Science denier! It’s perhaps the left’s most go-to phrase after racist! In the case of Joe Rogan, the left got in a two-fer. But the one is as false and stupid as the other. And just as destructive. The left might call themselves “progressive”, but the grim truth is that they are relentlessly dragging us down a relentlessly slippery slope into darkness.
On the racial front, the left are fostering a degree of racial separatism not seen since the Jim Crow south — indeed, the panjandrums of Critical Race Theory are openly calling for literal segregation in everything from education to housing.
But it is on the scientific front that the left are determinedly undoing the hard work of half a millennium of progress undreamed-of in human history.
The censorious attacks on Joe Rogan are grim evidence of both.
Demands to boycott American podcaster Joe Rogan for interviewing scientists who criticised aspects of Covid-19 vaccines, spearheaded by ageing rockers, reflects a depressing reality: the growing popularity of censorship among elites who once championed free speech.
Accusations of misinformation have proliferated during the pandemic. US President Joe Biden himself has urged social media giants to do more to stamp out so-called Covid misinformation. Yet much of it emanates from experts themselves […]
Public health pooh-bahs have an egregious history of trying to ruin critics who turned out to be right. Nineteenth-century Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered how hand washing could slash disease transmission, died in obscurity in the 1860s, mocked by experts.
Then there’s the vainglorious “I am Science!” Anthony Fauci. When world-class idiot Oprah Winfrey gibbered in 1987 that “one in five heterosexuals could be dead of AIDS in the next three years”, she was merely parrotting the unhinged fear-mongering of the likes of the then-young, ambitious new director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fauci argued that AIDS could be spread by “ordinary close contact” with the infected. The grim outcome was an unforgivable wave of panic and fear.
Forty years later, Fauci is still firmly esconced on his little throne, relentlessly contradicting himself, sowing fear and panic, and directing vicious attacks at anyone who dares dissent from his grand wisdom.
The pandemic has illustrated starkly how wrong public health experts can be. There’s a good reason no one yet has put their name to a book on the success of the world’s pandemic response. School closures, cloth masks and lockdowns were meant to slow the spread in a meaningful way – “three weeks to flatten the curve”, Boris Johnson said almost two years ago. Obviously, they didn’t. Remember Biden’s 100-day masking challenge to beat Covid? Washington DC is almost up to 450 days of compulsory masking amid one of its biggest outbreaks.
Anyone who argued natural immunity might play a role in reaching herd immunity, or vaccines wouldn’t stop transmission, was dismissed as a purveyor of dangerous misinformation.
Robert Redfield, the previous head of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said masks were as effective as vaccines. Successor Rochelle Walensky worried last March about a summer of “impending doom” before the opposite happened.
Claims individuals would be forced to get boosters were dismissed as a conspiracy theory, as was the idea the virus emerged in a lab in Wuhan. The holy grail of Covid experts – zero Covid – has rightly become a joke. Yet proponents of all these discredited arguments, ensconced safely in numbers in coward’s castles, hurled accusations of dangerous misinformation at those who turned out, for whatever reasons, to be right.
If any further proof were needed that the attacks on Rogan are motivated by a censorious drive to power rather than scientific integrity, consider the double-whammy of racist! accusations simultaneously thrown at the podcast host. Plenty of “people of colour” have attested that Rogan is indeed not racist — but that’s besides the point. The process is the punishment.
The crude episodes had sat on the internet for 12 years, seemingly without causing offence to his 11 million-plus audience or anyone else.
The clip wasn’t meant to fight racism but, rather, intended as a warning to anyone in the public sphere: step out of line enough and something in your past will be found to destroy you. That’s not a pleasant society in which to live.
The Australian
Yet, that is where we find ourselves.
Not in an age of free inquiry and social and scientific progress, but rapidly barrelling in the other direction into a New Dark Age.
