Earlier this week, YouTube deleted a video of two California emergency room doctors who criticized the state's COVID-19 shutdown. By the time it was deleted, it had been tweeted by Elon Musk, viewed more than 5 million times, and texted to me by conservative family members. The doctors had become heroes among a sect of the right that wants to immediately re-open the economy regardless of the human toll.

The video was and is dangerous, but by deleting it, YouTube made these two men martyrs in the right's ongoing war in which they claim Silicon Valley and The Left are censoring conservatives. The video in question features doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, who own a chain of urgent care facilities in California. In the video, Erickson and Massihi extrapolate data from their own emergency rooms to explain that, in their view, coronavirus is much less deadly than doctors have been saying, is more widespread than people previously thought, and that the shutdown is not only hurting the economy but also hurting people who need to go to the doctor for other conditions.