Wall Street Journal columnist Joel Zinberg today reminds us that in 2020 the Biden campaign in general and Kamala Harris specifically “maligned President Trump’s claims about the speed of vaccine development and questioned its safety and effectiveness. New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo cast doubt on FDA evaluations of Covid-19 vaccines and said states should conduct their own reviews. An Aug. 27 letter from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asking governors for help setting up vaccine distribution elicited a statement from Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer questioning the safety of the vaccines in development. Media ‘fact checkers’ said rapid vaccine development would take a ‘miracle.’”
Coincidentallu, Between April and December, Zinberg noted, the share of Americans who told pollsters they were likely to consent to vaccination declined from 74 percent to 56 percent.
Reuters quoted Joe Biden back in September as saying, “Let me be clear: I trust vaccines, I trust scientists, but I don’t trust Donald Trump. At this moment, the American people can’t either.”
In an editorial today the WSJ reported that on Monday two Democrat congressional representatives “sent letters pressing 12 cable and tech CEOs to drop contracts with right-of-center media outlets including Fox News. Two days later the Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing about ‘disinformation and extremism’ in conservative media. The only notable extremism on display was the majority party’s appetite for regulating and policing the free press.”A Texas Democrat representative said at the hearing that he saw a tension between “the freedom of speech versus other peoples’ safety.”
Like what was said by Biden, Harris, Cuomo, Schumer and certain media fact checkers?
From Kimberley Strassel’s WSJ column today: “Right now, the greatest threat to free speech in this country is not any law passed by the government— the First Amendment stands as a bulwark,” says Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr. “The threat comes in the form of legislating by letterhead. Politicians have realized that they can silence the speech of those with different political viewpoints by public bullying.”
This observation came after Twitter, Facebook and others banned prominent conservatives, Twitter locked the account of the New York Post for reporting news about the Democratic presidential nominee’s son, Google and Apple dropped Parler from their app stores and Amazon banned a three-year-old book questioning transgenderism.
There is more than one way to skin a free speech cat.
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