Shame on YouTube for Defunding Dark Horse
If it wasn’t clear before, it has now become blatant: Big Tech does not want you to have a conversation or think for yourself — they want to control the information you receive and unquestioningly swallow the narrative they want you to hear.
For the past year the husband and wife team of Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, two evolutionary biologists, have committed the “sin” of voicing their concerns with mRNA vaccines, and their hope for an alternative treatment with Ivermectin.
If you’ve never seen Weinstein and Heying, you are missing out on a masterclass in science and scientific reasoning by two people that have a clear passion for it. Weinstein’s capacity for articulating complex and nuanced ideas in a way that brings clarity and logic to the viewer is unparalleled, and Heying is an absolute master at dissecting the often head-spinning complexity of scientific literature and pulling out the hidden assumptions and flawed reasoning.
They’ve had other scientists too, as guests on their popular show (the Dark Horse podcast) to discuss such things as:
Pathogenic priming. When we mass vaccinate a population during a current outbreak we put evolutionary pressure on the virus to mutate into something that the vaccine has no effect on, and is therefore deadlier and more difficult to eradicate. This is a well-known, and documented, concern going back decades. We have done this with antibiotics, and with anti-malarial drugs, for example, resulting in bugs which cannot be killed.
The cytotoxic properties of the spike protein itself, which the mRNA instructs your body to produce. This has been shown to cause inflammation and clotting in the endothelial lining of your entire vascular system.
ADE, or antibody-dependent enhancement (aka. paradoxical immune enhancement). Some segment of the population may suffer from this, making them paradoxically more susceptible to the wild virus after being vaccinated. Again, this is a known and well-documented effect of mass vaccination programs.
The risk of vaccinating already-exposed and recovered COVID patients. They are effectively “vaccinated” and statistically suffer adverse reactions due to their already-primed immune systems attacking the existing antigen-bearing tissues in their body. (Some doctors have advocated screening for prior COVID as a precondition for vaccination, which has fallen on deaf ears of those who want a needle in every arm, regardless of outcomes).
The risk of vaccinating children, who are statistically already immune from COVID.
The risk of vaccinating pregnant mothers and the potential reproductive toxicity of the mRNA vaccines.
The flawed reasoning of some research and the sometimes nonsensical, and contradictory, public health messaging, e.g., on masks and asymptomatic spread.
How any discussion of long-term safety data on mRNA vaccines is ludicrous (since, by definition, there hasn’t been a “long term” yet).
Suspiciously absent safety data from the manufacturers, and flawed testing principles, such as excluding suspected-COVID and high-risk individuals from efficacy trials (which makes the outcomes look wonderful), and problematic statistics, such as using relative risk reduction (which makes the efficacy of the vaccine appear very high) but ignoring absolute risk reduction (which makes the vaccines look marginally effective at best).
The complete lack (and active suppression) of signal monitoring of adverse events. People are dying and being injured by these vaccines but the authorities deny this is even a possibility; therefore there is no effective safety monitoring in place. Moreover, the usual signals we rely on for this, doctor feedback, are being discouraged and suppressed, leading to a situation where doctors are either afraid to come forward or are measuring everything but vaccine-related injury to explain their patients’ symptoms.
The promise of cheap and risk-free alternative remedies for viral infections.
The attempt to shut down the conversation about any of these topics. Science relies on dissent and peer challenge and argumentation to give it validity. The whole reason we value science as highly as we do is that it is subject to error-checking and dissent. When you remove these things, its conclusions cease to be “scientific” in any sense that we know. It becomes, in effect, authoritarian, which means, in effect, that “science” is whatever the authority says it is.
The politicization and corporatization of science. When science serves political and corporate entities it ceases to be truth-seeking and testing endeavor and becomes a shield under which bad actors with perverse incentives can exploit the system using “science” as a cloak which cannot be challenged.
In other words, Weinstein and Heying have challenged the orthodoxy. They’ve uncovered faulty reasoning, reporting bias, and contradictory claims from bureaucrats hiding under the auspices of “science”. They’ve sought to uncover evidence, and what the proposed “evidence” actually says. They’ve pursued the truth.
In short, they’ve done their jobs as scientists.
This behavior, according to YouTube, constitutes “strikes” against the company’s “medical misinformation policy”, resulting in defunding.
All along, Weinstein and Heying have stressed that they are not anti-vaxxers. In fact, given their propensity for travel over the years, they are probably, in their own words, “two of the most vaccinated people we know”.
Further, they are rooting for the mRNA vaccines. They are, however, extremely concerned about the speed and recklessness with which we are deploying them, and the atmosphere of corruption and perverse, for-profit incentives involved, and the potential for doing massive harm whilst cloaked in the righteousness that we couldn’t possibly be doing anything wrong because of the prevailing belief that “Vaccines Good, no matter what.”
YouTube, in Weinstein’s words, are: “infantilizing a huge fraction of the population. They are making this discussion off-limits. We are only able to discuss the COVID situation if we adhere to certain pre-digested conclusions and we pretend that they emerge from evidence, which they do not. The evidence is conflicting and self-contradictory. What that demands is an analysis, which we are literally not allowed to do on YouTube at this moment.”
“Either YouTube has to relent and allow that conversation,” Weinstein goes on to say, “or we have to recognize that YouTube is effectively like Sesame Street now, where it’s going to tell us things that it believes to be in our interests and simply take them in and not question them.”
“Dark Horse,” he says, “is not a program for children. This is a program for people who are interested in nuance. It cannot exist on a platform like YouTube if YouTube is going to exert pressure of this form.”
Now, as I’ve discussed before, no private company is obligated to support ideas it does not want to support, and that goes for YouTube. What is shameful here is the loss of YouTube as a beloved free speech platform. YouTube has the potential for a being an unbiased town hall, a place that welcomes conversation, where anyone can give voice to an idea, and let the people (not the corporations) decide which ideas float and which sink. It could be a place for vigorous and open debate, un-muddled by corporate influence.
YouTube, clearly, is not that.
So, in response to this, Weinstein and Heying are moving their podcast to Odyssee, and taking a massive audience with them. They are not the first to make this move. Dr. Sam Bailey, a New Zealand doctor who has also come under fire for trying to explain the basic principles of medical research to people (and how those principles have become corrupted) has also migrated to Odysee to avoid YouTube’s priesthood of Acceptable Discourse. There are others, mirroring the migration of thousands of former account holders at Twitter to Parler.
People by the thousands are waking up to the tech giants and their blatant attempts to control the narrative. This is an old problem for tyrants: the more they try to shut down skepticism, the more skeptics they create.
YouTube wants a vault; they’ve created a sieve.
There was a time when those of us who defended free speech championed Google and YouTube for the democratization of knowledge and the massive threat they posed to the imposing monolith of traditional media. Now, it has become clear: YouTube has become the thing it opposed. Intelligent, freethinking people must look elsewhere.
“Hopefully YouTube will realize the gigantic error it is making,” said Weinstein.
I like to imagine there’s a boardroom meeting to that effect going on at Google right now.
Perhaps they are realizing, only too late, that rather than being told what to think and not to think, free people will simply direct their minds, and their loyalty, elsewhere.
“He who stifles free discussion secretly doubts whether what he professes to believe is really true.” — Wendell Phillips