About Those Onesies

A brief note to Senator Bernie Sanders

Dear Senator Sanders,

I’m writing to express frustration after your exchanges with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., this week. I understand you’re an advocate for guaranteed health care, and (as would be the case with any Republican president's nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary) Kennedy does not represent progress in that direction. However, you share common ground in many other areas, which made the hostility of these exchanges puzzling.

Regarding your “Are you supportive of these onesies?” questioning: the organization that makes those products, Children’s Health Defense, does indeed list Kennedy as a founder and former CEO. It’s also one of the most censored organizations in the world, a distinction the group shares with Kennedy, one of the most censored individuals.

You and Mr. Kennedy were both cited by one of the leading government-partnered “anti-disinformation” groups during the pandemic, the Stanford-based “Virality Project.”

The Virality Project was the successor organization to Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, which ostensibly focused on election misinformation in 2020 and partnered with the Departments of State and Homeland Security. The second project focused on Covid-19 “disinformation” and partnered with the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG) and the CDC.

The Virality Project identified Kennedy as a “well-known repeat offender,” meaning an actor whose posts are “almost always reportable.” This is a key innovation of the content moderation movement, in which platforms punish the speaker rather than the speech. Platforms are urged to look at the “totality” of a person’s message, not specific statements, and on that basis to deamplify or remove their accounts.

On May 12th, 2021, the Virality Project published its weekly bulletin, also sent to its six platform partners by email. These bulletins were compiled by analysts focusing on “real-time detection, analysis, and response to COVID-19 anti-vaccine mis- and disinformation”:

Kennedy’s name was mentioned twice. The first was in conjunction with a Children’s Health Defense post he re-tweeted, about a CDC announcement from April 16, 2021. The CDC had changed its reporting policy, listing “only vaccine breakthrough infections that result in hospitalization or death.” They were virtually alone in highlighting the change. Outlets like ProPublica and The New York Times only covered the CDC’s shift in reporting policy after Joe Biden went too far in July 2021 by saying, “You’re not going to get Covid” if you get vaccinated. The episode illustrates a dynamic I know you understand: it’s often a small group without powerful allies that leads the way in highlighting news uncomfortable to the political establishment.

The second Virality Project mention of Kennedy in that bulletin was under the headine: “This week’s top COVID-19 related post from a recurring anti-vax influencer on Facebook.” Kennedy’s offending post sounded a lot like something you or your staff might have written:

Big Pharma CEOs are making millions off COVID vaccines raising questions over massive pay packages, questionable stock sales, and windfall profits made possible by taxpayer funding.

You were saying similar things during that same time. After denouncing the “profit-driven” approach of vaccine-makers earlier that year, you said in May, “It’s not my job to tell parents or kids to get vaccinated.” That last comment was enough to earn you a mention in the Virality Project’s next weekly briefing, from May 18th, which listed your comments as one of its misinformation “events”:

The episode with Kennedy and the Virality Project took place just months after the Biden White House sent a letter to Facebook asking “if we can get moving on the process of having it removed ASAP,” and after your Senate colleague Brian Schatz of Hawaii sent a similar letter to Twitter. White House aides also asked Twitter to remove New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, whose offending post read, “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”

Many who (like you) who opposed mandates lost jobs, were removed from the Internet, or denounced as “anti-vax.” Others lost services, like the protesting truckers who had online fundraisers blocked. You did not speak in defense of these people. Many concluded that there were no defenders of free speech left in the Democratic caucus.

Left, this. Right, that.

I covered both of your presidential campaigns and as you know, have been closely following your career since the mid-2000s. By the outset of the 2015-2016 electoral cycle it was clear there was a burgeoning populist movement that was going to emerge somewhere. After the 2016 election you and I spoke, and while you were fiercely critical of Donald Trump, you also pointed out that his election showed how effective he’d been at harnessing that populist energy. “Donald Trump has rewritten the rules of politics. Let’s give the guy credit where credit is due,” you said.

In the eight years since, your second presidential run failed — was crushed, really — while Trump rebounded from a multitude of scandals to lay a near-exclusive claim to that populist vote. Your campaigns fell short for a variety of reasons, many not your fault, but if I had to point to one area where you gave support away, it was in failing to support the rights of people with whom you disagreed ideologically. You offered a tepid defense of Joe Rogan after groups like MoveOn denounced him, but said nothing while the Biden administration asked platforms to remove content of figures like Berenson and Tucker Carlson, to say nothing of the FBI targeting reporters sympathetic to you like Aaron Maté.

Even Children’s Health Defense would have been defended by a true political liberal. Most of its supposed “disinformation” incidents involved true claims: incidents of death or injury after vaccination, publication of VAERS statistics, and posts questioning the need for pregnant women or children to be vaccinated. Some of its views were questionable, but undeniably it turned out to be right about some things. Protecting such minority views was once the essence of American liberalism. I wouldn’t buy the onesies, but even those are protected speech, and there you were this week, asking a future Executive Branch official to “take these products off the market.” What’s a civil libertarian to think?

The Trump administration already has its own issues on the speech front, but why side with the same censors who’d be targeting you if you’d won the nomination?