Four Key Messages - Dr. Aaron Kheriaty About Censorship, Covid Crisis and the Decline of Liberal Democracies

A throwback to our interview with Dr. Aaron Kheriaty—on sacrificing his career for the sake of truth and why he has no regrets.

For decades, informed consent was a core principle of medicine: No medical intervention without full disclosure of risks, benefits, and alternatives. But with vaccine mandates, that principle vanished. People were misled about risks. Those who refused were punished—losing jobs, education, and freedoms. Dr. Kheriaty, who had served for almost fifteen years as a Professor of Psychiatry at the UCI School of Medicine and as Director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health, lost his career after challenging the university's vaccine mandate in court. If human rights can be violated this easily in a crisis, what stops it from happening again?

Government officials flagged posts they didn’t like and pressured social media companies to take them down. When the posts didn’t violate platform policies, the government pushed to have those policies changed—forcing platforms to censor information millions of times. This wasn’t just about false information. Even scientific studies and fact-based discussions were silenced. If the narrative was inconvenient, it disappeared. This is more than social media moderation. It’s an assault on free expression on a global scale. What happens when the government controls what you’re allowed to say?

At first, the bureaucrats said they were stopping “misinformation” (false but unintentional claims). Then, they targeted “disinformation” (deliberate falsehoods). Soon, even accurate information became a threat, so they invented “malinformation”: facts that don’t support the correct narrative. Science, history, public health—if it doesn’t align with the agenda, it gets suppressed. Censorship isn’t about protecting the truth. It’s about controlling what you’re allowed to know.

It is true that the new U.S. administration seems to have turned the tide. But it is also clear that there’s a global shift away from true democracy and toward an unelected, permanent bureaucracy—a system where the real power lies behind the scenes, immune to elections, public scrutiny, or accountability. COVID didn’t create this system. It accelerated it. Policies once unthinkable in free societies—censorship, surveillance, forced mandates—became normal overnight. Will the new U.S. administration change this trend? The truth is, we don't know. But if democratic institutions no longer function as they did 50 years ago, what are we becoming?

Check out the full interview, or read the articles based on it here or here.