Standing Up Against the White House Plot to Shut Down Discussion of Lab Leak Theory, COVID Shot Effects

A nearly 900-page report released last week by the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government details the Biden White House's dirty and unconstitutional plot to bully Big Tech companies into censoring conservative journalism and speech online, and the ways in which Big Tech sometimes voluntarily went even further than Biden's enforcers asked, to curry favor for their pet legislative issues.

Big Tech companies called this censorship a change in their content "moderation policy." At RedState, we have hundreds and hundreds of stories that were — and still are — being targeted by these "moderation policy" changes.

Last year, a federal judge said the situation "arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history" and directed all federal agencies engaged in this censorship and unconstitutional policing to stop all contact with private social media platforms immediately. However, the damage of algorithm censorship — which categorizes topics like climate change, COVID-19, illegal immigration, crime, opposition to transgender ideology, and much more as "misinformation" or "dangerous and derogatory" — has already been done. As the report concludes:

While the Biden White House’s pressure campaign largely succeeded, its effects were devastating. By suppressing free speech and intentionally distorting public debate in the modern town square, ideas and policies were no longer fairly tested and debated on their merits. Instead, policymakers implemented a series of public health measures that proved to be disastrous for the country. From unnecessary extended school closures to unconstitutional vaccine mandates that forced workers to take a newly developed vaccine or risk losing their jobs, the Biden Administration and other officials needlessly imposed harm and suffering on Americans across the country.

The government manipulated systems to strip our reporting and stories of advertising revenue, making it nearly impossible to continue our work. If we'd been fully dependent on revenue from Big Tech sources back in 2020 and 2021, RedState almost certainly wouldn't be around today. Thankfully, due to the RedState VIP program that we launched in 2019, we have been able to withstand those attempts at censorship and continue to bring our readers truthful information the White House would rather you not see.

We've been censored and demonetized for our work on many topics now, but we were hit first and hardest for our articles reporting on the COVID lab leak theory and side effects from the COVID "vaccine." Here's just one example of how the Biden White House's unconstitutional pressure campaign on Facebook and, by extension, RedState, worked.

On August 10, 2021, we published a piece by Jennifer O'Connell featuring comments from Dr. Daniel Stock about how the CDC and NIH were getting it wrong with regard to COVID. Stock had spoken at a school board meeting about mask mandates and speculation that "the unvaccinated" caused the Delta variant. Within three days, Facebook flagged the article as "partly false" and gave us the opportunity to correct our wrongspeak by bringing the article into compliance with the accepted orthodoxy (in this case, a Science Feedback/Health Feedback "fact check" of Stock's claims). To give some context as to why that was a big deal: At that time, if Facebook's fact-checkers flagged even a handful of articles from our domain as containing COVID misinformation, we were at risk of suddenly losing a huge percentage of revenue we needed to keep the lights on.

We were unwilling to change what O'Connell reported and simply placed an update at the top of the story stating that "fact checkers" found multiple claims from Stock to be false or misleading in an effort to get them to remove the flag. Here is their response:

Email from Science Feedback on vaccine article by Jennifer Van Laar on Scribd

It's a lot to read, but it has to be seen in its entirety to fully appreciate the level of gaslighting and illogical arguments made. If I had to choose one passage as an illustration, though, this would be it:

For example, the headline reads “Dr. Daniel Stock Disagrees With the CDC/NIH on COVID”. This headline suggests that there are two opposing sides of a debate, Stock and public health authorities, and that both positions are equally supported by evidence. This is not the case. As we explained in our review, Stock made multiple claims that are inaccurate and unsupported by evidence. Suggesting that his claims carry as much weight as the guidance issued by public health authorities like the CDC, which are supported by evidence, is misleading.

I'm assuming somebody wrote that with a straight face. Then again, since we now know that EcoHealth Alliance's Dr. Peter Daszak, who partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in possibly creating the SARS-CoV-2 virus, was one of Science Feedback's main experts on COVID, it makes sense.

Perhaps it was O'Connell's recitation of Stock's medical training, background, and experience treating actual human beings that got Science Feedback's dander up? From their email to RedState:

The article continues with four paragraphs focused on portraying Stock as a credible source by detailing his medical background and experience. This intention is made clear in the following statement:
“All that background is so you know, he’s no lightweight, rent-a-doctor television expert, or a bureaucrat. Dr. Stock actually treats patients”

How dare we list a doctor's background in an effort to give the reader enough information to make a decision about how much weight to give that doctor's opinion...

Anyways, thanks to the report from Weaponization, we know that throughout the summer of 2021, the White House was angry they weren't meeting their vaccination goals and had embarked on what Sheryl Sandberg called a "scapegoating" campaign against Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon and bullied them into removing and censoring what they deemed anti-vax content. This campaign peaked right around the time of O'Connell's article.

What a coincidence.

But Facebook continued to face continued pressure from the Biden Administration to censor content questioning vaccines, including true information, satire, memes, and other lawful content that is constitutionally protected and not violative of Facebook’s content moderation policies. In July 2021, tensions hit a fever pitch, with President Biden publicly accusing Facebook of “killing people.” Noting that they had “bigger fish to fry” with the Biden Administration, such as issues related to “data flows,” senior Facebook officials decided in August 2021 to enact new content moderation policies that would censor more anti-vaccine content. An internal August 2021 email states plainly that the decision “stemm[ed] from the continued criticism of our approach from the [Biden] administration.”

After reading Science Feedback's email reply to our attempt at conciliation – allowing their viewpoint on our pages, even though we disagreed with it – and knowing that our refusal to take down the article would harm RedState's bottom line, our editorial team decided that we were going to take the risk and basically raise a middle finger to the censors, which is what we continue to do to this day – and what your RedState VIP membership enables us to do.

Our commitment to reporting truthful information and not capitulating to government bullies has had an extreme financial cost, but we refuse to give in. We have an obligation to our readers and, frankly, no amount of capitulation will satisfy these bullies anyway, as Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon found out.

Sheryl Sandberg said they were being scapegoated because the White House was failing to meet its vaccination numbers. pic.twitter.com/ZV4OE8gjMr
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) May 1, 2024

Since February 2021, the company had been censoring the “Wuhan lab leak theory” “in response to … tense conversations with the new [Biden] Administration.” pic.twitter.com/lB9wg7tlDe
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) May 1, 2024

I've shared with you today the back story of just one of our articles reporting on the COVID-related topics the White House has so desperately tried to shut down, but hundreds of articles at RedState published between 2020 and now have been flagged or demonetized for allegedly containing "unreliable or harmful claims" or "dangerous or derogatory content," and even now Google is demonetizing articles from 2021 and 2020 related to these topics. We've learned a lot about what our powerful enemies in this battle for truth have done to try to destroy us, but the war is far from over.

If you think it's important to stand firm against government attempts to control the flow of information and against government censorship of truth-tellers, then you need to be a RedState VIP member – and I recommend the annual VIP Gold membership, which comes out to around $45 when you use discount code CENSORSHIP. In addition to joining us in raising a middle finger to Biden's bullies, your VIP Gold membership gives you an ad-free experience across all Townhall Media sites (RedState, Townhall, PJ Media, Twitchy, Bearing Arms, and Hot Air), access to exclusive VIP articles and VIP Gold live chats, and membership in our commenter community (which is always full of vigorous and knowledgeable debate). If you're already a member – first, thank you; we're very grateful for your support – you can lock in this rate for your renewal at the same link (it will just add a year to your existing membership), or you can gift a membership to a friend or family member (all you need is their email address).