According to LifeSiteNews, “the nineteenth ‘Twitter Files’ installment has revealed that a Stanford University initiative routinely told social media companies to suppress posts containing ‘[t]rue content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.’”

Journalist Matt Taibbi posted the latest batch of files on March 17th. Taibbi stated that a federally funded Stanford University initiative called the Virality Project instructed Big Tech social media platforms such as Twitter and TikTok to take action against admittedly true posts regarding the experimental COVID-19 vaccines as part of its fight against “disinformation.”

The Virality Project, which is partially funded by the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation, also directed the social media giants to treat “often true posts which could fuel hesitancy” as “misinformation” on their platforms.

Some of us on conservative sites have long alleged that this has been happening. Those on the left often deem anything with which they disagree, especially if true, to be “misinformation” or “disinformation.”

When the powers that be deem it necessary to suppress what they themselves acknowledge is “truthful” information, a Rubicon has been crossed from which it is well-nigh impossible to return, thus sentencing society to potentially permanent slavery and darkness.  

Al Stewart wrote a brilliant song titled “Roads to Moscow,” chronicling a Soviet soldier’s plight in World War II. Upon his return to the motherland after the war, the soldier discovered he was to be questioned and sent to a re-education camp…because authorities were worried that he saw the West…even in the guise of the dying Third Reich. The last lines of the hauntingly evocative song are:

And it's cold and damp in the transit camp, and the air is still and sullen
And the pale sun of October whispers the snow will soon be coming
And I wonder when I'll be home again and the morning answers "Never"
And the evening sighs, and the steely Russian skies go on…forever.

Historically, this kind of tragic abuse is what happens when authoritarians hold all the levers of power. This is what happens when that power depends on extreme suppression and denial of truth. This is what has happened in every Marxist/Communist nation from Bolshevik Russia/the Soviet Union to Cambodia, Cuba, China, and North Korea in the present day.

Ronald Reagan famously proclaimed it to be “morning in America.” And, in a sense it was, as he made it so. Today, I am mourning America, and it seems like evening. Late evening. Perhaps nearing midnight.

It is the death knell for freedom when certain questions aren’t even allowed to be asked, when considered opinion is reflexively, systemically labeled “disinformation.” And when the truth is suppressed and branded “misinformation.”

I pray it is never said of the nation founded on individual liberty that “the steely American skies go on… forever.”

Graphic credit: US3161929 CC BY-SA 4.0 license