April 8, 2016 at 2:12 p.m.
Once again: Beware the rising tide of censorship
Once again: Beware the rising tide of censorship
The tides have only swelled in size in that short time.
Subsequent pictures of the sombrero-wearing students, otherwise known as cultural oppressors, caused students and administrators to go berserk. According to The Washington Post, a couple of student government leaders faced impeachment, the party's hosts were expelled from their dorm, and administrators launched an investigation into a possible "act of ethnic stereotyping."
The first impulse is to enjoy this nonsense with a belly laugh over a beer, until you realize that so-called adult administrators were participating in this attempt at thought control and further realize that this generation - the true oppressors - will one day be running things.
More germane to our coverage of autism issues, and much more global and immediate in its implications, is the Tribeca Film Festival's decision not to screen the new documentary about government corruption in its vaccine research program, "Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe," after first announcing that it would.
Those who support the pharmaceutical industry-federal government's vaccine program could not countenance such a screening, and the crushing media and political press forced Robert De Niro, the festival's co-founder, to cave in and pull the film. That's par for the course because anyone who dares to question the establishment's position or its behavior is immediately labeled a looney tune or worse, a danger to society.
Beyond the motivation for pulling the film and for De Niro's surrender - for those interested, we highly suggest exploring a possible money trail from the other festival organizers and founders back to the pharmaceutical industry as a line of inquiry - there are three essential points to make.
The first is, supporters of the current vaccine regime will stop at nothing to silence their critics, and that includes condoning government corruption to do it. In other words, they want to suppress information about the government's suppression of information, so we guess it's all a good fit.
The movie by vaccine-safety advocate Andrew Wakefield is not about establishing a link between vaccines and autism but about government officials' attempt to cover up evidence of just such a link in the early 2000s.
The movie features conversations with a government whistleblower who admits he and his colleagues cover up evidence of a link between vaccines and autism in a certain population - young black males - and even "scheduled a meeting to destroy documents related to the study" and brought a big garbage can into the meeting room to get the deed done.
As former CBS report Sharyl Attkisson reported on this story, these are shocking admissions that would capture the headlines of every major news organization if it was about most anything else.
Instead, there are no headlines, and there will be no hearing or federal investigation. Here's how Attkisson puts it:
"In an untainted news environment, the allegations would make headlines in most legitimate publications and would trigger federal inquiries. However, the interests of the powerful pharmaceutical industry reach deeply into Congress and the news media through lobbyists, propaganda and advertising dollars."
The critical question is, if science on the side of the current vaccine regime's supporters, why the need to suppress the evidence of misconduct? After all, an earlier CDC study had also been called into question about its alleged manipulation of data to make a link between mercury and vaccines disappear, and the lead scientist in that study offered up a scientific argument about why and how the link disappeared - not maliciousness, but rigorous protocol, he asserted. In this case, some have questioned how strong the link the whistleblower says they omitted really is.
So, if science is on their side, and if it is the science that is important, then why not punish those who tried to go beyond that science? Why try to silence a whistleblower without even an investigation? Those who wear the "truth" on their sleeves should have nothing to fear about the screening of a film about rogue government employees, unless, of course, the "truths" they wear are not really truths.
That brings us to the second point. Not only are the media and other critics attempting to suppress a possible government cover-up of significant size, they also routinely distribute their own misinformation as objective facts. They do this about Wakefield - no, he was not convicted of fraud; no, his landmark study never asserted a link between the MMR vaccine and autism; no, the true findings of his study were never disproven, as the media claims - and they spread outright lies that links between vaccines and autism have been discredited and disproven.
The fact is, no study has even disproven a link. The media cites 10 major studies that can find no link, but routinely omits the fact that all of those studies were fatally flawed by conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry.
What the media is distributing is propaganda, by any other name, and on the flip side of that coin of control is censorship, and that's the third essential point. There are many kinds of censorship in modern society - political censorship, cultural censorship (the heavy hand of the cultural establishment as it ridicules and casts out its critics from the mainstream, a la Tribeca) and what we'll call empirical censorship, or the notion that science is purely fact-based and unquestionable.
Empirical censorship rejects any notion that scientific consensus is ever wrong - though it has often been so - or that it is dosed with measures of faith. It bathes itself in the myth of objectivity in reporting that the consensus is always right. The debate is settled, the science is clear, so this viewpoint goes, and so no more debate shall be allowed. We've heard this about man-made climate change, and we hear it about vaccine links to autism.
To give a voice to those who have been scientifically discredited is to create false balance, to destroy objectivity, to ignore empirical reality, according to this theory.
But there is also a falsity of false balance, as we have noted before. And that is, the best evidence for any theory is the number of people supporting it. Yes, the masses can and have been wrong, too, just as the elite scientific consensus has been, but people most often act and believe in their own best interests, and that's powerful evidence all it own.
That's why allowing the debate is important. The media's role is not to judge the debate but to facilitate it. That way it avoids both false balance and the falsity of false balance.
If Andrew Wakefield stood alone in his view, the media would be ever so correct in ignoring him except in a passing footnote. But behind Dr. Wakefield stands thousands of doctors and scientists who know what they find, and hundreds of thousands of parents who know what they see.
That's more than enough to allow them a place on the stage, a seat at the table of debate, and a screening of a film about government corruption.
More than that, an increasing cohort of studies is finding more and more environmental links to autism and now to the role of bacterial metabolites in the gut - circling right back around to Wakefield's original work - and pointing a suspicious finger not only at such things as toxic chemicals, dietary supplements, and antibiotics but at vaccines, too.
The autism crisis we face is too serious to allow special interests to shut down any line of rigorous inquiry and any forum for debate. Censorship in all its forms has never, ever benefitted the truth but has always served a master with something to hide, and the rising tide of censorship in the autism debate is no different. The rising tide of censorship only floats the boat of the epidemic; it does not sink it.
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