LAST weekend, TCW Defending Freedom kindly published a piece of mine entitled ‘The great Aids scam – a dry run for Covid’.
The responses were overwhelmingly positive, because this site tends to draw an intelligent, thoughtful, curious audience and lots of readers enjoyed having their eyes opened to the shocking parallels between Anthony Fauci’s confected Aids epidemic and Anthony Fauci’s confected ‘Covid-19’ pandemic.
Inevitably, though, there were one or two voices of outraged dissension. Their responses were so predictable that I could have written them myself – not because I am the new Nostradamus, but because I experienced exactly this sort of thing time and again during my years as an outspoken climate sceptic.
Let’s examine a few of the fallacies deployed by these people in their flailing desperation to discredit the piece.
The Ad Hominem: ‘Sadly, Mr Delingpole suffers from the increasingly prevalent complaint of EnglishDegreeItis. The symptoms are an ability to write entertaining nonsense about any subject including those about which he is totally unequipped to have an opinion.’
Appeal to the stone (argumentum ad lapidem): ‘This is flat-Earth nonsense on stilts, and does a great disservice to conservatism.’
Argument from incredulity: ‘What the f*** are you talking about? Of course Aids is real.’
Appeal to authority (argumentum ad verecundiam): ‘The Durban Declaration is a statement signed by over 5,000 physicians and scientists in 2000, affirming that HIV is the cause of Aids.’
Appeal to emotion: ‘Inspector General’s’ invocation of a wholly irrelevant anecdote about the liberation of Dachau.’
Appeal to consequences: ‘My big worry is that articles like this may induce folk to stop their drugs.’
Appeal to anecdote: ‘I just don’t believe this. One of my friends died of it – he was gay but not a degenerate who destroyed his own immune system.’
Perhaps you’ve worked out what all these responses have in common. Yes, that’s right. Not one of them counters – or even attempts to counter – any of the claims made in the piece.
Many of them are so weak that they barely even rise to the level of mere contradiction. Most are deliberately rude, insulting, belittling (‘Sorry, I just don’t believe that James Delingpole had a sex life in his 20s. Or at any other time’) – designed to imply that the author of the piece is so grotesquely stupid and hideous in every way that not a word he writes is to be taken seriously.
When this is the best they can do, you know you are winning.
I experienced it many, many times before during the Climate Wars and got so used to it that it no longer upsets me.
I’m sure I’ve quoted Margaret Thatcher on this before – but it’s worth doing again because what she said is so apposite: ‘I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally it means they have not a single political argument left.’
So it was whenever I wrote critically of the monstrously corrupt and mendacious Climate Industrial Complex. So it is now when I write about the monstrously corrupt and mendacious industry that devised the fake Aids crisis.
The techniques used against me were and are the same because it’s the same kind of people using them: industry shills, attack dog PRs, compromised ‘experts’ brandishing their debased credentials, useful idiots, rent-seekers, parasites, trolls.
You’d think it would be pretty easy, what with all those scientific institutions and tame academics they’ve got on the books, to prove once and for all that climate change was a serious problem.
You’d think it would be pretty easy, what with all those bought-and-paid-for medics and all that Big Pharma money, for them to have proved beyond all reasonable doubt that HIV causes Aids, that the Aids epidemic was real, and that it’s a serious, infectious condition.
But in all the decades that powerful vested interests have been pushing these scams, they have never once made an honest case for their existence.
Yes, sure, they’ve persuaded a lot of people, perhaps even most people, that their claims are true. They have not done so, though, by using facts and evidence dispassionately presented.
Rather they have achieved this through bullying, bribing, repetition, lying, smearing: the kind of behaviour we associate with totalitarian propagandists like Lenin or Goebbels, but definitely not with honest brokers who just want to ensure that everyone knows the truth.
These liars and shills for bankrupt causes which do many ordinary people real harm deserve nothing but contempt and mockery. That’s why, with medical journalist and TCW Defending Freedom contributor Neville Hodgkinson, I’ll be putting together another piece illustrating just how wrong they are on Aids, just to rub their noses in it.
In the meantime, I thought I ought to make it clear just how little respect I have for these Fauci bottom-feeders. I wanted to single out for especial attention the contribution of Christopher Snowdon, ‘Head of Lifestyle Economics’ at the Institute of Economic Affairs.
Snowdon decided to publicise my Aids article on Twitter with the following comment: ‘This is getting really sad now. Someone needs to stage an intervention.’
Obviously, it’s always nice when old friends express concerns about one’s mental health. But it’s surely an odd piece of critical commentary from someone who earns his living at a prominent think-tank.
In the past I’ve written many positive things about the IEA. I used to think that the bright sparks who worked there were far too subtle in their thinking and far too confident in their proudly free-market contrarianism to regurgitate, dutifully, whatever their donors wanted them to say.
But more recently I’ve come to suspect that their many critics (‘Who funds you?’) may have a point. Given that the IEA’s staffers pose as fearless foes of Big Government, their positioning during the Covid nonsense was disappointingly supine – almost to the point where you wondered whether their secret donors might include one or two pharmaceutical companies or government departments.
For Snowdon to dismiss my article on Aids as the work of a madman, though, is more bizarre still. Perhaps he has evidence to suggest that, contra my article, Anthony Fauci is an honourable man who just wants to do what he can for public health; or that AZT, far from having killed more people than ‘Aids’ ever did, is in fact a wonderdrug which prolonged the lives of everyone who took it, including the late Freddie Mercury; or that Peter Duesberg, the distinguished biologist, and Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis were quite wrong to speak out on the Aids scam and fully deserved to have their careers destroyed for taking on the medical establishment. If so, we’d all love to see it, I’m sure.
