During a time of perceived crisis, who are the best stewards of the truth? If the truth is uncertain, do those stewards have the right to silence those who might contradict them? More fundamentally, do they ever have that right?
Those were the legal and philosophical questions at hand at the most recent meeting of the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Testifying before the subcommittee were Robert Flaherty, the former director of digital strategy at the Biden White House; Andy Slavitt, former senior adviser for the Biden White House’s COVID-19 Response Team; Stanford Law School’s Matthew Seligman; and Todd Zywicki of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.
Flaherty and Slavitt, like many of the Democratic members of the subcommittee, portrayed the opening days of President Joe Biden’s presidency as an unprecedented time marked by widespread suffering and mass death from disease with vaccination and factual information provided by the government as our country’s best road to recovery.
Along with Seligman, they upheld the importance of social media companies moderating content for potentially dangerous misinformation and the federal government’s role in assisting those companies by providing them with its perspective on what content is appropriate for mass consumption.
However, whether interactions between White House officials and social media company employees were simply polite suggestions or something more akin to Paulie Walnuts calling you up and saying Tony’s got a favor he’d like to ask you was a matter of contention between House Republicans and Democrats.
As Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the chairman of the committee, pointed out, life became considerably more complicated for Elon Musk once he stopped enforcing federally favored misinformation policies on X. And, as Zywicki would suggest, there were concerns by social media companies that the federal government, if disobeyed, might start changing its enforcement of antitrust laws.
Furthermore, several Republican members, along with Zywicki, held the “factual” information provided by the government was not always very factual, while the COVID-19 vaccines were not always very effective.
“When the Biden administration told Americans that the vaccinated couldn’t get the virus, were they guessing or lying?” Jordan asked Flaherty at one point.
“When the Biden Administration said that masks work, was that misinformation or disinformation?” he continued, also asking similar questions regarding the White House’s rejection of natural immunity and the lab-leak hypothesis.
Flaherty’s general response can be summed up with his reply to one of the inquiries: that he and his colleagues at the White House “were communicating the best medical research that [they] had at the time on behalf of a group of some of the best doctors in the world,” as if that answered all questions and justified all actions.
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That seemed to be the stance of the Biden administration’s defenders. The White House had the best experts. Sometimes they may have been wrong. But working with social media companies to ensure people had the easiest access to ideas upon which the White House’s imprimatur had been bestowed, even if sometimes those ideas were in error, was preferable to a Wild-West free marketplace of ideas.
Yet, if the executive branch is claiming the right to regulate that marketplace, it, in effect, is rendering major components of the First Amendment nothing more than polite fiction. Thus, it legitimizes some of the worst mistakes of the COVID-19 crisis and sets our country up to repeat them while continuing its flirtation with totalitarianism.
Daniel Nuccio is a doctoral student in biology and a regular contributor to the College Fix and the Brownstone Institute.