There several reasons this episode is particularly both ominous and revealing. For one, it illustrates how the Left, this time armed with the cudgel of government power, used COVID as cover for expanding its power over citizens (and not coincidentally, why the government was so slow to let go of COVID scaremongering). For another, it showed why preserving the First Amendment in full force is so vital; if there is any subject about which the free flow of ideas is essential, it would have to be how to cope with a new, communicable disease with potentially quite important, but not at the time well-understood, consequences both for public health and the exercise of everyday freedom of movement and commerce. When only one side is allowed to be heard, the chances for error — for an over-reaction in one direction or the other — increase. And as we now know, there was over-reaction that had a severe impact on our wealth, the education of our children, and our freedom. It was so bad, and became so undeniable, that the COVID banshees took to the the pages of the Atlantic to ask for amnesty.

But that, important though it be, is not the main point. I was in the Justice Department (and its branch office, the US Attorney’s Office) for 25 years, mostly as a career attorney but at one time as a reasonably high level political appointee, and never once did I feel the need to call up the media to tweak or massage, much less to suppress, a story.

[This is straight-up fascism — coopting private sector companies to turn them into proxies for government, especially in an attempt to silence dissent and suppress the opposition. It is unprecedented in both its scope and in its endorsement from American media, which should know better but in reality could care less. Democracy dies in darkness, indeed. — Ed]