Barbara Ferrer Obliterates ‘Misinformation’

Barbara Ferrer did a good thing last week – a very good thing.

She didn’t know she was doing it, she did it by accident, and it will not be good for her or her Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s fight against the censorship lawsuit they are facing.

But it will be good for everyone else in Los Angeles, in California, in the nation, and maybe even the world.

Because Barabara Ferrer said in open court that misinformation – as defined by those who, like herself, use it as a cudgel to censor other people – does not exist.

The global censorship-industrial complex publicly bases its existence on the need to fight misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and other things people say and write that are inherently false and dangerous.  Obviously, the real reason has nothing to do with true/false and is only about maintaining the power of the elites and their servants, but – at least according to a frightening number of new polls – many people have bought the public lie and think it’s okay to censor/block the speech of spreaders of “misinformation.”

But if misinformation is merely a matter of opinion, a malleable subjective standard then there can be no  “for the good of society, for your safety, for your benefit” even theoretical justification for censorship.

Anyone paying attention knew this already, but now one of its practitioners has admitted it under oath:

“I think misinformation to me and misinformation to you would – it’s completely possible that they would be two separate things,” Ferrer said on the opening day of testimony in the Alliance of Los Angeles County Parents freedom of speech lawsuit against her department.

In other words, misinformation is in the eye of the beholder.

Not only did Ferrer largely gut her own legal defense, she also shined a light into the psyche of every censor currently roaming the halls of power.  

“It’s a matter of hubris,” said Jay Bhattacharya, one of the plaintiffs in the separate national Missouri v. Biden case involving federal censorship activities that has successfully proven clear First Amendment violations and will soon be heard by the United State Supreme Court.  “They believe that anything that contradicts them is misinformation.”

Bhattacharya – a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration which called for a more targeted pandemic response –  is a professor of medicine at Stanford, has a Ph. D in economics, and is an actual medical doctor.  Ferrer is not a medical doctor and, it seems from her testimony, is not exactly sure what her Ph.D is actually in, explaining that she “was in a program at Brandeis (University – Boston)” focused on public health policy but would “have to look” to check exactly what her Ph. D is in.

At the heart of the Alliance lawsuit was Ferrer’s decision to shut off public comments on the department’s social media sites and her communications’ director pushing then-Twitter to shut down an account critical of her and the department.

The decision to shut off comments came in July, 2022, around the time the department was considering re-imposing a countywide mask mandate.  News of that possibility infuriated members of the public who let Ferrer and her department know (though comments, emails, and such) that they were not supportive of the idea.  

“Not supportive” is actually an understatement. Ferrer’s defense counsel – Kent Raygor – emphasized the lurid nature of the messages and their putatively threatening nature to justify the shut off.  The comments ran the gamut from A to B to C to F to MF to N (Nazi, not the other N word) to P to S words – to be blunt, they were not kind.

Also around this time, doctors at LA-USC hospital said at a staff “town hall” function that the idea that COVID cases were increasing to the point that masking was called for was (at the very least) surprising, saying they were “just seeing nobody with severe COVID disease.”

A video of the doctors made the rounds and put a damper on Ferrer’s mask mandate plans.

When asked by Alliance attorney Julie Hamill if the USC doctors were engaging in misinformation, Ferrer hemmed and hawed, before settling on calling their statements “inaccurate.”  She did stress that she believed the pandemic was still very much active last summer and that the numbers her office was seeing were for the entire county and higher than LA-USC’s and, therefore, not reflective of the county as a whole.

Hamill noted that in the past Ferrer had stated COVID impacted lower-income people more and that since LA-USC is a public “safety net” hospital, its number should theoretically be higher than at the other 74 hospitals in the county.  

The social media comments were shut off after the decision to not reinstitute masking was made.  In response to the shut off, an “alternate” department Twitter account was created by an Alliance member.  The account re-posted information from the department account but left the comment/reply section open.

That account was shut down by Twitter for “impersonation” (of the department’s account) reasons after Ferrer’s communications director Brett Morrow – with the assistance of a staffer/friend in the office of Congressman Adam Schiff (and current senate candidate) –  used direct back channels to reach out to Twitter execs to have the account shuttered.

It is established legal precedent that a government agency can either have their “comments” sections on social media and other websites either on or off and that the agency can decide to turn them on if they’ve been off and turn them off if they’ve typically been on.  However, a government agency cannot make that decision based on the content of the comments – in other words, it can’t close the comments (a quasi-public forum) because people are saying mean things and/or it cannot delete mean comments while leaving positive ones up online.

Morrow and an assistant – Erica Lespron – both testified nasty comments were never deleted and that discussion of turning off comments was discussed – a bit –  prior to the re-masking timeframe.

That being said, Morrow had expressed frustration with “anti-maskers” and, the night before they were shut off, emailed another colleague the go ahead, saying “Let’s do it for all posts. I’m over people RN (right now.)”

Ferrer’s attorney asked her about misinformation, though not for a specific definition – she had told Hamill earlier she did not wish to “quibble” about that.

“I’m concerned about misinformation,” Ferrer said.  “We’re the public health department.  People coming to our sites are looking for accurate information.”

Ferrer said her office has a team of experts who “work hard to determine what is accurate information.  So I would say when the information is not aligned with that, with what we’ve determined is accurate information for us, that would represent misinformation.”

Ferrer then immediately undermined her own argument, saying:  “You asked a hard question because there are lots of ways people can think about misinformation.”

Bhattacharya was having none of that, noting how many claims – masks work, the vaccine keeps other people safe, too, lockdowns are necessary –  used to censor people were in fact utterly false.

“They don’t think it’s possible they could be wrong and they got everything wrong,” Bhattacharya said of the pandemicist censors like Ferrer. “What she’s trying to say is that people who disagree with her are incapable of understanding. It’s antithetical to the scientific method and it’s infuriating.”

Infuriating, but unsurprising, particularly from Ferrer who said this last year: “There are some people who have seen this as a time to really promote individual liberty and freedom, a sort of sense of entitlement, of being able to make our own rules as individuals, but that is a tiny fraction of the people.”

Barbara Ferrer: "There are some people who have seen this as a time to really promote individual liberty and freedom, a sort of sense of entitlement, of being able to make our own rules as individuals, but that is a tiny fraction of the people." pic.twitter.com/N9iXLJwHkG

— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) October 3, 2022

While a growing level of censorship existed prior and COVID topics are not the only ones by a long shot subject to the current wholesale censorship effort – see Hunter Biden’s laptop, etc. the pandemic provided a very convenient cover to massively increase the constitution-crushing practice, make the powerful much more so, and give an outlet to tiny tyrants to live out their deepest fantasies.

In other words, the global censorship campaign based on the existence of misinformation is, well, misinformation.

And now the world has it from the horse’s mouth.

All quotes were taken from an initial transcript of last week’s hearings produced by the court reporter and provided to the Globe.  The hearing part of the trail is over.  Both parties have until November 16 to submit closing briefs and live closing arguments will take place December 1.