I answer questions about my views of capital punishment, the Electoral College, and whether I’m concerned about a crackdown on free speech from the left.
On the Electoral College - It seems to me that the major problem with the Electoral College is that it was created before the advent of major political parties and thus without the understanding of what that would do to the College. The original idea was that each state would select a group of responsible citizens (the electors) who would then look at the candidates and vote on which one they felt to be the best choice. The idea was that the electors would be independent, each one able to vote his (since at the time no women would become electors) conscience. Clearly that is no longer the case. Our ossified binary party system has resulted in party loyalty becoming superior to independent thought. If we could find a way to return the Electoral College system to its original design and function, it might actually strengthen our presidential elections by removing from them excesses of passion, prejudice, and parochialism. I must admit that I’m unsure how that could be accomplished; electors would have to be chosen outside partisan political influence. What that conundrum makes clear is that our real problem is that ossified binary party system. Indeed, the Founders recognized that danger, publicly eschewing the idea of ‘factionalism’. But of course they then succumbed to it, creating the initial system themselves although it did not become the divisive juggernaut it has until the 1830’s. Having done so, it has now trapped us into and ‘us and them’ mode that has increasingly polarized us.
Don't worry, I feel that Mr Trump and company will get around to getting rid of many of us from the electorate, either by declaring us insufficiently American to be citizens or the more direct means they will find more viscerally satisfying.
Perhaps that were unlikely, but I have not bothered to count the number of times I have encountered on the Web a response to a suggestion that we regulate our militia better of 'If you want to take my gun* youʼre a traitor* and you know what the Constitution says we have to do to traitors*, donʼt you?'.
Yes, I’ve had a similar experience, but the internet for all it’s vicissitudes is in part a bit like the old bog standard playground bully - a lot of noise and not much courage when well- confronted.
On indicting Trump (or for that matter, any other ex or current president). I get the argument from political practicality. Indicting Trump on these various charges has certainly appeared to strengthen his followers’ belief in ‘lawfare’, and if any doubt exists about that, a daily reading of the OpEd pages of the Wall Street Journal should be quite enough proof.
I also get the argument that the choice should remain with the voters, not prosecuters, judges and juries. We are a republic, not a banana republic in which show trials motivated strictly by oppositional party politics or a dictator’s vengeance are a fixture of national life.
And I get the argument that all law, being created by human beings, is always going to be to some measure political rather than wholly ideal.
But if there is virtually no possibility of holding our leaders to an ideal state of law, then what? Democracy itself is both practical and ideal, so in order for it to be maintained, we must aspire to both.
A part of me (especially since I’m an old while guy of nearly 80 and thus unlikely to suffer much under Trump 2.0) increasingly wonders if what this country needs is the shock of an experience of Trump 2.0. Perhaps we periodically need a substantial wakeup call in order for us to realize that what unites us as a nation is far more powerful than what divides us as two competing political parties with two competing visions of the nation we were founded to be - the one more inclusive that exclusive, and the other the reverse.
Still, without Trump as repeat candidate, which legally and constitutionally should have happened after January 6th if the Republican Party for both practical and ideal reasons had helped to make happen, we might be in a much better place right now. Trump as merely a loud, bitter, increasingly incoherent voice instead of a viable candidate might be already fading into the background of a far less divisive campaign and future. The bar of justice cannot be merely political, or it cannot be justice at all.
On God and religion - To deny our capacity for spirituality would be to deny our humanity. We are that creature, alone among all the others (at least as far as any real proof of an alternative is available) which invariably imagines something greater than ourselves, which seeks reasons for that we cannot ourselves (yet anyway) effect, which seeks above almost all else a reason for existence itself. So there will always be a tendency in us to lust for some sort of ‘divine’, some comprehensive explanation beyond pure chance for all that we see to the furtherest micro and macro reaches of whatever universe we perceive.
The problem with this capacity is our determination to organize it into groups of the like-minded and then, because we think ourselves the only ones ‘in tune’ with the proper concept of the ‘divine', to attempt to inflict our beliefs on everyone else.
I am an atheist, although not of the militant variety. And we would have far less of a problem with organized religious faith if so many of those faiths were not of the militant variety themselves. The evangelicals have one thing right, I think, that each of us must find that relationship which Martin Buber defined as ‘I and Thou’. What they get wrong is demanding that everybody else has to see it the same way.
Religion by its nature is particularly a source of potential trouble because it is not subject to any objective test, so there is always a temptation to 'prove' it by forcing people publicly to agree, or not to disagree.
If your criteria for ‘potential trouble’ is because some human capacity is not subject to objective tests, you will have to include, among other human capacities, love. There’s no doubt that love has been the cause of not a few problems because of the need to ‘prove it’ along with the undoubted benefits it confers. But I doubt you’d want to toss it into the trash bin.
Our capacity for spirituality has been the cause of some of the greatest things we’ve ever written or built or done as well as some of the most awful. That is part and parcel of the human condition. We are a contradiction, a creature of internal storms - I often characterize us as an evolutionarily cobbled together combination of an animal, a poet, a builder, and a would-be god.
For that reason, I believe that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is one of the wisest moves the Founders made. For all the problems that have racked us, we’ve never yet succumbed to the madness of the Inquisition, the wars of the Reformation, or the rampant destructive forces of military jihad. Certainly there are forces within our nation that would like to change that, but despite the current help of the Supreme Court in their attempts to dismantle parts of the Clause, we’re still free of most of that. I ‘pray’ we remain so.
We likely would differ as to which, but some unprovable things seem to me to be worth the bother and others not.
I would hold, however, that religious disputes used to 'prove' unprovables have been particularly liable to mass-violence, notably the religious wars you referenced and that I, too, am sure the Founders had well in mind. I should say that some religions' truth-claims invite this: the suffering of millions dying in a war—but going to Heaven—pales to insignificance in comparison with the infinite suffering of one damned soul, and the calculus of anything you can can do to someone in an effort to 'save' them, or to dissuade others from damning themselves in imitation is the same.
"The idea was that presidential candidates should be forced to make their pitches broadly, to several states and regions of the country with distinct interests and outlooks, not just to a handful of population centers (the biggest cities, with the most votes), while ignoring the rest."
No, this is entirely untrue. The assumption was that it would be impossible for anyone to win a majority of the national vote. This was the belief even when the language describing the college was revised following Jefferson's election despite the fact that that had happened in all four presidential elections that had occurred. Once the "revolutionary generation" passed, it was assumed there would be multiple candidates, and no parties, and no one would ever win a majority outright. The original language allowed Congress to choose among the top five vote getters--the idea was to give candidates from small states a chance. The amended language cut that to three. The language you use was invented by Republicans trying explain away and justify their reliance on the Electoral College, because they can't win the popular vote. Frankly, your ignorance here is quite disappointing.
"Entirely untrue." I don't think so. The EC may be the part of the Constitution that functions most discontinuously from what the framers envisioned. Yes, we quickly developed parties, and long before the "founding generation" had passed, but the idea of electors dispassionately rising above factionalism to regally make a choice for the country as a whole proved thoroughly unrealistic almost immediately. What we've ended up with is a system that doesn't presume, let alone require, a meeting at which electors are empowered to make decisions about which candidate to elevate to the presidency independent of the popular vote totals. You yourself trip over my original point when you say "the idea was to give candidates from small states a chance." Yes, it was then, and it is now, too, and not just in competing to be chosen by Congress among the top five or top three popular vote winners. The intent has always been to ensure, as much as possible, that one region or faction or defined interest didn't come to rule despotically over the others. You may think this precisely describes the contemporary Republican Party because it sometimes wins the presidency despite the fact that it "can't win the popular vote." But of course it can, and it might again soon. (Our popular vote results are nowhere near as lopsided as they were for the Democrats in the 30s, early 40s, and mid-60s.) The Democrats could also try changing their electoral pitch to appeal to more "red" state voters, thereby removing the contingent advantage the GOP enjoys at this moment in our country's nearly 240-year history of attempting to govern itself.
This conversation reminds me of two issues that haven't quite made sense to me. First, isn't complaining that the Republicans "can't win the popular vote" (or haven't done so very often since 1988) a bit beside the point? After all, for better or worse, the electoral college determines how one wins the presidency. Because of that, both candidates and voters make calculations based on the electoral college that they would not otherwise. To give one small example, I voted for Kamala Harris in early voting this morning. But I don't like either candidate. The only reason that I voted for her is because I live in a swing state and want to prevent Trump from taking office again. If I did not live in. swing state, as has been the case in the past, I would have voted for a third party candidate this morning. I am sure that I am not the only voter who weighs his or her vote in this manner. I am sure that I would consider how to vote much differently under a straight up popular vote system. Likewise, presidential campaigns would be run much differently. In other words, complaining about "losing the popular vote" when we operate under the rules of the electoral college seems to make about as much sense as losing a game of chess and then complaining that the person who beat you never wins under the rules of checkers.
With all the above said, this brings me to my second issue. If one wished to alter the current electoral college given the fact that changing the Constitution itself is unlikely, wouldn't expanding the House of Representatives via legislation be the easiest way to do so? For instance, if one implemented the Wyoming rule, which would use the population of the least populated state as the ratio of representatives to people in a district, that would raise the total number of members of the House of Representatives to 574. In addition to making representation in the House more equitable, it would give more seats to the most populous states and thus would dilute any advantage that small states currently have in the electoral college. Some people might complain about expanding the House, although if Great Britain can have 650 members in the House of Commons with a much smaller population, surely the United States could expand the House of Representatives.
I'm sorry, the Electoral College was NOT created to force candidates to campaign all across the country, which was impossible in those days anyway. This is a rationale that has been added later by "explainers" explaining away a constitutional oddity that didn't cause any real damage in the past, but is causing plenty now. When Andrew Jackson was denied the presidency in 1824, the howl over the "Dirty Deal"--the constitutional mechanism functioning exactly as intended--demonstrates how far the thinking of the country had moved since the "Framers". In fact, Congress could have given the presidency to Henry Clay, who got less than half of Adams' vote total, and less than a third of Jackson's. What would have been the reaction to that? Today, of course, a Republican Congress would be happy to give Trump the presidency despite his coming in second in the popular vote, but they would, of course, insist that he really won.
A possible dispute: would abolishing the Senate by Constitutional amendment violate the 'unamendable "equal representation in the Senate"' clause in the Constitution?—the V.P. would then be President of Nothing. Would keeping the Senate but setting the number per state to zero permitted?
Friends - we are entering The Great Change. The West will no more resemble what we know and love than the Soviet Union resembled Czarist Russia or Xi’s China resembles the Ming Dynasty.
We are feeling it now.
An old and durable system of representative government is eroding beneath our feet through the absorption of humanity into The Digital Globe. Parliaments and Senates cannot keep apace.
Just as surely as the printing press destroyed a thousand year papal reign through the dissemination of Luther’s Reformation ideas.
Just as surely as the radio empowered Goebbels to spread the Fuehrer’s fiery speeches to an entire nation and FDR’s fireside chats the same.
Just as surely as the television beamed Vietnam images back home in real time to create a vigorous resistance.
These networking technologies are NOWHERE near the corrosive effect of social media, social networking, and AI - all designed to deliver bespoke experiences to each user as the epitome of selfish consumption. Uniting us globally to the bubbled like-minded…erasing prior connections (and affections) to countrymen we once fought and died for.
Democracy requires a modicum of patriotism and homogeneity to survive. In our age - we are atomized into hundreds of identity groups each advocating for recognition and “our rights”. Inherent to this digital world we increase daily is this division into “have it your way”. We cannot have both Democracy and this slavish devotion to this technology. History tells us that durable structures collapse beneath the weight of these scalable information networks.
So - it’s good news and bad news for us all. Trump may be a force multiplier - but we ourselves have unleashed this corrosive force. We are feeling the unintended consequences of something that was meant to unite us. Instead - it acts as the ultimate solvent of traditional human bonds.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall” —
I spent about 10 years working in microbiology and immunology research and I find the shadow banning around Covid very concerning. Many of the ideas that were suppressed were either within the scientific mainstream or likely the majority opinion among scientists. In some cases, a claim that was labeled misinformation in the US was the official position of other rich countries’ ministries of health. Trying to suppress scientific evidence and debate during a public health crisis is very dangerous.
I am very angry that in many cases these decisions about what is misinformation and what is accurate information is being made by people who don’t have a background in science. In some cases these errors were obvious to someone with only a basic understanding of the subject. It’s possible that in some cases (remember when natural immunity was a dangerous idea), misinformation experts knew that the so-called misinformation was truw but said it was false because they thought saying it was false would make people more likely to follow public health guidelines, but that’s even worse. The last thing we need is for accurate scientific information To be suppressed to get people to follow government recommendations.
On the Electoral College - It seems to me that the major problem with the Electoral College is that it was created before the advent of major political parties and thus without the understanding of what that would do to the College. The original idea was that each state would select a group of responsible citizens (the electors) who would then look at the candidates and vote on which one they felt to be the best choice. The idea was that the electors would be independent, each one able to vote his (since at the time no women would become electors) conscience. Clearly that is no longer the case. Our ossified binary party system has resulted in party loyalty becoming superior to independent thought. If we could find a way to return the Electoral College system to its original design and function, it might actually strengthen our presidential elections by removing from them excesses of passion, prejudice, and parochialism. I must admit that I’m unsure how that could be accomplished; electors would have to be chosen outside partisan political influence. What that conundrum makes clear is that our real problem is that ossified binary party system. Indeed, the Founders recognized that danger, publicly eschewing the idea of ‘factionalism’. But of course they then succumbed to it, creating the initial system themselves although it did not become the divisive juggernaut it has until the 1830’s. Having done so, it has now trapped us into and ‘us and them’ mode that has increasingly polarized us.
The Electoral College is not the problem. We are.
Don't worry, I feel that Mr Trump and company will get around to getting rid of many of us from the electorate, either by declaring us insufficiently American to be citizens or the more direct means they will find more viscerally satisfying.
Perhaps that were unlikely, but I have not bothered to count the number of times I have encountered on the Web a response to a suggestion that we regulate our militia better of 'If you want to take my gun* youʼre a traitor* and you know what the Constitution says we have to do to traitors*, donʼt you?'.
*(Wrong.)
Yes, I’ve had a similar experience, but the internet for all it’s vicissitudes is in part a bit like the old bog standard playground bully - a lot of noise and not much courage when well- confronted.
On indicting Trump (or for that matter, any other ex or current president). I get the argument from political practicality. Indicting Trump on these various charges has certainly appeared to strengthen his followers’ belief in ‘lawfare’, and if any doubt exists about that, a daily reading of the OpEd pages of the Wall Street Journal should be quite enough proof.
I also get the argument that the choice should remain with the voters, not prosecuters, judges and juries. We are a republic, not a banana republic in which show trials motivated strictly by oppositional party politics or a dictator’s vengeance are a fixture of national life.
And I get the argument that all law, being created by human beings, is always going to be to some measure political rather than wholly ideal.
But if there is virtually no possibility of holding our leaders to an ideal state of law, then what? Democracy itself is both practical and ideal, so in order for it to be maintained, we must aspire to both.
A part of me (especially since I’m an old while guy of nearly 80 and thus unlikely to suffer much under Trump 2.0) increasingly wonders if what this country needs is the shock of an experience of Trump 2.0. Perhaps we periodically need a substantial wakeup call in order for us to realize that what unites us as a nation is far more powerful than what divides us as two competing political parties with two competing visions of the nation we were founded to be - the one more inclusive that exclusive, and the other the reverse.
Still, without Trump as repeat candidate, which legally and constitutionally should have happened after January 6th if the Republican Party for both practical and ideal reasons had helped to make happen, we might be in a much better place right now. Trump as merely a loud, bitter, increasingly incoherent voice instead of a viable candidate might be already fading into the background of a far less divisive campaign and future. The bar of justice cannot be merely political, or it cannot be justice at all.
On God and religion - To deny our capacity for spirituality would be to deny our humanity. We are that creature, alone among all the others (at least as far as any real proof of an alternative is available) which invariably imagines something greater than ourselves, which seeks reasons for that we cannot ourselves (yet anyway) effect, which seeks above almost all else a reason for existence itself. So there will always be a tendency in us to lust for some sort of ‘divine’, some comprehensive explanation beyond pure chance for all that we see to the furtherest micro and macro reaches of whatever universe we perceive.
The problem with this capacity is our determination to organize it into groups of the like-minded and then, because we think ourselves the only ones ‘in tune’ with the proper concept of the ‘divine', to attempt to inflict our beliefs on everyone else.
I am an atheist, although not of the militant variety. And we would have far less of a problem with organized religious faith if so many of those faiths were not of the militant variety themselves. The evangelicals have one thing right, I think, that each of us must find that relationship which Martin Buber defined as ‘I and Thou’. What they get wrong is demanding that everybody else has to see it the same way.
Religion by its nature is particularly a source of potential trouble because it is not subject to any objective test, so there is always a temptation to 'prove' it by forcing people publicly to agree, or not to disagree.
If your criteria for ‘potential trouble’ is because some human capacity is not subject to objective tests, you will have to include, among other human capacities, love. There’s no doubt that love has been the cause of not a few problems because of the need to ‘prove it’ along with the undoubted benefits it confers. But I doubt you’d want to toss it into the trash bin.
Our capacity for spirituality has been the cause of some of the greatest things we’ve ever written or built or done as well as some of the most awful. That is part and parcel of the human condition. We are a contradiction, a creature of internal storms - I often characterize us as an evolutionarily cobbled together combination of an animal, a poet, a builder, and a would-be god.
For that reason, I believe that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is one of the wisest moves the Founders made. For all the problems that have racked us, we’ve never yet succumbed to the madness of the Inquisition, the wars of the Reformation, or the rampant destructive forces of military jihad. Certainly there are forces within our nation that would like to change that, but despite the current help of the Supreme Court in their attempts to dismantle parts of the Clause, we’re still free of most of that. I ‘pray’ we remain so.
We likely would differ as to which, but some unprovable things seem to me to be worth the bother and others not.
I would hold, however, that religious disputes used to 'prove' unprovables have been particularly liable to mass-violence, notably the religious wars you referenced and that I, too, am sure the Founders had well in mind. I should say that some religions' truth-claims invite this: the suffering of millions dying in a war—but going to Heaven—pales to insignificance in comparison with the infinite suffering of one damned soul, and the calculus of anything you can can do to someone in an effort to 'save' them, or to dissuade others from damning themselves in imitation is the same.
"The idea was that presidential candidates should be forced to make their pitches broadly, to several states and regions of the country with distinct interests and outlooks, not just to a handful of population centers (the biggest cities, with the most votes), while ignoring the rest."
No, this is entirely untrue. The assumption was that it would be impossible for anyone to win a majority of the national vote. This was the belief even when the language describing the college was revised following Jefferson's election despite the fact that that had happened in all four presidential elections that had occurred. Once the "revolutionary generation" passed, it was assumed there would be multiple candidates, and no parties, and no one would ever win a majority outright. The original language allowed Congress to choose among the top five vote getters--the idea was to give candidates from small states a chance. The amended language cut that to three. The language you use was invented by Republicans trying explain away and justify their reliance on the Electoral College, because they can't win the popular vote. Frankly, your ignorance here is quite disappointing.
"Entirely untrue." I don't think so. The EC may be the part of the Constitution that functions most discontinuously from what the framers envisioned. Yes, we quickly developed parties, and long before the "founding generation" had passed, but the idea of electors dispassionately rising above factionalism to regally make a choice for the country as a whole proved thoroughly unrealistic almost immediately. What we've ended up with is a system that doesn't presume, let alone require, a meeting at which electors are empowered to make decisions about which candidate to elevate to the presidency independent of the popular vote totals. You yourself trip over my original point when you say "the idea was to give candidates from small states a chance." Yes, it was then, and it is now, too, and not just in competing to be chosen by Congress among the top five or top three popular vote winners. The intent has always been to ensure, as much as possible, that one region or faction or defined interest didn't come to rule despotically over the others. You may think this precisely describes the contemporary Republican Party because it sometimes wins the presidency despite the fact that it "can't win the popular vote." But of course it can, and it might again soon. (Our popular vote results are nowhere near as lopsided as they were for the Democrats in the 30s, early 40s, and mid-60s.) The Democrats could also try changing their electoral pitch to appeal to more "red" state voters, thereby removing the contingent advantage the GOP enjoys at this moment in our country's nearly 240-year history of attempting to govern itself.
This conversation reminds me of two issues that haven't quite made sense to me. First, isn't complaining that the Republicans "can't win the popular vote" (or haven't done so very often since 1988) a bit beside the point? After all, for better or worse, the electoral college determines how one wins the presidency. Because of that, both candidates and voters make calculations based on the electoral college that they would not otherwise. To give one small example, I voted for Kamala Harris in early voting this morning. But I don't like either candidate. The only reason that I voted for her is because I live in a swing state and want to prevent Trump from taking office again. If I did not live in. swing state, as has been the case in the past, I would have voted for a third party candidate this morning. I am sure that I am not the only voter who weighs his or her vote in this manner. I am sure that I would consider how to vote much differently under a straight up popular vote system. Likewise, presidential campaigns would be run much differently. In other words, complaining about "losing the popular vote" when we operate under the rules of the electoral college seems to make about as much sense as losing a game of chess and then complaining that the person who beat you never wins under the rules of checkers.
With all the above said, this brings me to my second issue. If one wished to alter the current electoral college given the fact that changing the Constitution itself is unlikely, wouldn't expanding the House of Representatives via legislation be the easiest way to do so? For instance, if one implemented the Wyoming rule, which would use the population of the least populated state as the ratio of representatives to people in a district, that would raise the total number of members of the House of Representatives to 574. In addition to making representation in the House more equitable, it would give more seats to the most populous states and thus would dilute any advantage that small states currently have in the electoral college. Some people might complain about expanding the House, although if Great Britain can have 650 members in the House of Commons with a much smaller population, surely the United States could expand the House of Representatives.
We have all-but-'rotten' boroughs; it took an half-century in the U.K., but eventually even the Tories acceded to their being remedied.
I'm sorry, the Electoral College was NOT created to force candidates to campaign all across the country, which was impossible in those days anyway. This is a rationale that has been added later by "explainers" explaining away a constitutional oddity that didn't cause any real damage in the past, but is causing plenty now. When Andrew Jackson was denied the presidency in 1824, the howl over the "Dirty Deal"--the constitutional mechanism functioning exactly as intended--demonstrates how far the thinking of the country had moved since the "Framers". In fact, Congress could have given the presidency to Henry Clay, who got less than half of Adams' vote total, and less than a third of Jackson's. What would have been the reaction to that? Today, of course, a Republican Congress would be happy to give Trump the presidency despite his coming in second in the popular vote, but they would, of course, insist that he really won.
The Electoral College is not a moot issue because it could get bypassed by the next presidential election:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
Also:
A possible dispute: would abolishing the Senate by Constitutional amendment violate the 'unamendable "equal representation in the Senate"' clause in the Constitution?—the V.P. would then be President of Nothing. Would keeping the Senate but setting the number per state to zero permitted?
Friends - we are entering The Great Change. The West will no more resemble what we know and love than the Soviet Union resembled Czarist Russia or Xi’s China resembles the Ming Dynasty.
We are feeling it now.
An old and durable system of representative government is eroding beneath our feet through the absorption of humanity into The Digital Globe. Parliaments and Senates cannot keep apace.
Just as surely as the printing press destroyed a thousand year papal reign through the dissemination of Luther’s Reformation ideas.
Just as surely as the radio empowered Goebbels to spread the Fuehrer’s fiery speeches to an entire nation and FDR’s fireside chats the same.
Just as surely as the television beamed Vietnam images back home in real time to create a vigorous resistance.
These networking technologies are NOWHERE near the corrosive effect of social media, social networking, and AI - all designed to deliver bespoke experiences to each user as the epitome of selfish consumption. Uniting us globally to the bubbled like-minded…erasing prior connections (and affections) to countrymen we once fought and died for.
Democracy requires a modicum of patriotism and homogeneity to survive. In our age - we are atomized into hundreds of identity groups each advocating for recognition and “our rights”. Inherent to this digital world we increase daily is this division into “have it your way”. We cannot have both Democracy and this slavish devotion to this technology. History tells us that durable structures collapse beneath the weight of these scalable information networks.
So - it’s good news and bad news for us all. Trump may be a force multiplier - but we ourselves have unleashed this corrosive force. We are feeling the unintended consequences of something that was meant to unite us. Instead - it acts as the ultimate solvent of traditional human bonds.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall” —
E.O. Wilson
I spent about 10 years working in microbiology and immunology research and I find the shadow banning around Covid very concerning. Many of the ideas that were suppressed were either within the scientific mainstream or likely the majority opinion among scientists. In some cases, a claim that was labeled misinformation in the US was the official position of other rich countries’ ministries of health. Trying to suppress scientific evidence and debate during a public health crisis is very dangerous.
I am very angry that in many cases these decisions about what is misinformation and what is accurate information is being made by people who don’t have a background in science. In some cases these errors were obvious to someone with only a basic understanding of the subject. It’s possible that in some cases (remember when natural immunity was a dangerous idea), misinformation experts knew that the so-called misinformation was truw but said it was false because they thought saying it was false would make people more likely to follow public health guidelines, but that’s even worse. The last thing we need is for accurate scientific information To be suppressed to get people to follow government recommendations.