REP. HARRIET HAGEMAN: Fauci Diaries Expose Dangers Of Censorship Industrial Complex

America was hit six years ago with a pandemic of panic censorship.

As the novel Wuhan coronavirus began to spread across our shores, anxious Americans looked to public health officials to guide them through an uncertain biological outbreak. The moment called for sober leadership sharing carefully calculated analyses of the risks presented to a frightened public. What Americans received instead was a fervor of fear from the nation’s most senior infectious disease expert whose recently released diaries reveal he exaggerated the deathrate as at least 10 times higher than the seasonal flu. Dr. Anthony Fauci, however, made no secret about his disdain for dissent calling fair criticism of himself 18 months following the first American cases “very dangerous.”

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“Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science,” Fauci said.

For years, Silicon Valley agreed, whipping into action to suppress any contradictions to the approved Faucian narrative with dystopian prescriptions. Dr. Fauci denies ever serving as a government censor. Our work on the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, however, shows the nation’s largest tech platforms repeatedly coordinating with White House health officials where Dr. Fauci was at the top. Dr. Fauci, meanwhile, colluded with establishment media to craft a monolithic narrative on how to address the virus, and Big Tech’s corporate censors clung to his every word as the arbiter of “science” dictating pandemic-era speech. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Fauci Staffers Flagged Potential Gain-Of-Function Research At Wuhan Lab In 2016, Records Reveal)

Fauci said it was a conspiracy to believe the China virus came from a Chinese lab where researchers engaged in the kind of high-risk gain-of-function research of which he was a staunch proponent. Facebook banned posts supporting the lab-leak theory until late May 2021. Twitter suspended accounts that made the same assertion and maintained its COVID-19 misinformation policy until Elon Musk took over in late 2022.

Fauci said the Great Barrington Declaration calling for “focused protections” to replace the devastating lockdowns was “nonsense and very dangerous.” Emails between Dr. Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins reveal the pair conspired to smear the Declaration and its authors as “fringe epidemiologists.” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the declaration’s three authors, shared with Congress in 2023 that Facebook removed the Great Barrington Declaration’s page immediately after publication. Reddit similarly removed links to the Declaration from a COVID-19 policy discussion forum, and Google deboosted search results for the document while redirecting users to hit pieces.

Fauci said Americans should wear a face mask. One year after the first American case, he said Americans should wear two face masks. Four months after that, a vaccinated Dr. Fauci said Americans should keep the masks as a seasonal feature of post-pandemic life. Twitter removed a post from then-White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Scott Atlas in 2020 who dismissed the effectiveness of masks. YouTube removed a video of a March 2021 roundtable in Florida featuring Gov. Ron DeSantis over violations of the company’s COVID-19 misinformation policy. The streaming platform said the video “contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19.” But there was never any opportunity to crack the Faucian consensus on face masks established quickly with Big Tech’s help in 2020.

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Today, the left reveres Dr. Fauci as a hero who steered the nation to safety through a once-in-a-generation pandemic. In truth, his diaries expose him as a mascot of intellectual narcissism so shamelessly desperate for the spotlight he crashed the country with lockdowns, school closures, and societal self-destruction.

The American people expect their elected representatives to act. To that end, I’ve proposed a series of bills to serve as guardrails against censorship for this generation and the next. My First Amendment Accountability Act will give Americans the right to sue when federal officials violate one of their most fundamental civil liberties. The Preventing AI Censorship Act extends this ability to sue federal officials who violate First Amendment rights through the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Americans must have adequate recourse to challenge the censorship machine in the next pandemic. Otherwise, Americans risk suffering under another lockdown regime where mass isolation becomes worse than the virus itself.

Republican Rep. Harriet Hageman has served in Congress since 2023, representing Wyoming’s sole congressional district.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.

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