Sceleratus Censores (the Criminal Censors)

You know they are censoring the truth when even preprint academic servers create impossible hurdles to prevent you from releasing your work.

Censorship in academia is not new. Even before Fauci and Gates there had always been gatekeepers controlling what is considered to be ‘current Science^TM’. However, in recent times they have taken to censorship like it is a new art form, turning much of the supposedly peer-reviewed and published scientific knowledge since 2020 into something the Ancient Roman’s would refer to as sterculinum publicum (the public poop pile).

Censorship in Ancient Egypt

Censorship might seem to some as a new concept - or at least something that has only been in the public consciousness since newspapers, the first amendment to the American Constitution, or the internet. However, censorship goes back at least as far as the Pharaohs. The cartouche, or nameplate, of a Pharaoh was considered to hold part of that Pharaoh’s soul. Egyptian citizens were bid to read aloud the name of the deceased as it was believed that to speak the name of the dead restores the breath of life to him who has vanished. If a Pharaoh didn’t like his predecessor he would censor him from existence by defacing his temples and monuments and chiselling away his cartouche - effectively scrubbing his name from memory to ensure he could not be given an afterlife.

Censorship in Roman Times

In Ancient Rome a Censor (pl. Censores) was a magistrate. The Censor’s original warrant was to register citizens and their property (to record the census). They assessed property for taxation and they oversaw contracts. But in the 4th century BC their role was greatly expanded to include supervision of the Senatorial rolls and, more relevant for this discussion, they were made responsible for Regimen Morum - oversight of the rule of moral conduct. They punished offenders of public morality by removing their public rights - including ejecting them from the Senate, stripping them of the right to vote, and nullifying their tribe membership.

The first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus, was also said to be so concerned about the legitimacy of his rule that he expended great effort to censor information he didn’t like. During his reign he: (i) expanded the Leges Iuliae, the first legislative Acts pertaining to the morality of the people; (ii) exiled writers including Ovid (for writing racy texts) and Cornelius Gallus (for upstaging him in military and political circles); (iii) and censored the public record of governmental affairs and debates (the Actus Senatus ) by limiting publication of the populi acta diurna (news reports) and the ‘immoral’ Ars Amatoria. He also attempted regulation to censor nonconformists in the public and to limit the speech of opposing republican senators.

Censorship in Nazi Germany

In May 1933 key members of the Nazi Party (including Joseph Goebbels, head of the ironically named Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Ministry) encouraged German Student Union members to perform an act of ‘cultural cleansing’ by burning more than 25,000 ‘un-German’ books viewed by the Party as subversive or opposed to the ideals of Nazism. These included textbooks by famous Jewish authors like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, and novels by American authors like Ernest Hemingway and Helen Keller and English authors including H.G. Wells. The Ministry ensured the mainstream media provided Germans with a constant stream of pro-Nazi propaganda and slogans, whilst ensuring complete censorship of all other information or anti-Nazi views under threat of death.

Censorship in Modern Times

While I am certain we would like to consider ourselves more enlightened in these modern times, censorship persists and has taken many overt and covert forms during the last few decades. Commentators in the United States of America (USA) have begun comparing the last twelve months (2022) to the censorship wave in that country during 1981 (here).

Censorship in 1981

In 1981 SCOTUS agreed to hear a school board book banning case where a slew of books had been removed from public and school libraries in several States on what were primarily personal opinion and morality grounds - the school boards had successfully argued in the Federal Court of Appeals (FCA) that it was ‘permissible and appropriate’ for them ‘to make decisions based upon their personal, social, political and moral views’ regarding what books were or were not allowed. Effectively, the FCA agreed that these people could ban books that they decided were, on self-prescribed moral grounds, anti-American, anti-Christian or just plain ‘filthy’.

Anti-American?

Is that any better than the Nazi Party calling ‘un-German’ the scientific works of Albert Einstein or H.G. Well’s Little Wars (rules for battles with toy soldiers) ?

The sad outcome in the Pico case was that four Supreme Court Justices upheld the FCA ruling that book banning was ‘permissible and appropriate’ and four ruled it unconstitutional. While the remaining Justice concluded that the Court need not even rule one way or the other. Accordingly, no single opinion commanded a majority outcome and no legal binding rule resulted.

The Woke Revolution

More recently, what can only be termed as The Woke Revolution has seen:

1. Universities censor thousands of historic and literary texts by either inserting trigger warnings in or completely banning them, lest our precious snowflakes take offence at the mere mention of some current ideology-disapproved aspect of our past (here). Interestingly, a 2021 study found that even where a trigger warning might be appropriate (like before they show injured bodies on a news broadcast) they have very limited benefit and tend to back-fire by being counterproductive - serving only to encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD (here). If you really do need a trigger warning, what you actually need is evidence-and therapy-based PTSD treatment (here).

2. Employers, Institutions and Universities seeking to censor our thoughts through enforcement of requirements for staff (and students) to undergo diversity and unconscious bias training programs - that unsurprisingly a study published in Harvard Business Review found do not work (here). That Harvard study also found that all that diversity training does is to teach people, briefly, to respond appropriately to questionnaires (read: give the answers the EDI trainers want). A UK government report concurred, finding that: (i) there is a lack of evidence to support that unconscious bias training can create positive change or have any sustained positive impact on behaviours; and (ii) there is evidence to suggest unconscious bias training has detrimental effects and back-fires in a way that may exacerbate people’s existing biases (here).

3. Trans activism that seeks to censor anyone whose opinions are not in explicit agreement with trans ideologies on sex and gender. These efforts include: (i) mis-labelling women who speak out about the mysonginistic undertone of gender identity politics as TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) and seeking to ‘erase’ them (here, here and here); (ii) demanding that companies like Amazon censor or refuse to stock any material that might be viewed as opposed to the current trans world view (here and here); and harrassment and calling for the sacking of any teacher or university lecturer who does not play along with the current gender politics ideology - with irrelevant and spurious allegations, for example, of using pronouns that misgender students (here, here, here, here, here and here).

4. Employers and Universities censoring the speech of academics through the threat of internal investigations and disciplinary tribunals that have been commenced in some cases on the flimsiest of pretexts. Members of the public, whipped up into a frenzy by pro-Covid measures social media ‘medical influencers’¹ and accounts linked to 77th Brigade operatives have been seen to attack academics whose opinions or research do not align with the mainstream narrative. These attacks have seen academics we know constructively dismissed as a result of coordinated attacks involving anonymous and unproven complaints that these academics were either: spreading misinformation, gender biased, transphobic or racist. It seems that, and much like the witchhunts of the middle ages, nothing more than an unnamed person in the crowd pointing the finger and shouting “He/She’s a Witch!” is required.

   

Censorship of Academic Publications

However, academic censorship has become more overt and eggregious during ‘Covid-19’ times.

During what has colloquiolly become known as ‘Covid Times’ many academics have reported incidents of censorship linked to their attempts to publish scientific work presenting findings that disent from the mainstream Covid narrative. At the same time, many pro-Covid academics have been able to publish work that can only be described as incredible (that is, not credible). Inter alia (among other things), these include that: (i) Covid-19 would kill 500,000 people in the UK in only 6 weeks (here); (ii) the existence of models to estimate the number of lives saved by covid vaccines means lives were actually saved (here); (iii) that Covid vaccines saved 20mill lives in one year (here); and (iv) that covid vaccines that we know definitely arent, are 100% effective (here, here, here, and here).

Much of the rapid response Covid-19 research has been released as academic preprints. These preprints have enabled other academics and the general public to access results as they came to hand, rather than waiting months or years for peer review and publication in the journals. Some of these results have been important. While many others have just added to the sterculinum publicum (the public poop pile). However, while covid-related censorship by some mainstream academic journals was expected - like pro-covid vaccines Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton’s Lancet, it was not expected on the academic preprint servers.

During the last two years, preprint servers ArXiv and MedRxiv have become (in)famous for their censorship of ideas and prevention of dissemination of research that dares to challenge mainstream concensus - actively stiffling debate on Covid-related issues or the complicated and unresolved physics of superconductors. It seems that even though it is widely known that work released on preprint servers has not been academically peer reviewed, the operators of preprint servers have become the self-appointed arbiters (and peer reviewers) of this unreviewed content. Just like the Roman Censores and Nazi Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Ministry, they have appointed themselves as the judges of what is moral and right for you to see and know.

A prime example are nine papers released by the team managed by Professor Norman Fenton (see the image above).

While rejected arbitrarily by the censors at ArXiv and MedRxiv, several of these papers have gone on to be downloaded and read by people like you, via other platforms, hundreds of thousands of times.

For example (with thanks to Prof Fenton and his team):

and…

and…

Their work, that was refused by ArXiv and MedRxiv, has also led to an important recent finding by the Director General of Statistics for the UK to ignore any claims of vaccine safety based on ONS deaths by vaccination status data.

You would be forgiven for thinking that would be the end of it…

…except it isnt.

Papers by members of this team over the last few months have: (i) been accepted for publication with publication then delayed… indefinitely; (ii) specifically invited and then immediately rejected without reason by journals; and (iii) rejected by MedRxiv with emails setting impossible requirements for publication that demonstrate those running MedRxiv are either deliberately blocking release of this group’s preprint works OR are woefully ignorant of how hospital preclinical and clinical service audits and IRB/ERB protocols work.

In a recent rejection of one such paper, MedRxiv insisted that they require evidence of a decision made by an IRB/ERB even where aggregate or anonymous data is used, or where the data results from service evaluation or improvement studies.

Consider these for a moment: If, for example, we were to download publicly available anonymised CPRD data, the Cancer Imaging Archive, or any one of the many anonymised electronic health records datasets available online, we would not normally require IRB/ERB approval to work with that data. In fact, some IRB/ERB are so busy or meet so infrequently that they might be understandably annoyed at the imposition on their limited time to adjudicate such no-risk (as opposed to low-risk) requests. Similarly, it is common for hospital management to have policies and procedures in place to evaluate clinical and quality improvement audits and adjudicate whether they do or do not require IRB/ERB oversight. Where such an audit follows guidelines and policies that protect patient privacy and data security and pose no-risk, it has become common for a waiver of further IRB/ERB requirements to be granted.

However, if MedRxiv’s policy were enforced equally against all academics seeking to release a preprint on their server, they would surely reject the manuscript for every example I described above. I, like the members of Professor Fenton’s team that I spoke to today, remain sceptical that this is the case. As with all censorship, it is more likely that MedRxiv’s approach is to use such policies to censor those who MedRxiv have decided are immoral or un-whatever-the-current-consensus is.

Conclusion

Censorship has existed as long as we have had the written word. While those groups who resort to censorship claim it is a righteous tool, the truth is more often that it is used as a punative weapon of brute force and retaliation. Any resort to censorship is always an attempt to stiffle discussion and close down debate. No matter which side of a debate those censoring academic content are on, any censorship of academic discourse sets a dangerous precedent, damages intellectual freedom, leads to supression of accurate data that conflicts with industry interests, is a retaliation against those who dare to reveal such data, and causes self-censorship amongst academic authors.

Censorship of scientific results, academic discourse and informed debate is wrong.

Therefore governments, politicians, institutions, employers, journals and preprint websites that engage in censorship are also wrong.

Laws like the Online Harms Bill that purport to protect one group, while actively censoring the thoughts, ideas and right of expression of another are also wrong.

#EndCensorship

1. Such coordinated attacks against Covid-sceptic academics have been linked to social media followers of the accounts of: Trish Greenhalgh, Deepti Gurdisani, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, Devi Srindhar, Graham Bottley and the fatuous arm-waver Susan Oliver.