D
2024-12-10 15:25:05 UTC
Freedumb, You Say?
By Gabrielle Bauer December 10, 2024 Censorship, Public Health, Society
didnât give much thought to freedom until four years ago, at age 63.
Freedom was just there, like the water surrounding a goldfish. And then
the Covid-19 pandemic blew in, the world locked down, and admonitions to
âstay the fuck homeâ blazed through social media. No freedom was too
important to discard in the name of public safety: jobs, family
businesses, artistic endeavours, public meetings, social connections that
kept despair at bay, all took a backseat to the grim business of saving
grandma (who ended up getting Covid anyway). No discussion of moral or
practical trade-offs, no pushback from the press, nothing. It felt wrong
to me on a cellular level.
Apparently I was the only one in my middle-class liberal circle to harbour
misgivings about this astonishing new world. If I tried, ever so timidly,
to articulate my concerns on Facebook or Twitter, the online warriors shot
back with a string of epithets. âGo lick a pole and catch the virus,â said
one. âCrawl back into your cave, troglodyte,â said another. And my
all-time favourite: âYouâre nothing but a mouth-breathing Trumptard.â
From the get-go, I perceived Covid as more of a philosophical problem than
a scientific one. As I wrote on more than one occasion, science can inform
our decisions, but not dictate them. What ultimately powers our choices
are the values we hold. I saw Covid as a morality play, with freedom and
safety cast as the duelling protagonists, and it looked like safety was
skipping to an easy victory.
It was a heady time for the health bureaucrats, whose increasingly arcane
rules betrayed a naked impulse to control: the Canadian high-school
students required to use masks on both their faces and their wind
instruments during band practice, the schoolchildren forced (for hygiene
reasons) to study on their knees for hours in an Alaska classroom, the
âglory-holeâ sex advised by the British Columbia Centre for Disease
Control. The lack of public pushback against these absurdities heightened
my awareness of the fragility of our freedoms.
One of the earliest memes to surface during the pandemic was âmuh
freedumb.â The locution became a shorthand for a stock character â a
tattooed man wearing camo gear and a baseball cap, spewing viral particles
while yelling about his rights. A selfish idiot. The memes kept coming:
âWarning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.â âPersonal freedom
is the preoccupation of adult children.â Freedom, for centuries an
aspiration of democratic societies, turned into a laughing stock.
Eventually, pro-freedom voices began trickling into the public arena. I
wasnât alone, after all. There were others who understood, in the words of
Telegraph writer Janet Daley, that the institutional response to Covid-19
had steamrolled over âthe dimension of human experience which gives
meaning and value to private life.â Lionel Shriver decried how âacross the
Western world, freedoms that citizens took for granted seven months ago
have been revoked at a stroke.â And Laura Dodsworth brought tears to my
eyes when she wrote, in her 2021 book A State of Fear, that she feared
authoritarianism more than death.
Once the vaccines rolled out, the war on freedom of conscience went
nuclear. If you breathed a word against the products, or even the
mandates, you were âliterally killing people.â The hostility towards the
âunvaxxedâ culminated in a Toronto Star front page showcasing public
vitriol, splashed with such sentiments as: âI honestly donât care if they
die from Covid. Not even a little bit.â
This, too, felt viscerally wrong. I knew several people who had refused
the vaccine, and they all had well-articulated reasons for their stance.
If they didnât fully trust the âsafe and effectiveâ bromide recycled by
all government and pharmaceutical industry spokespeople, I could hardly
blame them. (And I say this as someone who writes for Big Pharma and got
five Covid shots.)
One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture was freedom of
expression, a core principle in the United Nationsâ Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown
faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing
news outlets. By early 2021, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 83
governments worldwide had used the Covid-19 pandemic to violate the lawful
exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.
âAuthorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed
critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted
vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health,â
the group wrote in a media release. âThe victims include journalists,
activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who
have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.â
But what about misinformation? Doesnât it kill people? Newsflash:
misinformation has always existed, even before TikTok. Itâs up to each of
us to sift the credible folks from the cranks. The best defence against
misinformation is better information, and itâs the policy wonksâ job to
provide it. Modern science itself depends on this tug-of-war of ideas,
which filters out weaker hypotheses and moves stronger ones ahead for
further testing.
Besides, misinformation comes not just from cranks, but from âofficial
sourcesâ â especially those tasked with persuading the public, rather than
informing it. Remember when Rochelle Walensky, former director of the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, asserted that
âvaccinated people do not carry the virus?â Or when Anthony Fauci
maintained that getting vaccinated makes you a âdead endâ in the chain of
transmission? I rest my case.
The marketplace of ideas is like a souk, with a lot of hollering and
arguing and the odd snatched purse â and thatâs exactly how it should be.
Itâs an ingenious and irreplaceable process for getting to the truth.
There are few ideas too sacrosanct to question or too ridiculous to
consider. Thatâs why, unlike just about everyone in my left-leaning
circle, I take no issue with Elon Muskâs shakedown of the old Twitter, now
the Wild West of X.
Under Muskâs algorithms, my feed has become a true philosophical souk,
with wildly disparate views smashing into each other, leaving me to sift
through the rubble in search of a gold nugget or two. Love him or hate
him, Musk offers a much-needed counterweight to the ideological lockstep
in much of the mainstream media. And when it comes to free speech, Musk
has put his money where his mouth is: when media personality Keith
Olbermann recently hopped on X, where he boasts a million followers, to
call for Muskâs arrest and detainment, Musk made no move to censor him.
Works for me.
While the âold normalâ has thankfully returned to our daily lives, save
the odd mask in a shopping mall or subway car, the stench of censorship
that blew in with the pandemic has yet to dissipate. An obsession with
disinformation permeates the zeitgeist, spurring lawmakers in several
Western countries to censor the flow of thoughts and ideas that gives a
free society its pulse.
We cannot excise personal freedom from a democratic society, even in the
interests of the âpublic good,â without poisoning the roots of democracy
itself. Article 3 of UNESCOâs 2005 Universal Declaration of Bioethics and
Human Rights states this plainly: âThe interests and welfare of the
individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or
society.â In our post-pandemic reality, the statement seems almost quaint.
Nonetheless, it expresses an enduring truth: that a democracy must never
discard the idea of freedom â even in a pandemic.
Freedom desperately needs a comeback from its current incarnation as an
expendable frill. In my own small way Iâm trying to make this happen:
never much of an activist before Covid, Iâm now part of a small group
preparing to launch a Free Speech Union in Canada, modelled after the
highly successful one in the UK. The organisation will offer legal advice
to individuals facing censorship, cancellation, or job loss because of
their words. I look forward to supporting people caught in this
anti-freedom web, including those whose words I heartily disagree with.
My newfound respect for free speech is also what propels me to keep
talking about Covid. The response to the pandemic exceeded the bounds of
public health, and we need to expose the forces that drove it. Hereâs
Daley again: âThe world went crazy. There is no other way to account for
what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties
and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.â We canât let it happen
again.
By Gabrielle Bauer December 10, 2024 Censorship, Public Health, Society
didnât give much thought to freedom until four years ago, at age 63.
Freedom was just there, like the water surrounding a goldfish. And then
the Covid-19 pandemic blew in, the world locked down, and admonitions to
âstay the fuck homeâ blazed through social media. No freedom was too
important to discard in the name of public safety: jobs, family
businesses, artistic endeavours, public meetings, social connections that
kept despair at bay, all took a backseat to the grim business of saving
grandma (who ended up getting Covid anyway). No discussion of moral or
practical trade-offs, no pushback from the press, nothing. It felt wrong
to me on a cellular level.
Apparently I was the only one in my middle-class liberal circle to harbour
misgivings about this astonishing new world. If I tried, ever so timidly,
to articulate my concerns on Facebook or Twitter, the online warriors shot
back with a string of epithets. âGo lick a pole and catch the virus,â said
one. âCrawl back into your cave, troglodyte,â said another. And my
all-time favourite: âYouâre nothing but a mouth-breathing Trumptard.â
From the get-go, I perceived Covid as more of a philosophical problem than
a scientific one. As I wrote on more than one occasion, science can inform
our decisions, but not dictate them. What ultimately powers our choices
are the values we hold. I saw Covid as a morality play, with freedom and
safety cast as the duelling protagonists, and it looked like safety was
skipping to an easy victory.
It was a heady time for the health bureaucrats, whose increasingly arcane
rules betrayed a naked impulse to control: the Canadian high-school
students required to use masks on both their faces and their wind
instruments during band practice, the schoolchildren forced (for hygiene
reasons) to study on their knees for hours in an Alaska classroom, the
âglory-holeâ sex advised by the British Columbia Centre for Disease
Control. The lack of public pushback against these absurdities heightened
my awareness of the fragility of our freedoms.
One of the earliest memes to surface during the pandemic was âmuh
freedumb.â The locution became a shorthand for a stock character â a
tattooed man wearing camo gear and a baseball cap, spewing viral particles
while yelling about his rights. A selfish idiot. The memes kept coming:
âWarning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.â âPersonal freedom
is the preoccupation of adult children.â Freedom, for centuries an
aspiration of democratic societies, turned into a laughing stock.
Eventually, pro-freedom voices began trickling into the public arena. I
wasnât alone, after all. There were others who understood, in the words of
Telegraph writer Janet Daley, that the institutional response to Covid-19
had steamrolled over âthe dimension of human experience which gives
meaning and value to private life.â Lionel Shriver decried how âacross the
Western world, freedoms that citizens took for granted seven months ago
have been revoked at a stroke.â And Laura Dodsworth brought tears to my
eyes when she wrote, in her 2021 book A State of Fear, that she feared
authoritarianism more than death.
Once the vaccines rolled out, the war on freedom of conscience went
nuclear. If you breathed a word against the products, or even the
mandates, you were âliterally killing people.â The hostility towards the
âunvaxxedâ culminated in a Toronto Star front page showcasing public
vitriol, splashed with such sentiments as: âI honestly donât care if they
die from Covid. Not even a little bit.â
This, too, felt viscerally wrong. I knew several people who had refused
the vaccine, and they all had well-articulated reasons for their stance.
If they didnât fully trust the âsafe and effectiveâ bromide recycled by
all government and pharmaceutical industry spokespeople, I could hardly
blame them. (And I say this as someone who writes for Big Pharma and got
five Covid shots.)
One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture was freedom of
expression, a core principle in the United Nationsâ Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown
faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing
news outlets. By early 2021, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 83
governments worldwide had used the Covid-19 pandemic to violate the lawful
exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.
âAuthorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed
critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted
vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health,â
the group wrote in a media release. âThe victims include journalists,
activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who
have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.â
But what about misinformation? Doesnât it kill people? Newsflash:
misinformation has always existed, even before TikTok. Itâs up to each of
us to sift the credible folks from the cranks. The best defence against
misinformation is better information, and itâs the policy wonksâ job to
provide it. Modern science itself depends on this tug-of-war of ideas,
which filters out weaker hypotheses and moves stronger ones ahead for
further testing.
Besides, misinformation comes not just from cranks, but from âofficial
sourcesâ â especially those tasked with persuading the public, rather than
informing it. Remember when Rochelle Walensky, former director of the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, asserted that
âvaccinated people do not carry the virus?â Or when Anthony Fauci
maintained that getting vaccinated makes you a âdead endâ in the chain of
transmission? I rest my case.
The marketplace of ideas is like a souk, with a lot of hollering and
arguing and the odd snatched purse â and thatâs exactly how it should be.
Itâs an ingenious and irreplaceable process for getting to the truth.
There are few ideas too sacrosanct to question or too ridiculous to
consider. Thatâs why, unlike just about everyone in my left-leaning
circle, I take no issue with Elon Muskâs shakedown of the old Twitter, now
the Wild West of X.
Under Muskâs algorithms, my feed has become a true philosophical souk,
with wildly disparate views smashing into each other, leaving me to sift
through the rubble in search of a gold nugget or two. Love him or hate
him, Musk offers a much-needed counterweight to the ideological lockstep
in much of the mainstream media. And when it comes to free speech, Musk
has put his money where his mouth is: when media personality Keith
Olbermann recently hopped on X, where he boasts a million followers, to
call for Muskâs arrest and detainment, Musk made no move to censor him.
Works for me.
While the âold normalâ has thankfully returned to our daily lives, save
the odd mask in a shopping mall or subway car, the stench of censorship
that blew in with the pandemic has yet to dissipate. An obsession with
disinformation permeates the zeitgeist, spurring lawmakers in several
Western countries to censor the flow of thoughts and ideas that gives a
free society its pulse.
We cannot excise personal freedom from a democratic society, even in the
interests of the âpublic good,â without poisoning the roots of democracy
itself. Article 3 of UNESCOâs 2005 Universal Declaration of Bioethics and
Human Rights states this plainly: âThe interests and welfare of the
individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or
society.â In our post-pandemic reality, the statement seems almost quaint.
Nonetheless, it expresses an enduring truth: that a democracy must never
discard the idea of freedom â even in a pandemic.
Freedom desperately needs a comeback from its current incarnation as an
expendable frill. In my own small way Iâm trying to make this happen:
never much of an activist before Covid, Iâm now part of a small group
preparing to launch a Free Speech Union in Canada, modelled after the
highly successful one in the UK. The organisation will offer legal advice
to individuals facing censorship, cancellation, or job loss because of
their words. I look forward to supporting people caught in this
anti-freedom web, including those whose words I heartily disagree with.
My newfound respect for free speech is also what propels me to keep
talking about Covid. The response to the pandemic exceeded the bounds of
public health, and we need to expose the forces that drove it. Hereâs
Daley again: âThe world went crazy. There is no other way to account for
what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties
and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.â We canât let it happen
again.