OPENING SALVO // The Ghost of Tom Paine
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
From Volume 3 // Issue 2 // Summer 2021 // Truth & Consequences
EXCERPT //
The truth is a writhing beast these days.
Trying to understand the pandemic is nearly impossible. A dizzying array of counter-claims continues its assault on our ability to know what to think and do. You can’t determine consequences when the truth that should set that chain in motion is fuzzy, or hard to find, or changing daily.
The fouled information ecosystem is a large part of why I started Root Quarterly. For some of us in the Citizen Sensemaking Brigade, an ad-hoc assortment of podcasters, YouTubers, Substackers, and magazine publishers, it’s become daily work to fact-check mainstream news outlets such as The New York Times.
Because I am trying to make sense of the world and pass that information on to you, my own personal sensemaking apparatus is reading, first and foremost, a ton of books. I add magazines such as Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Economist, and The Spectator, as well as newspapers such as The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer. I follow individual reporters and pundits such as Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, John McWhorter, and Jesse Singal. I listen to podcasts such as The Unspeakable, Rebel Wisdom, The Fifth Column, The Dishcast, Making Sense, and DarkHorse. I talk to people throughout my state, including my large family in the Lehigh Valley and the Poconos.
I try to understand what the best critiques of these sensemakers are, from both within that community (many of these people are friends and associates of one another), and from without. Because two of those individuals, Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein of the DarkHorse podcast, have a book on evolutionary biology that is featured in this edition of the magazine, our ideas editor, Walter Foley, and myself have been following closely the controversy surrounding them for their advocacy of using and studying ivermectin as a Covid-19 prophylactic and treatment. If you’ve not yet heard of this debate, I invite you to do your own research—very, very carefully, by which I mean: You can’t trust the politicized reporting in a host of mainstream news outlets.
I’m not going to follow every plot twist in this story, and will check back in maybe six months when more studies are available. I am vaccinated, something I didn’t hesitate to do, and so for my own health, it’s irrelevant. What others do is beyond my control. I’m letting this one go.
However, I’d like to relate that on the Saturday before we went to print, Walter and I discussed at length two things: the ivermectin controversy, and the growing power of cryptocurrency and the blockchain technology that supports it. In the morning, I woke and did exactly what you’re not supposed to do—I reached for my phone and scrolled through The New York Times.
The top headlines were blazing: The U.S. government was extremely worried about the power of cryptocurrency. A little further down, the lead story in Covid-update-land was growing concern over the use of ivermectin, which has been administered to humans in doses counted in the billions around the globe, saving countless people from diseases such as river blindness, but which also has a veterinary formulation, which the worried-about-Covid-yet-vaccine-skeptical have resorted to taking. These are desperate Americans who have little trust in our institutions, for good reason.
The lead of that story was an uncited claim that unspecified hospitals in Oklahoma were turning away gunshot victims because the beds were full of people who had taken the drug. That is a truly terrifying scenario.
The only problem is that it’s not true.
After beginning to read the story to Walter, I got no further than the first few sentences before he alerted me to the fact that a (not the… it was unspecified) hospital had issued a statement to the contrary. I was reading the main Covid news that The New York Times wanted me to know about our global pandemic. What I got instead, I realized upon further research, was 1) a hashed-up interview from a doctor in Oklahoma by a local news station: The doctor didn’t say that the hospitals were overwhelmed with ivermectin overdoses, and he related one gunshot victim who had to wait three hours for a transfer. Multiple people were not being turned away (the idea of which goes against every ER triaging schema you can logically ponder); and 2) a whispering-down-the-lane to algorithmically driven news outlets who ate the story up.
The incorrect information was repeated in Newsweek, The Guardian, by the BBC, on Twitter by Rachel Maddow, and by Rolling Stone. The paper of record had not bothered to fact check the opening of their pandemic story, and right-wing media outlets went nuts in their own way, in retaliation.
Why did the person sitting next to me in the room that Sunday morning know more than the Ivy League-educated New York Times fellows who wrote the story? How have we gotten to this place? How is this my Sunday?
The unequivocal statement from NHS Sequoyah hospital said that the doctor quoted worked for a staffing group they use, but had not worked at their location in two months. NHS Sequoyah stated that they had not treated any patients due to “complications related to taking ivermectin. This includes not treating any patients for ivermectin overdose. All patients who have visited our emergency room have received medical attention as appropriate.”
By later that afternoon, a slew of news outlets had issued corrections, including the Times, some more fulsome than others, some more prominently than others. But who aside from a small group of people would have noticed? Everyone else had scoffed over their coffee at the hayseeds eating horse medicine and moved on. The damage was done.
When the start to your day is learning that, once again, The New York Times has fallen down on the job, with their full-time reporters and deep pockets, it’s hard not to go right back to those fellow citizen sensemakers. Why am I fact-checking the Times’ story? I’m the little guy.
Thomas Paine, Philadelphia’s famous pamphleteer and the author of Common Sense enjoyed a meteoric reputational rise when the first printing was issued on January 10, 1776, just blocks from where my current home is. A blue marker enshrines the spot in Old City, which I walk by not infrequently. I take caution—but also heart—from the end of his story, which is perhaps less widely known.
Taking on the monarchy was a brave feat. It helped galvanize sentiment for the American Revolution, and it made Paine famous on both sides of the Atlantic. Individual citizens who take on the powers that be have a hard row to hoe, but they are a necessary part of making sense of the world. Sometimes, someone has to point out that you’ve just seen the emperor’s bare ass pass by. (And what will I find out tomorrow that rocks my world? I feel info-sick.)
Paine enjoyed success until he dared to criticize the well-loved George Washington, which dealt him a fatal blow. In the end, he died a pauper. At some point, his bones were disinterred and sent back to England for burial, but they were never buried, and were eventually lost.
As we continue to make sense of the world ourselves and share our insights with you, we’ll keep in mind that sometimes the consequences of telling the truth are catastrophic for an individual. But we believe that telling the truth still counts for something. //