Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
Phil Magness Profile picture
@PhilWMagness
Dec 18, 2021 • 14 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X
Scrolly
Thread summarizing what we've learned so far of the Fauci/Collins email dump on the Great Barrington Declaration:

It starts on 10/14/20 when Collins instructs Fauci and his staff to "take down" the GBD and the "fringe" scientists behind it. Image
Fauci responds immediately by circulating an article against the GBD from that austere scientific authority, @WiredUK. Image
The Fauci-endorsed Wired article is noteworthy for having one of the single worst hot-takes of the entire pandemic. It declared in October 2020 that the GBD should be ignored, because lockdowns were a thing of the past and would not be returning!

wired.co.uk/article/great-… Image
The next day, Fauci sends Collins an angry rant against the GBD in the @thenation by @gregggonsalves.

Collins approves. Image
Far from a scientific study refuting the GBD, Gonsalves's article is a political op-ed attacking @jacobin magazine for breaking "solidarity" with other far-left media outlets on lockdowns. Why? Because Jacobin ran an interview with @MartinKulldorff on how lockdowns hurt the poor. Image
Over the weekend, Collins launches the smear campaign against the GBD in the Washington Post.

washingtonpost.com/health/covid-h… Image
Collins and Fauci email each other about the WaPo hit, with Fauci quipping that the White House was "too busy with other things to worry about this" - perhaps an election reference? - and therefore would not push back on the anti-GBD campaign. Image
In the meantime, Gonsalves also gets in contact with Collins to volunteer his services (along with future @CDCDirector Rochelle Walensky) to attack the GBD in the media.

Collins approves, and forwards it to Fauci and a bunch of NIH underlings. Image
In the meantime, @gregggonsalves was having a public meltdown against the GBD on twitter.

Image
The emails get murky around 10/14/20, because the NIH redacted a bunch of emails that appear to be between Fauci and Collins.

Surrounding context suggests they were discussing how to trash the GBD if it came up at the WH Covid task force meeting on 10/16. Image
On the morning of the Covid task force meeting, Fauci sends Deborah Birx this email alerting her about the need to oppose the GBD at the meeting. The unredacted part suggests they are preparing to attack @ScottWAtlas, who was perceived as the task force's champion of the GBD. Image
10/16/20 is as far as I've gotten in piecing together the story of what happened. Still more documents to go through, including some more explosive revelations about where Fauci was getting his anti-GBD talking points. So stay tuned!
*typo in the above. The first email about "taking down" the GBD was on 10/8/20 - three days after the GBD broke into the news and went viral.
Here's an update with the next round of emails:

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Phil Magness

Phil Magness Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @PhilWMagness

Phil Magness Profile picture
Jun 18
Far-left historians today often exaggerate the importance of slavery to capitalism by tracing cotton's derivative products globally.

That said, there is one 19th century figure who directly benefitted from slave-produced cotton: Karl Marx.

For most of his adult life, Marx relied on handouts from his friend Friedrich Engels for his main source of income. From the 1840s-1869 Marx send Engels a non-stop stream of requests for money, which Engels usually obliged. After 1869, Engels sold his business partnership and began giving Marx a regular yearly allowance from the proceeds that more or less lasted until his death in 1883.

Engels's business, in turn, was a large textile mill in Manchester operated by his father's firm Ermen and Engels. And what did that mill make? Yarns and fabrics out of slave-produced cotton, which it sourced from the American south.

We know this because, in 1862, Engels wrote a letter to Marx about the American Civil War in which he reported that cotton from the south had dried up because of the blockade. Other business records indicate that Ermen and Engels got their cotton from shipments through Liverpool, which in the 1840s-1861 meant southern plantation cotton imports from the United States. Indeed, southern cotton would have been the raw material that sustained the majority of Engels' working career since he retired only 4 years after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in the United States. His firm likely also got cotton from other sources such as Egypt during the Civil War, but for most of his multi-decade career there, the cotton would have been slave-produced.

That means Engels very much made his family fortune as a derivative beneficiary of American slavery. And he used that slave-derived fortune to directly subsidize Karl Marx ;-)Image
Marx also knew where his patron's money was ultimately coming from, because Engels would write him detailed letters about the cotton markets in America - letters that were informed by his own business stake as a cotton textile mill manager. Image
We also know that Engels himself had no problem with his slave-produced inputs. In 1852 he wrote Marx, reporting that he had just pitched his father on relocating to Liverpool...

...where he would serve as the cotton procurement agent for the factory. Image
Read 6 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
Jun 7
I pick on Slobodian in the thread below as an egregious and recurring offender. But this sort of quote-editing by leftist scholars is *extremely* common in academia.

Here's another by Nancy MacLean & Sandy Darity where they transform an attack on Apartheid into a defense of it. Image
MacLean et all published the manipulated quote above (along with several other similar manipulations) in an article for the Australian journal "History of Economics Review" in 2023. Image
In 2023 trio of us wrote a response comment calling attention to MacLean et al's blatant misrepresentations & sent it to the journal as a request for correction.

We encountered the same pattern of a politically partisan editor running interference to protect MacLean.
Read 10 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
Jun 7
If a historian on the right abused evidence in this way, they'd face career ruination.

When Boston University's Quinn Slobodian does it, he gets a Guggenheim fellowship, book awards, and a Hewlett Foundation grant.

Academia's rot runs far deeper than a simple crisis of rigor. Image
Slobodian does this sort of thing frequently in his published works - almost always to make the person he is misquoting appear to be sympathetic to racism. Image
Here's another where he excerpts out the very next sentence in the passage...because it completely contradicts his own claim. Image
Read 14 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
May 28
🧵We all saw Gabriel Zucman's NYT op-ed justifying the California wealth tax proposal, along with ostentatious claims that billionaires pay lower tax rates than average Americans. Let's dig into the methodology... Image
Zucman & his coauthor Emmanuel Saez have been making this claim in various forms for years and presenting it as "fact," even though they have struggled to gain scholarly acceptance of their approach. Instead, they do "peer review" by sending their stuff to the NYT editorial page
I first caught this pair in 2019 when the rolled out "new" stats claiming that the ultra-wealthy only paid an overall tax rate (federal/state/local) of a little over 20%.

In reality, the wealthiest Americans pay about 41% - a fact admitted in Zucman's own stats from 2018. Image
Read 17 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
May 21
In 2018 Zucman published a paper in a top econ journal that inadvertently revealed the total federal/state/local tax rate of the top 0.001% was ~40%.

A year later, he realized this undermined his wealth tax. So he fudged the stats to fit his politics.

Image
Details and receipts here, including how I caught Zucman initially trying to hide the old stats off his website.

philmagness.com/2019/10/someth…
And here is a longer academic journal article I wrote about this episode, including digging into what Zucman altered to put his thumb on the statistical scale. independent.org/wp-content/upl…
Read 5 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
May 12
🧵The Trump admin's defense of Section 122 tariffs has a huge legal obstacle that almost nobody has noticed thus far.

It comes from an obscure provision of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. I'll explain below.
Let's start with Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. This is the provision that Trump used to reinstate a 10% across the board tariff after SCOTUS struck down his IEEPA tariffs in February.

The US Court of International Trade ruled against Trump on Thursday. He has appealed.
At issue with Section 122 is the meaning of "Balance of Payments deficits," which must exist before the president can impose tariffs through this law.

Historically, a BoP deficit meant a drawdown on the country's official monetary reserves under the Bretton Woods exchange system
Read 12 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

Send Email!

:(