Fireside Chats at the Anti-Intellectual Bonfire
Podcast Jay and Oster the Fraudster on the Same Stage?!
Tomorrow on April 23rd, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are holding a “Fireside Chat” about “Enhancing the Integrity of the Social and Behavioral Sciences,” “featuring top policymakers and advocates for change.” One of the most prestigious institutions for science and medicine in America has invited two of the most unscientific voices of the past several years: Jay Bhattacharya and Emily Oster. Not to point out their total lack of credibility caused by their constant errors & inability to admit them. Not to denounce weaponized quackery to advance a reactionary agenda. Instead, the NASEM is lending its credibility to the ongoing campaign to rewrite & obfuscate the history of COVID-19 as a submissive surrender to the narcissistic delusions of Donald Trump and RFK Jr.
Now the PAI has spent years covering both of these laptop class academics and their constant errors in the past, which can be contrasted with a growing mountain of evidence showing the harms of COVID-19 - a reality that both have denied; especially for children. We’ve also covered that both made quite a pretty penny spewing propaganda on behalf of lecherous conservative billionaires such as vampire Peter Thiel and cape-wearing neo-Confederate Jeffrey Tucker, just the same with Big Tobacco and oil companies. It’s a tired old playbook that we’ve seen time and time again, and yet… those whose job it is to know better keep falling for it.
The National Academies of Sciences hosting Oster & Jay for a “fireside chat,” alluding to images of President Franklin D. Roosevelt speaking directly to Americans through a Great Depression and a Second World War. Sorry, but making bank while falsely assuring parents that SARS-CoV-2 is harmless to kids isn’t half as heroic. Just because an anti-vaccine quack and his cronies have infested the Department of Health and Human Services, doesn’t mean that widely respected and prestigious organizations need to pretend that they’re worth platforming, much less be endorsed as “top policymakers and advocates for change.”
Should sports debate shows be bringing on 8-year-old Little Leaguers to critique the batting technique of the New York Yankees? Not doing so is censorship, y’know!
What’s even more offensive is that the National Academies of Sciences could have taken this opportunity to platform the scientists who have done critical research on the impacts of COVID-19, such as Putrino Lab. They could have platformed the doctors who are treating the millions of Americans disabled by COVID-19, including many children. They could have even been bold and platformed the engineers whose knowledge of how to prevent the transmission of viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 was soundly rejected by Oster and Bhattacharya! Instead, we get useless economists. Why shouldn’t we call this out for what it is? Censorship. Censorship of real science, engineering, and medicine in order to waste the spotlight on incompetent fraudsters blabbering nonsense to obfuscate the facts.
Why doesn’t the National Academies of Sciences just cut out the middlemen entirely, and bring on the billionaires directly to decree just what scientific facts the public are allowed to believe in?
An Alternative 2020
Let us briefly imagine a very different timeline.
The day after the online petition that was the Great Barrington Declaration was published, the administrations of Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford Universities put out a joint statement condemning the GBD and terminating the professorships of Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and Sunetra Gupta for unethical misconduct, exploiting the credibility of their respective institutions to sabotage the COVID-19 response. Brown University kicks Emily Oster to the curb for data fraud on behalf of lecherous billionaires. The University of California San Francisco sends Monica Gandhi packing for mocking those taking the pandemic seriously and later gives Vinay Prasad the boot for claiming that public health mandates are a gateway drug to fascism.
Together, these universities put their foot down and declare that the wealthy cannot buy science, and that gross incompetence during a crisis will not be tolerated. Would conservatives whine about censorship? That’s what they always do, so who cares?
Let’s take this fantasy another step further and start imagining an alternative timeline in which journalists at The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and other outlets honestly report the truth: crooked billionaires are attempting to sabotage the pandemic response, putting American lives at risk. Massive front-page exposes on how propaganda outlets such as Collateral Global and the Brownstone Institutes are muddying the waters, misleading the public with the help of credentialed yet crooked academics. Truth be told, most people don’t want the “Metaverse” dork or a cape-wearing neo-Confederate influencing decisions about the health of their children in the midst of a crisis. Yet, that’s what these institutions Americans should be able to trust helped make possible!
With all of the shamelessly unproductive distractions dumped in the garbage, we could start to have an actual policy debate about how to best save lives & safeguard the public’s health in the onset of the disaster. Instead, we’ve had to waste so many years & lives having to relitigate basic facts and argue against the absolute laziest, bad-faith attacks. The academy is supposed to be a great filter for discarding frivolous nonsense, and instead, the National Academies are helping to legitimize a regressive, anti-intellectual decline that celebrates widespread, unchecked pestilence.
A Harsh Proposal
Here’s a hotly controversial policy proposal nobody will like: The universities which choose to fail to enforce professional standards amongst their faculty - in which unqualified academics misrepresented themselves as experts on all-things COVID-19, often lashing out with childish & vulgar insults, showing a total disregard for the consequences of their influence - should be brought under strict federal oversight. The wealthy shouldn’t be able to buy their desired policy agendas (such as hundreds of thousands of preventable COVID-19 deaths) by buying the credibility of the academy and laundering this influence through our leading media outlets. If you won’t show respect for the public by keeping your own house clean, then maybe the government needs to come in and do it for you.
Most academics, doctors, and scientists in America are perfectly reasonable people. Unfortunately, they found themselves demonized and vilified as part of a massive anti-vaccine propaganda campaign that found itself legitimized in more mainstream media outlets, and the administration of their institutions that is supposed to have their backs cowardly stayed silent. We should be able trust the academy to separate fact from fiction, unthinking they would ever defer to the whims of wealthy jerks. This isn’t about censoring free speech, but instead defending free speech, by ensuring that factual information used to inform serious policy debates aren’t drowned out by a well-funded torrent of absurd nonsense.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine could have put on an incredible panel on how Bhattacharya and Oster should have been laughed out of the room in 2020. They could have hosted people with relevant qualifications about how to best minimize the negative impacts of COVID-19 in 2020. Instead, they’re putting on another useless fact-free podcast rewriting history.
If America is to survive through the many challenges, we face (fun side-effect of climate collapse: more pandemics like COVID-19!) we have to make a major shift in our politics, economics, and culture.
