How to Defeat the Censorship Industrial Complex
By Bobbie Anne Flower Cox
One of my colleagues, a medical doctor, that I often “tour” with on what many refer to as the “freedom” circuit, texted me a meme a while ago that I just love. Well, to be honest, I actually despise it because of what it symbolizes, which is the tremendous struggles we’ve endured the past four and a half years to get our voices heard by the masses. But part of me likes the meme because it completely embodies what life was like in 2020 for those of us who were speaking out almost from the moment the government said, “Lockdown! Just for 2 weeks to flatten the curve.”
Whilst my doctor (MD and PhD), academic, and economist colleagues were trying to warn people about the negative medical, mental, and economic consequences of locking down perfectly healthy people throughout the world for months on end, personally, I was shouting from the rooftops peering through my legal lens saying, “The government cannot do this, folks! Wake up!” But nobody was listening to me back then. Nobody was listening to any of us. And we didn’t know one another at that point. Nor did we know how to find one another, or even if each other existed at all! The censorship was so thick, you could cut it with a knife. (I’m not exactly sure that thickness has lessened any these past few years. It’s disputable, indeed, but that’s a story for another day).
Once my bold, vocal colleagues and I finally found each other through the fog of censorship, we shared our eerily similar stories about how mainstream media was boycotting us, our work and our “against the narrative” public speeches, and how Big Tech was silencing each and every one of us online. Facebook was sending us “warnings” for posting “misinformation” (whatever that means, because of course I challenged them constantly and asked who they thought they were to determine what was truth and what wasn’t – they responded to none of my challenges, since they clearly had no leg to stand on).
Then there was their blatantly obvious shadowbanning us to the point where I’d post something and they’d only let 14 people see it. In the early days, I had a YouTube channel, but they tore down my videos within an hour or two of posting, and they threw me in YouTube jail so many times, I lost count. Some of my colleagues had tens of thousands of YouTube or Twitter followers, and then poof! One day they lost them all because the overlords cancelled their accounts.
Despite the ever-thickening wall of censorship, we continued speaking out – trying to get the masses to hear logic. “No! The government cannot lock you down for months on end when you are perfectly healthy. It defies our laws, our Constitution, and basic logic.” Yet, we all were facing resistance that was truly unbelievable. Still do today, to a large extent. (Note, I have only about 6,000 followers on Twitter). I personally kept hearing about how, “Jacobson allows the government to control us when there is a health emergency.” I heard a lot of Jacobson this and Jacobson that. My response? Put Jacobson to rest, people. It does not give the government (Trump’s, Biden’s or anyone else’s) the power to lock us down indefinitely.
I stand by that still today. For anyone unaware of what “Jacobson” is, it was a 1905 US Supreme Court case called Jacobson v. Massachusetts, and it has been wildly twisted and distorted beyond belief during the years of the Covid pandemic. In almost all of my speeches over these past few years, I have tried to emphasize the fact that the Constitution does not have an emergency exemption. In other words, the Constitution is not invalid during times of emergency. In fact, it is during times of emergency that we need our Constitution most urgently, as that is the time when government will most likely overstep its bounds and violate our rights and freedoms (in the name of “public safety” of course).
If you think about it, it was during a time of great turmoil that our Constitution was first written, and it was specifically composed to keep the government in check – not to keep We The People in check! I have written a couple of articles about this crucial fact, which you can find here and here.
Okay, so this is the meme my colleague sent me that captures well how we felt four years ago…
Defeating censorship the old-fashioned way!
By mid-2020, I quickly realized social media was not going to be my friend. FB, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter…they were all controlled by the power lords. This has of course now been proven in an epic lawsuit known as Missouri v. Biden, which has not yet come to its final legal end, but nonetheless has proven the shameful and unconstitutional censorship collusion between the Biden/Harris administration and social media companies.
You can find out more on that in one of my recent articles, here, and you can also peruse the Congressional investigative report recently published, “THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: HOW TOP BIDEN WHITE HOUSE OFFICIALS COERCED BIG TECH TO CENSOR AMERICANS, TRUE INFORMATION, AND CRITICS OF THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION.” Here’s just a snippet of that report so you can get a flavor for its findings:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
“Just got off [an] hour long call with [Senior Advisor to President Biden] Andy Slavitt…[H]e was outraged – not too strong of a word to describe his reaction – that we did not remove this post…I countered that removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US but he replied that the post was directly comparing Covid vaccines to asbestos poisoning in a way which demonstrably inhibits confidence in Covid vaccines amongst those the Biden Administration is trying to reach.”
– Sir Nick Clegg, Meta’s President of Global Affairs, former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, describing his efforts to explain the boundaries of the First Amendment to the Biden White House in April 2021.
I digress.
Returning to defeating the censorship industrial complex…With the social media giants and the mainstream media silencing me and my important legal messages to New Yorkers, what was my other option to help people understand that what was going on was not just wrong but illegal?
Good old-fashioned conversations!
Because my law practice had, for 20 years, been based in real estate law (property tax valuations and transactional deals), the CDC’s nationwide eviction moratorium (which began in the spring of 2020 and lasted a year and a half), unleashed a flurry of panic (rightfully so) which resulted in my phones, email, and snail mail exploding with landlords (aka small business owners) desperately looking for help.
They were going under fast, as the federal government (and then the State government here in New York) had effectively made it legal for tenants to not pay rent, not get evicted, and to abolish the private contracts they had signed with their landlords. This was not only unprecedented in our nation’s history, it was wildly unconstitutional. I was so overwhelmed with calls for help, I couldn’t assist everyone individually, so I knew I had to help everyone collectively. Or at least I had to try.
And so, the power of personal communication, on a mass scale, took over. I began doing radio and podcast interviews, writing articles, and doing legal analysis for Real America’s Voice TV, (this was an interview I did on the illegal CDC eviction moratorium topic). Then there are the in-person speaking events. Nothing beats the personal touch! So, for the past four years now, I have been crisscrossing New York state, giving speeches to civic organizations, citizen groups, activists, grassroots organizations, political groups, and so on, teaching them about their rights, the Constitution, and helping them understand what is going on around them.
That quickly expanded to surrounding states, and even states as far away as Texas and Florida. After a speech or conference event, people sometimes thank me, call me “brave” for standing up and helping others make sense of what was going on, especially after I won my quarantine camp lawsuit against New York’s Governor and her DOH. My response to them is usually, “Well I’m either really brave or really stupid to do what I’m doing.” I jest because I gave up a lot in the past few years to speak out and fight for our rights against the ever-growing tyranny. I also lost (read was alienated by) many of my colleagues in the legal field, and friends, some of whom were dear to me.
Apparently, it’s part of the price you pay for speaking the truth and helping those who don’t know how to find their way out of this mess alone. In fact, we cannot get out of this mess alone. It’s impossible for one person to do it alone. We must all, every single one of us, pitch in and take action. Now! Before it is too late. And too late is fast approaching on November 5th.
That meme I shared above is starting to flip, as there are more and more free speech platforms and alternative media sources. Yet, the censorship industrial complex still exists today, and so we must keep pushing forward. We are in an information war. I think that is obvious. The mainstream media is no longer a reliable source of information. They only tell one side of the story. It’s not only pathetic, it’s dangerous.
It’s impossible to make informed decisions in your life if you are not hearing all the information, all the facts, all the possibilities. Freedom of speech is the bedrock of our free society. It was no mistake that our Founding Fathers listed it first in the Amendments to our Constitution, followed immediately thereafter by our right to bear arms! The Second Amendment protects the First, and all those that follow.
He who controls the narrative controls the people.
Just how dangerous can censorship be? I can tell you, from my own account, that I grew up during the Cold War, near its end, and as a competitive figure skater (a sport in which the Soviets absolutely dominated for decades), I had a number of friends from the Soviet Union. I can remember the stories their parents and grandparents would tell us about living in the USSR before they were able to “defect” and escape to the US. It seemed truly unbelievable to hear them talk about food shortages, bread lines, eating the same stale food for days in a row, sleeping in their coats because it was freezing outside and their apartment buildings didn’t have heat that worked.
It wasn’t because they were so poor. It was because it was all government-controlled. They explained how the radio only had a couple of stations, and those were government-controlled, so all day and night, all they really heard was propaganda. The Soviet people didn’t know they were being fed lies. How could they? There was no “dissent” allowed to be spoken. There was only ever one side. And so, they believed it.
If you want to understand just how dangerous that can be, I suggest reading the book, “Midnight in Chernobyl” by Adam Higginbotham. It is an absolutely fascinating read about the untold story of the cataclysmic Soviet nuclear power plant disaster that occurred in Chernobyl back in 1986, but the book is so much more than that. It gives you a phenomenal insight into how this utter catastrophe caused the Soviet government to lose control of its web of lies.
After the devastating meltdown of Reactor #4 at Chernobyl with all of the carnage and economic losses that it caused, the Soviet Union’s totalitarian censorship of information from its people was no longer sustainable. The Chernobyl disaster revealed to the Soviet people that their country was a state built upon a pillar of lies. Once the government lost its power to censor information from its people, the people regained their power! As a result, Chernobyl was a key event in the destruction of the Soviet Union.
How We Can Defeat the Censorship Industrial Complex
Turning to the “here and now,” the censorship that has been going on around us is simply stunning. Great example…In the beginning years of the Covid pandemic, you would hear reports or see videos of heartbreaking forced quarantines going on in China, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries, yet the dystopian “Isolation and Quarantine Procedures” regulation promulgated by New York’s Governor Hochul and her Department of Health (“DOH”) has been flying under the radar since day one. We’ve seen the complete and utter refusal by the mainstream media to cover the ghastly regulation.
One would think the story of a group of NYS legislators (Senator George Borello, Assemblyman Chris Tague, and Assemblyman [now Congressman] Mike Lawler) together with a citizens’ group, Uniting NYS, and backed by an Amicus Brief written by top-ranking NYS Assemblymen (Andy Goodell, Will Barclay, and Joseph Giglio), suing and defeating the Governor of New York over her ferociously unconstitutional regulation, would be front page news! Nope. The mainstream media still won’t report on it! Not a peep about the inhumane regulation, or how we sued the Governor and won, or how she and her DOH appealed the case to try to get the power back so they can lock you up (or lock you down) for however long they want, at whatever location they want, without any notice, without any right to an attorney, without any proof that you are actually sick, or how the appellate court shamefully dismissed our case for supposed lack of standing, and how I’ve been fighting to try to get our State’s highest court to hear the case…(Quarantine camp lawsuit update can be found here).
It’s truly a sin. The media is supposed to help We The People be watchdogs over our government to help ensure the greedy politicians and bureaucrats don’t overstep and harm us. Perhaps that was true some time ago, but today it is no longer.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Bobbie Anne, a 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is an attorney with 25 years experience in the private sector, who continues to practice law but also lectures in her field of expertise - government over-reach and improper regulation and assessments.
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