YouTube Reaffirms Adherence to Orthodoxy

Oligarchs avow their dedication to bring a famine upon our minds.

Medical Misinformation Commissars, Dr. Garth Graham and Matt Halprin, just issued “an update on how YouTube is thinking about the future of medical misinformation policies, including removing cancer misinformation.”

As the authors begin their advisory:

In the years since we began our efforts to make YouTube a destination for high-quality health content, we’ve learned critical lessons about developing Community Guidelines in line with local and global health authority guidance on topics that pose serious real-world risks, such as misinformation on COVID-19, vaccines, reproductive health, harmful substances, and more.

It seems to me that this statement is a straightforward affirmation of YouTube’s commitment to maintaining Medical Orthodoxy, as it is established by the World Health Organization, whose largest private donor is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

As I have observed in previous columns, theological and intellectual history have always been marked by a tension between orthodox and heterodox ideas and opinions. During the pandemic, YouTube reminded me of the Roman Inquisition and its Index Librorum Prohibitorum—Index of Forbidden Books, first published in 1559 counter the spread of protestant ideas the Church deemed heretical. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

The first printed Index included a prohibition against the “Bible in Castilian Romance or any other vulgar tongue,” a ban that remained in force until the 18th century. Many books deemed heretical or threatening to the faith were destroyed or hidden as a result of the Index and the accompanying inquisitions, and hundreds of printers took flight to Switzerland and Germany.

In 1564 the church published the 10 “Tridentine Rules” to clarify its prohibitions on books not necessarily enumerated in the Index, including against all heretical and superstitious writings, and to establish the punishment of excommunication for those in possession of such works.

The English statesman and poet, John Milton, visited Galileo in the summer of 1633, shortly after the latter’s trial for heresy. It was a moving experience that influenced Milton’s famous defense of free speech that he published in a 1644 pamphlet titled Areopagitica. In this speech he described censors as “oligarchs” who “bring a famine upon our minds.”

Milton argued from a Christian theological perspective. As he saw it, since the Fall, our understanding of reality is fractured, and we are inherently prone to error. In order to apprehend the truth, we must be able to examine and talk about not only fragments of clear truth, but also the bad and erroneous. Only by comparing and contrasting the two categories can our general understanding advance.

Milton was the beginning of a long philosophical tradition in the English-speaking world that conceived free speech as the principle mechanism for getting closer and closer to the truth. John Stuart Mill called this mechanism the “Marketplace of Ideas.”

When I was studying political philosophy in the 1990s, I mistakenly assumed that the English tradition going back to Milton was so firmly established in the United States, which enshrined free speech with the First Amendment, that it would never again be challenged. The two great dictatorships of the 20th Century—Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany—had also banned and burned books, and I assumed that these two calamities had served as a terrible reminder that we should guard our First Amendment with our lives.

I was wrong. The “oligarchs who bring a famine upon our minds” are now stronger than ever. All you heterodox thinkers and researchers out there have been put on notice: The WHO is already in possession of the full truth of medical matters, and if you post anything on YouTube that does not adhere to WHO Orthodoxy, it will be taken down.