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
How many genuine, shocking – and unexposed – scandals actually occurred in the last four years? To partially answer this question, I composed another of my List Columns.
The Most Epic of Scandals Might Be…
The world’s most epic scandal might be the massive number of citizens who’ve died prematurely in the last four years. This scandal could also be expressed as the vast number of people whose deaths were falsely attributed to Covid.
My main areas of focus – “early spread” – informed my thinking when I reached this stunning conclusion: Almost every former living person said to have died “from Covid” probably did not die from Covid.
The scandal is that (unreported) “democide” occurred, meaning that government policies and deadly healthcare “guidance” more plausibly explain the millions of excess deaths that have occurred since late March 2020.
My research into early spread suggests that the real Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of Covid should have already been known by the lockdowns of mid-March 2020.
If, as I believe, many millions of world citizens had already contracted this virus and had not died, the Covid IFR would be the same, or perhaps even lower, than the IFR for the common flu – said to be 1 death per 1,000 infections (0.1 percent).
Expressed differently, almost 100 percent of people who contracted this virus did not die from it – a fact which could and should have been known early in the “pandemic.” The fact this information was concealed from the public qualifies as a massive scandal.
Evidence That Would ‘Prove’ This Scandal
Furthermore, one does not need early spread “conjecture” to reach the conclusion that only a minute number of people who were infected by this virus later died from Covid.
After April 2020, a researcher could pick any large group or organization and simply ascertain how many people in these groups later died “from Covid.”
For example, more than 10,000 employees work for the CDC. About 10 months ago, I sent an email to the CDC and asked their media affairs department how many of the CDC’s own employees have died from Covid in the past three-plus years.
This question – which would be easy to answer – was never answered. This example of non-transparency is, to me, a massive “tell” and should be “scandalous.”
To be more precise, if the CDC could document that, say, 10 of their employees had died from Covid, this would equate to a disease with a mortality risk identical to the flu.
My strong suspicion is that fewer than 10 CDC employees have died from Covid in the last four years, which would mean the CDC knows from its own large sample group that Covid is/was not more deadly than influenza.
I’ve performed the same extrapolations with other groups made up of citizens whose Covid deaths would have made headlines.
For example, hundreds of thousands if not millions of high school, college, and pro athletes must have contracted Covid by today’s date. However, it is a challenge to find one definitive case of a college or pro athlete who died from Covid.
For young athletes – roughly ages 14 to 40 – the Covid IFR is either 0.0000 percent or very close to this microscopic fraction.
One question that should be obvious given the “athlete” example is why would any athlete want or need an experimental new mRNA “vaccine” when there’s a zero-percent chance this disease would ever kill this person?
The scandal is that sports authorities – uncritically accepting “guidance” from public health officials – either mandated or strongly encouraged (via coercion) that every athlete in the world receive Covid shots and then, later, booster shots.
Of course, the fact these shots would be far more likely to produce death or serious adverse events than a bout with Covid should be a massive scandal.
More Scandals
Needless to say, all the major pediatrician groups issued the same guidance for children.
In Pike County, Alabama, I can report that in four years no child/student between the ages of 5 and 18 has died from Covid.
I also recognize that the authorized “fact” is that millions of Americans have now “died from Covid.” However, I believe this figure is a scandalous lie, one supported by PCR test results that would be questioned in a world where investigating certain scandals was not taboo.
Yet another scandal is that officials and the press de-emphasized the fact the vast majority of alleged victims were over the age of 79, had multiple comorbid conditions, were often nursing home residents, and, among the non-elderly, came from the poorest sections of society.
These revelations – which would not advance the desired narrative that everyone should be very afraid – are similar to many great scandals that have been exposed from time to time in history.
Namely, officials in positions of power and trust clearly conspired to cover up or conceal information that would have exposed their own malfeasance, professional incompetence, and/or graft.
This Might Be the No. 1 Scandal of Our Times
As I’ve written ad nauseam, perhaps the most stunning scandal of our times is that all-important “truth-seeking” organizations have become completely captured.
At the top of this list are members of the so-called Fourth Estate or “watchdog” press (at least in the corporate or “mainstream” media).
In previous articles, I’ve estimated that at least 40,000 Americans work as full-time journalists or editors for mainstream “news organizations.” Hundreds of MSM news-gathering organizations “serve” their readers and viewers.
In this very large group, I can’t think of one journalist, editor, publisher, or news organization who endeavored to expose any of the dubious claims of the public health establishment.
When 100 percent of professionals charged with exposing scandals are themselves working to conceal shocking revelations…this too should qualify as a massive scandal.
To the above “captured classes” one could add college professors and administrators, 99 percent of plaintiffs’ trial lawyers, 100 percent of CEOs of major corporations, almost all elected politicians, and, with the exception of perhaps Sweden, every one of the public health agencies in the world, plus all major medical groups and prestigious science journals.
Or This Might Be Our Greatest Scandal
Yet another scandal – perhaps the most sinister of them all – would be the coordinated conspiracy to silence, muffle, intimidate, bully, cancel, demonetize, and stigmatize the classes of brave and intelligent dissidents who have attempted to reveal a litany of shocking truths.
The Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC) is not a figment of a conspiracy theorist’s imagination.
The CIC is as real as Media Matters, News Guard, The Trusted News Initiative, the Stanford Virality Project, and the 15,000-plus “content moderators” who probably still work for Facebook.
Government officials in myriad agencies of “President” Joe Biden’s administration constantly pressured social media companies to censor content that didn’t fit the authorized narrative (although these bullying projects didn’t require much arm-twisting).
Here, the scandal is that the country’s “adults in the room” were identified as grave threats to the agenda of the Powers that Be and were targeted for extreme censorship and punishment.
When people and organizations principled enough to try to expose scandals are targeted by the State and the State’s crony partners, this guarantees future scandals are unlikely to be exposed…which means the same unexposed leaders are going to continue to inflict even greater harm on the world population.
This Scandal Is Hard to Quantify
Other scandals are more difficult to quantify. For example, it’s impossible to know how many citizens now “self-censor” because they know the topics they should not discuss outside of conversations with close friends.
This point perhaps illustrates the state of the world’s “New Normal” – a now-accepted term that is scandalous if one simply thinks about the predicates of this modifier.
It should be a scandal that the vast majority of world citizens now eagerly submit to or comply with the dictates and speech parameters imposed on them by the world’s leadership classes.
The “New Normal” connotes that one should accept increasing assaults on previously sacrosanct civil liberties.
What is considered “normal” – and should now be accepted without protest – was, somehow, changed.
As I routinely write, what the world has lived through the past four-plus years is, in fact, a New Abnormal.
This Orwellian change of definition would qualify as a shocking scandal except for the fact most people now self-censor to remain in the perceived safety of their social and workplace herds.
The bottom line – a sad one – might be that none of the above scandals would have been possible if more members of the public had been capable of critical thinking and exhibited a modicum of civic courage.
As it turns out, the exposure of scandals would require large numbers of citizens to look into the mirror (or their souls) and perform self-analysis, an exercise in introspection that would not be pain-free.
It’s also a scandal our leaders knew they could manipulate the masses so easily.
Considering all of these points, it seems to me that the captured leadership classes must have known that the vast majority of the population would trust the veracity of their claims and policy prescriptions.
That is, they knew there would be no great pushback from “the masses.”
If the above observation isn’t a scandal, it’s depressing to admit or acknowledge this is what happened.
To End on a Hopeful Note
What gives millions of citizens hope is that, belatedly, more citizens might be growing weary of living in a world where every scandal cannot be exposed.
Donald Trump winning a presidential election by margins “too big to steal” is a sign of national hope.
Mr. Trump nominating RFK, Jr. to supervise the CDC, NIH, and FDA is definitely a sign of hope, an appointment that must outrage and terrify the world’s previous leadership classes.
For far too long, America’s greatest scandal has been that no important scandals can be exposed. Today, however, it seems possible this state of affairs might not remain our New Normal forever.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health”
Didn’t give much thought to freedom until four years ago, at age 63. Freedom was just there, like the water surrounding a goldfish. And then the Covid-19 pandemic blew in, the world locked down, and admonitions to “stay the ‘$^#&’ home” blazed through social media. No freedom was too important to discard in the name of public safety: jobs, family businesses, artistic endeavours, public meetings, social connections that kept despair at bay, all took a backseat to the grim business of saving grandma (who ended up getting Covid anyway). No discussion of moral or practical trade-offs, no pushback from the press, nothing. It felt wrong to me on a cellular level.
Apparently I was the only one in my middle-class liberal circle to harbour misgivings about this astonishing new world. If I tried, ever so timidly, to articulate my concerns on Facebook or Twitter, the online warriors shot back with a string of epithets. “Go lick a pole and catch the virus,” said one. “Crawl back into your cave, troglodyte,” said another. And my all-time favourite: “You’re nothing but a mouth-breathing Trumptard.”
From the get-go, I perceived Covid as more of a philosophical problem than a scientific one. As I wrote on more than one occasion, science can inform our decisions, but not dictate them. What ultimately powers our choices are the values we hold. I saw Covid as a morality play, with freedom and safety cast as the duelling protagonists, and it looked like safety was skipping to an easy victory.
It was a heady time for the health bureaucrats, whose increasingly arcane rules betrayed a naked impulse to control: the Canadian high-school students required to use masks on both their faces and their wind instruments during band practice, the schoolchildren forced (for hygiene reasons) to study on their knees for hours in an Alaska classroom, the “glory-hole” sex advised by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. The lack of public pushback against these absurdities heightened my awareness of the fragility of our freedoms.
One of the earliest memes to surface during the pandemic was “muh freedumb.” The locution became a shorthand for a stock character – a tattooed man wearing camo gear and a baseball cap, spewing viral particles while yelling about his rights. A selfish idiot. The memes kept coming: “Warning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.” “Personal freedom is the preoccupation of adult children.” Freedom, for centuries an aspiration of democratic societies, turned into a laughing stock.
Eventually, pro-freedom voices began trickling into the public arena. I wasn’t alone, after all. There were others who understood, in the words of Telegraph writer Janet Daley, that the institutional response to Covid-19 had steamrolled over “the dimension of human experience which gives meaning and value to private life.” Lionel Shriver decried how “across the Western world, freedoms that citizens took for granted seven months ago have been revoked at a stroke.” And Laura Dodsworth brought tears to my eyes when she wrote, in her 2021 book A State of Fear, that she feared authoritarianism more than death.
Once the vaccines rolled out, the war on freedom of conscience went nuclear. If you breathed a word against the products, or even the mandates, you were “literally killing people.” The hostility towards the “unvaxxed” culminated in a Toronto Star front page showcasing public vitriol, splashed with such sentiments as: “I honestly don’t care if they die from Covid. Not even a little bit.”
This, too, felt viscerally wrong. I knew several people who had refused the vaccine, and they all had well-articulated reasons for their stance. If they didn’t fully trust the “safe and effective” bromide recycled by all government and pharmaceutical industry spokespeople, I could hardly blame them. (And I say this as someone who writes for Big Pharma and got five Covid shots.)
One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture was freedom of expression, a core principle in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing news outlets. By early 2021, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 83 governments worldwide had used the Covid-19 pandemic to violate the lawful exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health,” the group wrote in a media release. “The victims include journalists, activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.”
But what about misinformation? Doesn’t it kill people? Newsflash: misinformation has always existed, even before TikTok. It’s up to each of us to sift the credible folks from the cranks. The best defence against misinformation is better information, and it’s the policy wonks’ job to provide it. Modern science itself depends on this tug-of-war of ideas, which filters out weaker hypotheses and moves stronger ones ahead for further testing.
Besides, misinformation comes not just from cranks, but from “official sources” – especially those tasked with persuading the public, rather than informing it. Remember when Rochelle Walensky, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, asserted that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus?” Or when Anthony Fauci maintained that getting vaccinated makes you a “dead end” in the chain of transmission? I rest my case.
The marketplace of ideas is like a souk, with a lot of hollering and arguing and the odd snatched purse – and that’s exactly how it should be. It’s an ingenious and irreplaceable process for getting to the truth. There are few ideas too sacrosanct to question or too ridiculous to consider. That’s why, unlike just about everyone in my left-leaning circle, I take no issue with Elon Musk’s shakedown of the old Twitter, now the Wild West of X.
Under Musk’s algorithms, my feed has become a true philosophical souk, with wildly disparate views smashing into each other, leaving me to sift through the rubble in search of a gold nugget or two. Love him or hate him, Musk offers a much-needed counterweight to the ideological lockstep in much of the mainstream media. And when it comes to free speech, Musk has put his money where his mouth is: when media personality Keith Olbermann recently hopped on X, where he boasts a million followers, to call for Musk’s arrest and detainment, Musk made no move to censor him. Works for me.
While the “old normal” has thankfully returned to our daily lives, save the odd mask in a shopping mall or subway car, the stench of censorship that blew in with the pandemic has yet to dissipate. An obsession with disinformation permeates the zeitgeist, spurring lawmakers in several Western countries to censor the flow of thoughts and ideas that gives a free society its pulse.
We cannot excise personal freedom from a democratic society, even in the interests of the “public good,” without poisoning the roots of democracy itself. Article 3 of UNESCO’s 2005 Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights states this plainly: “The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.” In our post-pandemic reality, the statement seems almost quaint. Nonetheless, it expresses an enduring truth: that a democracy must never discard the idea of freedom – even in a pandemic.
Freedom desperately needs a comeback from its current incarnation as an expendable frill. In my own small way I’m trying to make this happen: never much of an activist before Covid, I’m now part of a small group preparing to launch a Free Speech Union in Canada, modelled after the highly successful one in the UK. The organisation will offer legal advice to individuals facing censorship, cancellation, or job loss because of their words. I look forward to supporting people caught in this anti-freedom web, including those whose words I heartily disagree with.
My newfound respect for free speech is also what propels me to keep talking about Covid. The response to the pandemic exceeded the bounds of public health, and we need to expose the forces that drove it. Here’s Daley again: “The world went crazy. There is no other way to account for what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.” We can’t let it happen again.
Republished from Perspective Media
Author
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