Topping the list of assaults on our Constitutional freedoms is the war on our right to speak freely and peacefully assemble as governors warn their citizens to stay safe, stay home, and shut up. Joining them is the social media giant Facebook which, in its general censorship of conservative thought and opinion, has now decreed that using their platform to communicate complaints about government overreach during the Wuhan virus crisis and to organize protests against said overreach violates Facebook’s Alice-In-Wonderland “community standards”

In the age before cable, there was an iconic sci-fi program called The Outer Limits whose opening featured a series of test patterns, flickering screens and a narrator known as the “control voice” who solemnly intoned, “Do not attempt to adjust your television set. We will control all that you see and hear.” Today that is a chilling reality as social media giants like Facebook routinely censor what people can see and hear on their sites. Today Big Brothers like Mark Zuckerberg conspire nor only to control what we see and hear, but what we can say to each other and what Constitutional rights we can enjoy and when: 

Facebook is working with state governments across the U.S. to tamp down organized protests that violate stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus pandemic, according to new reporting.

CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan reported Monday that the social media website “has removed promotion of anti-quarantine events in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska after consultation with state governments.” The CNN report cited a spokesman from Facebook who said the protests were in violation of states’ guidelines.

The spokesman, O’Sullivan reported, “said Facebook would take down posts created through the Facebook Events feature that promote events in California, New Jersey and Nebraska. Other Facebook posts, including Facebook groups about the protests, might not be removed.”…

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos spoke to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on Monday about how the platform is addressing the pandemic, and Zuckerberg said the website is tackling content that promotes “harmful misinformation.”

“If somebody’s trying to organize something like [a protest], does that qualify as harmful information?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“We do classify that as harmful misinformation and we take that down,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s important that people can debate policies, so there’s a line on this, but more than normal political discourse, I think a lot of the stuff that people are saying that is false around a health emergency like this can be classified as harmful misinformation.”

What about the harmful misinformation about death rates and viral spread from experts and politicians whose computer models have been spewing “projections” that have been wrong from day one and proposed mitigation strategies that change repeatedly? Only the sick should wear a mask, leaving the majority of  them to the health care workers, we were told. Then we’re told everybody should wear a mask Millions will die, oh wait. We’re running out of ventilators and will never have enough, oh, wait.  Their harmful misinformation has helped tank a booming economy, possibly causing more deaths due to suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, and postponing so-called “elective” surgeries and treatments. People postpone or can’t get doctor appointments that might diagnose a serious ailment. The experts push telemedicine in situations when only a doctor’s stethoscope listening to your heart or lungs will do. Yet Facebook censors none of the “experts” or bloviating politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Andrew Cuomo.

The information these protestors convey is that the experts and the politicians haven’t always been right or informed, and that a lot of the stuff these people have been saying has been false about this health emergency.  Some misguided experts before the pandemic outbreak were actually helping to fund China’s Wuhan research.

What gives Zuckerberg the right to decide what “normal political discourse” is? These protestors are protesting a lockdown that has turned their country into a police state. They have become the tired huddled masses yearning to breathe free but are “informed” that if they leave their homes lives are endangered.

Many would respond that their lives are effectively over. For many their retirements have been eaten up in market panic. For others, their businesses and their futures will never come back. They sit at home listening to reporters, experts, and politicians who aren’t locked in their homes, have jobs to go to, and get a regular paychecks tell them what to do. They don’t have the stock options of a Mark Zuckerberg.

And for giggles listen to this: Zuckerberg’s Facebook, for accurate information, refers people to China’s sock puppet, the World Health Organization. The Facebook app displays the message:

“Help Friends and Family Avoid False Information About COVID-19. Share a link to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) website where they’ve put together a list of common rumors about the virus.”

Yeah, I’m sure they have. You’ve probably heard the rumor about the coronavirus leaking from a lab in Wuhan, except that it is not considered a tin-foil hat conspiracy theory anymore as foreign government like Britain give it serious considering the possibility and even the U.S. government is investigating WHO’s trail of lies and harmful misinfornation, one would think, would make Zuckerberg blush:  

The World Health Organization, an entity people everywhere can supposedly rely on for accuracy, gave provably false information to countries around the globe about human-to-human spread of Wuhan coronavirus in January.

To recap, at the end of December the WHO was warned by Taiwan officials that the Wuhan coronavirus was spreading through human-to-human contact. The WHO, an ally first to China… said two weeks later there was "no evidence" this was the case. They did this by citing unreliable, dishonest, official Chinese government sources. Nearly two weeks after that, the WHO argued against restrictions on international air travel. This of course ultimately led to the devastating pandemic we are in now.

…China destroyed samples of the virus, shut down labs, arrested doctors and welded shut buildings where victims of the disease lived.

WHO overlooked China’s perfidy, praising it for is transparency and later success in controlling the contagion it unleashed on the world  The WHO aided and abetted the indifference and silence that doomed the world’s people and the global  economy. Wasn’t the WHO a little bit suspicious when China banned air travel in and out of Wuhan but allowed international flights so that the contagion would spread outside of China?

A recent study reveals most of the Wuhan virus victim would have been spared bit for the “harmful misinformation” coming out of China and the World Health Organization:

A study published last week by the University of Southampton’s WorldPop population mapping group suggested that China could have prevented 95 percent of the coronavirus infections running wild across the world if the government had listened to the whistleblowing doctors of Wuhan instead of silencing and punishing them for daring to speak out.  

The study, titled, “Effects of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions for Containing the COVID-19 Outbreak in China,” reviewed the effects of quarantines, lockdowns, travel restrictions, and the techniques the world has come to know as “social distancing” over the past few months. The analysis concluded that identifying cases of infection and quickly implementing restrictions on human contact dramatically slows the spread of diseases such as the Wuhan coronavirus.

So now Zuckerberg is going to help liberal and progressive governors impose their  coronavirus police state. According to the Constitution, we have the rights to speak freely, to peacefully assemble, and to petition the government for redress of grievances. But Rev. James Hamilton of the King James Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi was told otherwise by a police officer after organizing a church drive-thru service.  In a video of the confrontation, a police officer actually approaches pastor Hamilton and asserts this astounding line: "We got an order from the governor, your rights are suspended." Our rights are what?

And lest you think this was just one overzealous cop, consider the words of the Democrat Governor of New Jersey Phil Murphy in an interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News:

Carlson asked Murphy about the arrests in Ocean County, N.J., of 15 men who were congregating for a rabbi's funeral at a Lakewood synagogue in early April. "

The Bill of Rights, as you well know, protects Americans' rights -- enshrines their right to practice their religion as they see fit and to congregate together to assemble peacefully," Carlson said. "By what authority did you nullify the Bill of Rights in issuing this order? How do you have the power to do that?"

"That's above my pay grade, Tucker," Murphy replied. "I wasn't thinking of the Bill of Rights when we did this... We looked at all the data and the science and it says people have to stay away from each other…”

Many governors are surveilling protestors and threatening them with arrest, even in their homes. They are not thinking of the Bill of Rights either. Now Zuckerberg’s Facebook is coming to their aid, working with such governors to suspend our rights.

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.