The Grip Tightens

Despite the anti-vaxx clown show that dominated public health this year, the president himself just recently got a Covid booster and a flu shot.

It just goes to show...

Trump and the rest of his posse never drink their own Kool-Aid. They're happy derailing the vaccine approval schedule simply because it plays well with their base. Trump and RFK Jr. will get up in front of the entire world to link autism with common painkillers or rant about windmills for an hour. The "resistance" falls for it every time. Many of you who read this newsletter know better. It's mostly an act. They don't believe any of it. The truth is much darker. They know, and they just don't care.

For them, it's all about money.

They'll pass policy after policy that puts our lives in danger, because it never affects them or their donors. It maximizes profits. They'll always be able to get whatever medical treatments and procedures they want. The misinformation only hurts the plebs. Many of them will never wake up, either.

So it seems to go with Bari Wiess, a flunkie journalist who managed to fail all the way up to the head of CBS News. Her ascent comes as tech billionaires consolidate their grip on the media, buying up everything from Paramount and HBO to Substack and TikTok. They're getting right down to business, appointing free speech czars and purging the organizations of anyone who actually dares to tell the truth. Newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post have all swung right, even more than usual, framing their sanguine coverage of Trump as "moderate."

Bari Weiss emanates a particularly obnoxious form of privilege, and she's been at the heart of the right's manipulation of public opinion on healthcare since the start of the pandemic. Her misinformation platform, dubbed The Free Press, has hosted anti-mask and anti-vaxx content going back to 2021, equating mask and vaccine mandates with tyranny and routinely casting doubt on pandemic mitigations. They've published several opinion pieces by Vinay Prasad, a disgraced physician who used his credentials to ridicule everything from vaccines for children to Corsi-Rosenthal boxes. He explicitly advocated for "letting children catch Omicron," and we've seen the results.

Children are sicker than ever, struggling in school, experiencing developmental delays, and suffering from immune system dysregulation. Long Covid is now the number 1 chronic illness in children. Stacks of peer-reviewed science and legions of experts have called for clean air in public schools, but the media almost completely ignores it all. While RFK Jr. gets most of the credit, Vinay Prasad did substantial damage to public health, and he used platforms like The Free Press to do it.

Unfortunately, we're not going to find a coherent criticism of Bari Weiss in most mainstream outlets. Even NPR sidesteps the gross misinformation pumped out by her publication, instead choosing to describe her as an "outspoken critic." These organizations drop the ball in the fight against fascism and eugenics time and again, and then they cry to us when the fascists chop their funding or fire their comedians.

At least we have a few truth tellers, like Jonathan Howard.

A few weeks ago, Howard sent me his new book, a 600-page tome titled Everyone Else is Lying to You. I've mentioned his first book a few times, We Want Them Infected, a chronicle of the lies that led us here.

Howard's new book lays out the consequences of letting our media run with lies about public health. The lies about Covid have become the lies about measles, about the flu, about RSV, and about autism. Abandoning the field on Covid gave them a big win, and they built on that win to capture our public health agencies, and now they're capturing our media. Vinay Prasad features prominently in this new book as well, simply because he's been the most persistent and the most vehement source of misinformation. Almost nobody revels in being wrong like Prasad.

If you're wondering about the value of a book that chronicles lies and misinformation at such length, consider this piece about Prasad "demanding" YouTube remove videos of himself bashing vaccines. He clearly wants to rewrite his own legacy, and that's just one reason why books like Howard's are so valuable. If the smallest part of you ever thinks there might be a reckoning one day, then that's the point.

We need books like Howard's because they can exist, in our homes, on our hard drives, and they contest the dominant narrative.

They're fighting fascism, for real.

Howard does the kind of heavy lifting I've been trying to do for the last several years, detailing the strategies of misinformation and calling out the lies. For example, he lays to rest any question that we should've "let children catch Omicron," as Prasad urged in late 2021. As Howard reviews, the science has made it extremely clear what an extraordinary mistake it was to push Covid, flu, and RSV infections on children.

It's been a minute since I've written about Covid. My last deep dive came out July 2024, and it's worth reading again for anyone who needs a reminder about why many of us continue to keep taking as many precautions as possible. Earlier this year, I also published a detailed review on N95 masks and their effectiveness. Bottom line, anyone who has spoken out against vaccines or masks like Prasad largely knows they're spreading misinformation, and they're doing it for money and power. Anyone who provides them a platform, like Weiss, is doing the same.

Look no further than Bari Weiss for examples, although you'll note that virtually every single person who spent the last several years bashing public health now enjoys positions of considerable wealth and authority. Many of them are in bed with the wellness industry, which pushes untested, unproven treatments for everything from measles to chronic illness. That was always the point.

As Howard outlines, many of these quacks willfully push misinformation precisely because it aligns with corporate interests and opens doors for them in their own personal careers. They can't cut it as real doctors, real scientists, real journalists, so they have to sell their souls to the super rich and do their bidding. Billionaires and CEOs don't want anyone staying home when they're sick. They want everyone out working, shopping, and generating wealth for them until they drop dead.

They use failed doctors like Prasad and failed journalists like Weiss to do it. The mainstream media gives it all a blessing.

Why have these clowns been so vocal about kids?

Well, you can't run a predatory capitalist economy predicated on mass death and suffering without a somewhat functional education system. Kids have to go to school, so their parents can shlep to work, where they fill trophy office towers and prop up an entire financial ecosystem that would otherwise collapse. And it almost did. As I also wrote about last year, the war on remote work was entirely about preventing a corporate real estate apocalypse. Vaccinating kids, keeping them home when they're sick, giving them masks to wear, it all gets in the way of their profit engines. They don't care about our kids. They simply use them as political props.

Putting Bari Weiss in charge of a major media company, despite zero experience and zero ethics, tells us exactly what we can expect from our media going forward. Substack. TikTok. X. Meta. CBS. ABC. MSNBC. These aren't going to be sites of resistance to fascism or eugenics, not anymore. Many of them helped promote the very lies about Covid that helped boost the anti-vaxxers to power.

Sure, many of us are sick of talking about Covid, but I keep bringing it up because it played a key role in the rise of these fascists. It was the last administration's failures on Covid, on Gaza, on the climate crisis, on human rights, that paved the way for Trump's return to power. They're all intimately connected. Covid remains with us. It will remain with us for generations to come, and it will continue to shape politics in ways that almost everyone else is unwilling to talk about.

As our infrastructure implodes, as climate disasters upend our lives, as ICE raids our offices and apartment complexes, Covid will be there in the background as yet another threat on our lives. It will be there right along with measles, flu, ebola, mpox, tuberculosis, and all the other diseases we aren't dealing with.

That's why we should celebrate every Jonathan Howard, every Taylor Lorenz, every Sarah Kendzior, every Richard Crim, every Christopher Hedges, every Greta Thunberg, every Geoffrey Deihl we've got. We should celebrate them and support them however we can. They're the ones actually fighting fascism.

It's not talkshow hosts and politicians.

It's us.

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