For Bhattacharya, Free Speech Means Freedom To Defund Dissenters

Over at MSNBC, I have a new piece debunking the false claims from many that Donald Trump’s pick to run the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, is somehow taking over the government agency that he believes coordinated “censorship” of his views on social media. Bhattacharya and his supporters have been making that claim for years, but the evidence is not there.

The irony is that Bhattacharya, who has long portrayed himself as a victim of censorship, now appears poised to use his new position to censor and punish those he disagrees with, all while cynically using the language of “free speech” to justify punishing those whose speech he disagrees with.

As I note in the piece, folks like Bari Weiss at the Free Press have been pushing this lie for a while and then celebrated Bhattacharya’s nomination as a vindication. Except that it’s all bullshit:

This past week, the editorial board of The Free Press (which has published articles by Bhattacharya falsely supporting his unproven claims of “censorship”) highlighted the “takedown” line (which it misleadingly condensed from two words to one) and said that Bhattacharya’s claims of government censorship were vindicated by the courts.

Oddly, it only discusses the ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It never mentions that this past summer, the Supreme Court, in a decision authored by Trump appointee Justice Amy Coney Barrett, reversed that ruling and remanded it to the lower courts for further adjudication. That ruling noted that the plaintiffs in the case, including Bhattacharya, totally failed to show any evidence connecting the statements of the U.S. government to unrelated actions by social media companies.

The majority opinion noted that “neither the timing nor the platforms line up … so the plaintiffs cannot show that these restrictions were traceable to the White House officials. In fact, there is no record evidence that White House officials ever communicated at all with [the platforms in question].” The court further noted that the only real evidence regarding Bhattacharya was the email between Collins and Fauci, but that the lawsuit in question was not against either. Rather, it was against unrelated individuals in the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Bhattacharya responded to this ruling on his X account, without acknowledging what the Supreme Court actually said. Instead, he said that “free speech in America, for the moment, is dead.” Except anyone who actually read the ruling would see that’s not what was said at all. Instead, the court pointed out that internet companies, as private entities, have the right to moderate as they see fit, and without actual traceable evidence of government coercion, there was no evidence of a First Amendment violation.

Indeed, as Barrett wrote, the evidence showed that the platforms were all moderating similar content “long before” anyone in the government spoke to them about anything, and further that the evidence shows that moderation actions from the platforms appeared to be exercises of “independent judgment.” She further noted how even when some White House officials later flagged content to review, the platforms were quick to push back and respond that the content in question “did not violate company policy.”

Basically, this was all an example of the marketplace of ideas at work, not censorship.

The Supreme Court decision, by a Justice appointed by Trump, makes it clear that Bhattacharya’s claims of government censorship are baseless. Despite this, he and his supporters continue to push this false narrative.

There’s a lot more, but I wanted to highlight a couple of related things that didn’t make it into the piece.

First, I went back and reread the Great Barrington Declaration, and beyond the overly pompous title, it struck me as not as bad as the narrative about it had described. As I wrote in my MSNBC piece, in the early months of the pandemic everyone was working off of imperfect information and trying to do their best. That included public health officials like Anthony Fauci as well as tech companies handling moderation decisions. And also Bhattacharya and his co-authors.

The main difference, though, is that I think the others would now admit that, in hindsight, while they did the best they could with the information they had at the time, in retrospect, their ideas were not entirely correct. Bhattacharya, though, seems 100% convinced that (1) the Great Barrington Declaration was exactly right on, and (2) that the government censored him.

As I detail in my piece, neither claim appears to be fully supported by the evidence, and his playing the censored victim act is silly.

It’s made even worse, of course, because now he’s made it clear that in his role as head of NIH, he intends to push censorial policies to silence researchers who disagree with him. Specifically, he’s talking about denying important NIH research funding to schools he judges to be too woke.

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health wants to take on campus culture at elite universities, wielding the power of tens of billions of dollars in scientific grants.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and economist, is considering a plan to link a university’s likelihood of receiving research grants to some ranking or measure of academic freedom on campus, people familiar with his thinking said.

Bhattacharya, a critic of the Covid-19 response, wants to counter what he sees as a culture of conformity in science that ostracized him over his views on masking and school closures.

So basically, if you support his general views about “campus culture,” he’ll continue to fund your totally unrelated research. That plan is way more censorial than anything that happened to him (again, nothing really happened to him).

If enacted, Bhattacharya’s plan would be a gross abuse of power that would have a chilling effect on scientific discourse. Researchers would be under pressure to conform to his preferred political views or risk losing vital funding. This is the exact opposite of the open inquiry and debate that science depends on.

This is a dangerous plan that threatens to politicize scientific research and undermine the credibility of the NIH. It’s also deeply hypocritical coming from someone who has built his brand on being a martyr for free speech. Apparently, in Bhattacharya’s world, free speech means the freedom to agree with him about how everyone should have responded to his speech.

Something I discovered after the MSNBC piece had been published is that a big part of Bhattacharya’s complaints about Facebook actually were that it was briefly taken down (and then restored!) not because of complaints from the government, but rather from angry anti-vaxxers who brigaded Facebook. That’s according to Lucio Eastman, who created the web page for the Great Barrington Declaration and paid for its hosting:

Seems kind of important, no?

In the end, Bhattacharya’s nomination and stated plans represent a troubling trend of officials using claims of “free speech” to justify actual censorship and punishment of dissenting views.

This is yet another example of the rank hypocrisy we’ve seen from many Trump appointees, who disingenuously invoke free speech principles while actively working to suppress views they dislike. Bhattacharya’s case is particularly egregious given his own false victimhood narrative. He’s the boy who cried censorship wolf, and is now eager to actually devour some dissenting sheep.