Tea at Trianon: A ‘Vast Censorship Enterprise’

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, October 2, 2023

A ‘Vast Censorship Enterprise’

From The Federalist:

When he saw U.S. institutions ignoring Swedish data out in June 2020 showing children hardly transmitted or contracted Covid-19 at school, Harvard University Professor of Medicine Martin Kulldorff decided to start speaking more on Twitter (now called X).
“I have three children and I need to be able to see them in the eyes,” Kulldorff told The Federalist when asked why he risked his position at Harvard, government research grants, even friendships, for publicly opposing lockdowns and vaccine mandates. “If I’m a scientist, I have to humbly seek the truth and honestly communicate that. I don’t think there’s another choice as a scientist. … It was obvious that we had to speak up.”
The epidemiologist and infectious disease expert with more than 200 research articles published in peer-reviewed publications and cited more than 25,000 times had tried to make scientific arguments against lockdowns in U.S. publications since February 2020, but he could only get his views into Swedish publications, he told The Federalist in a phone interview Wednesday.

So Kulldorff tried getting his support for “focused protection” instead of mass lockdowns out on social media. In his view, it was especially important that American children be allowed to go back to school, while neighbors continued to take precautions on behalf of the elderly and others at high risk of a Covid infection, unlike most children.

In attempting to speak on X, however, Kulldorff was blocked by what a lawsuit later discovered was a “vast censorship enterprise” throttling Americans’ ideas online at the behest of multitudes of government officials and government-funded proxies. The Biden administration has appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which paused lower courts’ injunctions against the censorship while considering whether to take the case. In the meantime, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals is also considering whether to re-expand an injunction against the censorship to more federal agencies based on further evidence. (Read more.)