From the Tom Woods Letter:
One of the most laughable developments of recent years has been the rise of the “fact-checker.”
The fact-checker, in the fantasy version, is a nonpartisan, dispassionate expert who wants to prevent people from being misled.
In the planet-Earth version, the fact checker is a hyperpartisan fanatic who wants to prevent people from entertaining thoughts at odds with the narrative the regime is trying to present.
My worst run-in with a fact-checker happened — when else? — in 2020. I had given a 20-minute talk called “The COVID Cult” at a Ron Paul event outside Houston.
In those 20 minutes I packed in as much common sense about the situation as I could, along with a bunch of charts that looked the opposite of how they should have if the alleged “mitigation measures” did any good.
The video took off — by the time Big Tech banned it, it had had 1.5 million views.
When they banned it, they rubbed salt in the wound with one of their absurd “fact checks.”
I devoted episode #1782 of the Tom Woods Show to refuting it.
Here’s a sample.
First, they sure didn’t like my mask charts!
Most of those charts showed one key thing: if you take an individual country, look at its graph of “cases,” and then try to guess where the mask mandate went into effect, you’ll always be wrong. It’s entirely random.
It’s not like (1) there are lots of cases, then (2) at the top there’s a mask mandate, and then (3) the cases go away. It’s random.
The “fact check” thought I was comparing one country with another, and said that there are many factors other than masks that can account for differences. Well, duh. But most of my presentation wasn’t comparing one country with another. It was comparing countries with themselves.
(Although you’d better believe that if the charts showed masked countries doing better, Facebook would have cited that against me without any of this concern for subtlety.)
And the point is this: the CDC director at the time was obviously full of it when he said that 4-6 weeks of mask wearing would get “cases” way down. Even Michael Osterholm, on Joe Biden’s COVID team, called that remark “unfortunate” (which is academicspeak for “b.s.”).
Also in my talk I made oblique reference to the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement authored by scientists from Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, and co-signed by countless more experts and citizens, calling lockdowns a public health fiasco and recommending instead a “focused protection” approach that would have allowed the young to resume their lives while protecting the old.
The entirety of the “fact check” on this was that some public health officials have said this is a bad idea.
There’s controversy about it, so that makes it wrong!
I further said that the public health establishment had been silent on the collateral damages of lockdown. This is wrong, I was told — why, hadn’t I seen, buried in paragraph 15, the World Health Organization saying something about it in September?
September! Six months after the fiasco started they finally make the tiniest acknowledgment of the damage, and that merits a “fact check”?
Anyway:
I bring this up because my friend Jeremy Hammond was just banned from LinkedIn for posting things that are indisputably true, but which the “fact-checkers” don’t like.
We discussed that and the larger phenomenon on my show, in an episode I withheld from YouTube.
You need to hear this:
https://tomwoods.com/ep-2198-the-fact-checker-scam/
Tom Woods
P.S. There are plenty of actual lies that do need to be fact checked, but those are allowed to stay. Hence my dashboard university, where we “fact check” the b.s. history and economics they fed us in school: http://www.LibertyClassroom.com
