fox files

One of the most laughable developments of recent years has been the rise of the ‘fact-checker(s).’

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 hyper-partisan little snot-nosed fanatic kid sitting in his mommy’s basement with a Hot Pocket who wants to prevent people from entertaining thoughts at odds with the narrative the regime is trying to present.

One of the worst run-in’s with a ‘fact-checker’ happened, when else, in 2020. Speaker Tom Woods had given a 20-minute talk called “The COVID Cult” at a Ron Paul event outside Houston.

In those 20 minutes, he packed in as much common sense about the situation as possible, along with a bunch of charts that looked the opposite of how they should have if the alleged ‘mitigation measures’ did any good.

That video took off. By the time Big Tech banned it, it had 1.5 million views.

When they banned it, they rubbed salt in the wound with one of their absurd ‘fact checks.’

Mr. Woods devoted episode #1782 of the Tom Woods Show to refuting it.

Here’s a sample.

First, they sure didn’t like his mask charts!

Most of those charts showed one key thing: if you take an individual country, look at its graph of ‘cases’, and then tried to guess where the mask mandate went into effect, you’d have always been 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 went away. It was just random and that’s all it was.

The ‘fact checkers’ thought Woods was comparing one country with another, and said that there were many factors other than masks that account for the differences. Well, duh. But most of his 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 him without any of this concern for subtlety.)

And the point is this: the CDC director at that time was obviously full of it when he said that 4-6 weeks of mask wearing would get so-called ‘cases’ way down. Even Michael Osterholm, on Joe Biden’s COVID team, called the remark “unfortunate” (which is academic-speak for complete bullshit).

Also in his talk he 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 still protecting the older and elderly.

The entirety of the ‘fact check’ on this was that some public health officials had said that it was a bad idea.

There’s controversy about it, so that makes it wrong!

Woods further said that the public health establishment had been silent on the collateral damages of lockdown. This is wrong, he was told. Then why hadn’t he seen, buried in paragraph 15, the World Health Organization saying something about it in September?

September! Six months after the fiasco started, they finally made the tiniest acknowledgment of the damage, and that merits a ‘fact check’??????