EXCLUSIVE — Ex-Clinton advisor banned from Twitter: De-platforming is 'terrifying' for democracy
By victort // 2021-06-18
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Dr. Naomi Wolf has been permanently banned from Twitter. A life-long progressive Democrat, Wolf has been a sharp critic of coronavirus passports and vaccines lately, telling Fox News’ Tucker Carlson in February that “we’re really moving into a coup situation, a police state situation, and that’s not a partisan thing.” (Article by Stephen Kokx republished from LifeSiteNews.com) Mainstream media outlets misleadingly claimed Wolf’s suspension was related to her spreading “anti-vaxx” conspiracy theories on the platform. In an interview with LifeSiteNews (presented below) Wolf, who had nearly 150,000 followers, rejects those claims, explaining that she was never informed by Twitter why she was banned. In May, Wolf, who supports abortion during the first trimester, spoke to LifeSite about her time testifying to Michigan state lawmakers about the dangers of mandatory vaccine passports. She re-iterated those concerns to LifeSite in this exclusive interview. Can you explain the tweet that got you suspended? Many outlets are saying you're spreading “conspiracy theories” and “anti-vaxx” info. Twitter did not inform me of why I was suspended. But the accounts in the news stories that make claims that I was suspended for "conspiracy theories" and "anti-vaxx" info are not correct. I do not see how news outlets can make these claims without anyone having contacted me for comment, and without any Twitter spokesperson providing any documentation. I was suspended for posting a two-minute video in which I read verbatim a press release from Oregon State Senator Kim Thatcher, about her bill SB 872, which bans vaccine passports and mask mandates. The bill is based on our model bills on the DailyClout.io Five Freedoms Campaign: No Mask Mandates, No Vaccine Passports, Open Schools Now, Freedom of Assembly, End Emergency Law. This campaign has been extremely successful and helped to end emergency law in New Hampshire, helped introduce bills to ban vaccine passports in Michigan and Maine, and helped to open Pennsylvania and end all unconstitutional restrictions on freedom and the rule of law in that state. I was also suspended a day after a video in which my husband Brian O’Shea, a private investigator/former military intelligence, read Dr. Ralph Baric's CV, which Brian had located on a public website. The CV confirms over $14 million in funding from NIH, including for gain of function research. It also mentions Dr. Shi Zhengli, the “Bat Lady” of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This CV contradicts the claim by Dr. Fauci to the US Senate that the NIH/NIAID did not fund gain of function research. After that video got 74,000 views in 24 hours, I was de-platformed. I am not “anti-vaxx” at all. That is inaccurate. I am pro-HIPAA, pro-Fourth Amendment, pro-Equality Act, pro-Nuremberg Codes; all of which make medical coercion illegal already. And I am pro-evidence-based reporting on public issues. We are certainly in a time when any solid investigative reporting that raises inconvenient questions — such as my reporting on some scientists' concerns around tissue inflammation post-vaccination — reporting I posted for months BEFORE the CDC called an emergency meeting this past week to address over two hundred cases of myocarditis (heart inflammation), notably in healthy young men, post-vaccination — are smeared baselessly as “conspiracy theories.”  That kind of inaccurate attack on evidence-based journalism and that silencing of journalists is not good for an informed public or a healthy democracy. What does your ban from Twitter say about the relationship between Big Tech and Big Pharma?  Without a subpoena, it is impossible to see exactly what the ties are between Big Tech, the NIH and Big Pharma. That is why I called two months ago, on Tucker Carlson, for an investigation of conflicts of interest around Dr Fauci. I believe I was among the first to do so. I assumed we would find the conflicts and relationships that we are already finding. The Fauci emails released already show communications between Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Fauci, and coordination around COVID messaging on Facebook, at a minimum. The redactions are problematic. The American public owns those communications, and the emails cannot be redacted in a FOIA if they are not classified. If they are classified, why are they classified? What this shows, even prior to undoing the redactions, is that this Big Tech platform coordinated with a government agency to spin a message, which is something that news outlets are not supposed to do and it is something that utilities such as the phone company cannot do. Google, Microsoft, Bloomberg, Amazon, Zoom, Nintendo, the Nasdaq and other tech companies united in “The COVID-19 Response Project” in early 2020, to coordinate messaging around the pandemic across all these platforms. As a tech CEO I can tell you that is an expensive and elaborate undertaking, yet they invested resources and engineers into the coordination to communicate a single message, fund research, and drown out conflicting evidence and commentators. All this coordination around messaging and now, this systematic de-platforming, is very terrifying for democracy. I am a progressive Democrat, but it's extremely disturbing to see Twitter and Facebook systematically de-platforming conservative voices, and even a former American President. I am in very distinguished company as someone who was de-platformed for raising serious questions that turned out to be necessary to raise. Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, one of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, was de-platformed by Twitter. He was 100 per cent right about the disastrous effect of "lockdowns" on public health and on children. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been de-platformed from various platforms. The round table in which Governor Ron DeSantis spoke to Dr. Kulldorff, Dr. Battacharya of Stanford, and Dr. Gupta of Oxford, about the public health harms of “lockdowns,” was de-platformed. Some of the most prescient and conscientious scientists, doctors and journalists in this difficult moment, have been de-platformed. This is how the CCP consolidates its power, and it is happening in the West, systematically. There is also a financial incentive to de-platform critics of “lockdowns” such as myself. Big Tech CEOs are up double-digit BILLIONS since March 2020, because “lockdown” policies drove everyone onto social media platforms. Why would they not wish to extend the disastrous “lockdown” policies? Shareholder obligations require that they lobby to keep people at home, kids out of school, etcetera.  Coordination of messaging with the government and news outlets distorted both policy and news about the pandemic and extended “lockdowns” though they made no difference in COVID outcomes, and turned out to be horrible policy. $12 million to the CDC Foundation a year from Big Pharma, $10 million a year from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, also corrupt the messaging of the CDC, in my view, and pose a serious conflict of interest. The fact that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is invested in Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, and that Microsoft built the first “vaccine passport,” poses an additional conflict and puts pressure on government agencies to message in only one direction regarding those issues. Tim Schwab of the Columbia Journalism Review has documented the flow of millions of dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to legacy news sites, which again puts pressure on editors in those news outlets and incentivizes misreporting on or marginalizing those of us asking what used to be understood, without these pressures on news sites, as reasonable, responsible questions. And lastly Big Pharma and Big Tech also fund the Democratic Party's runs for re-election, just as fossil fuels, the defense industry, fund the Republicans’. All these conflicts result in a tangle of attacks on good journalists and decent civic leaders when we engage in basic reporting or basic civic leadership. Where are we, as a country, when people like yourself and others are cancelled simply for exercising free speech online? We are where Germany was in 1933. It was still a fragile democracy, but outspoken critics of fascism were systematically fired, shamed, attacked, marginalized, lied about, intimidated and silenced. We should recall too that National Socialism early on organized a “health passport.” How have your liberal friends taken to your outspokenness on COVID? I imagine you may have lost a few along the way? Many liberals are as shocked and appalled as I am at how our traditionally liberal, tolerant, human-rights-oriented, equality-oriented, free-speech-supporting world view, has been so suddenly rebranded and re-launched as a Chinese Communist Party style straight up Marxist set of views, intolerant of dissent, resistant to Enlightenment style discussion of evidence and science, and totalitarian and punitive in its orientation. They are mostly quiet in public but discussing this among themselves privately, I am finding; I think we will see a big migration of these true liberals away from what has, I hope temporarily, become a party that appears to be held hostage by un-American interests and ideologies. I hope something good and new comes from that migration. I am seeing a massive realignment on the grassroots level — The Five Freedoms Campaign is a great example — in which patriots across the right, left and center are uniting to defend the Constitution and preserve an American culture of equality, freedom of speech and individual rights, and are saving the arguments over our differences around abortion, or the environment, or guns, for a day after our nation's actual liberty has been re-secured. I recall you tweeting not long ago that the conservatives you've met in recent months aren't what you originally thought they were. Can you expand on that?  Sure. I lived in the NY/SF/DC bubble of liberal urbanites, for most of my life. We are raised to fear and dread conservatives and libertarians, as I wrote in my tweet. Most news outlets caricature anyone who is a practicing Christian, owns a gun, voted for Trump, has reservations about abortion, and so on, as "deplorables" — universally uneducated, racist, homophobic, violent, misogynist hicks who are a danger to the nation. Libertarians are feared as heartless individualists driven by selfishness. Many liberals never actually meet a conservative or a libertarian in a context in which they can have a reasoned discussion about their respective views. I am lucky to have a job that has taken me outside my demographic “bubble” to speak to audiences from every walk of life, and patriots have supported my work since I wrote The End of America and Give Me Liberty, so I got to know people across the political spectrum. I married a libertarian (though I am not one, I'm still a classical liberal) and I had a wonderful fellowship at AIER. It was a joy to make friends with libertarians — what a pleasure to disagree with people without them feeling forced to change your mind; what a pleasure to be around people who tolerated other people's choices. In a time of coercion and CCP style efforts to forge mass consensus, this openness to others' choices was beautiful to behold. I've also been invited by many Republican state legislators to speak about the Five Freedoms. It's painful to me that almost all of the political leaders who are trying to pass bills to end tyrannies now are Republicans. I wish the Democrats were showing leadership on this instead of, usually, trying to kill these bills. Also, right-wing news outlets want to talk to me about this campaign — the usual liberal news outlets where I have appeared for decades, do not want to talk to me about freedom. This is disappointing for sure politically, but it also means I have made many news friends. And while we still don't agree on many issues, I am struck by how hospitable, civil, kind and patriotic so many are. It's time to heal our country of its divisions so we can unite to save America from what is really a coup by now by interests that do not represent us. We can unite as lovers of our country, and argue in the proper time and place, about policies on which we don't agree. Surely, we can agree on saving our Constitution and our culture of liberty.  It will save the nation and our kids if we can continue to make spaces to grow this kind of community and open, respectful dialogue and debate. What will you be doing going forward to keep raising awareness about the COVID injection and other totalitarian measures being taken by governments and social media platforms? I'll forge ahead with DailyClout and the Five Freedoms Campaign. I'm also launching a podcast as so many have asked, “where can we find Naomi?” We received many offers of distribution since my de-platforming. I am also taking legal action against some of these entities' unlawful behavior, about which more soon. Again, to note, I am not "anti-vaxx";  my efforts rather are always around the Constitution, which means opposing any illegal coercion; but I am glad that DailyClout can serve so well as a platform for all groups — ranging from health freedom groups to Moms for Liberty who are lobbying to reopen schools and get masks of our kids, to those wanting to end emergency law in their state. Any American wanting to affect the laws of the nation, or even to draft news laws, can use our platform and be a leader. That's how our Founders set up our system and I am honored to have helped create a platform that supports citizen leaders in a trans-partisan way. We need to save democracy together. And if Twitter thought that by de-platforming me I would be silenced in my fight to preserve the Constitution — our fight — they will find that they were sadly mistaken. Read more at: LifeSiteNews.com and Censorship.news.
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