> Substack is great because at least there are some voices out there getting heard. Alex Berenson and Glen Greenwald among the best.
I've mixed feelings about Greenwald, but he is smart and occasionally makes good observations. What good things can be said about Alex Berenson, who The Atlantic memorably called The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man [1]? He seems to depend on basic scientific illiteracy in his readers. Where Greenwald would respond to a substantive critique like the Atlantic's, Berenson seems to hope his readers remain unaware of the critique.
Berenson responds to that laughable description all the time. He loves nothing more than to call himself that when he gets proven right - again - often at the expense of writers in the Atlantic; I'd guess a quarter of his posts consist of "ha ha" type responses where he juxtaposes a tweet he made early in the pandemic alongside a government announcement or newly released scientific paper saying the same thing.
Neither of the two links you provide to his blog take any of the claims from the Atlantic piece and refute it. He mocks the title of the Atlantic piece but does not respond to its content. As far as I can see, it's bluster, pure rhetoric
Do you have any instances of Berenson actually attempting to refute specific claims made in the Atlantic piece?
If you don't read his blog then you probably shouldn't make claims about what he does or doesn't say in it, nor about the scientific literacy of his readers (much higher than average - they will happily peer review studies he posts and highlight in the comments when he's misinterpreted them or when the study is bad). So sure, he has responded to the Atlantic directly, many times.
The Atlantic on why Berenson was wrong: "[he is] arguing that cloth and surgical masks can’t protect against the coronavirus (yes, they can)."
The last three words are links to junk studies or articles of the sort that suddenly became fashionable after April 2020, after many years of studies saying there was no such evidence. But Berenson was and is correct. Mask mandates don't stop transmission or protect against COVID and this has been proven over and over again. Here's Berenson responding to this point by refuting it with another study, but this one is actually high powered and has a reasonable methodology (it isn't a dumb modelling study or lab experiment):
"On Laura Ingraham’s show, he downplayed the vaccines, suggesting that Israel’s experience proved they were considerably less effective than initially claimed"
They were claimed to be 95% effective at stopping infection after two doses. Nobody has believed this for a long time, not even governments, which is why Israel is now up to 4 doses and it still isn't working. This claim was a correct reading of Israel's data.
Now, Berenson shoots from the hip. He likes to treat Substack as if it's Twitter and sometimes publishes stuff that turns out to be wrong. But he doesn't have to be right 100% of the time or even 50% of the time to beat the media outlets criticizing him. The Atlantic should especially pipe down because it's probably the Pandemic's Wrongest Publication:
They've served up some great headlines in recent times. October: "Four measures that are helping Germany beat COVID" (Germany is currently one of the most restrictive countries in Europe). December: "We know enough about Omicron to know we're in trouble" followed by in February: "Open everything: the time to end the pandemic is now".
Anyone reading Berenson has been consistently about 6-12 months ahead of the "mainstream" journalism curve. Anyone reading the Atlantic would have been exposed to a whiplashing of overwrought nonsense that bears no reality to what actually happened.
This isn't the right thread to have this argument and I imagine dang will remove your post, but I just want to note: Trump and his supporters aren't merely alleging that there were some irregularities in the election (which may be true), or that the media was overwhelmingly biased towards Biden (which is definitely true.) They allege that there was enormous, widespread fraud that stole millions of votes and handed the election to Biden despite Trump being the rightful winner - and also that the evidence for this fraud is mounting and damning and there's a huge conspiracy by the media, big tech, etc to cover it up. That's a much stronger claim than anything you say and I'm yet to see good evidence for it.
I'm not sure why you're talking about COVID, Russia, oil prices etc because none of that was mentioned; I actually agree with most of what you wrote in your latter paragraphs. But this isn't the place to have this kind of flamewar.
There's always this effect of "X says there are lots of foo, incredible amounts. But we are good people, which is why we believe that there is practically no foo."
"What, you disagree that we should kick off people who claim that we're wrong to say that there's practically no foo? Let me round you to the X's, who claim there's lots of foo, which is crazy."
(Of course, this caricature is immediately picked up by the people who actually do believe there's lots of foo, and who very much appreciate either them passing as moderates, or the moderates being counted as them.)
And, of course, the reverse. In an outrage-based social media landscape, it is impossible to be a moderate: you will be rounded off to the extremists regardless of what you actually say.
Voting machines are bad. Their use makes it easier to commit fraud. However, those claiming fraud in the 2020 elections claimed "absolute proof" of fraud (Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy's, words) when they were demonstrably bluffing.
It is both the case that voting machines can be compromised and that we know the most well-advertised claims of election fraud in the 2020 election are themselves fraudulent.
If you're talking about experts in voting systems, no they didn't. Trump's CISA appointee to oversee election security, Chris Krebs, claimed the election was highly secure, which in a sense it was, because Trump had long been advertising concerns about the election which stimulated election security efforts. But in security you can never be completely sure the attacker doesn't have some trick you haven't thought of, so nobody competent claimed absolute proof of no fraud.
