Decoding Empty Qualifiers
Manipulative Messaging in Public Health Discourse
Imagine, for a moment: You're a young straight man in your late teens, maybe early twenties, and you spent your teenage years as a dorky, socially awkward computer gamer. You're now in college, and you've just heard about this brand-new invention called... "WOMEN." Maybe you'd like to date one, even, but you're not sure where to even start. You look in the mirror, and ask yourself a tough question: "How do I become attractive to women, so that they want to date me?" How do you dress yourself, how do you hold a conversation, flirt, etc. are all things you'll have to learn as a young man, in order to sell yourself as a desirable romantic partner.
There's an entire scam artist industry of sleazebags preying upon these men's desires, in what is loosely referred to as "pick-up artists." Essentially, they teach being an insufferable, anti-social asshole but wrap it up in coded language to make it seem masculine and attractive. Maybe you've heard of some of these terms, such as: "building rapport," "kino," or worst of all, the "HB7." This is all misogynistic garbage meant to prey upon romantically inexperienced men and sell them a range of classes, social media subscriptions, and other products that are utterly worthless snake-oil. Frankly, it should be outlawed.
Manipulative language is how worthless, counter-productive garbage is often repackaged and sold to the public as useful, informative, and/or something worth throwing money at. From relationship advice to public health, bad actors wrap up their bad ideas in seductive, manipulative language to take advantage of those looking for easy answers to complex problems.
We've talked before about how "Evidence-Based Medicine" is a construct that many who insist on a blind, faith-based approach to embracing SARS-CoV-2 and ignoring its potential for harm often use to offer legitimacy to their opinions, and subtly attack the credibility of others by inferring their beliefs are merely based in emotion, politics, or values.
The Great Barrington Declaration's Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and their most loyal sycophant, Vinay Prasad of UCSF, have all greatly abused the term "evidence based" to justify their fictional fantasy that COVID-19 would magically go away on its own with enough infections of millions of your unvaccinated children. They now regularly attack the mounting evidence that shows repeated COVID-19 infections are harming children, as accepting the reality that they got everything around SARS-CoV-2 dead wrong would require admitting fault.
In a truly scientific debate, moderators are on the lookout for a number of logical fallacies that, when deployed, are meant to be called out. Deploying a logical fallacy only shows how the speaker lacks confidence in their own arguments, and instead baselessly attacks their opponent. "Ad hominem," "No True Scotsman," and other fallacies such as this are easy to learn and point out, especially as they’re abused by anti-vax grifters and other crusaders against public health.
There used to be a time where tobacco companies used the endorsements of doctors to help advertise their harmful, cancer-causing products, as perfectly safe. This was obviously not the case. Yet, for challenging this "evidence-based" message that cigarettes are perfectly safe according to a diverse panel of calm-mongering medical professionals, you could easily be labeled as "irrational."
"Rational Ground," helmed by conservative propagandist Justin Hart, (PAI Profile here) who wanted to mass infect tens of millions of American children with SARS-CoV-2 in April 2020, is a COVID disinformation propaganda outlet that employs such a fallacy, inferring that their critics are irrational and should be soundly ignored at best, or mocked, ridiculed, and threatened at worst. In February 2023, Rational Ground produced a graphic about the immediately debunked Cochrane Review on PPE claiming there was no evidence that they worked.
Justin irrationally failed to mention how a lead author on this Cochrane review of PPE, Carl Heneghan, agreed with Hart when he was advising the UK Government to let COVID-19 infect, disable, and yes, kill countless unvaccinated millions in early 2020. Rational Ground took a lot of money from wealthy interests to flood social media platforms such as Substack and Twitter with irrational garbage, in the hopes of misleading the public into embracing COVID-19. They sadly succeeded with the help of the Biden Administration in 2021.
By embracing COVID-19, you were sacrificing your health for "normalcy." The term "normal" became a sort of blunt object across the spectrum of advocates for unmitigated COVID-19. Much like conservatives and "common sense," the term "normal" is completely artificial and can mean absolutely anything - human civilization has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, while the automobile has only been around for a little over a century, and yet it’s completely defined much of what is considered “normal” in modern America. In 2019, if you suggested infecting tens of millions of children with a SARS virus was an acceptable "normal," you would be rightly branded as a morally depraved sadist and shouted down.
Yet, we now have children who have now suffered half-a-dozen infections with SARS-CoV-2, and many have lost their health and dreams as a result, with no treatment or cure on the horizon. That has become their new "normal." Those who advocated gambling with these children's health on the roulette table and lost, completely abandoned these kids and shrugged their shoulders as they cashed their checks from Substack, speaking gigs, book deals, and so on.
A 2022 astroturf anti-vax group was even bold enough to go by the name “Urgency of Normal,” and was helmed by Scott J. Balsitis, a major fan of white nationalist creep Christopher Rufo. Do you seriously believe white nationalists and their supporters should be dictating what is “normal” for your children?
Much like the exploitative "gurus" of the pickup-artist industry, the grifters of public health who masquerade as advocates for children are exploiting (rightfully) anxious parents by selling them easy, but obviously wrong, answers to the complex challenges presented by the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, wrapped in empty qualifiers like "normal." Many children have paid a horrific price as a result, forced to shoulder the burden of their parents' poor judgement.
As we dive into the illogical hellscape of a second Trump administration, the liberals who embraced these empty qualifiers to defend the Biden-Harris Administration's botched pandemic response, including the mass infection of tens of millions of unvaccinated children with SARS-CoV-2, should take a hard look in the mirror and realize how they helped normalize this practice of embracing manipulative language to sell bad public health policies, as "Make America Healthy Again" has become a centerpiece of potential future Health & Human Services director and anti-vax grifter Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
It shouldn't be complicated to understand that by embracing pestilence, RFK Jr's vision of Making America "Healthy" Again through anti-vax quackery and libertarian deregulation is the complete opposite of "health." Sadly, Americans were already primed to accept this precedent from four years of the Biden-Harris Administration’s botched pandemic response, which shattered millions of American families in many different ways. It would cost Harris her shot at the White House.
Without an ounce of self-reflection or shame, many of the liberal bad actors of the Biden Administration including Leana Wen and Emily Oster are now working overtime to normalize bad public health practices championed by anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., such as drinking unpasteurized, or “raw,” milk, or raging against fluoride in the drinking water, a long-running conspiracy theory. There is a shared philosophical tenet between quacks like RFK Jr, and think-tank hacks like Wen and Oster: the libertarian delusion that the government shouldn’t play a role in protecting the public’s health, and to let bad actors run wild & unpunished with their scams.
If the Democrat Party ever dreams of being a serious contender for winning back control of the federal government from a dystopian hyper-grift movement full of rabid cranks that believe everything they read on conservative social media, then rebuilding the government’s role in protecting the public’s health from bad actors will be a central priority. That will require a certain ideological discipline which soundly rejects entertaining the nonsense of anti-vax crusaders like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. - whose most trusted medical “expert” is Andrew Wakefield, who lost his medical license after performing highly invasive procedures, including colonoscopies, on very young children. This is the quackery that liberals are happy to normalize.
It’s not normal, and actually quite dangerous, to drink unpasteurized milk. Fluoride is in the drinking water to fight pediatric tooth decay and has proven highly effective in doing so. Of the thousands of American children that have died of COVID-19, almost all of them were unvaccinated. Defending pestilence, especially in children, as a “reasonable choice,” the way that liberal cranks like Leana Wen are framing with empty qualifiers, is utterly disqualifying for the challenges we face.
You don’t win by giving your enemy everything they want on a silver platter.
