Berenson v. Biden: The Case Against Government Censorship

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It will be a long time before all the effects of the COVID years have worked themselves out. One reckoning that has yet to take place is the recompense due to those who were censored by their own government for expressing their own ideas. In the case of journalist Alex Berenson, he was personally targeted for censorship, and he has chosen to take former Biden administration Covid response team senior advisor Andrew M. Slavitt and others to court. He writes on his Stubstack:

I haven’t forgotten.

Or forgiven.

Last week, a Congressional committee released a massive report detailing how the Biden Administration stampeded the First Amendment in 2021 during its doomed quest to force mRNA vaccines on every American adult.

By July, with the mRNAs failing and Covid deaths rising, the White House privately and publicly attacked Facebook, trying to make the world’s biggest social media company censor jab critics. Facebook executives were furious – and worried about the Constitutional implications of the pressure they faced.

Yes, a private company proved far more concerned about the First Amendment than the government officials sworn to uphold it.

At the heart of the pressure campaign: Andrew M. Slavitt, a Democratic operative and healthcare investor. Slavitt pushed Facebook for censorship both during his official stint as senior advisor to the Biden Covid response team, which ended in June 2021, and afterwards – when the documents show he secretly represented the White House in conversations with Nick Clegg, a senior Facebook executive.

As you know, I have sued Slavitt, along with other government officials and two Pfizer board members, in federal court in New York for their conspiracy to force Twitter to ban me in 2021.

The new documents may play a crucial role in my case, Berenson v Biden, because they show Slavitt was acting on behalf of the federal government, not merely as a private citizen, in July, even as he continued his campaign against me. (More on this to come.)

The Biden Administration began pressing social media companies for censorship soon after it took office.

But the campaign accelerated in July, as the White House realized the mRNAs were failing and it would quickly need to push a third “booster” shot, as well as vaccine mandates, which it had previously ruled out.

On July 16, 2021, President Biden said Facebook and other social media companies were “killing people” by allowing vaccine criticism. In response, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s then-second-highest-ranking executive, complained in a text chain with founder Mark Zuckerberg that the White House was blaming the company because of “a virus they can’t get control of.”

Read more here.

Alex Berenson tells Tucker Carlson about his lawsuit against the Biden administration and Pfizer:

"I'm hoping, @elonmusk, you'll hear this and you will tell your lawyers to do this…" pic.twitter.com/F5SjHhnxJF

— Tucker Carlson Network (@TCNetwork) January 12, 2024