Fox News host Laura Ingraham reacted to the latest batch of “Twitter files” that were released Thursday by claiming that “shadow banning,” a conservative complaint dating back to the Trump administration, ultimately “led to death.”
Ingraham discussed the new batch—which came six days after the overhyped first one—with Stanford School of Medicine Professor Jay Bhattacharya, who was the subject of one tweet in a thread by Bari Weiss about what she dubbed the social media company’s “secret blacklists.”
Bhattacharya, who according to Weiss was put on one such “blacklist,” said that Twitter went “too far” with its “censorship.”
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“We needed to have a discussion—an open scientific discussion about the right policies for COVID,” he said. “Imagine how different [it would have been for] all the small businesses who could’ve stayed open, all the people that wouldn’t have missed their cancer screenings, all the kids that wouldn’t be depressed and suicidal, all the learning loss that could have been avoided if we just had an open scientific discussion. This was not a free and fair kind of discussion.”
Ingraham had the same train of thought.
“I think this shadow banning actually could have—well, did… a few steps removed—it led to death,” she said, similar to what right-wing activist Charlie Kirk told Tucker Carlson earlier in the night.
“I think kids, because of these lockdowns, the mental health evidence that’s piling up now all across the country—suicide, depression, anxiety, self-harm, everything we’re seeing that came out of those lockdowns—we couldn’t talk about it without getting suppressed,” she insisted. “You were called a conspiracy theorist and so was I.”
The World Health Organization has detailed a rise in mental health issues since the beginning of the pandemic, but Ingraham provided no details as to her speech being “suppressed.”
Later in the interview, Ingraham claimed that similar tactics are being used “on a whole series of medical issues,” including ones that she has discussed on her show.
Ingraham made the explicit reference to “sex change operations” as one example, and perhaps was also hinting at her segment about the “violent consequences” of marijuana legalization.
“Doctors are afraid to speak out,” she asserted.
