Thoughts on Covid Enemy #1 Alex Berenson
Substack superstar and universally-loathed Covid contrarian is back on Twitter
Alex Berenson on The Joe Rogan Experience
On July 5, COVID vaccine critic Alex Berenson was reinstated on Twitter after being “permanently” suspended over allegedly violating the blue bird’s COVID-19 “misinformation” policy.
On Substack, Berenson writes: “The parties have come to a mutually acceptable resolution. I have been reinstated. Twitter has acknowledged that my tweets should have not led to my suspension at that time.”
What’s perhaps most concerning about Berenson’s story is the government’s potential role in censoring him.
Last year, Congress repeatedly confronted CEOs of social media platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter in order to combat “misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.” In the summer of 2021, the federal government more aggressively pressured social media platforms to crack down on perceived dangerous COVID misinformation. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared it was an “urgent threat.” In July, President Joe Biden rashly rebuked social media companies, claiming, “They’re killing people.” He continued, “The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.”
Perhaps Twitter should have censored Biden for uttering such a demonstrably false claim.
Recent data (reported by Alex Berenson) from Manitoba, Canada, show higher death rates among the vaccinated. And this is after controlling for age since vaccinated individuals tend to be older.
As Berenson previously said on Tucker Carlson, the Biden administration’s vocalized pressure on Twitter to clamp down on seemingly false COVID claims last summer was “contemporaneous with” his permanent suspension.
What’s deeply sad about the Berenson saga is he’s a marginalized outcast in mainstream circles. Both sides of the political spectrum view him to be an anti-vax quack who distorts and hyperbolizes COVID data to push some kind of conspiratorial propaganda. The Atlantic published a hit-piece on him last year entitled “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man.”
I’ve been in both liberal and conservative circles where he has been openly mocked as some kind of mentally deranged activist. Demonization and condemnation of Berenson’s fearless reporting from the start of COVID has become completely accepted.
Other than regular appearances on Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson—which is an incredible privilege—Berenson is deemed too controversial for other platforms. Even podcasters and commentators in the alternate, contrarian (“IDW”) space don’t go anywhere near him. It’s shameful.
The pandemic has produced a mass hypnosis effect. Many prominent figures who shared real cynicism toward our increasingly politicized institutions abandoned reason and skepticism because the vaccines symbolized “objective science” (unlike leftist postmodernism). Except they didn’t—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and public health authorities appeared to repeatedly distort the data and misled the public in order to maximize profits and meet quotas.
Dr. Marty Makary and Dr. Tracy Hoeg’s new essay in Common Sense with quotes from top CDC scientists captures the disturbing rot of the establishment with the greatest responsibility to medically inform the public.
The bizarre new Big-Pharma-capture of once-critical journalistic outlets has led to publications refusing to report on the new Alex Berenson news. Other than Fox News, The Daily Mail, and The Epoch Times, virtually no major publications have covered Berenson’s landmark settlement.
What’s more, a good friend of mine who’s a reporter at a top U.S. publication pitched a story about Berenson to his editors and they outright rejected it without any reason. Mainstream media appears to not want to cover a story that would seemingly vindicate an “anti-vax conspiracy theorist.”
Such are the censorious times we live in.
Thank goodness for indomitable truth-seekers like Alex Berenson.
I am probably more conservative than to the left. I bring the perspective of a less politicized everyday person (well, everyday person in the 90%-99.2% bubble socioeconomically). My social circle is highly educated professionals (accounts, lawyers, business owners, investment advisors with actual clients, physicians, etc). They run the political spectrum, but are mostly everyday people not hyper political people.
My friends on left, even though generally more obsessed with social media, have no clue who Alex is. On the right my friends generally appreciate his willingness to point to actual data in his assertions. The complaints I get from the right about him, which I tend to agree with, is that when the facts back him, he’s fairly good at pointing to replicated data (think predictable failure of masks and evident failure of the vaccines). Where they take issue with him is when replication doesn’t back his bias, he’s as blind and misguided as the rest of the msm - ivermectin, Ukraine. It leads to questions about his stances on pot.
Qualitatively I’m a data nut. I think Alex’s statistical analysis of studies is sometimes wanting, and he conflates populations from time to time. I tend to look more towards Mathew Crawford and Bad Catitude for stat analysis (and a few others). The little line graphs and bar charts published on Covid dashboards around the world Alex was pretty good with, and most importantly, he actually pointed to widely available and very straight forward data the Covidians seemed incapable of actually looking at with their own eyes. Posting the actual data is huge in opening eyes.
I applaud Alex’s work to expose the dangers of the injection, but the last thing I would call him is an “indomitable truth-seeker.” He *actively* refuses to examine the compelling data regarding the efficacy of ivermectin, even after Pierre Kory graciously schooled him on this matter:
• “Letter to Alex Berenson on World Ivermectin Day” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-alex-berenson-on-world)
Alex has been shilling for Pfizer’s Paxlovid, despite the significant scientific evidence that $500 pill is both unsafe and ineffective versus the $2 ivermectin with hundreds of thousands of success stories behind it.
He still has never apologized for his embarrassing and juvenile side-swiping of Malone on Fox, and his pitiful clambering to be let back into the Cool Kids’ Club prevents him from ever wanting to be associated with “conspiracy theorists,” thus blinding him to blatant machinations of the WEF, the Great Reset underway, and the depopulation agenda (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/a-mostly-peaceful-depopulation).
His colossal ego takes precedence over truth-seeking, and his “controversial” status has benefited him financially. He never dares step out of his carefully inscribed self-censorship circle lest he threaten his chances of being let back in the MSM club.