Boys, its been over three years now.

And see — how the “marketplace of ideas” works here in America… is we encourage SCIENTIFIC debate. Even challenging debates, when based on real data.

Disagreement in these matters is… common. It is healthy. It is the way life sciences advance, without serious doubt.

But in epidemiology, the spreading of baseless and dangerous claims (DURING a pandemic, about drinking bleach or taking a bovine de-wormer — or colloidal silver potions!) — ones that ended up needlessly killing around 200,000 people in the US — before the real science took hold… ought to be… frowned upon.

And so Dr. Fauci, FDA, the NIH and CMS and HHS all put out wide-spread fact checks, and correcting pamphlets — all to ultimately save low-information / elderly folks’ lives.

The notion that the Powerline boys ludicrously equate this with “censorship“… is churlish beyond any serious argument.

In fact, it was Lloyd’s co-author, John Hinderaker, who throughout the Summer of 2020, kept saying that the fatalities were mostly over, at 20,000 people. He was wrong by a factor of 20X, when the real studies were tallied.

He was telling people to go out, maskless, and spend money in bars and restaurants, to keep his capitalism dreams alive. [HE personally wanted to eat nice dinners out — but few restaurants were doing sit-down dining.]

Telling him to shut his non-medically trained, narcissistic mouth… was no censorship. He was drowned-out, in the marketplace of ideas, by real facts.

These bitter old codgers regularly beclown themselves, now — but their readership is truly of what was once called… the “shop class track” now, so they get away with it, in the main. And Lloyd may be chief among these — just a few days ago, he was praising a guy from 1776 (patriarchal dead whyte dude who owned slaves, no less!) as “having the pulse” on the current, late-2023 actual practices of the Islam faith, and modern Muslims — all as a stereo-typical class. Ugh.

So stupid was that “hot take”, that Scott Johnson wrote a form of polite rebuke, yesterday — to suggest that the 1776 treatise was actually a critique of (wait for it!) Christianity — but used the phrasing “Mahomet”… over and over. Hilarious.

Scott’s utterly dubious claim is that the historians of the day could safely attack “heretical” faiths, like Islam — but critiquing Christianity… would be… a stoning offense. So (in Scott’s telling) everyone knew — just knew! — the words were meant to eviscerate Christian preachers, not Imams (like it was an elite secret code, of some sort). What a crock. And even if (or, ESPECIALLY IF!) that is true — Billings-puss in 2023 quoting it, and referring approvingly to this gross mis-characterization of modern Islam… and Muslims… is disgusting.

And, so… what a pair of putzes. Complete… putzes.