I knew Jesse attracted some rather unhinged followers on account of being at least nominally "anti-woke" but I'm surprised to see this amount of pushback in the comments of a paid post to what is a very reasonable accounting of a very crazy man's batshit worldview.
You can say that again. One of them seems to be paying $5/month for a brain toilet, and he has explosive diarrhea today. But he thinks he’s “educating” us.
Can you point me to someone saying the COVID vaccines have killed hundreds of millions of people? I haven't heard anyone say such a thing, and I cast a pretty wide net in my media consumption.
Let's say you're in a comment thread discussing these results and someone tosses this out there:
> "LIBERALS believe cops KILL MORE THAN 10,000 unarmed black people PER YEAR!!"
Would it be pedantic to respond with something like:
> "Actually, the poll indicates that only about 22% of highly liberal people believe that cops kill 10,000 or more unarmed black people per year, whereas 62% think the number is between 100 and 1,000, and 15% get it right by estimating the number is closer to 10."
Personally, I don't think so. It's just setting the record straight so that conversation can continue calmly on the basis of factual information. We're talking about order-of-magnitude level quantitative errors in both cases (not mere rounding errors), which are highly likely to negatively impact the tone of subsequent discourse.
Someone in a comment below said that "monsters" had forced "hundreds of millions" of people to take the Covid vaccine. I would assume the person you're talking about was referring to that comment, perhaps mistakenly attributing the phrasing to someone else making a different point.
Fair enough. Still worth correcting I think, if many readers would infer the message that there are influential people out there claiming that hundreds of millions were killed by the vaccines - a claim that's so easily refuted as to be absurd on it's face (I mean, did 100 million people even die of *all causes worldwide* in the last year?).
"Compare [Alex Jones] to the monsters who ordered hundreds of millions of people to get toxic and deadly non-vaccines they didn't need"
Now if something is 'deadly' then it must kill a fair percentage of the people who are exposed to it, and since 70% of the world's population is vaccinated against Covid, if you think the vaccines are deadly then surely you must think hundreds of millions have died from them.
Now this comment is an outlier in terms of hysteria levels, but there are certainly plenty of conspiracists who claim that all excess deaths since Covid are down to Covid vaccines, or attribute every sudden death to vaccines (the 'died suddenly' meme). Most of these people aren't numerate enough to quantify their claims but they are implicitly claiming that the vaccines have killed millions of people, and even though there are various different types from different manufacturers, they all happen to be deadly, and presumably every health authority in every country has just decided to ignore it.
Cutting more to the chase, I think the people who claim many millions of deaths from the mRNA vaccines are probably wrong. But I also think that the people claiming negligible deaths from those same vaccines, to the point that the risk/reward ratio is still favorable even in healthy young people, are also probably wrong.
I think a lot of the world's health authorities have reached this same conclusion, such that the following statement
> presumably every health authority in every country has just decided to ignore it
is inaccurate. Look up the official policies of European countries with respect to these specific vaccines and you will find that many of them have stopped recommending them below some age threshold. Denmark was the first, which stopped recommending the vaccines for healthy people under 50 in 2022. Why would they do that other than an estimation that in this cohort the vaccine posed a potentially higher risk than the infection it was intended to prevent?
An analysis of Pfizer's own clinical trial data published by Peter Doshi et al in 2022 [1] found an excess rate of 1 in 800 for "severe adverse events of special interest" (read: disability, chronic conditions, things you definitely do not want to have) in the treatment arm of the trial. This was around the time that European countries started curtailing their recommendations. I would argue they have done their job, and it is the US FDA and CDC, now outliers on the world stage on this issue, who are in dereliction of duty.
OK I see the comment now. I think there are a few steps of interpretation of the author's intent, especially the interpretation of the meaning of "deadly" as "something that kills a fair percentage of people that were exposed to it".
A lot of people called COVID-19 "deadly", a lot of them with much farther reach than Alex Jones - the president of the United States for example. Given that the population-wide infection fatality rate was known to be most likely in the ballpark of 0.2-0.3% from seroprevalence studies as early as May 2020, and that these same studies found a still much lower IFR in young people (all of which is borne out repeatedly in later more comprehensive studies) [1], you must therefore logically think that either:
A) it was unwarranted or alarmist for these people to describe the virus as "deadly" beyond the middle of 2020 since it did not appear to "kill a fair percentage of people exposed to it"
Or B) 0.2% is "a fair percentage of people exposed to it [COVID-19]". Accounting for age, 0.05% is a fair percentage of people under 70 exposed to COVID-19, and 0.01% is a fair percentage of people under 30.
Which one?
[1] see seroprevalence studies from Santa Clara county CA by Bhattacharya, Ioannidis et al, similar follow-up study in LA county.
*I* didn’t describe Covid as “deadly” so this gotcha doesn’t work. It’s dangerous if you’re in a high risk group but I wouldn’t say it’s a deadly disease for most people…. “Potentially fatal” would be a better description.
I guess a very generous interpretation of that comment could be that he thinks the vaccines have ‘only’ killed millions of people. Obviously that’s still batshit and Covid is much more dangerous than the risk of very rare fatal side effects from the vaccines. I get the impression that you’re some kind of anti-vaxx whack job so I will not be discussing this further.
So you do not think it's fair to make blanket statements which scaremonger about the virus to the general population. I agree.
And I also don't think it's useful to scaremonger about the mRNA vaccines. But I do think it is not unreasonable to estimate that the risks they pose to healthy young people outweigh the risks the virus poses, in agreement with many health authorities around the world, and on the basis of Pfizer's own trial data as analyzed by Doshi et al in 2022 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9428332).
A 1-in-800 rate of serious complication *does* lead to a reasonable conclusion that at least millions globally were seriously harmed by the mRNA vaccines, though not necessarily killed.
If that makes me a "whack job anti-vaxxer" then I don't know what to tell you, other than that your communication style is probably counterproductive to your goals.
Honestly, Bret's general worldview is solid, but he has a habit of irrational dot connection that he digs-in on instead of allowing it to be modified with new info. He is a great guy, which is why people love him, but he is dead wrong about the extent of vaccine injury and Fauci 's Mafia hits.
possible, but as an adolescent addiction psychiatrist, I eat implacable snideness for breakfast. I think he sees a world falling apart and correctly diagnoses some problems, and incorrectly diagnoses others. Just as combat soldiers get battle fatigue, I think a lot of culture warriors who face real, personal consequences get a period of hyper-reactivity and "battle fatigue". I'd attach a graph if I could get this to work on my phone. They have their period of usefulness, followed by over-confidence, followed by becoming a shell of their former selves... https://lermanet.org/scientology/hubbard2percentrule.html
My issue is that most people in the general world of people who follow Jesse wouldn't tolerate "he's a great guy aside from all of the falsehoods he doggedly defends" from, say, Michael Hobbes.
sure - but he has been a valuable contributor to a lot of discussions, whereas Michael Hobbes doesn't really meet that category. I think that the data contradicts what he says, and Weinstein is doing people a disservice by not reflecting on it and modifying, I really believe he has this conclusion laid-down in his brain as solidly as a memory at this point. It's effectively a "central dogma" he is working from. In issues not related to this one, I find him a useful contributor... never said that about Michael Hobbes.
I echo the general sentiment, though I'd personally prefer to avoid the mental illness metaphors. Given how scrupulously careful Jesse is about not getting ahead of the evidence, declaring his biases, acknowledging uncertainty, and so on, it's genuinely surprising to me that there are some (not many, but some) commenters in his audience who seem really bent on motivated reasoning and only interested in empiricism to the extent it confirms their priors. This is precisely what Jesse spends so much of his work warning against!
It’s the dopamine hit. People get addicted to attention. Bret Weinstein could have either labored away widely unnoticed in academia, or he could cultivate loads of minions hanging onto his every word, validating him, and making him feel good. All it cost him was his dignity with mainstream non-conspiracist society, but that’s a price he was clearly willing to pay.
*Restoring this comment to its former glory at the request of Cait. Slightly longer and harder as well*
Since the comments seem to be going wild, I’d like to leave my wildest, most off topic, totally-understandable if you need delete and ban me comment of all time:
There’s no way you could convince me that Bret Weinstein isn’t hung. It is the single most parsimonious explanation for everything else that makes him notable to the public eye.
1) The way he stood in front of all those students at Evergreen as if he had a secret power that would prevent him from getting hurt. Just watch that video in YouTube and tell me he isn’t packing heat.
2) The way his brother Eric seems to always be really insecure despite having a lot of objectively great accomplishments as if he was comparing himself as a man against someone he could never match. Brent may be a biologist, but Eric’s adult insecurities can directly be tied back to Brent’s incomparable pipe-laying abilities.
3) His wife seems to be genuinely turned on whenever he corrects her on a minor point in the few episodes of their podcast I’ve seen. Have you ever had someone seem thrilled to be corrected? Only one explanation fits.
4) His general high level of confidence about everything all the time as denoted above. Like he has something no one can take away from him that gives him superior and intrinsic value. Also when you have to use that much blood to power two heads you’re bound to just get things wrong from time to time.
In comparison to all other men I have known who were so blessed he is a perfect match. Just this laid back confident, generous air, but also it doesn’t necessarily strongly relate to what is actually going on around him because there’s a center of gravity in him so powerful that it distorts the nearby reality. In conclusion, all I’m saying is that if he ever makes the transition to OnlyFans I will subscribe for one day just to finally know.
I was extra paranoid about the Covid vaccine because my wife was pregnant at the time and we’d been having fertility problems so we extra didn’t want anything to happen to the baby, so I watched some of his podcasts. His wife getting turned on by being corrected was what gave me the lightbulb moment. He would jump in with this “let’s be careful now!” comment and then make some minor point and her eyes would shine with fire.
Oh man, the vaccine anxiety due to fertility issues is REAL. Or real, the everything anxiety. We had a terrible time with secondary infertility (happy ending - my second is 5 weeks old - but took years and many m/cs) and I was so nervewracked about vaccines, OTC medications, herbal tea…it’s the worst.
It was more that she got pregnant exactly at the same time the vaccine came out AND immediately after she recovered from getting COVID. So it was a very unique situation to try to figure out the right thing.
I don’t watch their podcast apart from like those two episodes but I hope to god they cover Jesse’s articles and make an Onlyfans in response to this comment.
It is pretty gross he said that guy was murdered though when the dude had a wife. He should probably just take the L on that one.
If you are referring to me, I thought your initial comment was hilarious!
My sister didn't die, but she is disabled from the anoxic brain injury and injury to her heart and central nervous system. My uncle did die from COVID right as my sister became ill, but I like to think uncle Richie would have laughed at your comment, too. He did love calling people "pricks!' It really has not been easy, I cared for my mother as all this was happening and she passed in 2022. Your compassion is truly welcomed, but don't lose that sense of humor. I am trying like hell to get mine back.
If you'd asked me yesterday "would you check out Bret Weinstein's package?" I'd have said no. But today? After this? Yes, 100% I'm giving that crotch a quick once-over.
Heather was definitely the bossier one 2021 or 2022... He seems too nice to really believe he is worth more than other people. However, I cannot refute your central point as he and I have never slept together
Heather seems to have gotten decidedly crueller, talking about how you can spot vaccinated generations because they are ugly, and have gotten uglier the more jabbed they get.
I contrast this with a kind email I got from her when I was agonizing over getting my 2nd covid shot, talking about risk and a friend of hers that has lupus (I do, too it's one of the reasons I got 3 shots) would bet that I would be ok, etc. Did fame go to their heads? I wish I knew.
I don't think so, it's like combat fatigue for fighting the culture war when you get fired, demonetized and demonized. I hadn't heard her say those things, but that's incredibly strange.
It’s easy to get pulled along in certain directions, I think, without even realizing it’s happening. I was internet fame-ish a whole back and I basically started to live my actual life like it was a comedy.
Before looking at the comments, I thought this passage was the best part of this post: "he once encountered a fluorescent raccoon that spoke to him [addressing him as ‘doctor’] and suggesting that the raccoon might have been an alien."
Our long era of unrest in the late 2010s/early 2020s really did break some people. I know a few myself. They got so alienated by wokies and/or extreme COVID hawks that they just kept drifting further into crazyland.
My suggestion to them: get offline more. Spend more time with real people in the real world. Find things to do that are apolitical, or at least close to it. It'll help. It really will.
RE: getting offline and spending more time with real people in the real world, finding things to do that are apolitical.
I would argue that said COVID hawks carry a lot of blame here for turning the simple act of spending time with real people itself into a political act that might brand you as MAGA-adjacent (with the one exception of mass BLM protests). And forcing all our kids out of each other's company and into the Internet, even while kids all over Europe were attending school.
Honestly, I never saw precautions against gathering in numbers as a threat to my freedom. I didn't want to catch COVID-19 and I didn't. I took a charitable view of the public health establishment's pronouncements and motives. It was a major health crisis, for heaven's sake.
I'm not talking about the initial public health pronouncements, even including hard lockdown, a policy which in the beginning, in the absence of data, probably made some sense.
I'm talking about the politicization of people voluntarily choosing to assess their own risk tolerance, *after data was available* which would make risk estimation possible (IFR estimates, home testing).
The politicization of having contrary opinions about the right balance of lockdown harms on mental and physical health.
All such opinions became coded as "right-wing", even though for example Sweden (no bastion of right wing thought) came down more on the side of letting people use their brains, and ended up with one of lowest total excess mortality rates in Europe for the entire pandemic period.
Parents who questioned the unwavering stance of teachers unions that schools must remain closed indefinitely - despite, again, governments throughout Europe making the opposite determination that education was too important, and the 0.0003% infection fatality rate in school age children too low (not to mention the low transmission rate in this cohort), to warrant sacrificing years of kids' lives for. People in the US lost left-leaning friends for making these arguments. Professionals were ostracized and coded as "fringe" - such as Stanford's own Jay Bhattacharya who was blacklisted on Twitter at the direct behest of the Whitehouse for expressing disfavorable but well-reasoned views about the net harms that lockdown would likely yield.
I largely agree, but in defense of teachers' unions: their mission is to advocate for their membership, it is not to advocate for the community that their membership serves. And if I was a teacher, I'd want some protections before being sent into a smallish room with 30 virus spreaders. I know a 35-yr-old woman, formerly fit and active, who is now crippled by long covid. The risks were and are real, and go beyond death as the only bad outcome.
Yep, raised two kids to happy adulthoods. And yep, when they were little, they absolutely were virus spreaders! I had way more colds and flus in those years.
I think it’s that *none* of the precautions were evidence based. 6 feet? Made up. Masks? Don’t work. Isolation? Almost everyone caught the virus anyway. It was literally *years* of power hungry bureaucrats making decisions that didn’t make any sense and also caused a massive amount of damage.
Of course, I can’t discern the motives are bureaucrats. They may have simply been totally incompetent. Either way, the rules were ridiculous and harmful. Also, you probably *have* had Covid and just didn’t realize it.
The point of these measures is to slow transmission so health systems don't get overwhelmed. Almost everyone got Covid eventually, but there's a big difference between that happening over the course of a few months and overwhelming hospitals and that happening over the course of years with a vaccine available to reduce the risk of severe illness.
The evidence available to make decisions is necessarily limited, but a basic understanding of physical reality is all that's needed to tell you that making people stand further apart and wear masks designed to filter aerosols will reduce transmission rates. Is there evidence that 6 feet is optimal compared to 5 feet or 7 feet? No, but the point is to minimise people breathing near each other.
The main failing was that communication didn't distinguish between cloth or surgical masks (which probably don't do much) compared to N95s designed to stop aerosols. Once those were in adequate supply they should have been emphasised more.
The thing is, many "deranged conspiracy theories" turn out to be true. You don't even need to go back as far as MK Ultra. Remember when talking about a lab-leak in Wuhan was one of those deranged conspiracy theories? We were instead supposed to follow the oh-so-reasonable theories about bats and pangolins at a wet market. You're very dismissive of Alex Jones, just asserting that he's a liar in an "everyone knows" sort of way. You want to call out Weinstein and/or Jones for specific things they said or did, then fine, that's valuable. Just making a broad assumption that someone is a "deranged conspiracy theorist" and therefore shouldn't be listened to is not. You might as well go work for MSNBC.
“After Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie died at Sandy Hook, gave a news conference the night after the shooting, Mr. [Alex] Jones said:
- ‘You know, after you lose your daughter, they put you on some antidepressants or something, but I thought those take a month to kick in. I mean, it’s like a look of absolute satisfaction, like he’s about to accept an Oscar.’
- ‘It looks like he’s saying, ‘OK, do I read off the card?’ He’s laughing, and then he goes over and starts basically breaking down and crying.’”
I don’t know what to tell you, man. Heckling the parents of dead kids gets you put in the deranged column in my book. The courts seem to agree with me: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63592386
His bootlickers (of which there are a few in these comments) claim that he’s apologized and hey, who among us hasn’t accidentally put the parents of dead children through multiple years of torment as you use your popular media only form to defame them, claim their kids were never killed, that they were all actors pretending to lose children etc? What about all the times he was correct??? (Citation needed)
Yeah, that's the one thing anybody knows about Alex Jones, because that's what the MSM publicized and told you what to think. That's fine, but I wish people who've never read a word he's written or watched anything he's done would stop babbling about it.
The great thing about conspiracy folks like yourself is that you’re serenely confident that you are the only ones who have ever sought out an alternative source for a news event. Yeah, we’re all sheeple who only think Alex Jones is horrible excuse for a human being because we just listen to what the dreaded MSM is telling us. Are the MSM in the room with us right now?
I've watched plenty of his videos out of curiousity (before Sandy Hook), and I listened to him on Joe Rogan. My first-hand analysis is that he's an idiotic blowhard and people who find him convincing have very poor critical thinking skills.
The classic conspiracist attempt at a syllogism: "Some conspiracies turned out to be true, therefore my specific conspiracy claim is true." It's not valid, I'm afraid. And what's worse, people trying this logical leap out always try and list the few conspiracies that they think were proven right, but they never wrestle with the hundreds of conspiracy claims that were proven wrong. Pointing to 3 correct conspiracy theories in a vacuum might seem impressive, but pointing to 3 correct conspiracy theories out of thousands of wrong ones is somewhat...less impressive.
When I was a biology undergrad in the early 2010s, what I heard from my professors about the inventor of PCR was
1) he got very rich
2) he became a crank
3) he moved to Hawaii to live a life of luxurious leisure
I also have a hard time believing someone who worked in higher education didn’t know that some Chinese people would really, really like to be Americans. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that many Chinese nationals at American universities had at best mixed feelings about their homeland and at worst would tell you their life’s goal was to get US citizenship.
I remember someone telling me that Mullis stopped getting invited to do talks about science because he would throw in a bunch of non-science life advice that was not great and expressed in a very crude manner. I have no idea if this is true, but if he thought HIV didn't cause AIDS then it's plausible that he gave really bad advice about sex.
I also remember talking to professors who'd met him and it was clear that they found him unpleasant. But they respected his PCR work because PCR is f'ing amazing.
As for the Chinese nationals, I have met so many Chinese scientists who want to be American citizens. I knew one who was a member of an ethnic minority -- he didn't want to talk about it besides the fact that it wasn't great for him back in China -- and he was willing to put up with just about anything if it meant he became and American Citizen.
My brother in law went to one of Mullis' talks (it was to an academic audience). He said Mullis threw in slides of attractive women into random places in a scientific presentation. He came across as unprofessional.
Being familiar with the place, I have an easier time believing it of a TESC professor, especially in their limited and highly siloed science department.
Thanks, Jesse. The comments here are as fascinating as the article. I’m as surprised about Bret’s trajectory as you. He could have evolved into a valuable source of useful doubt, but didn’t. Is he an example of audience capture?
I briefly followed Weinstein on Twitter after the Evergreen College thing, but it became apparent that he was just another right-wing troll. I'm sorry, though not especially surprised, to learn that he's gotten so much worse than that.
I suspect, based on which TESC (the school's name is The Evergreen State College, and it's referred to as either TESC or Evergreen locally, never Evergreen College or Evergreen State) profs (well, emeritus profs now, I suppose) showed support for him during the inital mess, that he started out as an old-school leftist crank and horseshoed his way around.
It's a shame that he went deranged grifter, though I suspect he actually believes a lot of the crap he's pushing.
Same here. I learned about the Evergreen State College incident quite a bit after the fact. Weinstein's account was reasonable, so I decided to listen to his Dark Horse podcast, which by then had been in existence for a while. Immediately I realized that Weinstein was willing to make broad claims about matters beyond the scope of his academic expertise in a completely authoritative manner. That was it. It didn't surprise me that Weinstein went on to greater heights of infamy and madness with the advent of the pandemic.
For some reason, I focus as much on form as I do substance, so I am especially sensitive to the tone of Weinstein's spoken delivery. Weinstein is unbearably snide. His words and tone deliver a one-two punch that communicates his utter disdain for the target of his ire.
Maybe so, I don't know. I unfollowed him on Twitter years ago and have never listened to his podcast. But having started out as a sympathetic follower, I never found anything of value in his social media presence.
yeah, Twitter is typically not his forte', because he does not say things succinctly. What my wife and i found very useful about him is that he carefully lays-out his thought process on his way to his conclusions (this also helps to see where the errors are, but he seems to suddenly become less careful and more impulsive in the areas of ivermectin and COVID vaccine injury). He is definitely a 2004 left-wing Democrat.
He’s certainly a conspiracy theorist. I don’t know that I’d call him right wing. That coding seems based on institutions being run by the left and he criticizes them (often bullshit criticism) and therefore he must be right wing.
There's only about 100 million other people who think man-made global warming is a colossal hoax (including countless credentialed, if cancelled, scientists). Also, the theory that HIV causes AIDS is questioned by many credible people. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has at least two chapters of "The Real Anthony Fauci" on the backstory of the "settled science" about AIDS. Bottom-line: That science was never settled.
Why can't someone do an interview on Alex Jones's show? Are you for free speech for some, but not everyone?
Alex Jones is a bigot who peddles bullshit as easily as breathing and anyone who claims that he’s a good faith actor is either unbelievably credulous to the point I’m surprised they remember to breathe or just as much of a fraud as he is
He wrote two chapters, but each chapter has 75 footnotes, citing numerous studies ... of scientists. So you could read RFK's two chapters and 150 other studies and articles written by 100 other scientists and experts. And some of these citations were other BOOKS on the topic - so you could then go read 400 pages by someone who devoted two years of their life writing a book on the topic. Celia Farber, a well-known freelance journalist, is one such author who wrote a book on this topic.
So, yes, from RFK's book, you can tell the science on HIV/AIDS is not settled. The book also develops that it was AIDS funding that allowed Fauci to massively grow the budget and influence of the NIAID. Fauci's flip flops on AIDS/HIV are also fascinating to learn.
I recommend the book for any fair-minded person who might want some view that is not the orthodoxy of Fauci or Pfizer or Merck or the Department of Defense.
For those who may be interested in the scientist who postulated the narrative-challenging hypothesis that HIV doesn't caused the disease AIDS, Substacker and well-known freelance journalist and author Ceilia Farber just re-published this fascinating article. It does NOT pay to challenge the Science Industrial Complex.
Here's the Cliff Note's version: In the early days of AIDS, when Fauci had just been appointed director of the NIAID, he was saying this was a disease caused by promiscuous gay sex. This caused an uproar among many gay activists. Fauci was their enemy and he was being seriously attacked. Soon enough though, Fauci flipped the narrative, which became "AIDS is a threat to everyone" and not just gay men. Fauci was not only off the chopping block, he found a way to get a massive increase in funding for his obscure little science agency..
For 40 years, he's been trying to create a "vaccine" for HIV/AIDS. That never worked. He did recycle a failed and toxic drug (AZT) for AIDS treatment.
Solving the AIDS/HIV crisis in Africa also became a massive boondoggle and a great place to test drugs and vaccines on people who could die in large numbers with nobody raising much of a fuss.
Even today, nobody knows why AIDS is a hetoresexual disease in Africa, but largely restricted to the gay community in America. I think this is one of those questions we're not supposed to ask. It's like today we're not supposed to ask, "Why are 10 to 20 percent" more people dying each year than they were five years ago?
I think Alex Jones has apologized profusely for his (admittedly) crazy views on the Sandy Hook school shooting. He also was found liable in a civil judgement and I think had to declare bankruptcy because of that. This said, I think he's been proven right with many of his contrarian views.
If the standard is someone that was spectacularly and embarrassingly wrong on some big issue can no longer have a talk show, I'd argue that every talk show host in the world who preached the "safe and effective" vaccine mantra (and bullied those who didn't do their civic duty by getting their shots), should also be banned from booking another guest. Their wrong views actually contributed to countless future deaths. Alex Jones' remarks might have offended many people, but he didn't kill anyone.
He absolutely has not apologized for everything he put those families through. Had he done so, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been hit with the biggest defamation judgment in American history. He’s a monster
How much is an apology worth anyway after he motivated hordes of his deranged followers to harass these grieving parents, forcing some to move from their homes? There ARE unforgivable acts for which an “apology” serves only as an added insult.
He “apologized” in the most perfunctory ass-covering way (which turned out to be far far too late legally speaking) and since then when asked about it has continued to say he has “questions” about the Sandy Hook shooting, which to everyone other than his brain dead followers clearly indicates he still believes all the bullshit that has him on the hook for over $1 billion
If he apologizes, he's attacked for his apology being too-little-too-late (or insincere) and if he doesn't apologize, he's probably still attacked for not apologizing ... so what's he supposed to do on the apology question? It seems to me it doesn't matter if he apologizes or not. The solution is to be able to sue people who caused harm to others in a court of law - which happened.
But I can't sue anyone who forced me to get a vaccine shot I didn't want and that may kill me or harm me ... or cause me to lose my job or not be able to go to a restaurant or play. Can I sue the government .... or Pfizer or Moderna? No. On Facebook, I can't even say what I think about dangerous shots and unconstitutional mandates ... I can't sue Facebook and they ignore my "appeals' of my posting bans.
He didn’t apologize Bill. Not for what he actually did. He’s a bullshiter addicted to spewing bullshit (among other, more chemical addictions) and so at one point in his firehouse of nonsense he may have uttered something like “I’m sorry to the families at Sandy Hook,” but that’s nothing compared to his continued actions. It’s like Kanye going around saying heinous things about Jewish people, then when he has an album coming out dropping the blandest, most perfunctory apology statement on Instagram and then proceeding to keep saying insane things about Jewish folks. If you accept their “apologies” in either case, you need your head examined or your reasoning is motivated (i.e. you’re just a big fan of the guy)
He's a monster who didn't kill anyone though. Compare him to the monsters who ordered hundreds of millions of people to get toxic and deadly non-vaccines they didn't need.
What about the "monsters" who ordered troops to go to war (and get killed or maimed for life) and kill innocent children and mothers under bogus pretenses (like "They have weapons of mass destruction!")
Are you for banning all the people who enthusiastically supported those wars from ever hosting a talk show? Have they apologized to the mother in Iraq whose child was blown to bits?
I'm throwing out the possibility you may condone some monsters and want vengence for others. As you note, Jones was punished in court.
I don't think any of the neocon talk show hosts ever had to pay any kind of civil judgement or go through any kind of trial.
P.S. He did apologize and he was still given that judgement.
I’m sorry, is your defense of Alex Jones’s credibility that he hasn’t killed millions of people? Good luck with that one buddy, and I hope you’re not in charge of operating any heavy machinery or anything g I. The future
I think he's saying that the level of ire commonly aimed at Jones is incommensurate and inconsistent given that the people who usually wield it do not also aim it at the (softer-spoken, more educated, higher-class) pundits who, e.g. pushed propaganda supporting the invasion of Iraq which killed 1 million Iraqis and created ISIS - some of whom no doubt still have jobs in media. It's whataboutism, BUT, it's also a fair question. Could you feel the same ire for Judith Miller? If not, why not? Is there an element of class, or culture, in play?
Are a lot of people still claiming to be big fans of Judith Miller and supporting her as she continues to lie about every subject under the sun? Does Judith Miller have tons of people hanging on her every word as a supposed brave truth teller saying the things that THEY don’t want you to hear? I’ll grant you that her shoddy reporting had far more calamitous effects in a global sense than Jones making life pure hell for a handful of Sandy Hook families for years, but I can walk and chew gum at the same time and so I have no problem saying Fuck Alex Jones and Fuck the people who cover for him
My "defense" of Alex Jones is simply that he should not be banned from hosting a podcast show. I'm trying to make the point that far worse monsters than Jones are allowed to keep doing their shows despite pushing views I'd label as sociopathic and sadistic.
I don't have a problem with anyone questioning his credibility. I can question the "credibility" of thousands of pundits and show hosts. Jones' batting average on true statements is probably far better than most hosts in the mainstream media.
Keep moving those goalposts buddy! Please point out where I said he shouldn’t be allowed to host a “podcast show.” He’s free to do whatever his hateful, bigoted heart desires within the boundaries of the law (which, oops, doesn’t include defaming grieving families and doubling down at every turn when called to account!)
Why does AIDS/HIV affect only gay men and IV drug users in American and the Western world, but it's supposedly an epidemic among heterosexuals, females and children on the continent of Africa? Why is this virus different in different places?
One of the great (taboo) AIDS scandals was the administration of AZT to tens of thousands of alleged AIDS patients (or people who allegedly had the virus HIV) .... and the drug killed untold thousands of said patients. The same thing has happened with remdesivir as an FDA-approved Covid treatment.
Anthony Fauci pushed both protocols.
In my view, it's okay to question the "settled" science. That's what you are supposed to do in science. If the only place you can do this is shows like Alex Jones or Joe Rogan's ... then you book an appearance on those shows. It's not like CNN is going to book you and let you talk about these topics on their airwaves.
"When did you stop beating your wife?" is the classic example of a dishonest loaded question, one that can't be answered with a straight yes or no because it either of those responses takes the assumption in the question for granted.
Bear in mind that since it is *you* who asserted "AIDS/HIV affect[s] only gay men and IV drug users in American and the Western world", the burden of proof is on you to explain how Arthur Ashe was secretly gay, an IV drug user, or didn't die of complications from AIDS. You also would need to to explain how all the women and children with HIV in this country got it from IV drug use rather than sex or blood transfusion. If you can do that without looking like the Pepe Silvia guy, you should get a medal.
You can also get AIDS from a blood transfusion, which is how Ash might have contracted the disease. RFK, Jr. and, I think, many others, speculate Ash didn't die because of AIDS but because he was given AZT.
I'll qualify my statement: 99 percent of AIDS victims in America who died got the virus from sexual intercourse or sharing contaminated needles (heroin drug addicts).
Am I correct in stating that most of the HIV/AIDS patients in Africa are NOT homosexual males or IV drug users?
Am I correct in saying the vast majority of AIDS victims in America ARE in these two groups?
I don't understand why the different outcomes and results in two different continents. This question makes me think the "science" on AIDS and HIV is not settled. A virus should affect people the same way regardless of where they live.
I started this thread only to dispute the author's apparent position that anyone who questions the HIV/AIDs theory should be cancelled or dismissed as some kind of kook.
Is the virus that causes Covid different in Europe than America?
Do you mean affect people the same way, or do you mean have the same demographics regarding infection? There's been a lot of research into the demographics aspect over the years. This one was from 24 years ago: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.288.5474.2153
I guess I can reply to Gavin. I agree that's the consensus CDC/Fauci-approved narrative on AZT. I just note that no small number of people dispute this conclusion. I'm probably different than most readers of this newsletter in that I don't automatically accept the pronouncements of the Science Establishment or Big Pharma as infallible truths. The same sources also say the Covid vaccines are incredibly safe, which I think is a mind-blowing assertion. Hasn't anyone noticed that all-cause deaths have exploded since the roll-out of the vaccines? The deaths can't be explained by Covid as the same experts say the shots are 95 percent effective at preventing death ... and 80 percent of the world was vaccinated.
I also think remdesivr has killed thousands of people and that drug's no doubt considered incredibly safe or it wouldn't have been approved by the FDA.
For alternative views on AZT, I'd recommend reading "The Real Anthony Fauci." Now I understand the author of that book has been officially labeled a kook and cancelled, but the book does include more than 2,300 citations and footnotes - so Kennedy is trying to back-up his claims with studies and evidence.
I read a book review of Deborah Birx's book (she's a Covid expert). The reviewer said her book didn't have one footnote in it. I thought that was a tell.
You have no understanding of virology or epidemiology. None.
Epidemics ARE different in different places, because of human behaviour and ACCESS TO MEDICINE, you absolute bore. Why is a cholera epidemic different in a country with no sanitation, compared to one that has sewers and flushing toilets?? Gee, that’s a tough one. Why is malaria more devastating in Africa than it it is in Greece? What a fucking conundrum! Someone call Sherlock Holmes.
You need to stop writing and start reading people who know what the fuck they are talking about. Then come back. Your lack of knowledge about HIV/AIDS should HUMBLE you, but of course, it won’t.
In Africa, HIV kills everyone because of poor sanitation and poor quality water. In America, the same virus doesn't kill everyone because our sanitation and water are better ... but it still kills gay men and IV drug users .... although, presumably, their sanitation and water systems are exactly the same as straight people and non-drug users. So I still don't get it.
Eric's broad comments during his Triggernometry discussion with Sam Harris about how Bret fell into the rabbit hole are very clarifying. He suggests YouTube demonetization during Covid-mania is what set him down his current path.
I will always appreciate how he held up during the Evergreen flapdoodle - but he's been embarrassing to watch for years and, I think, ground zero for how alternative media morphed into "just asking questions." His obsession with public dunking on Sam, regardless of Sam's beliefs, is adolescent.
This has been my question about this guy for a long time: Was he always crazy or did his Evergreen incident set off his crazy?
(And to be fair it might have made me crazy. When you read about it it's like Kafka leading a lynch mob.)
So it sounds like you're saying he went crazy post incident. Interesting. And he had a falling out with his brother Eric? I thought they were completely simpatico.
I like Sam, he’s one of my favorites. And facts aside - he kind of has it coming from Bret. Sam has dunked on Brett many times. It flows both ways. Sam doesn’t shy away from friendly fire. With that said, when it comes to truth telling Sam is on much firmer ground.
Subjecting someone to an actual mob or conspiracy, trite as the circumstances may seem to outside observers (YouTube demonitization, meh - letting your job for saying it's racist to kick white people off campus, bigger deal) is a great way to send someone down a paranoid path.
What do you think of Eric? Is he nutty as well? Case study: He thinks his wife was ousted from economics to prevent a new physics-informed econ theory (that he helped with) from yielding a more accurate CPI calculation ... so that the bureau of labor statistics can continue to lie about the cost of living in order to keep academic wages low ... so that STEM departments can keep hiring cheap foreign exchange students ... resulting in US talent being wasted (something like that, there might be more branching implicationsi haven't captured). Personally, I find a lot of his observations extremely compelling, especially about the frustrating stagnation of scientific progress, the smothering influence of gerontocracy, and the abandonment of liberal ideals and meritocracy in elite institutions. But I'm not sure I'm capable of adjudicating his ideas as explanatory theories, so much as I'm just glad someone is at least calling the emperor naked and bringing the level of conversation up a notch to this higher vantage point.
I saw Eric Weinstein on Rogan claiming pompously to have created a "theory of everything" that would, well, like unify physics and explain all the universe.
I think that's more than enough to make your mind up about the guy.
Covid and Covid-denial have sent so many people into mental health crises. The most damaging effects of the pandemic will be mental and emotional. Regardless of how one feels about the school shutdowns, it's obvious that an entire generation of children have been hurt in small, large, and epic ways. And it appears that it's also greatly affected Weinstein's mental health. His real trauma seems to have led him into dark fantasy.
Is it fantasy? I get so spun up myself worrying about this. I follow (or, followed, I should say, past tense, it started affecting my mental health in the ways you mention to the point it was affecting my job) Dr. John Campbell and other doctors on Twitter, discussing these giant clots, these horrible white and dark red bio structures found in the jabbed dead. Campbell says they have tensile strength (a coroner sent him samples to test), Karen Kingston says they have graphene in them, and if it's real that I and all covid jabbed have that growing in us, then the darkest most nefarious plots Weinstein imagines could be true. I had to delete my Twitter recently b/c of this; I was staying up all night, researching, sending things to people I love telling them we're all doomed and will be dead soon, not good! But my quandary I still struggle with is, if this shit is true about the jabs and what they did to us, wouldn't it be mentally unhealthy NOT to be obsessed about it, with your own imminent death at the hands of these bio-structures shredding your arteries? I wish I knew what was true.
PS- I just noticed your substack name. If you're the writer, I loved that one poem you wrote as a series of numbered stanzas juxtaposing mourning elephants and the boy who finds the trumpet. It was a decade ago I read it and I still remember how it moved me.
This is the conspiracy mindset. Not “this is true!”, it’s either: “I want this to be true!” or “I’m so afraid this is true!”
Motivated reasoning, and self-indulgence. Why do you have the motivation to stay up all night “researching” (you’re not researching)? Don’t you have real responsibilities that you are neglecting? The internet is just BAD for some people. You cannot fix the world’s problems, or even your own, by clicking obsessively on links to more and more deranged articles and blogs and posts and videos. Nobody on YouTube knows what they are talking about, except the ones who make videos on how to change the oil in your car or whatever. Those are helpful.
Vaccines are safe, the earth is an oblate sphere, we went to the moon. Go and do something useful with your own two hands, that’s how you achieve satisfaction. Bring food to an elderly neighbour, help a struggling young mother with her kids, go out for dinner with a friend. Just get off the fecking internet. You’ll be so much happier.
I maybe misrepresented myself. I work 7 day weeks and help care for a relative with a brain injury. The problem was, the little free time I had, even cutting in to sleep/rest time, I was spending obsessing over when the shots would kill me/all who I love. You are spot on about the two types of thinking that motivates, though.
I was more snippy than I should have been so thank you for the considerate response.
I’m interested in how you realised you were going off piste though. Is it because you actually have to be present in the real world that was the shield? I mean because you have real world responsibilities? My theory is that too few of us have our real lives filled with that kind of responsibility l.
The Bret Weinstein Drift has been so sad to witness. I feel bad for ever having defended him. Jesse I don't think you get enough credit for not having turned into a monster, as so many people in this space seem to do. Thank you for maintaining your principles and integrity.
Let me just say this clearly: I believe anthropogenic climate change is likely, but the theory that humans are not driving the majority of global warming and HIV does not cause AIDS are miles apart in terms of scientific plausibility, it's a bit of a red flag for an uninvestigated opinion that they would be grouped together. We do not have another Earth we can run experiments on where we raise the temp by adding carbon dioxide. We can infect cells in the lab with HIV. We are left with very complicated models, occasionally sus surface temp collection and longitudinal correlations to demonstrate anthropogenic CO2. You have to model CO2 effect on water vapor, determine upper atmosphere contributions, and it sure looks like CO2 fits into a warming effect--but there are so many cpmplicating factors like clouds, solar irradiation and planetary albedo that have to be considered--apart from factors like organic decomposition and global plant biomass. Rational, practical belief in anthropogenic global warming is based on the precautionary principal or it's faith in science few of us have the ability to grasp and ascertain for acccuracy
This is one of those “depends on which position you’re actually arguing” things, and everyone always strawmans.
Like, is the earth getting warmer? That seems pretty conclusive.
Does CO2 make earth warmer, all else being equal? Seems pretty conclusive.
Are humans putting enough CO2 into the atmosphere to have a measurable impact on climate? Yeah probably.
Do we know enough about the complex feedback in the atmosphere to accurately model exactly how much warming will happen how fast for a given amount of CO2? That seems to have a much less good track record (that is, seems like models have been pretty consistently overpredicting, and anyway the best models are not the ones showing catastrophic outcomes).
Can we confidently claim that “we have 5 years to change or climate change will cause human extinction”? Well now you’re totally off the rails.
I’m certainly no expert in anything, but I did take a class about 8 years ago in which the instructor, herself a scientist, laid out the evidence for anthropogenic climate change, and it looked pretty damn convincing to me.
My recollection goes something like this: we have about 800,000 years of good evidence, and a pretty clear cyclical climatic pattern is visible over that time. We should have been in a cooling cycle according to that pattern, and the only likely explanation as to why we’re not is greenhouse gas emissions.
I can’t remember all the details, but I remember the Milankovitch cycles were part of the curriculum.
In general, I tend to think complex systems like climate are much harder to understand for a lay person than they appear. It’s very easy to think you’ve made a well-informed observation after considerable effort that feels cautious, when you’re actually missing important information. My professor all those years back left me with the strong impression that the scientific basis for climate change is rock solid, that the relevant experts have put considerable effort and care into understanding this topic, and their remarkably uniform conclusions are well grounded in the evidence.
I’m a believer in skepticism, including of “official” narratives, which is why I love Jesse’s work so much; I feel he scrutinizes claims well and fairly no matter who is making them. I think in this case the mainstream claims are pretty solid, fwiw.
I really don't think the evidence is that good when you consider that there were much higher levels of CO2 millions of years ago without the corresponding temperature change. I also think that there are so many other factors that aren't being held constant, and many of these factors are really difficult to measure. i think Watts up With That website puts forth good arguments against the narrative, but until you have gone to the sophisticated skeptics, you really shouldn't be convinced. The uniformity of conclusions is not at all reassuring when you remember the ClimateGate scandal at East Anglia University where they were bullying the journals to not publish skeptical research. Look at the consensus against the lab leak among publishing virologists doing gain-of-function. Look at the consensus for pediatric youth transition among its practitioners. Consensus can be manufactured. It's extremely complicated, but the models are not showing us any certainty that we are destroying the planet in the near future, however, out of precaution, we might want to mitigate against that as best as we can.
1) the correlation disappears when you go back millions, 2) it is known that organic decomposition speeds up when temperatures increase, raising CO2. So, the data is not to be ignored, but isn't without caveats
Yeah but going back millions of years, you've got other factors like the output of the sun changing as it ages (it was 70% less bright when the earth formed) and I doubt it's as easy to get reliable data.
The organic decomposition argument doesn't make much sense because most ecosystems will be in a stable state where decaying matter is matched by new growth... when your data points are separated by decades, it doesn't matter if it takes a week or a month for a fallen tree branch to decompose, the total net output of carbon dioxide would be the same.
Ultimately it's basic physics that if you have more carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere absorbing and reradiating infrared, you're going to get less heat escaping back into space. We've added 50% more CO2 so that has to create a warming effect.
It is very true that previous climates may have had differences in the sun. Re decomposition: A lot of the organic matter in forests and rainforests is there for hundreds of years because much is trapped under surface soil-notice layers of dirt piling up over generations--hotter areas have less dirt buildup. Of course CO2, specifically in the high atmosphere traps infrared reflection. The question is the magnitude of the trapping. The previous models needed a water vapor multiplier to make the numbers work--water vapor traps a lot more infrared, and there was a hypothesized interaction between CO2 and water vapor. So, it is more complicated than a simple calculation. Again, it is probably real, but it is freakishly complicated compared to HIV causing AIDS.
I find the recent history of conspiracy-ism so fascinating. I'm in my forties. A significant amount of my social time in my 20's was spent poo-pooing left conspiracies about Bush amongst lefty friends. 9/11. Rigged voting machines. He'd cancel elections, etc. In fact for the first 3 or 4 years I knew of Alex Jones I thought he was a Keith Olbermann lefty type loudmouth because it was my lefty friends who were sending me links to his stuff! (Which I admit I wasn't reading closely because I thought it was nuts.) I'm honestly not sure how many lefty anti Bush conspiracists have migrated to right-ish conspiracies or if the current right ish conspiracists are a whole different group. Does anyone know of a good apolitical and (relatively) non judgemental book/article discussing "conspiracy theory in the 21st century" or something like that? I would love to read it.
(There may not be such a thing since this is such a political hot button. But if there is I think it'd be interesting as heck.)
It's a shame. As someone with a biology background, I initially enjoyed his and Heather's podcasts. When Covid began and he started peddling conspiracy BS he lost me, and apparently he's really gone off the deep end.
I knew Jesse attracted some rather unhinged followers on account of being at least nominally "anti-woke" but I'm surprised to see this amount of pushback in the comments of a paid post to what is a very reasonable accounting of a very crazy man's batshit worldview.
In my defense it appears to be a small minority of subscribers and they are posting many times
Jesse! I actually wrote this article in response to your article on why we shouldn’t dive into conspiracies. I actually think we should: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/why-we-should-dive-into-conspiracy
A fan of your work. Looking forward to your thoughts.
You can say that again. One of them seems to be paying $5/month for a brain toilet, and he has explosive diarrhea today. But he thinks he’s “educating” us.
Just showing up to the comment section and that one guy is making this impossible to read
Folks casually claiming that Covid vaccines killed hundreds of millions of people as easily as saying the sky is blue. Wild stuff
Can you point me to someone saying the COVID vaccines have killed hundreds of millions of people? I haven't heard anyone say such a thing, and I cast a pretty wide net in my media consumption.
The claim is that millions were killed by covid vaccines. Here for example is tech bro Steve Kirsch, his substack has 234,000 subscribers:
"Data from Health New Zealand confirms that the COVID vaccines have killed over 10 million worldwide"
https://kirschsubstack.com/p/data-from-us-medicare-and-the-new
Just to be clear, I believe this is absolute nonsense.
Also, to be clear: I'm aware of the "17 million" claim. And I too think it is too high to be believable on the evidence. If you want to hear it fairly adjudicated in long form I would recommend this debate hosted on Jay Bhattacharya's substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/illusionconsensus/p/watch-now-vaccine-death-debate-steve
The claim was that someone was saying *hundreds* of millions were killed.
Do you expect to persuade anyone of anything with this style of pedantry?
Here's another scenario.
There is a poll showing that liberal-leaning Americans greatly estimate the number of unarmed black people have been historically killed by police: https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf
Let's say you're in a comment thread discussing these results and someone tosses this out there:
> "LIBERALS believe cops KILL MORE THAN 10,000 unarmed black people PER YEAR!!"
Would it be pedantic to respond with something like:
> "Actually, the poll indicates that only about 22% of highly liberal people believe that cops kill 10,000 or more unarmed black people per year, whereas 62% think the number is between 100 and 1,000, and 15% get it right by estimating the number is closer to 10."
Personally, I don't think so. It's just setting the record straight so that conversation can continue calmly on the basis of factual information. We're talking about order-of-magnitude level quantitative errors in both cases (not mere rounding errors), which are highly likely to negatively impact the tone of subsequent discourse.
yes, I do think we should try to state the views of people we disagree with accurately, even anti-vaxxers.
I'm not trying to persuade, just to ensure accuracy.
Someone in a comment below said that "monsters" had forced "hundreds of millions" of people to take the Covid vaccine. I would assume the person you're talking about was referring to that comment, perhaps mistakenly attributing the phrasing to someone else making a different point.
Seems like an honest mistake to me.
Fair enough. Still worth correcting I think, if many readers would infer the message that there are influential people out there claiming that hundreds of millions were killed by the vaccines - a claim that's so easily refuted as to be absurd on it's face (I mean, did 100 million people even die of *all causes worldwide* in the last year?).
Here in this comments section Bill Rice Jr says:
"Compare [Alex Jones] to the monsters who ordered hundreds of millions of people to get toxic and deadly non-vaccines they didn't need"
Now if something is 'deadly' then it must kill a fair percentage of the people who are exposed to it, and since 70% of the world's population is vaccinated against Covid, if you think the vaccines are deadly then surely you must think hundreds of millions have died from them.
Now this comment is an outlier in terms of hysteria levels, but there are certainly plenty of conspiracists who claim that all excess deaths since Covid are down to Covid vaccines, or attribute every sudden death to vaccines (the 'died suddenly' meme). Most of these people aren't numerate enough to quantify their claims but they are implicitly claiming that the vaccines have killed millions of people, and even though there are various different types from different manufacturers, they all happen to be deadly, and presumably every health authority in every country has just decided to ignore it.
Source:
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/bret-weinstein-sure-has-a-lot-of/comment/50130394?r=r7kts&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&open=false
Cutting more to the chase, I think the people who claim many millions of deaths from the mRNA vaccines are probably wrong. But I also think that the people claiming negligible deaths from those same vaccines, to the point that the risk/reward ratio is still favorable even in healthy young people, are also probably wrong.
I think a lot of the world's health authorities have reached this same conclusion, such that the following statement
> presumably every health authority in every country has just decided to ignore it
is inaccurate. Look up the official policies of European countries with respect to these specific vaccines and you will find that many of them have stopped recommending them below some age threshold. Denmark was the first, which stopped recommending the vaccines for healthy people under 50 in 2022. Why would they do that other than an estimation that in this cohort the vaccine posed a potentially higher risk than the infection it was intended to prevent?
An analysis of Pfizer's own clinical trial data published by Peter Doshi et al in 2022 [1] found an excess rate of 1 in 800 for "severe adverse events of special interest" (read: disability, chronic conditions, things you definitely do not want to have) in the treatment arm of the trial. This was around the time that European countries started curtailing their recommendations. I would argue they have done their job, and it is the US FDA and CDC, now outliers on the world stage on this issue, who are in dereliction of duty.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9428332/
OK I see the comment now. I think there are a few steps of interpretation of the author's intent, especially the interpretation of the meaning of "deadly" as "something that kills a fair percentage of people that were exposed to it".
A lot of people called COVID-19 "deadly", a lot of them with much farther reach than Alex Jones - the president of the United States for example. Given that the population-wide infection fatality rate was known to be most likely in the ballpark of 0.2-0.3% from seroprevalence studies as early as May 2020, and that these same studies found a still much lower IFR in young people (all of which is borne out repeatedly in later more comprehensive studies) [1], you must therefore logically think that either:
A) it was unwarranted or alarmist for these people to describe the virus as "deadly" beyond the middle of 2020 since it did not appear to "kill a fair percentage of people exposed to it"
Or B) 0.2% is "a fair percentage of people exposed to it [COVID-19]". Accounting for age, 0.05% is a fair percentage of people under 70 exposed to COVID-19, and 0.01% is a fair percentage of people under 30.
Which one?
[1] see seroprevalence studies from Santa Clara county CA by Bhattacharya, Ioannidis et al, similar follow-up study in LA county.
In 2021 a systematic literature review by Ioannidis confirmed a reasonable estimate of 0.27% population-wide IFR and 0.05% IFR in the under-70 population (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7947934/).
Similar findings in a November 2020 paper in Nature surveying data from 45 countries(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0). IFR estimates from that paper summarized in a table here: https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/11/18/covid-infection-fatality-rates-sex-and-age-15163
*I* didn’t describe Covid as “deadly” so this gotcha doesn’t work. It’s dangerous if you’re in a high risk group but I wouldn’t say it’s a deadly disease for most people…. “Potentially fatal” would be a better description.
I guess a very generous interpretation of that comment could be that he thinks the vaccines have ‘only’ killed millions of people. Obviously that’s still batshit and Covid is much more dangerous than the risk of very rare fatal side effects from the vaccines. I get the impression that you’re some kind of anti-vaxx whack job so I will not be discussing this further.
So you do not think it's fair to make blanket statements which scaremonger about the virus to the general population. I agree.
And I also don't think it's useful to scaremonger about the mRNA vaccines. But I do think it is not unreasonable to estimate that the risks they pose to healthy young people outweigh the risks the virus poses, in agreement with many health authorities around the world, and on the basis of Pfizer's own trial data as analyzed by Doshi et al in 2022 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9428332).
A 1-in-800 rate of serious complication *does* lead to a reasonable conclusion that at least millions globally were seriously harmed by the mRNA vaccines, though not necessarily killed.
If that makes me a "whack job anti-vaxxer" then I don't know what to tell you, other than that your communication style is probably counterproductive to your goals.
Honestly, Bret's general worldview is solid, but he has a habit of irrational dot connection that he digs-in on instead of allowing it to be modified with new info. He is a great guy, which is why people love him, but he is dead wrong about the extent of vaccine injury and Fauci 's Mafia hits.
But is Bret a great guy? What if he turned his implacable snideness on you?
possible, but as an adolescent addiction psychiatrist, I eat implacable snideness for breakfast. I think he sees a world falling apart and correctly diagnoses some problems, and incorrectly diagnoses others. Just as combat soldiers get battle fatigue, I think a lot of culture warriors who face real, personal consequences get a period of hyper-reactivity and "battle fatigue". I'd attach a graph if I could get this to work on my phone. They have their period of usefulness, followed by over-confidence, followed by becoming a shell of their former selves... https://lermanet.org/scientology/hubbard2percentrule.html
My issue is that most people in the general world of people who follow Jesse wouldn't tolerate "he's a great guy aside from all of the falsehoods he doggedly defends" from, say, Michael Hobbes.
sure - but he has been a valuable contributor to a lot of discussions, whereas Michael Hobbes doesn't really meet that category. I think that the data contradicts what he says, and Weinstein is doing people a disservice by not reflecting on it and modifying, I really believe he has this conclusion laid-down in his brain as solidly as a memory at this point. It's effectively a "central dogma" he is working from. In issues not related to this one, I find him a useful contributor... never said that about Michael Hobbes.
I echo the general sentiment, though I'd personally prefer to avoid the mental illness metaphors. Given how scrupulously careful Jesse is about not getting ahead of the evidence, declaring his biases, acknowledging uncertainty, and so on, it's genuinely surprising to me that there are some (not many, but some) commenters in his audience who seem really bent on motivated reasoning and only interested in empiricism to the extent it confirms their priors. This is precisely what Jesse spends so much of his work warning against!
Something I wrote many years ago that, alas, is still pretty current: https://www.slaw.ca/2009/02/14/science-pseudoscience-and-the-law/
TLDR: don’t get your brain broken
It’s the dopamine hit. People get addicted to attention. Bret Weinstein could have either labored away widely unnoticed in academia, or he could cultivate loads of minions hanging onto his every word, validating him, and making him feel good. All it cost him was his dignity with mainstream non-conspiracist society, but that’s a price he was clearly willing to pay.
*Restoring this comment to its former glory at the request of Cait. Slightly longer and harder as well*
Since the comments seem to be going wild, I’d like to leave my wildest, most off topic, totally-understandable if you need delete and ban me comment of all time:
There’s no way you could convince me that Bret Weinstein isn’t hung. It is the single most parsimonious explanation for everything else that makes him notable to the public eye.
1) The way he stood in front of all those students at Evergreen as if he had a secret power that would prevent him from getting hurt. Just watch that video in YouTube and tell me he isn’t packing heat.
2) The way his brother Eric seems to always be really insecure despite having a lot of objectively great accomplishments as if he was comparing himself as a man against someone he could never match. Brent may be a biologist, but Eric’s adult insecurities can directly be tied back to Brent’s incomparable pipe-laying abilities.
3) His wife seems to be genuinely turned on whenever he corrects her on a minor point in the few episodes of their podcast I’ve seen. Have you ever had someone seem thrilled to be corrected? Only one explanation fits.
4) His general high level of confidence about everything all the time as denoted above. Like he has something no one can take away from him that gives him superior and intrinsic value. Also when you have to use that much blood to power two heads you’re bound to just get things wrong from time to time.
In comparison to all other men I have known who were so blessed he is a perfect match. Just this laid back confident, generous air, but also it doesn’t necessarily strongly relate to what is actually going on around him because there’s a center of gravity in him so powerful that it distorts the nearby reality. In conclusion, all I’m saying is that if he ever makes the transition to OnlyFans I will subscribe for one day just to finally know.
Me before reading your comment: “Ohhh, he means hanged.”
Me after reading your comment: “Ohhh, he means hung.”
It makes sense or am I crazy?
You have argued your point well!
It’s nigh irrefutable.
Nigh!
I hope Jesse leaves this comment as it stands because it left me rolling.
I was extra paranoid about the Covid vaccine because my wife was pregnant at the time and we’d been having fertility problems so we extra didn’t want anything to happen to the baby, so I watched some of his podcasts. His wife getting turned on by being corrected was what gave me the lightbulb moment. He would jump in with this “let’s be careful now!” comment and then make some minor point and her eyes would shine with fire.
Oh man, the vaccine anxiety due to fertility issues is REAL. Or real, the everything anxiety. We had a terrible time with secondary infertility (happy ending - my second is 5 weeks old - but took years and many m/cs) and I was so nervewracked about vaccines, OTC medications, herbal tea…it’s the worst.
My wife did not get the booster shots because she was pregnant and the original shots gave her a fever.
It was more that she got pregnant exactly at the same time the vaccine came out AND immediately after she recovered from getting COVID. So it was a very unique situation to try to figure out the right thing.
ROFLMAO!
I hope you are a stand-up comic IRL. I look forward to your first Netflix special.
I don’t watch their podcast apart from like those two episodes but I hope to god they cover Jesse’s articles and make an Onlyfans in response to this comment.
It is pretty gross he said that guy was murdered though when the dude had a wife. He should probably just take the L on that one.
If you are referring to me, I thought your initial comment was hilarious!
My sister didn't die, but she is disabled from the anoxic brain injury and injury to her heart and central nervous system. My uncle did die from COVID right as my sister became ill, but I like to think uncle Richie would have laughed at your comment, too. He did love calling people "pricks!' It really has not been easy, I cared for my mother as all this was happening and she passed in 2022. Your compassion is truly welcomed, but don't lose that sense of humor. I am trying like hell to get mine back.
In that case, may thoughts of Brent’s freakishly large, as to almost be deformed, member comfort you in these difficult times.
Pack it up boys, the Internet is done for today. Some Guy just hit the game winning shot.
The thing is that I’m only half joking. I would bet like a thousand dollars I’m right.
That's exactly why I laughed so hard when I read it. It was well-written, funny, and goddamnit you are probably not even joking, you madman!
If he was wearing tight jeans at a speech or something and I was there I’d give a glance.
If you'd asked me yesterday "would you check out Bret Weinstein's package?" I'd have said no. But today? After this? Yes, 100% I'm giving that crotch a quick once-over.
Heather was definitely the bossier one 2021 or 2022... He seems too nice to really believe he is worth more than other people. However, I cannot refute your central point as he and I have never slept together
Heather seems to have gotten decidedly crueller, talking about how you can spot vaccinated generations because they are ugly, and have gotten uglier the more jabbed they get.
I contrast this with a kind email I got from her when I was agonizing over getting my 2nd covid shot, talking about risk and a friend of hers that has lupus (I do, too it's one of the reasons I got 3 shots) would bet that I would be ok, etc. Did fame go to their heads? I wish I knew.
I don't think so, it's like combat fatigue for fighting the culture war when you get fired, demonetized and demonized. I hadn't heard her say those things, but that's incredibly strange.
It’s easy to get pulled along in certain directions, I think, without even realizing it’s happening. I was internet fame-ish a whole back and I basically started to live my actual life like it was a comedy.
His niceness is a byproduct of his confident power.
BDE, just like Pete Davidson.
yeah, but there's not the condescending niceness of say, the charismatic corporate CEO.
It’s big enough to be sincere for all of us. When a man has been so blessed he possesses true magnanimity.
"Laying pipe" is probably the funniest phrase I've read in a very long time.
Before looking at the comments, I thought this passage was the best part of this post: "he once encountered a fluorescent raccoon that spoke to him [addressing him as ‘doctor’] and suggesting that the raccoon might have been an alien."
I stand corrected, sir. This is pure genius.
Our long era of unrest in the late 2010s/early 2020s really did break some people. I know a few myself. They got so alienated by wokies and/or extreme COVID hawks that they just kept drifting further into crazyland.
My suggestion to them: get offline more. Spend more time with real people in the real world. Find things to do that are apolitical, or at least close to it. It'll help. It really will.
RE: getting offline and spending more time with real people in the real world, finding things to do that are apolitical.
I would argue that said COVID hawks carry a lot of blame here for turning the simple act of spending time with real people itself into a political act that might brand you as MAGA-adjacent (with the one exception of mass BLM protests). And forcing all our kids out of each other's company and into the Internet, even while kids all over Europe were attending school.
Honestly, I never saw precautions against gathering in numbers as a threat to my freedom. I didn't want to catch COVID-19 and I didn't. I took a charitable view of the public health establishment's pronouncements and motives. It was a major health crisis, for heaven's sake.
I'm not talking about the initial public health pronouncements, even including hard lockdown, a policy which in the beginning, in the absence of data, probably made some sense.
I'm talking about the politicization of people voluntarily choosing to assess their own risk tolerance, *after data was available* which would make risk estimation possible (IFR estimates, home testing).
The politicization of having contrary opinions about the right balance of lockdown harms on mental and physical health.
All such opinions became coded as "right-wing", even though for example Sweden (no bastion of right wing thought) came down more on the side of letting people use their brains, and ended up with one of lowest total excess mortality rates in Europe for the entire pandemic period.
Parents who questioned the unwavering stance of teachers unions that schools must remain closed indefinitely - despite, again, governments throughout Europe making the opposite determination that education was too important, and the 0.0003% infection fatality rate in school age children too low (not to mention the low transmission rate in this cohort), to warrant sacrificing years of kids' lives for. People in the US lost left-leaning friends for making these arguments. Professionals were ostracized and coded as "fringe" - such as Stanford's own Jay Bhattacharya who was blacklisted on Twitter at the direct behest of the Whitehouse for expressing disfavorable but well-reasoned views about the net harms that lockdown would likely yield.
I largely agree, but in defense of teachers' unions: their mission is to advocate for their membership, it is not to advocate for the community that their membership serves. And if I was a teacher, I'd want some protections before being sent into a smallish room with 30 virus spreaders. I know a 35-yr-old woman, formerly fit and active, who is now crippled by long covid. The risks were and are real, and go beyond death as the only bad outcome.
Referring casually to children as "virus spreaders" is dehumanizing. Do you have any children of your own? I'm sorry to hear about your friend.
Yep, raised two kids to happy adulthoods. And yep, when they were little, they absolutely were virus spreaders! I had way more colds and flus in those years.
Thank you for the clarification.
I think it’s that *none* of the precautions were evidence based. 6 feet? Made up. Masks? Don’t work. Isolation? Almost everyone caught the virus anyway. It was literally *years* of power hungry bureaucrats making decisions that didn’t make any sense and also caused a massive amount of damage.
Yeah. Not buying that, especially the part about power hungry bureaucrats. That's an ideology looking for a cause to exploit.
Of course, I can’t discern the motives are bureaucrats. They may have simply been totally incompetent. Either way, the rules were ridiculous and harmful. Also, you probably *have* had Covid and just didn’t realize it.
The point of these measures is to slow transmission so health systems don't get overwhelmed. Almost everyone got Covid eventually, but there's a big difference between that happening over the course of a few months and overwhelming hospitals and that happening over the course of years with a vaccine available to reduce the risk of severe illness.
The evidence available to make decisions is necessarily limited, but a basic understanding of physical reality is all that's needed to tell you that making people stand further apart and wear masks designed to filter aerosols will reduce transmission rates. Is there evidence that 6 feet is optimal compared to 5 feet or 7 feet? No, but the point is to minimise people breathing near each other.
The main failing was that communication didn't distinguish between cloth or surgical masks (which probably don't do much) compared to N95s designed to stop aerosols. Once those were in adequate supply they should have been emphasised more.
True. That was definitely a dynamic at play. And it sucked. But that's over now. The pandemic is done.
Indeed, let's hang out with real people again.
Honestly, that is the advice that everyone should follow, regardless of beliefs.
The thing is, many "deranged conspiracy theories" turn out to be true. You don't even need to go back as far as MK Ultra. Remember when talking about a lab-leak in Wuhan was one of those deranged conspiracy theories? We were instead supposed to follow the oh-so-reasonable theories about bats and pangolins at a wet market. You're very dismissive of Alex Jones, just asserting that he's a liar in an "everyone knows" sort of way. You want to call out Weinstein and/or Jones for specific things they said or did, then fine, that's valuable. Just making a broad assumption that someone is a "deranged conspiracy theorist" and therefore shouldn't be listened to is not. You might as well go work for MSNBC.
“After Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie died at Sandy Hook, gave a news conference the night after the shooting, Mr. [Alex] Jones said:
- ‘You know, after you lose your daughter, they put you on some antidepressants or something, but I thought those take a month to kick in. I mean, it’s like a look of absolute satisfaction, like he’s about to accept an Oscar.’
- ‘It looks like he’s saying, ‘OK, do I read off the card?’ He’s laughing, and then he goes over and starts basically breaking down and crying.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/us/politics/heres-what-jones-has-said-about-sandy-hook.html
I don’t know what to tell you, man. Heckling the parents of dead kids gets you put in the deranged column in my book. The courts seem to agree with me: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63592386
His bootlickers (of which there are a few in these comments) claim that he’s apologized and hey, who among us hasn’t accidentally put the parents of dead children through multiple years of torment as you use your popular media only form to defame them, claim their kids were never killed, that they were all actors pretending to lose children etc? What about all the times he was correct??? (Citation needed)
*platform
Yeah, that's the one thing anybody knows about Alex Jones, because that's what the MSM publicized and told you what to think. That's fine, but I wish people who've never read a word he's written or watched anything he's done would stop babbling about it.
“Yes yes Mrs. Lincoln, but aside from that how was the play?”
In any event, I’ve known about Jones back when he was the ‘9/11 was an inside job’ guy.
The great thing about conspiracy folks like yourself is that you’re serenely confident that you are the only ones who have ever sought out an alternative source for a news event. Yeah, we’re all sheeple who only think Alex Jones is horrible excuse for a human being because we just listen to what the dreaded MSM is telling us. Are the MSM in the room with us right now?
All I did was shoot up a school one time! It's like, Jesus everyone, I also play guitar!
"You fuck *one* goat....."
*horse
**stallion
It’s a pretty big one thing though and people are going to judge him accordingly.
I've watched plenty of his videos out of curiousity (before Sandy Hook), and I listened to him on Joe Rogan. My first-hand analysis is that he's an idiotic blowhard and people who find him convincing have very poor critical thinking skills.
The classic conspiracist attempt at a syllogism: "Some conspiracies turned out to be true, therefore my specific conspiracy claim is true." It's not valid, I'm afraid. And what's worse, people trying this logical leap out always try and list the few conspiracies that they think were proven right, but they never wrestle with the hundreds of conspiracy claims that were proven wrong. Pointing to 3 correct conspiracy theories in a vacuum might seem impressive, but pointing to 3 correct conspiracy theories out of thousands of wrong ones is somewhat...less impressive.
Scuba, you may like my article because I say the same exact thing and I also mentioned MK Ultra: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/why-we-should-dive-into-conspiracy
When I was a biology undergrad in the early 2010s, what I heard from my professors about the inventor of PCR was
1) he got very rich
2) he became a crank
3) he moved to Hawaii to live a life of luxurious leisure
I also have a hard time believing someone who worked in higher education didn’t know that some Chinese people would really, really like to be Americans. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that many Chinese nationals at American universities had at best mixed feelings about their homeland and at worst would tell you their life’s goal was to get US citizenship.
I remember someone telling me that Mullis stopped getting invited to do talks about science because he would throw in a bunch of non-science life advice that was not great and expressed in a very crude manner. I have no idea if this is true, but if he thought HIV didn't cause AIDS then it's plausible that he gave really bad advice about sex.
I also remember talking to professors who'd met him and it was clear that they found him unpleasant. But they respected his PCR work because PCR is f'ing amazing.
As for the Chinese nationals, I have met so many Chinese scientists who want to be American citizens. I knew one who was a member of an ethnic minority -- he didn't want to talk about it besides the fact that it wasn't great for him back in China -- and he was willing to put up with just about anything if it meant he became and American Citizen.
My brother in law went to one of Mullis' talks (it was to an academic audience). He said Mullis threw in slides of attractive women into random places in a scientific presentation. He came across as unprofessional.
Being familiar with the place, I have an easier time believing it of a TESC professor, especially in their limited and highly siloed science department.
Thanks, Jesse. The comments here are as fascinating as the article. I’m as surprised about Bret’s trajectory as you. He could have evolved into a valuable source of useful doubt, but didn’t. Is he an example of audience capture?
I briefly followed Weinstein on Twitter after the Evergreen College thing, but it became apparent that he was just another right-wing troll. I'm sorry, though not especially surprised, to learn that he's gotten so much worse than that.
I suspect, based on which TESC (the school's name is The Evergreen State College, and it's referred to as either TESC or Evergreen locally, never Evergreen College or Evergreen State) profs (well, emeritus profs now, I suppose) showed support for him during the inital mess, that he started out as an old-school leftist crank and horseshoed his way around.
It's a shame that he went deranged grifter, though I suspect he actually believes a lot of the crap he's pushing.
Same here. I learned about the Evergreen State College incident quite a bit after the fact. Weinstein's account was reasonable, so I decided to listen to his Dark Horse podcast, which by then had been in existence for a while. Immediately I realized that Weinstein was willing to make broad claims about matters beyond the scope of his academic expertise in a completely authoritative manner. That was it. It didn't surprise me that Weinstein went on to greater heights of infamy and madness with the advent of the pandemic.
For some reason, I focus as much on form as I do substance, so I am especially sensitive to the tone of Weinstein's spoken delivery. Weinstein is unbearably snide. His words and tone deliver a one-two punch that communicates his utter disdain for the target of his ire.
He is solidly left on a lot of issues and lost a ton of subscribers and supporters when he supported Trump's impeachment post J6
Maybe so, I don't know. I unfollowed him on Twitter years ago and have never listened to his podcast. But having started out as a sympathetic follower, I never found anything of value in his social media presence.
yeah, Twitter is typically not his forte', because he does not say things succinctly. What my wife and i found very useful about him is that he carefully lays-out his thought process on his way to his conclusions (this also helps to see where the errors are, but he seems to suddenly become less careful and more impulsive in the areas of ivermectin and COVID vaccine injury). He is definitely a 2004 left-wing Democrat.
He’s certainly a conspiracy theorist. I don’t know that I’d call him right wing. That coding seems based on institutions being run by the left and he criticizes them (often bullshit criticism) and therefore he must be right wing.
There's only about 100 million other people who think man-made global warming is a colossal hoax (including countless credentialed, if cancelled, scientists). Also, the theory that HIV causes AIDS is questioned by many credible people. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has at least two chapters of "The Real Anthony Fauci" on the backstory of the "settled science" about AIDS. Bottom-line: That science was never settled.
Why can't someone do an interview on Alex Jones's show? Are you for free speech for some, but not everyone?
Alex Jones is a bigot who peddles bullshit as easily as breathing and anyone who claims that he’s a good faith actor is either unbelievably credulous to the point I’m surprised they remember to breathe or just as much of a fraud as he is
Oh shit, RFK wrote at least two chapters on that? The science CANT be settled!
He wrote two chapters, but each chapter has 75 footnotes, citing numerous studies ... of scientists. So you could read RFK's two chapters and 150 other studies and articles written by 100 other scientists and experts. And some of these citations were other BOOKS on the topic - so you could then go read 400 pages by someone who devoted two years of their life writing a book on the topic. Celia Farber, a well-known freelance journalist, is one such author who wrote a book on this topic.
So, yes, from RFK's book, you can tell the science on HIV/AIDS is not settled. The book also develops that it was AIDS funding that allowed Fauci to massively grow the budget and influence of the NIAID. Fauci's flip flops on AIDS/HIV are also fascinating to learn.
I recommend the book for any fair-minded person who might want some view that is not the orthodoxy of Fauci or Pfizer or Merck or the Department of Defense.
For those who may be interested in the scientist who postulated the narrative-challenging hypothesis that HIV doesn't caused the disease AIDS, Substacker and well-known freelance journalist and author Ceilia Farber just re-published this fascinating article. It does NOT pay to challenge the Science Industrial Complex.
https://celiafarber.substack.com/p/the-passion-of-peter-duesberg?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2FThe%2520Passion%2520Of%2520Peter%2520Duesberg&utm_medium=reader2
Also, this update on Dr. Duesberg:
https://celiafarber.substack.com/p/i-have-a-surprise-for-you-peter-duesberg
I don''t care about Fauci's flip flops, I am strictly a teva kinda dude
Here's the Cliff Note's version: In the early days of AIDS, when Fauci had just been appointed director of the NIAID, he was saying this was a disease caused by promiscuous gay sex. This caused an uproar among many gay activists. Fauci was their enemy and he was being seriously attacked. Soon enough though, Fauci flipped the narrative, which became "AIDS is a threat to everyone" and not just gay men. Fauci was not only off the chopping block, he found a way to get a massive increase in funding for his obscure little science agency..
For 40 years, he's been trying to create a "vaccine" for HIV/AIDS. That never worked. He did recycle a failed and toxic drug (AZT) for AIDS treatment.
Solving the AIDS/HIV crisis in Africa also became a massive boondoggle and a great place to test drugs and vaccines on people who could die in large numbers with nobody raising much of a fuss.
Even today, nobody knows why AIDS is a hetoresexual disease in Africa, but largely restricted to the gay community in America. I think this is one of those questions we're not supposed to ask. It's like today we're not supposed to ask, "Why are 10 to 20 percent" more people dying each year than they were five years ago?
Is there any connection with the vaccine for HIV/AIDS and an acute inability to read a room?
Are you saying my theory isn't going over well in this particular room?
I'm used to this. It's my outreach effort. If I can change one mind, etc.
The goal of our rulers is to make sure contrarians like me don't get to ever make posts like this anywhere in the future. Thank Goodness for Substack.
I think Alex Jones has apologized profusely for his (admittedly) crazy views on the Sandy Hook school shooting. He also was found liable in a civil judgement and I think had to declare bankruptcy because of that. This said, I think he's been proven right with many of his contrarian views.
If the standard is someone that was spectacularly and embarrassingly wrong on some big issue can no longer have a talk show, I'd argue that every talk show host in the world who preached the "safe and effective" vaccine mantra (and bullied those who didn't do their civic duty by getting their shots), should also be banned from booking another guest. Their wrong views actually contributed to countless future deaths. Alex Jones' remarks might have offended many people, but he didn't kill anyone.
He absolutely has not apologized for everything he put those families through. Had he done so, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been hit with the biggest defamation judgment in American history. He’s a monster
How much is an apology worth anyway after he motivated hordes of his deranged followers to harass these grieving parents, forcing some to move from their homes? There ARE unforgivable acts for which an “apology” serves only as an added insult.
He “apologized” in the most perfunctory ass-covering way (which turned out to be far far too late legally speaking) and since then when asked about it has continued to say he has “questions” about the Sandy Hook shooting, which to everyone other than his brain dead followers clearly indicates he still believes all the bullshit that has him on the hook for over $1 billion
If he apologizes, he's attacked for his apology being too-little-too-late (or insincere) and if he doesn't apologize, he's probably still attacked for not apologizing ... so what's he supposed to do on the apology question? It seems to me it doesn't matter if he apologizes or not. The solution is to be able to sue people who caused harm to others in a court of law - which happened.
But I can't sue anyone who forced me to get a vaccine shot I didn't want and that may kill me or harm me ... or cause me to lose my job or not be able to go to a restaurant or play. Can I sue the government .... or Pfizer or Moderna? No. On Facebook, I can't even say what I think about dangerous shots and unconstitutional mandates ... I can't sue Facebook and they ignore my "appeals' of my posting bans.
He didn’t apologize Bill. Not for what he actually did. He’s a bullshiter addicted to spewing bullshit (among other, more chemical addictions) and so at one point in his firehouse of nonsense he may have uttered something like “I’m sorry to the families at Sandy Hook,” but that’s nothing compared to his continued actions. It’s like Kanye going around saying heinous things about Jewish people, then when he has an album coming out dropping the blandest, most perfunctory apology statement on Instagram and then proceeding to keep saying insane things about Jewish folks. If you accept their “apologies” in either case, you need your head examined or your reasoning is motivated (i.e. you’re just a big fan of the guy)
He's a monster who didn't kill anyone though. Compare him to the monsters who ordered hundreds of millions of people to get toxic and deadly non-vaccines they didn't need.
What about the "monsters" who ordered troops to go to war (and get killed or maimed for life) and kill innocent children and mothers under bogus pretenses (like "They have weapons of mass destruction!")
Are you for banning all the people who enthusiastically supported those wars from ever hosting a talk show? Have they apologized to the mother in Iraq whose child was blown to bits?
I'm throwing out the possibility you may condone some monsters and want vengence for others. As you note, Jones was punished in court.
I don't think any of the neocon talk show hosts ever had to pay any kind of civil judgement or go through any kind of trial.
P.S. He did apologize and he was still given that judgement.
I’m sorry, is your defense of Alex Jones’s credibility that he hasn’t killed millions of people? Good luck with that one buddy, and I hope you’re not in charge of operating any heavy machinery or anything g I. The future
I think he's saying that the level of ire commonly aimed at Jones is incommensurate and inconsistent given that the people who usually wield it do not also aim it at the (softer-spoken, more educated, higher-class) pundits who, e.g. pushed propaganda supporting the invasion of Iraq which killed 1 million Iraqis and created ISIS - some of whom no doubt still have jobs in media. It's whataboutism, BUT, it's also a fair question. Could you feel the same ire for Judith Miller? If not, why not? Is there an element of class, or culture, in play?
Are a lot of people still claiming to be big fans of Judith Miller and supporting her as she continues to lie about every subject under the sun? Does Judith Miller have tons of people hanging on her every word as a supposed brave truth teller saying the things that THEY don’t want you to hear? I’ll grant you that her shoddy reporting had far more calamitous effects in a global sense than Jones making life pure hell for a handful of Sandy Hook families for years, but I can walk and chew gum at the same time and so I have no problem saying Fuck Alex Jones and Fuck the people who cover for him
It is "whataboutism" but sometimes the "what about?" questions are germane to the topic. It is here (imo).
My "defense" of Alex Jones is simply that he should not be banned from hosting a podcast show. I'm trying to make the point that far worse monsters than Jones are allowed to keep doing their shows despite pushing views I'd label as sociopathic and sadistic.
I don't have a problem with anyone questioning his credibility. I can question the "credibility" of thousands of pundits and show hosts. Jones' batting average on true statements is probably far better than most hosts in the mainstream media.
Keep moving those goalposts buddy! Please point out where I said he shouldn’t be allowed to host a “podcast show.” He’s free to do whatever his hateful, bigoted heart desires within the boundaries of the law (which, oops, doesn’t include defaming grieving families and doubling down at every turn when called to account!)
Re: The settled science about AIDS/HIV ....
Why does AIDS/HIV affect only gay men and IV drug users in American and the Western world, but it's supposedly an epidemic among heterosexuals, females and children on the continent of Africa? Why is this virus different in different places?
One of the great (taboo) AIDS scandals was the administration of AZT to tens of thousands of alleged AIDS patients (or people who allegedly had the virus HIV) .... and the drug killed untold thousands of said patients. The same thing has happened with remdesivir as an FDA-approved Covid treatment.
Anthony Fauci pushed both protocols.
In my view, it's okay to question the "settled" science. That's what you are supposed to do in science. If the only place you can do this is shows like Alex Jones or Joe Rogan's ... then you book an appearance on those shows. It's not like CNN is going to book you and let you talk about these topics on their airwaves.
"Why does AIDS/HIV affect only gay men and IV drug users in American and the Western world"
When did you stop beating your wife?
What's your answer to the question? Why the difference in AIDS/HIV victims in America and Africa? I don't get the snarky analogy.
"When did you stop beating your wife?" is the classic example of a dishonest loaded question, one that can't be answered with a straight yes or no because it either of those responses takes the assumption in the question for granted.
Bear in mind that since it is *you* who asserted "AIDS/HIV affect[s] only gay men and IV drug users in American and the Western world", the burden of proof is on you to explain how Arthur Ashe was secretly gay, an IV drug user, or didn't die of complications from AIDS. You also would need to to explain how all the women and children with HIV in this country got it from IV drug use rather than sex or blood transfusion. If you can do that without looking like the Pepe Silvia guy, you should get a medal.
You can also get AIDS from a blood transfusion, which is how Ash might have contracted the disease. RFK, Jr. and, I think, many others, speculate Ash didn't die because of AIDS but because he was given AZT.
I'll qualify my statement: 99 percent of AIDS victims in America who died got the virus from sexual intercourse or sharing contaminated needles (heroin drug addicts).
Am I correct in stating that most of the HIV/AIDS patients in Africa are NOT homosexual males or IV drug users?
Am I correct in saying the vast majority of AIDS victims in America ARE in these two groups?
I don't understand why the different outcomes and results in two different continents. This question makes me think the "science" on AIDS and HIV is not settled. A virus should affect people the same way regardless of where they live.
I started this thread only to dispute the author's apparent position that anyone who questions the HIV/AIDs theory should be cancelled or dismissed as some kind of kook.
Is the virus that causes Covid different in Europe than America?
Do you mean affect people the same way, or do you mean have the same demographics regarding infection? There's been a lot of research into the demographics aspect over the years. This one was from 24 years ago: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.288.5474.2153
I take it there’s a lot that you don’t get
I get that you are one of those posters who don't answer specific questions.
Do you agree with Jones that the water is turning frogs gay?
Eazy E was neither gay nor shooting heroin.
"and the drug killed untold thousands of said patients"
Are you sure it wasn't, you know, the AIDS that killed them? AZT seems to be incredibly safe, if anything not strong enough.
I guess I can reply to Gavin. I agree that's the consensus CDC/Fauci-approved narrative on AZT. I just note that no small number of people dispute this conclusion. I'm probably different than most readers of this newsletter in that I don't automatically accept the pronouncements of the Science Establishment or Big Pharma as infallible truths. The same sources also say the Covid vaccines are incredibly safe, which I think is a mind-blowing assertion. Hasn't anyone noticed that all-cause deaths have exploded since the roll-out of the vaccines? The deaths can't be explained by Covid as the same experts say the shots are 95 percent effective at preventing death ... and 80 percent of the world was vaccinated.
I also think remdesivr has killed thousands of people and that drug's no doubt considered incredibly safe or it wouldn't have been approved by the FDA.
For alternative views on AZT, I'd recommend reading "The Real Anthony Fauci." Now I understand the author of that book has been officially labeled a kook and cancelled, but the book does include more than 2,300 citations and footnotes - so Kennedy is trying to back-up his claims with studies and evidence.
I read a book review of Deborah Birx's book (she's a Covid expert). The reviewer said her book didn't have one footnote in it. I thought that was a tell.
You have no understanding of virology or epidemiology. None.
Epidemics ARE different in different places, because of human behaviour and ACCESS TO MEDICINE, you absolute bore. Why is a cholera epidemic different in a country with no sanitation, compared to one that has sewers and flushing toilets?? Gee, that’s a tough one. Why is malaria more devastating in Africa than it it is in Greece? What a fucking conundrum! Someone call Sherlock Holmes.
You need to stop writing and start reading people who know what the fuck they are talking about. Then come back. Your lack of knowledge about HIV/AIDS should HUMBLE you, but of course, it won’t.
In Africa, HIV kills everyone because of poor sanitation and poor quality water. In America, the same virus doesn't kill everyone because our sanitation and water are better ... but it still kills gay men and IV drug users .... although, presumably, their sanitation and water systems are exactly the same as straight people and non-drug users. So I still don't get it.
Alex, I’ll take “Completely Ahistorical Posts” for $1000.
Yes and those 100 million people are wrong.
I'm glad we're turning to RFK Jr. for our evidence on AIDS.
Eric's broad comments during his Triggernometry discussion with Sam Harris about how Bret fell into the rabbit hole are very clarifying. He suggests YouTube demonetization during Covid-mania is what set him down his current path.
I will always appreciate how he held up during the Evergreen flapdoodle - but he's been embarrassing to watch for years and, I think, ground zero for how alternative media morphed into "just asking questions." His obsession with public dunking on Sam, regardless of Sam's beliefs, is adolescent.
This has been my question about this guy for a long time: Was he always crazy or did his Evergreen incident set off his crazy?
(And to be fair it might have made me crazy. When you read about it it's like Kafka leading a lynch mob.)
So it sounds like you're saying he went crazy post incident. Interesting. And he had a falling out with his brother Eric? I thought they were completely simpatico.
I like Sam, he’s one of my favorites. And facts aside - he kind of has it coming from Bret. Sam has dunked on Brett many times. It flows both ways. Sam doesn’t shy away from friendly fire. With that said, when it comes to truth telling Sam is on much firmer ground.
Subjecting someone to an actual mob or conspiracy, trite as the circumstances may seem to outside observers (YouTube demonitization, meh - letting your job for saying it's racist to kick white people off campus, bigger deal) is a great way to send someone down a paranoid path.
What do you think of Eric? Is he nutty as well? Case study: He thinks his wife was ousted from economics to prevent a new physics-informed econ theory (that he helped with) from yielding a more accurate CPI calculation ... so that the bureau of labor statistics can continue to lie about the cost of living in order to keep academic wages low ... so that STEM departments can keep hiring cheap foreign exchange students ... resulting in US talent being wasted (something like that, there might be more branching implicationsi haven't captured). Personally, I find a lot of his observations extremely compelling, especially about the frustrating stagnation of scientific progress, the smothering influence of gerontocracy, and the abandonment of liberal ideals and meritocracy in elite institutions. But I'm not sure I'm capable of adjudicating his ideas as explanatory theories, so much as I'm just glad someone is at least calling the emperor naked and bringing the level of conversation up a notch to this higher vantage point.
I saw Eric Weinstein on Rogan claiming pompously to have created a "theory of everything" that would, well, like unify physics and explain all the universe.
I think that's more than enough to make your mind up about the guy.
Covid and Covid-denial have sent so many people into mental health crises. The most damaging effects of the pandemic will be mental and emotional. Regardless of how one feels about the school shutdowns, it's obvious that an entire generation of children have been hurt in small, large, and epic ways. And it appears that it's also greatly affected Weinstein's mental health. His real trauma seems to have led him into dark fantasy.
Is it fantasy? I get so spun up myself worrying about this. I follow (or, followed, I should say, past tense, it started affecting my mental health in the ways you mention to the point it was affecting my job) Dr. John Campbell and other doctors on Twitter, discussing these giant clots, these horrible white and dark red bio structures found in the jabbed dead. Campbell says they have tensile strength (a coroner sent him samples to test), Karen Kingston says they have graphene in them, and if it's real that I and all covid jabbed have that growing in us, then the darkest most nefarious plots Weinstein imagines could be true. I had to delete my Twitter recently b/c of this; I was staying up all night, researching, sending things to people I love telling them we're all doomed and will be dead soon, not good! But my quandary I still struggle with is, if this shit is true about the jabs and what they did to us, wouldn't it be mentally unhealthy NOT to be obsessed about it, with your own imminent death at the hands of these bio-structures shredding your arteries? I wish I knew what was true.
PS- I just noticed your substack name. If you're the writer, I loved that one poem you wrote as a series of numbered stanzas juxtaposing mourning elephants and the boy who finds the trumpet. It was a decade ago I read it and I still remember how it moved me.
This is the conspiracy mindset. Not “this is true!”, it’s either: “I want this to be true!” or “I’m so afraid this is true!”
Motivated reasoning, and self-indulgence. Why do you have the motivation to stay up all night “researching” (you’re not researching)? Don’t you have real responsibilities that you are neglecting? The internet is just BAD for some people. You cannot fix the world’s problems, or even your own, by clicking obsessively on links to more and more deranged articles and blogs and posts and videos. Nobody on YouTube knows what they are talking about, except the ones who make videos on how to change the oil in your car or whatever. Those are helpful.
Vaccines are safe, the earth is an oblate sphere, we went to the moon. Go and do something useful with your own two hands, that’s how you achieve satisfaction. Bring food to an elderly neighbour, help a struggling young mother with her kids, go out for dinner with a friend. Just get off the fecking internet. You’ll be so much happier.
I maybe misrepresented myself. I work 7 day weeks and help care for a relative with a brain injury. The problem was, the little free time I had, even cutting in to sleep/rest time, I was spending obsessing over when the shots would kill me/all who I love. You are spot on about the two types of thinking that motivates, though.
Thank you.
I was more snippy than I should have been so thank you for the considerate response.
I’m interested in how you realised you were going off piste though. Is it because you actually have to be present in the real world that was the shield? I mean because you have real world responsibilities? My theory is that too few of us have our real lives filled with that kind of responsibility l.
The Bret Weinstein Drift has been so sad to witness. I feel bad for ever having defended him. Jesse I don't think you get enough credit for not having turned into a monster, as so many people in this space seem to do. Thank you for maintaining your principles and integrity.
I started listening to Weinstein early in 2023. But as I listened it seemed to me that he was getting more and more, to use a technical term, nutso.
Let me just say this clearly: I believe anthropogenic climate change is likely, but the theory that humans are not driving the majority of global warming and HIV does not cause AIDS are miles apart in terms of scientific plausibility, it's a bit of a red flag for an uninvestigated opinion that they would be grouped together. We do not have another Earth we can run experiments on where we raise the temp by adding carbon dioxide. We can infect cells in the lab with HIV. We are left with very complicated models, occasionally sus surface temp collection and longitudinal correlations to demonstrate anthropogenic CO2. You have to model CO2 effect on water vapor, determine upper atmosphere contributions, and it sure looks like CO2 fits into a warming effect--but there are so many cpmplicating factors like clouds, solar irradiation and planetary albedo that have to be considered--apart from factors like organic decomposition and global plant biomass. Rational, practical belief in anthropogenic global warming is based on the precautionary principal or it's faith in science few of us have the ability to grasp and ascertain for acccuracy
This is one of those “depends on which position you’re actually arguing” things, and everyone always strawmans.
Like, is the earth getting warmer? That seems pretty conclusive.
Does CO2 make earth warmer, all else being equal? Seems pretty conclusive.
Are humans putting enough CO2 into the atmosphere to have a measurable impact on climate? Yeah probably.
Do we know enough about the complex feedback in the atmosphere to accurately model exactly how much warming will happen how fast for a given amount of CO2? That seems to have a much less good track record (that is, seems like models have been pretty consistently overpredicting, and anyway the best models are not the ones showing catastrophic outcomes).
Can we confidently claim that “we have 5 years to change or climate change will cause human extinction”? Well now you’re totally off the rails.
I’m certainly no expert in anything, but I did take a class about 8 years ago in which the instructor, herself a scientist, laid out the evidence for anthropogenic climate change, and it looked pretty damn convincing to me.
My recollection goes something like this: we have about 800,000 years of good evidence, and a pretty clear cyclical climatic pattern is visible over that time. We should have been in a cooling cycle according to that pattern, and the only likely explanation as to why we’re not is greenhouse gas emissions.
I can’t remember all the details, but I remember the Milankovitch cycles were part of the curriculum.
In general, I tend to think complex systems like climate are much harder to understand for a lay person than they appear. It’s very easy to think you’ve made a well-informed observation after considerable effort that feels cautious, when you’re actually missing important information. My professor all those years back left me with the strong impression that the scientific basis for climate change is rock solid, that the relevant experts have put considerable effort and care into understanding this topic, and their remarkably uniform conclusions are well grounded in the evidence.
I’m a believer in skepticism, including of “official” narratives, which is why I love Jesse’s work so much; I feel he scrutinizes claims well and fairly no matter who is making them. I think in this case the mainstream claims are pretty solid, fwiw.
I really don't think the evidence is that good when you consider that there were much higher levels of CO2 millions of years ago without the corresponding temperature change. I also think that there are so many other factors that aren't being held constant, and many of these factors are really difficult to measure. i think Watts up With That website puts forth good arguments against the narrative, but until you have gone to the sophisticated skeptics, you really shouldn't be convinced. The uniformity of conclusions is not at all reassuring when you remember the ClimateGate scandal at East Anglia University where they were bullying the journals to not publish skeptical research. Look at the consensus against the lab leak among publishing virologists doing gain-of-function. Look at the consensus for pediatric youth transition among its practitioners. Consensus can be manufactured. It's extremely complicated, but the models are not showing us any certainty that we are destroying the planet in the near future, however, out of precaution, we might want to mitigate against that as best as we can.
In fact when you look at temp and CO2 over hundreds of thousands of years using ice cores, it's clearly tightly correlated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere#/media/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg
1) the correlation disappears when you go back millions, 2) it is known that organic decomposition speeds up when temperatures increase, raising CO2. So, the data is not to be ignored, but isn't without caveats
Yeah but going back millions of years, you've got other factors like the output of the sun changing as it ages (it was 70% less bright when the earth formed) and I doubt it's as easy to get reliable data.
The organic decomposition argument doesn't make much sense because most ecosystems will be in a stable state where decaying matter is matched by new growth... when your data points are separated by decades, it doesn't matter if it takes a week or a month for a fallen tree branch to decompose, the total net output of carbon dioxide would be the same.
Ultimately it's basic physics that if you have more carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere absorbing and reradiating infrared, you're going to get less heat escaping back into space. We've added 50% more CO2 so that has to create a warming effect.
It is very true that previous climates may have had differences in the sun. Re decomposition: A lot of the organic matter in forests and rainforests is there for hundreds of years because much is trapped under surface soil-notice layers of dirt piling up over generations--hotter areas have less dirt buildup. Of course CO2, specifically in the high atmosphere traps infrared reflection. The question is the magnitude of the trapping. The previous models needed a water vapor multiplier to make the numbers work--water vapor traps a lot more infrared, and there was a hypothesized interaction between CO2 and water vapor. So, it is more complicated than a simple calculation. Again, it is probably real, but it is freakishly complicated compared to HIV causing AIDS.
I find the recent history of conspiracy-ism so fascinating. I'm in my forties. A significant amount of my social time in my 20's was spent poo-pooing left conspiracies about Bush amongst lefty friends. 9/11. Rigged voting machines. He'd cancel elections, etc. In fact for the first 3 or 4 years I knew of Alex Jones I thought he was a Keith Olbermann lefty type loudmouth because it was my lefty friends who were sending me links to his stuff! (Which I admit I wasn't reading closely because I thought it was nuts.) I'm honestly not sure how many lefty anti Bush conspiracists have migrated to right-ish conspiracies or if the current right ish conspiracists are a whole different group. Does anyone know of a good apolitical and (relatively) non judgemental book/article discussing "conspiracy theory in the 21st century" or something like that? I would love to read it.
(There may not be such a thing since this is such a political hot button. But if there is I think it'd be interesting as heck.)
Love the phrase "conspiracy entrepreneurs"
It's a shame. As someone with a biology background, I initially enjoyed his and Heather's podcasts. When Covid began and he started peddling conspiracy BS he lost me, and apparently he's really gone off the deep end.