About Dr. Fauci, and the importance of the marketplace of ideas

Dr. Anthony Fauci is the face and official voice of all that is going on with the Covid pandemic, and how we should respond to it. Depending upon whom you ask, Fauci is either one who walks on water, or one who lives in hell.

I am one of the likely few outside the healthcare and scientific communities who had heard of the man prior to the invasion of COVID-19. That previous knowledge kept me from bowing down to him, as so many have. But at the same time, it gave me reason to give him the benefit of the doubt on the mysteries of, and prescriptions for dealing with the pandemic.

In the 1980s when AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) was a new thing, its causes were being investigated. Two schools of thought existed: one was that a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was the cause; the other was that long-term drug use and other factors that weaken the immune system were the cause.

Another scientist, Dr. Peter Duesberg, was prominent at that time. Duesberg isolated the first cancer gene through his work on retroviruses in 1970, and mapped the genetic structure of these viruses. This, and his continued work on viruses, resulted in his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986. He also received a seven-year Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Duesberg had made a name for himself in the scientific world. He is regarded as a specialist on viruses and retroviruses. He was a primary voice among those who argued that HIV is not the cause of AIDS.

One of the better-known opponents of Duesberg and his theory was, and is, Anthony
Fauci, and that is how I came to know who he is. Fauci has an MD degree and has worked in the National Institutes of Health, and as a clinical associate in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he now heads. He no doubt has learned things beyond what a practicing physician knows in some areas. But does he know more about viruses than a virology expert?

Duesberg’s position is that HIV is merely a passenger in AIDS, and not the cause, a position that draws derision from the HIV = AIDS faction.

Through the decades, viruses have been defeated by vaccines. Those include: flu, SARS, measles, hepatitis A and B, mumps, chickenpox, whooping cough, tetanus, polio, and recently COVID-19. However, to date, decades after AIDS came on the scene, there is no vaccine for HIV.

Is that perhaps because, as Duesberg maintains, AIDS is not caused by a virus?

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In his new book, The Case Against the New Censorship: Protecting Free Speech from Big Tech, Progressives, and Universities, liberal Democrat and civil rights attorney Alan Dershowitz makes the case for an unrestricted “marketplace of ideas.”

John Stuart Mill is generally credited with originating the concept of the marketplace of ideas back in 1859. He argued against censorship and in favor of the free flow of ideas, claiming that the free competition of ideas is the best way to separate falsehoods from fact.

However, in certain social media platforms today, the controlling oligarchs, likely unaware of Mills and his position, insist on removing content they regard as false, or perhaps just inconvenient.

But that creates potential problems. Dershowitz wrote: “If Facebook, Twitter and YouTube take down content which they deem to be untrue, then at least some viewers may come to believe that content that is not taken down must have passed the test of truthfulness.”

“So, when social media get into the business of selectively censoring some untruths,” he continues, “it is they who may be promoting false belief in the alleged truth of the untruths they do not censor. It is a no-win situation.”

And then getting to what many believe is the deliberate muzzling of conservative comments, Dershowitz wrote that, “censorship is almost never content-neutral. Codes that purport to ban ‘offensive’ or ‘untruthful’ words are inevitably invoked selectively against politically incorrect words.”

With the free flow of ideas comes the likelihood of false or misleading information being published, which Dershowitz defends by saying “the costs of imposing a regime of censorship outweigh the costs of tolerating dangerous speech and its consequences.”

He describes the present efforts to control speech and thought as “the current regressive war against freedom of speech being waged by ‘progressives,’ social media moguls, university administrators, and other well-meaning but dangerous censors.”

“The marketplace of ideas is the best option for a democracy not because it always produces the best ideas,” he wrote, “but because like democracy itself, the alternatives are far worse.” And then the kicker: “[W]ithout freedom of speech, democracy cannot survive.”

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And then there are these gems from Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy, who has been called the Will Rogers of our time:

“This election in Georgia will be the most important in history. You have nothing to worry about, unless you are a taxpayer, parent, gun owner, cop, a person of faith, or an unborn baby!”

And about some members of Congress: “how did these morons make it through the birth canal?”