Brownstone Institute
Fact-Checker, Check Thyself
From Brownstone Institute
In two articles on this site on November 13 and March 18, Andrew Lowenthal explained the intimate connections in the Virality Project between the US government, Stanford University, and Big Tech, to enforce Covid orthodoxy via the Censorship Industrial Complex. A similar collusion has operated in Australia but not, as far as we know, as an initiative of the security state.
This is the ABC RMIT Fact Check Unit. It is hosted jointly by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) that is mostly a publicly funded institution and the public broadcaster the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that is entirely funded by the state. It describes itself rather grandiosely as a partnership that combines “academic excellence and the best of Australian journalism to inform the public through an independent non-partisan voice.” This boast has helped to provide plausible cover for enforcing the orthodoxy of the medical establishment that suffers from the delusion that it is the single source of medical scientific truth.
The self-important pretentiousness was punctured this week. During a radio interview with 2GB host Ben Fordham on March 18, businessman Dick Smith said, “No country has ever been able to run entirely on renewables – that’s impossible.” He said this in the context of advocating for nuclear power to be added to Australia’s energy mix.
The Fact Check
ABC RMIT Fact Check promptly investigated this and adjudged that “experts consulted by RMIT ABC Fact Check suggested Mr Smith’s statement doesn’t hold up.”
In a follow-up interview on 2GB on March 25, Smith was angry. “The whole document is full of misinformation and lies, it’s designed to discredit me. Absolutely disgusting,” he told Fordham. He demanded immediate corrections from the taxpayer-funded broadcaster’s fact-check unit and threatened defamation action otherwise as the verdict was damaging his credibility.
US columnist Michael Shellenberger, who played a central role in breaking the Twitter Files story, said:
The Australian government is demanding that X, Facebook, and other social media companies censor content that its fact-checkers say is inaccurate. But now, one of the government’s main fact-checker groups has been caught spreading misinformation about renewables and nuclear.
X owner billionaire Elon Musk joined in, posting that “Having government ‘fact-checkers’ is a giant leap in the direction of tyranny!”
Bizarrely, to support its negative verdict on Smith, the fact check quoted Stanford University’s Professor Mark Jacobson to the effect that California had “been running on more than 100 per cent WWS [wind-water-solar] for 10 out of the last 11 days for between 0.25 and 6 hours per day.” Similarly, the fact check cited a forecast from the Australian Energy Market Operator that renewables will be able to meet the entire demand of the national electricity market by 2025, “albeit for short periods of time (for example, 30 minutes).”
This demonstrates gross reading comprehension problems. Or is it elementary maths? If California has been relying on renewables for between 0.25 and 6 hours per day, quite clearly that confirms Smith’s claim, for renewables could not manage power needs for between 18 to 23.75 hours per day. In addition, Smith claimed subsequently, California can draw on its own and two other states’ nuclear power as base-load backup power to renewables. Nor does a 30-minute capacity indicate the ability to meet Australia’s electricity demand 24/7 for 365 days a year.
The Proliferation of Fact-Checkers
The fact-check industry came into its own during the Covid years, gained in popularity, and proliferated in numbers of organizations and individuals. However, they typically operated with little transparency and clarity on the credentials of the fact-checkers and their qualifications to adjudicate between world-renowned experts making competing claims. After all, contestation is normal in scientific discourse. Anything that cannot be questioned but relies on authority alone is dogma, not science.
A good example of this syndrome was provided to this site on March 27 by Peter Gøtzsche, co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration and Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen, who has published more than 97 papers in the “big five” medical journals (JAMA [Journal of the American Medical Association], Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine).
Gøtzsche had produced a video of a conversation he had with Professor Christine Stabell Benn, “one of the most outstanding vaccine researchers in the world.” On their own Broken Medical Science site, the video (published last October) is described thus:
In this episode, Peter C Gøtzsche discusses with Professor Christine Stabell Benn the research that has shown that live, attenuated vaccines reduce total mortality by much more than their specific effects would predict; that non-live vaccines increase total mortality; that the order in which the vaccines are given is important for mortality; what the harms are of the Covid-19 vaccines; and why they are overused.
After reading Martin Kulldorff’s story in the City Journal on March 11 of how he was fired by Harvard University, Gøtzsche decided to test YouTube and put up the video on March 24. It was taken down within an hour for violating its medical misinformation policy. They appealed but having “reviewed your content carefully,” YouTube “confirmed that it violates our medical misinformation policy.” Gøtzsche was very impressed that YouTube fact-checkers were able to conduct a careful and thorough review of a 54-minute conversation, involving two internationally eminent medical experts, in less than an hour.
Is it any wonder that fact-checkers were quickly discredited for several reasons. They took official claims by governments and the WHO as authoritative and true. This produced some hilarious flip-flops as the narrative on Covid changed with respect, for example, to the likely origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan’s wet market or the research laboratory in the Wuhan Institute of Virology located just a few kilometres away. Also with respect to claims that the vaccines stop infection, transmission, and death.
Second, fact-checkers were shown to have a pronounced left-liberal bias. Third, their modus operandi turned out to be to ask different experts for their reactions to the claims under investigation and then side with the experts who aligned with their own bias. Fourth and most importantly, when challenged in court Facebook’s defence in December 2021 was that fact-check pronouncements were protected “opinions” under the First Amendment.
Thorsteinn Siglaugsson was wickedly accurate in sketching the typology of fact-checking techniques. Create a straw-man argument that can be easily knocked down. Assert that a claim is not supported by evidence, is questioned by other experts, lacks context, is misleading, or is only partly true, etc. Engage in ad hominem attacks against the person rather than with their evidence and argument.
ABC RMIT Fact Check, Check Your Own Facts
Smith makes the point that the fact-checker never contacted him. He could have told them he was talking about the total energy requirements, not just electricity requirements. Professor Jacobson told Fact Check that four countries draw 100 percent of their electricity power requirements solely from renewables: Albania, Bhutan, Paraguay, and Nepal.
The first thing to note is that even the electricity consumption per capita of the four countries is substantially lower than that of Australia as an advanced industrial economy (Figure 1).
Second, none of the four countries is an island continent without the option of connecting to a geographically wider energy grid to make up for shortfalls in national energy needs. In 2021, 24.1 percent of Albania’s, 27.6 percent of Nepal’s, and 10.1 percent of Paraguay’s energy needs were met from imports.
Third, according to Our World in Data, the share of electricity production from renewables for Paraguay was 99.88 percent in 2021, and for the remaining three was 100 percent. But power for the electricity grid made up only 22, 41, 13, and 38 percent of the total energy consumption of Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, and Paraguay, respectively.
Figure 2 shows the energy mix of three countries using data from the International Energy Agency (Bhutan’s is not available from that source).
Nepal
I’d like to look in more detail at Nepal, for a simple reason. I was born and grew up in the state of Bihar just 20-30km from the border with Nepal which is an open border for citizens of the two countries. Consequently I am intimately familiar with life and communities on both sides of the border. Like people in northern Bihar, many Nepalese lack access to electricity and rely heavily on wood, agricultural waste, and dung with high CO2 emissions for their daily cooking and heating needs.
Similarly, on both sides of the border fossil fuels power the majority of transportation and diesel generators are commonly used as a power source to offset unreliable grid electricity supply. Speaking of which, a common complaint from local Indians is that Nepal imports a lot of the electricity produced in India even though India’s own power requirements are not fully met.
In other words, the ABC RMIT Fact Check conclusions were misleading, lacked context, and made false claims about what Dick Smith had said in his interview. Good to see that despite repeated insistence that it was standing by its work, late on March 26 the Fact Check unit apologized to Smith and amended its report.
But this does rather beg the question. Having stood by their verdict for over a week, ABC buckled upon receiving a letter from Smith’s lawyers. He is both a public figure with access to media and politicians and very wealthy. The founder of the successful Australia-New Zealand retail chain Dick Smith Electronics, his state honour includes the highest level of civilian recognition, the Companion of the Order of Australia (AC), awarded in 2015. Ninety-nine percent of Australians lack his reach and ability to issue credible legal threats and risk penury. Consequently his win is unlikely, on its own, to end the ABC’s attitude problem rooted in arrogance, hubris, and complacency.
An earlier version of this was published in The Epoch Times Australia on March 27.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU.
I’m envious. The US has something the UK doesn’t have, namely a First Amendment. Yes I know there are those who wish the US didn’t have it either, including, I understand, John Kerry and that woman who still thinks she beat Trump the first time around. Kerry kind of wishes that the First Amendment wasn’t quite so obstructive to his plans. But from where I stand, you should be thankful for it.
Not only does the UK not have a First Amendment, it doesn’t have a constitution either, and that makes for worrying times right now. Free speech has little currency with Gen Z and the way it looks, even less with the new UK Labour government. Even Elon Musk, who takes a surprising interest in our little country, has recently declared the UK a police state.
It’s not surprising. Take for instance the case of Alison Pearson, who had the police knocking on her door this Remembrance Sunday. They had come to warn her they were investigating a tweet she had posted a whole year ago which someone had complained about. They were investigating whether it constituted a Non-Crime Hate Incident or NCHI. Yes, you heard me right, a ‘non-crime’ hate incident and no, this is not something out of Orwell, it’s straight out of the College of Policing’s playbook.
If you haven’t heard of them, you can thank your First Amendment. In the UK you can get a police record for something you posted on X that someone else didn’t like and you haven’t even committed a crime. NCHIs are a way they have of getting around the law in the same way John Kerry would like to get around the First Amendment, except it’s real where I live.
Alison Pearson is a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, but that doesn’t mean she can write what she likes. When she asked the police what the tweet was which was objected to, she was told they couldn’t tell her that. When she asked who the complainant was, they said they couldn’t tell her that either. They added, that she shouldn’t call them a complainant, they were officially the victim. That’s what due process is like when you don’t have a First Amendment or a constitution. Victims of NCHI in the UK are decided without a trial or a defense. They asked, very politely, if Pearson would like to come voluntarily to the police station for a friendly interview. If she didn’t want to come voluntarily, they would put her on a wanted list and she would eventually be arrested. Nice choice.
It’s true that there has been a public ruckus over this particular case, but the police are unapologetic and have doubled down. Stung into action by unwanted publicity, they are now saying they have raised the matter from an NCHI to an actual crime investigation. Which means they think she can be arrested and put in prison for expressing her opinion on X. And of course they are right. In the UK that’s where we are right now. Pearson tried to point out the irony of two police officers turning up on her door to complain about her free speech on Remembrance Day of all days, when we recall the thousands who died to keep this a free country, but irony is lost on those who have no memory of what totalitarianism means.
The way things are looking I would say things can only get worse. The new Labour government has made it clear that it wants to beef up the reporting of NCHIs and make them an effective tool for clamping down on hurtful speech. You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU. Germany in particular is keen to remove all misinformation from the internet, I understand.
Whenever I see the word ‘misinformation’ these days I automatically translate it in my head to what it really means, which is ‘dissent.’ Western countries, former champions of free speech, the bedrock of liberty and individual choice, en masse it seems, now want to outlaw dissent. What is coordinating this attack on free expression, I don’t know, but it’s real and it’s upon us. We are slowly being intellectually suffocated into not expressing any opinion that others might find objectionable or that might contradict what the government said. If you had told me that would happen in my lifetime, I would have called you a liar.
I live in the UK, the home of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, and the mother of parliamentary democracy. I was proud that we produced men like John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Paine, that we understood the importance of the Areopagitica, the Rights of Man, and incorporated On Liberty into our social thinking. But those days seem long gone when police knock on your door to arrest you for an X post.
So I’m glad someone somewhere has a First Amendment even if we don’t. It may be your last defense in that republic of yours, if you can keep it.
Author
The Most Devastating Report So Far
COP 29 leaders demand over a $1 trillion a year in climate reparations from ‘wealthy’ nations. They don’t deserve a nickel.
Another Mass Grave?
Can’t afford Rent? Groceries for your kids? Trudeau says suck it up and pay the tax!
-
Brownstone Institute21 hours ago
The Most Devastating Report So Far
-
Economy1 day ago
COP 29 leaders demand over a $1 trillion a year in climate reparations from ‘wealthy’ nations. They don’t deserve a nickel.
-
Censorship Industrial Complex1 day ago
Another Mass Grave?
-
ESG8 hours ago
Can’t afford Rent? Groceries for your kids? Trudeau says suck it up and pay the tax!
-
Alberta1 day agoMAiD In Alberta: Province surveying Albertans about assisted suicide policies
-
Energy1 day agoOttawa’s proposed emission cap lacks any solid scientific or economic rationale
-
Alberta1 day agoOn gender, Alberta is following the science
-
International9 hours agoElon Musk praises families on X: ‘We should teach fear of childlessness,’ not pregnancy