-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Taibbi <taibbi@substack.com>
To: add1dda@aol.com
sun, may 21, 2023 12:04 p.m.

Looking Back on the Sadism of the covid-19 Shaming Campaign

As Matt Orfalea's new video shows, apolgies are due for the media campaign against "the unvaccinated," which unveiled open cruelty as public policy strategy  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

	Open in app or online Looking Back on the Sadism of the covid-19 Shaming Campaign As Matt Orfalea's new video shows, apolgies are due for the media campaign against "the unvaccinated," which unveiled open cruelty as public policy strategy Matt Taibbi and Matt Orfalea May 21 ∙ Preview   Share   There's a scene in videographer Matt Orfalea's arresting new "Nobody is Safe!" compilation in which Jeff Van Gundy — one of the sharpest basketball announcers alive, and one of my favorites to watch — leans back and says, "I don't even understand what means, 'I'm doing my own research.'" The whole quote, from a preseason Heat-Rockets game Van Gundy called in October of 2021: What does that look like, you doing your own research? Are you doing studies yourself? Are you in a lab on a nightly basis? What are you doing? I don't understand what that means, 'I'm doing my own research.' How about this: we've got really smart people… who've already done the research. The subtext of Van Gundy's quote was one of the many stages of the Covid-19 messaging campaign, a collective roar against "asking questions" or "doing your own research." Just a few weeks earlier, Brian Stelter on cnn hosted a panel about "four little words that are hurting America's pandemic response." He showed evil always-villain Sean Hannity repeatedly uttering the "seemingly innocent" phrase, "Do your own research." He then rolled tape of comic Trevor Noah saying, "Nobody who's saying that is getting in a lab and doing tests." In hindsight, who knows, that might have been where Van Gundy got the idea. Make no mistake, however, there was and is an active campaign against people who do their "own research." This was a mostly unexplored theme in the #TwitterFiles material, as we did repeatedly see anti-disinformation "experts" identifying people who didn't quickly accept official messaging without question as already, in a way, spreaders of mis- or disinformation. We touched on this a little in a report about the Stanford Virality Project, which advised that "just asking questions" was a tactic "commonly used by spreaders of misinformation." We also saw it in an Aspen Institute report on misinformation, which recommended "strikes" against people they called "savvy spreaders," i.e. those who used phrases like "just asking questions," evading censors by "couching" misinformation as mere "uncertainty":...