- rwmalonemd.substack.com - Robert W Malone MD, MS - MAR 15, 2023 -
Weaponizing language is just another competitive strategy
"University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." - Henry Kissinger
I suspect that the weaponization of language to advance political agendas is probably as old as language itself. In my experience, many if not most human primates are quite socially competitive. Many humans will weaponize almost anything available, whether it be sticks or stones, words, political agendas or academic policies to advance personal or group/tribal interests. And many academics do seem to have a particular bent towards unusually aggressive political competitiveness, often associated with a jealous streak. In my experience.
Sayre's law states "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter." Sayre's law is named after Wallace Stanley Sayre (1905–1972), U.S. political scientist and professor at Columbia University.
Dr. Peter Hotez has recently published an opinion piece in an obscure academic journal in which he constructs a false equivalence between right wing politics, “Antiscience”, vaccine and vax mandate hesitancy (“Antivaxxer”), and antisemitism.
Link to the text of this article here.
Dr. Hotez has repeatedly pushed this false equivalence, including in prior interviews:
Link to the text of this interview here.
According to this article, In his forthcoming book, The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: How Health Freedom Propaganda Endangers the World (Johns Hopkins Press anticipated 2023), Hotez estimates that 200,000 Americans needlessly lost their lives from COVID during the last half of 2021 alone, which he largely blames on propaganda from the far right.
‘Death By Anti-Science’: Dr. Peter Hotez On Vaccine Disinformation
Sep 15, 2021