How did an anti-pot nitwit become an anti-vax nitwit? An investigation.
The road to becoming a contrarian edgelord is paved with lots of attention and money.
Great news for the discourse. '“Journalist” Alex Berenson has had his Twitter account reinstated. And he’s back with a bang, a middle-aged guy hip-hop reference from 2000, a big kiss from Elon Musk and more vaccine denial.
“Shady's back. Tell a friend. For the full story of my reinstatment, including @Twitter's acknowledgment of error, see my Substack,” he posted, before going straight into vaccine truthering.
“It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it - at best - as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”
I actually don’t think Twitter should be banning people, if only because it fuels their grievances and catapults their careers on alternative platforms. I didn’t know the brave truthteller had been thusly silenced because he has a blog on this website. So instead I want to investigate the strange trajectory of Berenson’s career.
Berenson started out as a reporter at the New York Times. Then he wrote some mystery books. Then he wrote a book pushing anti-pot tropes even the DEA doesn’t bother with anymore. In Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence, he railed against legalization and claimed marijuana caused psychosis and triggered schizophrenia, thereby leading to violent crime.
“Alex Berenson has a reporter’s tenacity, a novelist’s imagination, and an outsider’s knack for asking intemperate questions,” Malcolm Gladwell gushed. Ah yes. “Asking intemperate questions.” Don’t they literally crucify people for that these days?
Anyway, then he became a vaccine skeptic, following the trajectory of fellow Professional Contrarians™, whose tough interrogations of liberal pieties and the MSDNC have led them to vax trutherism and the warm embrace of Tucker Carlson.
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