I'll Stand with the Covid Dissidents
But Who are the Covid Dissidents?
I will admit to have bit of contrarian in me. Put me in a room with liberals—as I have been for most of my work life in non-profit and education jobs—and I will find opportunities to grind against the sacred cows. Put me in a room with conservatives—as I mostly was at Christian College—and I can quickly become the liberal in the room.
The Canadian Psychologist Jordan Peterson likes to talk about “the big five” personality traits, one of which is agreeableness. Having recently taken the test, I was not surprised that I rated on the disagreeable end of the spectrum. I’m sure it’s sometimes or maybe even often annoying trait, but I also doubt it’s going to change much. And it’s necessary. Hopefully I will find ways to harness and channel this trait over time in ways that become more productive, for both myself and the people around me. It’s also not lost on me that you don’t innovate to better technology or legislate to better policy without being willing to subvert norms and even perceived consensus. All change isn’t good, but improvement is change, and we need people who dare to disagree. Just like we need courageous people who are willing to move toward conflict while defending that which ought to be conserved, over again over again.
Let’s talk about Twitter for a moment. I took a break from the platform for a while, in part because I thought it was consuming too much of my writer-liness (this opened me to the possibilities of Substack), and also because I feared it was making me too reactive to the present “current event” and controversy. But I’ve returned in no small part because of the people I have found there.
Honestly, it has, at times, been my best source of information. Some censorship, to be sure, but there were also people engaging in real arguments on Twitter, sometimes even in good faith, and I haven’t always been able to find that in other places. Most of all, what I found on Twitter was that I was not completely alone on some concerns about decreasing Overton Windows on public issues, about a media class that is almost all committed to the same political party, about educational settings that all too often focus on what to think rather than how, and even the perceived weakness to our fundamental, legal right to speech and expression.
I came across individuals like Matt Taibbi, Meghan Daum, Caitlin Flanagan, Chloe Valdary, Nate Silver, Noah Smith, Glenn Greenwald, Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, Musa al-Gharbi, Lee Fang, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Heather Heying, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, and Glenn Loury. Organizations like Heterodox Academy, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and Braver Angels.
There is plenty of substantive disagreement among this group, but the common agreement seemed to be: we get to think. We get to argue. We get to question. Political party doesn’t have to be, and shouldn’t be, the main frame for how we draw conclusions about the world. We even get to change our minds. Oh, and attacking a person’s character who you happen to disagree with (rather than their idea) is weak, and that it’s so common says a good bit about the fragile fabric of our society and so-called democracy.
It’s far from an exact trade, but perhaps it’s not surprising that several of the Substacks I find myself reading comes right out of that Twitter crowd. I think the concerns that brought the aforementioned group together actually got worse during Covid, as governments and other institutions now had a universal excuse to grab for more power and to silence inconvenient voices. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that new names and voices emerged during that time who were also willing to courageously stand against various abuses of power.
Here are three such Covid dissidents and their Substacks for anyone who may interested:
Dr. Aaron Kheriaty (“Human Flourishing”) is an interesting voice in part because he has a very rigorous academic and professional background in both philosophy and medicine. In the “About” section of his Substack, the 47-year-old writes the following: “The real division today is no longer left/right, liberal/conservative, or even Democrat/Republican. It is between those who will accept a technocratic biosecurity surveillance regime and those who will resist.” Oh, and he was fired from his professorship at the University of California-Irvine in December of 2021 for refusing to be vaccinated for Covid-19. Even more interesting is that he’s now one of names on “Missouri v. Biden,” a court case we should all know about. At stake is the ability of the Federal government to initiate censorship policies for social media companies. They have been doing this for some time, though they’ve been temporarily ordered to stop. It’s troubling enough that we would have a government playing “Ministry of Truth” at all, but one of the facts that have emerged is that social media companies were specifically ordered to—never mind conspiracy theories—go after true speech (“needs context”) from the likes of Kheriaty and others who had the credibility and smarts to develop real influence. People, in other words, who don’t undo themselves.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (“The Illusion of Consensus”) is, I believe, involved in the same court case that is mentioned above. No fan of lockdown policies, the 55-year-old Indian doctor and Stanford professor caused all kinds of problems during Covid and since. His name came up in the released “Twitter Files” as one whose tweets were specifically prevented from showing up on trending topics. Bhattacharya has also not been shy about pointing out some of the ways his own university tried to get in the way of his Santa Clara Study, which was ultimately a nail in the coffin of some of the most absurd claims coming out of the World Health Organization about the virus’s (way-overestimated) death rate. The way the too-high rate got justified by paying attention only to people governments knew had been infected in the first place, and so Bhattacharya did what seems like would be the obvious thing to do, which was take a random sample of people and test them for antibodies. Sure enough, like with other known viruses, there were: 1) a lot of people who had been infected without knowing they had been and 2) the number of people who had been infected in general was much higher than previously suspected (in spit of the lockdowns), and we were pretty well on our way to all getting infected.
Jennifer Sey (“Sey Everything”) - is a former gymnast who wrote a book about the culture of sexual abuse in her sport and was also one of the producers of Athlete A, which told the story of the abuse and eventual arrest of Dr. Larry Nassar. Oh, and in her spare time the 54-year-old was a company Exec for Levi Strauss & Co. for more than twenty years. Here’s where things get interesting. During Covid, Sey started tweeting in opposition to school closures and allying herself with other mothers who were concerned about this issue. I believe she and her family even relocated so that her kids could be in-person (at a public) school (which is something people with means could afford to do). Now, of course, we know that there was significant and quantifiable learning loss that occurred for young students during this time, that they were never at significant risk from the virus in the first place, and that vulnerable populations got the worst of the learning loss. Even so, apparently Levi didn’t appreciate the attention Sey was attracting for her views, so they offered her a million dollars to leave and shut up about her experiences at the company. She left, without the money, and instead wrote a book: Levi’s Unbuttoned: The Woke Mob Took My Job but Gave Me My Voice.
I’m sure there are plenty of others who belong on this list, but it’s a good place to start.