Like many Americans, I am extremely disturbed by believers of wacky, unhinged conspiracy theories, who are duped like robots into accepting the most preposterous and illogical notions.

For the record, I don’t think the moon landing was fake, that Elvis is still alive, that 9/11 was an inside job, or that the Clintons drink the blood of children –at a DC pizzeria or elsewhere – in order to stay young (or for any other reason, for that matter). Barack Obama was not born in Kenya, and there aren’t a handful of people who meet off the coast of Georgia once or twice a year to control the fate of the world.

Ludicrous propositions like those have created a “boy who cried wolf” atmosphere in which those who justifiably scoff at the vast majority of looney claims refuse to give credence to the rare ones that are valid.

Conspiracies, after all, are not a figment of the imagination. The Great Brinks Robbery, Watergate, the Lufthansa Heist, and 9/11, among many others, are examples of ones that were very real. The FBI dismissed and denied the epitome of conspiracy, organized crime, for decades, until it no longer could. Arguably, now there’s a powerful conspiracy on the horizon worth examining, and you can make up your own mind about its validity: collusive censorship of information that contradicts whatever narrative the censors desire to be peddled to the masses.

The nation watched large media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter unleash their arrogant power by banning President Donald Trump because he dared to question the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Their reasoning, that they silenced him because his messages tended to incite or exacerbate violence, is an apparent ruse, as it has emboldened them and other information providers to censor other ideas, such as any skepticism about the COVID vaccine.

That conspiracy is becoming increasingly clear, as evidenced by a May 14 story in the Epoch Times, reporting that Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told the U.S. Senate Health Committee at a May 11 hearing that he thought “probably a little more than half, probably 60 percent” of his own NIAID employees were vaccinated. The Times story opened with that point, certainly a newsworthy one, considering that although Fauci is the face and voice of COVID in general and vaccinations in particular, a significantly large number of his employees have not taken the vaccine plunge. Granted, some among the unvaccinated may be predisposed to adverse reactions, simply didn’t get around to it yet but plan to, or haven’t announced their vaccination (not everyone’s obsessed with showcasing their jab receipt on social media). However generously we may account for those caveats, it still leaves a disturbingly large number of people working at the epicenter of infectious diseases who are presumably worried about becoming vaccinated. That’s big news. Yet, locating that story in the press requires a keen and persistent eye.

ABC News quoted Fauci’s confidence in the vaccine, and even provided an accompanying clip on its website, but left out his “a little more than half” line. CNN focused on Fauci’s ongoing friction with Sen. Rand Paul (KY), but also failed to mention the former’s estimated percentage of his unvaccinated staff. And a clip of Fauci disclosing that statistic has been removed from Twitter. Thankfully, the entire May 11 hearing remains accessible on C-SPAN, thereby demonstrating that the general public’s opportunity to access vital information is not impossible, even though it is perilously difficult.

Mention the Epoch Times with caution, as intolerant leftists will laugh it off as some nutty rightwing rag. But the key to good research is locating the original source, which in this case, is Fauci’s own statement at a Senate hearing. Granted, media outlets tend to focus on their primary audiences’ comfort foods, but that doesn’t mean the information they provide is false, especially when there’s a roadmap to the origin.

The sweeping of provocative comments like Fauci’s under the rug is plainly rooted in a concerted effort to vaccinate the entire planet. Not for diabolical reasons, such as to kill off hundreds of millions with a poison jab, or to turn them into mindless, compliant sheep (beyond what many already are), but for what the censors consider to be the public good: a happy, healthy world of humans saturated with countless vaccines. Nonetheless, neither scientists nor politicians, and surely not their media messenger boys, have the right to play God by withholding information that is pertinent to our making informed decisions about what to put inside our bodies.

The “it’s for their own good” argument is often made by folks with marginal minds and a whole lot of hubris, who fancy themselves as intellectually superior to the rest of us yokels, and so there’s no need to complicate things by filling us in on the details, lest we make pests of ourselves and thwart their medical engineering momentum.

Alexander Hamilton, who (in)famously said: “the masses are asses,” would be proud.

I recently had a conversation in a virtual town hall setting with Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House and a person I’ve often said is so knowledgeable that Google should be using him as a search engine. I asked him: “how is it that most Americans don’t even know about a story like this, and how can we educate them about it?” He said: “you’re doing it right now, by educating this town hall audience.” He encouraged me to spread the word and, thankfully, this column is a great way to do that.

As I’ve often said, many of the largest and most powerful media outlets can take a lesson from The National Herald, which has never censored my topics in the 12-plus years that I’ve been writing this column. And for that, Thomas Jefferson would be proud.