The truth is out; the cat is out of the bag; the king is not wearing any clothes. Name your saying, but they all mean the same. What we all knew was true has finally been proven. The White House has been censoring information about Covid-19 that didn’t conform to their political agenda.

This is business as usual in authoritarian regimes like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea – but it isn’t supposed to happen in the United States! The State isn’t supposed to control the news – and especially it isn’t supposed to control scientific debate. Yet that’s exactly what has been happening in America for the last two years.

Censorship by high tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon have been widely reported in the media, thanks especially to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. We’ve been receiving regular releases of Twitter emails disclosing the deliberate effort to suppress Covid and other information that didn’t conform to liberal ideology. But now we’re learning of the collusion between these companies and the White House.

Jenin Younes and Aaron Kheriaty, writing in The Wall Street Journal, tell us that newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media. Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House – not voluntarily. The emails emerged Jan. 6 in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private plaintiffs represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

On March 14, 2021, Mr. Flaherty emailed a Facebook executive with the subject line “You are hiding the ball” and a link to a Washington Post article about Facebook’s own research into “the spread of ideas that contribute to vaccine hesitancy,” as the paper put it. “I think there is a misunderstanding,” the executive wrote back. “I don’t think this is a misunderstanding,” Mr. Flaherty replied. “We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy – period. We want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game. This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.”

At this point, Facebook should have told the White House to stay out of their business. That’s what happens in a free democracy. But in authoritarian regimes, business must tow the government line or risk being put out of business. It’s not clear here whether Facebook wilted under the pressure or simply cooperated with a government who shares their political ideology. But the White House has no business pressuring Facebook to carry their political agenda.

What is known is that Facebook sent an email on March 21, detailing the company’s planned policy changes. They included “removing vaccine misinformation” and “reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation.”  Facebook characterized this material as “often-true content” that “can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking.” Facebook pledged to “remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalized content.”

The problem here goes beyond the issue of free speech. It goes to the heart of the question, “Who decides what is accurate information and what is misinformation?” The government employs medical doctors and scientists who express their opinions, but what about other medical doctors and scientists who disagree? Are we obliged to hear only the opinion of those healthcare professionals who are employed by the government? Is it possible their opinions are colored by the political agenda of their government employers?

On April 9, Mr. Flaherty asked “what actions and changes you’re making to ensure. . . you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse.” He faulted the company for insufficient zeal in earlier efforts to control political speech: “In the electoral context, you tested and deployed an algorithmic shift that promoted quality news and information about the election. . You only did this, however, after an election that you helped increase skepticism in, and an insurrection which was plotted, in large part, by your platform. And then you turned it back off. I want some assurances, based in data, that you are not doing the same thing again here.” The executive’s response: “Understood.”

The recently released documents show frequent further exchanges between Mr. Flaherty and Facebook, relentlessly pressing them to censor any information on their platform that did not conform to the White House position on vaccines. But the pressure didn’t stop there. President Biden, press secretary Jen Psaki, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy later publicly vowed to hold the platforms accountable if they didn’t heighten censorship. On July 16, 2021, a reported asked Mr. Biden his “message to platforms like Facebook.” Undaunted, Biden replied, “They’re killing people.” Biden later claimed he meant users, not platforms, were killing people. But the record shows Facebook itself was the target of the White House’s pressure campaign.

Facebook was not the only platform strong-armed by Mr. Flaherty. Google was treated likewise in April, 2021, when he accused YouTube (owned by Google) of “funneling” people into vaccine hesitancy. He said this concern was “shared at the highest (and I mean the highest) levels of the WH,” and required “more work to be done.” He demanded to know what further measures Google would take to remove disfavored content. An executive responded that the company was working to “address your concerns related to Covid-19 misinformation.”

This trove of emails recently released establishes a clear pattern. Flaherty, representing the White House, expresses anger at the companies’ failure to censor Covid-related content to his satisfaction. The companies change their policies to address his demands. As a result, thousands of Americans were silenced for questioning government -approved Covid narratives. Two of the Missouri v. Biden plaintiffs, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorf, are epidemiologists whom multiple social-media platforms censored at the government’s behest for expressing views that were scientifically well-founded but diverged from the government line; in particular that children and adults with natural immunity from prior infection don’t need Covid vaccines.

Ms. Younes, litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, summarizes the legal situation here: “The First Amendment bars government from engaging in viewpoint-based censorship. The state-action doctrine bars government from circumventing constitutional strictures by suborning private companies to accomplish forbidden ends indirectly. Defenders of the government have fallen back on the claim that cooperation by the tech companies was voluntary, from which they conclude that the First Amendment isn’t implicated. The reasoning is dubious, but even if it were valid, the premise has now been proved false.”

“The Flaherty emails demonstrate that the federal government unlawfully coerced the companies in an effort to ensure that Americans would be exposed only to state-approved information about Covid-19. As a result of that unconstitutional state action, Americas were given the false impression of a scientific “consensus” on critically important issues around Covid-19. A reckoning for the government’s unlawful, deceptive and dangerous conduct is under way in court.”

All Americans should be praying that the Biden Administration is held accountable for this unlawful censorship and violation of the First Amendment. It doesn’t matter what side of the political aisle you stand on; everyone deserves to know the uncensored truth.

The greatest danger to our youth is not Covid, illegal drugs, or even climate change. The greatest danger to our youth is the cell phone in their hands – and the access it gives them to social media. That’s not my opinion; it’s the opinion of Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist. Before you dismiss his opinion as unqualified or radical, listen to what he has to say. Tunku Varadarajan, journalist for The Wall Street Journal, interviewed him for his Saturday column and found Haidt has a lot of insight into a real problem.

Mr. Haidt is a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and refers to the present generation gap of Generation Z as “a national crisis.” Gen Z is usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995, what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility. There has never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.” He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood. The latter was the subject of his most recent book, “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure” (2018) with co-author Greg Lukianoff.

Mr. Haidt’s research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013, “especially for teen girls,“ but “it’s only Gen Z, not the older generations.” If you’d stopped collecting data in 2011, he says, you’d see little change from previous years. “By 2015 it’s an epidemic.” Naturally, you wonder what happened in 2012 to cause this change? Haidt says that was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site. It was also “the beginning of the selfie era.” Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood, in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 or 8, to between 10 and 12. The result was a generation of “weakened kids” who “hadn’t practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” with other children. As a result, they were deprived of “the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.” The inevitable outcome of this overprotection by parents, coupled with an obsession with social media, is a generation that lives largely just through their cell phones. They no longer hang out together, they even drive less than earlier generations did.

Mr. Haidt is especially concerned about girls. By 2020 more than 25% of female teenagers had “a major depression.” The comparable number for boys was just under 9%. In comparison, millennials at the same age registered at half the Gen Z rate: about 13% for girls and 5% for boys. “Kids are on their devices all the time,” he says, but boys play videogames, often in groups: “Boys thrive if they have a group of boys competing against another group of boys.”

By contrast, most girls are drawn to “visual platforms,” Instagram and TikTok in particular. “Those are about display and performance. You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.” He calls this phenomenon “compare and despair” and says: “It seems social because you’re communicating with people. But it’s performative. You don’t actually get social relationships. You get weak, fake social links.”

How widespread is this condition?

Zach Goldberg of the Manhattan Institute extrapolated from Pew Research Institute data and found that 56% of women 18 to 29 admit to having a mental condition. This condition may be real or just perceived – but Haidt says that’s the problem. “This new ideology . . . valorizes victimhood. And if your sub-community motivates you to say you have an anxiety disorder, how is this going to affect you for the rest of your life?” He answers his own question: “You’re not going to take chances, you’re going to ask for accommodations, you’re going to play it safe, you’re not going to swing for the fences, you’re not going to start your own company.” As a result, Haidt predicts that Gen Z women will be much less successful than millennial ones.

Interestingly, this problem is distinct to the U.S. and other English-speaking developed countries: “You don’t find it as much in Europe, and hardly at all in Asia.” Ideas that are “nurtured around American issues of race and gender spread instantly to the U.K. and Canada. But they don’t necessarily spread to France and Germany, China and Japan.” This problem is already impacting the work force. The anxiety and fragility at the youthful end of the American workforce is making the labor force troublesome to work with. “This is something I hear from a lot of managers, that it’s very difficult to supervise their Gen Z employees, that it’s very difficult to give them feedback.” Therefore, it’s also difficult for them to advance professionally by learning to do their jobs better.

What’s the solution?

Take away their cell phones! Haidt agrees. He says, “I’d raise the age of Internet adulthood to 16 and enforce it.”Thirteen-year-olds can legally sign up for social-media sites, and millions of much younger children use them. “They just lie about their birthdays. The Internet teaches them that all you have to do is lie and you can go anywhere. That’s what we’ve taught kids so far, and it has to stop.”

Parents are expected to protect their children until they are old enough to make their own decisions – usually that means 18. Haidt says, “We have more than a hundred years of making things safe for children. We require car seats and seat belts. We eliminated cigarette vending machines. We have fences around pools.”

Ironically, it seems the children know they need parents to restrain them. Haidt says when he has addressed classes of seventh and eighth-graders on the perils of social media, he asks them, “Would you get off it on your own?” Many are afraid to do that. But when asked, “What if nobody could be on? Would that be better?” Most say yes. He reports that they wish they had childhoods more like those of their parents, in which they could play outside and have adventures with their friends. They agree that getting off social media would be better, says Haidt, “So long as it’s not just targeting one child but everybody, I believe they’d be supportive.” Sounds like it’s time for parents to be the grown-ups in the room.

(Author’s Note: Today marks the rebirth of this blog under the new domain drbobroberts.net. After over two months of technical difficulties, I am pleased once again to send my subscribers twice weekly posts, on Monday and Thursday. Thank you for your patience until these technical issues were solved. If you have missed any posts since 11/10/22, please see the Archives list on the left side of the blog home page. If you wish to be a new subscriber, please enter your email in the box for subscribers and it will be sent to you automatically each week.)

It’s that time of the year when people make resolutions for the coming year. I’m not big on that practice most years, but in 1998 I made a resolution to read at least two books a month and I’m proud to say I’ve kept that resolution ever since. This year marks the 25^th anniversary of that New Year’s Resolution and that makes it a great time to look back on what I’ve accomplished and what I’ve learned.

In the last 25 years I’ve read 1025 books! Full disclosure; a few of them I enjoyed so much I read them more than once. But that still leaves me with over one thousand new books read. That’s many hours of entertainment and education that is generally much more satisfying than watching television. Along the way I’ve learned many things I didn’t know or learned much more about subjects I barely knew.

Imagine the impact on our culture if young people, who spend most of their time with their faces buried in cell phones, spent the same time reading books. What a game changer! Education remains the key to economic advancement and reading makes that possible.

Here are my top ten books for 2022 in no particular order:

1. Taking Paris – Martin Dugard – This is a great World War II account of the German forces taking Paris early in the war, the response of the Parisians to their occupancy, and the French Resistance movement that played such an important role in the eventual overcoming of the Germans by the Allied Forces.
2. Fault Lines – Voddie Baucham, Jr. – An insightful look at the social justice movement in America from the perspective of a black minister. He exposes the truth about the Black Lives Matter movement, Critical Race Theory, and other misleading propaganda from a Christian preacher’s point of view.
3. Hostages No More – Betsy DeVos – A great read from the former Secretary of Education in the Trump administration. She explains how school choice is giving millions of low-income students the opportunities to get ahead they have previously been denied by our educational system.
4. A Plague Upon Our House – Scott W. Atlas, M.D. – This Stanford University Medical School professor brings clarity to the confusion that surrounded the Covid-19 pandemic and our government’s response. When the CDC, FDA, and the White House colluded to spread misinformation that suited its political and public health agendas, Dr. Atlas remained steadfast in his pursuance of the truth. A must read.
5. Big Government Socialism – Newt Gingrich – An insightful look at the ways our government is imposing socialism upon our country without the people’s consent, and the bleak future if this trend is not turned around.
6. Killing the Killers – Bill O’Reilly/Martin Dugard – Another in their “Killing Series”, this time about payback for those terrorists who have terrorized the world. Much of this book has not been covered in the news.
7. Sooley – John Grisham – The master of the legal thriller is quite good at writing novels about sports, too. This one concerns a basketball player from Africa who escapes poverty through college basketball.
8. Dark Sacred Night – Michael Connelly – The creator of the Harry Bosch series has a new character named Renee Ballard; a female detective to give Bosch some competition. Connelly remains the best at detective thrillers.
9. Portrait of an Unknown Woman – Daniel Silva – The Gabriel Allon series continues with a deep dive into the art forgery business. Silva shows an amazing depth of knowledge of the art world while bringing great suspense to the story.
10. Dream Town – David Baldacci – Baldacci gives us a new look at Los Angeles in the early days after World War II and a new hero named Aloysius Archer. He demonstrates again why he is considered a great storyteller.

There you have them; read and enjoy. Make a resolution to read more books and watch less television. You’ll be glad you did!