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Nazis. With the Brownstone Institute it’s always Nazis.

The Brownstone Institute is once again promoting the tired narrative that public health interventions for COVID-19 are incipient fascism and those supporting them Nazis. Unfortunately, this false narrative resonates.

Nazis. It’s always Nazis. At least, with antivaxxers it is.

Since the pandemic, it seems that, no matter what governments and public health officials recommend or institute as interventions to slow the spread of COVID-19, antimaskers, anti-“lockdowners,” and antivaxxers refer to the interventions as authoritarian (or outright fascist), with public health officials being Nazis. Of course, comparing vaccine advocates to Nazis has a long and dishonorable history in the antivaccine movement, making the resurrection of this disinformation technique utterly unsurprising. In fact, the idea that anything beyond completely voluntary public health interventions—with which you should not comply!—are unacceptable assaults on freedom akin to Hitler’s totalitarian regime, complete with its genocide against European Jewry. This concept has become the organizing principle—the raison d’être, if you will—behind the Brownstone Institute, a COVID-19 disinformation machine that can’t make up its mind whether public health interventions against COVID-19 are fascism (with Anthony Fauci and other public health officials Nazis) or totalitarian Communism akin to the Chinese Cultural Revolution (which, I suppose, sort of makes sense given Brownstone’s embrace of the “lab leak” conspiracy theory for the origin of the pandemic).

So it was that I came across an article by Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, and Michael Baker on the Brownstone Institute’s website entitled We Can All Be Evil and the Germans Were Nothing Special. (We’ve met all of them before.) Regular readers and those familiar with the Brownstone Institute can probably guess where this article is going, but I do like to point out one thing. Notice how, in the Brownstone Institute narrative, public health interventions are not just misguided, scientific mistakes, errors, or excessive. They are evil, and the people who orchestrate them are evil (like Hitler), while those who carry out public health policies, while not necessarily evil themselves, are, as individual Nazis did during the Hitler regime, carrying out evil policies.

Unsurprisingly, neither Frijters, Foster, nor Baker have any expertise in infectious disease, virology, pandemics, immunology, vaccines, or public health. They are all economists. (Well, not really. Baker only has a BA in economics, which makes him an economist as much as my BS in chemistry makes me a chemist.) If you look at the articles they’ve authored for Brownstone, you will quickly see a recurrent theme, namely about how interventions against COVID-19 were “crimes” that “victims” won’t forgive, about how academia is drawn to “fascism” (which is hilarious to me because they use the broadest possible dictionary definition of “fascism” to make their point and also because of how much of an affinity antivaxxers like those at Brownstone have for fascism), how “dissent” is being “punished,” and the devastating effects of “lockdowns” (which, outside of China, haven’t been a thing for a year now and were arguably never much of a thing in most of the US).

So what do Frijters, Foster, and Baker have to say about COVID-19 containment policies? This passage seeks to liken COVID-19 public health responses to a “mania” not unlike the mania that swept Hitler into power and allowed him to consolidate power to become the absolute dictator of Germany in less than a year and a half after being appointed Chancellor of Germany:

For more than two years, the world has been swept up in covid mania. Ordinary people of almost every nationality have accepted the covid ‘story’, applauding as strong men and women have assumed dictatorial powers, suspended normal human rights and political processes, pretended that covid deaths were the only ones that mattered, closed schools, closed businesses, prevented people from earning livelihoods, and caused mass misery, poverty, and starvation.

The more these strong men and women did these things, the louder the applause, and the greater the disapprobation and abuse levelled at those who decried such actions. Police bullying of those speaking out against the covid story was cheered on by populations keen to see the naysayers brought to justice.

The past two years have proved that the Germans of the National Socialist period were really nothing special.

My first question was this: What are these people smoking? No, seriously, they got a hold of some seriously bad stuff. (Either that, or they’re completely delusional or lying, take your pick.) This is some seriously revisionist history of the pandemic. What really happened, of course, is that it didn’t take very long for public health interventions that were anything stronger than completely voluntary to encounter stiff resistance, at least in democracies. Just in my neck of the woods, in Michigan, by April 30, 2020 a little more than a month after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had imposed stay-at-home public health orders, there were armed militia members showing up at protests at the State Capitol Building as part of anti-“lockdown” protests. Because of Michigan’s messed up laws, these militia entered the Capitol Building with their weapons and freely roamed around, intimidating state legislators.

Members of the Michigan Liberty Militia and Boogaloo Bois, some posing in front of the governor’s office in the legislative building to intimidate her are certainly evidence of our Michigan governor exercising “dictatorial” powers in April 2020, wouldn’t you say?

Pray, continue, though, Brownstone Institute propagandists. Sadly, they do. First, they cite the famous Milgram experiments, in which subjects were ordered to give a person increasing electrical shocks to a “learner” (or so they thought) in response to wrong answers to questions, with the learner increasingly pleading for mercy. Famously, more than half of the subjects administered the maximum intensity of electrical shock. Also famously, the “learners” were actors hired to pretend to be suffering, and the real objective of the experiment was to see how far normal people would go in response to “prodding” by an authority figure. Of course, by today’s standards—and even arguably the standards of 60+ years ago—Milgram’s experiments were unethical. Nevertheless, Brownstone flacks see everyone who went along with “lockdowns” as subjects in Milgram’s experiments while citing Hannah Arendt, famous for coining the phrase the “banality of evil” to describe Hitler’s henchman Adolf Eichmann and for trying to explain how ordinary people could do such evil in response to orders. No one ever said Brownstone Institute flacks were subtle in their messaging.

Here’s another example of what I mean:

As Hannah Arendt pointed out, the most committed Nazis were the ‘Gutmensch’: Germans who genuinely saw themselves as good people. They had been loved by their mothers, were dutiful followers of the local faith, paid their taxes, had ancestors who died for Germany, and were in loving family relationships. They thought they were doing the right thing, and were roundly validated and supported in that belief by friends, family, the church, and the media.

The intellectual class had come face to face with this truth in the 1950s, but the relentless wish of humanity to look away from uncomfortable truths made societies, and over time even scholarly circles, forget. We told lies about the Nazis to feel good about ourselves. This self-rejecting cowardice grew over time and fed into today’s debilitated, self-hating woke culture in which you can hardly reference the Nazi period at all in polite company, much less try to open people’s minds to its lessons, without being accused of being a Nazi deep down yourself.

The Germans forgot not because the information about the Nazi period was hidden.  On the contrary, young German schoolchildren were forced to read books and watch documentaries almost constantly. They forgot the central lesson because they could not live with the idea that the behaviour they were told about was normal. So, like everyone else, they pretended that the Nazi period was totally abnormal, led and supported by people who were innately more evil than others.

Once again the Nazis. It’s always Nazis with these people!

Of course, the amusing thing about this post is the projection involved. To Frijters, Foster, and Baker, the true “heroes” weren’t the frontline medical workers, the people working for grocery stores and other essential businesses for whom working at home was not an option, or the police or frontline responders like paramedics for whom working from home was also not and option and who faced the danger of COVID-19 every day. Instead, apparently, their heroes are people who resisted:

What is then our explanation for why strong religious groups and maverick personalities within our countries were less affected by the madness? Our explanation is that those most strongly immune to the madness from the very start were already somewhat disconnected from the mainstream, often not even having a television or social media connection to mainstream society. Being outliers at the start protected them from being swept up in the madness of the mainstream crowd.

Michigan Liberty Militia and Boogaloo Bois (not to mention Proud Boys, Patriot Front, and other fascist—or at least fascist-adjacent—paramilitary groups) are arguably “somewhat disconnected from the mainstream,” although I would argue that they are certainly plugged in, given their massive social media activity. In any event, lest readers accuse me of cherry picking “resisters” to public health interventions, let’s look at who else “resisted”: antivaxxers such as Robert F, Kennedy, Jr., Del Bigtree, Joe Mercola, and pretty much every other antivaxxer; grifters and quacks like the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, Robert “inventor of mRNA vaccines” Malone, Mehmet Oz, Simone Gold, and Steve Kirsch; populist authoritarians like Brazilian President Jair Bolsanaro; and a wide variety of garden variety cranks and opportunists. These are not exactly the sort of people that I’d ever want to associate myself with in any way, nor should you.

There are reasonable arguments to be had over how best to balance the economic and health toll of public health policy interventions versus the benefits in terms of decreasing COVID-19 incidence, complications and death, but that’s not what these propagandists are about. They’re about nothing less than declaring any public policy that isn’t 110% voluntary as evil and fascist, with people implementing such policies akin to Adolf Hitler and those carrying out or supporting such policies being akin to the subjects of the Milgram experiments or the banality of evil under Hitler. I’m only surprised that they could resist citing Daniel Goldhagen.

I am rather amused, though, that Frijters, Foster, and Baker come so close to saying something somewhat reasonable, but can’t quite bring themselves to follow the implications of what they write:

Yet this is no recipe for the future, because a society of outliers is no society at all. Any social group has a core constituency of those who truly belong. The strong religious groups standing outside of the social mainstream may be inoculated from the madness of the mainstream, but they are just as prone to follow a wave of madness within their own group. 

Ditto for any other ‘maverick’ group. Within whatever group they belong to – and all humans belong to groups – humans get swept along when that group goes mad. Hope lies not in a society of outliers, but in a society with better ways of recognising and countering emerging madness, or at least more quickly snapping out of madness when it inevitably emerges.

So very, very, very close, and yet still so far:

For young Germans, the covid period has a bittersweet silver lining.  It has become clear, again, that the Nazis of the 1930s were entirely normal people, and that everyone else in the world can be a Nazi too. The Germans can release themselves from the belief that there is anything abnormally evil about being German. There is a potential Nazi in all of us. 

So incredibly close.

If only Frijters, Foster, and Baker could recognize themselves and Brownstone Institute in what they write. If only they could recognize the projection involved in their “analysis” and revisionist history. If only they could recognize that their anti-“lockdown” propaganda and activism derives more from a libertarian political viewpoint that promoted the Great Barrington Declaration, an astroturf “declaration advocating a strategy for the pandemic based more on resisting government authority to do anything for public health and promoting a eugenicistnatural herd immunity” strategy in which COVID-19 would be allowed to rip through the “young and healthy” population (who could go on about their lives), while the elderly and those with chronic health conditions that make them more susceptible to hospitalization and death were left on their own to protect themselves.

Alas, they cannot and do not. Either that, or they know quite well what they are doing. The longer I pay attention to the Brownstone Institute’s narrative about how everyone who sees through its antivaccine misinformation and COVID-19 minimization are Nazis, the more I suspect that it’s the latter.

By Orac

Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski.

That this particular surgeon has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 35 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)

DISCLAIMER:: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.

To contact Orac: [email protected]

43 replies on “Nazis. With the Brownstone Institute it’s always Nazis.”

There’s a very disturbing video out there of an unpleasant looking couple wearing masks with swastikas. In the background you can hear a woman howling in pain. Holding the phone is a man with what may be an European accent. He’s saying things like: The Nazis are no joke; they are no joke to her; she was there.

The brave mavericks are trying to explain that they are not Nazis. As if they had any idea of what a Nazi was.

As I’ve said before, there aren’t any right-wing think tanks — they’ve all become dogma tanks.

It is a little odd that these clowns are arguing these “bad things” (in their view) are things Nazis would do when the modern right has embraced modern nazis, who were far right politically, along with white supremacists and other scum.

That’s a weird essay, all right. The premise actually deviates from the old antivax theme of comparing vaccine advocates to Nazis, because it’s not about public health officials, or the government authorities that listened to the medical experts, but the regular folks who went along with the mitigation efforts. It is the “ordinary people” who have been “swept up in covid mania” that are the Nazis to Fritjers et al. Now, these authors are not so stupid as to compare masses of Americans to sterotypical blood-thirsty capital “E” evil Nazis out of Goldenhagen’s Wlling Executioners so they trot out the opposing persepctive on the “good Germans” — Hannah Arendt — to argue that the Nazi rank and file weren’t all that bad. These folks, they argue, were actually very fine people who “simply got seduced by a story and swept off their feet and out of their minds by the herd.”

This pretty much makes a hash out of Arendt, as demonstrated by their misreading of “the banality of evil” as “Evil, in a word, is banal.” That’s not what Arendt meant. It’s a kind of Germanic phrasing, in which the object noun comes first and the modifier follows. That is, it means ‘that form of banality which is evil’. It’s not that all evil is banal — or that all banality is evil. Arendt’s insight is that while we tend to see evil only in term of melodramatic blood lust, which are mutually exclusive with banality as banality is somehow moderate and/or ineffectual, this couldn’t explain e.g. Eichmann, who was at the same time a boring functionary and a perpetrator of unspeakable evil. This doesn’t let Eichmann or any regular Germans off the hook at all. Which is, yes, where the Brownstoners want to end up with all of us who masked up, social distanced, or eschewed trips to the mall for orders from Amazon. We are on the hook. Of course, this flatters all the COVID deniers, who understood the horrible Truth behind the banal mitigation measures, yet saw “the vast majority of their own neighbours and family go berserk.” So, what is it, berserk or banal? Oh never mind. The fundamental premise underlying abusing Arendt, or even Milgrom, here is that there’ something analogous between COVID mitigation and the Final Solution. Yeah…

“Experimenter”, the 2015 drama film about Milgrom by Michael Almereyda is really, really good.

Goldenhagen’s book was/is largely really about MidEast politics, by framing the Holocaust in terms that would connect to, and justify, hard-line Likud policies in relation to the Palestinians, Iran, etc.

These folks, they argue, were actually very fine people who “simply got seduced by a story and swept off their feet and out of their minds by the herd.”

I don’t know. There’s no reason that Brownstone couldn’t be peddling both narratives simultaneous, on the one hand arguing that the instigators of the “lockdowns” and mask and vaccine mandates were the uniquely evil (like Hitler, Mao, or Stalin) and then try to win over the “ordinary people” by telling them it’s OK, we understand why you “went along.” You just supposedly just got swept up in the moment and trusted Anthony Fauci (and the rest), like the “good Germans” who supported Hitler. You just need to learn from this and not do it again. It’s actually a fairly clever dual messaging to try to win responsible people over to their side.

In saying the premise deviates from the old evocation of “Nazi!” to demonize vaccine ‘authorities’, I didn’t mean it’s contradictory, just that 1) it’s not primarily about those ‘authorities’, and 2) presents a different take on what constitutes Nazism. The essay only mentions mitigation “instigators” in passing at the beginning, and while it avoids calling them Nazis, or any other specific epithet, the language absolutely portrays them as fascists: “Strong men and women” who “have assumed dictatorial powers, suspended normal human rights” and licensed “police bullying of those speaking out against the covid story.” The idea of the likes of Tony Fauci, Joe Biden, Peter Hotez, et al as strongman bullies is typically Upside Down for rightie propagandists. While the Brownstoners don’t exactly impute Manichean Evil to the mitigators, one could certainly infer something like that from their characterization of the consequences of mitigation as causing “mass misery, poverty, and starvation.”

I was seduced by Newton when I let go of my apples. They fell to the floor and were badly bruised. Had I listened to the Brownstoners they’d have safely floated in midair.

Maybe there should be a new version of (unscientific) “Godwin’s law of Nazi analogies” (that as any Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one). We could call it the Brownstone rule.

I noticed that Paul Frijters used to write for an Australian blog (Club Troppo), where he listed HART and SWPR as being reputable sources for medical/scientific information on COVID-19. For those who are familiar with those groups, the conclusions of these researchers would not come as a surprise…

I read a review of the book (the source of the articles published by Brownstone), by a New Zealand economist (with similar ideological slant to the authors) which republished a table from the book (table 1, page 3) and the following articles, to support the narrative that lockdowns don’t work, (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8890786/pdf/main.pdf). I don’t know how skilled the authors are as economists, but I have to question their ability to make epidemiological/medical conclusions, supported by actual evidence.

Everytime you hear an anti-vaxxer or someone from brownstone yelling crazy stuff comparing vaccines mandates to NAZI Germany then people like myself who left being right wing and switched to the Democrats always find out that these leaders are playing the Jim Jones of Jonestown card on us.

Gigi Foster is an American economist resident in Australia and she has been a guest on Q&A on a few occasions during the pandemic. Her eruptions have generally been met with stunned silence followed by suppressed laughter. Poor thing. Honestly, to have lived in Australia during the pandemic and still have those discredited views is quite an extraordinary feat.

I came across her for the first time a few weeks ago when idly watching Q&A prior to the recent election. I had no idea who she was at the time.

I found myself shouting at the tv as she spewed utter nonsense. The most telling moment was when she tried to justify her opposition to public health interventions etc by claiming that those who died from COVID-19 were going to die anyway within 2 years. She actually said that out loud. Stunned silence from the studio audience & most of the other panellists. The utter callousness of these anti-lockdown, antivax morons totally laid bare in that one comment.

The Narcissist’s Prayer

That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
And if it is, that’s not my fault.
And if it was, I didn’t mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.

It’s ridiculous that the Brownstain Institute* equates current public health measures to control the spread of COVID-19 to Nazi oppression. Just consider what the population of the Allied countries went through to support the the fight for freedom against the real fascists. Some of the measures, of course, went much too far (Interning Japanese-Canadians and confiscating their assets, for one). Compare that to what is being asked of people now.

Dr Granatstein presents it far more eloquently than I would:
https://www.macleans.ca/society/canadas-wartime-example/

Wear a mask? Get the vaccine? TYRANNY!!!
What a bunch of offensive idiots.

*Poop joke? Yeah, I went there.

That’s an awful lot of verbiage from the Daily Fail that hardly justifies the scare headline about a polio “outbreak”.

You have to get deep into the story to find that there hasn’t been an actual case, and that poliovirus has often been detected in sewage samples, likely from an arrival in the U.K that had received oral polio vaccine. The difference this time is the detection of positives over several months of different but related strains, which could reflect infection within a group of close contacts, but maybe not.

It’s a wake-up call to remind people to have their kids vaccinated, but poor reporting.

“poor reporting”

Truly a masterclass in understatement.

@aairfccha: Just the Daily Heil doing its Two Minutes Hate: “Something something migrants sewer something.” Draw your own conclusions—they certainly do.

I think this “They are all Nazis” emphasis helps lay the groundwork and support for the “Nuremberg 2.0” threats being hurled and physicians and scientists in record numbers these last few weeks. And if these folks get political power I don’t doubt they’ll try to bring it about.

Honestly, I think the Nuremberg shit is their fallback plan in case they don’t grab all the political power they’re after. “Oh now look what you made me do.” You can have a nice clean bloodless pogrom or a bloody paramilitary one; your choice.

Meantime, the people who should be off to Nuremberg 2.0 will probably get a congressional medal or something:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/new-report-on-how-scott-atlas-made-herd-immunity-an-unofficial-us-policy/

I’d like to say “shoot them all”, but at this point that “all” probably numbers a good 20–30 million Americans so you’ve far more chance of starting a Reichstag fire by popping off half-assed. So you had better smash them at the ballot box or Dog help us all.

As a research psych this whole thing is hilarious and a great example of how those with anti-social ideals (allowing diseases to run through so they won’t be inconvenienced). None of these Brownstone idiots have the merest clues about what drove Nazism or fascism. This is all just attempts to justify their own policies and desires. They abuse the ideas of “freedom” to justify their selfishness.

“None of these Brownstone idiots have the merest clues about what drove Nazism or fascism.”

As a research psych, your mistake is thinking they care. They know exactly what they’re saying and the purpose for which they’re saying it. This is textbook DARVO, the language of abusers, to justify their abuse. By casting their critics as cruel and violent aggressors, they justify resorting to extreme action to “defend” themselves.

In reality their IMAX-level projecting is about as convincing as Poland invading Germany, but that’s not the point. The point is to grant permission to those who already want to act but don’t want to own responsibility for their actions. The flimsiest rationale will do for people already willfully lying to themselves.

You want to understand antivaxxers, Trumpers, narcissists, psychopaths, and the rest, start by understanding the language and behavior of domestic violence.

And understand too, when given the choice, most bystanders will studiously choose to ignore the abuse. “Not my responsibility. Not my fault.” So make it.

“And understand too, when given the choice, most bystanders will studiously choose to ignore the abuse. “Not my responsibility. Not my fault.””

And yet the libertarians chose to believe that a society will function with minimal government because everyone will step up, take responsibility, risk their lives in defence of others, chip in financially for civic reasons…

You’re overanalyzing. As I quoted in the other thread:

To a narcissist the ‘truth’ is not seen as a finite, fixed entity, but as being malleable – as being whatever the narcissist says it is, at the time they say it. The truth is simply whatever serves the narcissist at that particular time.

Big-L Libertarianism just being narcissism framed as a political ethos (Hi, John!), Truth is whatever the Big-L Libertarian says it is, in the moment he says it. Reason and history can tell us it’ll be a feudalist shithole all they like; he doesn’t care. He knows it will be a freedom paradise, so that’s what it is. The world is a far simpler place when you only count to One.

Not unexpected, unfortunately. BTW, sorry there was no new post today. I unexpectedly had to schedule a bunch of cases today and this has to go to bed early. (I normally don’t operate on Fridays.)

And Clarence Thomas called for Lawrence, Griswald, and Obergefell to be overturned on similar lines: paving the way for states to reinstate bans on sodomy, contraception, and gay marriage.

But before that, guns guns guns. Of course, the supposed Constitutional principles applied in the two rulings are absolutely contradictory… but that’s kinda the point, isn’t it? The demonstration of unbridled power.

Lawrence, Griswald, and Obergefell, but interestingly not Loving. Maybe that’s because he’s a self-serving sadist and not actually an originalist of any kind!

I am just beyond angry, scared and afraid. How do people becomes this hateful?

If Thomas was really an originalist, he would only have three-fifths of a vote on the Court.

It’s not a coincidence the states with the highest death rates from Covid are also the most anti-abortion states – with Mississippi at the top of both lists. Covidiocracy.

A new piece by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker looks to my layman’s eye to include a useful review of the medical dangers of abortion bans — not back-alley procedures but how the legislation affects treatments for complications in pregnancy. (Possible subject for RI??)

That’s a good point: many medications and treatments are not tested in pregnant people, and in general the guidelines are “don’t take anything”, based on no data at all.

So in states like GA and LA, would/could doctors be prosecuted for treating a pregnant patient’s breast cancer? For continuing psychiatric medication? For ordering or conducting imaging for trauma?

(And isn’t it sad that I can’t even think of a famous historical woman doctor of obstetrics to say “Dr So-and-so wept”?)

Thanks for mentioning the New Yorker article. I’ve shared it among my friends, and we’re all appalled — and agree that abortion bans will criminalize pregnancy and other OB/GYN conditions.

Thanks for mentioning the New Yorker article.

I don’t know why Tolentino felt the need to do this:

“Even in states such as California, where the law explicitly prohibits charging women with murder after a pregnancy loss, conservative prosecutors are doing so anyway.”

What Calmatters actually reported is

“Across the entire state in the last three decades, Fagundes is the only prosecutor who has charged women who miscarry with murder.”

As expected, anti-vaxxers Katie Wright and Kim Rossi ( @ katiewr31413491; @ Age of Autism) can’t understand how the governor of NY can support abortion rights and yet discriminate against vaccination choice advocates.

In other SARS-CoV-2 news.

A National Institutes of Health-funded study has found that people with food allergies are less likely to become infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, than people without them.

Food allergy is associated with lower risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/food-allergy-associated-lower-risk-sars-cov-2-infection

@ Orac’s minions,

Hmm, compliments my recently published medical paper:

https://ijsra.net/sites/default/files/IJSRA-2021-0196.pdf

@ Orac,

WTF, allowing “nobody” to publish a guest post at RI is awful. A dissed and unhappy minion MJD is.

Speaking of Nazis, remember that they suppressed sales of comfy pillows. At least that’s what the CEO of MyPillow, Mike Lindell seems to be saying.

Mike, who is battling for the #2 spot on America’s list of Crazy Mikes, is fighting a battle of Biblical proportions for the soul and wallet of America.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mypillow-ceo-mike-lindell-compared-walmart-to-nazi-germany-2022-6

Remember that the modern-day Inquisition uses all the tools at its disposal, including the comfy pillow. And the comfy chair.

This is merely another iteration of the tried and tested maxim practiced by those on the right ‘accuse others of things we ourselves are guilty of’

Because I’m usually there anyway, I decided to look at and catalogue how alties have reacted to the SCOTUS ruling to show both their stated position and how they might use the issue to affect their followers- which tells us a lot about them and their perceived audiences:
— most of them have said NOTHING so far
— an obvious exception is NN who laud the decision and castigate “baby killers” and their enablers ( Mike and another writer)
— AoA and CHD do not mention anything despite their habitual rallying calls for ‘medical freedom’
— HOWEVER two writers at the aforementioned sinkholes of unreason, Kim Rossi and Katie Wright on twitter ( AOA’s and KW’S personal one), discuss the irony of women’s rights advocates who fail to recognise “vaccine choice” like the governor of NY
— nothing by Mercola, Green Med Info, RFK jr or Del Bigtree ( the last two on twitter)
— nothing from Null and prn- he was on air after the announcement

Remember that most of these people advocate for personal freedom and choice concerning vaccines and other medical decisions like “natural” or non-SBM.

OBVIOUSLY some of them might be avoiding the issue to ensure that followers who disagree with their position might not leave and stop buying product/ their support.
They always say that they support women and want to improve their lives and health UNLIKE SBM which harms women.
RFK jr and Del are/ were liberals; alties who tell followers to not follow the dictates of SBM which destroys personal choice are strangely SILENT now.
I’ll see if anyone speaks up one way or the other.

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