Journalist Brett Kelman just walked into a buzzsaw.
Promoting his latest article on Twitter, he began: "As COVID-19 swept the American South over the past 12 months, our uninformed and selfish choices worsened the pandemic in every way. We paid the price in lives."
In other words, the usual line: you stupid rubes wouldn't listen to your "public health" experts, so the deaths are all your fault.
Well, Ian Miller, who compiles so many of the charts I share with you, happened to see this.
The result was a brutal, bloody beatdown.
Ian began: "Hey Brett, wondering if you can explain this to me...if behavior and rules are so important, why do all of these curves look the same?"
Ol' Brett came back with: "Short answer? Because the behavior was largely the same. My story covers 4 of these states, and in those states residents generally followed the same gathering patterns, resulting in similar infection curves."
Ian wasn't about to let him get away with that.
"You think people in South Carolina and Louisiana behaved the same way? Despite totally different rules and mandates? That’s the explanation?
"How about Kansas and Illinois and West Virginia, same behavior there too?"
Ian keeps going.
"Nevada opened the largest casinos and hotels in the world last spring while California’s been one of the most closed states in the country since March. So we know the behavior’s been different there. What happened?"
Ian won't stop.
"Southern California counties have all had different rules at different times with wildly varying levels of compliance. Didn’t matter here either. Ever thought that maybe behavior is an excuse used by politicians to explain why their policies aren’t working?"
Kelman responded:
"Have I thought about it? Yes. I would like to look more at these charts you are posting, but not as Twitter screenshots. Mind sharing your source for these images?"
Ian proceeds to do so (they're listed at the bottom of each chart), with most of the data coming from the covidtracking dot com site.
Kelman thanks him, and the exchange ends.
It is virtually certain that Kelman had never seen any of this. He had bought the "it's your fault" argument hook, line, and sinker.
The chart for Arizona, Nevada, and California is especially important, because the LA Times and the government of California are trying to take the credit for the decline in cases. But Arizona and Nevada didn't have such extreme lockdowns, and their curves are about the same.
If we had actual journalists, our "public health officials" (I cannot use that phrase except inside mocking quotation marks) would be mercilessly interrogated about all this on a daily basis.
What we have instead are curious, honest people like Ian Miller who report the truths we should be reading in the news.
Of course, we also report stuff like this inside that little place in cyberspace where you know you belong: The Tom Woods Show Elite.
Think of it as an investment in your mental health in a world gone madly wrong:
