Category: Science

It Started With Darwinism

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About 25 years ago, I read Phillip E. Johnson’s Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law & Education. A law professor at Berkeley, Johnson was also the author of Darwin on Trial, and once remarked, “Something about the Darwinists’ rhetorical style made me think they had something to hide.” This is something any intelligent person must eventually notice. The advocates of coincidence as the explanation of everything become rather skittish when confronted by the most obvious arguments against their theory, and tend to resort to name-calling and censorship to discredit or silence their critics.

The debates prompted by the work of Johnson, William A. Dembski, Michael Behe and other proponents of “Intelligent Design” theory have largely ended for the simple reason that the Darwinists stopped debating, and effectively prohibited dissenters from being employed in academia. The arguments against Darwinism made by Johnson and others were not refuted, but rather were suppressed. And I bring this up because the tactics used to defend Darwinism have now become commonplace.

Those who disagree with the preferred liberal narrative about anything are now accused of promoting “misinformation,” and debate about public policy is increasingly one-sided because the media (including social-media platforms like Twitter and Facebook) seek to silence anyone who opposes or criticizes the preferred liberal narrative.

Over the years, we have seen this method used to suppress dissent over “climate change,” transgenderism, COVID-19 and now, elections:

Like most other popular social media sites, the Powers That Be at Twitter possess grossly inflated opinions of themselves, especially as it relates to what they feel is their supposed “duty” to keep their platform as free from so-called “disinformation” as they possibly can, most notably in election years.
“Twitter plays a critical role in empowering democratic conversations, facilitating meaningful political debate, and providing information on civic participation – not only in the US, but around the world. People deserve to trust the election conversations and content they encounter on Twitter,” the company proclaimed Thursday.
In reality, what they’re doing behind the scenes when they think no one is paying attention is acting as information gatekeepers for Democrats by way of penalizing conservative accounts for WrongThink and for daring to publish or promote unflattering stories and/or asking uncomfortable questions about candidates for higher office along with other high-profile public figures who have the potential to influence public policy.
One of the more notorious examples of this tactic in action was in their deliberate suppression of the New York Post’s blockbuster Hunter Biden laptop emails story in October 2020, just a few weeks out from the presidential election. Not only did they lock down the Post’s main Twitter account for about two weeks, but they also suppressed the story when other Twitter users attempted to share it, something Facebook admitted to doing as well.
Here we are nearly two years later, and Twitter has officially announced yet again in so many words that they are answering Joe Biden’s “special appeal” from January and are, in a nutshell, getting ready to start trying to stack the deck against Republicans ahead of the 2022 midterm elections:

Don’t dare say “Orwell” — that’s WrongThink! Anyone who suspects the “Civic Integrity Policy” to be a pretext for acting as Democratic Party enforcers is obviously in violation of the policy, and Twitter’s secret police have given themselves carte blanche to “take action.”

Let us not pretend that Twitter’s action is non-partisan, nor that the suppression of Intelligent Design was a politically neutral action. We ought to acknowledge that our opponents know what they’re doing, and credit them with using every weapon in their arsenal to achieve political hegemony. These things do not happen by coincidence, you see — their actions have meaning and purpose, and are part of an overall plan. Yet we will be told that election results are just part of a natural progression, an impersonal trend beyond the control of any individual.

Perhaps the analogy here is obvious enough that it is redundant for me to point it out, but I will anyway. Darwinists expect us to believe in trends in the universe, where everything is just a series of random coincidences, leading to the conclusion that human life is without meaning or purpose. Your beliefs and behaviors have no moral value, and your life is without significance — you are a statistic, part of the nameless “masses,” just another sheep in the herd. If anyone points out that such a belief system has logical consequences (which is the point Johnson makes in Reason in the Balance), your atheistic antagonist will quickly deny that these consequences are intentional, and you’re a “conspiracy theorist” for suspecting otherwise. Do you see what Johnson meant in saying that the rhetorical style of Darwinists led him to the suspect that they were less than honest? If you suspect their godless theory is merely an instrument for destroying the moral order of society, you are certainly not alone.




 

Why Don’t We Trust the ‘Experts’?

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One of the great fools of our age, Tom Nichols, published a book a few years ago with the title, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters, about which I’ll quote Wikipedia:

Publishers Weekly said that “The crux of the book’s argument is that… the American public have grown increasingly hostile to expertise” and described The Death of Expertise as a “highly researched and impassioned book that’s well timed”, further noting that “Generally, Nichols displays strong reasoning, but at times he goes off the rails. It takes some time [in some sections] for him to make his point”.
Kirkus Reviews described The Death of Expertise as “A sharp analysis of an increasingly pressing problem”, although Nichols (who “sounds less like an alarmist than like a genial guide through the wilderness of ignorance”) fails to propose a satisfying solution. Andrew Joseph Pegoda disagreed on the last point, writing that The Death of Expertise “does what good books do… and provides some possible solutions”. Pegoda also described The Death of Expertise as “extremely interesting, important, and timely” and said that “Nichols, in short, provides a brief History, informed by psychology and political science, of what he argues is a new phenomenon whereby people in the United States are not just regularly wrong or ignorant but ‘proud of not knowing things’“.

Now, I will be generous enough to stipulate that Nichols has a point, namely that we live in an age when it is common for people to overestimate their own abilities and knowledge. Some people believe that, because they can do a Google search about a topic, this puts them on the same level of expertise as a genuine expert.

Such pseudo-expertise, as we might call it, explains why every journalist with a blue-check Twitter account suddenly became an expert in epidemiology as soon as the COVID-19 pandemic hit, then just as suddenly became an expert in Eastern European affairs the moment Russia invaded Ukraine. If tomorrow the Earth were invaded by aliens from another planet, the same Twitter know-it-alls would instantly begin offering their opinions as experts in the field of extraterrestrial life.

This kind of fake expertise can have serious consequences. The loud clamor of voices demanding a maximum lockdown response to COVID-19 resulted in devastating harms that, in hindsight, were entirely unnecessary. Especially in terms of school closures, the evidence is now clear that (a) children were never a high-risk group for the disease, and (b) keeping schools closed for months produced enormous educational losses. Compare the per-capita COVID-19 death rate in maximum-lockdown states like New York (3,554 deaths per million population) and Michigan (3,619) to Florida, which re-opened in May 2020, with death rate significantly lower (3,457). The states that imposed onerous restrictions and kept them in place for months on end didn’t really save lives, yet the advocates of lockdown policies claimed that The Science™ was on their side,  so that if you questioned their policies, you were accused of being “anti-science.” The Science™ turned out to be a cult, and Doctor Fauci was the High Priest of that cult. The fact that Fauci had impressive credentials as a genuine expert makes the failure of The Science™ all the more devastating, and yet so powerful is the cult mentality that his followers won’t even admit they were misled.

Believe it or not, there are still people walking around wearing cloth masks, believing that this protects them against infection despite all evidence to the contrary. My daughter flew back from college this week, and when I went to pick her up, I was astonished by the number of people wearing masks in the airport. While the airlines may require masks while you’re on the plane, there is no such requirement in the airport, and if you didn’t catch COVID-19 while you were encased in a pressurized cabin with 200 other passengers, why would you imagine you were at risk just walking through the airport? But cloth masks simply don’t work, in terms of protecting against the virus, no matter what the cult of The Science™ would like you to believe. Alas, I have digressed . . .

The case of Anthony Fauci and COVID-19 illustrates my point that what Nichols calls The Death of Expertise is mostly a case of suicide — that is to say, the “experts” have discredited themselves, on issue after issue, in controversy after controversy, so that if people no long trust the “experts,” it is the experts, not the people, who are to blame.

Notice that, in the subtitle of his book, Nichols asserts that someone — who? — is waging a Campaign Against Established Knowledge:

A  kind of intellectual Gresham’s Law is gathering momentum: where once the rule was “bad money drives out good,” we now live in an age where misinformation pushes aside knowledge. This is a very bad thing. A modern society cannot function without a social division of labor and a reliance on experts, professionals, and intellectuals. (For the moment, I will use these three words interchangeably.) No one is an expert on everything. No matter what our aspirations, we are bound by the reality of time and the undeniable limits of our talent. We prosper because we specialize, and because we develop both formal and informal mechanisms and practices that allow us to trust each other in those specializations.

The essential problem with this argument is that it is un-American.

America was established by pilgrims, pioneers and frontiersman who, having left behind the civilization of Europe, created a new civilization by their own labors. The pioneer in his remote cabin in the wilderness had no “experts” to tell him how to do whatever it was he needed to do to survive. Thus, he had to be self-reliant, operating on a trial-and-error basis or else trusting in traditional methods — knowledge passed down from preceding generations — just to be able to support himself and his family amid challenging circumstances. It is from this pioneer heritage that the American spirit of “rugged individualism” emerged, and this is the spirit which Nichols denounces as “a very bad thing,” a threat to “modern society.” Americans like to do things for themselves, rather than waiting for some “expert” to tell them how to do it, and you sure as hell don’t expect Americans to seek permission from “experts” to form their own opinions of matters. This is the real heart of what Nichols is up to, in bemoaning public hostility to “experts.” It’s not so much about knowledge as it is about opinions. Tom Nichols was of the opinion that Hillary Clinton should be elected president, and he became angry because enough of us disagreed that Donald Trump got elected instead.

That’s the real bottom line for the whole #NeverTrump crowd — from the moment Trump rode down the escalator in June 2015, these “mainstream” Republicans decided he should not be president, and set about trying to prevent him from getting the GOP nomination. The first problem was, the #NeverTrump crowd was unable to coalesce around an alternative early enough to turn the primaries into a two-man race. The second problem was, Trump attracted to his campaign a legion of supporters who had never voted in a Republican primary. So while the anti-Trump votes in the primaries were divided up between a bunch of other rivals — Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Chris Christie, et al. — Trump kept stacking up delegates. But having invested their egos in the #NeverTrump jihad, his critics in the pundit class (the whole Bulwark crew, the Lincoln Project crowd, Max Boot, etc.) could not accept defeat, and instead doubled-down, becoming de facto Democratic Party operatives, whether they were willing to admit it or not. And what they were most angry about was that stupid voters got to decide the election, thus violating the “social division of labor” whereby pundits like Tom Nichols get to decide who is elected president.

You see what I mean in calling this “un-American”? The pundits who claim they’re trying to save “Our Democracy” don’t really believe in democracy at all. But again I digress . . .

What got me thinking about the crisis of the expert class wasn’t presidential politics or the COVID-19 pandemic. No, it was football.

In case you never read my blog before, I’m a born-and-bred University of Alabama fan and, when the New England Patriots drafted our quarterback Mac Jones in the first round of the 2021 NFL draft, I instantly became a Patriots fan. In doing so, I found a new class of experts to hate — the commentators, columnists and TV analysts who get paid to talk about the NFL. Some of these guys are actually OK, like Evan Lazar, who can analyze video with an astonishing level of insight. Some of them, on the other hand, are utterly evil. No, I’m sorry, let me restate that — one of them is utterly evil, namely Nick Wright of Fox Sports, a Kansas City Chiefs fan masquerading as a neutral commentator.

None of the other NFL pundits are pure evil like Nick Wright, but there is a notable bandwagon effect among these alleged football experts. Today I was checking ESPN’s site on my phone and noticed an emerging consensus that the Buffalo Bills are the team to beat in 2022.

This is not an unreasonable expectation. The Bills have an excellent quarterback, Josh Allen, and a tough defense. They have won the AFC East division two years in a row, made it all the way to the AFC championship game two years ago, and this past season lost a divisional playoff to the Kansas City Chiefs in an overtime thriller. It is thus a reasonable guess that Buffalo will be among the top contenders when the NFL season kicks off this fall. But (a) the Bills have never won a Super Bowl and (b) they haven’t been to a Super Bowl since the early 1990s.

If you say I am prejudiced against the Bills, I won’t deny it because, of course, they’re the rivals of my Patriots in the AFC East. But I daresay there may be elements of prejudice in the consensus of pundits who think Buffalo can make it to the next Super Bowl. One of the reasons the pundits like the Bills so much is because Josh Allen is one of those “mobile, athletic” quarterbacks who play the kind of run-and-gun “schoolyard” football that all the TV commentators love. The pundits seem to agree that this style of play is the future of football, and more traditional drop-back passers are dinosaurs on their way to extinction. As much as fans might enjoy the run-and-gun style — and that shootout between Allen and Patrick Mahomes in the divisional playoffs was one of the most exciting spectacles in NFL history — there are downsides to relying on the “mobile, athletic” quarterback. Typically, they don’t last very long in the NFL, where all it takes is one hard tackle to wreck your knee or ankle and there goes your precious “mobility.” Last year Josh Allen was the second-leading rusher for the Bills, with 763 yards on 122 carries, but how much longer can he keep that up? Trust me, as a Patriots fan, it was agonizing to watch New England’s defense try to catch Allen, who ran for 66 yards in the Wild Card playoff game. Sooner or later, though, Allen’s going to get wrecked. He cannot defy the probabilities forever — or at least, that’s my view, as an unapologetic fan of the Patriots and their old-fashioned quarterback Mac Jones.

My opinion, however, is that of a fan, not an expert. And what is the track record of these professional NFL pundits? Well, I decided to check. Last year, in their season preview, CBS Sports had seven of its personalities — Jason La Canfora, Pete Brisco, Will Brinson, Ryan Wilson, John Breech, Jared Dubin and Jonathan Jones — predict (a) the exact order of finish in each of the eight divisions of the NFL, (b) the six teams to get Wild Card playoff berths, (c) the teams that would make it to the Super Bowl, and (d) who would win the championship.

How many of these experts correctly predicted the Super Bowl winner?

Zero. The number is zero.

Still, some of them were close. Two of them (La Canfora and Wilson) correctly predicted that the Los Angeles Rams would win the NFC West division, and four others (Prisco, Brinson, Breech and Jones) had the Rams making it to the playoffs as a Wild Card. So six of the seven experts at least correctly predicted that the Rams would be in the playoffs, and two of those (Dubin and Jones) actually picked the Rams to win the NFC championship. But none of them — zero — figured that Coach Sean McVay and quarterback Matt Stafford would take L.A. all the way to victory in the Super Bowl. Two of the experts (La Canfora and Prisco) had the Tampa Bay Buccaneers returning to the Super Bowl as NFC champions, and La Canfora thought the Bucs would win it all. Wilson and Breech expected the Green Bay Packers to win the NFC title, with Breech predicting that Green Bay would win the Super Bowl. Brinson thought the San Francisco 49ers would be Super Bowl champs. In fact, the Buccaneers lost to the Rams in the divisional playoff, the Packers were beaten by San Francisco in the other NFC divisional playoff, and the Rams beat the Niners in the NFC championship game.

So while none of these experts correctly predicted the Rams as Super Bowl winners, they at least were fairly accurate in predicting the teams (Green Bay, Tampa Bay, San Francisco and L.A.) that in fact proved to be the main contenders for the NFC title. As for the AFC, however . . .

Oh, my goodness gracious!

Five of the CBS Sports experts (La Canfora, Prisco, Brinson, Wilson and Breech) predicted the Buffalo Bills would take the AFC championship, with Prisco and Wilson picking Buffalo to win the Super Bowl. As previously explained, the Bills lost a divisional playoff and thus didn’t make it to the AFC title game, much less win it. The team that beat Buffalo, the Kansas City Chiefs were picked by Dubin and Jones not only to win the AFC championship, but also to win the Super Bowl.

Well, at least the Chiefs made it to the AFC title game, but they were defeated there by Joe Burrow and the Cincinnati Bengals.

Guess how many of the CBS experts predicted that the Bengals would be in the playoffs? The number is — you guessed, didn’t you? — zero.

All seven of the CBS Sports experts picked the Bengals to finish fourth — i.e., last place — in the AFC North division. Five of the experts (La Canfora, Prisco, Wilson, Dubin and Jones) predicted that the Cleveland Browns would win the AFC North. In fact, the Browns went 8-9 and finished third in the division. Brinson picked the Baltimore Ravens to win the AFC North, but they also went 8-9 and, because of tiebreakers, placed fourth in the division. Breech was the least wrong of the experts in terms of predicting the AFC North winner, as his pick was the Pittsburgh Steelers, who finished second and lost a Wild Card playoff to the Chiefs.

How was it that nobody — not a single one of these CBS Sports experts — thought the Bengals were a playoff contender? How was it that the eventual AFC champions were a unanimous choice by these experts to finish dead last in their division? To give credit where credit is due, all seven experts correctly predicted the winners of the three other AFC divisions (Bills in the East, Chiefs in the West, Tennessee Titans in the South), and all of them also got the exact order of finish correct in the East (Bills, Patriots, Miami Dolphins, New York Jets). Breech correctly picked the final order of finish in the AFC South (Titans, Indianapolis Colts, Houston Texans, Jacksonville Jaguars). Nobody got the order of finish correct in the AFC West, however, because the Las Vegas Raiders (whom the experts predicted to finish third or fourth) ended up in second place. Prisco picked the Denver Broncos to finish second in the AFC West; in fact, the Broncos at 7-10 were last in the division. The other experts predicted the L.A. Chargers would finish second in the AFC West, but they were third. Of the many wrong predictions about who would get the AFC Wild Card playoff berths, La Canfora, Wilson, Dubin and Jones incorrectly picked the Chargers and Ravens for two of the three slots. Brinson and Breech wrongly predicted the Chargers and Browns. Prisco got two of the three Wild Cards correct, missing only with his pick of the Broncos. All seven correctly predicted that the Patriots would win a wild card bid. But none of them — zero — picked the Bengals.

Generally speaking, these experts produced a carnival of wrongness. Yes, they got some things right — the easy stuff, like figuring that the Chiefs, Bills, Packers and Buccaneers would be playoff contenders. But even though all of them predicted the Rams would be in the playoff hunt, only two thought the Rams would make it all the way to the Super Bowl, and none of them thought McVay’s team would win the Super Bowl. As for their AFC predictions, everything got completely wrecked for the experts by Cincinnati and their second-year quarterback Burrow.

It’s easy to see why the Bengals were underrated. Nobody anticipated what the reunion of Burrow and his LSU teammate, wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase, would mean for Cincinnati. Burrow and the rookie Chase connected on 81 passes for 1,455 yards and 13 touchdowns. For the season, Burrow completed 70.4% of his passes for 4,611 yards and 34 TDs. This was a remarkable improvement from Burrow’s rookie year and — just incidentally — Burrow isn’t one of those run-and-gun quarterbacks that NFL commentators rave about. Neither is the Rams QB, Stafford. Both of them are old-fashioned dropback passers, and so the bandwagon effect among the CBS Sports experts (who thought Mahomes and the Chiefs or Allen and the Bills would win the AFC) is readily apparent as a source of their total wrongness about the Super Bowl.

What does this say about Tom Nichols or Anthony Fauci? Not much, directly. But indirectly, the wrongness of the CBS Sports “experts” does illustrate the general credibility problem of our media-certified expert class. Once upon a time, wrong predictions would be forgotten because, despite the durability of the printed word, few people could be bothered to go to the library and do the research necessary to find who had predicted what. Thanks to near-universal computer access, however, anyone can now do this kind of research and publish it on the Internet.

Bad news for the experts — the Internet never forgets.




 

Climate Change ‘Science’ = Propaganda

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Considering how certain neocons are treating Ukraine skeptics, I’ll imitate them: “If you’re anti-fracking, that’s treason!”

For years, world leaders have accused Russia of funding environmental groups in Europe to steer nations away from energy independence and strengthen Russia’s iron grip over the continent. As nations across the globe begin shunning Russian oil in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. leaders are also questioning how deep Russia’s ties go in the environmental community.
“The Russians actually fund some of the most rabid environmental groups in Europe because they sic them on the energy projects that aren’t Russian,” James Carafano, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital in a recent phone interview.
Back in June 2014, just months after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, European leaders sounded off that Russia was using disinformation operations with environmental groups to steer countries away from fracking in favor of Russian oil.
“I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations – environmental organisations working against shale gas – to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former prime minister of Denmark and then-secretary-general of NATO, said, according to the Guardian. . . .
By 2016, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Scotland and Bulgaria had all banned fracking, either temporarily or permanently. Russia’s power over European energy grew large by 2022, providing roughly 40% of the continent’s natural gas supply. Lithuania, for example, gets 83% of its oil imports from Russia, Poland gets 58% and Finland 80%, The Hill reported.
“You’re not really an independent nation if you depend on foreign countries so heavily for your energy supplies,” Michael Shellenberger, the best-selling author of “Apocalypse Never,” told Fox News earlier this month.
Shellenberger said that 15 years ago, “Europe produced more natural gas than Russia,” but that all changed as “Russia increased its natural gas production and Europe reduced it.”
“Europe decided not to frack in large part in response to climate activists,” Shellenberger told Fox News. “We now think there is strong evidence suggesting [the climate activists] were supported directly through financing from Russia.”

If Mitt Romney can accuse Tulsi Gabbard of treason (!!!) because she believes the U.S. was operating bioweapons labs in Ukraine, then why can’t I accuse every climate change activist of treason? Aren’t they promoting Putin’s propaganda? Isn’t it all “disinformation”?

And if anyone is Putin’s puppet here, how about Joe Biden?

President Joe Biden reassured donors Monday that he would use his executive powers to act on climate change, even as energy prices are at record highs.
“The climate crisis is the existential threat. That’s not hyperbole; it’s a fact,” Biden said after taking the podium at a Democratic National Committee Fundraiser in Washington, DC.
Biden promised to take “aggressive” executive actions on climate regulations even if the Supreme Court overruled him. He acknowledged that progress on the issue of climate change was difficult to achieve in Congress, hinting that donors could help him pressure lawmakers.
“There’s a long way to go, but we’re running into some obstacles that I’m going to need your help on in terms of individuals, as well as circumstances,” he said.

Got that? Biden is going to ram the pro-Putin “climate” agenda down your throat, and you’re just an “obstacle” if you don’t like it.




 

The Science™ Is Actually The Politics™

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Ace of Spades remarks, “Quelle coincidence,” at the polling memo from Impact Research (which “has helped elect Democratic candidates at all levels”) advising Democratic candidates on how to pivot away from their ill-advised “COVID Zero” maximum-lockdown stance on the pandemic. The obvious proof that these lockdowns were never “necessitated” (to use the phrase of Biden’s pollsters) is the experience of Florida, which has been wide-open since the summer of 2020 with no apparent harm, compared to the Democrat-controlled states.

Keep in mind that every Democrat in Congress supported the Biden administration’s policy of firing millions of workers (including nurses) if they did not comply with the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. And every Democratic governor and mayor was on the pro-lockdown side of the argument. What the polling memo tells Democrats, basically, is to pretend that none of this ever happened and hope voters forget.

Exit question: Are voters as stupid as Democrats think they are?




 

Mass Formation Psychosis: What Is It and Why Is Everybody Talking About It Now?

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Have you ever heard of “The Streisand Effect”? It’s what happens on the Internet when someone tries to suppress the truth:

Barbra Streisand . . . in 2003 had sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia[dot]com for violation of privacy. The US$50 million lawsuit endeavored to remove an aerial photograph of Streisand’s mansion from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs. Adelman photographed the beachfront property to document coastal erosion as part of the California Coastal Records Project, which was intended to influence government policymakers. Before Streisand filed her lawsuit, “Image 3850” had been downloaded from Adelman’s website only six times; two of those downloads were by Streisand’s attorneys. As a result of the case, public knowledge of the picture increased greatly; more than 420,000 people visited the site over the following month. The lawsuit was dismissed and Streisand was ordered to pay Adelman’s legal fees, which amounted to $155,567.

In a free society, such censorship efforts always fail, if citizens understand what is at stake. Today was Everybody Blog About Mass Formation Psychosis Day, an effort to bring attention to a dangerous censorship effort. Last month, William Jacobson blogged about Mass Formation Psychosis and linked to this short primer on the subject:

A brief overview of Mass Formation, which was developed by Dr. Mattias Desmet. He is a psychologist and a statistician. He is at the University of Ghent in Belgium. I think Dr. Mattias is onto something about what is happening and he calls this phenomena:
MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS
So, when he says “mass” formation, you can think of this as equivalent to “crowd” formation. One can think of this as:
CROWD PSYCHOSIS
The conditions to set up mass formation psychosis include lack of social connectedness and sensemaking as well as large amounts of latent anxiety and passive aggression. When people are inundated with a narrative that presents a plausible “object of anxiety” and strategy for coping with it, then many individuals group together to battle the object with a collective singlemindedness. This allows people to stop focusing on their own problems, avoiding personal mental anguish. Instead, they focus all their thought and energy on this new object.
As mass formation progresses, the group becomes increasingly bonded and connected. Their field of attention is narrowed and they become unable to consider alternative points of view. Leaders of the movement are revered, unable to do no wrong.
Left unabated, a society under the spell of mass formation will support a totalitarian governance structure capable of otherwise unthinkable atrocities in order to maintain compliance. A note: mass formation is different from group think. There are easy ways to fix group think by just bringing in dissenting voices and making sure you give them platforms. It isn’t so easy with mass formation. Even when the narrative falls apart, cracks in the strategy clearly aren’t solving the issue, the hypnotized crowd can’t break free of the narrative. This is what appears to be happening now with COVID-19. The solution for those in control of the narrative is to produce bigger and bigger lies to prop up the solution. Those being controlled by mass formation no longer are able to use reason to break free of the group narrative.

Do you grasp the significance of this concept in our current situation? Guess what happens if you tell the truth in a world where major institutions are devoted to promoting official lies?

Twitter on [Dec. 29] suspended the account operated by Dr. Robert Malone, a U.S.-based virologist, and immunologist credited for significantly contributing to the invention of the mRNA technology, the foundation of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against Covid-19.
The ban came just hours after the AP posted a controversial “fact check” report claiming Malone “misled” people by claiming the vaccines are failing against the Omicron variant.

It is self-evident that vaccines haven’t stopped the Omicron variant, which produced a surge of “breakthrough” COVID-19 infections in vaccinated patients, even those who had gotten “booster” shots. Yet not only did Twitter ban Dr. Malone for “misinformation,” but because popular podcaster Joe Rogan hosted Dr. Malone on his program, everybody is now trying to ban Rogan:

Biden-appointed U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said Silicon Valley tech companies have an “important role to play” in preventing the spread of alleged coronavirus “misinformation.” His comments came during an MSNBC interview that specifically mentioned Joe Rogan.
Murthy made the comments during an appearance on MSNBC, in which host Mika Brzezinski asked Murthy what should be done about alleged misinformation from Joe Rogan and social media posts.
“What do you think are the best ways to push back on misinformation about COVID that continues to be aggressively pushed, whether it be Joe Rogan’s podcast or all over Facebook?” asked Brzezinski.
“We can have the best science available, we can have the best public health expertise available. It won’t help people if they don’t have access to accurate information,” responded Murthy. “People have the right to make their own decisions, but they also have the right to have accurate information to make that decision with.”
The Biden-appointed health official went on to urge private companies to use their power to limit the spread of alleged misinformation.
“This is about companies and individuals recognizing that the only way we get past misinformation is if we are careful about what we say and use the power that we have to limit the spread of misinformation,” said Murthy.
With an average of 11 million listeners per episode, Joe Rogan is arguably the most popular pundit in the western world.

Do you see the point? If indeed our “leaders” are trying to hypnotize the masses, the one thing they can’t allow is for anyone to tell the masses, “Hey, they’re hypnotizing you.” So the silencing of dissent is essential to the propaganda campaign that fuels Mass Formation Psychosis.




 

‘Mass Formation Psychosis’ and the Censorship of COVID-19 Criticism

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In December, Dr. Robert W. Malone was banned from Twitter: “The account referenced (@RWMaloneMD) was permanently suspended for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy.” Using the vague concept of “misinformation” to justify silencing critics of COVID-19 policy is part of a totalitarian project that Malone described on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. And guess what happened next?

A group of 270 scientists and doctors are pressuring Spotify to crack down on content from Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the U.S. One of the group’s complaints? His interview with doctor and scientist, Dr. Robert Malone.
Rogan isn’t merely the most popular podcaster in the country — he is, by some metrics, the most popular figure across the entire media.
It was recently reported that Rogan gets an average of 11 million views per podcast episode. The podcast’s closest competitor is Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, which gets an average of 3.21 million views.
Like Rogan, Tucker Carlson is also frequently the target of censorship efforts, but these have not dented his dominating position in cable news.
The group of experts who wrote to Spotify asking them to censor their most valuable personality objected to Rogan’s interview with Dr. Robert Malone, a doctor and scientist who conducted some of the earliest research on mRNA technology, which is used in Pfizer and Moderna’s coronavirus vaccines.
Dr. Malone, who objects to the use of mRNA in COVID-19 vaccines, was permanently blacklisted from Twitter.
Malone’s interview with Rogan, which was released just a few days after his ban from Twitter, was one of the podcaster’s more viral episodes.
The doctor’s contention that western societies are suffering from “mass formation psychosis,” a kind of collective hysteria brought about by shared feelings of fear and manipulation from outside authorities, proved particularly viral, with clips of Malone’s discussion of the concept viewed millions of times on social media.

It should be obvious, at this stage, that vaccines have failed to “shut down the virus,” as Joe Biden promised during the 2020 presidential campaign. If the vaccines are not effective against variants of the COVID-19 virus, what is the motive for the administration’s continued efforts to make vaccination mandatory? Good luck getting straight answers to that question. My cynical suspicion is that the attempt to make COVID-19 vaccines mandatory is just a payoff for the gigantic pharmaceutical companies that are manufacturing the vaccine.

What the censors obviously fear about Dr. Malone is not “misinformation” (because anyone can look at the number of so-called “breakthrough” infections in vaccinated patients and see the problem with these vaccines), but rather that his discussion of “mass formation psychosis” is giving people a clue about how powerful institutions have been manipulating public opinion. Those engaged in that manipulation — including the executives at Twitter — don’t want the public to become aware of the propaganda techniques being used by the elites to promote their preferred narratives. And this is why this Thursday is “Everybody Blog About Mass Formation Psychosis Day.”

Simply put: They can’t de-platform everybody.




 

Can We Make Thursday ‘Everybody Blog About Mass Formation Psychosis Day’?

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Darren Beattie has a piece at Revolver talking about how the Biden administration is trying, without much success, to convince Democratic voters to let go of the COVID-19 panic narrative to which they are clinging like a toddler with a security blanket: Masks are useless, children are not at risk, schools should be open, et cetera.

All of this is just common-sense stuff that skeptics have been saying since mid-2020, but because Democrats and their media allies have devoted so much effort to portraying skeptics as villains — you’re “anti-science” if you oppose drastic measures to fight COVID-19 — the people who voted for Biden refuse to accept the message now that the administration is ready to “move on” from the panic. Beattie writes:

The Biden Administration wants its rank-and-file followers in public schools, colleges, and hospitals to calm down. Instead they remain as paranoid as ever. It is entirely possible that this will continue for all of 2022, or even longer. Covid and its variants aren’t going away. To the extent they were ever effective at all, vaccines appear to lose their potency with every new booster campaign. The virus remains as mild for most people as ever, but constant testing means that even the healthiest progressives have worked themselves into a permanent state of fear and paranoia.
This has fascinating ramifications for leftism itself. Through Mass Formation Psychosis, the ruling class left seems to have finally memed its true believers into a pattern that it can’t talk them out of. For two years, they sowed panic by promoting the cult of the mask, the cult of the lockdown, and the cult of the vaccine. Now, they can’t suppress the cults they have created. Similarly, they ignited a “racial reckoning” in 2020 and are now powerless to stop the frenzy of murder and crime that this “reckoning” unleashed in every major city.

Recall that people are trying to de-platform Joe Rogan for hosting Dr. Robert Malone, who has popularized the “Mass Formation Psychosis” theory to explain public reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Well, here’s some news for you: They can’t de-platform everybody.

If all of us with access to digital platforms — bloggers, columnists, people on Twitter and Facebook, etc. — will unite behind this idea, we can defeat these censors and make it impossible for them to suppress the idea.

Therefore, I propose that this Thursday, Jan. 27, be declared “Everybody Blog About Mass Formation Psychosis Day.” The objectives:

  1. Call attention to the censorship campaign by which COVID-19 panic brigades are attempting to suppress criticism. If you look at the Google results, you’ll notice that the first page of results (which is all that most Googlers ever see) is dominated by “fact checks” and people endeavoring to “debunk” Mass Formation Psychosis as a “conspiracy theory.” This obviously reflects manipulation of the Google algorithm in an attempt to support censorship of Joe Rogan and others.
  2. Explain what “Mass Formation Theory” really means. There is nothing outlandish about the theory that Dr. Malone has outlined. When the “dominant narrative” is promoted by politicians and major media organizations — when they’re all on the same page, so to speak — most people will believe what they’re being told and react the way they’re instructed to react. The theory is a bit more complex and nuanced than can be summarized in a sentence or two, but the basic idea isn’t at all crazy or “extremist,” no matter what the self-declared “fact checkers” claim.
  3. Most critics of COVID-19 policy are not “anti-science.” This has been the problem with public reaction to the pandemic from the start. Various “experts” (including Dr. Anthony Fauci and the science/medical commentators on TV news outlets) presented themselves as having all the answers to COVID-19, and advocated restrictive policies as the One Right Way to fight the virus. Because these experts were presented as being the voices of “science,” anyone who criticized the restrictive policies was implicitly accused of being “anti-science.” This involved an appeal to a common prejudice among college-educated people, who cherish a self-image of being on the side of enlightenment, and who view themselves as engaged in a war against ignorance. To such people, it was easy to see Dr. Fauci as a heroic knight doing battle against the dragon of “anti-science.”

It does not matter, in terms of “Everybody Blog About Mass Formation Psychosis Day,” what you believe about the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines. Dr. Malone himself is deeply skeptical of mRNA vaccines, but that’s neither here nor there in regard to the importance of the free speech issue involved. I’ve gotten the vaccine, and have suffered no side effects worse than minor soreness in the arm where I got the shot, but I’m against making the vaccine mandatory, which is what the Biden administration has been trying to do, while demonizing anyone who refuses to get vaccinated, no matter their reasons.

A young woman of my acquaintance is a liberal and a mother of two sons. Like many other women of childbearing age, she is unvaccinated — that’s one of the dirty little secrets that the COVID-19 vaccine propagandists don’t want you to know. They keep trying to pretend that it’s us old white Republican guys who are the so-called “vaccine resisters,” but it’s really more common among women under 40 and among racial minorities. Furthermore, mothers especially are angry about schools being closed, and this is causing some liberal moms to declare themselves “politically homeless” because they can see that it’s Democrats who want to keep schools closed. So this young unvaccinated mom of my acquaintance, who lives in the Land of the Free — thank you, Governor DeSantis — has already had COVID-19 and thus has natural immunity. Yet she sees Joe Biden (whom she voted for) on TV demanding that everybody must be required to get the vaccination, as if natural immunity doesn’t exist.

The plural of “anecdote” is data, as they say, and I think there must be a lot of people like her out there. Two years into this pandemic, even liberal Democrats are sick and tired of the maximum lockdown mentality, and they are the real target audience for “Everybody Blog About Mass Formation Psychosis Day.” If they can be made to see how public perception can be manipulated by politicians and the media in this specific case, perhaps they will become more skeptical to other “dominant narratives” that are promoted in the same way. Who knows? Perhaps they’ll even start questioning Keynesian economics.

EVERYBODY BLOG ABOUT
MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS DAY

THURSDAY, JANUARY 27, 2022

Let’s make this happen.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

UPDATE II: On Twitter, this idea has already been endorsed by John Hoge, as well as Lawrence Person and Don Surber, among others.




 

Don’t Question ‘The Science’?

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Luke Rudkowski of We Are Change called attention to these headlines:

It’s Time to Give Up on Facts
— Jess Zimmerman, Slate, Feb. 8, 2017

You Must Not ‘Do Your Own Research’
When It Comes To Science
— Ethan Siegel, Forbes, July 30, 2020

Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole
Critical thinking, as we’re taught to do it, isn’t
helping in the fight against misinformation
— Charlie Warzel, New York Times, Feb. 18, 2021

Questioning authority has become
too much of a good thing,
and it’s killing people
— Al Cross, Northern Kentucky Tribune, Sept. 23, 2021

The general theme here is that skepticism is wrong — we must accept what we are told by those in authority. The “consensus,” as determined by university professors, mainstream journalists and government officials, should not be subject to criticism or debate. If you are not a member of the class of credentialed experts authorized to determine the “consensus,” your duty is to shut up and obey.

What they are telling us, really, is that our own education and experience are invalid. Whatever schools you attended, whatever degrees or diplomas you may possess, whatever knowledge you may have acquired through your employment — none of your credentials count for anything, if you are disposed to challenge the authority of the expert class.

When and how did this insistence on elite authority develop? It didn’t start with the COVID-19 pandemic or with “fact checkers” telling us not to believe Donald Trump. A more obvious starting point of this expert “consensus” theme was The Great Global Warming Scare (which has been renamed “climate change” because the experts find this phrase more convenient when record snowfalls occur). You could point to the 2000 presidential election as the historic fulcrum in this regard. Al Gore shoved his chips all-in on global warming, and lost the election to George W. Bush, whose connections to the oil industry were no secret.

It was just about the time Gore came out with An Inconvenient Truth (2006) that we were told “the science is settled” about global warming, and the expert class decided that skeptics must be silenced. The Michael Mann lawsuit against Mark Steyn, et al., was the manifestation of the belief that it should be illegal to question the “consensus.”

On all matters scientific, I find myself forced to defer to John Hoge, the engineer who makes space robots for NASA. A mere journalist has no business arguing about science with an engineer, really, and so whenever such subjects are under discussion on The Other Podcast, I am compelled to leave it to Hoge. But he is at odds with those who endlessly declare that we must believe The Science™ when it comes to things like dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no such thing as The Science™ — a complete set of solutions, of which Dr. Anthony Fauci and his colleagues are the sole proprietors — because that’s not how science works.

Reasonable skepticism — citing facts and logic that contradict the liberal establishment’s preferred narrative about COVID-19 or anything else — is now being labeled “misinformation,” not because of science, but because of politics. Skeptics cannot be permitted to speak freely, to express doubt toward the “consensus” on subjects that may affect the political power of the liberal elite. And therefore “deplatforming” and other means of censorship are used to suppress dissent: Shut up, because science.

Well, we won’t shut up — you can tune in to hear more at 7 p.m. ET Saturday night on The Other Podcast.