Five years ago this week, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, lamented on his official blog that some people were “making outrageous claims that the new corona virus causing the pandemic was engineered in a lab.”
On the strength of only one source, the NIH director authoritatively dismissed what is now well known. He then directed his readers to FEMA’s new Coronavirus Rumor Control website.
“Control” was the operative word.
Collins’ words have not aged well. A congressional investigation has now exposed the fraud of the source that he cited. And the FEMA site that was set up to bolster his claims has since been changed. Unfortunately, the record of changes before April 2023 was not captured by the Internet Archive's “Way Back Machine.”
We didn’t have a word for the suppression at the time. But this outrageous collusion of manufactured academic claims, official government denials of the truth, and non-governmental organizations has since been dubbed the “censorship industrial complex.”
Elon Musk exposed this beast’s existence when he bought Twitter and released its secret emails. Since then, Congress has held a series of hearings to expose the complex’s swampy tentacles and learn how to shut it down.
Kemmerer, Wyoming native, Mollie Hemingway was called to testify at the most recent of these hearings. She told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution that, “the right to free speech has been under worse attack in the last decade than at any other point in our nation’s history.”
That is quite a claim.
But Hemingway has more than personal experience and the Twitter files to back it up. As editor-in-chief of an online publication, The Federalist, she is also party to a lawsuit filed against the federal government’s pressure to bankrupt the publication.
In the discovery phase of this lawsuit, they exposed emails from high government officials that directly targeted citizens and media outlets for censorship, glossed over as “content moderation.”
It is called a “complex” because it is extremely complex and hard to understand. It is an incestuous stew of government actors, non-government actors, and globalist billionaires who decide what messages to create and which ones to throttle.
They use government funding of academia to create “scholarship” that supports their pre-determined conclusions. They dump huge government grants into the laps of non-governmental organizations that can spend money without any taxpayer accountability, to reward those who broadcast their created message and to penalize those who oppose it.
Finally, using the threat of regulation by the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230), they bully social media companies into manipulating their “community guidelines” to favor the government’s message over the truth.
“The tentacles of the Censorship-Industrial Complex,” Hemingway testified, “are choking out freedom of expression, important debates, and the right to criticize powerful institutions such as corporate media and the government.”
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley also testified at Tuesday’s hearing. There he discussed the role of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Set up to protect election integrity, CISA is supposed to make sure that the hardware and software of electronic voting systems are unhackable.
Instead, CISA’s director, Jen Easterly, decided to hack your brain. Under the Orwellian term “cognitive infrastructure,” CISA decided that cybersecurity required it to suppress wrongthink—labeling every departure from the government’s approved messaging as misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation (MDM).
So visitors to the secretary of state’s website who sought answers about the cybersecurity of Wyoming’s electronic voting systems were told, instead, to help suppress the spread of misinformation, disinformation and malinformation.
To his great credit, current Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray, took down this government mind-hacking soon after taking the oath of office.
Looking back five years to the beginnings of Covid-19, we can see the first exposure of what has been dubbed the censorship industrial complex. The more we learn of it, the more frightful it is. And it is nowhere close to going away.
Every Wyomingite owes a debt of gratitude to those dogged journalists, like Hemingway, who are helping to expose it. We all should give full-throated support to those legislators who are working to shut it down.
If the First Amendment is to survive, this hydra must be killed.
Jonathan Lange is a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. Follow his blog at https://jonathanlange.substack.com/. Email: JLange64@protonmail.com.
Correction - This column has been updated from a previous version that mistakenly stated that changes to the FEMA site between March 2020 and April 2023 had been deleted. They were, rather, not recorded.
