Without warning August 17, 2022, Facebook and Instagram simultaneously unpublished and suspended the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) accounts.1 This wasn’t the first account that Facebook or Instagram deleted after the owners published information about COVID-19 or vaccinations they felt was “misinformation,” and it likely won’t be the last.
Robert F Kennedy Jr. is an attorney and founder of Children’s Health Defense. He’s also the co-founder and president of an environmental group called Waterkeeper Alliance.2 He helped found the Alliance in 1999, through which he fought worldwide for clean water.
According to a press release, he left the organization in November 2020 to “devote himself, full-time, to other issues.” Those other issues have been the fight for children’s health against hypocritical recommendations by public health “experts.”3
In February 2021, Instagram banned Kennedy’s personal account, which they claimed was “sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines.”4 The removal of his Instagram account came as no surprise to people who had been paying attention in 2020 when privately owned social media companies began censoring users, often at the behest of government officials, basically qualifying themselves as bona fide instruments of fascism.
Just days after the announcement of Kennedy’s resignation from Waterkeeper Alliance, he appeared on the “Ron Paul Liberty Report,”5 during which he talked about evidence that suggested that his father, Robert Kennedy, was assassinated by a CIA agent hired as a security guard.
In an Off-Guardian article,6 Edward Curtin highlighted some of the close ties between the CIA and corporate mainstream media, which suggest that the organization’s role in the flood of censorship that started in 2020 may be more significant than most people imagine.
Removing Kennedy’s Instagram account in February 2021 appeared to be a knee-jerk reaction to a CNN Business report7 published the day before, which claimed that Instagram “continued to prominently feature anti-vaxxer accounts in its search results.”
The Children’s Health Defense Deplatformed by Meta
According to The Defender, Meta/Facebook and Instagram did not give any warning to CHD when they simultaneously shut down and suspended them August 17, 2022. The accounts had hundreds of thousands of followers. Notification from Facebook included the statement, “We encourage free expression, but don’t allow false information about COVID-19 that could contribute to physical harm.”8
Two years earlier, in August 2020, CHD had filed a lawsuit charging Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook and three fact-checking outfits with censoring public health posts and fraudulently defaming CHD.9
In an appeal filed July 29, 2022, CHD submitted additional documents produced by the CDC that showed the CDC advised Big Tech to “‘be on the lookout’ for various topics the CDC considers to be misinformation including COVID-19 vaccine shedding, VAERS reports, spike protein data and more.”10
As a side note, it’s important to recognize that the CDC was also warning Big Tech to identify and remove information posted about the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), which is co-managed by the CDC and the FDA.11 In other words, the organization doesn’t trust their own data, which is checked and confirmed by their staff.
Shortly after CHD was deplatformed, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky announced plans to overhaul the agency.12 Walensky admitted that their “response to COVID-19 was flawed and the agency committed a number of missteps in its management of the pandemic.”13
Her objective appears to be to reorganize the agency to restore the public’s trust in the CDC. As CNN14 points out, the debacle with the COVID-19 pandemic began in the early months when the CDC released a flawed test to public health laboratories, which they produced.
The missteps, confusing guidance and ineffective actions continued throughout the pandemic. Walensky’s plan to reorganize the CDC15 includes creating a new office of intergovernmental affairs and a new executive council, as well as a new equity office to increase diversity in the workforce. In addition, she plans to request new powers for the CDC, none of which are cost-cutting measures.
Paradoxically, Meta Censors Speech to ‘Protect’ Free Speech
Kennedy is the chairman of CHD and the chief legal counsel. Meta is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. After CHD was deplatformed, Kennedy made this statement:16
“Facebook is acting here as a surrogate for the federal government’s crusade to silence all criticism of draconian government policies. Our constitutional framers recognized this peril of government censorship.
We don’t need the First Amendment to protect popular or government-approved speech. They incorporated the First Amendment specifically to protect free expression of dissenting opinions. They understood that a government that can silence its critics has a license for every atrocity.”
Ask anyone who escaped from communist countries or Nazi Germany, and they will tell you that one of the chief methods of control was to silence anyone who criticized the government’s narrative. And, as history has borne out, it gave those governments license for horrible atrocities against humanity.
According to a CBS News article17 on CHD being deplatformed, Meta began cracking down on what it judged as false information, harassment and threats of violence in 2016. Since then, they’ve hired more than 40,000 people to “reduce the distribution of content that doesn’t violate its rules, but has been rated false by independent fact-checkers, so that it doesn’t go viral.”18
Even though free speech is a fundamental right that most Americans take for granted, censorship of free speech is one more way that technocrats are chipping away at personal freedom and controlling your thoughts and beliefs.
UK Online Bill Raises Risk of Censorship and US Following
Another peg planned in the removal of free speech is the U.K.’s Online Safety Bill. It was introduced to Britain’s Parliament in June 2022 and, as of this writing, is still in the House of Commons before being sent to the House of Lords.19 The bill seeks to take a giant step toward eliminating free speech under the guise of “protecting” its citizens from free speech.
It has come under fire from civil rights organizations that recognize it gives unprecedented censorship power to the secretary of state and the Office of Communications (Ofcom), with limited parliamentary or judicial oversight.20 The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a free market think tank founded in 1955, called the Online Safety Bill “unsafe” and outlined the broad scope of power it gives, which “raises significant issues for free speech, privacy and innovation.”
The report noted that the bill also opens the door to how “harmful” speech could be defined and that it imposes large regulatory costs on startups and smaller companies, which will make it risky for these businesses to host online content.
Although it may seem that this British Parliament bill is not pertinent to the remainder of the world, it’s important to note that the Brookings Institution, a public policy organization in Washington D.C., applauds the steps that the Online Safety Bill takes to “protect” free speech by limiting certain types of free speech.
“This systems approach is a promising way to reduce noxious but legal online material while preserving free expression,” writes Mark MacCarthy, from the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings Institution.21 He goes on to write the bill “provide[s] guidance for policymakers struggling with similar regulatory challenges and opportunities in the United States.”
In other words, they believe that limiting what some people perceive as “lawful but harmful”22 speech may be just the ticket to protecting free speech. While British Parliament argues over the Online Safety Bill and U.S. politicians consider how to create one of their own, other public health officials have begun calling for censorship as early as March 2021, including:
Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, who pressed Facebook and Twitter to make their bans on Donald Trump permanent23
California U.S. House Democrats Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, who went so far as to demand a dozen cable, satellite and streaming TV companies censor or remove entire news networks (Fox News, Newsmax and OANN)24
Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman Mike Doyle, who asked Facebook and Twitter to remove a dozen accounts, including mine, from their platforms during a House hearing on disinformation and extremism25
Delaware Democratic Sen. Chris Coons, who urged Twitter to expand its censorship categories to prevent the sharing of “climate denialism” views26
See how quickly things escalate? In less than a year, we went from massively censoring COVID-19 treatment information, the origin of the virus and COVID-19 vaccine information, to censoring election disputes and conservative news networks, to now calling for the censoring of climate information. And, believe me, it will not stop there. It’ll go on and on until all bases of human thought are covered.
CDC Admits the Vaccine Is Ineffective
The entire premise behind any mass vaccination campaign is to protect people and prevent unnecessary deaths. Yet, as has been demonstrated by multiple reports,27,28 online stories29 and data from the CDC and FDA,30 the vaccines have caused injuries and deaths that have been shrugged off.
It can only be assumed that public health officials believe these deaths are collateral damage in the name of the greater good. Otherwise, it appears that the U.S. government and public health researchers are not doing their homework, or worse, are intentionally encouraging the death and destruction of American lives.
In sticking with the technocratic narrative, Caitlin O’Kane, of CBS News, wrote: “Children’s Health Defense is a nonprofit known for being skeptical of vaccines, despite the fact that the vaccines available in the U.S. are safe and effective.”31 However, it appears the CDC doesn’t agree with her statement.
If you’ve been talking to friends, family and neighbors who have taken the shot, you likely have encountered at least one person who has been injured by it. Not only have reports demonstrated that the jab is ineffective,32 but it is also has some serious side effects33 — even before the shots were rolled out, the FDA was aware that they could cause myocarditis, autoimmune disease, stroke and death.34
On a related note, just two days after Meta’s actions against Children’s Health Defense, the CDC very quietly changed the COVID-19 guidelines August 19, 2022, saying, “CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur, though they are generally mild, and persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection.”35
Defending First Amendment Rights Is Part of the Answer
Now that the CDC has all but acknowledged the shots don’t work and Walensky is spending more money restructuring an organization in which the public no longer holds any trust, you must ask — is anything going to change?
There are no easy answers to the current situation, but defending freedom of speech is part of the stand that each person must take. This includes defending the First Amendment rights of those with whom we disagree. Each of us needs to call our political representatives and take a firm stand against all censorship.
Until a safer and better alternative is available, consider ditching social media networks that erode your civil liberties and join those that promote freedom of speech. For example, free speech alternatives to Facebook and Twitter include Gab, MeWe, Gettr, Minds and Parler. Uncensored alternatives to YouTube include Bitchute, Rumble, Brighteon, Banned.video and Thinkspot.
For content creators and alternative news sources that no longer have a social media presence due to censoring, subscribe to their newsletter if available, and/or mark their website in your favorites and check back on a regular basis.
Our global society is facing a rapidly approaching dilemma. But if large-enough numbers of people everywhere stand up for freedom, we can still win. And, in the long term, that will protect and benefit everyone, everywhere.
