When our information environment is intentionally corrupted, the entire thing becomes a poisoned well
"Died suddenly or confirmation bias?", an important piece from Cernovich
Good piece from Cernovich here, and one I largely agree with.
The reason I said “largely” is because I don’t feel Cernovich pressed down hard enough on the most important tension here. The piece fails to fully point to the horse which has been dragging an ugly cart behind it the entire time. And we can’t have a constructive discussion on this topic (i.e. figure out how we get out of this mess) if we're not being fully forthcoming on how we got here/if we don’t properly identify the driving-engine.
I was lamenting in December on Twitter and on Benjamin Boyce's podcast that my efforts on the COVID/vaccine front had become much more difficult since the propaganda dam broke in December of 2021, and increasingly so throughout 2022. Not because of the continual/systemwide deceptions from our media, government and health agencies (Truman Show); hell, I’ve been grappling with that since origin. No, what had evolved and made my role much more difficult was the amount of deceptive bullshit that ‘my side' was injecting into the discourse. The disinfo from the anti-jab camp got cycled with steroids as 2022 progressed! The bullshit stats that McCullough lobbed out which Cernovich honed in on in his article above is a textbook example. Personally, I’ve found that to be the consistent M.O. of McCullough all along. You may have picked up that I rarely if ever boosted his posts and articles. This is why. I don’t trust him, and he earned that distrust from me in spades.
It’s a shame too, because much of what McCullough spoke of and warned us about was true. But when you can’t help but pull the same deceptive nonsense to advance your cause, then you’ve merely made yourself a hypocrite in the same cesspool. And guess what? You’ve killed your own credibility and now people won’t take you seriously where they should be. Boy Who Cried Wolf, and the majority of the villagers stopped heeding McCullough's screams long ago.
It’s maddening as hell for me because I’ve put so much effort into not relaying bullshit. I amplified or discussed maybe 70% of what I actually came across. The other 30% wasn’t necessarily false (and often massively important if true!) but I couldn’t constitute it with receipts, I couldn’t make it hold water without my own confirmation biases, and I knew how vital maintaining trust and integrity was in the space I was operating in. I can’t repeat this enough: we have enough legitimate receipts to absolutely bury the people behind this, we don’t need to manufacture or circulate lies and deceptions of our own. Doing so is directly detrimental to our primary objective here, to getting to the truth and getting this nation on a better track. Many on Team Freedom have now become our own worst enemy. But let me return to Cernovich's sentiments…
I agree with them. It’s disgusting that we have cries of vaccine death on fact-patterns of suicide that would take 2mins to confirm. But again, how did we get to this broken state? Because we know this for certain: people have been injured by the COVID shots. Documented, no conspiracy. And yet, we're not allowed to even ask or speculate even when the fact-pattern screams of possible interplay with the vaccine. Below are several examples of exactly what I’m referring to. Cases where the society-level chilling effect was imposed merely to suppress scrutiny and protect the reputation of the shots (at the expense of our own health). This has been par for the course throughout…
One of those is the story of a mother who has been relentlessly attacked for sharing her own son's vaccine injury (myocarditis). In the thread below, I highlight her as well as three pro athletes also with vaccine injuries who you’ve probably never heard of. But how could that be when Stephen A. Smith and his Truman Show-ilk talked about COVID shots every damn night across sports media for months on end? He's ripping Kyrie but doesn’t mention Brandon? He trashes Rodgers but doesn't even address Kyle? Night after night they trashed Djokovic for refusing the jab, without ever telling their audience what the vaccine had done to his friend Chardy? WTF! 🚨
That is not ok! When we are attacked for asking whether Bieber's paralyzed face could be from the shots, whether Saget died out of the blue from them, whether the TV personalities passing out on camera could be related, inquiring why so many young healthy people seem to be having heart failure, why schools are doing heart screenings of athletes now, why hospital’s are running commercials about childhood myocarditis, why the CDC is pushing out info re blood clots in children, etc, it obviously is going to create an information vacuum that is ripe for deception and exaggeration to burst out the other way. It's the definitional cart dragging the horse.
The items in those two threads above illustrate reality. A reality that many Americans are now aware of. Yet, across much of our media, you wouldn’t even know vaccine injuries were occuring. They want you to think it doesn’t even exist. Take the Damar Hamlin case, for example…
Within minutes of Hamlin collapsing on that field, we have Medical Twitter not only conclusively diagnosing it as commotio cordis (which is patently insane and anti-medicine as that is achieved by way of a negative diagnosis once everything else is ruled out), but taking it a step further and attacking anyone who had the audacity to even ask whether the COVID shots could have played a role. Of course, they could have! In fact, basic logic tells you the odds of interplay with the shots are likely higher than that hit alone stopping Damar's heart. But the conclusion with astronomical odds is immediately mandated on all of us, while we are assaulted and called “ghouls” for merely pointing to the neon writing screaming off the wall. And even those behind that disgusting propaganda designed to suppress discourse and hide known vaccine injuries from the public are aware how faulty and wrong it is. How do we know that? Because the tone of pieces on Hamlin have changed profoundly in just one week flat…
Yes it is possible the shots played a role. Duh! So why are we prohibited from having that discussion, on a topic of great public importance? If they had merely acknowledged that the shots may have been a factor (or even just said we don’t know at this time) then it dampens the market for that speculation. But when you come out like political robots and chant in unison while demanding we all strap blinders across our faces too and join in your rabid quest or be labeled abhorrent, the opposite effect happens: Streisand.
Same thing happened with Bieber's story. Revisit how that was handled by our media:
What Cernovich is touching on is an absolute crisis, for all of us in every camp. How can we ever know if the shots did or did not play a role when our government won’t even acknowledge injuries, is still pushing shots on everyone without categorization, and all of legacy media and much of our critical science and medical institutions are openly carrying water? We can’t. Hell, the CDC has acknowledged they aren’t even tracking VAERS anymore. Team Biden waived the injury reporting requirement from OSHA when he used that law to try and force more injections on millions of Americans whether they needed them or not. So if the shots ARE causing injury, where do we get our warning sign? We don’t, they’ve been removed, especially under the amorphous and inflated spectre of “Long COVID”.
It’s a horrific situation, as Cernovich correctly identified. And yes, unscrupulous people in the anti-jab camp have made everything even muddier and more impossible for the rational to find the truth. But the only way we get out of it is to reverse the path that got us in. And that is not within the control of people like McCullough. Even if they all stopped today or were silenced (as many have been) the same problem remains… it's just simply a one-way street then. 💡
Attacking bad information while our avenues of good information are so broken and corrupt is a futile endeavor with no long-term function. It's the equivalent of going after individual ideologue educators while making no attempt to turn off the spigot producing wave after wave of them in the teacher training/education apparatus. It's an easy target, it may make you feel good about yourself, but it’s running away from the overriding issue at hand.
There's a reason Cernovich didn't push back harder on the vax issue. His hands are dirty. He pushed the shots hard on his Twitter followers back in 2021 and 2022, reasoning that "we need the voters on our side" to not die from COVID so they could vote in the midterms. He also stated that his followers were likely overestimating their physical health and underestimating their risk from COVID. That's sick and sociopathic, and it's paternalistic for him to assert that he could better assess risk for his followers than they could for themselves. Cernovich is a joke and a grifter who continually ret-cons his past positions to sand down his own cognitive dissonance. He should apologize for his advocacy for the vaccines. This article reads like he is trying to cover his ass. If you're still following him, you're being conned.