 So, looking at an excellent column here by Matt Tebe, the inevitable coronavirus censorship crisis is here as COVID-19 progresses. Censorship programs advance mid-calls for China-style control of the internet. This is excellent. Earlier this week, Atlantic Magazine fast becoming the favored media outlet for self-styled intellectual elites of the Aspen Institute type read an in-depth article of the problem's free speech post to American society in the coronavirus era. So, our elites think we have way too much free speech. We got too much democracy. So, why do we have too much democracy? Cause we elected Donald Trump and they voted for Brexit in the United Kingdom. So, according to many of our elites, we have too much liberty, too much freedom of speech, too much democracy, too many ways for ordinary people to voice their opinions. They censor you to control you. They censor you to humiliate you by making you say ridiculous things. So, let me go back here. Excellent piece. Here's the headline. Internet speech will never go back to normal. In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct and the US was wrong. This is published in The Atlantic. That China's approach to speech is correct and the American approach to speech is wrong. So, this is authored by a pair of law professors from Harvard and the University of Arizona, Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods. And they list all the reasons that we are on an inexorable path. The censorship, a Chinese style system of speech control may not be such a bad thing. They argue that a benefit of coronavirus is just waking us up to how technical wizardry, data centralization and private public collaboration can do enormous public good. Perhaps Americans should reconsider their understanding of the First and Fourth Amendments as the harms from digital speech grow and the social costs of a relatively open internet multiply. I've noticed this trend for 20 years. Law professors writing about the harms of the First Amendment and the harms of freedom of speech. So, this is all part of the whole line of let's rethink this whole democracy thing, pieces that have been springing up the last four years, ever since Brexit. We have articles in prestigious media, such as New York Magazine, democracies end when they become too democratic and too much of a good thing where we need less democracy. Now, these articles became common after two events in particular, Donald Trump's victory in the Republican primary race and the decision by British voters to opt out of the EU, Brexit. So, what these experts are consistently lamenting is the widespread decline in respect for experts among EU ignorant masses. Better known as the people Trump was talking about when he gushed in February, 2016. I love the poorly educated. The Atlantic was at the forefront of the argument that the people is a great beast that cannot be trusted to play responsibly with the toys of freedom. The Atlantic published a piece in 2016 that American politics has gone insane. They want to return to the smoke-filled rooms to help save voters from themselves. The author, homosexual Jonathan Roche, describes America's intellectual and political elite as society's immune system. Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick. This new piece by these law professors says, we're already sick. We've been made sick by our refusal to listen to the wisdom of experts. The time for asking the unwashed to listen harder is over. The Chinese system shows the way out. When it comes to speech, don't ask, tell. As the Atlantic lawyers were making their case, YouTube took down a widely circulated video about the coronavirus citing a violation of community guidelines. The offenders were doctors Dan Erickson and Aten Masahi, co-owners of an urgent care clinic in Bakersfield, California. They held a presentation which they argued that widespread lockdowns were perhaps not necessary. Reaction to the medical community was severe. Pointed out the two men owned a clinic that was losing business thanks to the lockdown. Message boards of real ER doctors lit up with angry comments scoffing at the doctor's dubious data collection methods and their dramatic choice to dress in scrubs for their video presentation. The American Academy of Emergency Medicine and the American College of Emergency Physicians scrambled to issue a joint statement to emphatically condemn the two doctors. Then Tucker Carlson on Fox said, these are serious people, these doctors who've done this for decades in the YouTube and Google of officially banned dissent. On MSNBC, Anker Chris Hayes reacted with fury to Tucker Carlson's monologue. There's a concerted effort on the part of influential people at Fox to peddle dangerous misinformation about the coronavirus. So Chris Hayes seized the gross indifference of Trump Republicans to the dangers of coronavirus. So Thomas Frank calls this the new utopia of scalding. He needs to win elections when you can personally reestablish the social order every day on Twitter and Facebook by banning dissent when you can scald and scald and ban and ban and ban and mute and shadow ban. That's the future and it's a satisfying one. A finger wagging in some vulgar proletarians face forever. So liberal America has become a giant finger wagging machine. News Media Academy of the Democratic Party show business celebrities masses of blue checked Twitter virtuosos become an umbrella agreement society united by looting of Trump fury toward anyone who dissents with their preoccupations. So this conventional wisdom is used itself as being solely concerned the early important thing which is removing Trump. So you can no longer disagree with its takes on Russia. Julian Assange, Jill Stein, Joe Rogan, 25th Amendment Ukraine, the use of the word treason, the removal of Alex Jones, the movie Joker, whatever else happens to be the resistance fixation of the day. When COVID-19 crisis struck, the scouting utopia was no longer an abstraction. The dream was reality. Pure communism had arised. Failure to take elite advice was now murder. Could not be tolerated. Media coverage quickly became a single floridly written tirade against expertise deniers. The Atlantic headline on Georgia's decision to end some shutdowns was Georgia's experiment in human sacrifice. The outset of the crisis, America's biggest internet platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and Reddit took an unprecedented step to combat fraud and misinformation to elevate authoritative news over the less reputable sources. H.L. Menken once said of America, the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor, is so low that any man who knows his trade does not fear ghosts as read 50 good books and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head. We have a lot of dumb people in this country. We also have a lot of experts who are so sure of themselves that they force others to go along with them. The combat ignorance, the scourge has created a new, more virulent species of it. Exclusive ignorance forced ignorance, ignorance with staying power. The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid than the president who tells people to inject disinfectant. Journalists are professional test crammers. Our job is to get an assignment on Monday morning and by Tuesday evening, act like we're authorities on intellectual piracy, the Civil War in Yemen, Iowa caucus procedure, the coronavirus, whatever. We know Jack, but we speed read, we make a few phone calls and in a snap, people inviting us on TV to tell millions of people what to think about the complex issues of the world. When we come to a subject core, the job is to consort as many people as possible who really know their stuff and try to settle on a set of explanations most believable. So we should not forget that a large part of the medical and epidemiological establishment called this disaster wrong from the outset when they were poured by reporters at the beginning of the year. The Washington Post published, get a grip America, the flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus. USA Today published, coronavirus is scary, but the flu is deadlier, more widespread. Want to protect yourself from coronavirus do the same things you do every winter said time. And then Wired Magazine, January 29th, we should de-escalate the war on coronavirus. There are dozens of these stories. They nearly all contain the same elements including inevitable quote or series of quotes from experts telling us to calm down is from the timepiece. Doesn't matter what the virus is, the routine things work says Dr. Sharon Nachman, pediatric infectious disease specialist at New York's Stony Brook Children's Hospital. There's a reason why journalists should always keep their distance from priesthoods. It's the nature of insular communities to coalesce around orthodoxies of blind people who should be the most knowledgeable. Experts get things wrong for reasons that are innocent. They've all been taught the incorrect things in school. Unless so, they may have a financial or professional interest in denying the truth. Tire community of pollsters in 2016 denounced, denounced as infamous the idea that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination let alone the general election. I had all these friends who said, oh, I know someone at Fox. There's no way Trump could win. I know things that you don't know. I saw a lot of experts say, I know things that you don't know, but they won't reveal their methods or what they actually know. Authorities by their nature are untrustworthy. Sometimes they have an interest in denying truths. Sometimes they define truth whatever way they want. Elevating authoritative content over independent, less well-known sources. It's an algorithmic take on the journalistic obsession with credentialing that has been slowly destroying our business for decades. Weapons of mass destruction fiasco in Iraq happened because journalists listened to people with military ranks and titles instead of demanding evidence and listening to their own instincts. Same thing happened with Russiagate, a story fueled by intelligence experts with grand titles who have now proven to have been wrong to a spectacular degree if not actually criminally liable and pushing a fraud. We've become incapable of talking calmly about possible solutions because we've lost the ability to decouple scientific or policy discussions or simple issues of fact from a political argument. So reporting on COVID-19, we've become the latest in a line of moral manias with Donald Trump in the middle. So instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works and in which circumstances is it most useful or if the less restrictive Swedish crisis response is merit or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis of being off, we're denouncing these very questions. We're framing the story to show people how they should think. Conservative Americans see coronavirus hope in progressive Sweden reads a political headline as if only conservatives should feel optimism in the possibility that a non-lockdown approach might work. So are we really rooting for an approach to not work? So removing those videos of those biggest field doctors is trying to stamp out discussions of things that do need to be discussed, such as when the damage to the economy and the effects of other crisis related problems such as domestic abuse, substance abuse, suicide stroke, abuse of children become a significant threat to the public as the pandemic. We do have to talk about this. We can't not talk about it out of fear of being censored or because we're confusing real harm with political harm. Turning ourselves into China for any reason is the definition of a cure being worse than the disease. The scolders who are being seduced by such thinking have to wake up before we end up adding another disaster on top of the terrible one we are already facing. A great essay here by Matt Taibi.