Kerby Anderson
Alex Berenson recently wrote about the “First Freedom.” He was on my radio program four years ago to talk about stories he was investigating after having left the New York Times. That was before he began reporting on topics related to the pandemic and vaccine that were considered forbidden.
Perhaps now you can see why he writes about free speech. He has faced social media censorship by merely reporting the truth about the clinical trials of the vaccine.
To make his point, he takes us back 82 years to a State of the Union speech given by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The president talked about four essential human freedoms. The second freedom was religious, “the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way.” The third was “freedom from want.” The fourth was “freedom from fear.”
But the most important freedom according to the president was “freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world.” That was the first freedom. That is the First Amendment.
But Alex Berenson goes on to say that “freedom of speech” is really “freedom of thought.” If people can’t say openly what they think, they will be forced into a shadow world. He goes on to explain, “It doesn’t matter whether the speech is right or wrong, objectively true or false. Indeed, the First Amendment makes no reference to the truth or falsity of the speech it protects.”
He is concerned that 70 percent now favor restricting “false information” online and he isn’t even sure the New York Times believes in the First Amendment. Twitter eventually banned him. One of his offenses was accurately reporting on the results of Pfizer’s own clinical trial.
Most Americans, including Democratic presidents, used to believe in free speech. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

Kerby Anderson
The phrase “trust the science” isn’t as popular in the culture as it has been in the past due to the recent revelations about inaccurate scientific statements during the pandemic. And the phrase “trust the science” isn’t as accepted as it was in the scientific community due to so many retractions.
The co-founders of Retraction Watch have been monitoring this problem for years. They found that only 40 scientific papers were retracted in the year 2000. But last year, 5,500 scientific papers were retracted. They concluded that only about a fifth of the retractions have been done due to an “honest error.”
The surge in bogus papers is driven in part by the reality that scientists need to “publish or perish.” But those pressures have been on academics for decades. A larger problem is the fact that many are turning to “paper mills” that sell manuscripts and other research projects to scientists needing to publish.
People are being harmed by these bogus papers. One anesthesiologist falsified data on an ineffective blood substitute that was widely cited in the literature. Patients were harmed by this false research.
Another aspect of this problem is illustrated by the so-called replication crisis. So many of the results published in scientific papers cannot be reproduced by other researchers. The University of Virginia attempted to reproduce five “landmark” cancer studies. It failed in one case and produced inconclusive results in two others. This suggests that “the science” in all these cases might be wrong.
It is becoming more and more difficult to “trust the science” when we discover how many scientific papers and scientific statements are wrong.