Facebook has announced that it will begin a slow purge of anyone questioning the absolute safety of vaccines, following the likes of Pinterest and YouTube. Of course, censorship backfires in many ways, and the push to censor vaccine skeptics will have the effect of dramatically growing their movement via the Streisand Effect, so called due to Barbara Streisand’s $50 million lawsuit against a photographer, for the crime of taking a picture of her house. She called it an invasion of privacy, but the ensuing publicity of the lawsuit resulted in a huge interest in the picture that was not there before.

Vaccine skeptics are intelligent, motivated, and organized. They will not just give up if they’re booted from the largest social media platforms. They will develop their own platforms, and, thanks to the attempted censorship, their audience will grow far more than it would have otherwise.

Much heat and little light has emerged from the debate about border security. The debate appears very superficial in its focus on a “wall”, which would be the least objectionable feature of the policy currently being pursued at our southern border. That policy is what the ACLU has dubbed a “Constitution-free Zone” which refers to the 100-mile wide zone, beginning at the border’s edge and extending into the US. In this area, your rights do not apply, and border agents can search, detain, harass, and bully US citizens as much as they like with no repercussions. 2 out of 3 US citizens live within this zone, patrolled by over 20,000 agents with an annual budget well over $14 billion. There is much written on the topic of the ‘Constitution-Free Zone, but it’s safe to say that no border security policy is worth the destruction of the rights of those supposedly benefiting from that security.