More on Midwits and Covid Conspirators

When the experts fail you, you just gotta trust even harder

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Scott Adams’ almost-liberation from the epistemic bonds of covid cultism, where he came so close but ultimately fell back into the programming. Since then, he has continued to play the game of “doubting the doubters,” which has generally not been very convincing to most. Indeed, his continuing fixation on the subject makes it seem like the man just can’t get enough of being ratioed. Yet, it’s really not that surprising since trusters have to keep trusting as a shield against disillusionment.

The fun thing about midwits is watching them just keep on trusting even after the object of their trust has been shown to be undependable. In this case, as with millions of other midwits across this country, the trust being placed is in “experts,” people who are supposed to have the knowledge and expertise to handle complex and difficult situations. It has to be disconcerting for them to continue to see their revered experts be consistently wrong and wrongly inconsistent as they keep changing their stories, changing their data and statistics, and even changing something as basic as the definition of a “vaccine.”

One particularly amusing recent tweet from Scott is this one:

This tweet is actually pretty typical of the mindset of a “science truster” since it attributes to science power and function that doesn’t really belong to it. For a lot of folks, “science” is viewed as some sort of infallible process that relies on completely objective data obtained through rigourous experimentation which is subject to interpretation by disinterested, impartial investigators. Of course, anyone who is aware of the decades long replication crisis in studies across dozens of fields of both hard and soft science know that this picture of science is, at best, unwarrantedly optimistic. This doesn’t even get into the problem of corporate money “influencing” results and subsequent public policy decisions (which certainly couldn’t have anything to do with Big Pharma’s Covid vaccines, of course).

But more to the point, the fact is that ALL science is “anecdotal.” All scientific research essentially relies on empirical observations that individual people tell others about. The fact that these observations may be recorded into a lab book doesn’t make them more special than any other. And the fact that they are expected to be reproduceable really doesn’t put them on any level above the data provided by thousands of non-scientists who somehow keep having the same independent observations about the Covid vaccines (to pick a completely random example). At some point, the reasonable person has to determine that rejecting mountains of anecdotal evidences from multiple disparate sources that all point to the same general conclusions comes close to being willfully stupid. Not to mention that there are actually many knowledgeable people in the relevant fields of study who are similarly skeptical about the vaccines and other “Covid-19 responses.”

Above all, there is the expectation that this evidence, and those who provide it, will be honest and aboveboard, which is something that cannot be assumed about any of the official “experts” in government and Big Pharma who are involved in the official response to Covid-19. Let’s face it - at some point the Branch Covidians are just going to have to accept that the officially designated “experts” have been lying to us for two years, and that they’ve done so because they have vested monetary interests and a desire to centralise power into their own hands. I mean, it’s not exactly like this is the first time a government has ever used the pretense of a “crisis” to grant itself emergency powers that never seem to get ungranted. Thinking that this could never happen, especially given how skitzy these “official experts” have acted over the past two years, strains the boundaries of incredulity.

Let’s ask ourselves which is more unbelievable. That people who are already in power, make up a transnational ruling class with little affection or connexion to those they rule over, and who share common ideological interests would coordinate the media, the government, and Big Science (all of which they already control) to engineer a narrative that they consistently follow? Or that a bunch of underconnected internet anons and small-time right wing influencers who are denied access to official media outlets, actively hounded out of polite society, and whose information networks are routinely disrupted by social media crackdowns could do the same? Obviously the latter is more unreasonable to presume, especially considering that the anons and right wingers don’t have the advantage of institutional power and perceived legitimacy backing them up.

Obviously, giving the appearance of being a monolithic creator of opinion makes some people suspicious, which is why The Powers That Be rely upon another artifice that is much beloved of expert trusters - the independent fact checker (which are neither). These are supposed to buttress official narratives by appearing to be “outside nodes” that aren’t “officially” connected to the politicians and experts. Thus, they can be used to present the façade of objectivity. But let’s be honest, anyone who doesn’t think there is a definite narrative being crafted and reinforced across the media (and that “fact checkers” aren’t a part of this) is hopelessly naive at best.

Calling every instance of skepticism about the Covid vaccines (or any other official pronouncement, for that matter) a “conspiracy theory” is a childish and non-thinking approach. Yet, Branch Covidians love this terminology, At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, the term “conspiracy theory” was actually created by the CIA for the express purpose of discrediting criticism of various of its operations and the term proved so useful that it has expanded well beyond its origins. The term is often used to conflate otherwise reasonable and mainstream suppositions about what The Powers That Be appear to be doing with obviously outlandish and strange theories that are held by fringe weirdos. You would simply have to be gullible and undiscerning to believe anything contrary to the official narrative, after all.

I recently observed this sort of approach on a blog that I came across which on many issues seems to have its head screwed on straight, but on this issue of Covid vaccines and allied topics, is a full-on expert trusting site. It is an independent fundamental Baptist site (which are usually extremely conservative) that purports to approach everything from a biblical perspective. Recently appearing on this site was a seven part series of posts about conspiracy theories (first in the series here). Essentially, these posts weren’t so much about conspiracy theories per se as they were about why believing things the author (who is pro-Covid vaccine) disagrees with makes you a gullible conspiracy theorist who is getting led around by the nose by Q-anon believing women, which is a completely different issue altogether.

From cruising through the comments, it was apparent that the author is a complete expert truster, even though (as several commenters pointed out) the same experts who tell us that Covid vaccines are safe and effective also tell us that science “proves” the validity of transgenderism and that homosexuality is natural and even good. This would seem to be discordant with his biblical beliefs and should be enough to cause him to at least question the sources from which he is drawing.

But it didn’t stop this guy, however. His schtick is to say that he wants to examine both sides of the issue objectively to find the truth, and then will link to papers from “official” sources like the CDC. He then asks his detractors to provide “credible sources” that refute the official claims. Of course, since he has already basically dismissed non-official sources as uncredible and relied upon by “conspiracy theorists,” he’s set himself up to “win the argument.” This is obviously a bit intellectually dishonest since it’s not exactly like official sources that are invested in pushing the official narrative are going to start contradicting each other as they’re all on the same side. Even when they do change their stories on occasion, they all change them in a uniform way. Expecting the experts to “tell on themselves” is kind of dumb.

I thought about stepping in and asking the guy if my having 19 years of experience as a scientist in biotechnology/biopharmaceuticals, 15 of which dealt specifically with various stages of vaccine development and monoclonal antibody therapies, might qualify me to be an expert as well. But I didn’t since I figured it wouldn’t matter. As we all know, an “expert” is not someone who knows what they’re talking about but is someone who lends their presumed credibility to the party line.

It’s hard to accept that this site has a lot of discernment since it’s promoting the very thing that is even now at this very moment being used to prepare the world for the sort of antichrist one world government that IFBers have been warning about from the Book of Revelation for generations. One does not have to believe that “they’re injectin’ us with microchips!” to understand where the development of vaccine passes, social credit scores, and all the rest are heading. This is something that is obvious even to many complete unbelievers, how much more so should it be to somebody who actually takes the Book of Revelation seriously?

These are, ultimately, merely two examples among many, many midwit expert trusters that could be given. Sadly, like most cults, their faith in their falsehood will be nearly unshakable. Every contradiction can be explained away. Every proof against their claims will be asked to jump through ever more epicyclic hoops. For the most part, these folks won’t stop because they’re asked to or because they become aware of the internal contradictions and errors in their narrative. Instead, they’ll eventually have to be compelled to leave the rest of us alone before sanity can return to society.