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Phil Magness Profile picture
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24 Dec, 6 tweets, 4 min read
When recently asked to comment on the Collins/Fauci email scandal over the ordered "take down" of the Great Barrington Declaration, the NIH referred a reporter to the Wikipedia page of the GBD.

Because "science," or something.
And speaking of Wikipedia, here's an experiment for you. Try proposing an edit on that page that documents Collins and Fauci's collusion to launch a media smear campaign against the GBD.

Let's see how long it lasts.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bar…
To give you a glimpse of the current GBD Wikipedia article, it heavily relies on the blog of a conspiracy theory writer named @NafeezAhmed.

Before Covid, Ahmed was best known for promoting "jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams"-style arguments about 9/11. web.archive.org/web/2006102815…
@NafeezAhmed For a further glimpse about the reliability of Wikipedia, Nafeez Ahmed's own wiki page is aggressively edited by single-purpose sockpuppet accounts to ensure that no mention of his 9/11 Truther conspiracy theorizing ever makes it into the page.

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti…
@NafeezAhmed Last year after he turned his conspiracy theory focus over to the GBD, I found several old blog posts where Nafeez Ahmed promoted outright loony theories about 9/11 and jet fuel.

Ahmed tried to purge his blog of them, but the internet never forgets.

web.archive.org/web/2006102815…
@NafeezAhmed More importantly though, Ahmed is hardly a neutral party. A few days after the GBD came out, he tried to orchestrate a twitter campaign to flood its signature page with hoax submissions - right when Fauci & Collins were pushing their own "take down" effort
washingtonexaminer.com/news/pro-lockd…

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More from @PhilWMagness

Phil Magness Profile picture
18 Dec
Time for some more documents from the Fauci/Collins email dump, picking up where we left off on 10/16/2020...
Up next we have the Washington Post, which sent Fauci's underlings a request for comment on the Great Barrington Declaration.
The message didn't make it to Fauci in time for the story though, which ran on the 16th. By the time his chief of staff got it on the 18th it was already out.

Keep in mind that Fauci was away for an unspecified reason on 10/16 that was redacted from the emails.
Read 8 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
18 Dec
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
Read 14 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
12 Dec
There's something really fishy about US historical inequality data in the new Piketty et al "World Inequality Report," especially pre-WWII.

Dashed red line was his old series, solid line is new one.

Yet corrections to his pre-WWII (dashed blue) should have *lowered* inequality.
Here's the reason. Piketty's report is trying to make a strong causal claim that progressive taxation & spending policies made inequality decline after WWII.

This is not accurate though.
In reality, the Piketty series' depicted WWII drop (1941-45) is almost entirely a statistical relic of unaccounted for changes in IRS data reporting + Piketty's failure to reconcile his denominator to IRS accounting.

Most of the decline happened pre-WWII bc of the Depression.
Read 4 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
11 Dec
Considering that the 1619 Project book dropped the two lines of text from Matthew Desmond's essay that led me to request a correction from the NYT in November 2019 (they refused at the time), I think it's fair to request an apology in print from @nhannahjones and @jakesilverstein
Specifically, Desmond dropped the false "calibrated torture" thesis of Ed Baptist, which was based on Baptist's misrepresentation of cotton production statistics from Olmstead and Rhode.

When I brought this to the NYT's attention, they ignored it. Now they cite Olmstead & Rhode. Image
Next I asked the NYT to retract Desmond's claim that Microsoft excel descended from plantation accounting books. Desmond inverted his own source, who wrote that excel did NOT come from the plantations.

Jake Silverstein specifically refused to make this correction in Feb 2020.
Read 4 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
10 Dec
Oh my. Ed Baptist appears to have been sent down the 1619 Project's memory hole in the new book edition. Image
In Baptist's place, Matthew Desmond now cites Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, who made a devastating critique of Baptist...

...and yet strangely he still retains Baptist's false 'calibrated torture' thesis, asserting that it "surely played [a] part as well." Image
The book's removal of Baptist is fascinating, because I pointed the problems with his thesis out to the NY Times very early on after the 1619 Project came out.

@nhannahjones and @jakesilverstein had ZERO interest in correcting Baptist's misrepresentations of Olmstead & Rhode. Image
Read 4 tweets
Phil Magness Profile picture
24 Nov
It's starting to look as if a 1619 Project contributor plagiarized another author by cribbing her article and making cosmetic modifications to its text.

philmagness.com/2021/11/did-ke…
Here's Kruse a few years ago specifically touting the page in question:
Here's the original article he cribbed from, by Elizabeth Fowler in the NYT:
Read 9 tweets

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