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Phil Magness Profile picture
@PhilWMagness
Dec 18, 2021 • 14 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X
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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:

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More from @PhilWMagness

Phil Magness Profile picture
May 1
Marxists: You can't use GDP to show prosperity because it's just a construct of the neoclassical paradigm to reinforce capitalist power disparities.

Also Marxists: Rising inequality proves that capitalism is failing, as per Piketty's stats...which use GDP as their denominator.
Marxists: Capitalism is responsible for climate change, colonialism, slavery, the bubonic plague, and every other disaster and death in human history.

Also Marxists: You can't fault Marxism for the atrocities of explicitly-Marxist states. Those weren't real Marxism.
Marxists: Economists are afraid of Marx and therefore refuse to read him.

Also Marxists: Every economist who reads Marx and methodically rebuts Marx's economic theories is really just part of a neoclassical conspiracy to uphold their own power relationships and capitalism.
Read 6 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
Mar 23
Tariffs are extremely unpopular with the American public (61% view them as harmful) and are uniformly opposed by economists. So why are we pursuing a trade war?

A. Trump stacked his economic team with fanatical band of Tariff Fundamentalist crackpots who support them anyway.
Unlike most tariffs in the receng past, there isn't even a strong lobbyist push behind these ones. Lobbyists usually try to carve out tariffs for specific goods or industries, not impose them on entire countries. That suggests the source of the current tariffs is ideological.
And what are the ideologies? Well, Trump is pro-tariff but with a shallow understanding of how tariffs work. As a result, you get about 5-6 different competing rationales for tariffs that also conflict with each other. Hence the see-saw effect we've seen since February.
Read 8 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
Mar 2
This is the fringe and error-riddled economic history that JD Vance brought into the White House.

americancompass.org/rediscovering-…
It's rooted in a bizarre rehabilitation of the economic philosophy of 19th century Sen. Henry Clay, a large slaveholder from Kentucky who believed that the role of the federal government was to centrally plan the national economy, all fueled by debt finance and a National Bank
When Clay laid out his agenda in a speech in 1824, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were still alive. They were both aghast at what they read, and believed that Clay's agenda was a full-fledged assault on the US Constitution.

independent.org/news/article.a…
Read 5 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
Nov 18, 2024
This exact same pattern may be found for almost every trendy jargon term from academia.

It starts as an obscure proprietary concept on the Marxist far-left fringes of the professoriate. Then from about 2015 onward, it's everywhere. Image
Two simultaneous trends explain why:

1. Starting around 2000, the academy shifted hard-left. With this shift, low-rigor ideological dreck from the Critical Theory fringe became the dominant perspective.

2. Journalism followed academia in adopting & promoting the same concepts.
Related example: the sudden "discovery" of misinformation/disinformation around 2016.

Both terms existed before then, but the academic left and elite journalism settled on them as a tactic to describe and discredit any/all dissenting arguments.. Image
Read 16 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
Sep 3, 2024
Academic leftists: "The reason academia skews left is because we do better research & reality has a left wing bias!"

Also academic leftists: "Here's my CV. I mainly do postcolonial ethnographies of how neoliberal capitalism oppresses indigenous Marxist sex workers in Greenland."
Academic leftists: "Our department won't hire anyone on the right because their research isn't good enough, according to us."

Also academic leftists: "Here's my CV. I mainly write Marxist cat poetry using a critical theory lens. Sometimes my cat is credited as the coauthor."
Academic leftists: "Our department only has leftist students because applicants on the right aren't good enough."

Also academic leftists: "Here's our admissions app. You will be evaluated mainly on whether your DEI statement agrees with intersectional critical theory."
Read 7 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
May 4, 2024
🧵Thread on @gabriel_zucman's claim that billionaires pay a lower tax rate than the average American, as published in yesterday's @nytimes.

The short version: Zucman manipulates his data to fit a pro-tax political narrative. You can see this by comparing to his own earlier work.
In 2018 Zucman (along with Piketty and Saez) published an article in the prestigious Quarterly Journal of Economics, estimating the avg effective tax rate on top income groups. They argued that the gap between top and bottom earner tax rates had closed due to payroll taxes. Image
But they also noticed something interesting when you look at the average effective tax rate paid by the wealthiest 1% of earners. It had only slightly decreased between the 1960s and the present! Image
Read 26 tweets

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