A year ago yesterday

Guest Post by Alex Berenson

The fight isn’t over, it’s just begun

That hot August night 12 months ago, it felt like someone had duct-taped my mouth shut.

Yes, I’d feared Twitter might ban me permanently if I kept telling the truth about the Covid vaccines. How could I not? On July 30, 2021, Twitter had locked my account after I did nothing more than report the results of Pfizer’s own vaccine clinical trial.

That “strike” was my fourth. One more and I’d be gone for good.

—

But the actual reality of August 28 – the moment I could no longer communicate with the hundreds of thousands of people who followed me or the millions reading my tweets – came as a shock.

Anyone who says being publicly “canceled” isn’t painful hasn’t had it happen.

The act is not merely meant to silence. It is meant to shame; you are so dangerous we aren’t even going to allow you to speak. And it is meant to be permanent. It is a show trial that ends in a life sentence, no appeal possible.

It is meant to be painful.

(Guess again, little bird)

That “Thanks, Twitter” is a particularly nice touch!

After that fourth strike, I tried to protect myself – highlighting the risk of the censorship I feared – even as I reported accurately.

I suppose some part of me hoped that as long as I stuck to the data and avoided conspiracy theories, Twitter would keep the promises it had made to me.

(Unicorns all the way down)

I was wrong.

In an instant, I lost what was by far my most powerful platform for journalism, one that offered free access to people around the world. Twitter gave me the chance to speak out in real time about the unprecedented medical experiment we’d conducted on a billion people, an experiment that continues to this day.

That megaphone, mine no more.

Which is why they did it, of course.

They.

I still don’t know who they really are, though I am on the path to finding out. At the time, I knew Twitter’s attitude towards me had changed dramatically six weeks before, after President Biden said social media companies were “killing people” by allowing questions about the Covid vaccines. And I suspected the Biden Administration and others had pressured Twitter privately, but back then I didn’t have proof.

Now I do. I know that in April 2021, three months before my deplatforming started, the administration summoned Twitter employees to the White House for a meeting in which my name featured prominently.

But in April 2021, Twitter didn’t think it could do anything about me. Twitter employees told each other that they had looked at my account and I was playing by its rules.

It wasn’t even clear Twitter wanted to do anything about me. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, was following me. And a Twitter executive had told me repeatedly that the company believed in free debate around Covid and the vaccines and that I was not violating its policies.

For a couple of months after that meeting Twitter continued to protect me – and its commitment to free speech.

But then, in July, the Biden administration raised the stakes. In under a week, the White House devoted most of a press conference to pressuring social media companies to ban vaccine skeptics; the President made his infamous “killing people” comment; and a Biden spokesperson said the administration might try to repeal the legal protection that prevents social media companies from being sued for posts they carry or their decisions to ban users.

—

Repealing Section 230 would cut to the heart of Twitter’s business model.

And the little bird could not tolerate the heat.

In just over a month I was gone.

—

The irony is that Twitter deplatformed me just as my skepticism about the vaccines was being proven right.

Maybe irony is the wrong word. Maybe the sequence makes perfect sense. A contrarian who’s wrong is merely a crank. A contrarian who’s right is dangerous. Especially if he has a megaphone.

And did I ever have a megaphone.

Well, now I’ve got it back, bigger than ever. The 345,000 Twitter followers I had last August are now over 400,000. The 100,000 Substack subscribers are now close to a quarter-million. (Most of you don’t pay, and that’s fine, but if you do – THANK YOU.)

I have two platforms now, and two missions (if not more) – to fight for free speech (and chase down the people who helped coerce Twitter to ban me last year); and to investigate the long-term impact of the mRNA shots.

That the vaccines are useless to stop coronavirus infection or transmission – my last tweet last year, the tweet that got me banned – is now beyond question. What we need to know now is what they’re doing to the billion-plus people who took them.

Neither fight will be easy. But I’m not fighting alone.

Keep spreading the word. Keep spreading the truth.

Onward.