopolized by physicians and other healthcare professionals. Just as homeschooling deinstitutionalized education so we need to demedicalize healthcare, at least to some extent. Medical professionals have our role—just as professional teachers continued to have a role, influencing and sometimes assisting the pioneers of homeschooling. But doctors and nurses need not be the only game in town. Over time, perhaps in fifty years, this decentralized health care movement will positively influence, directly and indirectly, the practice of institutionalized medicine.

This kind of democratizing movement, empowering ordinary people to act autonomously in their own self-care, is not without historical precedent in American medicine. In the nineteenth century, practical books for the domestic practice of medicine enjoyed wide popularity. According to Pulitzer Prize winning historian of medicine Paul Starr, “Written in lucid, everyday language, avoiding Latin or technical terms, the books set forth current knowledge on disease and attacked, at times explicitly, the conception of medicine as a high mystery.”^[iii] The most popular of these works was Dr. William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, which carried the subtitle, “an attempt to render the Medical Art more generally useful, by showing people what is in their own power both with respect to the Prevention and Cure of Diseases.” The book went through more than thirty editions in America between 1781 and the mid-1800s.

Although the author was a member of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh, the most prestigious medical institution of the day, he was highly critical of the medical profession’s monopolistic elitism, writing that “no discovery can ever be of general utility while the practice of it is kept in the hands of a few.” As Starr notes, “Though Buchan did not dismiss the value of physicians when they were available, he upheld the view that professional knowledge and training were unneeded in treating most diseases…. Most people, he assured readers, ‘trust too little to their own endeavors.’”^[iv] Buchan maintained a general skepticism toward the value of drugs, preferring like the Hippocratic physicians to focus on diet and preventive measures. In his words, “I think the administration of medicines always doubtful, and often dangerous, and would much rather teach men how to avoid the necessity of using them, than how they should be used.” As Starr describes, “He counseled repeatedly that exercise, fresh air, a simple regimen, and cleanliness were of more value in maintaining health than anything medicine could do.”^[v] This remains as true today as when Buchan wrote in the nineteenth century.

Today, the specific medical content of these books is less instructive than the fact of their enormous popularity, which indicated a culture that generally embraced a model of autonomous self-care, with lay medical wisdom cultivated in the context of the family. This was likewise a period of intense iatrogenic medical injuries, when “mainstream” medicine’s mainstays included harmful bloodletting and emetic purges for most diseases. Through these popularized works of domestic medicine, medical knowledge—such as it was at the time—and less aggressive medical interventions were democratized, decentralized, and made widely available to the broadest possible audience. Common sense was trusted to accomplish much of the necessary work, with physicians available when necessary for situations that the lay public could not manage.

The Hippocratic Society

In the realm of organized medicine, I’ll mention just one example of a parallel, alternative medical society that I recently helped establish along with three other doctors from Duke, Harvard, and Stanford. The Hippocratic Society, which as of this writing has chapters for pre-medical and medical students at eight universities, exists to form and sustain clinicians in the practice and pursuit of good medicine.^[vi] “HippSoc,” as we nicknamed it, focuses on helping medical students and practicing physicians cultivate the virtues that characterize good medical practice. Today’s medical ethics often asks doctors to set aside clinical judgment in service to the expectations of third parties or to patient “autonomy” arbitrarily defined. In contrast, Hippocratic Society physicians seek to discern and do what good medicine requires, thereby fulfilling our healing profession.

As I discussed in a recent post, today’s corporatization of healthcare treats practitioners as interchangeable “providers” who are expected to “just do your job”—i.e., do what the managerial elites dictate—which contributes to a crisis of medical morale. The Hippocratic Society embraces medicine as a sacred profession in the service of the patient’s genuine good. In our age of medical censorship, HippSoc also sponsors fair, serious, and open discourse about the most important questions facing medical practitioners in our time. Against the tendency in academia to ignore or suppress disagreement and dissent, this new medical society promotes public dialogue and debate about difficult questions in medicine. We are confident that by reasoning together, medical practitioners can discern better how to serve our patients and fulfill our profession.

If we succeed, by 2035 every major academic medical center will have an active chapter of the Hippocratic Society. A dense network of senior clinicians will serve as mentors to medical trainees, and a parallel network of clinician chapters will support practitioners across the United States and beyond. The success of this enterprise will be measured not only by the number of chapters created or symposia held, but especially by the character and flourishing of the practitioners who participate in this community. HippSoc members will be recognized by their peers and patients alike as exemplars of the medical profession—trustworthy healers characterized by knowledge and skill, wisdom and compassion, courage and integrity.

This is just one example among the hundreds of new medical institutions we need to begin building. If we fail to make the necessary reforms, young talent will be misdirected and their energies mismanaged. Iatrogenic harms from managerialized medicine will continue to multiply. The loss will be incalculable. This sobering and sometimes severe assessment of medicine’s current crisis need not be the last word. There is hope. If we succeed in building parallel institutions than can help restore medicine, the gains will be worth every effort. Renewal is possible if we put our hand to the plow and do the work.

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^[i] The concept of a Parallel Polis was elaborated by the Czech dissident, Vaclav Benda, who along with Vaclav Havel (later the first president of the Czech Republic following the fall of communism) and other collaborators opposed the Soviet Communist regime in the 1970s. See Benda’s essay on the parallel polis in Václav Benda, F. Flagg Taylor, and Barbara Day, The Long Night of the Watchman : Essays by Vaclav Benda, 1977-1989 (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 2017).

^[ii] See my essay, “Rebellion, Not Retreat,” The American Mind, June 27, 2023.

^[iii] Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 32.

^[iv] Ibid., 33.

^[v] Ibid., 34.

^[vi] For more information, including information on how to start a new chapter, go to

https://hippsoc.org

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Whether the influence of big pharma that profits from sickness, compromised public health agencies controlled by the very industries they are supposed to regulate, a biosecurity state that tends to jump from one declared health emergency to the next, medicine is now in danger of causing more sickness than it heals.

The year I was born, 1976, saw the publication if Ivan Illich’s prophetic book, Medical Nemesis, which opens with the startling claim, “The medical establishment has become a major threat to health.”^[i] The book explores the epidemic of iatrogenic disease—that is, illnesses caused by medical interventions—which has only worsened in the nearly half century since this book was published. Most of the current research literature on iatrogenesis focuses on the problem of medical errors, and how to institute systems that can minimize errors. This is obviously important to address, but medical errors are only part of the story of how medicine is harming us.

Illich’s basic thesis was that some systems, including our healthcare system, improve outcomes only until they expand to a certain industrialized size, monopolized scope, and level of technological power. Once this threshold is reached, without intending to do so, these systems paradoxically cannot help but inflict harm and undermine their stated aims. Illich diagnosed “the disease of medical progress” in its early stages; I believe this disease has now reached its advanced stage. The problem is political and not merely professional: he argued that “the layman and not the physician has the potential perspective and effective power to stop the current iatrogenic epidemic.”^[ii] Indeed, “among all our contemporary experts, physicians are those trained to the highest level of specialized incompetence for this urgently needed pursuit.”

Organized medicine has always carefully guarded its membership and monopoly on professional privileges, from ordering tests to prescribing medications. “The medical monopoly over health care has expanded without checks and has encroached on our liberty with regard to our own bodies.”^[iii] In my previous book, The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State, I explore how this tendency manifested during our disastrous response to covid. But the problem is not limited to that period of recent medical history, and the disastrous public health response was only a symptom of more widespread problems in our healthcare system.

The failed response to medicine’s ills so far has been more managerialism—more top-down control by more so-called “experts”—but this has only worsened the crisis, as I argued in a previous post. Likewise, demands for more medical care will, paradoxically, only exacerbate the problem. As Illich put it:

The self-medication of the medical system cannot but fail. If a public, panicked by gory revelations, were browbeaten into further support for more expert control over experts in health-care production, this would only intensify sickening care. It must now be understood that what has turned health care into a sick-making enterprise is the very intensity of an engineering endeavor that has translated human survival from the performance of organisms into the result of technical manipulation.^[iv]

A professionalized, physician-driven system of healthcare that expands beyond a critical limit causes illness for three reasons. First, an overly expansive healthcare system will tend to inflict clinical damage that eventually outweighs benefits. Second, the system tends to worsen the social conditions that render society unhealthy. Third, it tends to expropriate the power of the individual to heal himself. The solution therefore must involve a political program that facilitates the reappropriation of personal responsibility for health care, with sensible limits to the professional management of our health. To save medicine we must limit medicine. Strange to say, we need less, not more, professionalized health care.

Medicine has developed powerful, self-serving myths, to hide these inconvenient truths. But the epidemic of iatrogenic disease can no longer be hidden; people are waking up to realize that power over their health has been taken from them, and they want to reappropriate what they have given away to an ineffective healthcare system that no longer serves their needs. Physicians have become glorified data-gathering clerks, staring at a computer screen in the consulting room rather than engaging face-to-face with the patient. They ask a series of questions dictated by managers which have little or nothing to do with the patient’s chief complaint. Patients leave these encounters feeling bewildered, unheard, and unhelped.

Medicine now serves industrial, not personal, growth. It’s highest aim is not health efficiency—“throughput” in a favorite buzzword of hospital administrators, who copy the people-moving engineering of Disneyland to create a turnstile system that shuffles people through without helping them. Medicine has become about efficiently and predictably controlling bodies more than healing them.

Medicine has long exaggerated its effectiveness, though these myths have been thoroughly documented and debunked by historians of medicine and public health. A few examples will suffice, though these could be multiplied. Although we can now treat it with antibiotics, medicine did not cure tuberculosis: in New York in 1812 the death rate was 700 per 10,000; by the time the offending bacillus was isolated in 1882 the death rate was nearly half that at 370 per 10,000. In 1910 when the first sanitarium was opened it was 180, and following World War II but before antibiotics for TB were developed it was 48.

Other infectious diseases of the last hundred years, from cholera, dysentery, and typhoid to diphtheria, measles, and scarlet fever, likewise peaked and declined apart from medical therapies like antibiotics or vaccines.^[v] This decline was due primarily to improved host resistance due to better nutrition, and secondarily to improvements in housing and other living conditions. In other words, the two main tools of the original Hippocratic physicians, who focused primarily on dietetics and environment and only secondarily on drugs and surgery. As Illich explained, “the professional practice of physicians cannot be credited with the elimination of old forms of mortality or morbidity, nor should it be blamed for the increased expectancy of life spent in suffering from the new diseases.” Instead, “food, water, and air, in correlation with the level of sociopolitical equality and the cultural mechanisms that make it possible to keep the population stable, play the decisive role in determining how healthy grown-ups feel and at what age adults tend to die.”^[vi] Undernourishment in poor countries and poisons and mutagens in our ultra-processed food in rich ones are the major factors contributing to our current epidemic of chronic illness. Ozempic for everyone cannot cure our metabolic woes.

Health is not a commodity that can be mass produced on an engineering model. Following the managerialist revolution in medicine, even medical harms are depersonalized and thereby dismissed as minor glitches in an otherwise sound system:

Doctor-inflicted pain and infirmity have always been a part of medical practice. Professional callousness, negligence, and sheer incompetence are age-old forms of malpractice. With the transformation of the doctor from an artisan exercising a skill on personally known individuals into a technician applying scientific rules to classes of patients, malpractice acquired an anonymous, almost respectable status. What had formerly been considered an abuse of confidence and a moral fault can now be rationalized into the occasional breakdown of equipment and operators. In a complex technological hospital, negligence becomes “random human error” or “system breakdown,” callousness becomes “scientific detachment,” and the depersonalization of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.^[vii]

But these harms will not be solved by more technical or managerial measures—which will only, by a self-reinforcing feedback loop, exacerbate the problems they created in the first place. The solution can only come from individuals re-appropriating responsibility for their health—what Illich calls “the will to self-care among the laity”—and thereby limiting the expansive industrial scope of malignant medical systems. Perhaps, just to mention one offhand simple example, we should abolish the “note from the doctor.” Why should physicians exercise a monopoly on declaring someone sick? Why should suffering, mourning, or healing outside the medically designated patient role be considered a form of social deviance?

Without doubt, a limited number of specific medical procedures, and a handful of medications (perhaps a few dozen time-tested drugs), have proven extremely useful. Antibiotics for pneumonia syphilis, malaria, and other serious infectious diseases are effective when used judiciously so as not to breed drug resistant bugs. Medicine has its tools and we sometimes need them. It’s telling, however, that pharmaceutical companies invest almost nothing in research and development for new antibiotics, because a one-time prescription drug is not sufficiently profitable. They want drugs for chronic conditions that can be mitigated but not cured by medications. The effectiveness of medications for non-infectious diseases has been much less impressive. Some cancer screenings and therapies have improved survival outcomes, but cancer rates continue to rise due to environmental factors.

Some of the most effective drugs are sufficiently safe that they could be made available over the counter or following a simple screening for drug allergies or obvious contraindications. Some of our best medical tools can be de-professionalized. Organized medicine and medical societies, including the AMA, have strenuously resisted such proposals, as their purpose is to lobby for the maintenance of medical monopolies and the pecuniary interests of physicians. But our investment in medicine—we spend twice as much of our GDP on healthcare as any other nation and get worse outcomes than most developed countries—is enriching physicians but clearly not improving health outcomes. “The first occupation to monopolize healthcare is that of the physician of the late twentieth century,”^[viii] and he has failed to deliver the goods. It is time to decentralize this monopoly. The necessary “surgery” for our healthcare system will be painful and will meet resistance from entrenched interests. But it’s time for us to make the cut.

Our costly medical bureaucracies stress the delivery of repair and maintenance services for human bodies broken by modern social systems—the human components of our megamachine.^[ix] Physicians become auto mechanics for cars whose engines are forced to chronically redline, relentlessly pushed beyond their engineered limits. We doctors are told to open the hood and fix them, to get these cars—these broken-down bodies—back on a racetrack they were never designed to drive on. More equitable delivery of these repair and maintenance services will not resolve the underlying problems: the current system is set up to fail.

Medical care has been massively centralized, even in systems like that of the United States that are neither nationalized nor based upon a single government payor. The only way out of this dead-end aporia is decentralization. Give people back sovereignty and responsibility for their own health and give them ways to access healthcare that does not rely entirely on medical gatekeepers. I appreciate MRIs every bit as much as the next doctor, but universally available vitamin D would do more for the nation’s health than all our expensive MRI scanners at a fraction of the cost. As Illich put it, “The more time, toil, and sacrifice spent by a population in producing medicine as a commodity, the larger will be the by-product, namely, the fallacy that society has a supply of health locked away which can be mined and marketed.”^[x]

Health can be cultivated but cannot be purchased. Health care is something one does, not something one markets or buys. But our current system trains us for health care consumption rather than for health promoting action; indeed, the healthcare system itself constrains our range of autonomous action. Remedies available only on prescription become for many virtually unobtainable for patients and families accustomed to caring for themselves and their loved ones.

Most strategies for medical reform will fail because they focus too much on sickness and too little on changing the environment—the over-processed food, the toxins, the stress-inducing demands of advanced industrialized societies—that makes people sick in the first place. Public health must attend to these serious problems. However, the cure is neither more environmental engineering nor more human engineering efforts to adapt people to a disease-inducing environment. “A society that values planned teaching above autonomous learning cannot but teach man to keep his engineered place,”^[xi] which will only exacerbate our problems. For humans are not cogs in an engineered machine. The problems of overly industrialized medicine will not be solved by industrialized public health.

Further increases in medical controls are not the answer to our ills, for these will only worsen iatrogenic harms. We cannot allow the whole world to become one vast hospital—a recipe not for health but for dystopian totalitarianism run by an elite cadre of physician-therapists in white coats—where anesthetized patients become solitary, passive, and impotent. Many people today, sadly, already experience this state of helpless unfreedom—what Illich calls “compulsory survival in a planned and engineered hell”^[xii]—where one’s sickness only grows worse.

We must look instead to decentralized, small-scale initiatives that operate autonomously, apart from the managerialized systems of medical power. Self-healing is possible just as self-education is possible, without tossing the undeniable benefits of larger-scale organized medicine or educational institutions—so long as these are kept within due limits. Human nature is not infinitely elastic, contrary to our technocratic fever-dreams, but has inherent limits that medicine will never overcome, however powerful our technical tools.

The solution to our health woes will require empowering individuals and small communities with the tools necessary not only to heal, but also to cope with the inevitabilities of pain, impairment, and eventual death. Dependence and addiction to a broken managerialized system will only worsen our health. “The capacity for revolt and for perseverance,” Illich writes, “for stubborn resistance and for resignation, are integral parts of human life and health.”^[xiii]

As the Ancient Greek tragedians knew, hubris brings downfall. Any medicine that does not embrace rational restraint—that does not make the necessary cuts—will end up inflicting more harm than healing. Health is mostly something one does in the context of a supportive family and community, more than something one is granted from external agents. Physicians, and the associated technologies of modern medicine, should play a supportive role in a sane and humane healthcare system, but are not the lead actors in the drama of health and human flourishing.

^[i] Illich, Medical Nemesis : The Expropriation of Health, 3.

^[ii] Ibid., 4.

^[iii] Ibid., 6.

^[iv] Ibid., 7.

^[v] Cf. references in ibid., 16.

^[vi] Ibid., 17-20.

^[vii] Ibid., 29-30.

^[viii] Ibid., 111.

^[ix] For more on Lewis Mumford’s concept of the megamachine, a machine made of human parts, see my summary in Aaron Kheriaty, The New Abnormal : The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2022), 18-27.

^[x] Illich, Medical Nemesis : The Expropriation of Health, 62.

^[xi] Ibid., 264.

^[xii] Ibid., 271.

^[xiii] Ibid., 262.

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Carole H. Browner^1*, William I. Robinson^2*, Aditi Bhargava³, Lazlo Boros⁴, Aaron Kheriaty^5#, Hugo Loaiciga⁶, Roberto Strongman⁷, Arvind Thomas⁸, Anton Van Der Ven⁹, Gabriel Vorobiof¹⁰, and Patrick Whelan¹¹

ABSTRACT

A group of senior University of California professors was denied free speech and academic freedom by university administration and its nine student newspapers during the COVID-19 pandemic in furtherance of the university’s abominable policy of silencing all dissent, questioning, and criticisms of its draconian COVID policies. The system’s failure to allow public access to numerous highly credentialed scientific critiques of its scientifically unsubstantiated adoption of unproven, dangerous public health policies was blatant censorship causing immense mental, emotional, ethical, and physical suffering and harms. We write this article to caution the academic community to marshal its resolve to resist the silencing of scientific dissent and critique in the not unlikely event of future global emergencies.

BACKGROUND

In December 2019, the China office of the World Health Organization (WHO) reported a “novel” type of pneumonia circulating in Wuhan. Just one month later, the WHO’s International Health Regulation Emergency Committee named it “2019 Novel Coronavirus” (SARS CoV-2) and declared it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC, i.e., a pandemic), the strongest global alert they can issue. This PHEIC quickly led to cataclysmic global economic and social disruption.

International, national, and local media immediately stoked public fears of the virus’s massive lethality and lack of effective treatment. By March 2020, lockdowns, “social distancing,” and mandatory masking were haphazardly imposed despite glaring lack of empirical evidence of their effectiveness. The result was nation-wide confusion, chaos, and anger.  Ferocious and vindictive actions were taken against individuals deemed out-of-compliance, including job terminations, arrests, fines, and prison sentences.

In December 2020, the FDA granted Emergency Use Authorizations for mRNA injections dubbed “vaccines.”  The long-standing dictionary definition of a vaccine was itself changed to facilitate public acceptance of hastily-tested genetic mRNA technology that in the previous decade had failed to move beyond Phase 1 clinical trials for several serious infectious disease-causing viruses and bacteria, including influenza, Zika, and HIV (Feldman et al. 2019; ModernaTX 2010). Curiously, in the United States, only mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were recognized despite the WHO approving and recognizing other COVID-19 vaccines. This policy forced non-citizens from other countries to take two doses of mRNA vaccine if they wanted to enter the States, but citizens had no such requirement, further highlighting unscientific and irrational policies. An intensely unremitting hourly global media campaign urged, cajoled, and coerced universal uptake for all ages, including pregnant women and young children (despite no reports of serious illness or death from COVID-19 in healthy children under 18).

Government agencies and mass media became proxy advertisers/promoters for vaccine manufacturers’ initial claims that the shots were 95% “safe and effective,” not only to protect oneself, but to prevent transmission to others. Simultaneously, a cynical media campaign vigorously protected Big Pharma advertisers by censoring and suppressing all questions and concerns about the products, including testing data, safety records, the speed and scale with which shots were deployed, selective reporting of adverse events, and absence of explicit procedures for informed consent. Jabs were administered at schools without parental consent, with children and minors offered cash and other incentives to submit. Big Pharma-influenced legacy and social media all but forbade any public debate, and banished highly credentialed medical experts from their platforms for “spreading misinformation”  

Public health figures, politicians, and celebrities argued that those who refused the COVID-19 vaccines should be shamed, banished from society, forced into quarantine camps, denied food, and even left to die. Any report of death regardless of cause of an unvaccinated individual was celebrated with glee in mainstream media. We cited an Op-ed published in the Baltimore Sun highlighting the societal implications of these vaccine mandates (Doshi and Bhargava 2021) and how they were a form of “institutional segregation.”

After billions worldwide had received one or more COVID shots, reports of adverse events on both VAERS (the US vaccine adverse events reporting system) and Great Britain’s Yellow Card Vaccine Reporting Site had skyrocketed, and excess deaths among working age populations in the most vaccinated countries had risen by as much as 40%, the WHO finally ended the PHEIC declaration on May 5, 2023.   

THE UNIVERSITY’S RESPONSE

On December 15, 2021, University of California President Michael V. Drake  (coincidentally a Board Member of pharmaceutical giant Amgen) issued a COVID-19 Booster Mandate and Return to On-Site Operations requiring all students, staff, and faculty be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, including boosters, if they wanted to set foot on campus during the 2022-2023 academic year. This shifted the University policy from “fully” vaccinated to “up to date,” suggesting that boosters would be required in perpetuity.

We soon thereafter petitioned university administrators to reverse the mandate, or at least provide an exemption option (as was the case for all other vaccines).  We presented substantial medical/scientific expertise disputing the need to vaccinate the naturally immune who had previously contracted and recovered from COVID-19, and were chagrined to receive no reply whatsoever.

         Because the matter was literally one of life or death, we sought to publicize our findings via a guest editorial which, throughout March 2022, we sent to each of California’s major daily newspapers. With no response from any of them, we finally wrote to the University’s nine student-managed newspapers and received expressions of interest only from UCLA’s Daily Bruin and UC Berkeley’s Daily Cal. Ultimately, after days of discussing and advising the intention to print, neither published the editorial, presumably, in the face of pressure from higher up to censor any coherent counter perspective. We subsequently posted our editorial online (Browner et al. 2022).

The information we sought to convey to the public was supported by highly authoritative sources including JAMA Cardiology, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.  Our editorial would have reached a diverse audience of more than half a million Californians and possibly, motived otherwise intimidated and silenced scientific, medical, and academic communities to wake up and ask tough questions.

Our editorial made it known that despite the University’s claim that the booster would protect against COVID-19 infection and prevent transmission, a mountain of studies proved otherwise. Many publications in top-tier journals theretofore considered impactful had failed to perform thorough research, some even including data from SARS-CoV-2 negative patients in their final analyses (Lucas et al. 2020). Review of some key data from early COVID-19 patients shed light on how critical opportunities were missed to understand the role of comorbidities and the distinctly negative effects of some early treatments such as Remdesivir (Bhargava and Knapp 2023).

In a September 2022 article in the journal Vaccine (Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults, Fraiman et al. 2022), UC researchers Sander Greenland, Patrick Whelan and other scientists lamented the lack of “full transparency of COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial data,” and called for a thorough harm-benefit analysis of them.

A long list of serious potentially deadly adverse events had already been acknowledged by the CDC, the FDA, the HHS, the WHO, health ministries and medical researchers around the world – and even by principal manufacturer Pfizer! Our editorial highlighted mounting evidence of serious risks associated with m-RNA vaccination, including myocarditis, pericarditis, cardiac arrest, and a higher risk of death in vaccinated individuals. Data from CDC’s VAERS released on July 15, 2022 showed a whopping 1,350,950 reports of adverse events for all age groups (more than 135 times the reporting rate for flu vaccines). It also included 29,635 deaths and 246,676 serious injuries. It had further been well documented that fewer than one percent of all vaccine-associated adverse events are reported to the CDC’s VAERS. This means that actual morbidity and mortality was likely many times greater, as pointed out by, among others, a then recent HHS-funded Harvard Medical School vaccine injury study (Landofree 2021).

Prior to this pandemic, vaccine manufacturers sought to develop shots that mimicked natural immunity. Yet in the case of COVID-19 and in complete disregard of basic science and immunology, natural immunity was not recognized despite more than 150 peer-reviewed studies reporting that natural immunity acquired by recovering from SARS-CoV-2 infection was equal to if not superior to vaccination (Leon et al. 2022)

We noted that paradoxically, over time, COVID-19 shots increased rather than decreased the risk of contracting and spreading the virus (Tseng et al. 2023). Indeed, an article in The BMJ Global Health warned that “mandatory vaccine policies are scientifically questionable and likely to cause more societal harm than good (Bardosh et al. 2022).” We pointed out that the CDC and federal government had only “recommended” and not mandated the new booster, so the university’s decision to mandate exceeded even CDC/Federal guidelines (Team, Food, and Drug 2021).  Finally, we argued that multiple data sources showed that young healthy people who contracted SARS-CoV-2 had a recovery rate of 99.995%!

We referenced a March 2022 court order compelling Pfizer to release 55,000 pages of internal reports on vaccine effectiveness and side effects that eventually revealed 1,246 different adverse effects in the first 90 days of the vaccination campaign, including Guillain–Barré syndrome, cardiac arrest, deep vein thrombosis, immune-mediated hepatitis, myocarditis, brain stem embolism and thrombosis, interstitial lung disease, juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, liver injury, and multisystem inflammatory syndrome.  A preprint posted by Bardosh and colleagues (since accepted) found that 22,000-30,000 previously uninfected adults aged 18-29 would have to be boosted with an mRNA vaccine to prevent just one COVID hospitalization, that “booster mandates may cause a net expected harm: and that per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented in previously uninfected young adults, they anticipated 18 to 98 serious adverse events, including 1.7 to 3.0 booster-associated myocarditis cases in males, and 1,373 to 3,234 cases of grade ≥3 reactogenicity (Bardosh et al. 2024).”

We explicitly stated that while we were not against vaccination for those who chose it, we were deeply concerned by the coercive nature of COVID-19 mandates. We emphasized that never before in medical history had an entire population been required to receive a vaccine approved only for emergency use, for which there were no long-term data, and no informed consent, which, as a matter of law and ethics, requires that no one be coerced into a medical treatment.  We noted that the shift in UC policy from fully vaccinated to up-to-date signaled anticipation of an open-ended process of continuous vaccinations and boosters going far beyond addressing a temporary emergency. We protested that no exceptions were granted even for those who suffered serious adverse events from earlier covid shots in blatant disregard of the “my body, my choice” stance taken by the medical community for other procedures.

Our editorial referenced the Los Angeles Unified School District (among others) having suspended its vaccine mandate for students and staff in September 2022, after a Superior Court judge ruled that the school district did not have authority to mandate vaccination. We pointed out that the State of California had not mandated boosters for anyone except health workers, and that the nationwide trend was toward eliminating all mandates. We affirmed that the rate of hospitalizations was radically down, that COVID-related deaths appeared to be about on par with annual deaths from the flu, and that in contrast, “excess,” and sudden, unexpected unexplained deaths had increased sharply since the rollout of the experimental vaccines (StatsCan 2023). We noted that even Bill Gates himself, having substantially financed and massively promoted the COVID vaccination campaign, acknowledged in an interview: “We didn’t understand that it’s a fairly low fatality rate and that it’s a disease mainly in the elderly, kind of like flu (Gates 2022).”

CONCLUSION

Failure of the UC system and its student publications to allow public access to our editorial’s vitally important information was blatant censorship, cynically mocking free speech, academic freedom, and scientific integrity, let alone human decency.  Sadly, it showed that University leadership was far more concerned with maintaining funding from Big Pharma and government, than in the actual health, welfare, and well-being of its own students, faculty, and staff.  The academic community should marshal its resolve to better resist the silencing of scientific dissent and critique for future “global emergencies.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank Joseph A. Ladapo, former UCLA faculty member for his encouragement and Richard M. Rosenthal for astute comments and generous editorial assistance.

An abbreviated version of this article was published recently on the Academe Blog.

¹Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095

²Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106

³Professor Emeritus, Center for Reproductive Sciences and Department of ObGyn, School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143

⁴Assistant Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics, Endocrinology and Metabolism (retired), University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095

⁵ Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, UC Irvine School of Medicine, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697 and ^#current address: Fellow and Director, Bioethics and American Democracy Program, Ethics and Public Policy Center

⁶ Distinguished Professor of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106

⁷Associate Professor of Black Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106

⁸Associate Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095

⁹Professor of Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106

¹⁰ Former Associate Professor of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095

¹¹Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095

Address correspondence to:

Carole H. Browner

Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Science, University of California,

Los Angeles, CA 90095

Email: browner@ucla.edu

REFERENCES

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Browner, C. H., W. I. Robinson, R. Strongman, A. Thomas, A. Van Der Ven, H. Loaiciga, A. Kheriaty, G. Vorobiof, L. Boros, P. Whelan, and A. Bhargava. 2022. "Letter from 11 Professors to the University of California.

No College Mandates Newsletter

Letter from 11 Professors to the University of California

In September, the University of California (“UC”) mandated bivalent COVID-19 boosters for the 2022-2023 academic year for all faculty, staff, and students, in effect shifting its policy from fully vaccinated to up-to-date and suggesting that boosters will be required in perpetuity. We the undersigned, eleven members of the UC faculty from several campuses, sent the following letter to university administrators calling on them to reverse this new mandate. To date, we have received no response. In addition, we sent the letter to nine UC student newspapers for publication as an Op-Ed. The Op-Ed editors from two of these newspapers, the Daily Bruin (UCLA) and the Daily Cal (UC-Berkeley) initially agreed enthusiastically to publish the letter. However, they subsequently withdrew their decision to publish, we presume in the face of pressure from higher up to censor us…

Read more

2 years ago · 110 likes · 44 comments · No College Mandates

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Doshi, P., and A. Bhargava. 2021. "Vaccine mandates: a new form of ‘institutional segregation’ |

COMMENTARY." The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/2021/08/31/vaccine-mandates-a-new-form-of-institutional-segregation-commentary/, August 31, 2021.

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FDA/CDA. 2021. FDA and CDC Lift Recommended Pause on Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) COVID-19 Vaccine Use Following Thorough Safety Review. https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-and-cdc-lift-recommended-pause-johnson-johnson-janssen-covid-19-vaccine-use-following-thorough.

Feldman, R. A., R. Fuhr, I. Smolenov, A. Mick Ribeiro, L. Panther, M. Watson, J. J. Senn, M. Smith, Ӧ Almarsson, H. S. Pujar, M. E. Laska, J. Thompson, T. Zaks, and G. Ciaramella. 2019. "mRNA vaccines against H10N8 and H7N9 influenza viruses of pandemic potential are immunogenic and well tolerated in healthy adults in phase 1 randomized clinical trials."  Vaccine 37 (25):3326-3334. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2019.04.074.

Fraiman, J., J. Erviti, M. Jones, S. Greenland, P. Whelan, R. M. Kaplan, and P. Doshi. 2022. "Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults."  Vaccine 40 (40):5798-5805. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2022.08.036.

Gates, Bill. 2022. Bill Gates says COVID is ‘kind of like the flu,’ and that the vaccines are ‘imperfect’. edited by KUSI Newsroom. KUSI News: https://www.kusi.com/bill-gates-says-covid-is-kind-of-like-the-flu-and-that-the-vaccines-are-imperfect/.

Killingley, B., A. J. Mann, M. Kalinova, A. Boyers, N. Goonawardane, J. Zhou, K. Lindsell, S. S. Hare, J. Brown, R. Frise, E. Smith, C. Hopkins, N. Noulin, B. Londt, T. Wilkinson, S. Harden, H. McShane, M. Baillet, A. Gilbert, M. Jacobs, C. Charman, P. Mande, J. S. Nguyen-Van-Tam, M. G. Semple, R. C. Read, N. M. Ferguson, P. J. Openshaw, G. Rapeport, W. S. Barclay, A. P. Catchpole, and C. Chiu. 2022. "Safety, tolerability and viral kinetics during SARS-CoV-2 human challenge in young adults."  Nat Med 28 (5):1031-1041. doi: 10.1038/s41591-022-01780-9.

Landofree. 2021. "Harvard Vaccine Injury Study revealed a fewer than 1 % report rate in VAERS." 

LandoFree’s Newsletter

Harvard Vaccine Injury Study revealed a fewer than 1 % report rate in VAERS

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded Harvard Medical School a $1 million grant to track VAERS reporting at Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare for three years and develop an automated reporting system that would revolutionize the VAERS reporting system and transform it from a "passive" to an "active" system…

Read more

3 years ago · 13 likes · LandoFree

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BRIEF BIOS

Carole H. Browner is a distinguished research professor at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Gender Studies. Her research interests lie principally at the intersections of gender politics, reproduction, and health.

Aditi Bhargava is a molecular neuroendocrinologist with a research focus on sex differences in stress biology and immunology. She is professor emeritus in the Center for Reproductive Sciences and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

László G. Boros is an adjunct professor of pediatrics, endocrinology, and metabolism (retired) at UCLA. His principal investigations involve stable isotope labeled substrate metabolism research with their medical biochemistry-related interpretations. He is also an inventor of deutenomics, the study of heavy hydrogen’s biological distribution and behavior.

Aaron Kheriaty is a scholar and director of the Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For many years he was a professor of psychiatry and director of the Medical Ethics Program at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine. In 2022 he published The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State.

Hugo Loaiciga studies hydrology, especially groundwater hydrology, hydrogeology, water resources systems, and applied mathematics by applying numerical, statistical, and field methods to answer complex problems involving interactions between surface water, groundwater, and human activities. He is a distinguished professor in the Geography Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

William I. Robinson is a distinguished professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He specializes in global political economy and global political sociology. His most recent books include The Global Police State (2020) and Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic (2022).

Roberto Strongman is an associate professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Strongman’s interdisciplinary approach encompasses the fields of religion, history, and sexuality to further his main area of research and teaching in comparative Caribbean cultural studies.

Arvind Thomas publishes and teaches in the areas of medieval literature, medieval church law, and Latin rhetoric as an associate professor of English at UCLA. He studies texts written in Middle English, Latin, and German and more recently has also worked in critical animal studies and animal ethics.

Anton Van der Ven is a professor of materials engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Van der Ven’s research seeks to develop first-principles descriptions of non-equilibrium processes in the solid state with a particular goal of goal of generating an understanding of the mechanisms of phase transformations that couple diffusion and structural changes.

Gabe Vorobiof is a cardiologist and cardiac imager involved in multi-modality imaging technology to evaluate cardiovascular and neurological disorders. He is a former director of non-invasive cardiology laboratories and clinical professor of medicine/cardiology at the UCLA Cardiovascular Center and David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Patrick Whelan is a pediatric rheumatologist who coordinates care at UCLA for children with autoimmune encephalopathy and other neuroimmune disorders. Professor Whelan also lectures in virology at USC and teaches a Harvard undergraduate psychology course on the evolutionary origins of musicality and the role of auditory processing in health and disease. He is an associate professor of pediatrics at UCLA, adjunct faculty in molecular microbiology and immunology at USC, and a lecturer in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

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