There is no way not to take yesterday’s public warning from the nation’s top health official as ominous, indeed sinister. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy expounded on the risks of social media to children and teens, citing possible “harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” The remarkable 19-page advisory, begins by acknowledging that the effects of social media on adolescent mental health are not well understood, and even that social media can be beneficial to “some users.” It then goes on to argue ,“There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”

And thus the U.S. Surgeon General lays the groundwork for government censorship, despite admitting that there is insufficient hard data to support his conclusions. Parental supervision is not enough for this government, as we have already seen in multiple settings. After all, “it takes a village,” the village that one side of the current culture wars is trying to define includes treating words and expression as “harm” from which people must be kept “safe.” Predictably, the near-completely compliant national news media is behind such government appropriation of parental authority, in this as well as other matters.

“As social media use has risen, so have self-reports and clinical diagnoses among adolescents of anxiety and depression, along with emergency room visits for self-harm and suicidal ideation,” writes the New York Times. Oh! Then that must mean that social media use causes those problems, since they are both on the rise at the same time. Science!

When do we get a Surgeon General’s report of the health risks of faulty reasoning and media propaganda?

“The report could help encourage further research to understand whether these two trends are related,” the Times tells us. I think this means that the report will trigger more rigged and otherwise dubious studies allowing the government to try to justify First Amendment incursions to the courts. “At their clearest, the data indicate that social media can have both a positive and negative impact on the well-being of young people, and that heavy use of social media — and screen time generally — appears to displace activities like sleep and exercise that are considered vital to developing brains,” is one of the Times’ takeaways from the Surgeon General’s politicized outburst. How are these concerns any different from the past cultural freak-outs over television in the Fifties, or rock-n-roll, or, in an earlier era, dime novels and “Captain Billie’s Whiz Bang”? They aren’t. The difference is that no Surgeon General decided to use his influence then to distort the debate.

To be clear, it is obvious that social media is a problem; many problems, in fact. It is equally obvious that everything about the Biden Administration is political and aimed at social and government control for “the greater good,” with the Constitution considered just an obstacle to be run-over, crashed through, or changed. So is free speech: if the Twitter debacle has proven anything, it has proven that.

We cannot trust the motives of the federal government, we can’t trust its agencies (See: the FBI) and we should know that we can’t trust health officials after they used their influence and expertise to wreck the economy, children’s socialization and education, and more by pushing a destructive lock-down on American society out of panic and partisan political objectives. Funny, the Surgeon General’s office didn’t issue a warning about any of that.

Warning about the “health effects” of free speech is way, way outside the Surgeon General’s lane. The only value of his report is that it provides more evidence that our government and its agents are determined to limit the right of free expression and take as much authority away from parents in supervising the education, emotional development and acculturation of their children as can.

Dr. Murthy already swerved out of his lane when he declared gun violence to be an “epidemic.” The public now has “ample indicators” that he and his office are just another weapon in the arsenal of aspiring totalitarians .

[Geena is asking to make another appearance; so is Prof. Harold Hill, who has a song for you. But I think I’ll leave the post at that.]