With the election of Joe Biden and the Democrats, the leftist social media CEOs of Silicon Valley are no longer even bothering to pretend that they obey the federal law that requires them to act as a neutral platform, not a biased publisher. The latest example is one of the most outrageous yet.

Last month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a roundtable discussion with some medical experts about COVID-19 and what the so-called medical authorities such as the WHO and the CDC got wrong or right. They questioned the value of mask-wearing, particularly for young children and people who were already vaccinated; the lockdowns of schools and businesses; and slammed the ideas of a “vaccine passport” and forcing vaccinations on people who’ve already had the disease, saying that they’re actually undermining trust in public health and leading to fewer people getting vaccinated.

Now, if you read this newsletter regularly, or have a brain, you probably think those are perfectly reasonable areas for discussion. But not YouTube, which yanked a TV news story offline just for including video of the discussion. YouTube said it was removed “because it included content that contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

The people in the video were not untrained quacks. They were professors of medicine from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford Universities. But according to YouTube, they are not qualified to question the "consensus" of the same “settled science” crowd that admitted last week, after a year of obsessively scrubbing everything we touch with disinfectant, that your chances of getting COVID-19 from touching an infected surface are only about 1 in 10,000.

But YouTube is hardly alone: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pushing for federal regulations to make social media platforms legally liable for spreading “misinformation” (now redefined as “things leftists disagree with”), which would conveniently make it nearly impossible for any new start-ups to challenge established giants like Facebook. Note to kids who love socialism but don’t know what it is: billionaires using their connections with a corrupt government to crush any upstart competition is a hallmark of socialism.

So what is it about these tech nerds-turned-Silicon Valley billionaires that makes them think they know what’s objectively true and correct (more so even than a Harvard Professor of Medicine), and that anyone who questions them is dangerously ignorant and must be silenced – apart from being leftists, where that comes with the territory?

Roger Simon at the Epoch Times has a theory: they’re “Asperger’s Fascists.” He suggests that many of them suffer from Asperger’s Syndrome, meaning they’re very bright and understand science and business, but have difficulty with social interaction and nonverbal communication. They operate within a narrow world of restrictive and repetitive patterns of behaviors and interests, mostly limited to technology and political correctness. Having decided what they believe is correct, they're determined to use the money and power technology has given them to force everyone to comply, so there will be no disturbing, chaotic clashes of ideas from people who prefer freedom of thought and the right to question authority and point out when they think it’s wrong.

Of course, while this sounds eerily plausible, it’s just a layman’s diagnosis. Simon isn’t a Harvard medical professor. Although, come to think of it, to the people he’s talking about, even being a Harvard medical professor is meaningless if you question what they believe.

(Link goes to a lengthy excerpt since the full column is behind a paywall and you can only read it if you subscribe to the Epoch Times, which you should.)