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covid-safer-hotties · 1 month

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How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On COVID - Published Dec 22, 2021

Almost 3 years out from publication, and we can see the very real effects conservative dark money has played on public health in general, even for the liberal. (They never shift left for some strange reason.) Might be something to show your vote-blue-no-matter-who unmaskers in your life.

As Omicron surges, a shadowy institute filled with fringe doctors appears to be part of big business’ two-year strategy to legitimize attacks on pandemic interventions.

Earlier this month, as the Omicron variant began to spread, a small liberal arts school on a tree-lined campus in Michigan called Hillsdale College announced it was launching an Academy for Science and Freedom to “educate the American people about the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth.”

The academy was inspired by the pandemic. “As we reflect on the worst public health fiasco in history, our pandemic response has unveiled serious issues with how science is administered,” noted the college president in a press release.

But the venture isn't exactly an effort to apply science to the COVID-19 crisis. The so-called “fiasco” was government pandemic measures like mask and vaccine mandates, contact tracing, and lockdowns.

Hillsdale is a conservative Christian institution with ties to the Trump administration. And the scholars behind the academy — Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff — are connected to right-wing dark money attacking public health measures.

The trio also has ties to the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely-rebuked yet influential missive that encouraged governments to adopt a “herd immunity” policy letting COVID-19 spread largely unchecked, even as the virus has killed more than 800,000 Americans.

The academy is the newest initiative designed to provide intellectual cover to a nearly two-year campaign by right-wing and big business interests to force a return to normalcy to boost corporate profits amid a pandemic that is now surging once again thanks to Omicron.

That campaign’s most recent success came earlier this month when Senate Republicans and a handful of Democrats joined together to pass a symbolic measure to repeal a Biden administration rule requiring large corporations to mandate vaccines or regular COVID tests for workers.

This is the story of how that corporate-bankrolled campaign originally started, and how it has continued to supplant public health experts and hijack the governmental response to the pandemic.

The War On Public Health When COVID began its spread across the United States in early March 2020, states responded by locking down to varying extents. All 24 Democratic governors and 19 of the 26 Republican governors issued weeks-long stay-at-home orders and restrictions on non-essential businesses.

Lockdown measures drove down cases in the U.S. and likely saved millions of lives globally. But the decline of in-person shopping and work, combined with factory shutdowns in places like China, disrupted the economy. A 2020 report from the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found the hardest-hit industries would take years to recover.

One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing.

Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world.

The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.

“We can achieve public health without depriving the people most in need of the products and services provided by businesses across the country,” it read.

A month later, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a business lobbying group partially funded by Koch Industries, published a letter calling on President Donald Trump to enable states to reopen. That letter was signed by over 200 state legislators and “stakeholders,” including leaders from Koch-funded groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the James Madison Institute.

To fight its war, the Koch network also relied on the astroturf roadmap behind the anti-government Tea Party movement, using its dark money apparatus to coordinate anti-lockdown protests.

Participants for a number of anti-lockdown rallies were recruited by FreedomWorks, a dark money group tied to Charles Koch instrumental in organizing Tea Party protests in 2009. Several of the 2020 rallies were also promoted by the Convention of States Action, a group founded by an organization with ties to the Koch network and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer that wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution. In Michigan, a major event was organized by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a nonprofit funded by the family of Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos.

Groups funded by the Kochs and their colleagues also turned to a more insidious form of combat adapted from Tea Party strategies: building an academic and intellectual network that would create and promote its own “science” to attack COVID mitigation policies.

“Build Up Immunity… Through Natural Infection” On October 4, 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration was released to the world. Authored by Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford University professor Sunetra Gupta, the declaration recommended governments allow younger, healthier people to become infected with COVID-19 while reserving “focused protection” for the vulnerable, in order to reach herd immunity. Suggestions included having nursing homes limit staff rotations and businesses rely on workers with “acquired immunity.”

“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection,” read the declaration.

The document boasted a veneer of academic legitimacy. Its credentialed authors wrote the letter at a conference hosted by the auspicious-sounding American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. According to the declaration’s website, the letter has since been signed by more than 2,700 “Medical and Public Health Scientists,” and “none of the authors or co-signers received any money, honoraria, stipend, or salary from anyone.”

But the declaration arose out of the world of right-wing dark money and corporate interests, and many of its signatories aren’t verified.

AIER, which hosted and filmed the conference and registered the declaration’s website, is a Koch-tied libertarian think tank. From 2018 to 2020, the Charles Koch Foundation donated more than $100,000 to the institute. And before that, the Koch Foundation donated nearly $1.5 million to the Emergent Order Foundation, formerly Emergent Order LLC, a PR firm that engaged in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of marketing consulting for AIER.

AIER has also received $54,000 from the Atlas Network, an anti-regulation group formerly known as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation that has received more than a half million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation and the connected Charles Koch Institute. The Atlas Network also pocketed nearly $3.9 million from DonorsTrust, a dark money fund connected to wealthy right-wing donors such as Koch and Mercer, and its sister group, Donors Capital Fund.

In exchange, AIER has provided fellowships to academics in several Koch-funded programs. That includes economist Peter Boettke, the former president of the Mont Pelerin Society, of which Charles Koch has been a member, and Michael Munger, an adjunct scholar at the Koch-backed Cato Institute. AIER’s trustees include Benjamin Powell, director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, which has received millions from the Koch network. Powell is known for his defense of sweatshops.

Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, is a former research fellow at the Hoover Institution, which received $430,000 from Charles Koch’s foundation between 2017 and 2018, as well as $1.4 million from the dark money fund DonorsTrust from 2016 to 2020. Since then, Bhattacharya has appeared in multiple Hoover video programs.

Bhattacharya, Gupta, and representatives of AIER did not respond to requests for comment. Kulldorff insisted that he has never received money from the Koch network.

“Koch-affiliated foundations funded pro-lockdown COVID research by Dr. Neil Ferguson at Imperial College, but they have never funded me, either directly or indirectly,” said Kulldorff. “Lockdowns have generated huge profits for Koch and other big businesses while throwing children and the working class under the bus.”

“Access To The Very Highest Levers Of Government” The Great Barrington Declaration and its natural immunity strategy were widely derided by scientists around the world. The strategy was condemned by the Infectious Diseases Society of America and its HIV Medicine Association while World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called it “unethical.” Thousands of medical professionals called on governments to disregard strategies that rely on natural infection.

“Never in the history of public health has anyone suggested infecting the entire population with a pathogen with which we have no long term experience as a strategy for managing a pandemic,” said epidemiologist and physician Robert Morris, who has advised several federal agencies.

Nevertheless, the declaration and its authors were embraced by a number of political leaders, since their arguments provided their laissez-faire approaches to the pandemic with scholarly validity.

This list included President Trump. Two months before the release of the Great Barrington Declaration, Trump welcomed the document’s authors to a White House meeting, even though the administration’s COVID-19 advisor, Deborah Birx, warned colleagues that the doctors were “a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health, or on-the-ground common sense experience.”

Trump’s COVID-19 adviser, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no background in infectious diseases, appeared to be one of several staff who supported the declaration’s strategy. While Atlas has denied urging the natural immunity approach, he publicly claimed that masks do not help curb the virus and called the idea of mandating vaccines for young people a “denial of science,” a claim that has been thoroughly disproved.

The president became enamored with herd immunity and the quick fix it promised for his reelection campaign. In mid-September 2020, Trump began trotting out the concepts that would soon be codified in the Great Barrington Declaration. He declared at an ABC News town hall, “And you’ll develop…a herd mentality. It’s going to be — it’s going to be herd-developed, and that’s going to happen.”

Following Trump’s lead, a number of Republican-led states adopted hands-off pandemic strategies.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered the resumption of most commerce in November 2020, including indoor dining, and barred localities from enforcing mask mandates and social distancing.

Declaration co-author Bhattacharya advised DeSantis on his approach and called the governor “extraordinary” for his handling of the pandemic. Last month, DeSantis signed legislation banning vaccine mandates statewide.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott lifted his state’s mask mandate and COVID business restrictions in March 2021. The next month, he declared Texas could be close to herd immunity. Recently, Abbott issued an executive order banning mask mandates, which a federal judge recently ruled unenforceable because it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Great Barrington Declaration’s central arguments also found support overseas. In September 2020, co-author Gupta met in London with U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who had been slow to impose lockdowns and implement testing after the coronavirus was first identified in his country. A month after this meeting, Johnson sent a series of texts echoing talking points from the declaration, including that the virus wasn’t a real risk to people under 60.

The London meeting was also attended by Anders Tegnell, the state epidemiologist for Sweden, a country that became well known for its rejection of lockdowns. In April 2020, Sweden’s public health director asserted, “There is no clear correlation between the lockdown measures taken in countries and the effect on the pandemic.”

“You have to hand it to the [authors of the] Great Barrington declaration: They have had extraordinary access to the very highest levers of government,” said Gavin Yamey, M.D., M.P.H., a professor of global health and public policy at Duke University. “They have had a profound impact on policy-making. Time and time again, we’ve seen the [people behind the] Great Barrington Declaration get what they want.”

A Devastating Toll Despite the Great Barrington Declaration’s claim that it was delineating “the most compassionate approach” to COVID-19, states and countries that embraced its anti-interventionist strategy have all experienced a COVID massacre.

At the time of the declaration’s publication, roughly 200,000 Americans had died from the virus. Since then, that number has quadrupled, the highest known number of any country.

Florida has become a COVID-19 hotspot, accounting for nearly one in five U.S. cases last summer. Virus numbers also surged in Texas, with the two states accounting for one third of all U.S. COVID-19 deaths at the time.

Even with all those infections, herd immunity was never achieved. Last week, University of Texas researchers warned that the Omicron variant could lead to the largest surge to date in the state.

International efforts to reach natural herd immunity haven’t fared much better. A scathing report released in October by British lawmakers — many from Prime Minister Johnson’s own party — found that the country’s failure to respond to the virus quickly and aggressively was “one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced” and led to “many thousands of deaths which could have been avoided.”

And in Sweden, where roughly 11 out every 100 people had been diagnosed with the virus, COVID-19 fatalities stand at 1,476 deaths per million, many times that of its closest neighbors.

“We Are Intent On Not Letting Omicron Disrupt Work & School” Despite the costs, right-wing messaging against public health measures continues.

At first glance, lockdowns may appear beneficial to some big businesses, especially those that were deemed essential businesses and boasted robust online marketplaces. But social epidemiologist Justin Feldman, of Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, noted that “some regulations directly cost businesses money.”

Feldman explained that “paid quarantine and isolation means workers will be paid to stay home instead of working,” vaccine mandates could “make hiring difficult during a labor shortage,” and mask mandates “signal to the public that there is danger and they will then not patronize businesses.”

That’s likely why in March 2021, the dark money fund DonorsTrust spent nearly $800,000 to spread the narrative that the pandemic’s toll was actually due to government interventions. In May, DonorsTrust issued a press release claiming lockdowns hurt workers.

In June, Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank at George Mason University heavily funded by the Koch family, began funding a database run by Emily Oster, an economist who has argued that the drawbacks of school closures outweigh the risks of COVID-19 exposure. Oster’s work was cited by Gov. DeSantis when he signed an order last August allowing parents to defy school mask mandates.

And earlier this month, the Foundation for Economic Education, another Koch-funded nonprofit, claimed that “naive government interventions” were responsible for a rise in global malaria cases and a spike in worldwide poverty.

Such anti-public health intervention narratives have had a lasting impact.

President Joe Biden hasn’t embraced herd immunity through infection the way Trump did, and he instituted a vaccine mandate for large companies that has faced court challenges and pushback from Republican and conservative Democratic lawmakers.

But Biden, whose COVID-19 response team is headed by former investment firm CEO and so-called “businessman’s businessman” Jeffrey Zients, has continued his predecessor’s push to keep the country open, even prematurely declaring “independence” from COVID-19 on Fourth of July last summer.

Earlier this month, Biden assured reporters that lockdowns would not be returning, despite the emergence of the Omicron variant and continued spread of Delta. According to a recent scientific simulation, an eight-week stay-at-home order in response to the new surge could save 300,000 lives.

Last Friday, the White House’s coronavirus response team put out a statement reaffirming its limited approach, a stance Biden reiterated in his remarks on Omicron on Tuesday: “We are intent on not letting Omicron disrupt work & school for the vaccinated.”

The defeat of lockdowns is only part of big business’ takeover of the country’s COVID-19 response.

The country’s eviction moratorium was allowed to lapse after it faced multiple legal challenges funded in part by the Charles Koch Foundation — at the same time as Charles Koch began making new investments in real estate. A subsequent moratorium put in place by the Biden administration was also struck down by the Supreme Court.

And while one of Biden’s first presidential promises was to clarify COVID-19 workplace safety standards, the resulting guidelines ended up limited to a small subsection of workers, following months of lobbying by business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber and other corporate interests have also pushed for a corporate liability shield to protect employers from COVID-19-related lawsuits and have also been fighting against ongoing efforts to release the vaccine intellectual property at the World Trade Organization to speed up global vaccination.

The right-wing push against public health measures shows signs of success. Support for pandemic lockdown measures dropped significantly over nine months from the start of the pandemic. A Gallup poll from November 2020 found that a plurality of 49 percent of Americans said they would shelter in place in response to a serious outbreak, down from 67 percent in March. The decline was mostly due to a “sharp drop” among Republicans.

“A Shining City On A Hill” The Great Barrington Declaration’s authors continue to push herd immunity through COVID-19 infections. Gupta co-founded a U.K. nonprofit called Collateral Global dedicated to exposing alleged negative impacts of COVID mitigation measures, which has Bhattacharya on staff.

Bhattacharya, meanwhile, published an op-ed last January claiming that vaccinating people in his native India was “unethical” because most had “natural immunity” and the risk of adverse reactions outweighed the benefits of inoculation. A month later, the country experienced its worst-ever surge.

All three co-authors are also now affiliated with the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research, an Austin, Texas-based nonprofit founded by former AIER editorial director Jeffrey Tucker in May 2021 to prevent “the recurrence of lockdowns.” Bhattacharya serves as the organization's senior scholar, Kulldorff is a senior scientific director, and Gupta is an author.

According to Yamey at Duke University, the institute has been actively promoting vaccine disinformation.

“Time and time again, they have peddled dreadful misinformation and disinformation about vaccines,” he said. “They are, for example, vehemently opposed to vaccinating children, even though we know that unvaccinated children are 10 times more likely to be hospitalized. They very sadly went on television to say that health workers don't need to be vaccinated because they falsely claimed vaccination has no effect on transmission.”

Now declaration co-authors Bhattacharya and Kulldorff, as well as former Trump advisor Scott Atlas have surfaced yet again, as the first three “fellows” at the new Academy for Science and Freedom at Hillsdale College.

Hillsdale, a private non-sectarian Christian school, has long been a factory for conservative thought. In 2016, during a Hillsdale commencement speech, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas called it a “shining city on a hill.” Statues of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher adorn a section of its campus known as “Liberty Walk.” Hillsdale President Larry Arnn chaired Donald Trump’s reactionary 1776 Commission, which sought to craft American history curriculums around America’s strengths.

Hillsdale refuses to accept public funds so it can be free from government mandates. Instead, it accepts large sums from the foundations and donor conduits of right-wing corporate executives and their families. The Charles Koch Foundation has donated over $300,000 to Hillsdale since 2015, and DonorsTrust gave over $3.6 million since 2014, including $2.5 million in 2020. The school has also found generous benefactors in the DeVos family, known for their Amway fortune, and Betsy DeVos’ parents, the Princes.

According to the academy’s recently launched website, the new academy will work “to educate policymakers and the general public about important discoveries and ideas that might otherwise be ignored by scientific journals and corporate media.” To do so, the academy plans to host scientific workshops and conferences, publish academic papers, and engage in “media and government outreach.”

But Feldman isn’t buying it.

“They have no interest in science,” he said. “They have been wrong about the pandemic time and time again. They use their stature as 'experts' to push for policies that are indifferent to ongoing mass death.”

#covid #mask up #pandemic #covid 19 #wear a mask #coronavirus #sars cov 2 #still coviding #public health #wear a respirator

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darkmaga-retard · 9 days

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Jay Bhattacharya

Sep 11, 2024

Hi everyone,

In this conversation with Sharyl Attkisson, I delve into how pharmaceutical companies manipulate media narratives through their advertising power, causing journalists to self-censor. We also examine how regulatory agencies like the FDA and CDC are influenced by pharmaceutical funding, which undermines public trust in their decisions. This episode highlights the pressing need for critical, independent thinking in healthcare to protect public interests.

Timestamps:

0:22 Intro to Sharyl Atkinson

4:00 Inundated by pharmaceutical ads

6:45 Side effects of pharmaceuticals

8:30 Governance compromised by corporations

12:53 FDA approval & corruption

20:00 Controversializing the use of ivermectin

23:03 The rush job of vaccines by the FDA

30:07 The CDC ignoring the science for profit

37:40 Risks of the small pox vaccine

40:00 Scapegoating critics as anti-vaxxers

44:00 Autism & the propaganda campaign

48:00 The Amish response to Covid

51:05 Premature school closures

54:30 Doctors turning a blind eye

01:00:00 Censorship of honest research

01:02:30 The value of critical thinking

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mariacallous · 6 months

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Conspiracy theories and the people creating them have overwhelmed the US political process, and they’re becoming only more prevalent with each passing year. 2024 will be no different, if not worse: We’re already uncovering all kinds here on the WIRED Politics desk, from election conspiracy groups to claims that Boeing planes were made faulty on purpose. In the past few days alone, we’ve seen theories swirl online about the Baltimore bridge collapse and Kate Middleton’s cancer announcement.

A number of conspiracies were also given a boost this week by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s long-shot presidential campaign. Let’s talk about them!

The Longest VP Announcement

On Tuesday, RFK Jr. officially announced his VP choice: Nicole Shanahan, a tech entrepreneur, lawyer, and very wealthy ex-wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin. I checked in with WIRED contributor Anna Merlan to debrief what was probably the longest veep announcement in recent history, and to talk about the conspiracies, digital campaign strategies, and vaccine skeptics driving Kennedy’s campaign. I’ve been taking a hard look at how the campaign is reaching voters online, and Anna covered the announcement for WIRED. She’s also been reporting on RFK Jr. and the anti-vax conspiracy ecosystem for years.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

MK: Ok. Nicole Shanahan. When they played her introductory video at the RFK Jr. event, I wasn’t expecting her to come off so conspiratorial. Were you surprised by what she said at all?

AM: Obviously, Shanahan was widely reported to be the VP pick. I did not know her stance on medical conspiracy theories, but I figured there had to be something there because you probably wouldn't agree to appear on a ticket with RFK without that.

So in her introductory video, she said that her daughter started showing signs of autism spectrum disorder in her infancy, and then she segued into making a series of claims that are very legible to people in the anti-vaccine movement. She claimed that chronic illnesses and conditions like autism can be caused by environmental exposure, wireless technology, and medication. And then she added that science can't assess the cumulative effects of multiple childhood vaccines—which is not true. The childhood vaccine schedule is very, very, very studied. Vaccines are some of the safest, most tested medical products on earth. It's not true, but as a talking point, it is again incredibly recognizable to the anti-vaccine movement. So for me, hearing her saying that stuff solved a little bit of a mystery of why she's involved.

MK: There were a lot of other people on stage yesterday and I didn’t recognize all of them. Who were those people?

AM: This was obviously a very long event—I think you even tweeted that it was only slightly shorter than Dune 2, which is true. There was a parade of speakers: Some of the bigger ones were Del Bigtree, who is really well known among anti-vaccine activists and is currently serving as the Kennedy campaign’s communications director; Jay Bhattacharya, who is a very prominent anti-lockdown figure; a former border patrol agent; and a couple of people who are active, if not super well known, in the natural health space. Basically, these speakers were each meant to speak to a slightly different constituency, because RFK Jr.’s main focus for so long has been anti-vaccine activism.

MK: Let’s talk about Bigtree. I’m curious about the space he occupies in the online conspiracy world.

AM: Bigtree was definitely the biggest speaker who was on the stage. He’s a very well-known anti-vaccine activist and is the CEO of a group called Informed Consent Action Network that is funded by billionaire foreign donors. He was the producer of an extremely famous and successful vaccine movie called Vaxxed, with Andrew Wakefield, who is the father of the modern anti-vaccine movement. And he’s the person who first falsely claimed that there might be a link between vaccines and autism, and set off a huge panic. So, Bigtree is incredibly well known. He’s incredibly popular and his place on the Kennedy campaign, I would opine, is meant to signal to RFK Jr. supporters in the anti-vaccine community that it’s still going to be a concern for a theoretical Kennedy administration.

MK: It did feel like the campaign was trying to thread the needle between the left and the right.

AM: It’s an awkward fit, isn’t it? I mean, RFK Jr.’s campaign had a YouTube livestream where you could watch the announcement, and if you looked at the comments during the land acknowledgement for the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, they were pretty, unsurprisingly, racist. This is not a reflection on his campaign necessarily, but it's a reflection on some people who might have been inclined to support him. The sort of tug between having a Bay Area tribe on stage to get the land acknowledgement and then having somebody come on stage to talk about his history as a border patrol agent is awkward. Is that actually going to work on a large number of undecided voters? I don't know, but clearly that was what it was meant to do.

MK: Earlier today, I saw an ad on Twitter promoting an RFK Jr. documentary. It feels like such an investment in highly produced storytelling for the campaign. And this announcement event being so highly produced, it read like the campaign is trying really hard to make all of this pseudoscience appear legitimate. What did you think?

AM: RFK Jr.’s campaign, as you wrote about, has been very aware of sort of appealing to online spaces. One of those ways that you do that are these highly produced, slick little videos that look good on social media. So I wasn’t surprised.

But I was surprised that the announcement event was so long. I was surprised that there wasn't a little bit of attention to what the attention span is for an internet audience. I would definitely expect to see things that are highly produced, that are sort of media savvy, and that are also completely focused on burnishing RFK’s individual reputation. Because ultimately, in a long-shot candidacy like this, which may or may not be a sincere run for the White House, candidates are seeking to burnish their reputations in the worlds that they come from, and to even grow their market or their audience and become better known to a consumer base that they might not be known by already. Marianne Williamson, for example, had huge success with that.

MK: Another reason I can imagine why it was so long is because they knew how many eyes were going to be on this, and that it was probably one of their last big announcements and attempts to convince people to vote for him.

AM: The last big announcement. It's the last big chance to raise money, really. And they need money to get on the ballot. You’re trying to appeal to everybody, and you’re trying to make the most of what is probably your last moment.

The Chatroom

Occam’s razor doesn’t really exist on the internet. Or with conspiracy theorists. That couldn’t have been more apparent after a cargo ship tragically crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore this week, resulting in the presumed deaths of six people. Instead of assuming that the collision was due to a systems failure on the cargo ship, online conspiracy theorists have taken to blaming everyone from Nickelodeon to the CIA to DEI initiatives, as reported by my colleague David Gilbert.

We still don’t know too much about how and why the Tuesday morning collision took place, but if one were to guess—it’s unlikely that wokeness is the primary culprit.

But hey, maybe you know better than me. Leave a comment or send me an email at [email protected] and let me know.

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intellectual6666 · 7 months

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Mojaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!

Kuch bhi didi 😂😂😂 jai ghumate jao, otherwise Anirban Bhattacharya won't come 😁😁

#amswered #lovely mutuals

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 10 months

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By: Salomé Sibonex

Published: Dec 5, 2023

Until just a few years ago, I didn’t feel like I had a place in this world. That’s over 25 years of wondering why my life didn’t look more like the lives of people around me. Even my thoughts were different from the thoughts of people around me, for better and for worse. Before most people were using social media for anything besides posting pictures of food, I was accusing people of cultural appropriation. Insecurity, naivety, and intelligence are a dangerous combination.

In the last few years, I’ve lost my naivety, improved my insecurities, and kept the intelligence (this too, is a dangerous combination). Where I once played along with destructive leftism, like using any political disagreement as an excuse to attack people and consequently suppress my underdeveloped sense of self, I now follow a different compass.

Something changed in me after watching people who endlessly argued that words were violence suddenly defend real violence–mobs ganging up on individuals–if it was done in the name of BLM. The leftist ideas I previously scooped up on social media had gone from fringe to mainstream and were playing out in front of me; now executed in the real world, they were spilling blood with no remorse. The familiar feeling of being the odd one out returned. I knew this was a situation where I was compelled to do the unpopular: voice an opinion no one else seemed to hold. But this time, I was driven by my values instead of my insecurities.

I couldn’t see it from the peer group and media landscape I was in, but I wasn’t the only one finding lines they wouldn’t cross. Speaking out against people misusing the pursuit of racial equality to justify destruction led me to others who were also willing to go against the herd. I discovered principled individualist thinkers like Ayishat Akanbi. But there were many other people still finding the strength to speak up.

The years 2020 and 2021 will be remembered for many reasons, but perhaps the most inspiring is that many people found their voice. I started to notice a pattern: a unique type of person willing to bear insults and isolation rather than go along with bad ideas. These people are the black sheep and they show up any time a group starts going off the rails.

We saw doctors like Jay Bhattacharya speak out against vaccine mandates and lockdowns; we saw black intellectuals like Ayishat Akanbi and Africa Brooke speak out about anti-racist ideology and cancel culture; we saw academic biologists like Colin Wright speak out against the spread of a gender ideology that denies the existence of two sexes; and we saw a surge of people calling themselves “politically homeless” as a rejection of the rigid political identities being pushed on them. My years of always feeling like the odd one out ended when I found other people who weren’t afraid to be black sheep too. We’ve been too caught up in the madness to notice, but we’re living through a renaissance–not just of the individual–but of the individual who dares to defy the group.

In a time when destructive collectivism threatens to steamroll over individual freedom, understanding the psychology behind the black sheep concept will help us overcome it.

One of the earliest and most famous psychological experiments about the black sheep effect was conducted in 1988. Researchers had Belgian students rank four distinct groups by their likeability: likable Belgian students (in-group), unlikeable Belgian students (in-group), likable North African students (out-group), and unlikable North African students (out-group). Who would offend you most: an offensive person who’s more or less similar to you? This question adds a crucial element to the equation: identity. It wasn’t the unlikable North African students who the Belgian students found most unlikable, it was the other Belgian students. The black sheep effect explains some of the ugliest group behavior around. It’s how you end up with leftists calling liberals “nazis” and white “anti-racists” diagnosing any black person who challenges them with “internalized racism.”

The black sheep effect is dependent on another concept: social identity theory. This theory explains how our group identity informs our individual identity. When your group is challenged by someone from within, it isn’t just your group, but your sense of self that’s challenged. Research has found that people are more likely to lash out at ingroup members who deviate from their group’s norms than outgroup members. It isn’t men who challenge a feminist’s identity the most–it’s women who don’t agree with the feminist narrative.

The key to understanding the black sheep effect is understanding the motives that drive people to hate deviant ingroup members: it isn’t you, it’s them. Even if you’re correct in pointing out that “anti-racism” contradicts the humanistic philosophy that made the civil rights movement successful, as a black person who rejects “anti-racism,” you’re a more dangerous threat to the stability of the anti-racist movement than actual racists. This dynamic is crucial to understanding the black sheep effect today: punishing black sheep isn’t necessarily motivated by people deeply caring about their cause or simply having another perspective. The black sheep threatens the ego of people who gain their identity from that group–often at the expense of progress.

Destructive groups pursue the same, singular goal above all else: self-preservation. Unlike a group of gardeners, a group of feminists is more likely to become destructive because their individual identities are more deeply informed by their group identity. It’s a bigger statement about who you are to label yourself a feminist than it is to label yourself a hiking enthusiast. This might be the most dangerous and yet least recognized element in today’s surge of collectivism.

The stated goal of a group is not always the true goal of that group. The best way to discern the true goal of any person or group is to look at their actions more than their words. People do what they are most motivated to do; people say what they think is most expedient. When we saw anti-racist activists say that they were concerned about the hardships and inequality faced by black Americans, but we also saw them encourage and praise riots that led to arrests, death, and community destruction for those same people, the stated goals of the group didn’t align with its actions.

Similarly, neo-conservatives claim to care about protecting Americans, but consistently send Americans to die in unnecessary wars; feminists claim to care about empowering women, but push women to adopt cynical, victimized outlooks; leftists claim to care about the poor, but insist the only solution to poverty is destroying the economic system that’s lifted the most people out of it. In all of these groups, the gap between stated goals and true goals isn’t just hypocritical–it’s blatantly counter-productive. More than ever before, it needs to become common knowledge that actions speak louder than words, especially for political ideologies.

A lot of the groups that are fighting to control us are primarily fighting for nothing more than their self-preservation. And when a group is more interested in its own existence than the achievement of its stated goals, chaos follows.

These are the foot soldiers you’ve met online today who will attack anything endlessly. They are the people you’ve seen in viral protest videos who rabidly yell about a problem while offering no reasonable solutions. These symptoms reveal a group has entered a death spin of self-preservation for its own sake.

Healthy groups are genuinely concerned with the variety of perspectives their members have on how to achieve their stated goals. You can see this in any productive business where leaders engineer ways to get honest feedback from employees. Anyone who cares about effectively achieving a goal isn’t just open to criticism, they’re hungry for it. They know about concepts like Johari’s window, which explains that every individual has blindspots other people can fill in. When people are searching for solutions, any input on how to better solve the problem is welcome.

A group that tolerates its black sheep is more effective because it avoids becoming an echo chamber, where new ideas are kept out and stagnation is inevitable. Because the black sheep is a part of the group but tends to be a person with a unique vantage point or an unusual background, they can offer the most accurate and creative suggestions. The black sheep is a treasure to any effective collective: a genuine member with insider knowledge who’s different enough to fill in the crucial blindspots that members too immersed in the group can’t see. It’s why conversations between feminists and liberal women who reject that label could offer a fountain of insight into women’s needs today, but it’s also why that conversation is rare.

The black sheep’s strength isn’t just the unique perspective they offer to their group, it’s also the red flag they raise when that group attacks them. Any group that can’t tolerate constructive criticism from those who share its goal is no longer primarily pursuing that goal–it's pursuing self-preservation at the expense of that goal.

Black sheep are the canary in the coal mine. The treatment they receive from their group reveals if that group is doing the necessary reflection to hold rational beliefs and stop destructive beliefs from spreading.

Leftism today is the perfect example of a group that’s lost its mechanism for hitting the brakes on counter-productive ideas. Instead, many leftists hunt for the nearest heretic to punish for minor deviations, like mixing up someone’s pronouns, not using “inclusive” language, or failing to perform the correct level of collective outrage over the latest issue. This practice has been going on for so long in online leftist spaces that most of the heretics being picked on aren’t actually black sheep–the genuine black sheep with considered differences were pushed out long ago. Today’s targets are merely making naive mistakes, but are picked apart by other members desperate to reinforce their own in-group status. When a group has run off all its black sheep and is finding stand-ins for ritual punishment, you can be sure that group is on a path of destruction.

When I started publicly criticizing the destructive elements of leftism, I had no other political group to call home while doing so. I knew the ideology was wrong, but I still felt the pressure to mince my words and tread lightly enough to avoid becoming the next target of a social mobbing. I’d seen how individuals were torn apart in the virtual public square by anonymous attackers joining together to fuel a fire that would burn its victim in 1,000 different ways, 1,000 different times. While I’d much rather be attacked by a cyber mob than a real one, there’s something uniquely freakish about watching a digital effigy of yourself be spit on and ripped apart for all the world to watch.

For a while, I was torn between truth and fear; I wanted to speak clearly, but I knew that would put me clearly in the crosshairs of people with nothing to do but ruin my life. Once I realized that safety at the expense of integrity is a hamster’s life, I felt ready to bear the consequences of fully pursuing my values. Suffering in service of something meaningful didn’t exactly feel nice, but it felt powerful. Suddenly, bearing the emotional tantrums and attempted abuse from strangers was the obvious choice.

When I learned to see myself as a black sheep, it felt like the missing piece of a puzzle. A life that had always felt unusual suddenly made sense. I was exactly where I belonged all along–the odd one out who held a mirror to the others. If you want to develop your own perspective on life, you have to stand in places that few others are. Humans have created symbols since the beginning of our history. We look to them for meaning to bring it to our own lives. The black sheep is a powerful symbol; it encapsulates both the problem of our time and the solution. Perhaps more people would trust their gnawing sense that something’s wrong and push back on destructive groups if they realized they aren’t just the odd one out–they’re exactly where they’re meant to be.

#Salomé Sibonex #Salome Sibonex #individualism #tribalism #identity politics #collectivism #religion is a mental illness

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lasseling · 5 months

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Senate Intel Chair Confirms CISA, FBI Have Resumed Coercing Social Media Companies to Censor the Speech of MILLIONS OF AMERICANS

In March, the US Supreme Court heard arguments from The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft , the state of Missouri, the state of Louisiana, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Aaron Kheriaty, and Jill Hines (“Free Speech Plaintiffs”) in arguments against the Biden Administration and an army of government agencies.

#cisa #fbi #social media #Censor the Speech #dominion voting #biden administration

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89845aaa · 1 year

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nonyayo2 · 2 years

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trukker94gurl · 1 year

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Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Biden Admin’s Push for Everyone to Get New COVID Vaccine Is ‘Irresponsible’

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Biden Admin’s Push for Everyone to Get New COVID Vaccine Is ‘Irresponsible’ https://link.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/us/dr-jay-bhattacharya-push-for-everyone-to-get-new-covid-vaccine-by-biden-admin-is-irresponsible-5481044?utm_source=andshare

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airbrickwall · 2 years

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#Martin kulldorf #video #jay bhattacharya

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beardedmrbean · 2 years

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The second part of the Twitter Files revelations dropped on Thursday night, revealing the social media giant did, in fact, engage in the suppression of conservatives and skeptics of lockdowns during the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, but questions remain about the extent of the suppression.

"A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users," journalist Bari Weiss revealed in a Twitter thread on Thursday, referring to the suppression as "shadow-banning."

Several conservative users, including Stanford University's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — a longstanding opponent of a COVID groupthink during the pandemic who expressed opposition to lockdowns — and Fox News’ Dan Bongino were named in the files as having been placed on the site’s secret blacklists.

"Twitter denied that it does such things," Weiss noted. "In 2018, Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said, ‘We do not shadow ban.’ They added, ‘And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.’"

However, questions remain about the extent of the suppression and whether left-wing accounts faced similar restrictions. It is currently unknown just how many accounts have been subject to what Twitter calls "visibility filtering."

ELON MUSK’S SECOND INSTALLMENT OF ‘TWITTER FILIES’ REVEALS ‘SECRET BLACKLISTS,’ BARI WEISS REPORTS

"'Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,' one senior Twitter employee told us," Weiss tweeted.

"'VF' refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the ‘trending’ page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches. All without users’ knowledge."

Twitter did not return Fox News Digital's inquiries about the extent of "visibility filtering," as well as the partisan breakdown of the practice.

Bongino reacted the revelations, tweeting, "We ALWAYS knew we were a target of the Twitter suppression machine. ALWAYS. Yet liberals insisted it was another 'conspiracy theory.' Tonight is vindication, yet I expect no apologies from liberals. They live to abuse power and they’ll make no apologies for doing so."

#nunyas news #the reasons for many #peoples opposition to the purchase #is becoming more and more clear

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covid-safer-hotties · 23 days

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Column: With a conference on the pandemic, Stanford gives purveyors of misinformation and disinformation a platform - Published Aug 29, 2024

We’re living in an upside-down world, aren’t we?

It’s a world in which scientists whose research findings that COVID probably originated as a spillover from wildlife have been validated by dozens of scientific studies, but got them hauled before a Republican-dominated House committee to be brayed at by the likes of Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and accused of academic fraud.

Meanwhile, the purveyors of claims that COVID’s danger was overstated and could be met by exposing the maximum number of people to the deadly virus in quest of “herd immunity” have been offered a platform to air their widely debunked and refuted views at a forum sponsored by Stanford University.

This is awful, a full on anti-science agenda (and revisionist history), tone deaf to how this kind of rhetoric contributed to the deaths of thousands of Americans during the pandemic by convincing them to shun vaccines or minimize Covid. — Vaccine expert and pseudoscience debunker Peter Hotez

The event is a symposium on the topic “Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past,” scheduled to take place on campus Oct. 4.

No one can doubt that a sober examination of the policies of the recent past with an eye toward doing better in the next pandemic is warranted. This symposium is nothing like that.

Most of its participants have been associated with discredited approaches to the COVID pandemic, including minimizing its severity and calling for widespread infection to achieve herd immunity. Some have been sources of rank misinformation or disinformation. Advocates of scientifically validated policies are all but absent.

The event is shaping up as a major embarrassment for an institution that prides itself on its academic standards. It comes with Stanford’s official imprimatur; the opening remarks will be delivered by its freshly appointed president, Jonathan Levin, an economist who took office Aug. 1.

The problem with the symposium starts with its main organizer. He’s Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of health policy. Bhattacharya is one of the original signers of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a manifesto for herd immunity published in October 2020. The university didn’t respond to my question about Bhattacharya’s role. He didn’t respond to my request for comment.

The core of the declaration is what its drafters call “focused protection,” which means allowing “those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk” — chiefly seniors, who would be quarantined.

Focused protection, the promoters wrote, would allow society to achieve herd immunity and return to normalcy in three to six months.

The quest for herd immunity from COVID has several problems. One is that infection with one variant of this ever-evolving virus doesn’t necessarily confer immunity from other variants. Another problem is that COVID can be a devastating disease for victims of any age. Allowing anyone of any age to become infected can expose them to serious health problems.

Bhattacharya’s name doesn’t appear in the event announcement, but he has identified himself on X as its “main organizer.” Among the announced speakers is epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, another of the declaration’s original signers.

Several other speakers advocated fewer restrictions on schools and businesses while predicting that COVID would be manageably mild, like the flu — predictions that were consistently and catastrophically wrong.

The date of the symposium, by the way, is the anniversary of the signing of the Great Barrington Declaration. It’s also Rosh Hashana, one of the High Holy Days of the Jewish calendar. Stanford says the “overlap” with the holiday is regrettable, but it hasn’t offered to reschedule.

Stanford responded to my request for comment about the event by simply reproducing language from the event announcement.

“The conference was organized to highlight some of the many important topics that public health officials and policymakers will need to address in preparing for future pandemics,” the university said. “The speakers, including those already listed and others who will be added over the next several weeks, represent a wide range of views on this issue. We look forward to a civil, informed, and robust debate.”

That won’t do. Stanford’s argument that it’s merely providing a platform for “robust debate” among speakers with a “wide range of views” is belied by the roster of speakers, in which members of a discredited fringe of pandemic policy advocates are heavily overrepresented.

The event announcement has elicited skepticism and dismay among scientists seriously concerned about pandemic policy.

“Knowing who the speakers and panelists are,” wrote the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski, “I know that ‘assessing the past’ will likely consist of highly revisionist history ... claiming that public health interventions didn’t work.”

The description of some of the daylong symposium’s sessions should give one pause. The precis of a panel titled “Misinformation, Censorship, and Academic Freedom” states as fact that “governments censored information contrary to public health pronouncements in social media settings.” It asks rhetorically, “Does the suspension of free speech rights during a pandemic help keep the population better informed or does it permit the perpetuation of false ideas by governments?”

Yet who among these speakers lost their “free speech rights”? On the contrary, several, including Bhattacharya, rode their discredited claims to regular appearances on Fox News, op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and appointments to blue-ribbon government committees in red states.

A look at the speakers list should tell you where this event is heading. On a panel on “Evidence-Based Decision Making During a Pandemic” is Anders Tegnell, the architect of Sweden’s pandemic policy. Sweden has been held up by critics of school closings and lockdowns and advocates of herd immunity as a success story, the theme being that by keeping schools and restaurants open, the country beat the pandemic.

The truth is just the opposite. As I’ve reported, the Tegnell record is disastrous. Sweden’s laissez-faire approach sacrificed its seniors to the pandemic and used its schoolchildren as guinea pigs. Swedish researchers concluded in retrospect that its policies were “morally, ethically, and scientifically questionable.” The death toll rose so high that the government was eventually forced to tighten up the rules.

Sweden’s death rate from COVID was much worse than that of its Nordic neighbors Denmark, Norway and Finland, which all took a tougher approach. If Sweden’s death rate had only matched Norway’s, it would have suffered only about 4,400 COVID deaths, rather than its toll of 18,500.

Then there’s Scott Atlas, a radiologist and former professor at Stanford medical school, who is currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution, the right-wing think tank housed on the Stanford campus. Atlas was recruited to join the Trump White House as a COVID advisor in July 2020 after having volunteered to Medicare Administrator Seema Verma that the government’s pandemic policies were “a massive overreaction” that was “inciting irrational fear” in Americans.

Atlas estimated that the coronavirus “would cause about 10,000 deaths,” which “would be unnoticed” in a normal flu season. By the end of 2020, as it happens, COVID deaths in the U.S. exceeded 350,000. As of today, the toll is more than 1.2 million.

At the White House, Atlas promoted scientifically dubious prescriptions for the pandemic. He pushed for reduced testing for COVID and dismissed masking as a countermeasure. Most damaging, he called for a herd immunity policy.

Atlas’ prescriptions disturbed his Stanford colleagues, about 110 of whom wrote an open letter in September 2020 alerting the public to “the falsehoods and misrepresentations of science” that Atlas was preaching.

“Encouraging herd immunity through unchecked community transmission is not a safe public health strategy,” they wrote. “In fact, this approach would do the opposite, causing a significant increase in preventable cases, suffering and deaths, especially among vulnerable populations, such as older individuals and essential workers.”

The Stanford administration also formally disavowed Atlas’ statements and prescriptions. “Dr. Atlas has expressed views that are inconsistent with the university’s approach in response to the pandemic,” the university said. “We support using masks, social distancing, and conducting surveillance and diagnostic testing.”

Yet now Atlas appears to be back in the university’s good graces, judging from his presence on the roster. Stanford didn’t respond to my questions about Atlas’ role, and he didn’t reply to my request for comment.

Allowing this symposium to proceed along the lines laid out in the announcement will be a black mark for Stanford in the scientific community.

“What’s happening at Stanford?” asked vaccine expert and disinformation debunker Peter Hotez on X. “This is awful, a full on anti-science agenda (and revisionist history), tone deaf to how this kind of rhetoric contributed to the deaths of thousands of Americans during the pandemic by convincing them to shun vaccines or minimize Covid.”

Stanford’s claim to be a neutral host of a scientific symposium falls short as a fair description of its duties as an academic institution.

No university claims to be open to the expression of any or all views, no matter how unorthodox or counterfactual; they make judgments about the propriety of viewpoints all the time; the level of discernment they practice is one way we judge them as serious educational establishments.

By that standard, Stanford deserves an “F.” On the evidence, neither the university nor its medical school, which is a sponsor of the symposium, exercised any judgment at all before greenlighting an embarrassing gala for the pandemic fringe.

#covid #mask up #pandemic #covid 19 #wear a mask #coronavirus #sars cov 2 #public health #still coviding #wear a respirator

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