Thread by @_johnbye

Covid sceptics' latest cause is the banning of Denis Rancourt from @ResearchGate.

Everyone from @toadmeister to @ClareCraigPath and @profnfenton have tweeted support for him.

The problem is he's a racist crank with no expertise in viruses and a long history of writing nonsense.

His recent output on ResearchGate (which he was repeatedly warned about before the ban) includes articles claiming "vaccines are inherently dangerous" and that the surge in deaths last spring wasn't caused by covid but was "mass homicide by government response".

Before covid he was also a climate change denier.

A 2007 article claimed global warming was a "useful myth" that "deflects attention away from real world issues" such as "power-driven financiers, corporations and their cartels backed by military might".

activistteacher.blogspot.com/2007/02/global…

This seems to be a common thread. As a physics professor in 2005 he turned an environmental studies class into a workshop on "what the high priests of science have been talking about and how science is being used". Without telling university officials.

web.archive.org/web/2012110704…

He then started a blog attacking colleagues.

One series of posts, in which he accused a law professor of acting like the university president's "house negro" and trying to discredit reports of systemic racism, later resulted in him being sued for libel.

canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc…

He walked out of the trial (in which he was representing himself) after accusing the judge of being biased and running a "kangaroo court", and compared it to a Stalinist show trial.

Unsurprisingly he lost the case.

And the appeal.

ottawacitizen.com/news/local-new…

When he was eventually fired by the university in 2009, accused of inflating grades after giving all 23 students on one course an A+, he blamed "the military industrial complex and the Israel lobby" for his misfortune.

web.archive.org/web/2009042308…

This seems to have escalated into a full-on antisemitic rant, in which he apparently accused the "Israel lobby" of being "chief-whip for the US military economic finance empire" and providing "direct and forceful control of politicians and intellectuals".

veteranstodayarchives.com/2014/11/10/the…

This is the man that @toadmeister, @ClareCraigPath, @profnfenton, @NickHudsonCT and others are now defending.

A racist conspiracy theorist who believes Israel and its supporters in the US are secretly running the world, supported by the mainstream media and pop culture.

Maybe, as with Michael Yeadon's Islamaphobia, covid sceptics will turn a blind eye to Rancourt's antisemitism. Because he supports their beliefs on masks, lockdowns and vaccines (despite a lack of expertise in the field).

But don't let them forget they associate with racists.

In case anyone thinks this was an isolated incident, here he is again in 2014, tweeting about a blog post he wrote which says the Israel lobby "serves to align and discipline all the politicians" and uses the holocaust to "levy compliance".

https://twitter.com/denisrancourt/status/495397240228548608?s=19

His covid writings are equally crazy. Here he is way back in March 2020, suggesting covid-19 might be a biological weapon designed to kill Iranians, seeded in China by US soldiers, and that "media hysteria" about the virus was coordinated by the CIA.

activistteacher.blogspot.com/2020/03/is-cor…