The Twitter Files—COVID Edition

The first of what may be a number of Twitter Files related to COVID was released this morning. To the surprise of no one who has been following the catastrophic government response (and subsequent cover-up) to the pandemic from the beginning, David Zweig, the independent journalist who reports on the files, summarizes:

I suggest that you read Zweig's analysis in it's entirety.* The bottom line might best be summarized by this meme:

U.S. government agencies, working in conjunction with Twitter (and also other social media platforms), suppressed critical public health information. Their actions—censorship, dishonesty, and outright propaganda—were (and are) reprehensible in an open democracy and should be roundly condemned by all political ideologies.

Yet, many progressives, most of whom made up the legion of catastrophists who adopted the government narrative as their own, are oddly silent on much of this. 

In blue states during 2020 and 2021, authoritarian mandates were adopted and praised by those same progressives, who claimed that they were "following the science." Nothing could be further from the truth. 

They remained silent as epidemiologists and public health experts were censored; they condemned those who voiced concern about lock downs, school closures, and mask mandates that were unsupported by the data or the science. They cheered as young people who had little risk of death or serious illness were forced to become vaccinated under threat of job loss. 

And now, they continue their fantasy thinking, arguing that the Twitter Files, written in the words of the same government agencies they praised, are a "nothingburger" or "slanted reporting" or "biased." 

They seem unable to admit that they were wrong about the government's response to the pandemic, their virtue signalling reaction to it, and hard facts that now demonstrate that the positions they championed did far more harm than good.

The propaganda media (a.k.a. main stream media), an arm of the progressive movement, refuses to report on the Twitter Files, opting instead to continue its vicious and dishonest attacks on the messenger—Elon Musk. The deep state (e.g., the FBI) suggests that the Twitter Files are "disinformation" or "Conspiracy Theory"—the 'go to' smear made by those who have been proven to have done wrong. 

In my view, the most damaging aspect of all of this is a loss of trust. Despite all of the evidence to the contrary, progressives may continue to believe that big government has our best interests at heart; that it makes decisions based on the best and most complete data available; that it tells the truth. But tens of millions of citizens have now rejected that notion. And that's not good for the country.  

FOOTNOTE (added: 12-27-2022):

*  Zweig has published an article that describes his finding in The Free Press. It begins with a statement that many of us who doubted the veracity of the government claims and resultant policies (and condemned the propaganda media for being complicit) have believed since April, 2020:

I had always thought a primary job of the press was to be skeptical of power—especially the power of the government. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, I and so many others found that the legacy media had shown itself to largely operate as a messaging platform for our public health institutions. Those institutions operated in near total lockstep, in part by purging internal dissidents and discrediting outside experts.

Twitter became an essential alternative. It was a place where those with public health expertise and perspectives at odds with official policy could air their views—and where curious citizens could find such information. This often included other countries’ responses to Covid that differed dramatically from our own.

But it quickly became clear that Twitter also seemed to promote content that reinforced the establishment narrative, and to suppress views and even scientific evidence that ran to the contrary.