“Misinformation” is one of those catch-all terms Democrats like to use to make the other side of the aisle seem reckless and dangerous. But the word has no real meaning anymore — it simply represents anything Democrats don’t want people to say, such as “Hospitals are performing irreversible sex-change treatments on minors” or “COVID-19 vaccines don’t stop transmission of the virus.”
Unfortunately, the “misinformation” smear has been quite successful. Big Tech platforms have used it to suspend conservative accounts, such as Libs of Tik Tok, for exposing the harmful procedures children’s hospitals are performing on gender-confused children in the name of “gender-affirming care.” The FBI was even able to shut down avenues of a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden before the 2020 election by writing off tips about alleged criminal activity as misinformation, according to a whistleblower report.
Notably, all of this has been done by third-party institutions like Twitter or the legacy media. California, however, wants to change that and put the power to define what misinformation is and how to punish it directly into the hands of the government.
A new bill that has advanced in the state legislature would allow California medical regulators to punish doctors for spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19, which is vaguely described as “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus.” Doctors found in violation of this law could have their medical licenses suspended or even revoked entirely.
It is impossible to overstate just how radical this proposal is. It violates doctors’ right to free speech, undermines basic scientific inquiry, and gives California Democrats a totalitarian-esque ability to control debate.
This is all the more disturbing considering just about everything that has been labeled “COVID-19 misinformation” has been proven … true. The lab leak theory was misinformation until top intelligence officials revealed that it wasn’t. The argument that cloth masks were ineffective was misinformation until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted otherwise.
Similarly, the claim that healthy individuals who naturally contracted COVID-19 might not need a vaccine, or that religious people who objected to the use of aborted fetal cells in the development of vaccines might need an exemption to employer-imposed mandates, were written off as misinformation simply because they stood in the way of the Left’s goal of mass compliance.
This is the common thread in almost every one of Democrats’ complaints about misinformation: The argument or report that supposedly crosses the line is something that, if said out loud, might threaten their control. This is why the New York Post’s bombshell report about Biden’s laptop was falsely smeared as misinformation — because it might have cost Joe Biden the White House. It’s why the lab leak theory was dismissed as misinformation — because a closer look into it might have raised questions about leftist bureaucrats’ role in the pandemic’s outbreak. And it’s why any attempt to point out the harms associated with social and physical sex transitions is labeled misinformation — because the Left knows that exposing the truth about gender ideology will cause the entire thing to blow up in their faces.
California’s bill might be aimed specifically at “COVID-19 misinformation,” and it might only apply to doctors. But it won’t stop there. The Left has proved repeatedly over the past several years that they will go to extreme lengths to shut down dissenting thought as a means of preserving their agenda. And as with everything in government, once it has the power to do something, there’s no taking it back.
