Five paintings, four of them new, for the July 4th, that marks the 250th.

[These paintings are all available as art prints through here.]

Happy 4th!

New sociopolitical painting of mine.

My claims upfront: We are born into an extraordinary mystery, with too few clues to realistically hope to solve it in this lifetime. We have been given a compass (moral compass, and intuition), so we do have something to guide us through this mystery, but we don’t know who gave us this compass, and we cannot prove in material terms its existence or reliability.

All the most important things cannot be proven by us here and now, and appear to belong to an ethereal realm that is intertwined with the material realm; the knowledge that life is meaningful has been given to us, and our only option is to either dismiss this knowledge that we access through subjective processes, or make a leap of faith by trusting it (which is what I mean in the title by ‘mysticism,’ and for my purposes here I could just as well have called it ‘spiritualism,’ or ‘romanticism’). Agnosticism is not an option in response to this unknown because life compels us to act, and our actions reveal our beliefs.

In an attempt to have certainty some people put on knowing more than they do, by claiming they know the moral compass to have material origins in behavior selected by natural selection through survival of the fittest. In addition to false certainty, this belief leads to nihilism because matter alone is soulless. There’s no sense in wasting time on any road known to lead to nihilism, since those roads are known dead ends.

The choice to believe in what we already seem to know through subjective processes does not lead to a lack of concern for objective truth because we must be objective about the information we submit to the judgment of subjective processes, if we want the subjective processes to point us in the right direction.

The realist does not bury their head in the sand and reject a whole realm of knowledge (subjective knowledge) just because it is mysterious, and appears to be (and may very well be) ethereal rather than material in origin. The realist accepts the mystery and then uses what little they do know to navigate the unknown as best they can.

Those are my claims up front, now I’m going to proceed to not prove an ounce of it. I’ll just show you that you already know I’m right.

There is a narrative arc, in my life, that mirrors a centuries spanning narrative arc of our civilization.

This being the journey that starts from solid foundations in Christian faith, then proceeds to initial doubts, and then to wandering out beyond the Church. This is a story that plays out at both an individual and civilizational scale. I know this story then at a personal level.

Like our civilization I grew up Christian (analogous to how the whole West was enveloped in Christianity for some centuries, and in places, well over a millennia), I had a solid foundation for my belief system: the word of God, bound between two covers, nice and neat. A divinely inspired instruction manual for life – perfect. Likewise the West, when it all came under Christendom, was confident it had the truth.

Then the West began to question its previously held beliefs in Christianity and the Bible. Doctrinal disputes here and there and what not, were the first pebbles of the eventual avalanche.

Christianity is still a significant force, of course, and its mark on the West, for both better and worse, remains visible everywhere. But The Church and the Bible have been dethroned. Most people do not accept an appeal to the Bible or church doctrine as valid argument. Furthermore, the Church specifically has been singled out for exclusion from the halls of power, with the secular doctrine of the separation of Church and state, all the while, other belief systems are embedded within the state, such as scientism, Zionism, and up till recently, and perhaps soon again, Woke (which is a type of living dead, Christian/Un-Christian, zombie Christianity, that is based on the social gospel and the Beatitudes, all while vilifying its very own foundations by being anti-Christian. But Woke/zombie-Christianity, wasn’t seen as ‘The Church’ so it was allowed into the halls of power).

As with the West questioning Christianity after being immersed in it, I too had questions about the authority of the Bible and the legitimacy of Christian doctrine. Tugging at those questions ultimately unraveled the beliefs that I had at first thought would serve as the foundation for my world view. This set me adrift. I went from a believer who had the answers, to a wanderer seeking them.

At a societal level we haven’t handled this uncertainty very well at all. In fact we’ve generally refused to accept uncertainty, and have opted instead to end our wanderings at the first available opportunity by clamping down prematurely on conclusions. We’ve decided we must have certainty, and we must have it reducible to hard proof that can be physically measured by our instruments. This petulant response to uncertainty, has led us to insist that what lies beyond the capacity of our scientific instruments to measure, does not exist at all.

Our most fundamental experiences such as consciousnesses, and the exercise of our will, cannot be measured by our scientific instruments, and so the “scientific” view insists that they aren’t real at all – that they are mere illusions.

This insistence on only measurable matter being real is philosophical materialism, or in popular parlance atheism, which leads to excluding such ethereal concepts as a spiritual realm and the soul. Most people profess some religious or spiritual belief but based on how I see people in our society act and argue I think that philosophical materialism has been the most prestigious belief system for well over a century, because arguments based on The Science (generally understood to limit itself to materialist explanations) are the most socially acceptable.

Matter alone is not meaningful, and so nihilism flows logically from philosophical materialism. You can see this in anything that philosophical materialism touches – it becomes dead and meaningless, or at least the modernist, whose unstated default position is philosophical materialism, tries to flatten whole fields of endeavor and reduce them to matter alone, and thereby deadens the field to the degree that they gain influence over it. Take art for example. Art, music, and poetry, are means of tapping into ethereal realms. They are to the ethereal, as the sciences are to the material.

Modernity Meets Art, Makes Surprising Discovery That Paintings Are Actually Just Paint Stuck to a Flat Surface.

Recent centuries have seen a flowering of great art (thanks to romantic streaks that have survived “progress”), that serves as a medium channeling the ethereal and mysterious elements that flow through landscapes, and nature, and the human form. But this is something you detect by feeling it, and letting it speak to you on another level, not measuring it with a scientific instrument, and so of course from the materialist view, what the art channels doesn’t exist at all.

So what does a modernist mindset, where philosophical materialism is the prestigious viewpoint, look for in a painting? The measurable things, the physical paint itself, the flat surface, etc.

Read carefully the following excerpts from modernist art critics, and immerse yourself in their mindset:

“Pollock not only emphasizes the materiality of the paint, but all components of No. 2. Drips and splatters of paint evoke the fluid nature of the medium, but Pollock’s paint also bring awareness to the surface it lays. In some instances, drips of paint soak into the canvas taking on its texture, emphasizing the canvas’ own materiality. This along with the bare canvas exposed on the periphery makes the viewer aware that they are viewing a canvas with paint sitting on top, not some sort of illusionary space. Along with the material of the canvas, Pollock displays the adherence of the canvas to frame. Exposed staples line the perimeter of No. 2, bringing a commonly hidden aspect of painting into view. The attention brought to the material nature of all aspects of No. 2 agrees with Greenberg’s two-dimensional ideal of painting by dispelling any idea of illusionary space. However, the materiality also agrees with Rosenberg by drawing attention to the process of No. 2’s creation in Pollock’s studio. In his essay “The American Action Painters,” Rosenberg writes, “the act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence.” Pollock’s No. 2 is an extension of Pollock himself. Every mark applied to the canvas records Pollock’s existence in the moment of application. The emphasized materiality of the paint, canvas, and staples eases the viewer’s struggle, even making it difficult not to imagine Pollock splattering paint on the canvas. Rosenberg’s argument then plays back into Greenberg’s. Imagining Pollock in the act of creating brings attention not only to the emotional performance of its creation but also further entrenching the notion that the work is an utterly flat creation of paint laid on canvas.”

– On the Materiality of Painting By Sam Powers 2019

“The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it
with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him.
The image would be the result of this encounter.”

“The big moment came when it was decided to paint . . . just to PAINT. The gesture on the
canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value—political, aesthetic, moral.”

The American Action Painters Harold Rosenberg - 1952

With modernist painting we get a nice encapsulation of what happens when you reduce things to physical matter only – painting became liberated from value, or we could say value free, valueless, pointless, nihilistic: flattened in more ways then one. The same happens at the macrocosmic level; when your world view is reduced to only believing in what is measurable with scientific instruments, then the world becomes to you about as shallow and surface level as Jackson Pollock’s No. 2.

(The supportive critics, and painters, of this kind of art may or may not be philosophical materialists themselves, but their approach, in which the physical matter itself becomes their focus, and they exhibit deafness and dumbness to the ethereal, is consistent with the physical materialism infused modernist outlook, and would be a very dense, dim, way of looking at art for someone who believes in an ethereal realm. That’s why I see philosophical materialism as the dominant belief of people who talk like these art critics do, even if they profess some spiritual beliefs)

Painting just for the sake of painting is meaningless. But the physical materials that make up a painting become meaningful when they are used as a medium that channels something else. Paint and panel that serve as portal, threshold, or liminal space. Matter that thins the veil. Likewise the whole material world becomes mysterious, and at least potentially deeply meaningful, if the physical world is not just itself, but is serving as the medium for the soul and the ethereal world.

How We Got Here: Mutually Assured Destruction

Our civilization’s flip from Christianity to nihilism is somehow built in as a sort of mutually assured destruction between Christianity and the West. At an individual level I have known many Christians to defend their belief in the inerrancy of the Bible by insisting that life would become meaningless to them if the Bible is not really the word of God; that if they don’t have the Bible as the bedrock of their faith, they have no reason for faith in anything. The Bible or nothing.

What I think this is, is a type of persuasion where you try to make someone (including yourself) believe something by making the alternatives seem unbearably awful.

Happens all the time:

Don’t believe in Covid? Well then you are going to die! Or . . . well . . . your grandma is going to die and it will be your fault!

Don’t believe in the Bible? Well then you are going to burn in hell for all eternity, muahahaHAHA!

Don’t think you need to convert your friends and family? What then, do you want them to burn in hell?

All the Abrahamic religions present themselves to their target audience as the only way. Lamentably even the poetic gospel of John puts forth such an argument:

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

John 14:6

Let us hope that this was just some unscrupulous scribe, trying to bully people into belief, who put that passage in, and not the venerable Jesus of Nazareth saying such things.

We can see then that Christianity, like other belief systems, has tried to browbeat people into believing it, by making them think that it is the only option. Salvation through Christianity, damnation outside of it. The Bible is worthy of one’s faith or nothing is.

To respond to the crumbling of one’s Christian faith by going straight to nihilistic beliefs such as philosophical materialism/atheism is to succumb to the emotional blackmail that clever Christian activists and apologists began putting into place the better part of two thousand years ago.

Our society did succumb to that trap, or at least that’s part of my theory for our societal level rejection of post Christian wandering in favor of flipping right over into materialism.

What We Really Believe

We do not have definitive material proof that life is meaningful, or that truth and goodness exist, in any meaningful way.

We also don’t have definitive material proof that they don’t exist; we have no compelling reason that would justify ruling them out. Life might be deeply meaningful. Truth and goodness may both exist in a meaningful sense, and we might have the means of accessing them, and knowing what they are or at least getting closer to them.

Agnosticism, simply not knowing, and not pretending to know, is then the most intellectually defensible position to be in, in regard to these big questions. But agnosticism won’t do. We don’t have the luxury of being agnostics. You can be an agnostic only so long as you don’t take action. Once you start doing things you reveal what you really believe.

I’m going to paraphrase William James now. I can’t find the book I read this in, and can’t find the quote online by searching for fragments of what I think the passage read, but anyways, I’m pretty sure I read this or something like it, in some collection or another of William James’ essays. Here it is:

“Suppose that a man in a room proclaims himself an agnostic on the question of whether or not the room is too cold, too warm, or just right. He simply doesn’t know, he insists.

But then this man, of his own volition, gets up, closes the windows, puts on a coat, and starts a fire in the fire place. By his actions he has revealed that he believed the room was too cold. He was not an agnostic after all.”

– Henderson paraphrasing what he thinks is from William James.

The man’s actions above do not prove that the room is too cold, only that he believes the room is too cold.

So let’s now apply this concept that taking action reveals what your beliefs really are.

We intuit that we are capable of knowing goodness and truth or at least getting closer to them by consulting what we call the conscience, the moral compass, or the little voice in our head. In other words, we believe that we can hone in on goodness and truth like a dowsing rod equipped water witcher hones in on water.

We also believe that other people have this moral compass, and that theirs too will point them towards truth, goodness, and right action. However, we think that these moral compasses work to some extent like a key in a field guide. Let me explain:

If you have, say, a mushroom field guide, it will have a key that you ‘feed’ information into. The key will ask things like:

“Does the fruiting body (of the mushroom in question) have gills on the underside radiating out from a stalk? If yes, go to page X. If no, go to page Y.”

Then let’s say you go to page X, because the mushroom meets that criteria. Page X will ask you another question like:

“Is the mushroom growing out of dead wood?” and if yes, it will send you to another page, and if no, there will be other questions that will send you to different pages.

And in this way the key, will use all the information you feed into it (by answering its questions), to point you in the right direction, that is, it will identify what type of mushroom you are looking at with the major caveat that you must give the key accurate information, and you must have enough information. If you feed inaccurate information into the key it will give you a wrong answer. If you don’t have enough information – say you don’t know what color the mushrooms spores are, you may need to go out and collect more information (such as taking a spore print, or digging up the mushroom to inspect the base to look for other defining features), before the key can give you a reliable answer.

Moral compasses have a similar aspect. They will point you in the right direction if you give them accurate information to work with, or at least that’s what we all believe.

Now you may think me very arrogant for believing that I know that other people believe these things too. But I do. By their actions they are showing what they believe.

If we thought other people didn’t have moral compasses, we wouldn’t waste time arguing over what is the right thing to do. But we do frequently argue as if we believe that there really is a right and a wrong in the moral sense, and that we have a means of knowing this, and that the other person has a means of knowing this too.

Furthermore, we think that the reason the other person’s moral compass isn’t pointing them in the right direction is either because they aren’t listening to their moral compass (in which case we try to get them to do so with exhortations such as: imagine if it were the other way ‘round, listen to your heart/don’t be heartless), or we see that they are listening to their moral compass (trying to do the right thing, their heart’s in the right place), yet their moral compass is still pointing in a different direction from ours.

In the latter case, we don’t shrug our shoulders and go, “guess our moral compasses just point in different directions.” No, we still think that both our moral compasses are designed to point towards truth, goodness, and right action. We assume that at least one of us has fed inaccurate information into their compass/field-guide-key, and because of that the key/compass is pointing them in the wrong direction. We think that this can be remedied by finding and correcting the inaccurate information, or providing critical missing information. That’s why we inspect their argument looking for where they went wrong in constructing their premise, or went wrong in building on their premise, then we challenge them on the errors we identified in the hope of getting them to correct faulty premises, which will then lead their moral compass to re-calibrate and point them in the right direction.

A vast amount of discussion, argument, and introspection, from personal quibbles, to society wide debates, is consistent with people either trying to get people to listen to their moral compasses to begin with, or getting people to re-calibrate their moral compasses by correcting false information/premises that they fed into the compass’s ‘key.’

In this way (by observing our choices) it is as clear that we believe these things, as it is that the man who chooses to close the windows, put on a coat, and start a fire, believes the room is chilly.

Let’s keep going in this vein, looking at things we all, or many of us, believe, but won’t admit we believe, but give away that we believe them, by acting in accordance with these beliefs.

We intuit that the ethereal sensation of consciousness and free will are real. Our anguish and pain and guilt at times are all consistent with our believing that we really are at least partly responsible, that we really do have real choices in how we conduct our life, and that decisions we made, we could, at least some of the time, have made differently.

We intuit that our physical, material, body is the medium of an ethereal soul.

This belief in the body being the medium of an ethereal soul isn’t just visible in obvious ways, like beliefs in ghosts, an afterlife, or reincarnation; this belief permeates our language so much that we’re unfazed by people talking as if they consist of not just their physical body but something else too. Very common expressions show this belief:

“He conducted himself well”

As if ‘he’ consists of not just his physical body, but also another self, different from his physical body, that is leading his physical body, as if this non-physical self were a conductor, and his physical self, an orchestra.

“She’s driving herself too hard, she’s gonna get burnt out, driving herself like that”

As if ‘she’ is something other than her physical body, and that she is driving her body (‘herself’) like a man driving an ox, and in this case she’s driving ‘herself’ too hard, potentially leading to ‘herself’ (her body) balking at her demands, and getting too tired to carry them out. And so on and so forth, with sentences like these, which indicate that we believe ourselves to be made up of our physical body bound with something else, with something other than our physical body, but that is also us:

“I forced myself to do it”

“I tricked myself into doing it”

“You need to listen to what your body is telling you”

My own working hypothesis for what’s going on here is that our body is governed largely by laws of matter and Darwinian instinct, but that our ethereal soul can hone in on truth and goodness by means of a moral compass accessible to the soul. The moral compass sometimes points in a different direction from where our body’s instincts might want to lead us, leading to internal conflict. I cannot prove this of course, but I do think it is a good working model with a lot of explanatory power. More on that in a moment.

Then, whether we admit it or not, we believe that: there is goodness and truth. That we have a moral compass that can point us to goodness and truth. That other people have such compasses too. That these compasses are a bit like keys in field guides, and need accurate information to give good answers. That our volition is real. That we have real choices. And, that our self is not just our physical body, but some other self of ours that is not the physical body, but is bound up with the physical body, together making up our self.

We go on believing these things, and professing our belief in them through our actions, but we won’t profess our belief in them through our words. Why not?

Well for one we overreacted. We’re still throwing our civilization-spanning tantrum, where we threw out not just The Church, but the entire ethereal realm with it. We only want to admit to believing in what we can prove and measure with our scientific instruments. Admitting to believing the things we can’t prove is a low class, backwards bible thumper way of doing things. We, modern man, the control freak, will only admit to believing the things we can prove through science.

‘Dumb’ people admit to believing things that they can’t prove, ‘smart’ people believe those very same things and also can’t prove them, but the smart people won’t admit they believe them, because they’re, you know, smart, and rational – guided by science and reason.

What if these things we believe, we don’t just believe: what if we outright know them? How humbling would it be if arrogant man were to be granted the ability to prove things only within certain limits like the material world, but the most important knowledge we have we were simply granted from the get go, and we don’t even get to know who gave us that knowledge or how we’re accessing it? Well, that appears to be the case.

Darwinian Just So Stories

Our most basic experiences and beliefs point beyond mere matter. This poses a problem for materialists. So they (materialists) need a means of explaining away the presence of these experiences (i. e. that consciousness is an illusion, that just sorta happens once you get a big enough computer/brain going), or flattening these beliefs into matter only.

If you read materialists such as New Atheists and evolutionary psychologists, you will find that when they come up against something they don’t know and can’t prove, they often won’t just say “It’s mysterious: who knows what lies behind this?” Because they would find themselves leaving doors open right and left, and even opening doors that had before been thought sealed shut – doors that might lead to ethereal, non-material explanations, ugh, and they need the doors to the otherworldly shut tight, so that they can feel secure and confident in their materialist outlook.

At best they’ll acknowledge it’s an unknown, but that they know already that if the answer is ever found the answer will be a material explanation for the phenomena. This much they know, cuz . . . yeah, it’s scientific you see.

Often they’ll go further though and spin a Just So story, of how matter alone leads to something that appears otherworldly (as in, influenced by something beyond just the material world). These Just So stories are unfalsifiable. You can’t prove them right, you can’t prove them wrong, they might be true, they might not be.

The materialist favors their Just So story though, because often their Just So story is the best explanation from a materialist standpoint, and since they believe that materialist explanations are the only valid explanations, they see their Just So story as the most likely explanation, which it is, if you have first dogmatically ruled out the ethereal world, leaving only material explanations.

For example, Darwin felt the gloriously long train of feathers possessed by the male peacock was so extravagant as to be a handicap, a hindrance. That bothered him (Darwin that is, not the peacock; the peacock is very pleased with his over the top feathers. He thinks himself quite handsome with them, and the ladies agree). Why hadn’t natural selection favored a fitter peacock with a more modest feather train?

Well, the popular explanation among evolutionary biologists these days is that the more encumbered by an extravagant feather train the male is, the fitter he really has to be, to survive with something so unfit, so the extravagant feather train signals to the peahens that the male must be very fit, because of all that unfitness he’s burdened with, but surviving anyway.

You can read the long version of the tale about peacock tails and evolution here.

Now what the evolutionary biologists have done there is give themselves a story where evolution selects for both the fittest traits, but also unfit traits, to signal to females that a male with unfit traits must be extra fit to survive with the unfitness. Survival of the most unfit, that’s still fit enough to survive. What is going on here? Just So stories are being spun, that do nothing to truly advance our understanding; they just give a false sense that something mysterious has been explained through a Darwinian framework.

Something similar is done with our moral compass. Evolutionary psychologists create two opposite categories, and any evidence that contradicts one category they put into the other, making their theories unfalsifiable Just So stories. Stories that make it seem as though another unknown has been accounted for in Darwinian terms.

Moral imperatives are explained by evolutionary psychology to be a set of behavioral instincts, selected by natural selection, because those instincts led to the highest fitness at either the individual or the group level.

What about individuals sacrificing their own interests to do what they feel is right, such as monks, and nuns dedicating themselves to charity and piety, and sacrificing their own reproductive interests by doing so: how is that fit from an evolutionary standpoint? Well, they would say, it is evolution working at the group scale. Sacrificing for the good of the group makes the group fitter, and is a behavioral trait that natural selection would select for at the group level.

What about selfish behavior that benefits the individual but is detrimental to the group? Well, of course they would say that is evolution working at the individual level.

What about selfless behavior against one’s own group? Such as a whistle blower jeopardizing the success of their own side, and putting themselves in danger of retribution, because they feel their own side has acted wrongly? Well you know evolution is blind: sometimes you get runaway selection; it must be some trait that in other circumstances would have benefited the survival of the individual or the group, and here it just went awry.

Any data that contradicts one part of the story is just put in another, opposite category. Selfless behavior contradicts self interest so it just gets categorized at the group fitness level; selfish behavior that harms the group is moved to the individual self interest level. And if the behavior cannot be explained still, it is assumed that it must at one time have served at either the group or individual fitness level, and evolution being blind couldn’t foresee how it would be applied in a different circumstance, so it went awry.

Now let’s say that this were true, that moral imperatives really do just boil down to behavioral traits that ultimately just serve to enhance the fitness of the individual or the group. That would mean that right and wrong, good and evil, don’t really exist, in any sense other then being synonyms for fit and unfit. There would only be fit and unfit.

The little voice, the conscience, the heart’s whisper, would actually just be the voice of the survival of the fittest, of evolutionary instinct. The inner voice telling us something is good would really just be instinct pointing us towards behavior that is fit. The conscience warning us that some behavior is wrong, is really just instinct trying to prevent unfit behavior.

Now that we know this we should be able to replace all our of language about good and bad, and right and wrong, by just saying, that’s fit, or that’s unfit. In fact right and wrong couldn’t help but collapsing into just fit and unfit.

Let’s say country A, a more powerful country overruns country B, and exterminates the genetically different inhabitants of country B. You can’t possibly say that’s wrong, you could only say whether it’s fit or unfit, and it looks pretty fit actually (from an evolutionary standpoint), and if fit is the basis of morally right, then we would even have to say it was the morally right thing to do.

Or take a fertility doctor substituting his own sperm for artificial insemination without his patient’s consent: is that wrong? Well if right and wrong ultimately have their basis in fitness and unfitness, we’re going to have to say what he did was right. Take this guy, 94 kids at least, that makes him fitter than almost anyone else alive (from an evolutionary standpoint), doesn’t matter what happens to him now, he has been extremely fit, he fulfilled the purpose that morals are apparently serving too. I’m afraid we’re going to have to consider him one of the most morally good men for his deception. He excelled at the thing that evolution selects a sense of morals for to begin with – evolutionary fitness.

How about the biblical story where Moses orders the Israelites to slaughter all the Midianite men, boys, and married women, but keep for themselves the virgins (whose mothers, brothers, and fathers, they had just massacred): was that wrong?

“They fought against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and killed every man. Among their victims were Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur and Reba—the five kings of Midian. They also killed Balaam son of Beor with the sword.

The Israelites captured the Midianite women and children and took all the Midianite herds, flocks and goods as plunder. They burned all the towns where the Midianites had settled, as well as all their camps. They took all the plunder and spoils, including the people and animals, and brought the captives, spoils and plunder to Moses and Eleazar the priest and the Israelite assembly at their camp on the plains of Moab, by the Jordan across from Jericho.

Moses, Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the community went to meet them outside the camp. Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.

“Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.” Numbers 31 7 through 18

Well clearly we would have to say it was the most morally right thing they could have done, that it was good, nothing wicked or evil about it, because it was fit, it was very fit.

The reason we don’t say these awful behaviors that I listed above are good, and morally right, is because we know very well that the basis of good, and right, is not fitness. Darwinian morality is an oxymoron.

The moral compass is above and beyond evolutionary instinct, not a product of it, as we can see from the way the moral compass is just as likely to condemn as condone our instincts.

Our moral compass will take two behaviors, both of which are evolutionary advantageous, and tell us that one of of them is good, and the other bad. We will affirm an instinctive behavior that is fit, such as a mother’s love for her child, and our compass reading will tell us that yes, that is very good. But another equally fit, evolutionarily advantageous behavior, such as the Israelites’ treatment of the Midianites (above) our moral compass will point us away from; we recoil at it. If we’re listening to our heart then, we don’t want that done, not even if the one’s doing it were genetically our twins.

Even the Israelites’ who carried out the Midianite massacre, had to either ignore their moral compasses (behave heartlessly), or corrupt the reading of their moral compasses by feeding their compasses’ ‘keys’ wrong information; that God made them do it, and that the Midianites deserved it, because they had been very bad, worshiping the wrong gods, and other, you know, just somehow bad things that justified their being treated this way.

Remember my working hypothesis that I introduced earlier in this essay:

“My own working hypothesis for what’s going on here is that our body is governed largely by laws of matter and Darwinian instinct, but that our ethereal soul can hone in on truth and goodness by means of a moral compass accessible to the soul. The moral compass sometimes points in a different direction from where our body’s instincts might want to lead us, leading to internal conflict. I cannot prove that of course, but I do think it is a good working model with a lot of explanatory power.”

See how nicely my model can account for our moral compass condemning one behavior, and condoning another, even when both behaviors are fit and evolutionarily advantageous?

Of course my working hypothesis is as unprovable, at least for now, as the materialists’ Just So story, but at least I don’t have to engage in verbal acrobatics and mental contortions, saying things like,

“Well you see my dear, Watson, it’s elementary; the feeling of right and wrong is an evolutionary adaptation, which also frequently condemns evolutionarily advantageous behavior.”

I can avoid the mental contortions on the matter of the peacock’s feathers too. Instead of saying that, “Well clearly the burdensome unfitness of the extravagant and cumbersome feather train displays the male’s fitness. The more unfitness the male is burdened by the more fit he really is, and so survival of the fittest has selected for these unfit traits.”

Instead of that, I can propose a much cleaner more straightforward hypothesis. I can take the appearance of two principals at work, and think, well you know what? Maybe it looks like two principals are at work because there are two principals at work.

The female is selecting for beauty, and her sense of beauty is informed by something more than just fitness – some other principal. The male must then display this beauty to fulfill the females’ demand for it, but natural selection through survival of the fittest still comes into play, as only the fittest males can pull off the unfit display of beauty and still make it. The peacock is then a compromise, or maybe even a dance, between fitness and beauty, with beauty being a different principal from fitness.

The human I also see, I could put it this way, as a compromise, or a struggle, and maybe even, when we’re conducting ourselves especially well, a dance, between the Darwinian instinct driven material body, and the morally attuned ethereal soul, with the Darwinian instincts of the body, and the ethereal morals of the soul being separate principals.

Crossroads: Known Dead Ends Versus Destinations Unknown

We can choose materialism or other similar roads that ultimately lead to nihilism. These roads are dead ends, in that even if they were to turn out to be true they still wouldn’t lead us to anything worthwhile.

The only reason to choose the dead ends would be if the weight of the evidence came down so strongly in favor of materialism that we were compelled to see materialism, or some other path that leads to nihilism, as true if we wanted to remain honest with ourselves.

We don’t have to choose those roads though; we are not intellectually compelled in the slightest to take those paths, because the weight of the evidence is not in their favor. The best the materialists have done is make the world safe for atheism by creating a defensible intellectual framework around the dogma that only matter is real.

Defensible is not the same as likely though, and their perspective is no likelier then competing perspectives. The illusion that they have an edge is formed by making up Just So stories, which make it seem as though their perspective accounts for just about everything. But again, providing an account doesn’t mean your account is true, or likely to be true, in many cases it just means you spun a story, and in the case of Darwinian Just So stories, opposite effects (fitness/unfitness, selfishness/selflessness) are attributed to the same materialist principle, meaning no evidence can count against the story: it’s unfalsifiable, and unprovable. You could probably put a Biblical Just So story to the test more easily than a Darwinian one.

Now, the roads that lead off into mystery, that hold the promise of meaning, and goodness, we can’t prove those roads more probable to be true either, so why take them?

Well, if you were at a crossroads, and you knew that one set of roads were dead ends that led to meaninglessness, and another set of roads led off into the unknown, why wouldn’t you take the roads into the unknown? You have nothing to lose by taking them, and there you may find truth, goodness, meaning, and light. Whereas the known dead ends offer nothing.

This is why I think the materialists put on knowing more than they do, using Just So stories to paper over doors into the unknown, because unless the evidence were to be overwhelmingly in their favor, there’s simply no reason to waste time on the known dead ends. How much better, more exciting, and more promising to head down the unknown roads off into the mystery.

Now you might argue there’s a thousand unknown paths, how could we ever take the right one? The odds are against us, but no, to get going we’re not facing a thousand choices, we’re just facing one. Either, the means that we have been given to hone in on truth and goodness can lead us to the truth and the good or they can’t.

It’s something like the story in The Princess and the Goblin. The Princess Irene is given, by her great, great, grandmother, a ring, with a thin thread, woven from spider’s webs, attached to the ring, and to home. When she gets lost in the labyrinth of the goblin’s caves, she follows the faint feeling of the thin spider’s thread back to home.

We similarly are in some mysterious place; we don’t know where we are, how we got here, and don’t know the way forward, and to just pick a course of action at random sounds unwise, but we have a ring with a thin thread (the moral compass, our intuition, our conviction that life is indeed meaningful, and that there is good that we can hone in on, and so forth). Unlike Irene we don’t know who gave us the ring and the thread, but someone or something appears to be looking out for us.

My point here is that leaning into our beliefs (that we believe whether we admit to it or not, as revealed by our actions, as I went over earlier in the essay), is not to respond to uncertainty by just rolling the dice and picking a random course of action, it is to respond to uncertainty by leaning into the most promising things that we have been given, even if we don’t know how we got them or where they lead.

Options:

• Pointless course of action – to pick a road that is a known dead end, such as philosophical materialism which leads to nihilism.

• Careless course of action – to roll the dice and pick a random direction.

• Intuitive course of action – to place our faith in the tools we have been given to guide us, such as our moral compass, and use them to hone in on truth and goodness like a water witcher uses a dowsing rod, and hope for the best.

The third option of course is the only reasonable course of action, and so reason and romanticism re-converge, and intertwine, as they always should have.

Jordan Henderson is an artist from the United States. His paintings can be Viewed Here, and Essays Here.

Latest sociopolitical painting of mine. As always, feel free to use the image of this painting to illustrate a blog post if you’re writing on related topics. Prints of the image are available here.

Enjoy the artwork.

—Jordan

The red cloth used by the Matador, to maneuver the bull, in the third and final stage of the bullfight, is called a Muleta. There are enough ways to respond to this painting that it is practically a political Rorschach test. So then . . . look at it and tell me what you see.

Colorado readers can view the original painting in person at the Truth Show, in Pueblo Colorado, at Blo Back Gallery. The painting will be up for this month, alongside many other artworks on the theme of truth, including several more of my paintings

I began the painting above as a plein air last spring while house sitting and tending animals for a friend who was away. I struggled to keep the periodic gusts of wind from knocking my canvas over, and I kind of regretted that I had used a 3 1/2 foot across canvas that practically acted as a sail. After fighting the wind awhile I eventually said to myself, “forget it!” and finished the painting later back at my studio from memory, and simply left it less detailed (I have nothing against photographic references, but I decide not to use them now and then just for fun).

The above painting is a storybook illustration that I did as a sample for a children’s book author. We didn’t end up collaborating on their book, but doing some sample sketches for it pushed me in an interesting direction. I knew that, given budget and time constraints, if I was to illustrate their book I was going to need to be able to produce the illustrations pretty fast. The example above, after I had done some preliminary sketches, I painted in a single session of wet into wet paint - the end result I thought was fresh and spontaneous feeling - interesting enough to share, anyways.

The charcoal sketch above of Charles Dickens, I did as a demonstration for a drawing class. As usual for demonstrations I worked fast and left it half unfinished so that the students would have time to work on their own drawings in class. Also as usual, I thought the fast-half-finished-look to have an energy to it that is easy to lose in a more finished work.

Now on to the interviews.

Recent (by what I consider “recent) Interviews:

Fakeologist Interview. (Link Here) John C. A Manley (Author of the novels, All the Humans are Sleeping, and Much Ado About Corona, both of which I illustrated the covers for) and I, had a wide ranging discussion with Ab, the host on the show. Topics included art, vaccines, and the adventurous backstory to John’s recent marriage and move to the Netherlands.

Valerie Kochmann Interview. (Link Here) Valerie Kochmann (a Slovenia based writer who came out strong against Covid from the beginning) interviewed me late last year about my vaccine series, and my artwork with plenty of visuals throughout the interview.

Recent(ish) Engagement with my Work from Fellow Authors:

I’ll start with Bees Dance, ’s poetic engagement with my essay on AI art:

New World Dreaming

Bees Dance

‘Paragraphs should be like chimps: surprisingly human, but slightly unpredictable.’ —Sean Kernan, 13 Signs You Used ChatGPT to Write That…

Read more

a year ago · 6 likes · 4 comments · Nowick Gray

Greg Beattie of Vaccination Dilemma, wrote a concise paper titled Vaccines - Reassessing Their Relevance for the journal Orthomolecular. Beattie incorporated my graph juxtaposing historical whooping cough mortality with vaccine introduction in Sweden. I was pleased to see this as that graph is probably the most important of all the many vaccine graphs that I created for my series, because, as Beattie succinctly put it:

“This [the Swedish whooping cough example] is perhaps the only example of a country vaccinating, pausing for a considerable period, then resuming, with other factors remaining presumably constant. It may therefore be considered a challenge→de-challenge→re-challenge: a protocol considered very strong evidence regarding the notion of causation when observed at the population level.”

and have incorporated various aspects of my vaccine series into some of their extensive videographic presentations. In addition to bringing my findings to a wider audience, their videos also provide those findings in a much more digestible form.

For example, suppose you want to introduce a vaccine believing friend to some vaccine heresy. You could, say, send them some of my graphs on vaccines, but it might be good to accompany those graphs with commentary and context. My 70,000 word Vaccine, Evangelists, Apostates, and Apologists series is not very approachable for someone new to the topic. Whereas the Bailey’s video A for Antivaxxer, which incorporates some of those graphs, clocks in at a bite sized 18 minutes - just the thing to send your vaccine believing friend.

Likewise their video on whooping cough provides context and incorporates some of my graphs, along with Bystrianyk’s and Beattie’s graphs, all within a very maneageable 20 minutes.

Also; for those who objected to my not addressing, in my vaccine series, what did cause the mortality decline (since that was not, for my purposes, strictly necessary in order to disprove what didn’t cause the decline), please see the Bailey’s the Healthcare System Hoax where they discuss the mortality decline, including discussion of McKeown’s and McKinlay’s famous studies on the topic.

Earlier this year Rusere Shoniwa wrote a four part critique of my essay On the Great Replacement I’ve Come Around: Here’s Why. Shoniwa’s four part critique of my essay is called The Great Replacement Consciousness Test. Then I wrote a counter critique and follow up piece called Trust the Plan: Q-Anarchism for White People.

This is old news to you if you already read my piece Trust the Plan: Q-Anarchism for White People, but I’m guessing, based on the low view count, and the paltry four likes, that not many of you did. That’s okay, I get it, it was a gargantuan 17,000 word essay, and the intro, the first few paragraphs that I added at the last moment, sucked. I added those paragraphs because I felt like I had to justify why my essay had nothing to do with the Current Thing at the time, and that was silly of me. Good news though; I cut the boring first few paragraphs and now the essay is a little shorter and gets right into the interesting stuff.

Anyhow, if you missed it, the initial essay I wrote On the Great Replacement I’ve Come Around: Here’s Why set off a whole conversation, drew considerable criticism, and I responded with in depth counter criticism. It didn’t turn into a drama fest either, it remained a good debate.

On the Current Thing - Israel/Iran/Trump/WMDs/Nukes/Something/Something or Another

The current Current Thing only makes sense as an instance of some deeper, underlying, ongoing thing that is bubbling to the surface.

How many bombs were really dropped? What damage did they really do? What are the real motives? We’ll know later, that’s all hidden for now in the fog of the Current Thing. The only real value to be had from paying any attention to the things maybe going on in the Middle East right now, is to see what light they shed on underlying ongoing things.

Here’s some recommendations:

of the has written extensively on how compromised, hollowed out, and fake the resistance to Israel and their NATO vassals is. To see the parallels between Iran’s compromised government and Russia’s, start with his Russia analysis — Is Putin a Treacherous Puppet or an Incompetent "Bafoon"? and this post right here. Then proceed to his Iran posts such as this one.

’s essays on Greater Israel give a thought provoking big picture.

Ron Unz has written extensively on the history of Israeli terrorism and assassinations. His latest article focuses on the implications of Israel maintaining as much standing as it does, despite, even just the well known portion of it’s terrorism, being sufficient to establish Israel as the world’s preeminent practitioner of terrorism.

Here’s the intro to Unz’s piece:

“Ten days ago a sudden surprise Israeli attack inflicted a terrible, decapitating blow upon the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran, successfully assassinating the country’s top military commanders, its chief nuclear weapons negotiator, and nearly all of its most prominent nuclear scientists. Many of these victims were killed in their own homes together with their family members by explosive drones or missile strikes that sometimes destroyed entire apartment buildings, causing many collateral civilian deaths.

No such sudden massive wave of public assassinations against the top leadership of a major nation had ever previously happened, and the resulting war with its salvos of retaliatory Iranian missiles against Israel has now also brought America into the conflict.

Among other things, these events conclusively demonstrated the near-total control that Israel and its political partisans have achieved over the entire Western global media. Iran was in the midst of ongoing negotiations with the Trump Administration over its nuclear program, so Israel’s sudden strike was obviously an unprovoked attack, totally violating all international laws. Similarly, the assassination of so many of Iran’s military leaders and civilian scientists also broke every existing rule of international warfare. If any other country in the world had committed even a small fraction of these crimes, it would have been universally condemned in the strongest possible terms by every international body and subjected to the harshest international sanctions, quite possibly including coordinated military action to remove its regime and bring its political leadership to trial.

But since Israel’s fervent supporters completely dominate the global media, they can easily transform black into white and up into down. Thus, the bizarre result of this illegal, unprovoked Israeli attack upon Iran was a wave of public statements strongly sympathetic to Israel made by European and American political leaders from President Donald Trump on down, thereby demonstrating that all these powerful, once independent nations had merely become subservient vassals to the Jewish State.”

Zionist Israel as the Assassination Nation

has been analyzing and tracing the rise of Zionism through the Rothschilds. Start with his article Zionism: the bigger picture.

has traced the rise of Judaism through Christianity. Start with his essay The Devil's Trick: Unmasking the God of Israel.

Immigration — the Penultimate Current Thing

The LA riots pushed immigration into the Current Thing spot, right before Israel/Iran shouldered it out. But here again we are looking at an instance of people simply paying attention to (for a while) one of the big underlying ongoing things. Here’s some recommended reading:

A quarter century ago Chronicles Magazine published an article on immigration in California titled The Reconquista of California. I’m sure that article was interesting then; it is even more interesting now. Another piece on the California Reconquista that is also of renewed interest due to the LA riots, and is also more than a quarter century old is Reconquista!: The Takeover Of America, California Coalition for Immigration Reform.

One more particularly interesting article on immigration for now, this one much more recent, is Immigration as Collective Punishment: Open Borders as Revenge. The article discusses the change in rhetoric - as it becomes clearer that mass immigration is detrimental to the host population, it is argued that it should still happen anyway as a means of punishing the host population for the sins of their ancestors. Very interesting read with plenty of direct quotes and examples of the pro-immigration side arguing that mass immigration should be accepted as just punishment for the West’s traditional peoples.

A Classic Art Criticism Gem

If you like art criticism (such as my recent article Treebeard’s Razor), then let me bring to your attention the brilliant, witty, essay HOW TO BE A CRITIC: A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO ARTBOLLOCKS, written in 1999 by Brian Ashbee. It makes for five pages of biting critique that is as funny as it is insightful, and it has aged extremely well.

That brings you up to speed with my artwork, interviews, responses to my earlier writing, and related recommendations from me. I’ll be posting a new social commentary painting later this month (keep in mind we’re talking my version of “later this month,” meaning it might be next month). Let’s close with a couple memes:

Above - Stolen by me from ’s feed.

Stolen from ’s collections.

Stolen from ’s collections.

Stolen from ’ collections.

There is still a lot of excitement about generative AI. Clearly then, not enough cold water has been thrown on it. I am here to help.

First we need to equip ourselves with a philosophical razor, Treebeard’s Razor.

Treebeard is an Ent, a tree man character from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Treebeard doesn’t like AI art, he thinks it’s crap.

In the following excerpt from the Lord of The Rings, Treebeard explains something about his tree people’s language, Old Entish.

“It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time saying anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to."

– Treebeard

From this I’m going to formulate Treebeard’s Razor, which you can use to trim away and discard AI art and writing. You can also use this razor to trash ghostwritten celebrity work.

My formulation is much more moderate then Treebeard’s original statement (technically then I should call it the NeoTreebeardian Razor but that wouldn’t be as catchy). I’m not going to say that you have to take a long time to say something. If you can say something briefly that’s just as well.

However, what you say must at least be worth taking the time to actually say it. If a speaker is saying something of so little value that it is not worth their own time to say it, then it is not worth our time to listen to it.

“What?” you think, “Treabeard’s Razor is unnecessary because if it wasn’t worth their time to say it, and they knew that, then they simply wouldn’t have said it!” No, no, you’re wrong. Many people will attempt to occupy your time with something that wasn’t worth their time to say, and they won’t waste their own time saying it, they will only appear to say it. The saying of it they will have delegated to something else. A ghostwriter or AI.

Now, we are armed . . . with Treebeard’s Razor. Let’s start applying it. First we’ll apply it to painting. For painting we do not even need to modify Treebeard’s words into my more moderate NeoTreebeardian Razor; painting can withstand full strength Treebeardian scrutiny.

Painting is a language, a visual language. It can be a beautiful language. Like Old Entish, it takes a long time to say anything in the language of painting. It doesn’t matter if you paint fast, that’s still slow compared to how we generally communicate.

What does this tell us? It tells us that one of the statements a painter is making by choosing to communicate through Old Enti . . . I mean painting, is that the statement being made is worth taking a long time to say.

For example: look at this painting by Stanhope Forbes:

What is this artist communicating to us? Many things, but not least of these is that the artist has told us that commoners, out and about on a shiny beach during a gray day, doing their ordinary fish market tasks, are so important, such worthy subject matter for study and contemplation, that it is worth his time, attention, and hard won skill, to carefully portray them as he has done in this great work. The observation, time, and energy the artist dedicated to this portrayal is a major statement in itself.

Now let’s look at another painting:

Maynard Dixon isn’t merely stating that the desert landscape is worthy of dedicating years of his life to studying, feeling, learning from, and sharing what he has found with his audience (us) – he has proven that he believes this, for he did indeed spend years of his life doing just that.

Is it worth our time to contemplate and be transported by paintings? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on the painting, BUT, odds are good that the answer is in fact yes. Why? Because the artist doesn’t merely profess that the painting is worth looking at, the artist had to put their time, and if they used high end materials, a chunk of their money, where their mouth is. So we very nearly have proof that the artist is in earnest. They really did think their statement was worth taking a long time to say.

The Ents would approve.

Yes, I know, lots of celebrated artists this past century or so have been deluded and their judgment can’t be trusted on much of anything. But, for those whose judgment is at least halfway decent (this is an important caveat), the painting is strong evidence that they thought the statement worth taking a long time to say – and while this does not guarantee that it is worth your while to look at it, it does increase the odds that it is.

Now let’s take Treebeard’s Razor (just the more moderate NeoTreebeardian formulation) and apply it to AI art. Is it worth our while to look at AI art? In general, no.

If it’s not worth the artist’s time to say it it’s not worth our time to look at it.

The great innovation of AI art is that it allows you to make visual statements that aren’t worth taking much of anytime to say.

“Want to say something, but don’t think it’s important enough to bother investing your own time, thought, and energy into saying it? Boy have we got the answer for you!” - AI art.

This same principle applies to AI writing too.

The purpose of writing isn’t content generation, it’s communication. Ideally you put your work in front of people because you had something worth telling them. Content generation for the sake of content generation is an act of vandalism that pollutes the information commons with garbage that people have to wade past, making it more difficult for them to get to meaningful writing (or imagery).

Imagine someone creating a machine that can churn out semi plausible sounding gibberish and using it to fill books with plagiarism and derivative hackwork, and then putting nice sounding titles on them and stuffing a library with them. Patrons would then have to sort through all the junk to get to the original works, thereby making the library less useful. That’s the equivalent of having AI generate content and then diluting the original work on the internet with the AI derivatives.

For someone to put a platter full of AI content in front of us for our consumption is an insult to the audience. Let me give you an example of why with a little story:

Mr. Busy Calls his Mother

Mr. Busy’s mother was surprised to receive a phone call from her only child on Christmas. He never called, he was too busy. She used to invite him to drop by for coffee or lunch to catch up but he was always too busy. They met maybe once a year despite living in the same city.

She was pleased that he had made time for her at least on Christmas. She answered the phone and they talked for, to her surprise, 20 whole minutes. The next month he called again; at first she was worried that maybe an emergency had happened.

“Ha ha, no no, I’m fine mom, I just wanted to check in, see how things are going and chat a little.”

Later that year at the family reunion Mr. Busy’s mom asked him about the sky diving trip. Mr. Busy looked perplexed.

“Sky diving trip?”

“Yes, you said that you were going to go sky diving when we last talked, remember.”

“Oh, no, that must have just been an AI hallucination.”

Now it was Mr. Busy’s mom who looked perplexed.

“AI hallucination? What are you talking about?”

“Ah, well you see, I felt bad about never making any time for you mom; I’m just too busy you know, but thanks to technology I can call you every month despite my busy schedule. The program is called KSAI or Keepintouch Solutions AI.

It uses information from all my previous phone calls, conference calls, and social media to recreate my voice, and converse with you like it was me. Don’t tell her, but I have it call Samantha and Johnny (Mr. Busy’s wife, and son) when I’m away on business trips too, it saves me a lot of time. Of course they’re probably using Keepintouch to answer my calls too; in which case it would just be AI talking to AI, ha ha, imagine that! I’ve even been using it for courtesy calling my less important clients, makes them feel like they’re important.”

“Oh, now mom! Don’t act all hurt and offended like that. You said you were delighted to hear from me more often. Don’t let the knowledge that it’s AI ruin it for you, it’s still based on me.”

— The End.

I think that gets the point across well enough at just how offensive it is to pretend to say something to someone by delegating the task to a machine. This demonstrates that you in fact had nothing to say, and value their time so little that you occupied their time by pretending to talk to them anyway.

This deep insult to the audience is much older then AI. Politicians and celebrities have long expressed unadulterated disdain for their audience by doing something like this by using ghostwriters.

For example, Kristi Noem (Current Secretary of Homeland security and former South Dakota governor), received blow back from her now notorious story about shooting her puppy or something, in her book No Going Back. But far more interesting is that the book also included an anecdote of Kristi Noem’s meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un – a meeting that never happened. The controversy then revolved around whether or not Kristi had told her ghostwriter and publisher to include this story or if it was an innocent mistake with the ghostwriter and publisher having taken liberties.

That there could even be any question as to whether or not this was written without Kristi Noem’s knowledge of it, reveals just how uninvolved Kristi Noem was with the writing of her book; not only did she not write her book, she might not have even read it.

The biggest scandal of Kristi Noem’s book No Going Back isn’t the puppy (rest in peace) or the potentially blatant lying, the deeper scandal is how little she values other people’s time, and that she polluted bookstore shelves with garbage. I’ve never read her book and never will, because I already know that it is not worth anyone’s time to read it. She didn’t have anything to say. Or at the very least, whatever she may have had to say was so unimportant that it wasn’t worth her own time to say it.

Had she had anything worth her time to say she would have said it and would then have had no need for a ghostwriter. (I sort of want to like Noem for having not gone crazy on Covid-1984 like the other governors, but I’ve chosen to use her as an example anyway, and denounce her crime of polluting the information commons because I don’t feel like finding another example from another politician or celebrity).

So AI is in some ways the poor man’s ghostwriter (or ghostpainter, or ghostphotographer). Now rich and poor alike can pollute the information commons with visual and verbal statements of so little value that they’re not worth the author taking their own time to say them.

This is the pointlessness of generative AI: Do you have something to say?

Yes – Then say it.

No – Then don’t occupy people’s time and or visual space (in the case of AI art) by pretending to say something.

“But if you can say something faster and more efficiently why not?”

Why not indeed. Look at this vivacious work by Fragonard painted in 1761 (sorry about the “fish eye” camera lens distortion; the colors and resolution on this image were better than others available online).

On the back of this painting was an old note stating painted in one hour’s time. Whether that boast is true or not Fragonard was fast, and the painting is great, but Fragonard still said it. This visual statement, is Fragonard’s statement. It was worth his time (one hour), and his intense focus (necessary to pull this off), to make this visual statement.

If Fragonard had been alive today, and had saved himself the trouble on this painting by entering a prompt into AI along the line of “Painting of young man in colorful clothing,” then Fragonard would have saved himself an hour and some energy. He also wouldn’t have said anything at all; he would have merely prompted a machine to churn out some visual content.

Entering a prompt into an AI program to generate visual content is no more painting then hiring a ghostwriter is writing. We come back to the same pointlessness of generative AI. If you have something to say, and it’s worth your time to say it, then just say it, you don’t need AI or a ghostwriter. If you have nothing to say, or it’s not worth your time to say it, you still don’t need AI or a ghostwriter, because it simply doesn’t need to be said at all then.

A Couple Possible Objections that I’m Going to Preemptively Address and Dismiss

1^st Objection: Not everyone can paint, AI lets everyone paint, it democratizes painting.

No it doesn’t, it’s not letting anyone paint, because the user isn’t painting at all, and no, the image prompt doesn’t count as painting either or anything like it. Here is why:

First, look at this painting:

Why did the artist go through all that trouble of actually painting the image? Wouldn’t it have been easier to make a simple written statement like: “ woman kneeling at a grave with an umbrella, hills and building in the background, green grass and some wildflowers in the foreground”? There, see, that required next to no time for me to write that, yet it must have taken Nono weeks or more to paint that painting. So why did he go through all that trouble?

Because the artist is trying to do something that cannot be achieved with a simple written statement. Whatever the artist is exploring/channeling/expressing requires going beyond a simple written statement or else the artist would have saved himself the trouble and given us a simple written statement instead of a painting.

But what do you put into an AI image generator? A simple written statement like the one I just provided. So everything beyond the written statement isn’t you speaking, it’s the image generator filling in based on its programing. That’s what I mean when I say that you aren’t saying anything at all with AI art. Your part is the written prompt; everything beyond the written prompt for the image generator doesn’t have to do with you. But everything beyond the written prompt is everything that matters, because painting is getting at things that you can’t get at with a simple written statement: otherwise no one would bother painting to begin with, but would instead just make simple written statements.

2^nd Objection: “But many people do use AI art, especially for illustration work – article and editorial illustrations, children’s books, and so forth, so clearly it must be serving some value or else so many people wouldn’t be availing themselves of what it offers.”

Yes, clearly it is performing a function, but what is that function? I’m going to argue that that function isn’t primarily to make imagery, but to get (access) imagery. AI art programs serve as a stand in for a sophisticated search engine, access to most the world’s images, and a magical copyright begone wand.

If the same money put into AI art programs had been put into scraping all the images off the web, but instead of using them as the basis of AI art using them as a free to everyone image library searchable with an extremely responsive search engine, then I bet that this would be even more useful for most purposes (especially article images and illustrations) than AI. Most of the time when someone uses an AI image there’s a very good chance that there is an original painting or photograph out there that would have been even better for their purpose, but they either couldn’t find it (save by finding it as a derivative in the form of AI art) or they could find it but couldn’t use it because of copyright, watermarks, or too low of resolution.

So a massive repository of images, a very responsive search engine, and a magical copyright begone wand are all real functions of AI art programs, but none of those actually have to do with creating artwork; they all have to do with archiving, retrieving, and removing copyright.

Let me show you a hypothetical: suppose I wrote a space science fiction book, decided I wanted a nice dramatic cover for it, and so I wrote a prompt into an AI image generator. All I say is in the style of John Harris, that’s it: I literally wrote that right now and got this:

Okay, well, clearly the image generator has in it’s data base the works of the English artist John Harris, known especially for his science fiction covers, because I didn’t say space based. The image generator mostly kicked out space-ish sci-fi though, so they must have his works tagged along those lines. Some users are probably getting derivatives of John Harris without even realizing it when they put in space related prompts, not to mention many other artists whose works are being copied with enough machine alteration that we’ll never learn whose art we’re actually looking at (in derivative form).

But I didn’t need that derivative image above; nobody needs it; it added nothing to the world, there already existed something much better:

The AI prompted derivative is nowhere near on par with the original John Harris painting (above) that it appears to be somewhat based on, and the same could be said for all manner of AI art - on the rare occasions when you can figure out what the source material is for the AI, the source material is almost always better. But, in my hypothetical situation the AI is serving a purpose . . . as a copyright begone wand. The original John Harris above is copyrighted, whereas the AI derivative would be unlikely to face a copyright challenge.

Provenance

Messages generally do not exist in a vacuum. Who said it, when they said it, where they said it, and how they said it, are all aspects that can contribute to, and alter the meaning of the message. AI black boxes that do not allow us to see what the imagery is based on strip away all this information. Multiple layers of meaning are removed. AI images are atomized images. In contrast paintings are enmeshed within the webs of human societies, individual lives, and specific times and places.

Let’s look at some examples:

The Raft of the Medusa (above) was controversial, because it is a dramatic, vast painting (16 by 23 feet), of proportions and seriousness usually reserved at the time (1819) for high, noble, biblical, mythological, and historical depictions. But what this painting depicts is in fact scandalous. A sensational shipwreck with the captain’s competence called into question, that led to the death of most the crew, with survivors resorting to cannibalism.

Was it worth this artist putting an immense amount of time, energy, research, and expense, into creating a monument to that tragic and sordid event? An open question. I like the painting, though personally I’m with the critics from two centuries ago on this one — I don’t think the subject justifies the monumental proportions and effort.

No AI art will ever lead to such a scandal and such a debate because there is no threshold at which something becomes worthy of being painted with AI.

Late 19th century paintings celebrating ordinary people, farmers, fishermen, children, and peasants, have sometimes been derided as “sentimental” by ivory towered - art world - air headed - smooth brained - know nothings. On the contrary, there is nothing wrong with sentiment, and these late 19th century paintings are remarkable. These paintings represent artists dedicating the same time and skill that used to be reserved primarily for paintings of kings and queens and high subjects - to painting peasants. So I think you can see some very positive social significance to that.

AI art does not have such social significance. The medium cannot convey a comparable message of loving time, care, skill, and attention dedicated to the subject.

Even when it comes to weirdness AI art can’t match the weirdness of real art. Anyone can get a weird image by prompting AI, and what of it? That’s just goofing off. In contrast it takes a real weirdo to dedicate hard won talent and and skill to envisioning and summoning into this world a weird vision to be shared with the audience. For example: knowing how serious and dedicated Cormon had to be to plan out and see through to completion his epic painting Cain is part of what makes it so delightfully deranged.

Direct Experience

Every artist’s work will be partly derivative, based on influence and inspiration from other artists who provide the foundation that they’re building on. But their work will also involve their own observations of the world. Real life and the real world are breezes that continually freshen up and ground the artist’s work. For example, we can feel Maynard Dixon’s own experience of moonlit nights informing his painting Roadside.

But of course AI is never going to draw upon its own experience of a moonlit night. Rather than combining inspiration from other artists with its own experience, AI is entirely derivative.

In Summary

Mediums are there to convey messages. Nobody needs content for the sake of content. There exists already a vast quantity of written and visual material. The principal issue isn’t a shortage of content; the issue is quality content getting swamped by junk content. The main contribution of generative AI has been, and most likely will continue to be, making the problem worse, by increasing the quantity of junk derivative work that we have to wade through to get to high quality original information and imagery.

Ah, the wonders of big tech - right when the internet was already drowning in garbage from clickbait and hackwork they came along and provided us with a state of the art junk generator like no one had ever seen before.

Speakers (as in communicators) who have something of value to share with us will share it by saying it themselves through writing, painting, speaking, photography or some other medium of communication. If someone delegates the task to generative AI, that is a sure sign that they either had nothing to say, or that what they did have to say wasn’t worth taking their own time to say, and consequently isn’t worth our time to listen to or look at.

P. S. If you are a writer/content creator, you are more than welcome to use images of my paintings off my website as illustrations for your own blog posts, and videos as needed. I only have some 50 or a 100 images up online, but still, every bit helps to reduce the use of generative AI. Should you take me up on this, please just credit the image source with my name and a hyperlink to my website page where you found the image.

Conciliatory Note:

In this essay I have shown no mercy in my trashing of AI art, and I should have kept it that way because that was fun. But unfortunately I struggled with my inner angel (damn him). He got the better of me, marched me back to the keyboard, sat me down, seized the controls to my arms and hands, and forced me to write this conciliatory note (that’s the real danger of letting my essays sit for so long before publishing as I generally do; it gives that nasty little goody two shoes too many openings to slip words in edgewise).

So here’s the thing - many independent writers, podcasters, and documentary makers, whose work is of a high quality, and clearly a labor of love, do use AI for much of their imagery. I would not want to demoralize, or denigrate these hardworking communicators, and to be fair (and it looks like I’m going to be fair now, I guess . . . because of my whiny, killjoy, oversensitive, conscience that keeps intruding on my writing) they have a legitimate (?! . . . Well, how about at least understandable) reason for their use of AI.

Namely, they are usually verbal communicators, who use written and spoken words to convey their message, not visual artists. They are under no obligation to provide any imagery at all to accompany and enhance their verbal message, meaning that even when they use AI for their imagery, that represents them going above and beyond and putting in more work, not less, into the crafting and delivery of their message. They are creating multimedia productions and delegating to AI the visual imagery part at which they are not themselves specialists.

So maybe I should appreciate their effort rather than harshly condemning them? Well I do in fact appreciate their efforts, and I enjoy many indie media productions, but appreciating their use of AI art? That’s a bridge too far, but I’ll compromise; I’ll hold off on the condemnation . . . or, well . . . I won’t heap it on so thick. They don’t have my blessing for their use of AI art, but they do have my understanding.

I understand that they are still playing an active role in their use of AI through selective editorial decisions and using the imagery to set the tone and visual ambiance. For the same level of effort they may be getting more exciting, personalized, and appropriate imagery than what they would get by hunting through free stock photography and clip art which look like they might be getting sloppified by a flood of AI junk anyway.

As I mentioned earlier in this essay AI has had so much money and effort poured into it that in many ways it is a huge image library (maybe the biggest ever) with more images, and a more responsive search engine than other image repositories. And of course the copyright begone magic of AI art let’s you draw upon even bodies of modern sci-fi and fantasy art (in derivative, degraded form) that would otherwise be protected by copyright.

So there, see, I am understanding, merciful, and magnanimous. Can my inner angel please let me go now and end this commie struggle session? Good, thank you. So all that being said, I encourage content creators to think about the imagery they use not just as a decoration, or ambience setting; instead think about doing this:

When you can, use your illustration needs to draw attention to original works. The images free of copyright concerns are usually going to be older works of art and photographs. Where applicable use them instead of AI. Credit the image source and drop a few details in (name of the artist, year of the work). I don’t think that I am alone as a reader in being more impressed by an article illustration where the author or editor used an old artwork instead of AI - because suddenly it’s not just a decoration on the article - it’s a curated selection, it’s a historical connection, and it’s a step in re-popularizing painting.

Again, AI art is atomized and disconnected - paintings, on the other hand, are enmeshed within human society and history. We have lost much of the connection with the bodies of visual work from the past. That’s not AI’s fault. Painting was cast down from its prominent position that it held in the late 19th century, not by any new technology, but by the hostile takeover of the artworld by anti-art Emperor’s Taylors (after their success making him his new clothes they set about popularizing the Emperor’s New Art) who alienated the public from painting.

The public, from all walks of life used to crowd into the salons every year to see the works of their nation’s visual artists. The hostile takeover of the art world by the Emperor’s Taylors drove out the good art, and elevated Emperor’s New Clothes style art (blank canvases, upturned urinals, sharks in formaldehyde, Campbells soup cans, etc.) and through this they alienated the public from painting.

Good art never stopped being produced, it just lost most of its official, and institutional patronage. A contemporary artist like John Harris, for example, (who we looked at earlier) found patronage for his work through science fiction book covers. In two books published on John Harris’s work (Beyond the Horizon, and Into the Blue) the introductions mention that John Harris drew inspiration from the Romantic art movement of the 19th century, and the Orientalists, so we can see that a modern science fiction artist is connected to the historic flow and web of visual art movement stretching back centuries.

Let’s pause a moment to appreciate Meckel’s painting above. The original is over six feet across the long side, so of course we’re not going to get the full impact from a picture of the painting, but we can still get a lot. The composition is strong, and stands out clearly even at a thumbnail scale (so it would grab your attention from across the room when seen in person). There’s plenty of breathing room, it’s bright and airy. Yet, when we inspect the details (which Meckel wisely concentrated/grouped so that they contribute to, rather than ruin the composition) we find ourselves enjoying an almost Where’s Waldo? type of fun.

The woman in the lower left of the composition smoking a cigarette is smiling at something funny or mischievous said by someone with their back to us. The rocks behind her are lit from beneath with warm light bouncing off the sand back into the shadows. The man to her left, the most prominent figure in the piece, looks like he has stopped in to chat while about on other business. Deeper into the painting we find women washing clothes, and goats and donkeys on the bank. A brilliant extravaganza.

Continuing with the contemporary artists connection to the past: the artist Steve Henderson (my dad) has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of artists and art movements, stretching from renaissance Italy and 19th century Russia into early 20th century American illustrators. So he is deeply informed by and connected to the historical flow of visual communication.

(In the Witching Hour above, I like it that, despite the title, there are actually no overt symbols of magic; all the magic needed in this case, is in the gathering dusk, the dark trees, and the shimmering water surrounding the woman’s central figure.)

The flow of realist imagery, in for example, oil painting, runs unbroken from headwaters in the late middle ages right down to the present day - for some. But for much of the public the connection is broken.

That’s where writers can elevate their article illustrations beyond mere decorations. Each illustration, if you can find a suitable pre-existing image, is an opportunity to re-familiarize and reconnect the audience with the flow of visual communication - a place where you can use those visuals to highlight great original creative works rather than merely generating more machine made derivatives.

For old artworks, no problem, if they’re old enough to be in the public domain, high resolution images through Wikimedia commons, auction houses, and museums, are getting easier and easier to come by. Late 19th century works tend to be especially accessible to, and easily appreciated by, a modern audience.

For contemporary artists - well, it’s up to us, the copyright holders, to give permission to indie media creators to use our art as illustration in their blog posts and videos. And I would encourage contemporary artists to consider doing that, because the AI programs have probably already scraped your images off the web and are using them to make derivative artwork; wouldn’t you rather that your original creative work go out instead of anonymous derivatives of it? And that way you at least get credit for your work.

Closing Thoughts

I really am going to end this essay before wandering off on another tangent, so don’t worry, any paragraph now I’ll end this essay. But first, a couple last thoughts:

Encouraging Snobbery

The public tends to hate AI art. They’ve become art snobs. That’s wonderful, and I hope that my essay here will serve to embolden the AI art haters. While not all uses of AI art are damnable offenses (maybe just purgatory), any attempt, though, to place machine made derivative art images alongside natural intelligence, man made art, is a crude insult to human agency and organic sources of inspiration.

Expecting the audience to take machine made derivative art seriously is unreasonable and the audience is right to be offended by this.

I encourage people not to let fears of hypocrisy get in the way of practicing snobbery towards AI art:

Let’s say that someone sees an image and they love it. But then they find out it’s AI. Now they want to withdraw their approval, and instead actively dislike the image, but they think that might be hypocritical of them. That now they are somehow bound to continue liking the image. But no, they are under no such constraints.

It is always acceptable to change your mind based on new information. It is perfectly legitimate to begin disliking an image that you initially liked after you find out it’s AI.

Remember, communication doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Who said it, how they said it, and so forth, are factors that can change the meaning of a statement, such as a painting. As you find out more about an artistic statement, it is natural, and right, and healthy, that your opinion of the work evolves and changes.

For example: I initially disliked Frida Kahlo’s work - wasn’t my cup of tea, but as I found out more about the pain and struggle Kahlo endured and used her canvases to express, my opinion changed, now I can appreciate her work to some degree.

A terrible bus accident with a trolley impaled Kahlo’s pelvis with a handrail, broke her spine in multiple locations, crushed her foot, and a long list of other injuries left Kahlo with recurrent pain and illness from that point on. The Broken Column is an example of her working through her pain on canvas:

As another example of someone reasonably changing their view of an artwork based on new (to them) information, let’s look at Fragonard’s The Swing.

My sister used to love this painting . . . till she found out that the man in the bushes is looking up the skirt of his mistress, while her husband in the shadows propels her on the swing. Then she wasn’t so enthused about this painting anymore. That’s a reasonable reassessment. The painting at first seems sweet and enchanting but upon closer inspection is sullied by the questionable subject it portrays. It seems to me to represent upper class moral rot, but celebrates and trivializes it rather than criticizes it.

The first artist approached with the commission, Gabriel François Doyen, is said to have refused the commission, and it would have been to Fragonard’s credit if he too had turned it down.

As a final example of why it is appropriate to dislike something you initially liked, upon finding out more about it, such as that it is AI, there is of course the story I provided earlier in this essay Mr. Busy Calls his Mother, where Mr. Busy’s mother went from being happy about her son touching base by phone, to being offended when she gained new information about the phone call - that it was AI. And I think we would all see her change of mind in the hypothetical story to be justified.

Honest to Goodness, Final Paragraph(s), For Real This Time

By this point it’s probably started to dawn on you that this essay doesn’t have much to do with Treebeard. You may be wondering how much it really even has to do with AI art. That only 1 image in this essay, out of 22 images, is AI art is perhaps a little suspicious.

Well, AI art provided a good foil for discussing real paintings. If you weren’t enthusiastic about paintings before, I hope that some of my enthusiasm has rubbed off on you. If your snobbery towards AI had begun to waver I trust my arguments will have renewed your aversion to it. And finally (really), if the pretentious word salads of the art establishment had alienated you from paintings I hope that my plainspoken essay will have brought you back.

Jordan Henderson is an artist from the Northwest of the United States. His original paintings can be Viewed Here, Art Prints Here, and Essays Here.

Monsieur Martin-Dausch (in the painting above, arms crossed, lower right hand corner) does not trust the plan.

What we think of today as the Nazi salute, or fascist salute, was introduced, or reintroduced, into the modern world not by the Nazis nor Italian Fascists, and no, not by the Americans either, though they to used to salute the flag that way (the Bellamy Salute), no, it was introduced by a painter and adopted by the French revolution. Yes, the irony really is just that delightful; the so called Nazi salute was popularized by the Mother-Revolution of modern-era leftwing revolutions. The revolution where the very terms left and rightwing come from to begin with.

Even the famous photograph of shipyard workers doing the Nazi salute while a lone man refuses with arms crossed, is itself an echo of a painted scene from the French Revolution. In the oil study above you can see a man seated, arms crossed, Joseph Martin-Dauch, the lone man from the Estates General to dissent during the Tennis Court Oath.

Martin-Dauch was right to have reservations about his revolutionary colleagues and their plan - they were not thinking straight. But at least the revolution was better than the Monarchy! right? . . . mmmhh, no, not even that.

French King Louis the XVI, was I think, a conscientious, somewhat bumbling man, who did the best he could for his people and country in a tough situation (failed crops, and concurrent famine and social upheaval), and well . . . his best didn’t cut it. But Louis the XVI was certainly better than the Terror. (And you can’t wriggle out of this by saying, well, the Terror was just the price of liberty - that argument doesn’t work, because the revolution failed and led to Emperor Napoleon. If the best you can get is Napoleon in place of Louis the XVI, well that’s not worth a nickel, let alone the actual high cost of the revolution in blood and treasure.)

Louis the XVI tried to govern under enlightenment principals. The modern historian Simon Schama, in his book Citizens, paints a convincing (to me anyways) picture of France during Louis the XVI’s reign as a dynamic country full of scientific invention, revolutionary ideas, increased religious tolerance, the abolition of torture, increasing social mobility, where the King himself was enthusiastic about, and bestowed royal funds on such things as groundbreaking schools for teaching the blind and the deaf.

France was certainly no utopia, and had plenty of injustice, high taxes, and famines during major crop failures of course, but the point is it was moving in the right direction, and the Revolutionary Terror wasn’t an improvement. The revolution gave way to Napoleon, and Emperor Napoleon, sacrificing great numbers of Frenchmen on the killing fields of the European chess board, on behalf of the game Napoleon was playing, certainly wasn’t an improvement either.

So think about that; the first great Leftwing revolution, where the the term Left (politically) was coined to begin with, failed the people it was supposed to help, didn’t do better than what it just overthrew, and set the stage for Napoleon.

The Plan, didn’t work, and the warning signs were there from the beginning. But woe betide anyone who tried to point out that the revolution was on a collision course with reality!

The Left has kept failing in much the same way ever since.

They know where they want to go - roughly greater freedom, peace, and prosperity for all. Good, laudable. They have a plan.

They have a vague map, with a considerable amount of information missing. They plot a course on the map anyway, and then stick to it, even when new information comes to light. People discover new obstacles not originally on the map; there’s a deep chasm between themselves and their destination, they must change course and find another way round. But don’t point that out or you’re a counter revolutionary, or a reactionary, or sowing dissent, or whatever, you need to be shouted down, so we can get back down to the business of following the plan.

In the oil sketch heading this essay three figures embrace in the center, two Catholic clergy and a Protestant, symbolizing the religious tolerance, and everyone getting along, attitude of the revolution. But that didn’t happen. The revolution was itself a belief system and it eventually subjugated the competing belief system. The revolution nationalized the Catholic Church, looted it as a source of easy funds, sent many priests who protested to the guillotine, and carried out a de-Christianization campaign.

Amusingly, Jacques-Louis David never went on to do the full sized painting of that oil sketch above, in part, because by the time he would have got round to it, too many of the former revolutionary heroes in the painting had already become personas non grata, for such things as not swearing allegiance to the constitution, and being moderates.

But this essay isn’t about the French Revolution, so we’ll be moving on. All I wanted to do actually was share Jacques-Louis David’s oil sketch as a perfect illustration for this piece, but then I thought I would give some background on it, and then I decided to just go ahead and use it as an opportunity to ground this essay in some historical perspective. However, before we move on let’s answer: what got the French revolutionaries doing the “Nazi salute” thing to begin with? Well let’s take a look at this painting, Oath of the Horatii. also by Jacques-Louis David:

Short version of what’s going on in that painting. The three Roman Horatii-family brothers are about to go fight as champions representing Rome, against three champions representing Alba Longa, to settle a dispute. Their father holds their swords for the oath. Their sister Camilla is unhappy not just because her brothers are heading out for a battle to the death, but because she is betrothed to one of the Alba Longa champions whom they’ll be fighting, so she’ll lose a loved one no matter what. The lone survivor of the fight, one of the Horatii brothers, comes back to find his sister weeping over the loss of her fiance - one of the Alba Longa champions he killed. Furious at his sister for weeping over the enemy, he kills her. Dubious morality there that that is, the painting moved the French Revolutionaries, and the dramatic salute shown in the painting became popular.

That leftist/far-right-salute thing certainly isn’t the only iconic hand/arm gesture to have been introduced or reintroduced into popular culture by a painting. Nothing less than the iconic thumbs down gesture has been attributed (I haven’t seen the first hand sources of this for myself hence my cautious wording) to popularization through a painting. Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1872 painting - Pollice Verso.

There above you see the crowd with thumbs down indicating they want the fallen gladiator killed rather than spared (apparently the painting caused immediate controversy over whether or not the hand sign in Gérôme’s painting was historically accurate).

Ah, yes . . . that’s right, this essay isn’t about paintings or hand signs either, is it? Well then, the museum detour is over (you didn’t have to remind me, with your little, “cough coughs,” and “ahems”), and off to the main subject matter, we go — that being Q-Anarchism:

I’m going to share some graphics. Some are surveys. Surveys have their limits of course - these are mostly just interesting for corroborating what we have already seen and felt around us in our society.

Yes, correlation does not prove causation, and not just immigration but also off-shoring is a means by which capital undercuts labor, yet . . . the similar profiles of those two graphs above should certainly give us reason to pause and reflect.

Table of Contents

“WTF?!” you think. “We did that ramble through the paintings, looked at all those graphics, and only now we reach the table of contents?!” Calm down, I can explain:

Firstly, if you think this essay is too long, I wrote a little section just for you titled, Note on the Length of This Essay, where I play a violin in empathy for any Diva McComplainers who are unhappy that I didn’t compress this material into a tweet.

Secondly, I called the first part a preamble, didn’t I? And I did that for exactly the reason you cynically suspect I did. I thought “Preamble? That words got ‘amble’ in it. So if I call the first part a pre-amble that means we don’t have to get right to the point, we can wander around and look at paintings first. Ha ha ha!” Now, no more lollygagging - back to the table of contents.

• Preamble - (you already read that part, see, we’re making good time.)

• Introduction

  • Note on the Length of This Essay

  • Rusere Shoniwa’s Critique of My Earlier Essay

  • Note on the State of the Truth Movement Migration Feud

  • Note on the Title of This Essay

• Diversity & Religion

  • Religious Differences Don’t Matter?

  • Examples of Religion Shaping the Public Square

  • Further Remarks on Diversity and Religion.

  • Jewish Gentile Conflicts of Interest

  • Note on South Africa

  • Note on India & Pakistan

• Interracial Crime

  • Shoniwa’s Critique of my Argument.

  • Red Pill Poet’s Counterpoint

  • Making Sense of the Numbers, Plus Non Fatal Violent Crime

  • Clearer More Recent Data Plus the Combined Interracial & Intraracial Homicide Rate

  • Yes, This Matters, Yes, We have to Talk About it, and No, There is No Ill Will Here

• The Great Leveling Has Been Canceled

• Trojan Horses, and Cuckoo Birds - Trump & Musk

• The Root Cause Cop Out

  • Assailing Criminocracy from all Sides

• Q-Anarchism

  • The Moment of Truth

  • The Jury is in: The Plan Failed

• Postscript - Sharing a reader’s insight given as a comment to my last essay

Introduction:

A few weeks back I published an essay titled, On the Great Replacement, I’ve Come Around: Here is Why. The title is self explanatory. If it sounds interesting to you, read it, as ultimately this post is a defense of that post. What you are in the midst of is a debate, and an interesting one.

Here I am to going to propose that those who have strongly objected to; my writing, Simon Elmer’s writing, and to Nevermore for publishing our work on replacementism, sense at some level, what I know — the hoped for diverse coalition of the various groups making up the 99%, or proletariat, is largely an illusion, and a simple stress test of a mild sort will prove it. They want to avoid the stress test for the same reason I want to apply it. We both suspect the same result if the coalition is subjected to a mild stress test — it will vanish because it was a mirage all along.

Firstly though, I will engage with the published critique of my essay from Rusere Shoniwa (after that I’ll describe the mirage chasing, ‘trust the plan,’ belief, that I dub Q-Anarchism).

Note on the Length of This Essay:

Whenever I publish something short and sweet my critics tell me, “Not enough context!” then if I reply with a considerably more detailed piece and more context they tell me TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read). I’ve had exactly that happen to me before.

I’m not saying my new critics would do that, but just in case; let’s not have that happen here. Multiple people faulted my short sweet 6,000 word previous piece for not providing enough context for the dozen topics that I briefly touched on.

Had I called my earlier piece “J. Henderson’s Encyclopedia: The Authoritative Compendium of Scholarly Treatises on White Guilt, Mass Migration, and Multiculturalism” then the charge of not enough context and not enough in-depth detailed study would be valid. But it isn’t valid because my previous piece was a humble and self critical personal account of what changed my viewpoint. I specifically described it as a whirlwind tour, and for those who wanted more detail beyond the brief examples I offered, I cited other articles and very in-depth studies that influenced me such as Rodney Stark’s book For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery.

However, I appreciate that Shoniwa has taken the time to engage with my previous work at length, and I will respond in kind. More context and explanation does, though, mean more length and detail. To quote an ancient Chinese proverb - deal with it.

Rusere Shoniwa’s Critique of My Essay

Recently Rusere Shoniwa, who publishes Plague on Both Houses, and contributes to the publication Real Left, published a four part critique of my essay. Shoniwa’s four part series is titled The Great Replacement Consciousness Test, and the four parts are:

Part I - Some of My Best Friends Are . . .

Part II - Positive Stereotyping, Interracial Crime, and the You-Know-Who’s

Part III - Religion and Diversity.

Part IV - The Heart of the Matter

Those four parts above are hyper linked and will take you to Shoniwa’s critique of my essay.

Shoniwa takes issue with what I wrote for a multitude of reasons, and offers counter rebuttals to some of the arguments that I laid out.

The arguments put forth by Shoniwa vary from reasonably concrete arguments all the way to numerous misrepresentations of my essay, and gratuitous misrepresentations of me. (As one example of many: he editorializes when quoting me, by claiming that I “scream” the sentence he quotes of mine. My sentence that he quoted contained neither an exclamation mark, nor all caps - no indication that “he (me) screams” the sentence. I typed it sitting quietly at my keyboard. That’s the kind of gratuitous misrepresentation of me found throughout Shoniwa’s critique. It wasn’t courteous of my critic, and it isn’t conducive to reasoned debate.)

Many of Shoniwa’s arguments appear like counters to my argument, yet when I parse them he seems to have just reaffirmed what I said. For example: I pointed to the self hatred of the West, which I wish to help undo. Shoniwa incensed, points out that the West is to blame for destroying itself. Yes, and?

Many of Shoniwa’s arguments in his critique of my essay are along these lines, in which his tone implies that he is strongly disagreeing with me, but when I parse his counter argument I can’t find what it is that I stated that he is contesting. He paraphrases me a lot, too, and much of his paraphrasing doesn’t line up with what I actually said.

So my counter critique will focus on what I consider to be Shoniwa’s most cleanly laid out arguments - most of the misrepresentations, including of me personally, I will simply leave unaddressed to avoid cluttering this essay, and to stay focused on Shoniwa’s stronger arguments.

Note on the State of The Truth Movement Migration Feud:

Let me take a moment to bring you up to date on this dispute around immigration that has been lighting up some sections of what has come to be loosely known as the Truth movement:

Shoniwa’s four part critique of my essay was published on his site Plague on Both Houses and also published on Real Left. The publication The Stirrer weighed in, in favor of Shoniwa’s critique and contra Nevermore for having published excerpts from Simon Elmer’s work, and my work, and then they weighed in again here. A roughly similar dispute emerged earlier between Simon Elmer and the publication Off-Guardian, and another similar dispute between writers C. J Hopkins and Eugyppius on Substack. Nowick Grey’s take here, Paul Cudenec’s take here, Iain Davis take here. All on roughly this same topic.

Everyone I just mentioned was an opponent of Covid-19, varying between regarding it as a totalitarian overreaction, all the way to regarding it as a total psyop and fake pandemic (my view).

Some have despaired at another fracturing of the Truth movement, but don’t. Rigorous debate is good, this is fine. Sure there has been some excommunication, and vociferous denunciation of wrongthink going on, but that’s just extra spice.

Note on the title of this essay:

Shoniwa prefers the term Volutaryist instead of the closely related term Anarchist — a sensible choice. I nonetheless titled this Q-Anarchism because that’s closer to Q-Anon, and therefore catchier. Besides, the position I’m critiquing is held primarily by anti-fascist, anarchist, former anarchist and anarchist adjacent publications and people.

Religion & Diversity

Religious Differences Don’t Matter?

The clearest and most concrete of Shoniwa’s arguments in my view is in the third part of his series: Part III - Religion and Diversity.

In my essay, that Shoniwa is criticizing, I have a subsection under the subheading Religious Differences Matter. There I explained that when people take their religions seriously, religious differences do matter, and they can and do affect the world in major ways.

Shoniwa boldly states that “No, religious differences do not matter.”

Shoniwa regards my approach of looking at what a religion teaches, and looking at the example set by a religion’s founder, as risible and trite. His preferred approach is to examine the behavioral outcomes.

Very well then, let’s see how Shoniwa does that.

Shoniwa begins by attributing the world’s current state of affairs to the “accumulation of centuries of the Christian West’s will to power,” he only mentions negative aspects of the current state of affairs (presumably to counter what he views as an overly positive assessment of the West on my part). And then he says this (emphasis mine):

“Now, I am not trying to argue that Muslim culture is better than Western culture. I really do like living in London and would not trade it for Islamabad or Riyad. As weird as this may sound to Henderson, I am now, for all intents and purposes, a Westerner, but I have a perspective that allows me to be a little more critical. To reiterate my position on culture – if you want to present any culture as a Good Thing, you must put both its horrors and its beauty on the scales and prove a net positive. That is an exercise in futility, but if you’re going to try it, I would suggest that Henderson’s less-than-rigorous approach is risible.”

Firstly, when Shoniwa states that he wouldn’t trade living in London for Islamabad or Riyadh he appears to be stating a preference for one culture over another, and acknowledges that at least one of the cultures is shaped by a religion.

Religions are cults, and serious cults cultivate the social order and form cultures. Shoniwa understands that, because this is still the section where he is discussing religion, but he has switched to the broader term culture, and appears to be using the two terms interchangeably. This indicates that Shoniwa recognizes that religion belongs in that category (that category being belief systems that cultivate the social order — culture).

So while Shoniwa may be unwilling to attach any value judgement to different religions, his stated preference is for a city steeped for much of its past in the cult of Christianity, and he wouldn’t trade this for Islamabad or Riyadh - cities whose cultures are still steeped and shaped by the cult of Islam.

Secondly, despite Shoniwa finding my method of evaluating religions risible and trite, the only method he offers that I can find in his essay is what he mentions in my quotation of him above about weighing the horrors and beauty of a culture on the scales. Of this method, that he proposes, he says that it is “an exercise in futility.”

Shoniwa does not like my method, and the only method he offers he calls an exercise in futility, so it appears that Shoniwa does not have a method for evaluating the significance of religious differences.

How then is Shoniwa so confident as to boldly state, “No, religious differences do not matter.”?

Simple, he advocates that everyone adopt his belief system (voluntaryism) in public and keep their own belief systems in private and out of the public sphere. I’ll quote Shoniwa at length.

“Religious differences don’t matter if you’re a voluntaryist in spirit, not name. That’s the starting point. A voluntaryist world is one in which everyone gets to choose their spiritual or religious belief system on the understanding that they can’t enforce that system on others in any way.

Thus the public square becomes a neutral place in which we interact on the bread-and-butter things required to live – work, trade, and so on. We can even engage in entertainment and exchange of ideas in the public square as long as everyone understands that those exchanges are not an imposition of ideas on anyone. If the ideas or entertainment offend your religious principles, you make a free choice not to attend those exchanges.

Then there is religion which operates in the private sphere, and it does not matter, because the public square is unaffected. That is the ethos behind separation of Church and State. We interact in the public square on principles governed by universal principles of Natural Law which can be respected by all faiths, and we follow our separate faiths in the private sphere.”

The separation of Church and State is nothing more then the triumph of one belief system over another (secularism over Christianity). Christianity was historically very interested in the public square, as are Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism too of course.

In an essay I wrote a few years back titled Science! Blessed be Thy Name: The Vanishing Value of Religious Freedom I went into some detail on how the secular belief systems can be every bit as oppressive and intolerant as the religious belief systems that they displaced. The Science, democracy, and patriotism (in the modern context civic nationalism), are secular belief systems. The Followers of The Science for example, practice as part of their belief system the ritual of vaccination, but they also believe that nearly everyone must practice this rite in order for it to work, so they attempt to impose the ritual that they believe in (vaccination) on non believers.

Secularists, whether peaceful voluntaryists like Shoniwa, or the not so peaceful Followers of The Science, are like the proverbial fish that doesn’t recognize water; they are so immersed in secularism that they have come to assume that even religious people think about religion the way they do, and agree that religions should be relegated to the private sphere.

Secularists tend to view the imposition of a religious belief system as anathema, but are not as alarmed at the imposition of a secular belief system, because they don’t recognize that they are both belief systems. To show secular fish the existence of water, try my essay Science! Blessed be Thy Name: The Vanishing Value of Religious Freedom. Here’s one of my paintings that I used as an illustration for the aforementioned essay.

And while were at it, a couple more Covid era science paintings:

That might have looked like I just shamelessly slipped in three of my paintings, but to be fair it was almost on topic. Now, where were we before we wandered off into the gallery? That’s right, religious differences.

Examples of Religion Shaping the Public Square.

• The Hindu caste system was most certainly not confined to the private sphere; on the contrary, it shaped whole societies over thousands of years.

• Christianity was so integral to the social order in Europe in both public and private, that before Christianity was displaced by competing belief systems and internally fractured, European nations made up what is known as Christendom.

• In Islamic nations Islam historically exerted considerable control over not just the Muslim population but the non-Muslim population too, through the system of dhimmitude. The fabled multicultural paradise of al-Andalus (Spain under Islam), is a myth.

“By any objective standards, then, and in spite of its undeniable artistic, literary, and scientific accomplishments, and of modern wishful “let-us-all-get-along” thinking that tries to gloss over evidence to the contrary, Islamic Spain was not a model of multicultural harmony. Andalusia was beset by religious, political, and racial conflicts controlled in the best of times only by the application of tyrannical force. Its achievements are inseparable from its turmoil.”

- Darío Fernández-Morera author of the The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain

• Christians in their turn expelled or forcefully converted Muslims and Jews after the reconquest of Spain.

• And while they never outright conquered Spain for themselves, we have good reasons to believe that the Jews, if they had outright conquered Spain, wouldn’t have done any better than the Muslims or Christians at trying to maintain peace between the three belief systems. Even at the time in Spain the Jewish community were persecuting each other over differences in their belief system. As - Darío Fernández-Morera points out:

“In Granada, rabbi and visir Ibn Naghrela “The Prince” boasted that “[Andalusian] Jews were free of heresy, except for a few towns near Christian kingdoms, where there is suspicion that some heretics live in secret. Our predecessors have flogged a part of those who deserved to be flogged, and they have died from flogging.” In Catholic lands in the eleventh century, Orthodox Jews persecuted the then thriving Karaite Jewish community, which rejected the authority of the Talmud, and expelled it.”

• Hindus and Muslim in India haven’t been on the best of terms:

• As Indians themselves immigrate into other countries, they’re bringing their religious conflicts with them. Canada has now been enriched with multicultural Hindu/Sikh conflict.

The conflicts come just weeks after RCMP announced they had evidence of Indian officials’ involvement in homicides, extortion and other violent crimes on Canadian soil, which led to Canada expelling six Indian diplomats, and India expelling six Canadian diplomats in retaliation. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has repeatedly accused Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s representatives of engaging in covert campaigns to repress and kill Sikh activists living in Canada, including gunning down Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, B.C., last year.

It all boiled over this week in multiple Canadian communities, where out-of-control demonstrations by nationalist Hindus and Sikhs led to condemnation from politicians and forced municipal leaders to contemplate new bylaws that would ban protests at places of worship. In Surrey, three men were also arrested after violence broke out when hundreds of demonstrators showed up at a Hindu temple.

Fears of more clashes between Sikhs and Hindus in Brampton, Ont., as Canada-India rift spills over into suburbs - The Globe and Mail

Further Remarks on Diversity and Religion.

I hardly needed to point out that religious beliefs shape conduct in both the private sphere and in the public sphere because Shoniwa already knows that this is the case. He is not averse to appealing to the teachings of religious figures to try to shape people’s conduct in the public sphere. Shoniwa quoted me:

““What would Jesus do? Is not an alarming thing to hear: What would Muhammad do? is unsettling, and rightly so”, says Henderson.”

And then Shoniwa responded:

“If he (me/Henderson) had asked himself the question: what would Jesus do? Before he bashed away at Islam in this trite way, he might not have engaged in Islam-bashing, which I’m afraid is what he did. The proper Christian thing to do is to love thy neighbour, not tell them their religion is “unsettling”.”

So right there he, says the proper Christian thing to do. Therefore Shoniwa expects Christianity to shape a Christian’s behavior (Shoniwa evidently assumes that I am a Christian - too complicated to get into here) including in the public sphere, such as influencing what one does or doesn’t write for public consumption. He also expected me to take seriously Jesus’ example and align my own public sphere behavior with it. And so I contend that Shoniwa should then understand the significance and ramifications of Muhammad and Jesus having set radically different examples.

We have another enigma to solve here. Shoniwa evidently believes that voluntaryism (a system of beliefs about how best to cultivate the social order) is a better belief system than other cults such as Statism or religious beliefs systems. But how did he come to choose voluntaryism for cultivating the social order over other secular or religious belief systems?

Let’s first take a closer look at what my example was that I used to illustrate the significance of religious differences. I wrote in my essay (my essay that Shoniwa is critiquing):

“Islam and Christianity are both focused on their respective founders who believers regard to have led perfect lives and seek to emulate.

For Christians it is Jesus’s example that one should emulate, for Muslims it is Muhammad's example that one should emulate.

Muhammad and Jesus set very different examples.

Muhammad started wars, founded an empire, enslaved captives, ordered non Muslims to convert or die, or pay special taxes and live in a subservient state - Dhimmitude, kept a harem, and so forth.

That might surprise you because you have probably heard that well actually Islam is a religion of peace and that the Prophet Muhammad preached peace.

What you don’t hear is, when Muhammad preached peace, and when he didn’t. We must look at the example set by Muhammad: like so many revolutionaries throughout the ages Muhammad preached peace when his movement was vulnerable, militarily weak, and expansion through war wasn’t a viable option. Once his movement was militarily strong, and expansion through conquest was an option, Muhammad preached war.

Before writing off critics of Islam, please at least hear what they have to say. Islam Unveiled by Robert Spencer would be a good place to start.

Yes Christians have committed many crimes but you can always hold them to account with their own standard by pointing out that their behavior is un-Christlike.

What would Jesus do? Is not an alarming thing to hear: What would Muhammad do? is unsettling, and rightly so.”

That section right there is what Shoniwa called alternately risible and trite.

Shoniwa’s approved method for evaluating belief systems he admitted was an exercise in futility; so again, he doesn’t approve of my way of evaluating belief systems and his own way of evaluating them he himself calls an exercise in futility so he doesn’t appear to have any means of evaluating belief systems. Yet here he is promoting voluntaryism.

What gives?

I’ll hazard a guess. I suspect that Shoniwa evaluated voluntaryist beliefs in a very sensible way: by examining the teachings and doctrines of those who developed and promote voluntaryism. Then he would have engaged in a thought experiment about what the effects would be on the social order if voluntaryism were widely accepted and applied.

Shoniwa’s mental model would have been informed by both his life experience and his book learning. He would have seen the potential for a better social order and quite reasonably adopted voluntaryism, including to the point of seeing universal acceptance of voluntaryist-philosophy-as-the-principal-belief-system-for-cultivating-the-social-order (AKA - Not Multiculturalism) as a recipe for social harmony.

If my guess is right, and I’m pretty confident it is (though of course, you be the judge on the probability of my guess, and hopefully Shoniwa will let us know if I’m on the mark), then Shoniwa does in fact have a method for evaluating belief systems, and it is approximately the same method I used for my short and sweet example of the importance of the differences between Christianity and Islam - you know, the risible and trite method.

Jewish Gentile Conflicts of Interest

In my earlier essay I touched on this matter under the subheading Ethnocentrism and Racial Solidarity: Everyone Else’s Not So Secret Weapon, and Shoniwa in his critique of my essay brought it up but then brushed it aside without really addressing it.

This was an important point demonstrating what happens when ethnic solidarity and organizing on behalf of one’s own group is socially acceptable for some, and verboten for others. The consequences are not hard to see. Many major government policies and social taboos line up with organized Jewish interests while conflicting with Gentile interests.

Foreign Policy

The United States has shelled out well over 300 billion dollars in military and economic aid to Israel, and the US acts as a powerful ally of Israel, fighting some of Israel’s enemies for them such as the multi trillion dollar Iraq war, and staging aircraft carriers and shooting down missiles on Israel’s behalf. And there remains the risk of embroiling the USA in another major war on Israel’s behalf depending on how things progress in the Middle East.

This is all very well for Israeli interest groups, but is most definitely not in the interests of the American majority, who would be better served by the USA having a policy of neutrality in the Middle East. Oh, but we need a big military presence in the Middle East - what for? Defending Israel? And conducting multi-trillion dollar wars against Israel’s enemies? If it’s really just about oil, then wouldn’t we have focused on building our alliance with, oh, I don’t know . . . maybe countries that actually have oil, like Iraq and Iran instead of Israel? But those countries hate the USA - Right, because we support Israel against the Arab states to the detriment of the entire region (overthrowing the Iranian government and reinstating an unpopular Shah probably wasn’t the best overture of friendship on our part either).

Freedom of Speech

Criminalizing and/or creating some of the strongest social taboos we have, around free speech in various Gentile countries on behalf of defending perceived Jewish interests such as controlling discussion around the Holocaust, sets a dangerous precedent for free speech. People obviously should be able to investigate any historical matter and come to the conclusion that they feel best fits the evidence, and speak openly of it. Holocaust speech laws may have benefited perceived Jewish interests but are directly detrimental to Gentile interests such as robust protection for free speech. But again, who’s going to prevail? The group for which it is socially unacceptable to organize and advocate on its own behalf? Or the group that can?

Even here in the United States with much more robust protection of free speech than Europe we still have the ADL, and AJC leading the charge, advocating for more censorship online.

Circumcision as a Case example

The worst of the transgender madness might not have been as easy to carry out if there had already been some sort of sensible ban against unnecessarily chopping off healthy tissue from children for ideological purposes, such as a ban against the ritual of circumcision which has plenty of downsides that you can read about here. Even if the risks of a serious mishap are relatively small, why take that risk, and put the child through trauma, for a procedure for which there is no benefit? (Save for people who still believe that HIV causes AIDS)

This makes for an interesting case example.

Iceland tried to ban circumcision, and was faced with outrage and international condemnation including of course from the ADL. Denmark considered banning circumcision too, with some 83% of Danes surveyed supporting the ban. But Jewish and Muslim interest groups didn’t like it.

So who do you think got their way, the white majority that wanted the ban? Or the ethnic and religious minority interest groups? As always, the white majority is expected to subvert its own best judgement and instead defer to minority interests. Of course Iceland and Denmark backed down.

Immigration

A considerable number of Jewish interest groups make no secret about their support for high levels of immigration. They believe that because they sought and were given refuge in the United States, they now have the right, and obligation, to invite the rest of the world too. (Here are some examples: The Rabbinical Assembly, Jewish Center for Justice, Union for Reform Judaism, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, Jewish family and Community Services, and so on, and so forth).

Considering the longstanding historical religious tensions between between Jews and Christians, and that Jews rarely admit that there is another side to the story, and that their behavior wasn’t exactly exemplary either — instead always blaming the Christians for the past conflicts — it makes you wonder if there might be some other motives to these organizations’ pro-immigration stance.

(It takes a lotta chutzpah, to openly admit that your people are always running into trouble with almost everyone else, over thousands of years, and to always blame the other, and not stop and think, “Mmmhh, maybe it’s not just them; maybe we are just as much to blame.” But that would be anti-Semitic to suggest that of course.)

While opinion surveys have shown Jewish American opinion warming up to Christians, as they no doubt come to realize that the white culturally Christian majority is the group they can most easily guilt trip, as early as a decade ago a 2014 polling showed American Jews ranking Evangelical Christians at an average abysmal rating of 34 on a 0 to 100 warmth scale, slightly worse even than what they ranked Muslims, while white Evangelical Christians ranked Jews at an average warmth of 69 on the same scale.

So let’s look at some other possible motives for strong support for immigration from Jewish interest groups:

A congruent opinion is expressed by prominent Jewish social scientist and ethnic activist Earl Raab, who remarks very positively on the success of American immigration policy in altering the ethnic composition of the United States since 1965. Raab notes that the Jewish community has taken a leadership role in changing the Northwestern European bias of American immigration policy (1993a, 17), and he has also maintained that one factor inhibiting anti-Semitism in the contemporary United States is that “an increasing ethnic heterogeneity, as a result of immigration, has made it even more difficult for a political party or mass movement of bigotry to develop” (1995, 91). Or more colorfully:

“The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country.

We [Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible—and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever. (Raab 1993b, 23)”

—Kevin MacDonald, & Kevin MacDonald quoting Earl Raab — The Culture of Critique

MacDonald provides plenty of similar excerpts in the immigration section of his book. Many Jewish advocates did not feel comfortable in a white majority, culturally Christian country and sought to change the demographics to suit themselves, with evidently no regard for the majority’s interests.

Here is an excerpt from an essay by Lawrence Auster

For some Jews, the desire to destroy white society is not based on any perceived threat posed by that society, but on pure animus. When Charles Moore of the London Spectator described how his Muslim neighbors prayed loudly next-door during the Gulf War in 1991, and spoke of his worries of what would happen to England if the number of Muslims kept increasing, an enraged Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, fired off this riposte:

“Three cheers, I say, for the neighbors. I hope that they pray noisily, and that they pray five times a day, and that the evening prayer comes just as the Moores and the Mellors and turning to the claret … It is amusing to watch the colonizers complain about being colonized. [The New Republic, January 6, 1992.]”

Wieseltier is not exactly shy in his hatred. He mocks an Englishmen’s fears about the survival of English culture. He rejoices at the thought of Englishmen being discomforted, disoriented, and displaced in their own country by Muslims. If anyone is driven by an ethnic animus, surely it is Wieseltier and the many Jews who think and feel as he does.

— Lawrence Auster

Another interesting case example is Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and National Director of the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), who took issue with Tucker Carlson for having brought up replacement. Greenblatt wrote:

“Last night, in a segment on his program dealing with voting rights and allegations of voter disenfranchisement, Tucker Carlson disgustingly gave an impassioned defense of the white supremacist “great replacement theory,” the hateful notion that the white race is in danger of being “replaced” by a rising tide of non-whites. While couching his argument in terms of what he described as the Democratic Party attempting to replace traditional voters with immigrants from third-world countries, Carlson’s rhetoric was not just a dog whistle to racists – it was a bullhorn.”

Tucker Carlson, though, responded in a news segment by quoting from the ADL’s website:

“Furthermore, bi-nationalism is unworkable given current realities and historic
animosities. With historically high birth rates among the Palestinians, and a possible influx of Palestinian refugees and their descendants now living around the world, Jews would quickly be a minority within a bi-national state, thus likely ending any semblance of equal representation and protections. In this situation, the Jewish population would be increasingly politically – and potentially physically – vulnerable.

It is unrealistic and unacceptable to expect the State of Israel to voluntarily subvert its own sovereign existence and nationalist identity and become a vulnerable minority within what was once its own territory.”

- Israel a Guide for Activists by the ADL page 59

So the ADL’s position is quite clear when you see their statements side be side - Jewish spaces are for the Jews, white spaces are for everyone.

Carlson also cited the New York Times opinion piece We Can Replace Them (them being whites) where Michelle Goldberg wrote:

“In a week, American voters can do to white nationalists what they fear most. Show them they’re being replaced.”

And Michelle Goldberg is of course, um . . . I’m sure that last name is Gaelic, or Greek, or something.

By their own accounts Jewish campaign contributions in 2016 made up 50% of contributions to the Democrats, and 25% to the Republicans. That’s from a population that is 2% of the American population. (If someone has estimates for 2024 campaign contributions, please drop them in the comments.)

Now again, I don’t take issue with anyone for being Jewish, why would I? I favorably cited Simon Schama’s book at the beginning of this essay, I like Leonard Cohen’s music, Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl I consider a top-notch painter, and my firsthand in-person experiences with Jewish people have been universally good.

But let’s not pretend that unchecked organized Jewish interest groups haven’t been pursuing their people’s (perceived) interests at the expense of Gentile interests — they clearly have been, all the while denouncing any attempt by the white majority to organize on their own behalf.

Note on South Africa

Shoniwa oddly enough cites South Africa as a success story in the fourth installment of his critique of my essay. Nelson Mandela and company did succeed in ending apartheid and that is good; one people should not rule over another, but I will point out that South Africa is not a multicultural, rainbow nation success story, it’s more of a multiculturalism warning story, with numerous noteworthy issues such as its shockingly high murder rates (the homicide rates look like an improvement over the 1990s only because of even higher rates during civil war. “There’s currently a 4 to 5% chance that your cause of death in South Africa will be murder.”).

Crucially for our discussion, is that South Africa was not an example of a diverse coalition organizing on a class level, and facing up to the oligarchy. On the contrary inequality and income disparity became worse, not better after apartheid.

A Note on Pakistan and India

In the second installment of Shoniwa’s critique of my essay he brings up animosity between India and Pakistan, and he also uses this as an opportunity to engage in an ad-hominem attack on me:

“Pakistan and India harbour more animosity towards each other than Henderson does towards the you-know-who’s, murderous US Blacks, and Swedish immigrants combined.”

Shoniwa evidently believes that the animosity between India and Pakistan is somehow an argument against my essay - I can’t make heads or tales of why Shoniwa thought that this was a counterpoint. There is irony here though, because Shoniwa in his third installment proclaimed “No, religious differences do not matter.” Yet, here he is right before that pointing to animosity between India and Pakistan. What’s the driver behind that India Pakistan animosity to begin with? Ah yes, that’s right, religious differences:

“The long-term religious conflicts between the Hindus and Muslim people of the region have forced the countries into countless skirmishes and three brutal wars.”

A History of the Conflict between India and Pakistan with Intervention from the United Nations

A question for the multiculturalists: do you think that you are better than Hindus and Muslims? No? Then what makes you think that in proximity your culture won’t eventually clash with either of their cultures as they have clashed with each other?

Interracial Crime

The next most concrete of Shoniwa’s argument in his critique of my essay, is in the second part of his series:

Part II - Positive Stereotyping, Interracial Crime, and the You-Know-Who’s

In my essay I briefly touched on interracial crime. Specifically because major movements like Black Lives Matter, BLM, give us the impression that whites are most often victimizing blacks, while in incidents of interracial violent crime it’s actually most often the other way around. I gave the example that black on white homicide is more than twice as common as white on black (that was a very conservative estimate as we will see, it is more than five times as common).

Shoniwa thought that there was no good reason for me to even bring this matter into the discussion. He did not see me as setting the record straight, but only taking a “low blow” at blacks. Is there any way I could frankly discuss interracial crime without Shoniwa accusing me of taking a low blow at someone? And if not, does he just want the subject not talked about? How then would one set the record straight and push back against the scapegoating of whites?

I brought this matter into the discussion as yet more evidence of a general anti white-Christian-majority attitude. So even when whites are victimized more, the story is spun the other way around.

Like I said in the intro of my earlier essay:

“Replacement immigration views are tightly interwoven with white guilt and beliefs about: white people, about Western civilization, and about the Christian tradition. So this essay will be a whirlwind tour of how I came to recognize that I had unwittingly accepted a whole ecosystem of what I now regard to be anti-white beliefs, and related ideas.”

To even begin to be concerned about the negative effects of mass immigration on the white majority requires getting past the demonization of whites, and recognizing that the American white-culturally-Christian-background-majority have valid interests too, and that they are not obligated to automatically defer, and sacrifice their own interests, on behalf of minority interests.

Shoniwa’s Critique of my Argument.

Shoniwa argues that my point about black on white homicide being more common than white on black, is invalid, because I did not factor in that whites are far more numerous in America than blacks.

I’m going to quote Shoniwa at length so you can see his argument clearly:

“Using the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, Noahpinion finds that the number of Black-on-White homicides is 566, and the number for White-on-Black is 246. This broadly ties in with Henderson’s claim – Black-on-White murder is about 2.3 times as common as White-on-Black murder. This does not mean that a White person is more likely to be murdered by a Black person than vice versa.

To find out how likely you are to get murdered by someone of another race in the US, you have to divide the total homicide numbers by the respective populations. With the White population estimated at 258.65 million, and the Black population estimated at 48.22 million, it turns out that:

• Black-on-White murders as a percentage of the White population means that there are 0.22 per 100,000 White people murdered by Black people (566/258,646,488).

• White-on-Black murders as a percentage of the Black population means that there are 0.51 per 100,000 Black people murdered by White people (246/48,221,139).

Bottom line: Black people are at greater risk of being murdered by White people in America than vice versa. Put another way, when it comes to the crime of homicide in the US, Black people have more reason to fear White people than White people have reason to fear Black people.

More perspective: If you’re a White person in the U.S., you’re probably less likely to get murdered by a Black person than a South Korean person is to be murdered by another South Korean. Or, Americans are as safe from interracial murder as Danish people are from murder in general.”

Red Pill Poet’s Counter Point

Black on white murder being 2.3 times more frequent than white on black is a number based on absolute numbers. Shoniwa argued that a relative number would be more accurate and calculated that blacks per 100,000 population are at greater risk of interracial homicide from whites than vice versa.

Red Pill Poet of Red Pill Poems - a pseudonymous poet, mutual reader of Shoniwa and me, and frequent provider of astute commentary, pointed out in the comments that there was another way to run the numbers. Red Pill Poet replied to Shoniwa:

“As usual you get into the weeds as few do and it's all up to your usual high standard but...with all due respect, you seem to have got something very wrong when you state: “Put another way, when it comes to the crime of homicide in the US, Black people have more reason to fear White people than White people have reason to fear Black people.”

259 million people do not encounter and engage with 48 million people. They interact one on one or in small groups. Using your numbers, the average Black is 12.34 times more likely to kill a White, than the average White is to kill a Black.”

There was some back and forth between Shoniwa and Red Pill Poet in the comments. Neither disagreed with the statistic the other provided. The source of their disagreement was which statistic mattered more here:

• The rate at which blacks are killed per 100,000 population by whites, and vice versa.

• Or the percentage of blacks per capita who kill whites and vice versa.

So very simple; statistically blacks are more likely to kill whites than vice versa, but blacks are also more likely to be killed by whites than vice versa.

Confused yet?

Making Sense of the Numbers, Plus Non Fatal Violent Crime

We have three numbers here:

1. Blacks kill whites 2.3 times more frequently than whites kill blacks. That’s based on absolute numbers (well, again it’s a lot more than 2.3, but we’ll get to that in a moment).

2. Per 100,000 population blacks are killed by whites 2.3 times more, than whites are killed by blacks (0.51 per 100,000 vs 0.22). That’s a relative number — risk per 100,000 population.

3. Blacks are on average 12 times more likely to kill whites than whites are to kill blacks in interracial homicide. This is also a relative number.

Note! the US government source document for these calculations didn’t separate out Hispanics for the relevant categories, so these numbers aren’t perfect, and they don’t reflect all homicides, as Noah Smith who Shoniwa cited, noted:

Third, and most importantly, this table doesn’t include all murders; it only includes those for which:

• an arrest was made, and

• there was only one murder and one victim.

So the homicide data we’ve been looking at has major limitations, but should still give us rough big picture of trends. Let’s make this a little more robust then, by looking at another data set for another crime category such as the National Crime Victimization Survey for 2019 for non fatal violent crime and look at table 15 (on page 18), where Hispanics are separated out.

So in addition to homicide data we also have non fatal violent crime data and it comes from the survey cited above. I found that additional information through the same article that Shoniwa cited by Noah Smith.

Let’s see if the non fatal violent crime data corroborates what we would expect having seen the homicide data.

Noah Smith calculated from the National Crime Victimization Survey for 2019

• Black on white non fatal violent crime was 5.2 times more common than vice versa in absolute numbers.

• Per 100,000 population whites are slightly more likely to be victimized by blacks in non fatal violent crime than vice versa - 232 per 100,000 vs 203 per 100,000.

• And then I calculated (just now) the per capita rate at which blacks victimize whites, and whites victimize blacks, using the survey numbers, and the population numbers that Noah pulled from the census bureau in his article:

  • 89980/203768170 = 44 incidents of whites perpetrating a non fatal violent crime against blacks, per 100,000 white population.

  • 472570/44419767 = 1063 incidents of blacks perpetrating a non fatal violent crime against whites, per 100,000 black population.

  • So according to the survey numbers, blacks perpetrate non fatal violent crimes against whites 24 times more often than vice versa. That’s another relative number, and it’s the equivalent of the number that Red Pill Poet calculated for the homicide numbers.

So based on the above we now have six numbers. Let’s graph them out for easy visualization:

There’s the visual. Now, how can it be that for interracial homicide, per 100,000 population, blacks are killed by whites 2.3 times more often, yet blacks are per capita 12 times more likely to kill whites than whites are to kill blacks in interracial homicide?

Well, Red Pill Poet was onto it when he wrote:

259 million people do not encounter and engage with 48 million people. They interact one on one or in small groups.

Let me show you a hypothetical:

Now suppose that there were 246 Blue-on-Orange homicides, and 566 Orange-on-Blue homicides.

Clearly the orange elves killed more blue elves.

But suppose someone points out that actually in relative terms the orange elves are at greater risk of being killed by blue elves than vice versa. Their argument is like this:

Orange-on-Blue murders as a percentage of the Blue population means that there are 0.22 per 100,000 Blue people murdered by Orange people (566/258,646,488).

White-on-Orange murders as a percentage of the Orange population means that there are 0.51 per 100,000 Orange elves murdered by Blue elves (246/48,221,139).

Bottom line: Orange elves are at greater risk of being murdered by Blue elves in Elfland than vice versa.

Is that argument valid? No, at least not in our simple Elfland hypothetical, and we’ll get to the US in a moment. We can see that most the blue elves don’t even live near the orange elves, and should therefore be excluded from the equation. The orange elves that don’t live near the blue elves should also be excluded from the equation.

What really matters is the blue elves and orange elves who live side by side of each other, or for other reasons (work, shopping, transport) are frequently intermingled.

For the USA, Shoniwa’s equation dilutes the risk for whites by factoring in an enormous number of whites who live in white majority areas, and are very unlikely to be victims in interracial crime for the simple reason that they are de facto segregated in mostly white areas.

Shoniwa’s equation would dilute the risks for blacks too because there are mostly black areas too.

But the dilution of the risk in both groups won’t evenly cancel each other out, the same way diluting the risks for both the groups in my Elfland experiment still won’t change the invalidity of claiming that the orange elves had more to fear from the blue elves; the dilution of risk was uneven because half of the orange elf population lived in Both City, whereas only an eleventh of the blue elves lived in Both City.

Shoniwa’s approach would work if whites and blacks where evenly intermixed throughout the USA, but they’re not. You can look at a series of racial distribution maps in the USA on this Wikepedia Demographics page, and see that blacks concentrate very heavily in the south and and east. Hispanics in the south, southeast, and west. Whites in the center and north, and rural areas.

The de facto segregation continues all the way down to the neighborhood level within the cities (emphasis mine):

“The report breaks new ground by looking at how the racial makeup of census tracts differs significantly from the racial makeup of the larger metropolitan area that surround them. Areas may appear to be integrated because they are home to many different racial groups, when in fact those groups live completely apart. The city of Detroit is 80% Black, for instance, while Grosse Pointe, a suburb that shares a border with the city, is 90% white.”

— Time: The U.S. Is Increasingly Diverse, So Why Is Segregation Getting Worse?

While all the groups tend to cluster, wherever I can find break downs of the clustering such as by neighborhoods, whites are more heavily concentrated in white neighborhoods than the other groups are in their respective neighborhoods. This means Shoniwa’s method will underestimate per capita white risk significantly more then it will underestimate per capita black risk; here’s another example of how much more whites cluster in white majority areas.

“In cities, suburbs, and rural communities across the United States, our neighborhoods remain stubbornly segregated along racial and ethnic lines. A typical white person lives in a neighborhood that is 75 percent white and only 8 percent African American, whereas a typical African American person lives in a neighborhood that is only 35 percent white and 45 percent African American.”

—Causes and Consequences of Separate and Unequal Neighborhoods Margery Austin Turner and Solomon Greene

So take that example above of average white, and black neighborhoods. That works out to whites outnumbering blacks 9.4 to 1 in average white neighborhoods. And blacks outnumbering whites by only 1.3 to 1 in average black neighborhoods. Which makes in this example, black exposure to whites 7.2 times higher.

This is just one of many estimates, but you get the picture: black exposure to whites is much higher than white exposure to blacks, so Shoniwa’s method of estimating risk to blacks from whites, and vice versa, won’t work because it doesn’t take that into account. Scroll up and look at my Elfland demographic map again if you need a visual of why you would have to take that into account.

Clearer More Recent Data & Homicide Combined Rate

This Hispanics getting lumped in with other groups thing is vexing. At least for the non-fatal-violent crime data Hispanics were shown separately, but we need that for the homicide data too.

The best source I can find for national level data of interracial homicides with non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics each having their own category is the ambitious project and data base set up by National Conservative. They have the data for last year (2024), and the year before that (2023), broken down in far more detail then anywhere else I’ve seen. So let’s take a look:

For 2024, there were:

• 477 black on white homicides.

• 87 white on black homicides.

“Wait?” you think, “Wouldn’t there be like 120 additional white on black homicides?”

Those are Latino on black homicides, 119 of them: that’s what happens when the data is separated out — most the white on black homicides end up being Latino on black homicides.

So with the categories separated out let’s recalculate our numbers. I’ll use the 2020 census based, racial demographic breakdown on wikipedia for the population numbers in these calculations, and the National Conservative data base for the homicides. Starting with 2024:

• There were 5.5 times as many black-on-white homicides as vice versa.

• Whites were at slightly greater risk of a black-on-white homicide than vice versa as measured per 100,000 population (0.25 per 100,000 vs 0.22 per 100,000). This is the equivalent of the calculation Shoniwa used that I don’t consider a particularly useful indicator for the reasons listed in the earlier section, but we can see that even this number doesn’t support his contention once non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics/Latinos are categorized separately.

• Per capita, blacks were 26 times more likely to commit a black-on-white homicide than vice versa (1.1943 per 100,000 vs 0.0454 per 100,000).

These homicide ratios line up almost exactly with the ratios we calculated earlier from the National Crime Victimization Survey for 2019.

That the non fatal violent crime ratios, and that the homicide ratios, corroborate each other (when they are broken down with separate categories for non-Hispanic white and Hispanics/Latinos), I see as a fairly strong indicator for the reliability of these numbers.

For 2023 the interracial homicides were even higher and breakdown like this:

• 603 black-on-white homicides vs 101 white-on-black

• There were 6 times as many black-on-white homicides as vice versa (5.97 to be precise).

• Whites were at slightly greater risk of a black-on-white homicide than vice versa as measured per 100,000 population (0.31 per 100,000 vs 0.25 per 100,000).

• Per capita, blacks were 28.6 times more likely to commit a black-on-white homicide than vice versa (1.5098 per 100,000 vs 0.0527 per 100,000).

To put it mildly: the point I made in my earlier essay (that the direction of interracial homicides between blacks and whites is mostly the opposite of what we are led to believe), a point that Shoniwa contested, is a point that holds up. More complex and precise analysis (such as separate categories for non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics, and corroboration from the violent crime survey), far from debunking my point, greatly strengthened it.

Now let’s look at the homicide rate of whites and blacks for the combined rate of interracial and intraracial homicide (same race, victim and perpetrator).

• Firstly, because most homicides are same-race on same-race.

• Secondly, because this allows us to cut past the issue of estimating varying levels of de-facto segregation between groups.

Apparently finding categorical separation of non-Hispanic white and Hispanic data is difficult or unavailable at the national level (the National Conservative data base is for interracial homicide, not total homicide rates by race).

But this data can be found at the state level. What I found (through the website Reason Without Restraint) is the data table in the study Are Blacks and Hispanics Disproportionately Incarcerated Relative to Their Arrests? - Casey T Harris. Et al.

This study uses data for the State of Pennsylvania from 2003 through 2007, and it separates out the categories so that Hispanics don’t get lumped in with other categories. You can see in Table 1. of that study, that with Hispanics separated out, for the State of Pennsylvania the black per capita homicide rate is 20 times higher than the white rate.

That table above is showing the percentage of each crime that the respective demographics would account for if they each made up an equal share of the population.

That study cited above has the best tables I’ve come across for viewing, all in one place, a breakdown of relative rates of homicide and numerous non-fatal violent crimes, and it categorizes Hispanics in their own columns. So, it’s very handy. Unfortunately it’s just for Pennsylvania. If you know of other similarly useful, user friendly, breakdowns that have separate categories for non-Hispanic whites, and Hispanics, please do name them in the comments.

So we can see that the much higher rate of black-on-white homicide is most probably just a reflection of a much higher overall homicide perpetration rate per capita for blacks.

This can’t be dismissed as police bias either, because these numbers are closely corroborated by the National Crime Victimization Survey which surveys victims.

Yes, This Matters, Yes We have to Talk About it, and No, There is No Ill Will Here.

How do you review these statistics without people accusing you of taking a low blow at blacks? Well, either you don’t touch the matter with a ten-foot pole, or you get accused of spreading hate facts, or equivalent. This is no-go territory. Even if I felt animosity towards blacks (which I most certainly do not) I wouldn’t bring this up, because why face the social opprobrium from raising this matter? It wouldn’t be worth the social cost, that’s why nobody touches it.

My first hand experiences with blacks, from childhood friends, to people I’ve met overseas, have been almost universally positive experiences. I have no reason to bear ill will towards any racial group, and I don’t.

So why bring this up? Why not leave this matter to the side? Because you can’t straighten the record if you’re not willing to even look at it. And this information is important for pushing back on several different anti-white narratives:

The black incarceration rate is much higher than the white incarceration rate. This is used to claim that there is systemic racism, that whites are privileged, that white supremacy remains a major issue, and whites, whiteness, and white racism against blacks are blamed.

The reality is that the disproportionate black incarceration rates are not because of white supremacy, but are instead because per capita, blacks commit a disproportionate share of violent crime.

Likewise, blacks make up a disproportionate share of fatalities from violent police encounters. This is used as further evidence of widespread white racism against blacks. That reasoning is invalid because it is to be expected that whichever group, per capita, commits a disproportionate share of violent crime, will also have more encounters of all sorts, including fatal encounters, with the police.

Now let’s return to white flight. White flight is yet another cudgel used to demonize whites. In my earlier essay (that Shoniwa was critiquing, and I am here defending), I had a section on white flight, and I noted:

“When I did read about it I learned that whites were concerned about their physical safety because crime actually did go up as a consequence of the demographic shift in their neighborhoods. Their concerns were real, which probably wouldn’t come as a surprise if we weren’t all so ignorant of and averse to discussing interracial crime rates.”

&

“What made white flight another point that ate away at my previous beliefs, was the realization that even when whites are victimized and driven out of an area by crime and ethnic conflict, they get no sympathy; instead they are blamed, and derided as racists.”

Knowing that there are enormous differentials in violent crime rates between groups helps you better understand that whites had legitimate reasons to be concerned about the demographic shifts in their neighborhoods, and that whole populations of whites were driven out of their neighborhoods and cities, and were themselves victims of civil rights era social engineering policies (such as lawfare against freedom of association, and against housing covenants that allowed people to have at least some say over who moved into their neighborhoods).

In order to push back against the demonization and scapegoating of whites, we have to be willing to look at things like interracial crime rates. Otherwise we can’t set the record straight.

The Great Leveling Has Been Cancelled

Shoniwa wrote:

“Henderson does actually mention the economic harm caused by immigration in the form of wage suppression but he devotes only a couple of sentences to it, and this brief moment of sanity is smothered by his wild strawman bayonetting.”

This is characteristic of Shoniwa’s misrepresentation of my essay. The section that he claims that I devoted only a few sentences to, the section under the subheading Immigration, Labor, and Housing, is actually ten paragraphs, and 421 words, or about a page in length. Short, yes, it was a whirlwind tour, and all the sections in that essay were short. That section was actually quite a bit longer though than the mere 252 words under the subheading Interracial Crime.

This kind of blatant misrepresentation of my essay is a regular occurrence in Shoniwa’s critique, and the only reason I can see for it is simply that Shoniwa wished to present me in a negative light to his audience.

But yes, lets’ discuss labor and immigration a little further. What happens when the ratio of labor goes down and the ratio of capital stays the same?

That happened in England during the Black Death. The arable land (not technically capital but still the main means of production in a preindustrial society) to be cultivated remained the same but the number of people around to cultivate it went down. The English parliament went to the extreme degree of trying to freeze wages:

“Labourers, statute of, 1351. The statute was an early attempt at a wage freeze, rarely a popular policy. The scourge of the Black Death led to an acute shortage of labour and in June 1349 the council issued an emergency ordinance (23 Edw. III s. 1) imposing restraint. When Parliament met in 1351 there were complaints that ‘out of singular covetise’ wages had risen, and the statute (25 Edw. III s. 1) was passed. Men were to work at pre-1349 wage levels, which were laid down, and masters were forbidden to offer more. Persons below the age of 60 not in employment were not to refuse offers of work. Prices were merely to be ‘reasonable’. Despite determined efforts to impose the policy and the appointment of special justices of labourers, it proved difficult to enforce. Even the carpenter at Knightsbridge who made the stocks to hold offenders had to be paid over the odds. But resentment played a part in the grievances leading to the Peasants' Revolt in 1381.”

J. A. Cannon - The Oxford Companion to British History

The paper Wages and labour relations in the Middle Ages: It’s not (all) about the money argues (among other analysis) that legislation and restrictive labor practices did succeed in freezing peasant wages at first but that ultimately the attempts to hold down wages failed and wages at least moderately rose.

Today we wouldn’t need a plague to shift power from capital to labor. The demographic shift to lower birth rates would naturally do that, but immigration has kept our population growing long after it should have leveled off or begun to decrease in size, as it would have done without immigration.

Capital no doubt knows this, and also knows that the medieval style wage caps are unlikely to be viable in the political climate today.

So again, capital can undercut labor, through sourcing cheaper labor in two major ways: off-shoring, and importing labor.

We should allow capital neither option. Tariffs should be sufficiently high to disincentivize off-shoring, and making it economically unviable to offshore if they want to want to retain access to the domestic market, and immigration should be restricted enough that capital cannot source cheaper labor from abroad and must pay the going market wages from a slow growing, stable, or falling, population. (The population may have just stabilized not fallen, without immigration, because the upward pressure on wages from a stable population, and the downward pressure on housing from a stable population would have kept single income families with kids a viable option. A lot of people, don’t have, or delay having, kids, because they simply can’t afford to.)

The Great Replacement has undermined (replaced) what should have been the Great Leveling.

Trojan Horses, and Cuckoo Birds - Trump & Musk

One of the political lessons I learned in Washington was “when you see a parade going by, get out in front and pretend you're leading it.” - Robert Underwood

There are some people in the Dissident Left who reflexively push back against whatever Trump, and Musk advocate. Their reasoning seems to be that because Team Trump is a Technocratic Trojan horse (true), then whatever they advocate is bad. That’s too simplistic of reasoning. Just because Team Trump is the latest Technocratic threat (and a very serious one it looks to be), doesn’t mean it is reasonable to oppose something for no better reason than that Musk endorsed it.

C. J. Hopkins is an example of what I’m talking about.

I like C. J. Hopkins, I do, and I admire him for his legal fight against the German authorities. His attacks on Musk and Trump? - Excellent, many of the points he makes, and views he shares are good, like this one and this one.

But Hopkins’ reasoning on some issues today seems to have devolved into thinking that if Musk says something is an issue then it’s not an issue. If Musk believes that something is right, then it’s wrong.

Because Musk has called attention to Pakistani rape gangs C. J. Hopkins ridicules those who think that Pakistani rape gangs are a serious issue. Because Musk is leaning into some sort of Germany for the Germans idea, Hopkins is opposed to it. Because Musk suggests that maybe Germany should abandon Holocaustianity, Hopkins thinks that that’s tantamount to Nazism.

If Musk said, “the sky is blue,” you can be sure that the next moment C. J. Hopkins would be ridiculing anyone who thought the sky was blue, and claiming that they are a brainwashed Musk cultist for thinking so.

I get it. It is right to be wary of ideas endorsed by the Silicon Valley + ZOG, swamp monster frontman Trump, and the military contractor, Thiel connected, Musk.

So what’s actually going on here?

Team Trump found a parade — an actual populist movement — got in front of it, and will no doubt try to steer it to their own ends. Actually Hopkins already knows this, he identified what’s going on, controlled opposition (emphasis mine):

“I have to tip my hat to Musk, and to the formerly secret consortium of global-capitalist behemoths that took over Twitter. They saw an opportunity, and they seized it. There we were, a multiplicitous mass of opposition to the New Normal Reich, righties, lefties, inbetweenies, people of every color and creed, united in defense of our democratic rights, pushing back against a weird new form of totalitarianism, and … well, that couldn’t be allowed to continue.

It was obvious what had to be done. As Vladimir Lenin famously noted, “the best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.”

— C. J. Hopkins

The movement, though, that Team Trump is trying to takeover is real. And the movement has a mind of its own to at least some degree.

An example of this can be seen with the Indian immigration debacle. Musk defacto advocated further undercutting American labor, on behalf of big business. That’s the kind of thing Team Trump wants to do. But it backfired spectacularly, demonstrating that Team Trump clearly is not in the driver’s seat, not securely anyways, not yet. They wanted to steer the movement that way, they failed, and lost credibility.

So then Musk makes a big show of supporting the anti-immigration AdF in Germany. How much more obvious could he get? Musk let the mask slip with the Indian immigration debacle, so he was trying to rebuild political capital. That doesn’t mean that Germany abandoning Holocaustianity is anything other than a good idea, just because Musk supports it.

It simply means that Team Trump is struggling to rebuild political capital, and endorsing popular causes in an attempt to regain that capital. They haven’t yet actually taken complete control of the parade.

So we don’t need to reflexively oppose something just because members of Team Trump endorse it. They are of course going to endorse some good ideas if they want to maintain the appearance of being the leaders of the populist movement.

Now the danger is that they (Team Trump) might actually take control of the populist movement and steer it to their own ends. They’ve done it before, so it’s a credible threat. Sadly actually, it is a probable outcome. That’s no doubt what they’re betting on, though the Indian immigration debacle shows that they’re having a harder time this time around.

So what are Team Trump’s real motives? So far these seem likely.

1. Technocracy: they will try to steer the populist movement into supporting Technocratic Corporatocracy through Dissident Right/Curtis Yarvin type ideas.

2. They clearly wanted to do a bait and switch of making people happy that they clamped down on illegal immigration while continuing to undermine American labor with legal immigration. Though again, the populist movement is watching them more closely this time, so they’re going to have a hard time pulling that off without losing political capital.

3. Sparing Americans no expense to serve Israel, of course. They might have big plans of a wider war or something in the Middle East, on behalf of Israel. They’ll need a lot of political capital if they want popular support for that.

4. Corporate welfare, you know 500 billion dollars to tech companies for AI junk, or bailing out bitcoin billionaires, and various other transfers of tax payer dollars to big business.

5. Organized Jewish interests may have finally figured out that undercutting the white culturally Christian majority has been an immensely foolish strategy. The new minorities cannot be as easily guilt tripped as the white majority, and consequently Jews are fast losing their spot at the top of the oppression points pyramid. That may be a big part of why we’re seeing some rollback of woke.

Probably a little of all five reasons. So yes, I welcome the verbal attacks on Trump, Musk, Thiel, and co. That cabal in the white house is ominous. Trust them none. But we shouldn’t just reflexively oppose something because they endorsed it; they’re going to endorse some good ideas and important causes - the cuckoo bird must fool the host.

A good read on Trump 2.0 is Neo Feudal review’s Fool’s Gold: How Trump’s Populist Return Is a Trap for the Naive.

Mathew Maavak’s perspective that the Oligarchy may be switching back to nationalism for the time being is worth checking out too, and he has a good list of the taxpayer funded corporate welfare that Musk’s companies receive. (I think it’s pretty clear that Trump, Musk, and company are internationalist/ globalist oligarchs, not nationalists, but it’s equally clear that they are riding and redirecting nationalist sentiment as an energy source for their cabal.)

And Catherine Austin Fitts’ takes on the crypto angle are especially interesting.

This, by the way, is the Traditional Oppression Point Pyramid (brought to my attention by a Neo-Feudal Review article).

Times are changing fast. This pyramid no longer holds up on the Left. The other minorities weren’t just going to leave the top spot uncontested, and many of the other minorities now just see Jews as white oppressors, and have cast them to the bottom in their updated versions of the oppression point pyramid.

This pyramid now only holds true for republicans, old school liberals, and most Christians. So this might result in a shift of the policies of organized Jewish interest groups, but maybe not anytime soon; there’s so much built up momentum in the push against the white culturally Christian majority, I think they might have a hard time applying the breaks now.

I mentioned cuckoo birds, in conjunction with Trump, in the subheading. common cuckoos are nest parasites. They lay their eggs in other bird’s nests. Their egg hatches first, and then their little chick pushes the other eggs out of the nest. The parasitized birds, whose own young were pushed out of the nest by the cuckoo, think that the cuckoo is their chick and feed it. It demands more and more food. Sometimes the cuckoo is way bigger then the birds whose offspring it killed and they still don’t get it, they keep feeding the insatiable cuckoo chick.

Well, that’s what Trump and company were last time round, and they will no doubt try to be this time. They dominate the populist movement, try to fuel up on it, gain energy from it, make the populists think that they’re one of them, redirect their energy.

Back in 2020, in a symbolic artwork, I painted a presidential seal in the background, with a common cuckoo in place of an eagle, and spotted cuckoo eggs instead of clouds. I also put cuckoo clocks above the seal on the right and the left of the seal. With the hands of the clock above the cuckoo’s right wing (bird’s right, not the viewers) pointing at the four and the five, for 45. If you wondered what that part of the symbolism in the painting was about now you know.

The Root Cause Cop Out

Those who do not want whites in the dissident Left, trying to set the record straight on racial matters, will insist that you must set any concern for pushing back against anti-white narratives to the side, and instead address bigger problems. Shoniwa writes:

“Tackling some of the causes of immigration is a thorny subject for me because I don’t believe you get to consent to your government actively supporting foreign wars while also rejecting the blowback consequence of migration from the war zones. I recognise that we are not given a choice when our so-called democracies enthusiastically sponsor armed conflict abroad but, as I argue in the next section, that is the ultimate problem we need to focus on. We don’t have democracy in any meaningful way, and if an alleged Great Replacement turns out to be a valid problem, it won’t get solved until we resolve the primary cause – an utterly broken system that offers no meaningful avenues for people making all the choices and not politicians.”

Note the unjustified assumption that we have consented to foreign wars, then the admission that we’re not given a choice anyways.

C. J. Hopkins writes in a comment:

“No, the actual issue is the systematic dissolution of national sovereignty and borders, which is being carried out by the global-capitalist empire that we all live under, i.e., globalization. Fomenting racial hatred isn’t going to stop that process. I realize neo-nationalists are giddy at the moment, but, if they think they’re actually going to ethnically cleanse their countries, they’re dreaming.”

Neither Shoniwa nor Hopkins actually believe what they’re recommending here; they both directly attacked the Covid narrative as well they should have. They identified root causes of the Covidianism but they also addressed specific details (like the vaccines, and facemask rituals). They didn’t insist that we set aside opposition to Covid until we had brought down the oligarchy, or Globo Cap first, they rightly saw direct opposition to Covid as direct opposition to the oligarchy/Globo Cap. But for some reason they can’t see that on immigration and anti-white majority agendas.

Let me illustrate the unreasonableness of believing that you must root out the global oligarchy before you can work on specific issue like culturally inculcated anti-white beliefs.

Imagine that you live in a cabin in the woods and are faced with a forest fire creeping towards your cabin. You immediately sound the alarm.

“Common! Let’s get clearing brush, cutting a fire line, and making sure the cabin doesn’t burn down.”

Some onlookers, named Shawn, and J. C. Thomkin (no relation to real persons living or dead) berate you,

“What are you doing! The fire burning towards your cabin is not the root cause! Poor forestry management is the root cause, stop worrying about the fire, you must focus on forestry management.”

Poor forestry management may well be the root cause. The forest may need thinning, grazing, and controlled burns. That’s not going to save your cabin though. Save your cabin first, then focus on forestry management. Otherwise you won’t be focusing on forestry management anyways, you’ll be rebuilding your cabin.

Assailing Criminocracy from all Sides

The West is waking up on some matters, the divide and conquer tactic of mass immigration, and multiculturalism is seen for what it is by more and more people. Why not encourage this waking?

Why not use opposition to mass immigration, and cultural and demographic replacement, as a basis for uniting against Globo Cap, or the Criminocracy?

Opposition to cultural and demographic replacement is opposition to top down social engineering. Why not rally around this banner?

So here we dissidents are attacking the Oligarchy’s stronghold. Sometimes we hit upon some strong stuff that does some real damage (reinvestigating germ theory, 9/11 Truth, AIDS Truth).

But in other areas, involving the atomization of our societies, we haven’t been doing much damage to Oligarchy Inc. We’ve basically been throwing sticks at its walls, lobbing water balloons against the towers, plastering the gates with paint ball guns; nothing seems to do the trick.

But then some of the dissidents wheel up a big bronze canon, a cartload of iron cannon balls, and barrels of powder. Written on the side of the cannon is Opposition to Cultural and Demographic Replacement.

Oh ho ho, explosive, let’s see what that bad boy can do to the walls of the Globo Cap fortress.

But no sooner is it loaded and pointed at the walls, when our good friends Shawn, and J. C. Thomkin (again, any resemblance to persons living or dead, is purely coincidental) berate us,

“What are you doing pointing that Opposition to Cultural and Demographic Replacement canon at Globo Cap?! Don’t you realize that Globo Cap is the root cause, not immigration?!”

If you want to bring down the Criminocracy why not assail it from all sides? Exploit its weaknesses. Assail it for it’s callous bloodshed and destruction from the anti-war side. Assail it for its trade agreements that undercut peasant agriculturalists, and industrial workers from the protectionist side. And assail it for its divide and conquer methods from the Opposition to Cultural and Demographic Replacement side.

Ah, but what if some of the supposed coalition of the 99% find that actually globalism is working just fine for them? What if many Muslims rather like having most of Europe open to them, want to see more of their compatriots in Europe, and see globalism as working for them on behalf of spreading Islam? Africa’s population is booming, what if many of their nations see globalism as the easiest way to provide an outlet for more population pressure than they can handle by moving overseas into other countries? What if Hindu nationalists value globalism as a release valve for demographic pressure too, and an opportunity to have a powerful diaspora working on India’s behalf abroad?

“They (Indian diaspora) can be India’s voice even while being loyal citizens in those countries. That is the long term goal behind the diaspora diplomacy. It is like the way the Jewish community looks out for Israel’s interests in the United States”

Ram Madhav, BJP general secretary.

I think the hang up for Q-Anarchists is that they don’t want to lose the illusion of a coalition of the 99%. You oppose some globalist policies and you can maintain that illusion. You oppose other globalist policies and then, ooh, the fractures appear and the real conflicts of interest between groups show up.

But if bringing down the Criminocracy is more important to us then maintaining the illusion of a coalition of the 99%, then let’s open up the front on the Opposition to Cultural and Demographic Replacement side of things.

Q-Anarchism

Q-Anon was the phenomena where Trump supporters were led to believe (by an anonymous account, that supposedly was in the know) that Trump was really working on their behalf, even though a plurality of evidence pointed to the contrary. They were told to keep trusting the plan. The effect was people continuing to give their support to, and pin their hopes on, Trump, long after the evidence available to them should have encouraged them to rethink, and find another vehicle for their interests other than Trump. (So the Trump supporters were like poor little read warblers stuffing food into the gaping maw of a giant cuckoo chick, long after they should have been suspicious about what this thing was that they were actually feeding)

Q-Anarchism is the Leftwing version of Q-Anon.

Let’s return a moment to what I said early on in this essay:

“Here I am going to propose that those who have strongly objected to; my writing, Simon Elmer’s writing, and to Nevermore for publishing our work, sense at some level, what I know — the hoped for diverse coalition of the various groups making up the 99%, or proletariat, is largely an illusion, and a simple stress test of a mild sort will prove it. They want to avoid the stress test for the same reason I want to apply it. We both suspect the same result if the coalition is subjected to a mild stress test — it will shatter because it was a mirage all along.”

So what’s the simple stress test? I’ll show you, look at this handy graphic that I lifted from Nemo Jones’ Natural Law Article:

Every people including white people need to be able to practice both sides of the right action chart, including the masculine side. Take no shit, set the record straight, push back against demonization of their group, and take the interests of their own demographic seriously too.

If white people standing up for themselves and having frank discussions about immigration, the dangers of ethnic conflict from multiculturalism, and so forth, is all it takes to tear apart the coalition, then there is no coalition, there’s just an abusive relationship.

The white majority in this relationship is the woman who thinks “they really have something going” and covers up for her abusive boyfriend/husband to maintain the illusion of a partnership. “No he didn’t hit me, I just fell down the stairs. No don’t confront him about it, you’re going to ruin what we’ve got going.”

The Stirrer, Rusere Shoniwa, and company direct more anger at Simon Elmer for calling attention to Pakistani rape gangs than they do at the Pakistani rape gangs, or at the UK authorities for covering it up.

They recognize that the divisions are so real, and serious, that merely acknowledging them will tear apart the appearance of a coalition. They know as well as I do that multiculturalism is divide and conquer, but are displeased with me for pointing it out. They feel they can somehow keep that reality at bay through pretense.

For my having brought up the skyrocketing crime from immigration in Sweden, Shoniwa accused me of having “sucker-punched immigrants as far as Sweden.” But what about the Swedes? Does the effect of immigrant crime on them matter? Should we not pay close attention to what lessons the Swedish example can teach us about the dangers of multiculturalism and mass immigration?

That’s what I mean, they know that the divisions beneath the surface are sufficiently serious that the slightest stirrings of discontent from the whites who are supposed to keep quiet will break the appearance of a coalition. The coalition can’t handle a simple test.

A real coalition, a true partnership, can handle open frank discussion.

So a question for Shoniwa, The Stirrer, and company - If you don’t want the white culturally Christian background majority to practice even the mildest form of purely defensive ethnic solidarity by speaking out and setting records straight, then what are you doing to prevent other groups from practicing ethnic, and religious solidarity? Or is it just the white culturally Christian majority that you don’t want doing that?

The Moment of Truth

The next step is simple. Welcome open frank discussion, encourage the white majority to take their own interests seriously too, and then see who is still willing and wanting to work with you.

The minorities that remain we can form a coalition with. Those who were put off by the white majority asserting the legitimacy of having their own interests too, were no real friends to begin with. The coalition still might not work in some cases because the minority’s ethnic interests and the local white majority’s might be completely at odds.

The best thing for a given minority’s ethnic interests may be to keep importing more of their compatriots. That might be a logical thing for them to do for their people.

That might be a terrible thing for the white majority in terms of housing costs, wages, crime, overburdening of social services, overcrowding of cities, and so forth.

There might be work arounds in some of these cases. For example: many Hispanics have a class interest in having very little immigration but an ethnic interest in continued immigration. It might be possible for them to fulfill both class solidarity and ethnic solidarity, by being against more immigration (class interest), but also against trade agreements that hurt the small scale farmer and lower classes back home with which they share ethnicity.

The Jury is in, The Plan Failed.

How long should we keep trusting the plan, and thinking that if only the white, culturally Christian background majority sets aside their own interests and practices activism on everyone else’s behalf, then we’ll all join together, push against the oligarchy and create a more just social order? Should we try the plan out for 10 years? Okay we’ll give it 20 years and then re-evaluate? How about half a century? Let’s add another decade for good measure and make it 60 years.

Well it’s been sixty years, and to this day people think that white flight from the 1960s and 70s is a sign of white bigotry and they still blame white people for getting driven out of areas. They still give us the differentials between black and white incarceration rates, and income, disingenuously omit the Asian stats, and people buy it as a sign of white racism against minorities.

Why wouldn’t they? Why would we expect people to focus on pushing back against the oligarchy if they think that whites, whiteness, and white supremacy is the real issue?

And how are we going to change that if we don’t set the record straight and push back against the anti-white narratives?

What other consequences have been caused by white Westerners renouncing any form of ethnic solidarity for themselves? Look at white Anglo Americans - they are atomized and their society is broken. They are so conditioned and propagandized that they recoil at the wrongthink concept of having any sense of kinship or solidarity with each other.

I’m not saying that everyone needs to switch gears and make this The Issue. This is just one of many issues, but it is a serious issue and we shouldn’t regard it as the one issue that we can’t have frank discussions about.

The Stirrer for example, looks like they’re are doing great work, in their community, and crafting thought provoking content. They feel they can bring people together and don’t want to break a fragile coalition. Excellent, they needn’t address this issue at all, but they also needn’t discourage discussion on the matter.

This issue isn’t going away, and there is important work to do in rolling back decades of anti-white propaganda. Again, if members of the white culturally Christian majority standing up for themselves and having frank discussions about immigration, the serious dangers of ethnic conflict from multiculturalism, and so forth, is all it takes to tear apart the coalition, then there is no coalition to begin with.

Sixty years the plan hasn’t worked and counting — Q-Anon almost looks reasonable compared to Q-Anarchism. Our analysis and discussion should accommodate the reality, of not just class conflicts of interest but ethnic and religious conflicts of interest too. Q-Anarchism glibly dismisses thousands of years of ethnic and religious conflicts on behalf of wishful thinking. That won’t do.

Postscript

My last essay received some great, thoughtful comments, and one comment, on the Nevermore posting of my essay especially stood out to me. So I’m going to end this essay with that comment, from Serial Misfit.

Let me start by saying that I'm Greek, so not technically white, at least not aryan, as we've never felt we belonged to any particular race other than our own, which is a mixture of pretty much all races. Greeks always vaccillated between the east and the west, settling for none. We were black to the Northern Europeans, and white to the Africans, easterners to the westerners and westerners to the easterners.

I'm also an immigrant in Australia, 25 years now, where for the first few years I was unintentionally illegal. I won't go into the details, but believe me, I know the dread of seeing a policeman in the distance, the exploitation, the sense of worthlessness, the despair.

I'm an anarchist, holding the traditional anarchist ideals, perpetually dreaming of a free, colour blind world, where everyone can realise their best potential, and move unobstructed.

Over the years, I have changed the way I look at immigration.

To begin with, I know first hand that migration creates a hole in one's soul that never gets filled. Nobody would choose to migrate from their homeland if they had a chance to live a good life there, save some pathological adventurers, and even they would most probably choose their homeland as a base.

So rather than support people's right to seek a better life elsewhere (my previous position), now I would rather support people's fight to fix their homelands instead, and live that better life among their families and friends, smelling the only fragrances, eating the only foods, and looking at the only landscapes and faces that can soothe their souls.

I went from living in a poor monocultural to a rich multicultural society, and though I find it very interesting and enjoy the challenge of understanding other people, I can still recognize that it doesn't help create cohesion and a supportive community, or to phrase it differently, it would take far more effort and many more generations to bring together racially and culturally diverse people into one unified community, than if they started from a point of cultural understanding and ethnic singularity.

It's a far lonelier world that of a multicultural society, and I'm pretty sure there's stats to show that.

I go back and forth to Greece whenever I can, and over the course of 25 years I've seen what mass immigration has done to the country, which under the guidance of the EU has become what they call a "depository of souls", most locked up in concentration camps, while the "lucky" ones outside either work for nothing, or have to resort to crime to survive, prey to the gangs of criminals that have also flooded the country, and to the Greek assholes who exploit their despair.

At the same time rich foreigners, "investors", and "developers" are displacing the local population who since the manufactured financial crisis of 2008 have become the second poorest in Europe. People are forced to sell, lose their homes to hedge funds, and a whole young generation faced with 45% unemployment has fled the country.

Greece is dead, and I'm crying as I write that, because I'm as territorial and tribal as the person next door, though I never thought I had it in me before I left.

Who has gained from all that? Certainly not the Greeks, neither the poor immigrants.

The second point I wanted to make, re white people being singularly attacked for crimes other races may have committed as well, is that this is the price you have to pay when your whole history is Eurocentric. The centre, becomes the bull's eye that all arrows will point at. There may be other worthy targets at the periphery, but everyone will aim at the glaring centre.

And last, a question that has bugged me all my life: is racism an instinct?

You see, I always had cats, and on some occasions they gave birth to litters of kittens who were all of the same colour but one. I observed how the kittens would play with each other but shun the odd one. There was nothing wrong with that kitten, it wasn't sickly or anything, it was just ginger or whatever. Was it coincidental? I don't know, haven't dug into it, but always made me wonder. Are we programmed to be hostile to the "other"?

To conclude, I remain convinced that a better world is possible, that dialogue and mutual compromise (stress on compromise) is the avenue, and that one can simultaneously hold two beliefs that seem contradictory at first glance, ie support people's right to seek a better life wherever they want, AND people's right to keep their ancestral lands and cultures intact.

I ultimately support people's right to choose, whatever that may be, provided nothing and nobody gets hurt in the process, whether I personally agree with their choice or not.

— Serial Misfit

“The West suffers from a strange self-hatred that one can only describe as pathological; although the West tends to be laudably open to other values, it no longer tolerates its own. Of its own history it sees only that which is reprehensible and destructive, and it is not in the position to recognize what is great and pure.”

— Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 2004 (who later became Pope Benedict XVI), Translation by Clarifying Catholicism. This quote above was first brought to my attention by the book The Unprotected Class, by Jeremy Carl.

I wrote this essay originally for publication in a media outlet that deals with these kind of issues. By their silence I presume that either my email never made it or that they turned down the submission as is their right to do of course.

I mention the above not to start any new internecine indie media squabbles but simply because this essay makes the most sense in context. That is, it was written for fellow conspiracy realists of an essentially egalitarian persuasion, and it was written to weigh in on the general ongoing discussion — Is replacementism a thing? Is it a cause for concern?

Secondly, I am genuinely worried that the conspiracy realist movement, at least the egalitarian side of it, which so brilliantly navigated Covid -19, 9/11 and the War on Terror, is losing its way on this issue, and missing the forest for the trees.

I haven’t submitted this essay to any additional conspiracy realist publications of an egalitarian persuasion, as I would normally do, because I don’t want to pressure them. They must do what they believe is right based on the information available to them. I took a while to come around on this matter, they might need plenty of time too, and I will respect that. If though, some of them happen to read this and they find this essay of mine compelling, they are very welcome to republish it as a way of broaching this subject with their audience.

I too hesitated to publish this because I know that some people simply cannot, or will not, understand the difference between standing up for white people, and white supremacy. And, silly as it sounds, when it comes to being called names, racist has much more of a sting than conspiracy theorist or anti-vaxxer (especially seeing as anti-vaxxer is arguably a compliment).

Conspiracy realists, in particular those involved with unmasking false flags blamed on Islamic terrorists, such as 9/11, will worry that objecting to high levels of multiculturalism and mass immigration is feeding into a strategy of tension. That’s a valid concern, keep those trees in mind (false flags being used to create tension), but here I want to talk about the forest.

I aimed to treat this sensitive topic with a difficult to achieve combination of tact, and frankness. As to whether or not I succeeded in doing that . . . you be the judge.

Below is the essay, only slightly altered, with a few paragraphs and words taken out to remove direct reference to the original intended recipient.

On the Great Replacement, I’ve Come Around: Here is Why.

Whether or not we recognize replacementism at all, and whether or not we think that it is a good thing or a bad thing, is the tip of the iceberg. What we think about replacementism (if we see it to begin with) will be decided by what we think about a whole system of closely related ideas.

Replacement immigration views are tightly interwoven with white guilt and beliefs about: white people, about Western civilization, and about the Christian tradition. So this essay will be a whirlwind tour of how I came to recognize that I had unwittingly accepted a whole ecosystem of what I now regard to be anti-white beliefs, and related ideas.

This essay will also illustrate how changing my mind on those related ideas allowed me to see that yes, the Great Replacement is an observable, ongoing phenomena, happening in real time, and to see that no, it is not a good thing.

I think my experience will be of interest to (Publication X) because we have a lot of shared views. My experience may be of value to readers even if they ultimately disagree with me.

Like many (Publication X) readers and contributors, I am a conspiracy realist; I regard Covid to have been a fake pandemic, I don’t think office fires caused Building 7 to free fall into it’s own footprint on 9/11, I believe William F. Pepper’s case is convincing that James Earl Ray didn’t assassinate MLK – the US government did, and I know that Germany was not the aggressor of World War I – they were just honest enough to officially declare war after France and Russia had defacto declared war.

I’m not the MSM stereotype of a conspiracy theorist either: I’m not into aliens, I believe the world is a globe because that best fits the evidence available to me, and while I like David Icke and appreciate his mind expanding work, I don’t think that the global power elite are reptiles (though I might not put money on that last point).

What I Believed

I used to think in terms of uniting the 99%, (the peasants) against the 1% (the overlords). I would still like to see the peasants win but realize now that there might not be any 99% as I’ll explain later.

I felt that opposition to immigration was a divide and conquer tactic at best and outright racist bigotry at worst. I thought what right do colonialist governments have to keep out people from nations that they have exploited? What is a border but an arbitrary line on the map?

For the USA I had even less patience: it stole the land from the natives through war and a long string of broken treaties, and stole another big chunk of land in an outright war of aggression against Mexico. The USA has no right to this land so it has no right to decide who comes and goes, was my thinking.

I regarded civilizations as monstrosities, and I looked to indigenous cultures for inspiration, wisdom, and purer ways.

I knew that there was an anti-white agenda, and a lot of anti-white bigotry in the West. That never escaped me and was obvious to me decades ago. But I was only really concerned about it as an obstacle to uniting the 99% against the 1%. I also favored arguments about how anti-white racism actually hurt minorities, because I couldn’t oppose anti-white racism for the simple reason that it hurt white people – I wouldn’t go there.

One of my favorite jokes went like this:

A financier, an immigrant, and a worker were sitting at a table with a plate of 20 cookies. The financier grabbed 19 of the 20 cookies, stuffed some of them into his mouth and the rest into his pockets. The financier got up to leave, turned at the doorway on his way out, and said to the worker:

“Watch out, the immigrant is going to steal your cookie.”

Those were my views, they were dear to me and a big part of my identity, I was loathe to part with them. I knew I wasn’t on completely solid ground so I went out to compile evidence to shore up my beliefs.

Evidence of malfeasance on the part of the USA against the Indians, and of former colonial empires continuing to dominate former colonies through neo-colonialism was easy enough to come by and good to know. It is in other ways that the new evidence and perspectives I exposed myself to crumbled my former beliefs.

The Unraveling: Beginning with Indigenous People

The first place where my world view started to fall apart was with indigenous peoples. My precious noble savages soon degenerated into plain old humans, on average no better then everyone else, once I actually started to learn about them. Here are some examples of the kind of behavior that deeply disappointed me:

In 1835 some Māori warriors in New Zealand commandeered a ship, and with their families onboard piloted the ship to the Chatham Islands where the peaceful Moriori lived. The Māori warriors killed a 12 year old Moriori girl and hung her flesh on posts to make a point. They killed some 300 Moriori, ate many of them, and enslaved the rest (most of whom died).

Another example is the Iroquois in North America conquering a vast swath of land, monopolizing the fur trade, and driving out and destroying other tribes. Iroquois torture and cannibalism of their prisoners is widely attested to by French, Dutch, English and natives at the receiving end of Iroquois conquest such as the Huron.

There’s nothing exceptional about either of those examples, they’re well within the range of human behavior found across many people groups of all sorts.

People will blame the Europeans for all this of course, they will say that Europeans upset the balance of power, and traded firearms which set off Iroquois and Māori conquests of their neighbors. This reasoning doesn’t cut it for me – I’m not impressed by people not doing something bad that they couldn’t do anyways.

Yes, when the Iroquois and various Māori groups were not much stronger than their neighbors they didn’t conquer them, but that doesn’t mean much because at the time they couldn’t. The real test is what did they do when they could? When they were stronger? When they had guns and their neighbors did not? That’s the real test. As we can see, once they could conquer their neighbors they did.

Same thing with indigenous people and the environment. They generally refrained from over exploiting the environment only so long as they lacked the means and the motive to do so. The Iroquois didn’t hunt to near extinction the beaver in their area only because they had no motive to do so; once they had a motive (trade) they overhunted the beaver for their gain. The Māori had the means and the motive (tasty food) to wipe out the giant Moa birds of New Zealand and they did.

Yes, I know two wrongs do not make a right. Just because Indians and Māori conquered and destroyed their neighbors once they had the opportunity to do so does not mean that it was right of Europeans to do this in turn to Iroquois and Māori.

I’m just showing you the unraveling of my beliefs. I had such difficulty finding indigenous groups that were truly peaceful, that despite desperately wanting to find such groups I had to admit to myself that the rare peaceful groups I clung to as evidence were the exception that proved the rule – The indigenous peoples were not the moral superiors of white Europeans – generally they committed the same sins when they had the means and the motive to do so.

It is a testament to how much I had internalized an anti European/white/Christian attitude that I was crestfallen to learn that the indigenous peoples were generally not the moral superiors of white Europeans.

We can learn much from the myriad indigenous societies and their oftentimes exceptional (in both good and bad ways) practices without adopting an attitude of indigenous peoples chauvinism - an attitude that I have found to be quite common.

Slavery

It was probably the reading of a couple African history books (Fortunes of Africa, and Scramble for Africa) in my teens that drove home to me the very widespread enslavement of Africans by Africans and Islamic slave raiders, and that this was an ancient practice. Only slowly, though, did it dawn on me how unreasonable it was then that white Europeans were singled out as the scapegoat to be blamed for doing what everyone else was doing too.

I think a major tipping point for me was reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in which he tries to show that Americans still deserve extra guilt for slavery because he claims American slavery was uniquely brutal. I had already read (in the aforementioned books) about the Sultan of Zanzibar’s slavers raiding deep into Africa, rounding up and enslaving villagers, and force marching them all, including women and children, across great distances with heavy loads of ivory, and many of them dying on the way, so I knew that Zinn was just trying to single white Europeans out, and scapegoat them for what everyone else was doing too, but I still didn’t come to terms with just how outrageous that was.

What finally did it for me was someone writing what I already had all the information to know but just hadn’t thought of it that way (I can’t remember where I read this so I’m afraid I can’t give credit). They pointed out that white people keeping slaves is hardly notable considering how widespread and nearly universal slavery has been. What is truly remarkable is that whites stopped keeping slaves, crusaded against it, and stamped out the trade in many places all around the world.

That whites get singled out for slavery guilt while having done the most to stamp it out hit me as a potent example of just how pervasive and perverse anti-white beliefs are.

Interracial Crime

A white person killing a black person often receives enormous media coverage and outrage, to the point that you would think white people are out to get blacks. It’s used as an example to say “See, see! We told you America is a white supremacist country.” The situation though, is the opposite of what we’re led to believe. For interracial homicides blacks kill a lot more whites in the USA than whites kill blacks. For all of this century (21st century) black on white homicide has been around twice the number or greater than white on black.

I didn’t know that till sometime in 2024. Why doesn’t everyone know that? Why did we have widespread BLM protests when it’s actually white people who are victimized the most in these interracial homicides?

The more I thought about this the more I saw how hypocritical it was. This seemed a clear indicator to me that in our society white lives matter less, to the point that the group of people who suffer the most from interracial killing get the least sympathy, the least publicity, and the fact is not generally even acknowledged.

We don’t want to talk about it because it might hurt black people’s feelings, and we don’t want to demonize black people as a group? I get that sentiment, but why are white people not offered the same consideration? And ultimately we must face the facts, with tact yes, but keeping quiet to avoid hurting feelings on such major issues is irresponsible.

Note! (Added June 2025) I said above that black on white homicide has been around twice the number or greater than white on black - that is a severe understatement: black on white homicide has actually been happening at five to six times the rate of white on black homicide. I discuss this in the follow up piece to this essay called Trust the Plan: Q-Anarchism for White People. Here is the link to the specific section in the follow up essay where interracial crime is discussed.

In short, the data I linked to in this first essay does not separate out Hispanics from non-Hispanic whites - it lumps the two categories together under “white” (of course some Hispanics are in fact white, but oftentimes they are Mestizo - European + Amerindian, or fully Amerindian, for example; Mayan, and they can also be African/African admixture). When you separate those categories (Hispanic from non-Hispanic white), most of the “white” on black homicide ends up actually being Hispanic on black. But most the black on white remains black on white.

White Flight

I’ve always heard about white flight but never thought much about it. And certainly never read about it. When I did read about it I learned that whites were concerned about their physical safety because crime actually did go up as a consequence of the demographic shift in their neighborhoods. Their concerns were real, which probably wouldn’t come as a surprise if we weren’t all so ignorant of and averse to discussing interracial crime rates.

Here’s an excerpt from a very gentle intro to the complexities of white flight by William Voegeli:

“During this era, Rotella points out, crime increased dramatically in South Shore, where it had previously been low. The worst felonies—murder, assault, rape, robbery, and burglary—were committed at rates nearly three times the Chicago average, turning South Shore into one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods.

Whites’ fear of crime, Rotella says, “wasn’t unfounded, nor was it simply reducible to white people reacting to the arrival of black people.” The many neighbors who moved away during his adolescence had their reasons, “but the way the story of their departure got told often took the form of ‘enough is enough’ after a gunpoint robbery, home invasion, or similar last-straw outrage.” One former South Shore resident interviewed for Rotella’s book said simply, “Who wants to get used to living like that?”

The last-straw outrage for some came in 1970, when, during an attempted robbery, a young black man shot and killed Manny Lazar, owner of the Wee Folks toy store. Lazar was “beloved by generations of children in the neighborhood,” says Rotella. His daughter, Caryn Lazar Amster, published a memoir, The Pied Piper of South Shore (2005), which quotes one of her father’s former customers: “The day ‘Mr. Wee Folks’ was shot was, for many of us, the day that South Shore died.”

You can easily get into much heavier darker accounts of white flight, but this above, is enough to see that there is another side to this story.

What made white flight another point that ate away at my previous beliefs, was the realization that even when whites are victimized and driven out of an area by crime and ethnic conflict, they get no sympathy; instead they are blamed, and derided as racists.

Immigration, Labor, and Housing

Let’s return to that joke I told about the financier, the immigrant, and the worker. So I thought any “They’re taking our jobs” concerns over immigration were silly only because I wasn’t thinking at all. Once I thought about it it became clear that inflating the supply of workers cheapens labor.

Capital can undercut the bargaining power of labor here in two major ways: they can take the jobs overseas someplace where labor is cheaper, and save money that way, or they can bring anyone willing to do the job for less in from outside.

When you take into account the iron law of supply and demand it is no wonder that the agents of capital, both the conservatives and liberals, are all for immigration (even if the conservatives pretend that they are not).

A labor shortage is good for the bargaining power of laborers, a labor surfeit is good for capital that wants to undercut labor.

So a major means that the financier in that joke uses to take all the cookies is to use immigration to cut the laborer’s bargaining power. It is for this reason that labor should be worried about immigration.

People can deny it all they want to, but besides the truism of the supply and demand consideration, we can all see that mass immigration into the United States, for all it’s supposed benefits certainly isn’t bringing us any closer to the situation where our grandparents could raise a family and buy a home on a single income and that was considered normal.

Then we get to housing:

The easiest way to ease up the demand on housing is to stop bringing in millions more people who need housing each year.

Yes, the United States still has a lot of room that we could pave over with suburbs and apartment complexes and add yet more lanes to our roads to accommodate increased traffic. We still have wide open spaces, but wouldn’t it be nice to leave them that way?

Getting past all the gas lighting and coming to terms with the brazenly obvious – that mass immigration, legal or not, is detrimental to Americans already here, including in some basic and critical ways (housing and worker bargaining power), was another turning point for me that I only finally reached in 2024.

Ethnocentrism and Racial Solidarity: Everyone Else’s Not So Secret Weapon.

Two more major turning points for me were first, reading the The Dispossessed Majority by Wilmot Robertson where he makes the point that if every other racial and ethnic group can and does organize on behalf of their group but it is taboo for whites to do so, then the groups that take their own side will take over and whites obviously will lose.

A second major turning point closely related to Roberston’s arguments was this insight from the article On Moral Unity and Regime Legitimacy by Academic Agent.

“However, universalism as a political doctrine (rather than as men standing amazed as apes before the heavens), is everywhere and always the tool of a dominant hegemon to conceal their sectional interests."

For whites to even notice that many minority groups are not working for high minded universal ideals (despite proclaiming those ideals) but instead are working for their own group’s interests, along racial, ethnic, and religious, lines is an immediate charge of being a Nazi.

For example, Hollywood is dominated by a certain minority. It’s no coincidence then that Hollywood produces an endless stream of movies and shows about the thing that is best for portraying that minority in a very sympathetic light – the Holocaust. If we accept the Holocaust narrative, and it’s accompanying numbers, at face value there are still plenty of other tragedies just as brutal, and sometimes at a much greater scale (Soviet and Maoist crimes against their people), but those other tragedies are not valuable for portraying a certain group as the ultimate innocent victims, so those other tragedies don’t get anywhere near the same attention.

That same minority group that looks out for their own identity group’s interests in Hollywood is also sure to look out for their own interests in politics through powerful lobbying firms. The public is already softened up and sympathetic from the endless Holocaust guilt reminders, so we’re ready to be fleeced by both parties who continue the gravy train in weapons to Israel and have oriented US foreign policy to serve Israel.

This was inevitable. Jewish solidarity was seen as a good thing, white solidarity as something only a Nazi would do. Given this situation there is no way that the former couldn’t have gained political power and cultural influence and the latter lost it. One group could organize on their own behalf, the other dared not.

I suspect that the only reason we don’t see more ethnic conflict in the West is because whites serve as the padding between the groups. Every other group can push their minority interests at the majority’s expense.

If whites push back by organizing on their own behalf then there will be no more easy marks to pushover for satisfying the ambitions of organized minorities, and more ethnic tension will arise.

If the white majority (for now) remains the one group that does not organize on their own behalf they will just continue to lose ground.

The longer whites wait to push back the weaker their position will be when they do.

We might not ever get to cash in on minority rights even if we become a minority of the population. The coalition of minorities is already preparing the groundwork to switch from talking about minority rights to instead talking about the rights of the global majority, which means everyone but whites.

More Diversity = Fewer Whites

A call for increased diversity in a white majority nation is to say that the white percentage is too high, and consequently must be lowered and replaced with “diversity” (anyone other than whites).

When you put two and two together and realize that we need more diversity is code for reduce the white share and give it to someone else, then the constant calls for more diversity, everywhere, in everything, start to take a decidedly sinister tone.

Anywhere that whites are a clear majority is “unbearably white.” The Unbearable Whiteness of Hiking, The Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing. No one in polite society says that kind of thing about any other group, even when another group is a clear majority in their area, but it’s been said about whites for a long time.

Anti-white people who are not tone deaf are not going to come out and say fewer whites but the insatiable demand for more diversity is the same thing. This realization was just another little wake up call for me.

The Asian Omission

Thomas Sowell’s book Intellectuals and Race brings up this really excellent point that deserves widespread dissemination. In almost any instance when disparity between whites and blacks and Hispanics is used as an example of racism and white supremacy in America, the data for Asians is omitted.

So for example CNN tells us Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of Whites, new report on state prisons finds. CNN uses this to argue that this disproportionate incarceration rate demonstrates racism, and leaves us with the implication that whites are to blame, but they didn’t show us the Asian data or mention it at all.

In this document here from the US Department of Justice, table 11, we can see that there are 20 times as many whites incarcerated in state correctional facilities as Asians, but whites only outnumber Asians ten to one in the total population, so the white incarceration rate is twice that of Asians.

Are we going to argue that this must be because of Asian supremacy and racism against whites?

Same goes for all the other disparities that are used to claim whites are holding down minorities. In per capita income Asians in general and a whole host of Asian ethnicities in particular earn more than whites in the United States.

So we can see why we are only shown the disparity between whites and then black and Hispanics. It gives the impression that whites are on top and that they must be there because they’re oppressing minorities since apparently systemic racism is the only explanation, but even that kind of simplistic thinking makes no sense when you see that whites aren’t on top – East Asians, South Asians (Indians), and Southeast Asians are on top in wealth.

So all the comparisons of whites vs blacks as evidence of white supremacy are lies by omission because they leave out Asians.

I knew of this long ago after reading Sowell, which probably made me more amenable to listening to white advocates later. Whites will get blamed if they do better per capita than any other group. If any other group does worse on any given metric than whites, it is white people’s fault.

Indians for example, can do better per capita in the USA than almost everyone else and that’s a heartwarming immigrant success story and we’ll be told that their success is helping all of us through the economy or something. In contrast according to the current thinking white can do no right and whites logically can only escape blame for everyone else’s woes when and if whites end up at the bottom of income and top of incarceration metrics.

Immigrant Crime in Sweden

“Migration, we are told, is beneficial for Sweden. But if this is so, it would also show in crime statistics. According to the present investigation, the first more comprehensive study since the 2005 report by the Swedish Crime Prevention Agency, this is, however, not the case. In 2017, 58% among those suspected for crime on reasonable grounds are migrants. Regarding murder and manslaughter, the corresponding figures are 73%. These figures are interesting out of purely scientific reasons. Due to migration, murder rate in Sweden has quadrupled.”

– from Migrants and Crime in Sweden in the Twenty-First Century

I’m using Sweden as an example because of how stark it is. For the Swedish government to have welcomed immigrants and refugees in, is not at all a noble or humanitarian thing for them to have done if the price they paid was the safety of their people and the loss of the social cohesion of their formerly high trust society. What Sweden did is pathological.

The other interesting aspect of Sweden as a warning story (showing both, that you can't just assume assimilation is going to succeed, and that the consequences can be disastrous if it doesn't), is that the children of immigrants in Sweden, the second generation, are more prone to crime not less:

“While the over risk (of crime) has gone down among first generation migrants, it has increased among children to migrants born in Sweden.”

– from Migrants and Crime in Sweden in the Twenty-First Century

You can supplement the statistical analysis with reading more about the Swedish example from a first person perspective in the article Farewell Sweden, My Beloved Country.

Religious Differences Matter

Replacementism necessitates sweeping differences, of all sorts, under the rug. Those who preach diversity are the first to gloss over differences (so they fail at the most fundamental level to even recognize diversity) and tell us that all the religions teach basically the same thing.

The turning point for me on taking religious differences seriously was reading Rodney Stark’s book For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery.

Rodney Stark makes a compelling case that all those things (witch hunts, the abolition of slavery, etc) for better and worse are directly related to religious doctrines.

When people are serious about religion the doctrines do matter and will have real world effects that have driven many world shaking changes and paradigm shifts.

Religions aren’t interchangeable, they’re not all the same, they do not teach basically the same thing.

Islam and Christianity are both focused on their respective founders who believers regard to have led perfect lives and seek to emulate.

For Christians it is Jesus’s example that one should emulate, for Muslims it is Muhammad's example that one should emulate.

Muhammad and Jesus set very different examples.

Muhammad started wars, founded an empire, enslaved captives, ordered non Muslims to convert or die, or pay special taxes and live in a subservient state - Dhimmitude, kept a harem, and so forth.

That might surprise you because you have probably heard that well actually Islam is a religion of peace and that the Prophet Muhammad preached peace.

What you don’t hear is, when Muhammad preached peace, and when he didn’t. We must look at the example set by Muhammad: like so many revolutionaries throughout the ages Muhammad preached peace when his movement was vulnerable, militarily weak, and expansion through war wasn’t a viable option. Once his movement was militarily strong, and expansion through conquest was an option, Muhammad preached war.

Before writing off critics of Islam, please at least hear what they have to say. Islam Unveiled by Robert Spencer would be a good place to start.

Yes Christians have committed many crimes but you can always hold them to account with their own standard by pointing out that their behavior is un-Christlike.

What would Jesus do? Is not an alarming thing to hear: What would Muhammad do? is unsettling, and rightly so.

The Tower of Babel

At the beginning of this essay I wrote,

“I used to think in terms of uniting the 99%, (the “peasants”) against the 1% (the overlords). I would still like to see the peasants win but realize now that there may be no 99%”

We conspiracy realists want to keep framing everything in terms of class – ruling class and ruled class: class conflicts of interest are real, but so too are ethnic and racial conflicts of interest, and religious conflicts of interest.

So here we are, worried about not objecting to having high levels of immigration and multiculturalism (which invites cultural, ethnic, and religious tension) imposed on us, because we think that objecting to it is playing into a divide and conquer strategy.

We’re being too clever for our own good. The answer I think is much more obvious: high immigration and multiculturalism is divide and conquer in action; that’s how we are being divided and conquered – through multiculturalism.

What we’re ending up with is a tower of babel (sometimes with literal language barriers), in which our fellow proles may be less likely to join with us because they don’t see an “us” they may see their own group as being different from us and having their own distinctly different interests which may very well directly conflict with our interests. Their vision and ours might not be compatible.

Diversity is Strength is as Orwellian as War is Peace.

The more multicultural our society the more divided it is, the less common ground there is between us, the less we understand each other, the less we trust each other and the less cohesion our society has.

The Great Replacement

There’s an article published on a website called American Renaissance, and the article is titled Renaud Camus on the Metaphysics of the Great Replacement. Costello and Camus provide a far more lucid, erudite, and deep analysis of the matter than I could, so I’m simply going to recommend reading that article, and I’ll offer an excerpt or two to give you a taste:

“It is perfectly fine to acknowledge it (the Great Replacement) as a reality if one celebrates it. If, on the other hand, you do not like the Great Replacement, then it does not exist, you are the one inventing it and you are a fascist, a racist and a propagator of conspiracy theories. If you like it, it exists, and it is an opportunity for France, an opportunity for Flanders, a blessing for Belgium, a lifeline for Europe; and you are a benefactor of humanity.”

“Under capitalism, everything becomes a replaceable, recyclable “commodity” — and this includes human beings themselves. Men become mere “consumers” manipulated by producers to desire whatever is offered to them, and qua consumers, they are entirely replaceable. Everywhere in the modern world, for Heidegger, there is a will toward uniformity, replaceability, recyclability.”

Conclusion

Don’t worry I’m not going to spring a white supremacy pitch on you at the end or anything. There are many reasons why I think white supremacy should go the way of the dodo but the most basic and incontrovertible of them is because, well . . . look at white people. That whites have been so naive and trusting in recent times is almost endearing.

Look at them (including me till recently) just accept it while a coalition of ethnocentric minorities and self hating whites demonized, and blamed whites for just about everything. Look at how we watched various minorities practicing ethnocentrism and racial solidarity right in front of us and let them call us Nazis if we so much as considered doing the same. Who could look at that behavior of whites across almost all the West and think master race?

If I was a eugenicist I would look down on whites from some high tower, scoff, and proclaim, “Ha, make way for evolution! Let the more ethnocentric groups crush the pale faces back into the earth from whence they came.”

But I’m not a eugenicist. I don’t think people’s worth can be reduced to their evolutionary fitness. I think there are far higher values that originate outside the material world (I believe evolutionary psychology can only satisfactorily explain some aspects of morality) and in moral worth I do not see that whites are of any less value than any other people.

And of course we must be fair, and keep in mind not just the epic failures but also the long list of successes that whites and their culture (broadly speaking Western culture) have had in art, architecture, music, clever inventions, and society building. The West’s now fading embrace of monogamy (today often derided as “Victorian Morals”) for example, was ultimately an egalitarian move that set the stage for other things like a higher status for women in the long run.

I think white people should stick up for themselves, and not allow themselves to be used as an all purpose scapegoat. As to when we should maybe, kinda, sorta think about getting around to doing that — I would say let’s take the classic advice on when to plant a tree: The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is now.

For the reasons laid out in this essay I have come to see replacementism, and widespread socially acceptable (and promoted) anti-white, anti-Western, anti-Christian-tradition, beliefs as a major proximate cause of our era’s illness.

I don’t know what the solution to this is, but I do know that it starts with acknowledging that there is a problem.

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Jordan Henderson is an artist from the Northwest of the United States. His original paintings can be Viewed Here, Art Prints Here, and Essays Here.

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Postscript

I was not originally going to bring up Simon Elmer’s work on replacement immigration simply because I knew it was the source of a recent truth movement feud, and I didn’t want to inadvertently fuel that feud. I figured I would just work in my own way, and in parallel.

But after tracking down and reading Elmer’s four part series The Great Replacement: Immigration in the UK I knew I had to give it a shout out and recommend it. Elmer’s series is simply top notch work.

Elmer did such stellar work that I thought, “Well damn! Why did I even bother writing my own piece on this?”

I think it’s a good thing then that I didn’t read Elmer’s work till after writing my own essay on the topic, because I’m glad I wrote this:

Firstly, there is a place for shorter, informal, spontaneous essays such as mine, alongside in depth, multipart studies, such as Elmer’s.

Secondly, my essay gives a personal American view of the matter focused on the white-guilt mental blocks that stop Americans from seeing what is happening, which I think complements Elmer’s UK perspective.

Thirdly, the convergence between writers working separately indicates that where they arrived at similar conclusions wasn’t group think.

And fourthly, the more voices the better. The political right saw the hand writing on the wall years ago, and even they, until recent years, had only a few much maligned voices willing to plainly state what they saw. The socially egalitarian camp still has very few voices on this matter. Let’s not let the few willing to speak up feel that they’re alone.

Anyhow, Simon Elmer’s The Great Replacement: Immigration in the UK is a must read along with Renaud Camus on the Metaphysics of the Great Replacement.

Note! (Added June 2025): in response to extensive criticism of this essay, I wrote a follow up piece. Here is the link! Trust the Plan: Q-Anarchism for White People

John C. A. Manley released his latest book All the Humans are Sleeping, and I had the pleasure of painting the cover art for it (the oil painting above).

The dystopian novel is extensively researched with considerable attention to detail, but all that is kept in the background and supports the brisk plot. The story is immersive on multiple levels.

Manley’s dystopia hits closer to the mark than say Matrix, because in Manley’s novel there is no need to have rogue machines turning against humans — humans are perfectly capable of turning the machines against humans/themselves.

I highly recommend the book. You can read more about it, including a preview, over here on Manley’s website.

I recently finished this painting - a picture of this year’s national elections here in the states. Though it could just as easily portray many previous elections, both here and elsewhere.

You may already be familiar with this artwork thanks to it having been published this last week by Activist Post, Off-Guardian, and Winter Oak, where Paul Cudenec wrote to go along with it Vote for Nobody, bringing our attention to the candidate Nobody, who looks substantially better than the other candidates.

I’ll use this as an occasion to share an excerpt from Lysander Spooner. This is from his essay On the Trial By Jury written more than 170 years ago in 1852 (Note: I broke the original long paragraph into four for easier reading):

“Neither is it of any avail to say, that, if the government abuse its power, and enact unjust and oppressive laws, the government may be changed by the influence of discussion, and the exercise of the right of suffrage. Discussion can do nothing to prevent the enactment, or procure the repeal, of unjust laws, unless it be understood that the discussion is to be followed by resistance. Tyrants care nothing for discussions that are to end only in discussion. Discussions, which do not interfere with the enforcement of their laws, are but idle wind to them.

Suffrage is equally powerless and unreliable. It can be exercised only periodically; and the tyranny must at least be borne until the time for suffrage comes. Besides, when the suffrage is exercised, it gives no guaranty for the repeal of existing laws that are oppressive, and no security against the enactment of new ones that are equally so. The second body of legislators are liable and likely to be just as tyrannical as the first. If it be said that the second body may be chosen for their integrity, the answer is, that the first were chosen for that very reason, and yet proved tyrants. The second will be exposed to the same temptations as the first, and will be just as likely to prove tyrannical.

Who ever heard that succeeding legislatures were, on the whole, more honest than those that preceded them? What is there in the nature of men or things to make them so? If it be said that the first body were chosen from motives of injustice, that fact proves that there is a portion of society who desire to establish injustice; and if they were powerful or artful enough to procure the election of their instruments to compose the first legislature, they will be likely to be powerful or artful enough to procure the election of the same or similar instruments to compose the second.

The right of suffrage, therefore, and even a change of legislators, guarantees no change of legislation --- certainly no change for the better. Even if a change for the better actually comes, it comes too late, because it comes only after more or less injustice has been irreparably done.”

Enjoy the artwork, enjoy this episode of the election show, and Happy Thanksgiving.

Prints of the painting People’s Choice are available here, and the original here.

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I have written no accompanying essay for this painting but as fate would have it, while I was finishing this painting, Paul Cudenec was finishing an article tackling through writing what I here tackled through paint. Our two works, one written the other painted, dovetailed smoothly enough that this painting visually compliments Paul’s article The military-industrial guilt complex as one of the article’s illustrations. Likewise, for the written compliment to this painting I recommend heading on over to Winter Oak and reading The military-industrial guilt complex.

The original painting I shipped down to Blo Back Gallery in Pueblo Colorado, for the Truth Show which opens the day after tomorrow. If you are in that neck of the woods, you can see this painting in person at the show, along with works from 30 other artists who have entered this year’s Truth Show.

Prints available here.

For this post I offer you no political nor controversial topics, but instead drawings and a painting of mine from these past few months for your viewing pleasure. If this post interrupted you in the midst of doom scrolling so much the better!

The two charcoal drawings above were each done over the course of a couple afternoons, with indirect late afternoon light illuminating the subject matter that I had set up by the window.

The four sketches above (the leather work boots, a deer’s skull, and a toy horse) were all done very fast: I did them as demonstrations for students during some classes that I taught recently. Each one was done in 30 to 45 minutes with various pauses during that time to stop and explain what I was doing and why. Having to execute them fast and leave them unfinished keeps them fresh and spontaneous.

The above two studies based on historical photographs I did a while back, but I didn’t get around to photographing them till just recently.

Over the years I’ve sketched tons of portrait studies based on old black and white photographs. The reasons are several: Firstly, it simply makes for good practice, and honing skills.

Secondly, it is interesting to see if I can add something in my interpretation - that is not just to objectively reproduce the information from the photo in a drawing but to see if I can breathe some new energy into it.

Thirdly, it compels me to study in detail the composition and lighting used by these old photographers many of whom who were masterful in these areas.

The above two sketches were studies I did in preparation for an oil painting as I had originally planned on executing the sketch “Elephant in the Room” (that I used as the cover illustration for my Vaccine Evangelists, Apostates, and Apologists essay) as an oil painting, though I’m thinking I may have said what I wanted to say with the sketch alone.

I hope you enjoyed the artwork: more paintings planned for this year. Both allegorical/political and non political pieces. I have numerous other commitments though so we’ll see how many of the paintings I intend on doing I actually get around to executing - probably few but hopefully many.

A portfolio of my artwork can be viewed at either of my websites: Original Paintings – Fine Art Prints

This is the 7^th and final installment of this essay series. Here is the itinerary of the final installment: It’s been a while since the publication of the 6^th installment, so to get back in the rhythm of the series I’ll kick off this installment with some classic anti-vaccinationist fun – juxtaposing pro-vaccine propaganda with the reality that directly contradicts it.

We’ll look at how an illustrious Belgian institution attempts to deceive the reader into believing that Belgium’s 1959 routine diphtheria vaccination program is responsible for the plummet in Belgian diphtheria mortality, and then we’ll cure that fanciful pro-vaccine notion with a dose of reality.

Next I will sum up the principle strategies by which vaccine apologists attempt to dismiss the awkward little detail that the big, bold, pro-vaccine historical mortality-based messages are directly contradicted by the historical mortality data – this summary is the Vaccine Apologist’s Playbook.

Following the playbook will be a discussion of the implications of what we have studied in this essay series. I’ll also provide (in an appendix) suggested reading for other areas of the vaccine debate that this series hasn’t touched on at all due to these other areas lying outside the scope of this series.

For the finale I’ll close the series with a review of the Italian historical mortality data juxtaposed with vaccine introduction – the Italian mortality data is especially noteworthy for reasons that will be discussed momentarily.

First though, here are links to all the earlier essay installments of this series, followed by a table of contents for this essay installment.

Links to the earlier essay installments.

Part 1 - The Evangelists

Part 2 – Apostasy

Part 3 - The Red Herring: A Tour of the Motte

Part 4 – Spanish Death Data.

Part 5 – The Apologists

Part 6 The Apologists Continued

Table of Contents for this Essay Installment

1. Belgian Diphtheria Vaccine Propaganda vs What Actually Happened

• What They (Sciensano) Would Have You Believe Happened in Belgium.

• What Actually Happened in Belgium.

2. The Vaccine Apologist’s Playbook

• Vax-Apologist Strategy #1 – Conflate historical arguments with efficacy arguments.

• Vax-Apologist Strategy #2 – The no duh approach accompanied by unsubstantiated claims about medical care.

• Vax-Apologist Strategy #3 – The argument from the data we don’t have.

• Vax-Apologist Strategy #4 – The whooping cough warning story.

• Vax-Apologist Strategy #5 – Pointing to that same, one, Canadian measles case notifications graph.

• Vax-Apologist Strategy #6 – Direct defense of the narrative.

• Vax-Apologist Strategy #7 – The Shameless Projection Gambit

• Brief interlude to debunk the Shameless Projection Gambit.

• At a Glance Summary and Prevalence in Percentages

3. Revelation of character and conduct

• Firm Grounds for Distrust.

• Rigging the Risk Benefit Analysis

• Measles vaccines saved 17 mill . . . wait, no – 56 million lives! – The impressive exponential growth of the simulated number of lives saved by measles vaccination!

• Measles vaccines save X number of lives circular reasoning

4. Important strategic consideration

• First document the position of the goal posts, then kick the ball

5. Child mortality reduction, late vaccine introduction, and low vaccine coverage in Italy

• Whooping Cough Mortality in Italy 1887 – 2003

• Measles Mortality in Italy 1887 – 2003

• Meningitis Mortality in Italy 1887 - 2003

6. Summary

Appendix: Further Reading & Resources

• The Philosophical side of the vaccine debate

• Vaccine Risks

• Rethinking disease paradigms

• The Gallery of Graphs

• Rounding out the alphabet – Vaccine Evangelism Exhibits U through Z.

1. Belgian Diphtheria Vaccine Propaganda vs What Actually Happened

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What They (Sciensano – Belgium’s Institute of Public Health) Would Have You Believe Happened in Belgium.

The following excerpts are from the diphtheria page on the website of Sciensano. Emphasis is mine:

“In the past diphtheria was a major cause of death among children. Thanks to widespread vaccination in Belgium since 1959, diphtheria has almost disappeared from our country. But the bacteria are still in circulation and vaccination is the only way to prevent diphtheria.”

“Thanks to widespread vaccination in Belgium since 1959, the number of cases has decreased considerably and the risk of a diphtheria epidemic is currently minimal.”

• 1943: 16,157 cases and 982 deaths

• 1980 – 2012: less than 15 cases and 1 death (a person of Belgian nationality in Moscow)

• 2013: 1 case of respiratory diphtheria due to a toxigenic strain of C.ulcerans

• 2014: 0 cases

• 2015: 3 cases of cutaneous diphtheria, 2 related to a toxigenic strain of C. ulcerans and 1 due to a toxigenic strain of C. diphtheriae

• 2016: 1 fatal case of respiratory diphtheria in a 3-year old unvaccinated child”

Sciensano leads with talking about death, and then they switch to talking about vaccination reducing cases. This allows them to strongly imply that vaccination is the reason for diphtheria no longer being a major cause of death in Belgium, while leaving themselves a very thin layer of plausible deniability.

Sciensano proceeds to tell us about the historical mortality data rather than just showing it to us. They give us the number of diphtheria deaths in 1943 (982 deaths) to illustrate the world before vaccines. Their message is clear enough, and can be summed up as so:

1. Diphtheria used to be a major cause of child mortality in Belgium.

2. Diphtheria is no longer a major cause of child mortality in Belgium.

3. Vaccination is the reason that diphtheria is no longer a major cause of child mortality in Belgium.

We’ll revisit their message in a moment.

What Actually Happened in Belgium.

Figure 60

Even if one believes that diphtheria vaccinations are of any value at all, it is still inescapable that widespread diphtheria vaccination in Belgium in 1959 cannot be the primary reason for the diphtheria mortality decline, as almost all the decline occurred before 1959.

Sciensano only provides us the 1943 statistic of 982 deaths for pre-vaccine era historical perspective, yet still, it is unavoidable that widespread vaccination beginning in 1959 cannot be the principle reason for Belgium no longer having 900+ diphtheria deaths a year either, as most the post 1943 decline (95%) also occurred before 1959.

Sciensano’s vaccine propaganda uses the exact same two truths and a lie formula that we’ve seen the health authorities in the USA, Spain, and Ireland, using, and they do it for the same reason – to make it seem as if vaccination played the leading role in the historical reduction of infectious disease mortality.

The Basic Two Truths and a Lie Historical Mortality Formula for Promoting Vaccines is as Follows (the same formula works for other countries and illnesses):

1. Diphtheria used to be a major cause of child mortality in Belgium. = TRUE

2. Diphtheria is no longer a major cause of child mortality in Belgium. = TRUE

3. Vaccination is the reason that diphtheria is no longer a major cause of child mortality in Belgium. = FALSE

2. The Vaccine Apologist’s Playbook

Note: This playbook is intended as a resource for anticipating pro-vaccine responses when they have had their pro-vaccine historical mortality propaganda debunked. If you’re not planning on actively debunking pro-vaccine historical mortality based claims anytime soon, then you may not wish to study their responses in this much detail. Feel free to just skim through the playbook, stopping at what interests you and otherwise moving onto Section 3 of this essay – Revelation of Character and Conduct.

This playbook is based on field observations of the vaccine apologists in their natural habitats – from the wilds of the blogosphere, to the orderly pages of government documents. The 15 Vaccine Apologetics Case Examples documented and reviewed in Parts 3, 5, and 6 of this essay series are the principle basis from which I am drawing my observations for writing this playbook.

The vaccine apologists do regularly publish their own playbooks. For example, the Australian Government document, Responding to arguments against vaccination - a guide for providers (which we reviewed as Vaccine Apologetics Case Example 9 last essay), is a clear example of a playbook for vaccine apologists.

Case Example 5 from last essay, the CDC’s Some Common Misconceptions about vaccination and how to respond to them, is also a clear example of a playbook for vaccine apologists.

The vaccinationists are currently working on newer, better playbooks. For example, JitsuVax is an EU funded multi-university collaboration working on a slick, interactive, vaccine apologist’s playbook, designed to guide the apologist to the right answers to specific anti-vax talking points, and provide them with insight and guidance for responding to anti-vaccine arguments.

With so many literal vaccine apologist’s playbooks already out there, and the next generation of vaccine apologist’s playbooks in the works and already functional, what am I bringing to the table with another vaccine apologist’s playbook?

I’m bringing the one where the quiet parts are said out loud.

This playbook is more specialized, too; it’s centered solidly within this essay’s scope: the matter of vaccines being credited for what they did not do (credited as being the major reason for the historical infectious disease mortality declines).

Let’ recap the predicament the apologists are in.

Some of the most popular messages preached by the vaccine evangelists involve crediting vaccines for a large portion, up to most or all, of the infectious disease mortality decline from what it was in the early 20^th and late 19^th centuries to what it is now. (see Vaccine Evangelism Exhibits A through Z in parts 1, 4, and 7).

These are simple, easy to understand messages that powerfully illustrate the value of vaccines and help encourage the public to get vaccinated.

The difficulty for the vaccinationists is that these popular talking points of theirs are directly contradicted by the historical mortality data.

When people find this out, such as when vaccine apostates graph out the historical mortality data and show it to people, this undermines people’s faith in vaccines, and may prompt them to ask:

“If they’ve been misleading us on this aspect of vaccines, where else have they been misleading us? Have they been exaggerating the safety of the vaccines, and omitting crucial information there, too?”

This is where the vaccine apologists step in and assure everyone that really the vaccinationists haven’t been misleading anyone, and that it is really the anti-vaxxers who are being misleading by bringing this up at all, and that the historical mortality data doesn’t matter much to the vaccine discussion, and so forth.

Here are the ways they do that:

Vax-Apologist Strategy #1 - Conflate historical arguments with efficacy arguments.

In this strategy the apologist acts as though the primary or sole purpose of the anti-vaccine graphs and historical mortality based arguments is to show vaccines as inefficacious. The apologist points out that most mortality graphs don’t tell us much about vaccine efficacy. The apologist finishes with accusing the anti-vaxxers of being intellectually dishonest and logically fallacious. (See Figure 43 in Part 5, for more details on how this strategy works.)

The obvious usage of the graphs for testing pro-vaccine claims that directly relate to historical mortality data is simply ignored by the apologist. That the vaccinationists themselves promote vaccines with historical mortality based arguments is sometimes denied (such as Case Example 2), but most often just ignored.

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How popular is this strategy? 12 out of the 15 Vaccine Apologetics Case Examples reviewed in this essay series used this strategy either as their main strategy or as an auxiliary strategy.

(The three that did not use this strategy were Case Examples 3, 4, and 7 – all the others used this strategy.

Case Examples 3, and 4 were direct defense of the narrative and so did not need to pivot to notifications.

Case Example 7 did pivot to case notifications, but instead of using conflation to do that they mostly used the argument from the data we don’t have, which we’ll look at in a moment.

Case Example 5 (CDC) makes no mention of graphs, but does of pre-vaccine declines which the CDC treats as being related to case notifications only, and so I have counted Case Example 5 as having used a variant of this strategy.)

Vax-Apologist Strategy #2 – The no duh approach accompanied by unsubstantiated claims about medical care.

When someone debunks a pro-vaccine historical mortality related talking point, the vaccine apologists of course want to avoid conceding that the anti-vaccinationists had a valid point, or that the vaccinationists had been deceptive. They do this by using the no duh approach to make it seem like the vaccinationists had never been trying to credit vaccines with most of the infectious disease mortality decline to begin with.

The apologist acts as if vaccines having had very little (if anything) to do with the historical infectious disease mortality declines is the sort of thing that would come as no surprise to anyone.

They treat it as brutally obvious that most of the mortality decline would have occurred without the vaccine. They don’t, of course, say that most of the mortality decline occurred without the vaccine, no not like that, instead they understate it by just saying that mortality rates were declining.

After this they often make the unsubstantiated claim that the pre-vaccine decline was because of medical care. If they offer any example to try to substantiate this it’s usually polio and the iron lung (see A close look at Gorski’s iron lung example from Part 5 of this essay series).

Sometimes they are more reasonable and mention some other factors such as nutrition, and living conditions too, but their preference is to make medical care out to be the main reason – often mentioning medical care only. Presumably because they don’t want people thinking that the disease had become far less of a threat. Better to keep people thinking of kids on scary life support systems as the main reason for the mortality decline. Make the possibility of a world without vaccines look dreadful.

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How popular is this strategy? 9 out of the 15 Vaccine Apologetics Case Examples reviewed in this essay series used the no duh approach accompanied with unsubstantiated claims about medical care.

Those were case examples 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 14, and 15.

Vax-Apologist Strategy #3 – The argument from the data we don’t have.

Here the apologists invoke the historical serious disease complications sorted by cause data that we don’t have, to downplay the historical serious disease complication sorted by cause data that we do have (death).

They point out that illnesses can cause all manner of other grave consequences besides death. They themselves don’t provide any such data that is comparable to the historical mortality data, they simply point out that the anti-vaxxers didn’t provide this data (which they can’t find either, but they don’t mention that).

After stressing the importance of serious disease complications to downplay death data, the apologist refocuses the conversation on case notifications. That case notifications are a far cry from serious disease complications data, they don’t acknowledge; they just act as if somehow case notifications have more to do with serious disease complications than does death.

Sometimes they round this out by using the anti-vaccinationist’s focus on mortality data instead of case notifications data as a reason for accusing the anti-vaccinationists of being heartless, callous people who don’t care about the suffering of children – the implication being that if they really cared about the suffering of children they would be more concerned with case notifications data rather than death.

~

How popular is this strategy? 5 out of the 15 Vaccine Apologetics Case Examples reviewed in this essay series argued from the data that we don’t have.

Those were case examples 1, 2, 7, 14, and 15.

Vax-Apologist Strategy #4 – The whooping cough warning story.

To give the impression that without vaccines mortality rates would soar, the apologist invokes the whooping cough warning story. Usually this involves pointing to what happened in Sweden, the UK, and Japan when pertussis vaccination rates in those countries fell.

Unfortunately for the vaccinationists, in most places where the pertussis vaccination rates fell, so also did pertussis mortality, or it stayed low, which contradicts the message they want to push. They can talk about case notifications going up, but as always they need something much more frightening and impactful; they need to make it seem like mortality went up too.

To give the idea that mortality went up, rather than down or stayed the same, they either use Japan mostly and imply that the same thing happened in the UK and Sweden, or they simply mention the deaths that occurred in the UK after vaccination rates fell and act as if it was more than when vaccination rates were higher.

~

How popular is this strategy? 4 out of the 15 Vaccine Apologetics Case Examples reviewed in this essay series used the whooping cough warning story.

Those were case examples 2, 3, 5, and 9

Vax-Apologist Strategy #5 – Claim that anti-vaccine historical mortality graphs are in general dishonest, then point to that same, one, Canadian measles case notifications graph.

Pretty self explanatory: The apologist begins by claiming that anti-vaccine historical mortality graphs are in general intellectually dishonest. Then if they want to appear as if they actually have a basis for this claim they need something to point to.

Unfortunately for the vaccine apologists they don’t have many examples of anti-vaccine graphs that are actually intellectually dishonest. In fact the only example I see them point to that really is intellectually dishonest, isn’t even a mortality graph at all. It’s that same, one, Canadian measles incidence graph covered in the 2010 Gorski article (which we reviewed in this essay series as part of Case Example 2, in Part 5).

No matter – the apologists need something to point to. If they can only think of one example which isn’t even a mortality rate graph, then they make do with what they have. Most readers won’t conduct a study of 15 different examples of this kind of vaccine apologetics as we have done and will therefore not know that the apologists who make this claim about anti-vaccine historical mortality graphs are all pointing at the same anomalous example as their “representative” example.

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How popular is this strategy? 4 out of the 15 Vaccine Apologetics Case Examples reviewed in this essay series claimed that anti-vaccine historical mortality graphs are in general intellectually dishonest, and then backed this up by pointing to that same Canadian measles case notifications graphs (by citing Gorski).

Those were case examples 2, 6, 7, and 12

Vax-Apologist Strategy #6 – Direct defense of the narrative.

This is a strategy for only the most daring of the vaccine apologists. It does not involve trying to reroute the conversation to notifications data, nor do the audacious apologists who attempt direct defense worry about gaslighting their audience into forgetting about the big, bold, historical mortality related pro-vaccine claims.

No, none of that: these apologists attempt to directly defend the claims that their fellow vaccinationists have been making.

There is simply no easy way for them to do this. Foolhardy bravery notwithstanding, the direct defense is untenable if subjected to any serious scrutiny.

The Irish health board (Case Example 3) relied on the public’s unfamiliarity with logarithmic scales to attempt the direct defense. I’m sure they fooled plenty of unsuspecting parents, but it must not have worked too well as I don’t see them trying it now.

Ian A. York (Case Example 4) fabricated a data point and left out a half century of data in his attempt at direct defense. That backfired just about immediately and he was backtracking in no time.

The Australian government health agency (Case Example 9) was a little more clever using a hybrid strategy of rerouting the conversation to case notifications data, but then still attempting a direct defense later using their own historical mortality graphs. In these they provided as little of the relevant information as they could get away with while still trying to prop up the pro-vaccine historical mortality related beliefs.

~

How popular is this strategy? 3 out of the 15 Vaccine Apologetics Case Examples reviewed in this essay attempted to directly defend the belief that vaccines played the major role in the infectious disease historical mortality declines.

Those were case examples 3, and 4 (direct defense as primary strategy) and 9 (hybrid strategy incorporating some direct defense).

Vax-Apologist Strategy #7 – The Shameless Projection Gambit

I call this the shameless projection gambit because it is an attempt to get the attention away from the fact that vaccinationists regularly hide/omit information by accusing the anti-vaccinationists of hiding information, whenever they (the anti-vaccinationists) reveal what the vaccinationists have hidden.

It is the vaccinationists who regularly omit the “detail” about almost all the mortality decline for various infectious diseases having occurred pre-vaccine, or without a vaccine at all.

When anti-vaxxers expose this by showing people the big picture, the vaccine apologist first concedes that the maximum theoretical contribution of vaccines to the mortality decline is so little as to be unnoticeable in the big picture (they don’t say it so plainly though), then they use this as the basis for accusing the anti-vaxxers of being the ones who are hiding something (by showing what the vaccinationists have been omitting).

The apologist insists that the only reason the anti-vaccinationists are showing you the big picture is to hide the alleged contribution of the vaccine. Like this:

“This is the problem with the anti-vaccine graph, it is deliberately zoomed out so far that you can’t see the impact of vaccines. That is why the pro-vaccine graph is a better representation. It’s not zoomed in as an effort to conceal something, rather it is zoomed in because that is the only way to see that vaccines did actually have an important impact.” From the article Yes, vaccines did save us from disease: a graphic analysis (which we reviewed last essay as Vaccine Apologetics Case Example 11)

So this strategy is an add on to the no duh approach. The apologist acts as though it is already well known that the maximum theoretical contribution of vaccines to the mortality decline was so little as to be unnoticeable in the big picture and that therefore the only reason to show the big picture is to hide the theoretical contribution of vaccines.

They avoid seeing the obvious usage of the graphs for debunking vax-evangelist historical mortality based claims, by, as usual, simply not acknowledging that their fellow vaccinationists have been preaching the messages that they preach.

~

How popular is this strategy? 2 out of the 15 Vaccine Apologetics Case Examples reviewed in this essay series used the shameless projection gambit and accused anti-vaccine graphs of hiding the impact of vaccines because they showed the big picture.

Those were case examples 6, and 11.

While the “net” I cast of 15 Vaccine Apologetics Case Examples only picked up two instances of this strategy, I’ve seen this strategy crop up elsewhere. Here is a very clear example: Melanie Mallon used the shameless projection gambit in her 2015 article The TRUTH about Bad Measles Charts the Mainstream Media Is Suppressing published on SkepChick.

She looked at a graph which showed that nearly 100% of the measles mortality decline in England had occurred pre-vaccine and stated:

“There’s only one reason to start this graph in 1838: to increase the scale so that the death rate appears even smaller in the years before the vaccine was introduced than it would if the graph focused on a relevant time frame. It’s not like anyone looking at this doesn’t already know that mortality from all causes was much higher in the 19th century than in the 20th.”

That’s a good case of shameless projection combined with the no duh approach. She in effect insists that it would come as no surprise to anyone to learn that the maximum theoretical contribution of the vaccine to the measles mortality decline in England is a fraction of a percent. Therefore according to Mallon, the only reason to look at the big picture is for the purpose of burying the fraction of a percent that represents the maximum theoretical contribution of the vaccine.

Note: I didn’t include Mallon’s article as a case example of vaccine apologetics because she doesn’t appear to have ever read the article that she is criticizing and doesn’t know what it’s title is. If you care to know how I know this here is a brief explanation – (otherwise just scroll on down to the debunk of the shameless projection gambit).

Malon says (emphasis mine):

“Roman Bystrianyk and Suzanne Humphries have a cherry to pick with proponents of vaccination. Their article on the measles vaccine was recently published on Health Impact News’s Vaccine Impact website under a heading promising us a mouthful of impacted truth: The Truth About Measles the Mainstream Media is Suppressing.

The actual article by Bystrianyk and Humphries is titled “Was the Introduction of the Measles Vaccine Responsible for Wiping Out Measles?” although the article barely even touches on that question, which is related to incidence of measles. Instead, the authors begin with a focus on mortality rates, which makes sense if you believe vaccines fight death, not disease.”

Mallon’s basic statements about the article she is criticizing are incorrect.

• The original article is not titled “Was the Introduction of the Measles Vaccine Responsible for Wiping Out Measles?” That is a subheading on the Health Impact News article. The actual article is titled Vaccines: a peek beneath the hood.

• The article begins with a focus on mortality rates, because vaccine proponents invoke mortality to illustrate the value of the vaccines. Bystrianyk and Humphries documented examples of historical mortality based vaccine evangelism at the beginning of their article. Mallon either never read the introduction of the article or pretends not to have.

• Health Impact News did not publish Roman Bystrianyk and Suzanne Humphries’ article, they only published an excerpt of it – they cut the entire original introduction.

• The article is not about measles vaccines specifically as Mallon claims. It is about vaccines in general with whooping cough, measles, and scarlet fever as case examples.

Mallon does have a valid point against the Health Impact News subheading, just not against the actual article. The Health Impact News’ article used an inappropriate subheading, and butchered the Bystrianyk and Humphries article by leaving out the article’s introduction which set the stage and provided key evidence.

Why did Mallon claim that the Health Impact News’ subheading was the actual article’s title? Most likely because she never followed the links back to the original article, or she pretended not to have. If she didn’t follow the links back then she wouldn’t have read the article’s introduction and would never have seen the actual title or key evidence presented by the authors.

Mallon’s sloppy journalism didn’t stop there. For example: she confidently asserted and insisted, citation free, that England did not introduce the measles vaccine in 1968 but instead in 1963. She really should have cited a source because the UK government certainly seems to think it was 1968.

In sum, Mallon’s article is a great example of the shameless projection gambit following the no duh approach. However, no matter what one thinks about vaccines, Mallon’s article is fatally flawed for the reason that she never read, or pretends to have never read, the whole article that she was critiquing, doesn’t know it’s title, doesn’t know what it’s actually about having missed the intro, and apparently didn’t realize this. I wasn’t sure what to do with something that sloppy so I left it out of the case examples.

Brief interlude to debunk the Shameless Projection Gambit.

These claims that the only reason to show the whole data set is to hide the theoretical contribution of the vaccine, can be easily debunked in a couple different ways. So let’s take a moment to do that.

The first way to debunk the Shameless Projection Gambit is to simply point out that because vaccine evangelists regularly invoke the pre-vaccine era in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries to illustrate the world before vaccines, then we have to show the whole data set reaching back into the 19^th and early 20^th centuries in order to thoroughly debunk those claims, and illustrate just how detached from reality those pro-vaccine messages are.

A second way to debunk the Shameless Projection Gambit is this:

Pro-vaccine advocates who want to maximize the impression of the vaccine’s contribution also use entire data sets going back deep into the 19^th century. This establishes beyond doubt that there are other reasons to use the whole data set besides supposedly hiding the alleged contribution of the vaccines.

Ian A. York’s pro-vaccine post Measles deaths, pre-vaccine (Case Example 4) used an English measles mortality graph that goes all the way back to 1838.

The Irish health board’s Vaccination - Your Child's Best Shot” section of their MMR Information Pack (Case Example 3) used a graph of the Irish pertussis mortality that goes all the way back to 1864.

The Australian Government’s – Responding to arguments against vaccination - a guide for providers (Case Example 9), tried to make it seem as though they had provided as much historical perspective as they could.

Why then do some vaccine apologists, including government agencies, use the entire data set, or at least pretend that they have, while other vaccine apologists insist that only anti-vaxxers would do that? It simply depends on this:

If they are trying to defend what their fellow vaccinationists are actually preaching, then they need to make it look as though vaccines played a major, preferably foremost, role in the historical mortality decline.

On the other hand, if they have decided that they simply can’t pull off a direct defense of the misconceptions that their fellow vaccinationists have been preaching, then they need to act as if their side hasn’t been, and isn’t, making such claims to begin with, and gaslight their audience into believing that these claims are not being made.

At a Glance Summary and Prevalence in Percentages

Presented below, based on our 15 Vaccine Apologetics Case Examples, are the seven most common vaccine apologist strategies used to counter anti-vaccinationists who have debunked the pro-vaccine historical mortality related messages (such as the messages in Exhibits A through T in parts 1 and 4). Listed here is the percentage of case examples in which each strategy showed up.

80% – Conflated historical arguments with efficacy arguments

60% – Used the no duh approach accompanied by unsubstantiated claims about medical care.

33% – Employed the argument from the data we don’t have.

27% – Invoked the whooping cough warning story.

27% – Pointed to that same, one, Canadian measles case notifications graph.

20% – Attempted direct defense of the narrative.

13% – Used The Shameless Projection Gambit

That concludes the Vaccine Apologist’s Playbook.

3. Revelation of character & conduct

The study of the vaccine evangelist messages (Exhibits A through T in parts 1 and 4) that we have conducted in this essay series reveals that the vaccine advocates’ standard approach is to tell us whatever they think that we need to hear in order to convince us to do what they think that we should do – get vaccinated, and support vaccination.

We have seen that we cannot count on them to tell the truth and furnish us with the most relevant information; we can only count on the vaccinationists to tell us information that makes vaccines look good. We can also predict that no matter how relevant and critical certain information may be, they will omit that information if it looks bad for the vaccines, and if they can get away with omitting it.

The vaccine evangelist messages are so far removed from reality that most of the vaccine apologists do not even attempt to defend them and instead spend all their time rerouting conversations, conflating distinct ideas, engaging in shameless projection, gaslighting, and even going so far as to outright deny that their side has been preaching the messages that they are still preaching (Gorski in Case Example 2, Part 5. of this essay series).

Firm Grounds for Distrust

Most of us, myself included, do not have the time, means, and relevant expertise to put to the test every single one of the myriad claims and pronouncements made by the vaccinationists, but most of us can test at least some of those claims. We have done that. In this study of the vaccinationists (this essay series), we have tested their powerful historical mortality related claims (their Graveyard Gambits, and Lifespan Lectures, and Bait and Switch preaching).

We tested them; they failed. Furthermore, we know that they will generally not admit wrongdoing on their side, even when it has been firmly demonstrated. The apostates caught them red handed, and debunked their messages fair and square. The vaccinationists did not acknowledge their error and course correct. They instead responded by closing ranks, plowing ahead, and doing what they could to make the messenger (anti-vaccinationists) look like the villain.

Therefore we not only have good reason not to trust the pronouncements of vaccine experts – the pediatricians, immunologists, public health authorities, and so forth – but knowing what we know, it would be unreasonable and irrational for us to take them at their word.

Not being able to test the experts in a certain area is no reason to trust them – that would be an argument from ignorance. Consequently, even when we do not have the time, or do not have the means or expertise, to put to the test a vaccinationist claim, we nonetheless are fully justified in doubting the vaccine expert’s pronouncements, because:

The cumulative evidence of widespread deception on the part of vaccine experts and advocates is enormous. That presented in this essay series alone is sufficient grounds for strong distrust.

The takeaway lesson I see is this: when we do not have time or means to test a vaccine claim from authoritative sources like government health agencies, prominent vaccine developers, and doctors, we must rely on our knowledge of the character and conduct of the vaccinationist camp from the instances in which we could put them to the test. When we did put them to the test, such as we did in this essay series, we found that they are deceptive, omit critical information, and do not admit their wrongs when challenged but instead close ranks against the critics.

Rigging the risk benefit analysis

When vaccine advocates tell us whatever they think that we need to hear in order to convince us to do what they think that we should do (get vaccinated, and support vaccination), they are feeding the public information that in effect rigs people’s informal risk benefit analysis to ensure that people’s risk benefit analysis comes down solidly in favor of vaccines. They do this by making the alleged benefits of vaccines seem as great as possible while making the risks seem as small as possible.

People “know” that without vaccines we would see our local cemeteries crowded with ever more tiny headstones as our children drop dead to the scourges of the Victorian era. We would see our lifespans shortened by decades. The air would fill with dreadful sounds of children gasping for their last breath as they succumb to whooping cough, and diphtheria.

If people swallow the pro-vaccine historical mortality related claims and believe that vaccines really are the reason these illnesses don’t strike us the way they did in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, then the benefit side of vaccines is stacked so heavily you might as well not even bother weighing the risks.

When it comes to exaggerating the alleged benefits of vaccines, the vaccinationists certainly don’t leave all their eggs in one basket. Wherever they can, they say whatever they can get away with, to stack the benefit side of the vaccine risk benefit analysis as high as possible. We’ve seen this with historical mortality related claims. I’ll provide you with another example of them doing this to illustrate my point further.

Measles vaccines saved 17 mill . . . wait, no – 56 million lives! – The impressive exponential growth of the simulated number of lives saved by measles vaccination!

The CDC on their webpage Fast Facts on Global Measles, Rubella, and Congenital Rubella Syndrome (CRS) Flatly state:

“Measles vaccines saved more than 57 million lives worldwide between 2000-2022.”

The WHO makes this statement in fact sheets too.

“Measles vaccination averted 56 million deaths being between 2000 and 2021”

&

“Accelerated immunization activities by countries, WHO, the Measles & Rubella Partnership (formerly the Measles & Rubella Initiative), and other international partners successfully prevented 56 million deaths between 2000–2021.”

That’s from the WHO’s measles Fact sheet.

The CDC and WHO both state this impressive number of 56 to 57 million lives saved like it’s a fact, on webpages called Fast Facts, and Fact Sheet. That kind of gives the impression that this statement is a fact, doesn’t it? Well it isn’t. The 56/57 million number is generated by running a simulation on a model. They’ve been generating impressive sounding numbers of lives saved by running simulations on models for years.

In order to generate more and more impressive sounding numbers they keep inflating the hypothetical number of deaths that they think there would have been in a no vaccine scenario. Take a look at some of their simulations:

Just a few years back their measles vaccine simulations generated 1.2 million lives saved per year. Between 2000 and 2014 measles vaccination saved an estimated 17.1 million lives!

Now measles vaccine simulations are generating a remarkable 2.7 million lives saved per year. Between 2000 and 2021 measles vaccination saved an estimated 56 million lives!

What is going on here? How did we go from 17.1 million lives saved by the measles vaccine between 2000 and 2014, to 56 million between 2000 and 2021?

Were an additional 39 million lives saved by the measles vaccine in just 7 years? For 14 years from 2000 to 2014 the measles vaccine saved an average of 1.2 million lives each year, and then after 2014, it saved on average 5.6 million lives, bringing us up to 56 million by 2021?

No, they just inflated the hypothetical number of measles deaths that they say there would have been in a no vaccine scenario across the entire time period (back to 2000), yielding for them a larger simulated number of lives saved for every year in their simulation.

Surely they can’t just “revise” their simulation to get as big of a number as they think the public is gullible enough to believe? They can. They can say whatever they want, because it’s all hypothetical.

Not only is the number of deaths that there would have been without measles vaccination unknown, the number of deaths that there were with measles vaccination is also unknown.

In contrast to England and Wales, Ireland, Australia, the USA, Belgium, Sweden, and Spain, that we have reviewed, most countries do not, and have not, kept detailed cause of death records. In the 2005 WHO Bulletin Counting the dead and what they died from: an assessment of the global status of cause of death data the authors found that:

“At the end of 2003 data on death registration were available from 115 countries, although they were essentially complete for only 64 countries. Coverage of death registration varies from close to 100% in the WHO European Region to less than 10% in the African Region.”

Even in 2021 UNICEF notes that still:

“Only about 60 countries, mainly high-income, have a well-functioning Civil Registration and Vital Statistics System which produces timely, high-quality mortality data.”

There are over 190 countries, so to this day we’re only looking at about a third of the world’s countries having this data.

This lack of data is a major advantage to Vax-Evangelists preaching globe spanning (as opposed to country specific) messages about lives saved and deaths averted by vaccination. They don’t have to worry about being contradicted by the hard data . . . because no one has it.

These numbers, generated from simulations, run on models, are as far from factual as you can get. But the CDC and WHO present these numbers as though they are facts.

This supports my contention that vaccinationists will usually say whatever they can get away with saying to make vaccines look as good as possible. Presenting these impressive hypothetical numbers as though they were facts looks very good for vaccines.

Measles vaccines save X number of lives circular reasoning

The measles vaccine simulator generated numbers of 17 to 57 million lives saved are regularly trotted out as evidence of the vaccine’s global beneficial impact by Vax-evangelists and apologists alike. Even when vaccinationists acknowledge that the number is an estimate, they are engaging in circular reasoning if they use it as evidence of the vaccine’s alleged beneficial impact, because the simulation involves the assumption that the vaccines have had the intended impact.

Vaccination data is one of the data types they are using in their simulation. They say that right in the paper:

“The measles mortality model used to generate estimated measles cases and deaths is rerun each year using the new and revised annual WHO-UNICEF estimates of national immunization coverage data as well as updated surveillance data.”

You do not need to know how many people got vaccinated in order to estimate measles mortality unless you are using the vaccination data as part of your equation by making assumptions about the effectiveness of the vaccines. If you do that, then you can’t use your estimate as “evidence” of the vaccine’s impact because you just assumed what the real world efficacy of the vaccine is as part of your equation.

If we dig into their references for their model we find further confirmation of this (emphasis mine):

“The first routine dose of measles vaccine was assumed to be administered at 1 year of age, and we assume 85% efficacy. The second routine dose of measles vaccination was assumed to be administered to children at 2 years of age with 95% efficacy. The supplemental campaigns vary in the age groups targeted but are assumed to have 100% efficacy,”

That’s from their 3^rd reference, the paper Estimation and prediction for a mechanistic model of measles transmission using particle filtering and maximum likelihood estimation

In sum, the measles vaccination simulator generated numbers prove a grand total of nothing about how many lives, if any, measles vaccines have saved. What they do serve as supportive evidence for though, is that the vaccinationists are so intent on rigging the risk benefit analysis in favor of vaccines that both of the world’s highest profile health institutions (The WHO and CDC) will go so far as to present hypothetical numbers as facts in their fact sheets.

4. Important Strategic Consideration

I stated early on in Part 2 of this series:

Death-rate graphs are only one of many types of evidence in the vaccine debate, but they will be the fulcrum of my analysis of the vaccine conflict, because death-rate graphs more succinctly illustrate, better than any other tool I know of, the disconnect between what the Vaccine Evangelists’ claim or imply happened, versus what actually happened.

This essay series sprang initially, in large part, from my identifying the need for a cleanup exercise to remove obstructions and pave the way for the unencumbered use of death rate graphs for debunking Vax-evangelist messages. The cleanup I saw a need for was to gather up, study, and dissect all the most common pro-vaccine attempts at dismissing death rate graphs.

If you are considering engaging in the good work of spreading vaccine realism, for the benefit of your friends, family, and/or audience (if you are a writer or podcaster), debunking the pro-vaccine historical mortality based messages is an excellent place to start.

Based on my observations of the vaccine debate itself, I’ll offer a recommendation on something to do first, before presenting the historical mortality data.

First document the position of the goal posts, then kick the ball

We know that most anytime anti-vaccinationists debunk the vaccinationists fair and square, the vaccinationists will simply pick up the goal posts, reposition them somewhere else, often in a completely different field, and then insist that the anti-vaccinationists don’t have a valid point because, look, see, the goal posts are way over there now.

What else are the vaccinationists going to do? Admit that their side has been deceptive and/or deluded in their beliefs? Admit that the the anti-vaccinationists were right? Of course not.

Even when you are simply in a personal discussion with a friend or family member, and have done your best to keep the discussion non adversarial, remove your ego from the discussion, and avoid confrontational wording that might inadvertently bring their ego into the discussion, there is still a good chance that they will move the goal posts on you anyway.

In my experience, belief in vaccination is strong enough that the believers generally evaluate the quality of the evidence based on how well it corresponds to their vaccine beliefs. If the evidence undermines their beliefs, then they “know” it must be wrong.

If they can’t demonstrate the evidence to be wrong, and it becomes clear to them that it is solid evidence, then the remaining option for them to prevent the evidence from undermining their belief is to “know” that it is irrelevant. The easiest way for them to know that it is irrelevant is to simply move the goal posts into another field where that evidence doesn’t apply.

This is why it is generally best to first document where the goal posts are positioned and who put them there, then kick the ball.

Many vaccine skeptics have already taken care to do this: Beattie opened his book Fooling Ourselves on the fundamental value of vaccines with a detailed example of the vax-evangelist’s Graveyard Gambits. Bystrianyk and Humphries opened their article Vaccines: a peek beneath the hood with numerous examples of historical mortality based vax-evangelism. The 2023 publication of Vacunación Libre provides various examples of historical mortality based vax-evangelism as preached in Spain before they go on to debunk those messages. And of course in this essay series I began with extensive documentation of historical mortality based vax-evangelism.

Taking this precaution will not of course stop the vaccine apologists from moving the goal posts, but it will make it difficult for them to gaslight anyone who has seen your argument with the position of the goal posts well documented.

So, how do you document the position of the goal posts? Simply provide examples of the vaccinationists making their historical mortality related claims – their Graveyard Gambits, Bait and Switch Preaching, and Lifespan Lectures. When they make these claims they are establishing the goal posts, and they are responsible for the goalposts being where they are – for it is they who put them there.

If you don’t have your own collection of the vaccine evangelists’ preaching for documentation of where the goalposts are and who put them there, help yourself to the collection that I have put together in this essay series (Exhibits A through T in Part 1 and 4, and now Exhibits U through Z in the appendix of part 7).

5. Child mortality reduction, late vaccine introduction, and low vaccine coverage in Italy

For the final section of this final installment of this essay series we will look at one more set of mortality declines juxtaposed with vaccine introduction.

What makes the Italian mortality data especially noteworthy is that not only did Italy introduce pertussis and measles vaccines relatively late, it also did not initially introduce these vaccines as part of the country’s universal mandatory vaccination program. Most parents did not seek out these optional vaccines (as evidenced by a major 1985 survey). As late as the mid 1980s only a small minority of Italian children were receiving the recommended measles and pertussis vaccines.

The data I’m using for these graphs is from data spreadsheets provided by the Italian National Statistics Institute (Istat) in their 2014 press release Child mortality yesterday and today in Italy.

Istat put together a time series of the Italian cause of death data from 1887 till 2011 (for some reason 2004 and 2005 are missing in their spreadsheets, so I’m simply ending the graphs at 2003).

Istat calculated the deaths for a selection of different causes as an annual death rate for under five year olds per thousand live births. This is ideal and gives us an apples to apples measurement across a time period of significant changes in population size and birth rates in Italy.

Let’s start with whooping cough.

Whooping Cough Mortality in Italy 1887 – 2003

Figure 61

Like everywhere else with old data and late vaccine introduction, we can see that almost all the whooping cough mortality decline happened before Italy’s relatively late introduction of pertussis vaccines in 1961.

Unlike other vaccines in Italy, the pertussis vaccine was not compulsory. In 1985 a large survey was carried out by the Italian Government across multiple regions of Italy to see how many parents were getting their children vaccinated with the optional vaccines, and the answer was . . . not many.

In 1985 pertussis vaccine coverage was only at 11% of children in Southern Italy, and 16% in Northern Italy.

By the early 1980s whooping cough child mortality had fallen over 900 fold or 99.89% from what it had been less than a century earlier in Italy, and again, that is with most Italian children still being unvaccinated against whooping cough.

Now let’s look at measles.

Measles Mortality in Italy 1887 – 2003

Figure 62

Spain’s greater than 400 fold decline in measles mortality before widespread vaccination was impressive. Belgium’s 544 fold decline is even more impressive, and Sweden looked like it would be the most noteworthy case for measles at just shy of a 1,000 fold measles mortality decline before widespread vaccination.

But here we can see that, at least so far, the title for most impressive measles mortality decline before widespread measles vaccination goes to Italy with a measles mortality decline of 1,200 fold by the early 1980s.

The measles vaccine became commercially available in Italy in 1976. It was officially recommended in 1979. But as with pertussis vaccination, it was not included among the compulsory vaccines, and the 1985 survey to assess uptake of these vaccines found that measles vaccination rates were even lower than pertussis vaccination rates – the 1985 survey found a mere 4% of children had received the measles vaccine in Southern Italy and 12% in Northern Italy.

Meningitis Mortality in Italy 1887 – 2003

Here we have another major mortality decline in Italy, with almost all of the decline occurring before relevant vaccines (such as Hib, Pneumococcal and Meningococcal vaccines) had been added to the schedule.

Figure 63

6. Summary

This essay series began with the charge that vaccinationists are and long have been promoting vaccination with powerful historical mortality based messages that are so unhinged from reality that even their own apologists generally avoid directly defending them. I added the additional charge that the apologists were guilty of gaslighting, using a Motte and Bailey doctrine, and general bad faith, because they did whatever they could to avoid acknowledging that their fellow vaccinationists heavily promote these messages to begin with.

I believe that I have provided the necessary and sufficient evidence to prove my case.

The evidence consisted both of a review of other author’s work (primarily Bystrianyk and Humphries, and Greg Beattie) and three original collections of supporting evidence that I provided in this series. These three collections are:

1. Evangelism - 26 Exhibits of Vaccine Evangelism (Exhibits A through L in Part 1, Exhibits M through T in Part 4, and Exhibits U through Z below in the appendix).

2. Apostasy – 50+ New graphs of historical mortality from various causes, in different countries and cities, juxtaposed with vaccine introduction. (Found throughout the essay installments and gathered all in one place in the Gallery of Graphs page – More on that below in the appendix).

3. Apologetics -15 Case Examples of Vaccine Apologetics (Case Example 1 in Part 3, Case Example 2 in Part 5, and Case Examples 3 through 15 in Part 6).

As well as supporting evidence for my arguments, these collections of evangelism, apostasy, and apologetics are meant to be a reference and resource for whoever needs them. Help yourself to the material in those collections as needed.

So ends this 7 Part essay. Below are some more helpful resources in the appendix.

Jordan Henderson lives in Washington State in the Northwest of the United States. He works in oil paints, and charcoals. A portfolio of his works can be viewed at either of his websites: Original Paintings – Fine Art Prints

Appendix: Further Reading & Resources

This essay series has been hyper focused on historical mortality related vaccine questions.

Of course this focus means that I have left everything else to the side. I haven’t touched vaccine risks in this series. I’ve brought up vaccine efficacy only to distinguish it from historical mortality claims. And I intentionally refrained from offering explanations and opinion on what did cause the mortality decline, as it is not strictly necessary for debunking the pro-vaccine historical mortality messages.

All these other areas are of great importance too; their exclusion was purely to keep this essay series focused and within a manageable scope. But now that this series is at its end, it would be good to take stock of major areas of the debate that fall outside this essay’s scope - what we haven’t been looking at.

Smallpox and polio I mentioned in Part 2 of this series as topics that I would be leaving out as they deserve to be discussed at length on their own. I left a selection of recommended reading regarding smallpox and polio at the end of Part 2.

What did cause the pre-vaccine decline is a topic that I may eventually address with an essay on it specifically. In the meantime I encourage readers to share their views and recommended reading on the pre-vaccine mortality declines in the comments.

Suggested reading on the philosophical side of the vaccine debate

Modern Medicine: The Hidden Influence of Beliefs and Fears - Olivier Clerc (brought to my attention by a commentator on a previous article of mine).

Conscience and Vaccines by father Ambrose – Essay here – video adaptation by Dr. Sam Bailey here.

My main contribution, to date, to the philosophical side of the vaccine debate is the essay Science! Blessed be Thy Name: The Vanishing Value of Religious Freedom.

Vaccine Risks

This is another major area of the vaccine debate. Most people probably think that vaccine risks make up the whole vaccine debate. While vaccine risks are only one aspect of the vaccine debate they certainly are an important topic. Here is some recommended reading if you’re looking for suggestions (And do please place your own suggestions in the comments):

The books Dissolving Illusions (Bystrianyk and Humphries) and Vaccination: a parent’s dilemma (Greg Beattie) discuss vaccine risks, as well as a strong focus on historical mortality matters.

Forrest Marready’s book, The Autism Vaccine, centers on the history, development, and dangers, of various diphtheria vaccines and serums.

The book Turtles All the Way Down comprises a tour de force of the scandalous methodology used in vaccine studies to get the “right” answers and avoid inconvenient discoveries concerning vaccine risks.

Pharmaceutical Fraud and the Discovery of Rotavirus – Video by Dr. Sam Bailey

A list of Vaccinated vs Unvaccinated literature from Children’s Health Defense.

Rethinking Disease Paradigms

This is a hot topic that you may have heard as the Virus vs No Virus debate or the Terrain Model vs Germ Theory or something along those lines. Covid-19 placed the Terrain Model vs Germ Theory debate on the radar of most in the Covid-19 opposition. Each side has its enthusiastic supporters and detractors.

The debate of course isn’t new and had been resurfacing well before Covid, especially among AIDS heretics.

The topic is divisive, but feuds and strategic disagreements between different factions of the Covid opposition aside, it is fundamentally a good sign to see so many people re-investigating the foundations of what we have been taught about disease. Renewed interest in rethinking disease paradigms is one of the most promising aspects of the silver lining from Covid-19 in my view.

If you haven’t explored the thinking of the virus skeptics I would encourage you to hear them out.

some good places to start exploring the topic would be the Bailey’s book The final Pandemic, and their video Germ Theory vs Terrain Theory, Mike Stone’s article ViroLIEgy 101: Koch's Postulates, and Boostershots humorous compendium Virus "Denialism" for Beginners.

Gallery of Graphs

For easy reference I have compiled all the graphs that I created for this essay series of historical mortality juxtaposed with vaccine introduction, on a single page. On that page I have also placed many more graphs that I created but did not include in this series due to space considerations.

Expanding the anti-vaccinationist graphical analysis of historical mortality data into many more countries and cities was one of my major goals with this series. You can access the collection on the Gallery of Graphs Page. All those graphs may be freely shared in articles and blog posts, no additional permissions from me needed.

Vaccine Evangelism Exhibits U Through Z

For the reasons I laid out in Section 4 of this Essay ~ Important Strategic Consideration ~ I believe that compendiums of vaccine evangelism are nearly as important a resource in the vaccine debate as compendiums of historical mortality graphs.

The mortality graphs do the heavy lifting in debunking pro-vaccine historical mortality propaganda, but if we don’t first document the goal posts, we leave the Vax-Apologists an easy out. This is where compendiums of Vax-Evangelism come in handy.

Within this essay series there is such a compendium of vaccine evangelism already: I provided 12 Exhibits (Exhibits A through L) of vaccine evangelism in Part 1, along with eight more such exhibits (M through T) in Part 4.

We are only six exhibits away from rounding out the alphabet and including in this series a full 26 examples of vaccine evangelism spanning Exhibits A through Z, so here are six more examples of vaccine evangelism to bring us up to Exhibit Z.

The first two vaccine evangelism exhibits below are examples of what I call the Child Mortality Moralism (Exhibits Q,R, and S from Part 4 also fall under this category). The last four vaccine evangelism exhibits below are Graveyard Gambits. This essay series began with an exhibition of Graveyard Gambits. I think it fitting that we end with them.

~

Vaccine Evangelism Exhibit U

Taxonomic Category – Child Mortality Moralism

The Guardian’s 2021 article No concept of how awful it was’: the forgotten world of pre-vaccine childhood in Australia uses historical child mortality to illustrate the world before vaccines:

“In the 19th century, the leading cause of death in children was infectious disease. People would have 10 children and might lose five of them. We lived with high rates of infant mortality,”

~

Vaccine Evangelism Exhibit V

Taxonomic Category – Child Mortality Moralism

“Infants and young children were and remain the target population for the majority of vaccines due to the high risk of morbidity and mortality in this population. Infectious diseases, including the now vaccine-preventable diarrheal diseases, diphtheria, measles, pertussis, and influenza, were the leading causes of death in US children at the beginning of the 20th century. However, from 1900 to 1998, with the advent of widespread, universal infant and childhood vaccination programs, the proportion of US pediatric mortality due to infectious disease decreased from 61.6% to 2%.”

From the 2012 paper Lessons learned and applied: What the 20th century vaccine experience can teach us about vaccines in the 21st century

published in Human Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics

~

Vaccine Evangelism Exhibit W

Taxonomic Category – Graveyard Gambit

“Historically, many children died before their fifth birthdays (take a look at any historical cemetery and you will see this many tombstones of infants, toddlers, and young children) and this continues today in many third world countries. Since the advent of vaccines and vaccination programs, the numbers have decreased due to the creation of now preventable diseases like tetanus, polio, measles, etc. Vaccines contain the same antigens (or parts of them) that cause diseases, so it prepares your body to one day fight off the actual antigen when exposed by helping it create antibodies now.” (sic)

Written in 2023 by pediatrician Luis Velasquez

~

Vaccine Evangelism Exhibit X

Taxonomic Category – Graveyard Gambit

“The Bloomfield memorial and many more like it at Oakland and other older cemeteries illustrate the tragic deaths of children (and adults) from acute infectious diseases in the 19th and early 20th centuries when vaccines to combat these scourges had not yet been developed.

Nearly 30% of the interments at Oakland - which was established in 1850 - are children. Many died from diphtheria, typhoid fever, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough) and other acute illnesses. These graves are a heartbreaking testament to the fragility of life in that era.

Today, American children and many across the industrial world have little to fear from these dreaded diseases due to the wide availability of the DPT (Diphtheria-Pertussis-Tetanus] and the MMR (Measles-Mumps-Rubella) vaccines that are mandated for all children before entering public school”

“Sadly, there are many among us who eschew the extraordinary value, safety and efficacy of vaccines in providing safe and healthy communities. Now, there are even some political figures who are actually calling for the repeal of all vaccine mandates. Do these people actually want to go back a century in time to when so many died from what are now treatable diseases?”

Excerpts from the 2021 article Visit to historic cemetery shows power of vaccinations published in The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

~

Vaccine Evangelism Exhibit Y

Taxonomic Category – Graveyard Gambit

“Dr. Phyllis Townsend, a pediatrician in Franklin, TN, is concerned about recent trends that leave children unprotected from potentially deadly diseases. “If you walk through an old cemetery, you can see why vaccines are important. Many people lost a child, often under the age of one, from diseases that are completely preventable now,” shares Dr. Townsend.”

From — Dr. Phyllis Townsend Shares How Vaccines Save Lives, a page in the resources and education section of the website of Pediatrics Association of Franklin (Tennessee).

~

Vaccine Evangelism Exhibit Z

Taxonomic Category – Graveyard Gambit

This excerpt (below) is from an ABC News interview with Dr. Lolita McDavid, published in the 2016 article Why Parents Aren't Vaccinating Their Kids, According to New Study

“To help inform parents about the importance of vaccination, McDavid said she gives parents an assignment to go on a field trip to a graveyard.

“I want you to go to an old cemetery, walk through, look at the headstones of the babies that died at age 1, 2, 3 years of age," she said, but thanks to vaccines, "people don’t see this anymore, so people don’t know what to be afraid of.” ”

For easy reference I have gathered together, and presented on this page all the graphs that I created for the essay series Vaccine Evangelists, Apostates, and Apologists.

Also presented here are graphs that I made, but never ended up actually including due to space considerations (such as graphs for whooping cough, measles, and scarlet fever, in Belgium, Northern Ireland, New Zealand, Glasgow, and New York City).

Note! Opening the images on this page will probably not function when read in your email, but will function from a web browser. All the graphs show up as square thumbnails - click on the thumbnail for a medium view, and right click and open image in a new window for a large/high resolution view.

Some General Notes:

• All the graphs that I created may be freely shared and reproduced in blog posts and articles. Links directly to the publicly available sources from which I pulled the data for these graphs are provided in each section.

• The graphs that I shared in the Vaccine Evangelists, Apostates, and Apologists essays which are from other authors are not reproduced here, instead links to those author’s pages are provided on this webpage, (The exception being some screenshots from the WHO and from Analysis of Health in Spain Across the 20^th Century, which I did include here).

• Most all these graphs are mortality graphs for the reasons discussed throughout the Vaccine Evangelists, Apostates, and Apologists essay series.

• The presentation of the graphs is by country or city, in order of oldest data sets first (except for Northern Ireland, which I wanted to keep next to the rest of Ireland).

• In these graphs juxtaposing historical mortality with vaccination for various countries and cities, I focused on three illnesses - whooping cough, measles, and scarlet fever, though for many places one, up to many, other disease are covered too.

• To my knowledge scarlet fever vaccines were not used systematically, in any of the below locations, nor incorporated into national vaccination programs, which allows scarlet fever to serve as a no vaccine control.

• Scarlet fever often ceases to get it’s own category in most the statistical yearbook tables sometime in the later half of the 20th century, usually right around when scarlet fever deaths reach zero or close to zero per year, hence the reason for the scarlet fever graphs presented here ending at earlier dates.

Contents

Belgium 1851 to 2018 — Whooping Cough, Measles, Scarlet Fever, Diphtheria

Sweden 1861 to 2018 — Whooping Cough, Measles, Scarlet Fever, Diphtheria

Ireland 1864 to 2015 — Whooping Cough, Measles, Scarlet Fever

Northern Ireland 1912 - 1995 — Whooping Cough, Measles, Scarlet Fever

New York City 1868 to 1978 — Whooping Cough, Measles, Scarlet Fever

Norway 1869 to 2016 — Whooping Cough, Measles, Scarlet Fever, Diphtheria

New Zealand 1881 to 2016 — Whooping Cough, Measles, Scarlet Fever, Diphtheria, Typhoid Fever, Pulmonary Tuberculosis.

Glasgow, Scotland: 1881 to 1970 — Whooping Cough, Measles, Scarlet Fever.

Italy 1887 to 2003 — Whooping Cough, Measles, Meningitis, Influenza, Pneumonia, Bronchitis, Child Mortality.

Spain 1900 to 1990 — Whooping Cough, Measles, Scarlet Fever, Diphtheria, Typhoid Fever, Tuberculosis, and many others.

Some graphs for the USA, one for France, a couple for Switzerland, & miscellaneous graphs — Infectious disease mortality in the USA (tuberculosis, diarrhea and enteritis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles, and whooping cough), diphtheria in France, a meme, an infographic, and measles and scarlet fever in Switzerland from 1876.

Selection of Graphs as Black and White Line Graphs for Easy Printing (minimal ink needed to print them).

Links to web pages with historical mortality graphs for more countries and places.

Belgium 1851 to 2018

Left to right

Top Row - whooping cough - big picture view, and detail view.

Bottom Row - measles - big picture view, and detail view.

Belgium Continued:

Left to right

Top Row - scarlet fever - big picture view, and detail view.

Bottom Row - diphtheria - big picture view, and detail view.

Links to data sources:

The Statistical Yearbooks of Belgium.

The WHO Mortality Data Base.

Sweden 1861 - 2018

Left to right.

Top Row - 1. whooping cough back to 1861. 2. whooping cough detail. 3. whooping cough case notifications.

Middle Row - 4. whooping cough cases (in thousands) and case fatality rates. 5. measles.

Bottom Row - 6. scarlet fever. 7 Diphtheria.

Links to data sources:

Historical Series of the Official Statistics of Sweden.

The WHO Mortality Data Base.

Ireland 1864 - 2015

Left to right - whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever.

Links to data sources:

The Registrar-General Annual Reports of Marriages, Births and Deaths in Ireland.

The WHO Mortality Data Base.

Northern Ireland 1912 - 1995

Left to right - whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever.

Data Source - Registrar General Historical Reports Northern Ireland

New York City 1868 - 1978

Left to right - whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever.

Links to data sources:

Annual report of the Department of Health of the City of New York for the calendar year 1912

Annual report of the State Department of Health of New York 1960

Annual report of the State Department of Health of New York 1965

Vital Statistics of the United States

Norway 1869 - 2016

Left to right:

Top row - whooping cough, measles.

Bottom row - scarlet fever, diphtheria.

Links to data sources:

The Norwegian Statistical Yearbooks.

The WHO Mortality Data Base.

New Zealand 1881 - 2016

Left to right

Top Row - whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever.

Bottom Row - diphtheria, pulmonary tuberculosis, typhoid fever.

Links to data sources:

The Statistical Yearbooks of New Zealand.

The 1910 Vital Statistics of the United States (the international tables).

The WHO Mortality Data Base.

Glasgow, Scotland: 1881 to 1970

Left to right - Whooping Cough, Measles, Scarlet Fever.

Data source: Glasgow Chief Medical Officer of Health Annual Reports. You can find digital archives of all these reports from 1900 through 1973 in the Wellcome Collection.

Italy 1887 - 2003

Left to right.

Top Row - whooping cough - big picture view, and detail view.

Bottom Row - measles - big picture view, and detail view.

Italy Continued

Left to right

Top Row - meningitis, tuberculosis, malaria.

Bottom Row - pneumonia/etc, gastritis/etc, child mortality.

Data source: The data spreadsheets provided by the Italian National Statistics Institute (Istat) in their 2014 press release Child mortality yesterday and today in Italy.

Spain 1900 - 1990

Left to right.

Top Row - whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever.

Middle Row - diphtheria, typhoid, tuberculosis.

Bottom Row - pneumonia, influenza, infant mortality rate.

Spain Continued

Bellow - Left to right.

Top Row - comparative mortality.

Middle Row - meningitis, bronchitis, diarrhea & enteritis.

Bottom Row - population growth, live births.

Links to Data Sources:

Analysis of Health in Spain Across the 20^th Century (the graphs with writing in Spanish are screenshots directly from this publication, and I used tables from this publication for at least some of the decades in most the graphs I created).

The statistical yearbooks of Spain

Graphs for the USA, one for France, a couple for Switzerland & Miscellaneous Graphs

Left to right.

Top Row - 1. Tuberculosis USA, 2. Gastrittis Enteritis USA, 3. Diphtheria death and case notifications rates USA.

Middle Row - 4. whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever USA. 5. diphtheria deaths and case notifications France. 6. Drs Offit and Gorski meme.

Bottom Row - 7 Infographic illustrating pro-vaccine misdirection. 8 Measles deaths Switzerland 1876 to 2016. 9 Scarlet fever deaths Switzerland 1876 to 1976.

Links to Data Sources:

Historical statistics of the United States : colonial times to 1970 by United States. Bureau of the Census

1966 Statistical Yearbook of France

Statistical Yearbooks of Switzerland 1910, 1950, 1980

Selection of Graphs as Black and White Line Graphs for Easy Printing (minimal ink needed to print them).

Left to right.

Top Row - Whooping Cough in: 1. Sweden. 2. Spain. 3 New York City

Middle Row - Measles -in: 1. Sweden. 2. Spain. 3 New York City

Bottom Row - Scarlet Fever in: 1. Sweden. 2. Spain. 3 New York City

Links to web pages with historical mortality graphs juxtaposed with vaccination for more countries and places.

For England and Wales (including for Smallpox) from 1838, the USA from 1900 to the late 20th century, and the state of Massachussets from the 1860s, see the graphs by Roman Bystrianyk and Suzanne Humphries at Dissolving Illusions.

For mortality from whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever and more, in the country and continent of Australia from 1870 to the late 20th century see the graphs by Greg Beattie at Vaccination Dilemma.

This is the sixth, and penultimate, installment of the essay series, Vaccine Evangelists, Apostates and Apologists. These essays are a study of the vaccine debate itself, using historical mortality questions as the focal point of this analysis. Here are the links to all the installments:

Part 1 - The Evangelists

Part 2 – Apostasy

Part 3 - The Red Herring: A Tour of the Motte

Part 4 – Spanish Death Data.

Part 5 – The Apologists

Part 6 - The Apologists Continued (You are here)

Part 7 - The Apologist’s Playbook

We have so far in this essay series looked at two case examples of vaccine apologetics. Those were:

Case Example #1 of Vaccine Apologetics Isabella B’s article Graphical Proof that Vaccines Work.

&

Case Example #2 of Vaccine Apologetics: Dr. David Gorski’s articles.

Both these case examples we reviewed and deconstructed in depth in Part 3 and 5 of this essay series.

Now we will look at many more case examples of vaccine apologetics, but we will spend far less time with each as most of them are very similar in their core strategies to what we have already reviewed. I will mostly give brief commentary for each case example of vaccine apologetics, often no more than a few at a glance bullet points, with the occasional more elaborate demonstration mixed in.

The purpose of this selection of case examples of vaccine apologetics, spanning two decades, is to provide us a basis for identifying and studying the principal strategies used by the vaccine apologists, which I’ll summarize in the 7^th and final installment of this essay series The Vaccine Apologists’ Playbook.

On top of this survey of vaccine apologetics we will also explore some infectious disease mortality declines in Ireland at the beginning of this essay, and in Norway, and Sweden at the end.

Table of Contents for Part 6

1. Direct Defense of the Narrative, Vaccine Apologetics

• Case example 3 - Emerald Isle Shenanigans – MMR Information Pack

• They still preach the same message in Ireland today

• Three questions concerning the Irish vaccine info

• What really happened in Ireland?

• Case Example 4 -Ian A. York’s post – Measles deaths, pre-vaccine

2. Evasion and Diversion Vaccine Apologetics - Case Examples 5 through 15

• Case Example 5 - The CDC’s - Some Common Misconceptions about vaccination and how to respond to them

• The Whooping Cough Warning Story (yet again)

• Case Example 6 – Webb’s - Analysis of Anti-Vaccine Graphs

• Case Example 7 – Vaccinate Your Children’s - Graphs and Data page

• Case Example 8 – Anna Kata’s - An overview of tactics and tropes used online by the anti-vaccination movement Published in Vaccine

• Case Example 9 -The Australian Government’s – Myths and Realities – Responding to arguments against vaccination – a guide for providers by the Department of Health and Ageing

• Case Example 10 -Gallagher’s Measles Vaccination: make an informed choice

• Case Example 11 - The Logic of Science’s - Yes, vaccines did save us from disease: a graphic analysis

• Case Example 12 - When Anti-Vaccine Activists Falsely Dismiss Polio and Measles Harm Published on Debunking Denialism

• Case Example 13 - Dr. Vincente Iannelli’s - Graphs That Show Vaccines Don’t Work

• Case Example 14 - Naturopathic Doctors for Vaccines’ – The Mortality Gambit

• Case Example 15 - Northern Rivers Vaccination Supporters’ - Weren’t the death rates from these diseases dropping before vaccines came along?

• End note for this section

3. Postscript: Measles Mortality in Norway and Sweden

• Norway 1874 – 2016

• Sweden 1861 - 2018

1. Direct Defense of the Narrative - Vaccine Apologetics in Ireland

Here is what I mean by direct defense of the narrative. Last essay (Part 5 of this series) I deconstructed a deceptive English measles mortality chart from Ian A. York’s post Measles deaths, pre-vaccine. That post of York’s is an instance of directly defending the belief that vaccines played the major role in the historical infectious disease mortality declines (though in this case measles specific). York claimed:

“Obviously, there’s no 95% drop. Measles deaths were pretty much constant for over 100 years, until the vaccine was introduced.”

That is the sort of belief that the vaccine evangelists are promoting for infectious diseases in general and specific diseases in particular (as we have seen in Exhibits A through T in Part 1 and 4 of this series). York tried to defend that belief directly.

That’s what I mean by direct defense.

Most vaccine apologists do not attempt direct defense, they instead reroute the conversation to vaccine efficacy questions, or some equivalent.

But we can see that sometimes they do attempt direct defense. Here we will look at an example of direct defense in Ireland. There are also hybrid examples that use a combination of rerouting the conversation, but later still try to defend the idea that vaccines played the major role in historical infectious disease mortality declines (such as Case Example 9 from later in this essay).

Vaccine Apologetics - Case Example 3 - Emerald Isle Shenanigans

This case example of vaccine apologetics will be one of the earliest examples that we review. It will also provide a nice opportunity to explore some Irish historical mortality declines.

We have here some year 2000 Irish vaccine apologetics from the “Vaccination - Your Child's Best Shot” section of the MMR Information Pack published by a health board of the Irish Government’s then Department of Health.

They (the Irish health board that produced this information pack) exhibit an awareness that the belief that - vaccines are primarily responsible for the historical infectious disease mortality declines - is a belief that some have questioned, and they try to shore it up beginning with the following paragraph:

“It is often stated that the numbers of deaths from childhood infectious disease were declining before the introduction of vaccines. This is true for some diseases. It is also true that the introduction of vaccines has accelerated this decline, (for example see figure 3, rate of decline of pertussis deaths in Ireland).” [sic - they meant figure 2, figure 3 in the document is case notifications]

Then they show you this graph:

Figure 2 From Irish Health Board’s MMR Information Pack.

After showing you this graph they continue:

“The value of whooping cough vaccine is demonstrated clearly in Ireland in Figure 3 [sic, again Figure 2 in their document is the deaths, Figure 3 is notifications]. While deaths from pertussis were declining from the late 19^th century, the rate of this decline was dramatically accelerated in the 1950s following the introduction of pertussis vaccine.”

Let’s pause a moment and observe what they have done. They have conceded that Okay, yes, fine, pertussis deaths were declining before the vaccine, BUT! The real dramatic decline came with vaccination. And then they do what they (vaccinationists) almost never do, they provide us with a death rate graph, using the whole entire data set!? Astonishing, It’s both a death rate graph, and it goes all the way back into the 19^th century. That’s the sort of historical perspective you would usually expect from anti-vaccinationists.

I have pointed out before that vaccine evangelists much prefer to tell you about the death data rather than showing it to you. They tell you how bad it was before the vaccine in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and how many people died, and then they talk about the low rates at some point after the vaccine. But here they are actually showing us the death data, the whole data set, they didn’t chop off the first part of the graph. This is an unusual find.

A quick glance at the graph they provided (and keep that glance quick, don’t look too close) reveals that it beautifully illustrates their point; there is only a gradual, unimpressive, decline in whooping cough mortality pre-vaccine followed by a spectacular plummet post vaccine. This supports the popular, regularly promoted belief, that vaccines played the primary role in the decline of infectious disease mortality.

To really hammer home their point and demonstrate that yes, it was the vaccine that caused that decline, and that the decline wouldn’t have happened without the vaccine, they give us a powerful verbal illustration of what happens if you stop vaccinating:

“ The value of pertussis vaccine was more recently demonstrated following a concern about the safety of pertussis vaccine in the 1970s. In many countries this scare led to a marked decline in public confidence and vaccine uptake. This was followed by outbreaks of disease in all of these countries and many deaths ensued, (see Table 1 for experience in Japan). Pertussis incidence was 10-100 times lower in those countries where high vaccine coverage was maintained.”

Then they provide you a table with ten years of pertussis deaths and cases data for Japan which shows a definite jump in both recorded cases and deaths following the pertussis vaccine scare in the mid 1970s. This supports their case.

The same message is preached in Ireland today

Before I get to deconstructing the Irish case example, I want to take just a moment to bring you up to speed with the preaching in Ireland now. The Irish Health Service Executive Immunization Office is still pushing a message that gives the impression that pertussis vaccines played the primary role in reducing pertussis deaths in Ireland:

“The 1950s saw the introduction of two vaccines which would transform child and adult health in Ireland.

Prior to the introduction of a Pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine in 1953 there were up to 200 deaths each year from whooping cough. Following the introduction of the vaccine, cases and deaths from whooping cough fell rapidly.”

That is from their web page History of Vaccines in Ireland. You can see them promoting the same message on their twitter account too. In some ways they’ve gotten worse over the last two decades. Now they no longer provide any visualization of the historical mortality data, and they no longer even bother mentioning pre-vaccine mortality decline.

Whether today or two decades ago, unwary and trusting readers of this information from Ireland’s health services would no doubt believe vaccines to be the primary reason for the whooping cough mortality decline in Ireland.

Three Questions

After reading the “Vaccination - Your Child's Best Shot” section of this MMR Information Pack MMR Information Pack from one of Ireland’s health boards, I had three questions about the information they had presented.

1^st Question: Their graph of pertussis mortality uses a scale in which the upper range of the data from 10 to 100, occupies no more of the vertical/Y axis than the range from 0.1 to 0.01. That’s called a logarithmic scale. Scroll up and take another look at it if you didn’t notice that.

Presenting the mortality profile on a logarithmic scale was an inappropriate choice for the point they were making, because it does not allow you to easily see whether or not the rate of decline had in fact “dramatically accelerated.” They could have simply used a standard linear scale, which would have provided an easy visual for understanding if the rate had accelerated and by how much. This is what raises the first question: what was their reason for using a logarithmic scale where it was both unnecessary and unhelpful?

2^nd Question: To drive home the value of pertussis vaccination they pointed to the rise in cases and deaths that occurred when pertussis vaccination rates fell in various countries in the mid 70s. They provided limited details for one of these countries – Japan, and no specifics for any of the others.

But Ireland itself was one of the countries where pertussis vaccination rates fell in the mid 70s. If they were only going to use one case example to show what happens when pertussis vaccination rates fall, why didn’t they just use Ireland as the example? We are after all talking about an Irish health board, writing a story to convince Irish parents of the value of vaccinating their Irish children. Wouldn’t pointing to what happened in Ireland have hit closest to home for their Irish audience? Why did they pass up the example that was literally right under their feet?

3^rd Question: If they had wanted to use multiple examples of historical infectious disease mortality rates, that would have been good, but if they were only going to use one example, and that is all that they used for this particular point, it would be logical for them to have used measles, not pertussis, to illustrate their point, because it’s in an MMR information pack, not DTP. Why did they use only pertussis, and provide no such graph of measles deaths in an MMR Information Pack?

What really happened in Ireland

Now we’ll look at what their own data actually shows, and then these mysteries will be solved: the reasoning behind why they used a logarithmic scale on their graph, as well as likely reasons behind why they used pertussis deaths instead of measles deaths, and why they switched to Japan as their example instead of Ireland, will all become apparent.

Let’s start by showing the same mortality data that they presented on a logarithmic graph. We will look at it on a straightforward linear scale, and we will also look at the yearly data rather then ten year averages. I want to see if they glossed over any critical details in the yearly data.

Figure 56

Once we see the full Irish whooping cough mortality data set presented on a straightforward linear scale, it becomes obvious that the Irish health board was lost deep in wishful thinking when they stated:

“While deaths from pertussis were declining from the late 19^th century, the rate of this decline was dramatically accelerated in the 1950s following the introduction of pertussis vaccine.” - the MMR Information Pack

The dramatic decline began well over a half century before the introduction of pertussis vaccines. The decline did slow down and appeared to level out in the 1930s, but then resumed a steep decline again in the late 1940s, before the vaccine. The low in 1950 and the high in 1951, both pre-vaccine data points, are both substantially lower than even just the previous low in 1946, and the previous high in 1947.

The vaccine came just a few years too late to take credit for the resumption of the steep decline. Not like that stopped this publication from an Irish health board from crediting the vaccine anyway; but had they been honest and frank they would not have done that.

Our first question is answered. We can now see why they chose a logarithmic scale for something that they could have so easily provided on a linear scale.

Without the logarithmic scale there is simply nothing there in that Irish whooping cough mortality data set to support their narrative. Most of the mortality decline occurred in a spectacular pre-vaccine plummet, and even the last portion of steep decline had set in before the vaccine.

To be clear, a logarithmic scale is perfectly fine in and of itself, but their use of it was deceptive, in the same way that a Mercator projection map (world map where the projection makes Greenland look bigger than Australia) is not inherently deceptive, but if you were to use a Mercator projection map to convince people that Greenland is bigger than Australia, then that would be deceptive.

Returning to the whooping cough mortality decline in Ireland: if there is any doubt about whether or not that last bit of mortality decline would have occurred with or without the vaccine, then what happened next should lay such doubts to rest.

According to the abstract (which is all of it that I can find online) of Epidemiology of Pertussis in the Republic of Ireland, adverse publicity in 1973 caused a decline in pertussis vaccine coverage to just 30% coverage in 1976 and still only 40 to 45% coverage in “recent years” which for the 1992 paper would work out to the late 80s/early 90s.

So what happened when the pertussis vaccination rates took a nose dive in Ireland? Were the morgues filled? The graveyards planted with heartbreaking rows of those proverbial Graveyard Gambit children’s headstones? No, the pertussis mortality simply continued to decline (see Figure 56 above).

Now we have a probable reason for why that Irish health board ignored the example that was right under their feet and instead used Japan for their story about the horrors that unfold if you let vaccination rates fall: What happened in Japan provided support for their narrative, while what happened in Ireland directly contradicted their narrative.

We still have our third question to answer though: Why did they use pertussis instead of measles as their case example in this MMR Information Pack?

Figure 57

And there we have a likely answer. Though the measles mortality profile for Ireland is very similar to the whooping cough mortality profile, the measles vaccine was introduced three decades later, so even with a logarithmic scale presented to an audience unaccustomed to logarithmic graphs, that still would not have hidden the reality of all the dramatic decline occurring pre-vaccine.

The initial 1985 measles vaccine introduction coincides nicely with a slight drop at the very tail end of the mortality decline, so they could have chopped off the first 120 years of the data set to get something that would look okay for the vaccine, but they were making an effort to make it seem as though the vaccine played a major role in the mortality decline in the big picture, so the chop-off-the-portion-where-most-the-decline-occurs-strategy would not have met their need.

While deconstructing this example was a good opportunity to gain some historical perspective on mortality declines and vaccines in Ireland, it is also an unusual and instructive example of vaccine apologetics. They did not try to retreat into a Motte by dismissing mortality data and rerouting the conversation to case notifications data. They did not try to gaslight their audience into thinking that the vaccinationists hadn’t been making all their claims about lives saved, deaths averted, mortality reduced.

The Irish health board attempted to defend the idea that the vaccinationists regularly promote: that vaccines played the major role in the historical infectious disease mortality declines.

Their means may have been deceptive and dishonest, but I appreciate that they fought in the Bailey and didn’t flee to a Motte (see Part 1. if you need a refresher on Motte and Bailey doctrines).

Vaccine Apologetics – Case Example 4 – Ian A. York’s post Measles deaths, pre-vaccine

The deceptive English measles mortality graph from Ian. A York’s post Measles deaths, pre-vaccine is the most interesting part of York’s post and we already reviewed it last essay (Part 5. under the pro-vaccine deceptive graphs section). All I’m doing here is simply including York’s post in the list of Vaccine Apologetics Case Examples, and labeling it Case Example 5, for easy reference.

The deceptive graphs that we reviewed last essay from France and Spain I consider to properly belong in the category of vaccine evangelism not apologetics, and so I’m not including them as Vaccine Apologetics Case Examples. York’s post on the other hand is clearly apologetics, and specifically directed against anti-vaccine mortality rate graphs which places it solidly within the scope of this essay. York’s post also clearly belongs in the direct defense of the narrative section.

2. Evasion and Diversion - Vaccine Apologetics - Case Examples 5 through 15

These case examples all employ some degree of evasion, and they all act as if the vaccine evangelists have not been preaching the messages that they have been preaching: messages which give the idea that vaccines played the primary role in the historical infectious disease mortality declines (for examples of vaccine evangelist preaching see Exhibits A through T in Part 1 and 4 of this series).

These remaining case examples are presented in chronological order (most recent last). Wherever I could sum up all that I wanted to note or criticize about the case example with a simple bullet pointed “At a Glance” section I did. Even where I offer more in-depth deconstruction I still have provided an “At a Glance” section to summarize for those who wish to skim through these.

Every case example has a hyperlink that will take you right to the case example being discussed, so that you may easily examine these case examples for yourself. Those links are below the “At a Glance” sections.

Case Example 5 – The CDC’s Some Common Misconceptions about vaccination and how to respond to them

At a glance:

• Considers historical arguments concerning the role of vaccination in the context of notifications of incidence data only, and does not acknowledge let alone address mortality based arguments.

• Invokes the whooping cough warning story.

We looked at part of this example last essay actually, as it is an instance of invoking the Swedish whooping cough warning story. The CDC put this up on their website at least. back in the 2000s, but the publication goes back further still to the 90s. It is titled,

Some Common Misconceptions about vaccination and how to respond to them

Sections of this have been widely reproduced on the web ever since. It’s up on the WHO’s website to this day. The only section of particular interest for this essay is under the subheading,

Diseases had already begun to disappear before vaccines were introduced, because of better hygiene and sanitation.

The subheading appears as though it might address anti-vaccine mortality based arguments, because disease could involve mortality, and mortality is the most consequential and complete of the available historical data for measuring the disease toll.

Furthermore the CDC itself regularly tries to give the impression that vaccines are the principal reason for mortality declines from, for example, whooping cough and diphtheria (see Exhibits G and H, in Part 1. of this series). So it would be reasonable to expect the CDC to try to shore up the belief it promotes regarding mortality declines.

One more point concerning that subheading is that it creates a false dilemma as if what isn’t attributable hygiene/sanitation must then be attributable to vaccines, or vise versa. But who is to say that hygiene/sanitation and vaccines are the only factors? The CDC later under that subheading at least mentions nutrition, so why they would have used a false dilemma in the subheading is strange – possibly lazy thinking on their part or an intentional effort to make the anti-vaccine standpoint easy to attack.

Additionally the rubric of hygiene/sanitation, while often used, is so broad as to be unhelpful. Hygiene/sanitation brings to mind both factors that are totally unimportant to the historical mortality declines (such as wearing deodorant, and spritzing Lysol on handrails), while also including factors like clean drinking water that are especially important to historical mortality declines for some major causes of death (like cholera, typhoid fever, and dysentery).

Now back to the matter at hand; does the CDC address historical mortality based arguments? This is the only section in that publication where the CDC could plausibly be responding to historical arguments against the beliefs promoted by vaccine evangelists.

In this publication that is supposedly hitting the main anti-vaccine talking points, the CDC does not acknowledge, let alone address, any mortality based historical arguments. They focus exclusively on notifications of incidence when dealing with pre-vaccine declines.

In this same publication, when the CDC has left the topic of the pre-vaccine declines and it is once again safe for them to bring mortality into the discussion, they do. This is when they invoke the examples of countries where pertussis vaccination rates fell and then they talk about both cases and deaths:

“The effect was dramatic and immediate. In Great Britain, a drop in pertussis vaccination in 1974 was followed by an epidemic of more than 100,000 cases of pertussis and 36 deaths by 1978.”

At various other points in this publication the CDC continues to invoke death for the purpose of emphasizing the danger of the diseases and the alleged benefits of the vaccines.

So we can see that the CDC in that very same publication was intent on pushing the idea that both morbidity and mortality would soar up without vaccines, even though they wouldn’t even mention, let alone address, historical mortality-based arguments concerning the majority of the declines occurring before the vaccines.

I included this as a case example not because the CDC addressed the pre-vaccine mortality declines, but because they didn’t, but appeared as though they might – this little shell game is extremely common. The apologist puts on as if they are going to address the anti-vaccine historical mortality arguments head on but then lifts up the shell after shuffling them around, and what’s there underneath the shell is something like notifications data or efficacy questions instead.

The Pertussis Warning Story (Again)

About those deaths in the UK that the CDC is talking about, let’s take a moment to debunk that. It is unclear the precise time frame to which the CDC is referring. Are they including deaths beginning in 1974 or only after 74? Are they stopping the count at the end of 1977 or including part of 78? I can’t tell due to their imprecise wording and lack of citations, but I can tell that they are definitely trying to give us the impression that pertussis deaths went up in the UK when the vaccination rates fell. They are being deceptive. Deaths went down:

According to the data tables over at the user friendly WHO Mortality Data Base: In the UK in the early 1970s - the five years of 1970 through 74, there were 73 deaths. In the late 70s – the five years 1975 – 79, there were 48 deaths. So notably fewer pertussis deaths in the late 70s after vaccination rates fell.

The UK pertussis example is used frequently by many others besides the CDC, and they almost always, just like the CDC, try to give you the impression that deaths went up when pertussis vaccine coverage fell, but again, deaths went down. Here is another example:

“The media excitement and public concern after a Lancet report linking measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism¹kindles a sense of déjà vu. It is highly reminiscent of similar scares over pertussis in the 1970s,² which resulted in much suffering and many deaths from pertussis both in Britain and internationally ]. . .

. . . [national immunisation rates fell from 80% to 30%. The number of susceptible children rose, and in the 12 years after 1976 three major pertussis epidemics accounted nationally for over 300 000 notifications and at least 70 deaths.” - MMR vaccination and autism 1998

In this other example, invoking the same UK pertussis warning story, they give you the impression that 70 deaths (79 all told) in the 12 years following 1976 was some kind of an increase, but it is definitely a decrease; because in the 12 years before 1976 (1964 – 75) there were 264 pertussis deaths recorded in the UK (which you can verify through the WHO Mortality Portal).

Taking this back to the CDC: of the examples the CDC provided then, only in Japan did a drop in pertussis vaccination rates coincide with an uptick in reported pertussis mortality. In the UK deaths went down when vaccination rates fell. In Sweden, as we reviewed in Part 5, pertussis deaths stayed at an extremely low rate when vaccination rates fell, and then pertussis deaths actually went up slightly when pertussis vaccines were brought back in.

Two out of three of the CDC’s own chosen examples directly contradict the point that they are trying to make. On top of that we have also seen, as we reviewed just a moment ago, that vaccination rates went quite low during this time in the Republic of Ireland, too, and there also, pertussis deaths did not spike when the vaccination rates fell; instead the mortality just kept dropping.

Only for case notifications does the data consistently support them, but as we saw with Sweden in the last essay, this created a strange teeter totter situation where, when case notifications fell after the vaccine’s reintroduction, case fatality rates jumped.

These whooping cough warning stories are regularly trotted out to give us the impression that whooping cough mortality climbs when vaccination rates fall, but that is not so, as evidenced by the majority of these natural experiments.

Case Example 6 Analysis of Anti -Vax Graphs by Robert Webb.

At a glance:

• Claims that anti-vaccine graphs use deceptive data manipulation but can only point to that same one Canadian measles incidence graph as evidence of this (from that 2010 Gorski article which we reviewed in this essay series as part of Case Example 2, in Part 5).

• Pivots from mortality to notifications of incidence based on the assumption that the only matter at hand is the question of efficacy rather than what vaccines did or did not do.

• De facto concedes that the maximum theoretical contribution of vaccines to the mortality decline is so little as to be nearly unnoticeable in the big picture, but then uses this to imply that showing the big picture (the whole mortality data set) is therefore deceptive, and that it is better to chop off the portion of the historical data where almost all the decline occurs and instead show graphs that zoom in on just the portion around the vaccines introduction.

Robert Webb published this article Analysis of Anti-Vax Graphs in 2010, both on his website and on VecSkeptics.

Case Example 7 – Vaccinate Your Children’s Graphs and Data page

At a glance:

• Argues from the serious disease complication data we don’t have to downplay the serious disease complication data we do have (death).

• Pivots (mostly) from mortality to notifications of incidence data.

• Claims that anti-vaccine graphs are inaccurate but can only point to that same one Canadian measles incidence graph as evidence of this (from the 2010 Gorski article which we reviewed in this essay series as part of Case Example 2, in Part 5).

• Created a deceptive Australian polio mortality graph (that we reviewed last essay).

This case example is the “Graphs and Data” page from the website Vaccinate Your Children. (we looked at their deceptive Australian polio mortality graph last essay) If you go to their website you will notice that they prominently display right on the banner image, the message: “Vaccination has saved millions of lives: will your kids be among them?” Prominently displaying a mortality based message makes their pivot to notifications of incidence that much more ironic.

Case Example 8: Anna Kata’s - An overview of tactics and tropes used online by the anti-vaccination movement

At a glance:

• Conflates historical arguments concerning what vaccines did or did not do with efficacy arguments.

• Leads with the assumption that anti-vaccinationists who are debunking historical pro-vaccine claims, regarding mortality declines that occurred in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, should for some reason, be obliged to acknowledge alleged vaccine related health improvements from recent decades instead. No reason is given nor alluded to for this strange assumption of Kata’s.

• Introduces the usual non sequitur attributing pre-vaccine mortality declines to medical care, and also as usual does not substantiate it.

• Beattie’s Australian death rate graphs are the sole example she gives of the graphs that she is talking about (the only other example she cites doesn’t have graphs). Kata believes that notifications graphs should have been provided. Kata was oblivious to the matter that the key notifications data for Australia are missing (see Case Example 9 below, for more details on that). And Kata was equally oblivious to Beattie having dedicated a whole chapter of his book to notifications data where he provided what little of this data Australia has.

• Dr. David Gorski’s blog posts appear to be the principal source of the academic author’s (Kata’s) understanding, or lack thereof, of anti-vaccine historical mortality based arguments.

The full article title is; Anti-vaccine activists, Web 2.0, and the postmodern paradigm – An overview of tactics and tropes used online by the anti-vaccination movement. Written by Anna Kata who is listed as working at McMaster University at the time. This article was published in the journal Vaccine in 2012. It has been cited since then by roughly 700 other publications.

The only part of Kata’s article that appears to engage with anti-vaccinationists who have debunked pro-vaccine messages through historical mortality data is the section under the subheading “Vaccines didn’t save us.” That is the section of her article covered in my At a glance bullet points above.

Case Example 9: The Australian Government’s Myths and Realities – Responding to arguments against vaccination - a guide for providers by the Department of Health and Ageing

At a glance:

• They fault the anti-vaccinationists for not providing the incidence data that they themselves (the Australian government) didn’t even collect.

• They do actually try to salvage the belief that vaccines played a major role within the big picture of the infectious disease mortality decline. To do this they rely on a selection of historical mortality graphs whose deficiencies are discussed in detail below.

• They invoke the typical whooping cough warning story, mentioning the usual three (Sweden, Japan, and the UK). They focus mostly on the UK and try to give you the impression that deaths went up rather than down after pertussis vaccination rates fell.

This case example is comprised of the 2013, 5^th edition of the Australian Government’s Responding to arguments against vaccination - a guide for providers. It’s a 92 page document and one section of it is of interest for the purpose of this essay series.

The one section where they appear to address anti-vaccinationists who have debunked the vaccine evangelist’s preaching through historical mortality data is under the subheading “Improved living standards, not vaccination, have reduced infectious diseases” on page 29. They write:

“Some argue that improved health and hygiene have caused the dramatic decline in infectious diseases over the last century, not vaccines. To support this argument, graphs are used to depict declining disease death rates before the introduction of vaccines and no visible impact from vaccination. These graphs always show death rates overall rather than disease incidence and hide the true effect of vaccines.”

Here we see the usual retreat to case notifications data. But in this case it is especially hypocritical because much of the key case notifications data is missing for Australia.

Of measles notifications in Australia the WHO notes:

“Notifications of measles cases in Australia were sporadic until the establishment of the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS) in 1991.”

And in 1989 the paper THE INCIDENCE AND NOTIFICATION OF MEASLES IN AUSTRALIA the authors note:

“The incidence of measles in Australia is unknown. In most States it is not notifiable.”

For pertussis in Australia the notifications are also missing. Australia stopped collecting the data in 1949, and didn’t resume collection of the data again until 1991.

As Beattie points out in his book Fooling Ourselves on the fundamental value of vaccines:

“When mass vaccination commenced, seven out of our eight states and Territories stopped counting whooping cough cases. Why? Why stop monitoring an indicator which is now claimed, by some, to be the most meaningful measure of the impact of the vaccine? Was this not an acknowledgement that notification data was never intended to be used for this purpose?”

Yet here we have the Australian government faulting anti-vaccinationists for not providing data that for Australia, for many of the most crucial decades, is missing altogether as the Australian government didn’t think it important enough to keep collecting.

Ultimately though the Australian government wouldn’t have had a valid point even if they had collected that data, because A. The prominent Australian vaccine skeptic Beattie, did also provide what little notifications data there was for Australia and B. The anti-vaccinationists are debunking pro-vaccine mortality based arguments and the mortality data would be the appropriate data for doing that even were the Australians not missing key notifications data.

After faulting the anti-vaccinationists for not providing the data that the Australian government didn’t collect to begin with, they try to make vaccines out as being a major factor in the historical infectious disease mortality declines after all:

“While overall improvements in living standards, healthcare and treatment have reduced deaths from all diseases, the additional impact of vaccines themselves is illustrated by the near disappearance of deaths from diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio and measles (see ‘Deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases’). Such a dramatic decline in deaths after vaccine introduction, often in short periods of time, could not possibly be attributed to improvements in living conditions or medical treatment alone.”

The Australian government document then provides its own mortality graphs on page 74.

Figure 11 from the Australian Government’s Responding to arguments against vaccination

There are some major problems with their graphical presentations here. At least five problems.

Firstly, there is the obvious issue that they themselves are aware that you can’t even tell if the vaccine came in at the beginning, middle or end, of each ten year period. They caution the reader about this. Instead of cautioning the reader about the deficiency of their graphical presentation they should have just solved the problem by showing the yearly data in the decades before and after the introduction of the vaccines, or at least they could have simply written dates by the arrows on their graph – how hard would that have been?

Secondly, they have provided the raw number of deaths; they ought to have presented the deaths as a mortality rate. I too have provided raw numbers of deaths in some of my own charts whenever dealing with diseases that primarily affected children for populations such as Spain and Sweden where there was on the whole little or no increase in the number of children born each year (I was being quite fair to the vaccinationists by doing this; the maximum theoretical contribution of the vaccine would have appeared even smaller had I used the rate per 100,000 in those instances).

Australia is no such place: you can see this most easily by consulting the vital statistics table on the Australian Demographics Wikipedia page. Australia experienced enormous growth over the 20^th century, both in population and in the number of children born each year. Consequently they really should have used the death rates on their graphs to account for that kind of growth.

Why they didn’t provide rates may have been mere carelessness, or it may have been to hide the extent of the pre-vaccine mortality decline – neither reason would surprise me.

Thirdly, by beginning their graphs in 1926 they have deprived their audience of much needed historical perspective to the point that their diphtheria graph has not so much as a single pre-vaccine data point and therefore does not and cannot provide any indicator of the vaccine’s impact on diphtheria mortality since they have not established the pre-vaccine trend to any degree at all. And their pertussis graph, with only one pre-vaccine data point, is almost as bad.

That it would have been no insurmountable task for them to have provided the early 20^th and late 19^th century data is demonstrated by the fact that Beattie had already done so, from existing publications, and Beattie provides detailed documentation of those publications. Other researchers have done this too: Michael Willem de Looper compiled, discussed in detail, and graphed the older data in his doctoral thesis Death registration and mortality trends in Australia 1856–1906 ( here is the download link).

If these individuals could do this, no doubt Government health agencies with far greater manpower and money than individual researchers could have pulled this off with ease. If they have time to write 92 page documents appearing to address while in fact avoiding anti-vaccine arguments, I’m sure they could do more serious work like assembling time series of their nation’s cause of death data.

Moreover other Australian government agencies, years before the publication of Responding to arguments against vaccination - a guide for providers, already had put together time series of Australian mortality data going back to 1907. Other Australian government agencies could do it - so was the Department of Health and Ageing uniquely incapable of accessing the publicly available older data?

The only apparent obstacle that would have stopped the Department of Health and Ageing from providing earlier data on their graphs was that doing so would have been fatal to the story they were spinning.

Fourthly, they have committed a post hoc fallacy; the mere introduction of vaccines they see as reason enough to attribute considerable mortality declines to them. They did not even bother doing the simplest, yet crucial steps, such as establishing vaccination coverage rates (which is important if you are trying to credit the vaccine. You need to begin with first showing that enough people got the vaccine for it to at least be plausible that the vaccine could have caused the decline). Their arrows show the mere decade in which the vaccine was available, not necessarily the point at which most people routinely got it. Nor did they acknowledge let alone address other very basic, crucial, considerations such as whether or not there had been changes in diagnostic criteria.

The only reason they give for their assumption that these post vaccine declines had to do with the vaccine is this (from page 21):

“Such a dramatic decline in deaths after vaccine introduction, often
in short periods of time, could not possibly be attributed to improvements in
living conditions or medical treatment alone.”

They assume that if it was not living conditions and was not medical care it must therefore be vaccines, but at no point have they demonstrated that there are only three possibilities. Again, obvious possibilities that could result in statistical artifacts that would show dramatic declines, such as changes in diagnostic criteria, are not addressed by them at all.

Furthermore, whether they think it possible or not, far more dramatic declines than anything that occurred after their vaccination programs could occur in the complete absence of a vaccine - because they did: the most dramatic, impressive, Australian mortality declines for measles, whooping cough, and diphtheria occurred in the late 19^th and first decades of the 20^th century as shown by Greg Beattie. Australia is not anomalous, and equally dramatic mortality declines occurring in the complete absence of vaccination can be seen for many other countries, as we ourselves have reviewed in this essay series (Sweden, Spain, England, etc).

Fifthly, unlike Beattie, they provided no examples of the mortality profiles for major infectious diseases for which there was no widespread vaccination. Therefore their graphical analysis lacks controls. Why they would have left out controls is fairly obvious; the mortality decline for diseases in Australia such as scarlet fever was equally dramatic to any of the others, yet vaccination programs were not carried out for it, and had they shown this it would have cast doubt on their narrative.

In sum the Australian Department of Health and Ageing’s graphical presentation of infectious disease historical mortality declines in Australia looks like it was done more for the purpose of obfuscation than of illumination – they left out a great deal of relevant information and detail that they could have easily provided. For a much more impressive, detailed graphical analysis of Australian mortality data replete with controls, and plenty of historical perspective see Beattie’s graphs.

After attempting to claim that vaccines really did play a major role in historical infectious disease mortality declines after all, they pivot back to notifications of incidence for a few paragraphs, and then finish out with the ever popular whooping cough warning story:

They mention (on page 22) the usual triad of Sweden, Japan, and the UK, but they mostly focus on the UK, and they most definitely try to give you the impression that pertussis deaths went up in the UK when pertussis vaccination rates fell:

“There was a decline in the acceptance of pertussis vaccine in Britain in the mid-1970s. Between 1977 and 1979, there was an epidemic of 102,500 cases of pertussis during which 27 children died from the direct consequences of pertussis and 17 developed permanent neurological damage. Acceptance of pertussis vaccine has now improved to about 93 per cent and pertussis has declined. Similar large epidemics occurred in Japan and Sweden at about the same time due to low acceptance of pertussis vaccine.”

Once again, consulting the WHO mortality database, we can see that deaths went down, not up, after vaccination rates fell.

If we are going to just grab whatever three year period we want, as the Australian government document is doing, then I’ll point out that in the three year period of 1969 through 1971, a few years before the vaccination rate fell in the UK, there were 62 pertussis deaths – twice what they mention happening in the random three year period that they picked after the fall in vaccination rates.

Case Example 10: Gallagher’s - Measles Vaccination: make an informed choice

At a glance:

• Repeatedly finds fault with a mortality rate graph designed to address historical questions, because it does not do something it was not intended for (addressing efficacy questions). And this despite the author having explicitly stated that the graph was not intended to address efficacy questions.

• After spending the whole article downplaying the value of mortality data, he ends his article with the mortality based claim Vaccination saves lives.

Science blogger Paul Gallagher’s 2014 article Measles Vaccination: make an informed choice is mostly an attack against an Australian measles death rate graph from Greg Beattie’s book Fooling Ourselves on the fundamental value of vaccines.

There are numerous aspects of Gallagher’s article that could be criticized. For example; he attempts to claim that Beattie’s Australian death rate graph is wrong by referencing a graph for the USA as if that somehow makes the Australian graph wrong because it doesn’t show what the USA graph shows (he interestingly cites York’s post Measles deaths, pre-vaccine). He attempts to refute a death rate data point with another data point that has not been calculated as a rate. He suggests that Beattie’s graphs have been examined and discredited by the Australian government with his basis for this belief being this Australian government document here where there is no mention at all of graphs, nor charts, nor Beattie. He claims that anti-vaxxers are saying all sorts of things while providing no documentation of it.

I’m not going to try and disentangle Gallagher’s almost incoherent article, though. All that it contains of interest to me is Gallagher’s repeated insistence that Beattie is trying to use the graph from his book to show that vaccines don’t work despite Beattie having explicitly stated in his book that the mortality rate graphs are intended to provide historical perspective and are not intended for the purpose of evaluating vaccine efficacy (emphasis in the following excerpt from Gallagher’s article is mine):

“One notes the first problem is his reliance on mortality and not morbidity. Death as a consequence of a vaccine preventable disease is a limited indicator of how effective vaccination has been in reducing infection. Overall morbidity (infection) offers a more realistic picture.”

Gallagher of course does not note that Australia is missing the relevant measles incidence data, nor does he note that Beattie did in fact provide as a graph (in the same book where he provided the measles mortality graph), what little Australian measles notification data there is.

After repeatedly faulting Beattie’s graph for not doing something it wasn’t intended for, Gallagher ends his article with.

“Make an informed decision. Vaccination saves lives.”

The irony of spending a whole article downplaying mortality data and then ending with Vaccination saves lives apparently escaped Gallagher.

Case Example 11 – The Logic of Science’s - Yes, vaccines did save us from disease: a graphic analysis

At a glance:

• Despite having made the bold claim in the title that vaccines (plural) have saved us from disease (general) the article is almost entirely dedicated to arguing that vaccines are responsible for the last 1 ½ % of the mortality decline of one disease (measles) in one country (the USA). This is supposed to somehow show that the anti-vaccinationists and their graphs are therefore wrong.

• Conflates historical arguments with efficacy arguments.

• Introduces the usual non sequitur crediting pre-vaccine mortality declines to medical care, and also as usual does not substantiate it.

• Applies double standard; says that it is usually best to use the whole data set but had earlier in the same article accused an anti-vaccine graph of being “deliberately zoomed out” because . . . it used the whole data set.

Yes, vaccines did save us from disease: a graphic analysis (Archived Version Here) is an article posted on the LogicOfScience.Com in 2015 by an author using the very apt pseudonym Fallacy Man. He states on his about page that he has a B.S, M.S and Ph.D in biology and that he is a post doctoral researcher at his University.

Fallacy Man’s strategy has some originality to it.

As noted in the At a glance portion above, Fallacy Man’s article is devoted almost entirely to laying claim for the vaccine, to the last 1 ½ % of the USA measles mortality decline. His basis is that an apparent leveling out in the USA measles mortality decline is followed by a sharp drop in recorded measles mortality, post vaccine. This supports his contention.

Had Fallacy Man limited himself to merely making a pro-vaccine argument with a title that corresponded to the article’s argument, then the limited scope and modesty of his claim would be perfectly fine. But Fallacy Man was attacking the anti-vaccine position and arguing that the anti-vaccinationists and their death rate graphs are wrong, and that showing the whole data set as they do (which he later in the same articles says is the best practice) is deceptive – deceptive because the 1 ½ % post vaccine decline looks quite small compared to the greater than 98% pre-vaccine decline? Those dastardly anti-vaxxers cunningly making 1 ½ % seem as though it is much smaller than 98%.

The anti-vaccine graphs were not intended for the purpose of countering pro-vaccine messages about vaccines having contributed to 1 ½% of the mortality decline for one illness in one country, because that’s not a real world pro-vaccine message. If you were to go around saying that vaccines account for less than 2% of the mortality decline for allegedly vaccine preventable diseases people would consider you an anti-vaxxer.

The real world pro-vaccine message is that vaccines have been one of the foremost, up to the very foremost factor in reducing infectious disease mortality in general and mortality form the allegedly vaccine preventable diseases in particular (as we have seen in Exhibits A through T in Part 1 and 4 of this series).

To put the lie to the real world vaccine evangelist preaching you of course need to show the whole historical data set where most the mortality decline occurs, not just the portion with less than 2% of the decline.

Fallacy Man, like all the others, avoids addressing this by simply not acknowledging that vaccinationists make the claims that they do, acting as if they don’t, and conflating efficacy arguments with historical arguments.

One final somewhat unrelated observation of Fallacy Man’s article: despite the last 1 ½% of the measles mortality decline in the USA being the focus of Fallacy Man’s article, all he does is commit a post hoc fallacy: he doesn’t make an effort to identify let alone control for other factors, and he does not acknowledge let alone address the most basic considerations such as whether or not the diagnostic criteria was stable or changed over the time in question.

Case Example 12: When Anti-Vaccine Activists Falsely Dismiss Polio and Measles Harm Published on Debunking Denialism

At a glance:

• Drives home the gravity of measles by invoking deaths in the pre-vaccine era and claims that measles vaccines have saved 17 million lives in 14 years. Then after making these claims that pertain directly to mortality, the author calls it intellectually dishonest for anti-vaccinationists to point to mortality rates.

• The Author backs up his insistence that pointing to death rates is “intellectually dishonest” by citing that 2010 Gorski article (which was reviewed in this essay series as part of Case Example 2, in Part 5). But the only truly intellectually dishonest example in the Gorski article isn’t even a death rate graph, it’s that same Canadian measles cases graph.

• Claims that the major decline in the USA diphtheria case notifications was initiated by widespread vaccination in the late 1940s. This is demonstrably false as already covered in this essay (See Figure 22 from Part 3 of this essay series).

When Anti-Vaccine Activists Falsely Dismiss Polio and Measles Harm was published on Debunking Denialism in 2016.

Case Example 13: Dr. Iannelli’s - Graphs That Show Vaccines Don’t Work

At a glance:

• Conflates historical arguments (what vaccines did or did not do) with efficacy arguments (what vaccines can or cannot do).

• Dr. Iannelli also makes posts that appeal to Graveyard Gambits and various other historical mortality related claims about lives saved, deaths averted, and mortality reduced by vaccines. These are posts which give you the impression that vaccines played the major role in the historical infectious disease mortality decline – precisely the belief debunked by the anti-vaccinationist mortality graphs that Dr. Iannelli is trying to dismiss.

Graphs That Show Vaccines Don’t Work was published on Vaxopedia in 2016. The author, Dr. Vincente Iannelli is a board certified pediatrician, author of a parenting book, and founder of the website Vaxopedia. The article is a response to anti-vaccine graphs in general. The author assumes right in the title that the principal purpose of anti-vaccine graphs is to show vaccines as inefficacious. As with all the other apologists, Dr. Iannelli does not consider the obvious usage of the graphs for the purpose of debunking pro-vaccine mortality based messages.

Dr. Iannelli regularly makes posts in which he stresses the value of vaccines through mortality related claims. His post Grave Reminders of Life Before Vaccines provides a handy list of other posts to remind you of the world before vaccines, including of course, as you would suspect from the title, graveyard gambits, along with other strong reminders of the world before vaccines such as 19^th century epidemics. He gives his readers the idea that vaccines are the reason we no longer see that kind of mortality.

Dr. Iannelli, is both a vaccine evangelist and apologist. When he is in apologist mode, he dismisses anti-vaccine historical mortality graphs (graphs that debunk the belief that vaccines played the primary role in the infectious disease declines) and is oblivious to their usage for debunking vaccine evangelist mortality based messages. Then in another post there he is preaching about the world before vaccines, and referencing deadly 19^th century epidemics to do it – his evangelist message is exactly the sort of message that those graphs debunk.

Case Example 14: Naturopathic Doctors for Vaccines’ – The Mortality Gambit

At a glance:

• The author gives an example of anti-vaccinationists who have clearly addressed morbidity and mortality as distinct questions.

• The author then shows us an example of an anti-vaccine mortality graph that is labeled mortality and death, but then the author insists that it is nonetheless intellectually dishonest because it shows . . . mortality.

• The author assumes that the sole purpose of historical mortality rate graphs must be an effort to show vaccines as inefficacious. That someone might use historical mortality data to, oh I don’t know . . . address historical mortality related claims about what vaccines did or did not do, apparently did not occur to the author.

Die Another Day: The Mortality Gambit was written by Maxwell Cohen, ND, and published on Naturopathic Doctors for Vaccines in 2019.

Case Example 15: Northern Rivers Vaccination Supporters’ - Weren’t the death rates from these diseases dropping before vaccines came along?

At a glance:

• They assume that the sole purpose of mortality rate graphs is to measure vaccine efficacy rather than to debunk claims made by vaccinationists that directly pertain to mortality. Like all the others they do not acknowledge that such claims are made and act as if such claims are not made.

• They introduce the usual non sequitur of crediting pre-vaccine mortality declines to medical care, and like Gorski they use polio and the iron lung as their case example (See A Close Look at Gorski’s Iron Lung Example in Part 5 of this essay series)

• Their effort to reroute the conversation away from historical questions and instead to efficacy questions is especially unreasonable, as they themselves make numerous historical mortality claims on other pages of their website such as, “In the 1900s, diphtheria caused more deaths in Australia than any other infectious disease and was a common cause of death in children, but has now almost disappeared in Australia due to immunisation.” - From their diphtheria page.

Northern Rivers Vaccination Supporters’ page Weren’t the death rates from these diseases dropping before vaccines came along? is listed by them as having been reviewed in 2021. They are based in Australia.

End note for this section:

The 15 case examples of vaccine apologetics provided in this essay series, make for an ample basis from which to analyze the principle strategies used by vaccine apologists when they are trying to dismiss the presentation of historical mortality data that directly contradicts the messages preached by their fellow vaccinationists. These 15 case examples cast a wide enough net to capture multiple examples of all their go-to arguments. These go-to arguments of theirs I will summarize next essay.

Up Next, the Final Installment – Part 7: The Vaccine Apologist’s Playbook

In the final installment of this essay series I will:

• Publish the Vaccine Apologist’s Playbook: A concise summary of the principle strategies used by the vaccine apologists to avoid confronting the awkward fact that vaccines are preached to the public through powerful messages that are directly contradicted by the historical mortality data.

• Comment on the significance to the overall vaccine debate of the material that we have here reviewed in this essay series. And explore some of the inferences and deductions that we can make about the vaccinationists themselves based on our study of their evangelism and apologetics.

• Provide one last set of graphical presentations for infectious disease mortality declines juxtaposed with vaccine introduction. The country we will look at is an especially revealing example in my opinion.

Correspondence: most comments and questions will be most valuable when simply placed in the comments below this article where other readers can engage with the comments and questions, and benefit from seeing the exchange of ideas. That being said, don’t hesitate to contact me directly. Here is one of my current emails:

jdc.henderson(at)mailfence(dot)com

(I will get back to you, but not always very fast).

Jordan Henderson lives in Washington State in the Northwest of the United States. He works in oil paints, and charcoals. A portfolio of his works can be viewed at either of his websites: Original Paintings – Fine Art Prints

3. Postscript: Measles in Norway & Sweden

Last essay we looked at a natural experiment that occurred in Sweden when they stopped their pertussis vaccination program. I promised that we would return to Scandinavia this essay and look at another natural experiment that happened in Scandinavia but with measles instead.

The information on measles in Scandinavia worked fairly smoothly into the flow of this essay . . . until I decided that I didn’t like the earlier version of this essay, started over, and rewrote the whole essay. Now it doesn’t smoothly fit in, but I did promise this information, and it’s worth looking at, so I’m delivering the Scandinavian measles mortality information here in a postscript.

Scandinavia is traditionally comprised of the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

The natural experiment that I had in mind was this: Norway was the first Scandinavian country to introduce a measles vaccination program beginning in 1969, Denmark was the last Scandinavian country to introduce a measles vaccination program beginning in 1987. That leaves roughly 17 years during which time Norway had a measles vaccination program and Denmark did not.

Denmark did have measles vaccines available before 1987 and some parents did have their children vaccinated in the early and mid 1980s (note 44 in the article cited) before the national measles program was in place, but that still leaves the entire decade of the 70s during which time Norway had widespread measles vaccination and Denmark had next to none.

Both Norway and Denmark had steeply declining, similar measles death rates before either of them had a vaccine program. The average yearly measles death rate in the 1960s was – 0.97 per million population in Norway, and 1.16 per million population in Denmark.

Then during the 1970s the measles death rate was lower still in both countries, almost the same, just slightly higher in Norway (0.55 per million) with a vaccine program than in Denmark (0.43 per million) without one. (You can verify these numbers by downloading the data sets through the WHO Mortality Data Base.)

If the measles vaccine had a major beneficial impact on measles mortality in Norway you would expect widespread measles vaccination in Norway to have resulted in Norway pulling ahead of Denmark and having had a substantially lower measles mortality rate than Denmark in the 1970s. Instead measles simply continued to decline in Norway and in Denmark as it had already been doing, and they both continued to have very similar mortality rates, with the rate in Norway not improving over Denmark again until the mid 1980s.

I was going to elaborate this information further with graphs of the data side by side, and so forth, but the more I thought about it the less important this natural experiment seemed to me, because any country to country comparison, even if they have many similarities is still precarious as they are bound to have many differences too.

Furthermore all this natural experiment suggests is that measles vaccination contributed at most little, if anything, to the measles mortality decline in Norway which is also suggested by simply looking at the historical mortality data for Norway, juxtaposed with the beginning of their vaccination program.

So that’s what we’ll do here, we’ll look at the historical mortality profile of measles in Norway from the late 19^th century forward, juxtaposed with the beginning of their measles vaccination program. And while were at it we’ll also return to Sweden and take a look at the historical mortality profile for measles in Sweden too.

Norway

Figure 58

Sweden

Figure 59

Sweden once again ends up being one of the most remarkable examples. This is most likely because we get more historical perspective with Sweden than we do with Norway, or most other countries for that matter, and because the mortality declines, at least for some diseases, seem to have set in much sooner, and progressed more rapidly in Sweden.

We are looking at a pre-vaccine, measles mortality decline in Sweden, that is just shy of a 1,000 fold decline.

Notes for the postscript:

1. I had hoped to put together similar graphs for the other Nordic countries - Denmark, Finland and Iceland, but I have not found comparably easy to access online archives with the older historical cause of death data for the other Nordic countries. Though you can easily find the younger data for all of them, back to 1950, through the WHO Mortality Data Base.

2. The Scandinavian countries experienced population growth over this time period, but the number of children born each year did not change all that much, so as with the diseases that primarily affected children for Spain, I here too used the actual number of recorded measles deaths rather than the rate per 100,000.

3. Here are the links to the online archives of the Norwegian Statistical Yearbooks, and the various Historical Series of the Official Statistics of Sweden.

4. I have also pulled, from the same sources, the historical data for scarlet fever in Norway and Sweden, and whooping cough in Norway (we already reviewed whooping cough in Sweden – Figure 52 in Part 5), and I’ll provide graphs of those later in an addendum to this series along with some other graphical presentations that I prepared but either cut from the series when I rewrote sections, or that I never ended up working into the main essays in the first place.

→ Continue to Part 7: The Vaccine Apologist’s Playbook

This is the fifth installment of the essay series, Vaccine Evangelists, Apostates and Apologists. Here are the links to all the installments:

Part 1 - The Evangelists

Part 2 – Apostasy

Part 3 - The Red Herring: A Tour of the Motte

Part 4 – Spanish Death Data

Part 5 - The Apologists (you are here)

Part 6 - The Apologists Continued

Part 7 - The Apologist’s Playbook

This essay installment is centered around the deconstruction of Dr. David Gorski’s vaccine apologetics. Gorski is a prolific writer and polemicist who has devoted a considerable number of his articles to defending the reputation of vaccines. The deconstruction of Gorski’s arguments will provide a springboard for hitting a couple especially interesting related topics. In particular we will in this essay installment:

• Explore a selection of deceptive pro-vaccine graphs from various institutional and independent authors.

• See what really happened in Sweden when they stopped vaccinating against pertussis.

~ Recap of a couple points especially salient to this essay installment ~

In Part 1 of this series I introduced the reader to the principal misconception of the Doctrine of Salvation Through Vaccination. This is the belief promoted by vaccine evangelists that:

• Vaccines played a primary role in causing the drastic decline in deaths attributed to infectious disease in general, and many major diseases in particular, that occurred in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, especially as this relates to the plummet in infant and child mortality rates. And they (vaccine evangelists) also imply and sometimes directly preach the corollary belief that, these diseases would return with comparable devastation if we stopped vaccination against them.

In Part 1. and Part 4. of this series I provided extensive documentation of doctors, pediatricians, scientists, journalists and public health organizations making claims such as the graveyard gambits, lifespan lectures, and so forth, that directly promote the misconception laid out above. They make claims of lives saved, deaths averted, mortality reduced. Claims that give undue credit to vaccines.

I provided the reader various analogies to facilitate understanding of the dynamic by which the Vaccine Apologists indirectly defend the Evangelists from the criticism of the Apostates.

The analogies were: Bait and Switch Confidence Games, Motte and Bailey Doctrines, Gaslighting, and Red Herrings.

These are all means by which the following dynamic takes place:

Vaccine Evangelists make claims that are directly contradicted by the historical mortality data.

Vaccine Apostates show that that the evangelists’ claims are directly contradicted by the historical mortality data.

Vaccine Apologists cannot directly defend the claims of the vaccine evangelists because the evangelists are indeed wrong, and their claims and implications are directly contradicted by the mortality data, so the apologists find all sorts of ways to confuse, misdirect, and get the conversation away from the matter of historical mortality declines altogether. In short, they deflect people’s attention off the main point.

All this is important to keep in mind as we focus our attention on the Apologists.

~End of Recap~

~

Table of Contents for Part 5

Section 1. Case Example #2 of Vaccine Apologetics: Dr. David Gorski’s articles:

• Leads with misdirection and conflation

• Illustrative Fable: The Vax Fire Crew and The Great Fire

• Capitalizing on Conflation

• Likely that Gorski is arguing in bad faith

• But don’t anti-vaccinationists argue that vaccines don’t work?

2. Pot Calling the Kettle black

• Gorski deconstructs a deceptive anti-vaccine graph

• Gorski uses a deceptive pro-vaccine graph from the CDC

3. Setting the Record Straight: Deceptive Pro-Vaccine Graphs Galore

• French deceptive pro-vaccine graph

• Spanish deceptive pro-vaccine graph

• Australian deceptive pro-vaccine graph

• American (using English data) deceptive pro-vaccine graph

• Who then is really creating all the deceptive graphs?

• This is just the tip of the iceberg

4. Unsubstantiated claims about modern medicine

• A close look at Gorski’s iron lung example

• What then did cause the infectious disease mortality decline?

• What you would logically need to do to substantiate Gorski’s medical care claim

5. The Swedish vaccine warning story is an own goal* for the vaccinationists

• Whooping cough death in Sweden

• Whooping cough cases in Sweden

• Coup de grâce: cases divided by deaths equals . . .

(* “Own goal” is to inadvertently inflict a defeat on one’s own side: The Swedish example is put forward by the vaccinationists to demonstrate how bad it would be if we stopped vaccinating, but closer inspection of the Swedish example reveals the opposite.)

6. Summary of my critique of Gorski’s arguments

• Principal Criticism

End of table of Contents

This article was originally published on Winter Oak, Activist Post, Nevermore, and Valerie Kochmann.

Section 1. Case Example #2 of Vaccine Apologetics: Dr. David Gorski’s articles:

“Vaccines didn’t save us” (a.k.a. “vaccines don’t work”): Intellectual dishonesty at its most naked”

&

J.B. Handley versus vaccine science. Again. Not surprisingly, J.B. loses.

We began the deconstruction of vaccine apologetics in Part 3 with:

Case Example #1 of Vaccine Apologetics Isabella B’s article Graphical Proof that Vaccines Work.

Now we will deconstruct our second case example; comprised of articles by the vaccine apologist Dr. David Gorski. Especially the articles “Vaccines didn’t save us” (a.k.a. “vaccines don’t work”): Intellectual dishonesty at its most naked (Archived Version Here) and J.B. Handley versus vaccine science. Again. Not surprisingly, J.B. loses (Archived Version Here)

The first article Vaccines didn’t save us” (a.k.a. “vaccines don’t work”): Intellectual dishonesty at its most naked was published on Science Based Medicine back in 2010 and it is a Vaccine Apologist classic. That article is widely referenced by other Vaccine Apologists and continues to be the article that Gorski himself refers back to whenever the matter of undue credit given to vaccines comes up.

So, Gorski’s article “Vaccines didn’t save us” (a.k.a. “vaccines don’t work”): Intellectual dishonesty at its most naked” isn’t just a popular classic with other Vaccine Apologists, it’s Gorski’s own go to article to reference whenever dealing with apostates who are removing undue credit from vaccines.

The other article I know of in which Gorski deals with apostates removing undue credit from vaccines in which he doesn’t just refer back to his 2010 article is Gorski’s 2018 article J.B. Handley versus vaccine science. Again. Not surprisingly, J.B. loses.

I’ve taken trouble to document how Gorski continues to reference his 2010 article for the purpose of demonstrating that Gorski evidently still stands behind that work and believes that this article of his has stood the test of time.

So I will deconstruct the classic 2010 article of Gorski’s, and also the 2018 article. These two comprise all of Gorski’s work focused on the debate surrounding the matter of undue credit given to vaccines, that I am aware of, with any of his other work that appears to deal with this matter merely referring back to one of these two articles.

Please consider taking the time to read Gorski’s Vaccine Apologist classic “Vaccines didn’t save us” (a.k.a. “vaccines don’t work”): Intellectual dishonesty at its most naked and/or the other Gorski article that we are here placing in the hot seat (J.B. Handley versus vaccine science. Again. Not surprisingly, J.B. loses).

Let’s begin the deconstruction!

Gorski Leads with Misdirection & Conflation

Gorski wastes no time in conflating two distinct ideas: The question of what vaccines have or have not done, with the question of whether or not vaccines work. Where does Gorski do this? Everywhere, but he starts right in the headline;

“Vaccines didn’t save us” (a.k.a. “vaccines don’t work”)

That’s as heavy handed of a conflation of two ideas as you can get; “vaccines didn’t save us” is a negation of claims about what vaccines have allegedly done. “vaccines don’t work” is an assertion that vaccines are inefficacious.

These are not the same claim.

Let me show you what Gorski is doing and why. First with a visual (Figure 43) and then with an illustrative fable:

Figure 43

~

Illustrative Fable: The Vax Fire crew and the Great Fire

Once upon a time The Great Fire raged across vast swaths of some region, burning homes and woodlands.

A small crew of firefighters showed up known as The Vax Fire Crew.

After The Vax Fire Crew showed up the fire was put out.

The Vax Fire Crew were celebrated for their heroic deeds - for they put out the fire. How do we know that they put out the fire? Simple;

There was a great fire.

Then The Vax Fire Crew arrived.

After The Vax Fire Crew arrived the fire was put out.

What more do you possibly need to know? The Vax Fire Crew saved us, they put out the fire.

Lots of expert-written informational material celebrating The Vax Fire Crew’s deeds was provided to the public stating things like,“Before The Vax Fire Crew arrived The Great Fire burned X number of acres per day, after they arrived the fire was put out.”

Now some naysayers and doubting Thomases insisted that The Vax Fire Crew didn’t save us: They pointed to publicly available time stamped series of regularly taken aerial photographs of The Great Fire from fire reconnaissance planes. These photos clearly showed that almost all of the fire had been put out before The Vax Fire Crew had even arrived on scene.

A combination of other factors such as rainstorms, cooler weather, farmers with plows, and other fire crews such as the Nutrition Fire Crew, had done almost all of the work and put out almost all of the fire before the The Vax Fire Crew even showed up.

Well this was awkward; the most glorious deed that The Vax Fire Crew had done, was being exposed as a sham. So much of their reputation rested on this, what were they to do?

The Apologists for The Vax Fire Crew sprang into action. They could not deny that yes indeed almost all the fire was put out before The Vax Fire Crew had even arrived, but they also couldn’t let it get out that The Vax Fire Crew’s most glorious deed was a sham, so they had no choice but to misdirect the conversation away from the matter entirely.

Their strategy was brilliantly simple; they conflated the question of whether or not The Vax Fire Crew had put out The Great Fire with the question of whether or not The Vax Fire Crew was proficient at their job.

They conflated these two distinct concepts with headlines like this:

“ The Vax Fire Crew didn’t save us” (a.k.a. “ The Vax Fire Crew don’t work/aren’t proficient at their job”): Intellectual dishonesty at its most naked

Then any time someone brought up the time stamped aerial photographs showing that almost all The Great Fire had been put out before The Vax Fire Crew even arrived, the apologists for The Vax Fire Crew would retort;

“So you’re saying that The Vax Fire Crew isn’t proficient at their job? You realize that these time stamped photos tell us nothing about whether or not The Vax Fire Crew is proficient? They are irrelevant to the conversation, the time stamped photos are a non sequitur. To judge the proficiency of the The Vax Fire Crew we need to look at these test results of how they did with fire line digging exercises, water pump operations, and hose lays.”

And so the promoters of The Vax Fire Crew continued to preach the misconception that The Vax Fire Crew had put out The Great Fire. And the apologists defended the reputation of The Vax Fire Crew by misdirecting the conversation through the conflation of the two distinct questions of whether or not The Vax Fire Crew had put out The Great Fire and whether or not they were proficient at their job.

They conflated the matter of what the Vax Fire Crew did or didn’t do with the matter of what they could or couldn’t do.

The End (of the illustrative fable)

~

Capitalizing on Conflation

What I just described in the illustrative fable is precisely what Gorski is doing. Gorski knows better than to deny that almost all the infectious disease mortality from most the major infectious diseases declined before the respective vaccines for those diseases were introduced or became widespread.

In order to avoid conceding that the reputation of vaccines is resting on a mountain of undue credit Gorski has no choice but to misdirect the conversation away from the question of what vaccines did or did not do, by conflating that question with the question of whether or not vaccines work.

Let’s observe how Gorski can use this conflation of ideas to skip right past the main point of those he is criticizing.

In his 2010 classic“Vaccines didn’t save us” (a.k.a. “vaccines don’t work”): Intellectual dishonesty at its most naked Gorski takes issue with these graphs of Australian mortality profiles by Greg Beattie.

Figure 44

Here is what Gorski has to say (emphasis in the original):

“In fact, let’s look at the Vaccination Library claims first. Notice that there are six graphs, four of which are for vaccine-preventable diseases for which widespread vaccination was undertaken, two for which it was not. All of them show decreasing death rates from various diseases. Wow! It seems like slam dunk evidence, doesn’t it? Vaccines didn’t save us! After all, death rates were declining years before the vaccine, and they were declining for the diseases that didn’t even need a vaccine!

Death rates.

Here’s the problem. It’s not surprising that death rates were declining before introduction of the vaccines. Medicine was improving. More importantly, supportive care was improving. For example, take the case of polio. Before the introduction of the iron lung and its widespread use, for example, if a polio patient developed paralysis of the respiratory muscles, he would almost certainly die. The iron lung allowed such patients to live. Some even survived in an iron lung for decades. No doubt improved nutrition also played a role as well. However, if you want to get an idea of the impact of vaccines on infectious disease, take a look at this graph from the CDC of measles incidence, not death rates:”

While Gorski insists that this is not surprising, it most certainly would come as a shock to many people that between most of the mortality decline up to almost all of the mortality decline for these diseases occurred in the absence of vaccination against them and before their respective vaccination programs.

The reason this would come as a shock to many is because, as I demonstrated in Parts 1 and 4 of this essay series, doctors, pediatricians, scientists, journalists, and public health institutions preach messages which convey the idea that vaccines are principally responsible for the drastic reduction in infectious disease mortality.

Furthermore this actually is slam dunk evidence against the claims about lives saved, deaths averted, mortality reduced that vaccine evangelists preach, but Gorski does not acknowledge that his fellow vaccinationists have preached any such messages.

Gorski calls the Vaccination Library post with the graphs disingenuous, but how? They provide death rate graphs, which are clearly labeled death rate and then underneath those graphs they talk about them being exactly what they; are death rates. Where is the disingenuity? How is providing accurate information that is clearly labeled as exactly what it is disingenuous?

The answer is that Gorski is judging the graphs based on what they tell us about vaccine efficacy which of course is not the point of those graphs; those graphs were meant to give historical perspective.

The graphs Gorski is criticizing were created by Greg Beattie. Having encountered the strategy that Gorski is using, Beattie wrote in 2011:

“these people tend to argue one thing—that this data cannot be used

to assess vaccine performance. And they are correct. These graphs do not make

any attempt whatsoever to measure the performance of a vaccine. They simply

put things into historical perspective for us. This perspective illustrates that

vaccines were unimportant influences in the bigger picture; that they arrived

too late to be considered potential contributors of any significance.

In Chapter Three we will examine (under a microscope) the contribution that

vaccines made to the tail end of the declines. For now, let us simply acknowledge

that, in historical perspective, vaccination made little if any contribution to the

decline in deaths from each illness.

-From Beattie’s book Fooling Ourselves on the fundamental value of vaccines

Let’s zoom ahead to Gorski’s 2018 article and see how he continued to evade his opponent’s principal point by capitalizing on the conflation of two separate questions – Have vaccines done what they are claimed to have done? And - Are vaccines efficacious/do they work?

In Gorski’s 2018 article J.B. Handley versus vaccine science. Again. Not surprisingly, J.B. loses He is criticising this article by J.B Handley (Archived Version).

Now it is perfectly clear in Handley’s article (Which Gorski is criticizing) that Handley’s article is not about whether or not vaccines work, it is about whether or not vaccines have done what they are claimed to have done. Here is how Handley opened his article:

“Since 1900, there's been a massive decline in mortality rates in developed countries, largely due to a marked decrease in deaths from infectious diseases. Did vaccines play a major role in this decline? The history and data provide clear answers that matter greatly in today's vitriolic debate about vaccines”

Handley does not do a surprise pivot in his article to the separate question of whether or not vaccines work. Handley’s article sticks to the topic of whether or not vaccines played a major role in the mortality decline he is talking about. The closest Handley gets to vaccine efficacy in the whole article is a single quote he provides from someone arguing that vaccines do more harm then good.

Gorski on the other hand, predictably conflates these two separate questions thereby allowing him to repeatedly misdirect and pivot away from the question at hand to the separate question of whether or not vaccines work. Gorski sets the stage (emphasis mine);

“This time around, he reminded me of one of the two main tactics of antivaxers, a tactic that isn’t covered enough. Basically, there are two central tenets of antivaccine pseudoscience. The first, of course, is that vaccines are harmful because they’re chock full of toxins and cause all sorts of horrific health problems. Skeptics refute this type of misinformation quite well. However, the second tenet of antivaccine pseudoscience is that vaccines don’t work (or don’t work very well) and as a result are not nearly as beneficial as vaccine advocates claim. One variety of this “vaccines don’t work” trope is what I like to refer to as the “vaccines didn’t save us” gambit, which is essentially the claim that vaccines had little to do with the decline in infectious disease over the last century. You can tell that’s the trope by the title of Handley’s blog post, “Did vaccines save humanity?” I will give Handley credit for one thing. This is a wrinkle on this hoary old bit of antivaccine intellectual dishonesty that I haven’t seen before.”

After having set the stage with the direct conflation of distinct ideas (as you can see in the excerpt above), Gorski was free to repeatedly misdirect, and that is what he did. Throughout his article Gorski misdirected the conversation away from the question of whether or not vaccines have saved the lives, averted the deaths, and reduced the mortality as the evangelists claim that they have to the separate question of whether or not vaccines work. The following are examples of Gorski doing this in his article (emphasis in the following excerpts from Gorski’s article is mine):

“Of course, what Kass was really showing was that there are more ways to prevent disease than just vaccines, and this is hardly a message that anyone in public health would dispute. Nor is it a message that shows that vaccines don’t work. I’ll elaborate more as I discuss the next reference cherry picked by Mr. Handley.”

~

“Consideration of mortality alone as the be-all and end-all of whether a vaccine works completely ignores all the morbidity, all the suffering caused by infectious disease.

~

“The use of mortality as the be-all and end-all of vaccine efficacy is an intentional strategy of the antivaccine movement. This strategy completely ignores the morbidity and suffering due to vaccine-preventable diseases.”

~

“No, the only one spreading lies here is Mr. Handley, who is also attacking an obvious straw man. Vaccines work.

The bottom line is that vaccines are safe, effective, and prevent disease. Yes, sanitation and public health measures decreased mortality from infectious diseases before vaccines for them were developed, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t work or aren’t important. The “vaccines didn’t save us” gambit, as demonstrated by J.B. Handley, remains intellectually dishonest.”

Those are all from Gorski’s 2018 article. As you can see, he repeatedly misdirects the conversation to the separate question of whether or not vaccines work. Gorski keeps asserting that “Vaccines work” as if he is correcting Handley. Yet in the article that Gorski is criticizing Handley does not once say “Vaccines don’t work” because again that is clearly not the argument Handley is making in that article; Handley’s article is about what vaccines didn’t do not what they can or could do.

I’ll take a second to point out also that in the second and third excerpts where Gorski states: This strategy completely ignores the morbidity and suffering due to vaccine-preventable diseases. He is arguing from the data we don’t have. Gorski provides no historical data sets of disease suffering sorted by cause. He uses a show of concern for serious disease complications only to downplay the serious disease complication sorted by cause data that we actually do have – which is death.

Interestingly though Gorski does exhibit a hint of understanding that the question at hand is the question of whether or not vaccines have done what they are claimed to have done. Gorski attempts to head off that question by asserting that his fellow vaccinationists have not been making the claims that they have in fact been making:

“No one ever said that vaccination did account for the impressive declines in mortality seen in the first half of the 20th century. Antivaxers like Handley like to make that claim, either explicitly or implicitly, but that doesn’t make it so.”

It is an easily demonstrable fact that vaccinationists did and do say what Gorski is claiming that they are not saying. I demonstrated this at the very beginning of this essay series; here I will simply point you to where I did that. The Lifespan Lectures directly falsify Gorski’s assertion that no one is saying this (Exhibits I through L in Part 1 of this essay series, and Exhibit T. in Part 4).

For example, in Exhibit I I documented four different instances of Paul Offit claiming that vaccines have added 30 years to our lifespan. In Exhibit T I shared an interview with Rino Rappuoli in which he reminds the audience that Before vaccines we lived 47 years and that if we stop vaccinating we will return to living 47 years rather than the 85 current average at the time of the interview.

These are cut and dry examples of vaccinationists saying exactly what Gorski is asserting that no one is saying. And Paul Offit and Rino Rappuoli aren’t just any vaccinationists; they are some of the most prominent vaccine developers, and evangelists in the world.

Likely that Gorski is Arguing in Bad Faith

A potential excuse for Gorski could be that he had no idea that his fellow vaccinationists are heaping undue credit on vaccines for impressive historical mortality declines, which could be why Gorski claimed that no one is saying the things that they are demonstrably saying.

Firstly this is implausible: if you are alive today you have almost certainly been exposed to these kind of claims. If you are deeply involved in the Vaccine Wars there is simply no way that you wouldn’t be paying attention to these kind of claims when you hear them; these claims wouldn’t slip past your notice.

But I can go beyond pointing to the implausibility that Gorski is unaware of the undue credit that Vax-Evangelists are heaping on vaccines; I can go a step further and definitively demonstrate that Gorski knows that these kind of claims are being made.

Gorski watched The Vaccine War by PBS. We know this because he wrote a positive review of it as an article back in 2010.

The Vaccine War by PBS begins with Paul Offit claiming that vaccines have added 30 years to our lifespan. PBS appears to have polished up and edited the episode at some point, but you can go all the way back to the transcript that PBS posted in 2010 and see that the episode begins with Paul Offit claiming that vaccines have increased our lifespans by 30 years.

Later transcripts have some changes but still have Paul Offit proclaiming that vaccines have increased our lifespans by 30 years.

Gorski reviewed this episode; unless he skipped the introduction, which would be odd for someone writing a fairly in depth review of it, then Gorski knows perfectly well that prominent vaccinationists are making these kind of claims and that their claims are portrayed favorably as factual claims and amplified on national television.

But it gets worse. Gorski is arguably one of the people giving undue credit to vaccines for impressive mortality declines. From his 2012 article The problem of waning pertussis immunity I provide the following excerpts (emphasis mine):

“First, Cherry notes that the purpose of vaccination against B. pertussis is not to eliminate all disease. It’s to prevent serious disease (whooping cough) with its potentially horrific complications, up to and including death, particularly among young infants.”

~

“In any case, this graph illustrates quite clearly that the pertussis epidemics over the last few years are mere blips on the curve compared to what was observed in the past, before there was a vaccine available to combat pertussis. In other words, even with the recent epidemics in the US, this is not the bad old days, when up to 270,000 cases of pertussis could be diagnosed in a year, with as many as 10,000 deaths, mostly among infants.”

Gorski also quotes the CDC

“Nevertheless, vaccination continues to be the single most effective strategy to reduce morbidity and mortality caused by pertussis.”

Gorski tells us about the US before vaccines with as many as 10,000 deaths. He also approvingly quotes someone who notes that the principle purpose of whooping cough vaccines is to prevent serious disease up to and including death, and Gorski quotes the CDC corroborating this. Gorski credits the improved situation to vaccines and makes no mention of other factors. This would no doubt give the reader the impression that vaccines are the reason or at least one of the principal reasons for the drastic reduction in whooping cough deaths. There can be little doubt either that it was Gorski’s intent to give the reader the impression that the vaccine was responsible for the impressive pertussis mortality decline.

What’s the graph he is talking about? I will show you in just a moment under the subheading – Gorski uses a deceptive pro-vaccine graph.

For now let us just note that we know, and have documented, that Gorski knows that vaccinationists try to attribute impressive mortality reductions to vaccines, and that therefore mortality data is the appropriate data source for evaluating such claims.

Gorski’s efforts to sideline historical mortality data through denying that vaccinationists are making claims to which mortality data directly relates are rhetorical maneuvers that Gorski is likely doing in bad faith since we can demonstrate from his own writing that he knows that prominent vaccinationists are making the kind of claims that he insists no one is making, and he himself makes misleading statements that give readers the impression that vaccines are the reason for the USA no longer having 10,000 pertussis deaths per year.

But don’t anti-vaccinationists argue that vaccines don’t work?

Yes, they do. Many anti-vaccinationists most certainly argue against the efficacy of vaccines. And some of the mortality data such as that showing the major smallpox epidemics that swept through heavily vaccinated regions in the 1870s does count as evidence against the efficacy of a vaccine (see the smallpox graphs at Dissolving Illusions).

What must be understood though is the simple concept that the same person can make different arguments on different topics and their arguments should be evaluated based on what they are arguing. The same person can make arguments both about whether or not vaccines work (a vaccine efficacy argument), and they can make an argument that vaccines did not do what they are said to have done (a historical argument).

The evidence that they present in their argument about whether or not vaccines work should be judged for it’s value in evaluating vaccine effectiveness.

The evidence that this same person presents in their argument that vaccines did not do what they are claimed to have done (a historical argument) should be judged in light of that question; whether or not vaccines did what they are claimed to have done.

For example: whether or not Greg Beattie or J. B. Handley make arguments that vaccines don’t work, does not change the logic that their arguments that vaccines did not do what they are claimed to have done, are arguments which should be evaluated as the historical arguments that they are.

What vaccines can or could do are vaccine efficacy questions.

What vaccines did or didn’t do are historical questions about what actually happened.

Greg Beattie is meticulous about noting that his graphs provide historical perspective and are not intended to answer vaccine effectiveness questions.

And J. B. Handley’s article that Gorski was criticizing was clearly about what vaccines didn’t do, not what they can or could do.

2. Pot Calling the Kettle black

Gorski deconstructs a deceptive anti-vaccine graph

In his 2010 vaccine apologetics classic “Vaccines didn’t save us” (a.k.a. “vaccines don’t work”): Intellectual dishonesty at its most naked Gorski deconstructs a measles notifications of incidence graph for Canada created by Dr. Raymond Obomsawin. The Obomsawin Canadian measles cases graph is a deceptive graph which amounts to a lie by omission.

I’m not going to rehash how and why the Obomsawin Canadian measles notifications graph is deceptive here; Gorski already did an excellent job of deconstructing it which you can read in his article.

What work I have seen of Dr. Raymond Obomsawin I have appreciated (excepting this graph of his) and I believe his writings are well worth reading, some of which you can read over here on this website that vaccinationists positively love to hate.

Appreciation for Obomsawin’s work notwithstanding, I’m going to call it as I see it; Obomsawin’s Canadian measles notifications graph was deceptive and Gorski was right to deconstruct it.

Gorski uses a deceptive pro-vaccine graph

In Gorski’s 2012 article The problem of waning pertussis immunity he shares the following graph to prove a point that he is making:

Figure 45

What’s the problem with this graph? I deconstructed two similar pertussis cases graphs in Part 3 of this essay series (another one very similar to this also by the CDC and one by Isabella B) I’ll briefly recap:

DTP was licensed and/or introduced in 1948 or 1949 depending on which source you go by. Even Gorski’s fellow Science Based Medicine contributor Steven Novella, in an article on Science Based Medicine states

“In 1948 the whole cell pertussis vaccine was combined with vaccines for diphtheria and tetanus to make the DTP vaccine.”

From - Whooping Cough Epidemic Steven Novella - April 4, 2012 (Gorski linked to Novella’s article in Gorski’s same article where he shared this graph).

Where is that arrow pointed on the CDC’s graph that Gorski shared? It should be pointed at 1948 or 1949, but they pointed the arrow at 1943 or 1944. You can tell by consulting the data source, and see that that little “shelf” in the data to the left of their arrow, right before the major drop, represents the two years 1942 and 1943 each of which had right around 190,000 reported cases.

Remember what happened when I corrected the arrow placement on the similarly deceptive graph by Isabella B (Figure 24 from Part 3)? It changed the picture considerably.

Figure 24 from Part 3 Revisited

The USA whooping cough notifications data set with the arrow placement for DTP corrected, far from corroborating the point that Gorski is trying to make, actually contradicts his point and shows the steep decline in whooping cough notifications beginning well before the introduction of DTP.

To be clear, even with the arrow placement corrected, I do not think that the USA whooping cough incident notification data proves much of anything at all, and I would not trust it as a gauge of actual incidence because it is a weak incomplete data source for the reasons I laid out in Part 3.

However, these graphs by the CDC and Isabella B are unmistakably deceptive once deconstructed, for they have “misplaced” the arrow for DTP to the very area on the graph that would make the vaccine look as good as possible.

I am going to give Gorski the full benefit of the doubt here: I won’t accuse him of being intentionally deceptive on this, I will instead charitably assume that he made no attempt to double check the CDC’s work, and that he was sufficiently unfamiliar with his subject matter that he did not notice something amiss in the graph, and that therefore he did not know that the CDC graph he shared was deceptive and that once corrected it actually contradicts the point he was trying to make.

3. Setting the Record Straight: Deceptive Pro-Vaccine Graphs Galore

It is of course quite common for vaccinationists to charge that anti-vaccinationists are dishonest, misleading, lying by omission and so forth, with the unstated implication being that vaccinationists are forthright, or at least more forthright than the anti-vaccinationists.

Gorski has been claiming that anti-vaccinationist graphs and “vaccines didn’t save us” arguments are “intellectually dishonest” for at least13 years now. His basis for this claim is his own conflation and subsequent equivocation of two distinct concepts as we just now reviewed, and also that one deceptive 2009 graph that uses Canadian measles notifications of incidence data that Gorski points to. One graph from one author, that’s it. To date that’s all Gorski’s got on the opposition’s graphical presentations that they use to debunk the Doctrine of Salvation Through Vaccination.

Now, what have we got on the vaccinationists’ graphical presentations? Already we’ve reviewed four deceptive pro-vaccine graphs: The deceptive pertussis graph, and the deceptive diphtheria graph by Isabella B, that we reviewed in Part 3 of this essay series, and two different instances of the CDC creating deceptive pertussis notifications graphs, one of which which we reviewed in Part 3 and one of which we just now looked at (Figure 45, this essay).

So already the score is 4 to 1. I’m going to go ahead and double that with a review of four more deceptive pro-vaccine graphs. Gleefully pointing to deceptive pro-vaccine graphs is good fun of course but it is also educational, and helps us catch future pro-vaccine deception by understanding past deception, so let’s set the record straight.

French deceptive pro-vaccine graph

France is ground zero for the diphtheria toxoid vaccine. According to the paper Childhood Vaccine Development: An Overview. Baker, J., Katz, S.:

“The key figure in developing the first efficacious and well-tolerated toxoid vaccines was the French investigator Léon Ramon of the Pasteur Institute. Ramon used both heat and formalin to generate a chemically modified toxin (which he termed anatoxin) with better properties than those of Glenny's toxoid in 1923. The French Academy of Medicine approved this vaccine for children in 1927. Ramon, it should be noted, also played a central role in developing tetanus toxoid between 1923 and 1926. In no small thanks to Ramon's advocacy efforts, France used diphtheria toxoid widely among children and tetanus toxoid among the military during the 1930s.”

And according to the diphtheria page on the website of the Montpellier University Hospital Center.

“Vaccination was made compulsory for military service in 1931 then compulsory for all in 1938. Massive campaigns were organized in 1942 and applied mainly in occupied zones; diphtheria vaccination was compulsory in Germany in 1941.”

Let’s take these dates for diphtheria vaccination in France and juxtapose them with the French diphtheria death and notifications of incidence data.

Figure 46

There are gaps in the diphtheria mortality data available for France, hence the gaps in the red line for mortality. (Here is a link to the 1966 Statistical Yearbook of France from which I pulled the data for this graph).

We can see that this French data could present a rather awkward situation for our vaccinationist friends.

A major spike in diphtheria deaths, accompanied by the years with the greatest recorded number of diphtheria cases for France, occurs well after diphtheria vaccination has been developed, approved, used and made compulsory in France.

If they tried crediting the vaccine for the decline after the diphtheria toxoid vaccine had merely been developed in 1923, as Isabella B did on her USA diphtheria graph (Part 3 of this essay series Figure 21), it would look bad for the vaccine as here in France the rates go up after 1923.

The year of vaccine approval, 1927, won’t help them either as the rates go up after that year too.

Nor will it help their case to point to the year the French government made diphtheria vaccination compulsory (1938) nor can they make this data look good for them by pointing to the mass vaccination campaigns carried out in German occupied France (1942).

Here it does not matter if they pivot to the notifications data alone, it still doesn’t support their narrative. Whatever are the vaccinationists to do with this awkward French data right from the pioneers of diphtheria vaccination?

Easy, they just chop off the portion of the graph that looks bad for the vaccine, and they start at a point that looks good for the vaccine. That is exactly what they do.

Figure 47

The graph above is a large graph of diphtheria cases and deaths from 1945 to 1975 with a smaller inset graph that is a detail from 1975 on. This graph is from page 51 of Guide to Vaccination by the French General Directorate of Health Technical Committee on Vaccinations.

In the diphtheria section of that guide they make no mention of the diphtheria vaccine having been made compulsory in France in 1938 and having been in use for many years before that. They shamelessly only mention vaccination efforts from 1945 onward and start their graph at that date.

Spanish deceptive pro-vaccine graph

In Part 4 of this essay series I shared multiple examples of Spanish Vax-Evangelist preachings which would give you the idea that the introduction of the pertussis vaccine to the immunization schedule in 1965 was the principle reason for the reduction in whooping cough mortality (Exhibits M through P). And I provided a graph of the Spanish mortality data (Figure 41) showing that over 98% of the 20^th century whooping cough mortality decline in Spain occurred before 1965.

How then would Spanish vaccinationists share a graph of whooping cough mortality in Spain without tipping off their audience that almost all the decline occurred before the introduction of the vaccine to the schedule in 1965?

Same simple strategy that the French use with diphtheria; chop off the portion that you don’t like and start the graph at whatever point looks best for the vaccine. For the data from Spain this means chopping off the first 65 years of the whooping cough mortality data set, and beginning it in 1965, which is in fact what they have done.

Figure 48

Figure 48, is a screenshot of figure 9 from page 11 of the document Situation of whooping cough in Spain 1998-2016 by the National Epidemiology Center; to the right is simply a detail of the latter portion of the same graph. They make no mention in that document that most of the whooping cough mortality decline occurred before the vaccine was added to the schedule in 1965, and they give no explanation for why they started their graph in 1965.

To avoid acknowledging the incredible decline in the pre-vaccine era, they state, also on page 11.

“In the pre-vaccine era whooping cough deaths exceeded 30 per year.”

In the pre-vaccine era in Spain whooping cough deaths exceed 4,000 per year in Spain in the early 20^th century, and were still exceeding a 1,000 a year in the 1930s, and were still up in the multiple hundreds even into the early 1950s.

Why would they describe thousands as exceeded 30? Yes, they are technically right, thousands certainly do exceed 30, but that’s like saying:

“Commercial jets fly at over ten miles an hour.”

“The world’s tallest mountains reach heights of more than 500 feet above sea level.”

“Bull elephants weigh upwards of 73 pounds.”

This is particularly odd as usually the Vax-Evangelists do not downplay pre-vaccine deaths; they just unjustifiably credit vaccines for the reduction from 19^th and early 20^th century highs.

There are only three logical reasons that I can see for why they would describe Spanish pre-vaccine era whooping cough mortality with the extreme-to the point of absurdity, understatement of exceeded 30 per year:

1. To avoid acknowledging that whooping cough mortality plummeted from quadruple digits to double digits all during the Spanish pre-vaccine era.

2. To leave the reader with the impression that vaccines are the principle reason for whooping cough mortality decline in Spain.

3. To give the impression that there was no significant change in whooping cough mortality before the vaccine, which would suggest that there is nothing of great import to see in the earlier mortality data.

To put the deceptive Spanish graph into perspective here is Figure 41 again from the last essay installment.

Figure 41 from Part 4 of this series revisited

The portion to the right of that red line is all that the deceptive Spanish whooping cough mortality graph showed (Figure 48). The portion to the left of that red arrow is the pre-vaccine era in Spain where the majority of years whooping cough deaths are in the thousands. This they described as, “In the pre-vaccine era whooping cough deaths exceeded 30 per year.”

Australian deceptive pro-vaccine graph

We are now going to look at an especially interesting graph from the Graphs and Data page of the website VaccinateYourChildren. This page on VaccinateYourChildren was created sometime after Gorski’s 2010 classic “Vaccines didn’t save us” (a.k.a. “vaccines don’t work”): Intellectual dishonesty at its most naked because they cite Gorski’s article.

This is a polio graph. I have not discussed polio in this essay series and I refer the reader to the recommended reading that I provided at the end of Part 2 if you would like to get the views of vaccine apostates regarding polio. For polio in Australia I specifically recommend Chapter 7 of Greg Beattie’s book Fooling Ourselves on the fundamental value of vaccines.

Below is how vaccinationists created a deceptive graph with Australian polio data.

Figure 49

Looks fantastic for the vaccine doesn’t it? You couldn’t ask for a more favorable graph. Of course the reason it looks so good for the vaccine is because they fudged it.

They employed two types of deception to get this result: they used concealment, and of course they “misplaced” the arrow.

To obscure all the detail they used ten year averages rather than just showing us the yearly data: this simplified their graph to the point that they have just 8 data points on it.

Here is what the yearly data for polio mortality in Australia looks like:

Figure 50

Figure 50 is a screenshot from Polio in Australia, a PDF document by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. So you can see that there is some important detail that the graph from VaccinateYourChildren obscured. But obscuring the data alone was not enough to make their graph show what they wanted it to show, they also had to “misplace” the arrow pointing to the vaccine’s introduction. As you can see in the graph in Figure 50 from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare the polio vaccine was introduced in 1956 in Australia not 55. Now scroll back up to figure 49 and visually move that arrow over one data point to the right where they should have placed it on the 1956-65 data point and see how that alters the picture.

Now it is true that:

“The trivalent inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which includes all three poliovirus serotypes, was first registered in Australia in 1955, with routine vaccination on the National Immunisation Program (NIP) starting in 1956.”

- NCIRS Polio Fact sheet

But I think we can all agree that the year in which routine vaccination began is the relevant point to note on a graph, not the mere year of registration – even the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare knows this as they marked 1956 as the year of introduction on their own graphs. Either way though, the vaccine’s Australian introduction was well after the peak not at the peak as shown in the VaccinateYourChildren graph.

American deceptive pro-vaccine graph (that uses English Data)

This is a graph created by Ian A. York, PhD. York created this deceptive pro-vaccine graph in 2009 which is the very same year that Obomsawin created his deceptive anti-vaccine graph that Gorski is still pointing to. I thought it appropriate that we end our tour of deceptive pro-vaccine graphs here with York’s graph, because York and Obomsawin, who both have Phds, created their respective deceptive graphs that same year.

York created this graph shortly before he went on to work for the CDC and became the team lead of their Molecular Virology and Vaccines Team, though at the time he created this graph he was still working as an assistant professor of immunology and virology at Michigan State University.

Just last year in 2022 York deleted almost all of his old posts. That was smart of him; I would delete those posts too if I were he. The only reason I found out that York had created something so outrageous and tried to pass it off as real is because so many other vaccinationists cited York’s article where he posted this graph, that I ended up searching for and found it in the internet archives, as I was wondering who this York was that these vaccinationists were citing.

Pulling this skeleton out of York’s closet is worth the trouble as it is simply too interesting not to share; York created this before Gorski’s classic article, and it may have been Gorski’s article which popularized the strategy of conflating two distinct concepts so that the apologists can get the attention away from the question of what vaccines have or have not done and misdirect to efficacy questions. Almost all the apologists since then have used that strategy.

But again, York’s piece predates Gorski’s classic, and York doesn’t use the conflation and misdirection strategy; York tries the near impossible task of directly denying the apostate’s claims which leaves him little option other than bald-faced lies to do it, and bald-faced lies he does use!

This is from York’s post Measles deaths, pre-vaccine which is only available as an archive these days. Here it is:

Figure 51

York created this graph as an attempt to refute the anti-vaccinationists who point out that almost all the measles mortality decline occurred before the introduction of the measles vaccine. Right underneath this graph York wrote:

“Obviously, there’s no 95% drop. Measles deaths were pretty much constant for over 100 years, until the vaccine was introduced.”

What’s wrong with York’s graph?

York’s graph has a series of data points that are ten year averages for measles mortality rates in England from 1840 to 1920. But then, right before the mortality begins to really plummet in England is when York ceases to provide the ten year averages and instead he skips ahead 17 years and provides one single data point for just the one year of 1937 and then ends his graph right there. Exceedingly suspicious, not to mention that even if York hadn’t faked this graph it still couldn’t prove his point as he ends it 30 years before the vaccine was introduced in England.

The only thing in support of York’s assertion is the strange 1937 data point. That 1937 data point in York’s graph shows roughly 450 measles deaths per million which is wildly off. We can go straight to the English and Welsh death data as provided by the UK National Archives, add up the measles deaths for 1937, and calculate the death rate based on England and Wales population at the time and see that the measles death rate per million in 1937 was 25.6 not 450. York’s 1937 data point is over 17 times too high.

What’s York’s excuse for the 1937 data point? York claims that:

“the 1937 data are from a text entitled “Anomalies and curiosities of medicine” By George Milbry Gould.”

I think not: George Milbry Gould died in 1922, and the co-author of Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine Walter L. Pyle died in 1921.

So that’s that for York’s outrageous graph from his post Measles deaths, pre-vaccine. It is both a lie by omission as he ended all his valid data at 1920, thereby omitting nearly a half century of the data before the vaccine, and it is a lie by outright fabrication due to his seventeen fold too high 1937 data point that he tried to pass off as something he found in a book whose author and co-author died in the 1920s.

York evidently doesn’t know about the conflation then equivocation strategy that Gorski later uses. York understood perfectly well that the question is about undue credit given vaccines for reducing mortality. York initially made no attempt to conflate and misdirect, as is clear in the title of his article Measles deaths, pre-vaccine. Without a clever means of deception through misdirection occurring to him, York resorted to the desperate measure of plain old lies.

For an accurate presentation of the English and Welsh data see the graphs at DissolvingIllusions.

York is exonerated: Shortly after publishing this graph York began to backtrack as can be seen in the archives of subsequent updates that he made to the post where he presented this graph. York did continue to lie, and did continue to try to pass off this graph as real with his statement:

“Nevertheless the death rate drop was nowhere near the 95% claimed by antivaccine loons, as the charts here show.”

York did do something that was commendable though: he conceded in the comments:

“By far the most important reason was nutrition. Childhood nutrition (and childhood quality of life) really started to improve around the turn of the century, and nutrition is an enormous factor determining measles survival. This is still hugely relevant today; measles case-mortality rates in Africa are much higher than in the US or UK, for example, and nutrition status is the major predictor. American children in general had better nutrition than British, and that helps account for the earlier drop in measles mortality in the US.”

York then did something even more commendable and began a series investigating what really did cause the measles mortality decline, which looks like he was really investigating the matter in that series in good faith.

I consider York to have made up for this graph, and moved on. I pulled this skeleton out of his closet not to malign York but to demonstrate:

• Just how far vaccinationists will go to defend the narrative.

• That they understand perfectly well that the “Vaccines didn’t save us” argument is about what vaccines didn’t do.

• And to demonstrate why they are all now using Gorski’s tactic of conflation and misdirection.

Directly defending the misconceptions about “Vaccines saved us” was an untenable position even for a bright, well-educated-in-relevant-fields, mind like York’s.

Who is really creating all the deceptive graphs?

As there is to my knowledge no comprehensive review of all vaccine related graphs, I instead offer this quick and dirty method for gauging the prevalence of deceptive graphs coming from each side:

Gorski, after all these years is still pointing to that same Canadian measles cases graph from 2009. That’s the only one shown or mentioned in his article that is genuinely deceptive. Of all the many other vaccine apologists I have read, none of them have done any better. They claim that anti-vaccinationist historical mortality graphs are deceptive but if they actually offer a concrete example that really is deceptive they cite Gorki’s article where he deconstructs the Canadian measles cases graph.

This indicates that deceptive graphs are rather rare from the anti-vaccinationists, considering how very few examples that the vaccinationists can point to (as in they can point to that one Canadian measles cases graph. Surely they have another example somewhere?).

Whereas the prevalence of deception in vaccinationist graphs is so great that I (with far fewer years as an observer and participant in the vaccine discussion than Gorski) can easily point to many deceptive vaccinationist graphs, spanning from 2009 all the way up to the CDC’s ongoing shenanigans of “misplacing” arrows marking the introduction of DTP on their graphs. Each of these pro-vaccine graphs that I have pointed to is as deceptive or more so than Gorski’s one example of a deceptive anti-vaccine graph from 2009.

This is just the tip of the iceberg

There are of course many other deceptive vaccinationist graphs; we could go on pointing them out. Such as more examples of French institutions that also chop off the unfavorable portion of the diphtheria data and start at the point that looks best for the vaccine, or we could look at a Smallpox graph for England that brazenly excludes the 1870s to keep the major epidemic years of the 1870s in a nation with high vaccination rates from messing up their narrative. We could look at Spanish measles incidence graphs that start in 1981 thereby avoiding giving the viewer historical perspective that would alert them to the awkward fact that the two highest ever years for reported measles cases came after measles vaccination, and after Spain had reached over 40% and greater than 70% vaccination rates respectively.

We could review collections of American data based graphs which contain no pre-vaccine data for historical perspective, yet claim to show the impact of vaccines on death and cases. We could review an Australian pertussis graph that impresses the viewer with the total absence of cases after widespread vaccination, but fails to inform the viewer that the absence of cases is simply because Australia stopped collecting the data in 1949. But none of that is what I mean about these deceptive pro-vaccine graphs just being the tip of the iceberg

All these deceptive pro-vaccine graphs, numerous as they are, represent only a tiny portion of the vaccinationist deception. Vaccinationist deception is most often verbal, not visual:

The Graveyard Gambits and Lifespan Lectures. The CDC and Dr. David Gorski giving readers the impression that vaccines are to thank for the USA no longer having 9,000 or 10,000 whooping cough deaths each year. Paul Offit and Rino Rappuoli claiming that vaccines have added 30 and 40 years to our lifespan, Dr Ari Brown pointing to children’s graves in old cemeteries to remind parents of the world before vaccines. All of that is how the vaccinationists give undue credit to vaccines most often.

4. Unsubstantiated claims about modern medicine

As noted earlier in this series, when apologists are forced to concede the existence of major pre-vaccine infectious disease mortality declines, they salvage what glory they can for modern medicine by crediting modern medicine in general for whatever decline that they can’t credit to vaccines specifically.

Gorski repeatedly asserts that the pre-vaccine mortality declines are due to modern medicine; rarely does he make any effort to back up this assertion:

Here Gorski is in 2023 mentioning medical care only, as though it were the primary reason for the pre-vaccine infectious disease mortality decline (emphasis mine):

“This is commonly known as the “vaccines didn’t save us” gambit, in which antivaxxers point to the declines in mortality from vaccine-preventable diseases that had occurred, due to better medical care, before the introduction of vaccines in order to claim that vaccines really didn’t do us much good.”

Here is Gorski over a decade earlier (2012) stating the same:

“The reason mortality was falling before the vaccine was for other reasons. Medical care was getting better, and a smaller percentage of people who got the disease died from it.”

Gorski doesn’t mention anything other than medical care in either of these cases, and he provided no reasoning, nor citations to back up these assertions.

On rare occasions Gorski will at least mention some other factor (such as nutrition), and on only one occasion that I know of did Gorski actually try to provide a reason for his assertion that the declining pre-vaccine mortality rates were due to medical care. Let’s look at this rare instance of Gorski backing up (or at least trying to) his assertion crediting the decline to medical care.

A close look at Gorski’s iron lung example

Gorski’s classic 2010 article “Vaccines didn’t save us” (a.k.a. “vaccines don’t work”): Intellectual dishonesty at its most naked is the one instance that I know of where he attempts to provide a reason for his assertion that the declining infectious disease mortality was due to medical care. This is also one of the rare instances in which he lets nutrition share in some of the glory too. Here it is:

“Here’s the problem. It’s not surprising that death rates were declining before introduction of the vaccines. Medicine was improving. More importantly, supportive care was improving. For example, take the case of polio. Before the introduction of the iron lung and its widespread use, for example, if a polio patient developed paralysis of the respiratory muscles, he would almost certainly die. The iron lung allowed such patients to live. Some even survived in an iron lung for decades. No doubt improved nutrition also played a role as well.”

Gorski wrote that in response to the six Australian death rate graphs by Beattie that we looked at in Figure 44 of this essay. Gorski then in the article of course pivoted to efficacy and case notifications and pointed to a single USA measles case rate graph as a rebuttal to the six Australian death rate graphs because I guess that was supposed to be a logical response.

So Gorski attempts to credit the pre-vaccine mortality plummets to modern medicine. Now firstly that is a non sequitur on Gorski’s part. The point of those graphs that Gorski is criticizing was to demonstrate what was not responsible for the mortality decline – what vaccines didn’t do; it was a refutation of vaccinationist messages that give people the impression that vaccines played the primary role in infectious disease mortality declines.

And so, even if Gorski could have explained what actually did cause the mortality declines, that would neither change nor refute the point being made -- the point being that it wasn’t the vaccines that caused the decline as the Vaccine Evangelists would have us believe.

Secondly, Gorski offered an explanation for one of six diseases (polio); if you are going to attempt to explain the infectious disease mortality decline in general with just one example then at least choose a representative example. Historical polio mortality trends are not representative of historical infectious disease mortality trends. When the other diseases were at their worst in the 19^th century, polio was still relatively unknown in many areas. As the mortality for the other diseases plummeted in the first half of the 20^th century, polio mortality climbed. Polio mortality had the opposite trend of most the other diseases and the opposite trend of infectious disease mortality in general.

Thirdly, in the big picture polio accounts for a smaller portion of the infectious disease mortality decline than any of the other six diseases shown for Australia in the graphs Gorski is addressing, making polio even less relevant for an explanation of the infectious disease mortality decline in general.

Fourthly, the explanation Gorski provides for the pre-vaccine polio mortality decline doesn’t hold up: Gorski points to the introduction and widespread use of the iron lung to explain the decline. In Australia polio deaths peaked in 1951. Is that when the iron lung was introduced or came into widespread use in Australia? No, by the late 1930s the Australians were already not just using iron lungs, they were developing new designs that were cheaper and easier to manufacture, and producing these iron lungs (technically plywood lungs, but that doesn’t have the same ring to it) in Australia (see Here and Here).

The worst polio mortality years came after the introduction, development, production, and widespread use of iron lungs in Australia. This isn’t of course to say that the iron lungs caused the spike in polio deaths, I’m not suggesting that, I’m simply pointing out the inadequacy of Gorski’s explanation for the pre-vaccine mortality decline.

If he was going to use only one example to back up his assertion about medical care, which is the case, then polio was in every which way the least relevant example Gorski could have used to illustrate his point, and his claim about pre-vaccine polio mortality declines doesn’t hold water anyway.

What then did cause the infectious disease mortality decline?

Frequently I have found that vaccinationists bizarrely act as though they have defeated an argument about what didn’t cause the mortality decline by pointing to something that could have caused the decline. We can see that Gorski does this, and I have personally experienced this multiple times. I’ll, for example, share in a social media group, a graph which demonstrates that a vaccine could not have had anything to do with the majority of a decline in a certain infectious disease. I will make no other claims. Defensive vaccinationists will start with calling the data fake until they take the time to actually check it out and realize it’s real, and then they retort along the lines of:

“Well then it was nutrition that caused that decline. So there! Take that you dumb anti-vaxxer!”

By pointing out what may very well have caused the decline they are merely corroborating my point about what didn’t cause the decline, but somehow they see this as a refutation of the point being made. This comes up so often I thought it worth addressing.

What then was driving the differences in infectious disease mortality rates? Well actually I’m not going to answer that question. I don’t need to. My point here is to remove undue credit from vaccines. I do not need to identify what did cause the decline in order to rule out what didn’t. It’s like a murder suspect: if it can be demonstrated that Mrs. Peacock wasn’t even at the party the evening of the murder, you can then conclude that Mrs. Peacock didn’t kill Miss Scarlet in the billiard room with the pipe wrench. Even if you don’t know who did, you know who didn’t; Mrs Peacock didn’t because she wasn’t there that evening.

That is the beauty of the notorious anti-vaccinationist death rate graph: We can use such graphical presentations to debunk various Vaccine Evangelist messages by demonstrating that vaccines did not cause these major mortality declines because for most the infectious diseases they arrived to late to have done so. We do not need to positively identify what did cause major infectious disease mortality declines in order to begin the process of elimination and rule out things that couldn’t have.

Clearly something, likely many things, changed, and these changes drove the decline in infectious disease mortality. Changes in food quality and quantity, drinking water quality, air quality, substance abuse, medical practices, child rearing, breastfeeding or not, living environments, working environments, emotional states which affect physical states, and so on and so forth, could have all exerted in their own way, positive and negative influences on infectious disease mortality rates. And those are just known possible factors; who knows how many other relevant factors we are overlooking?

It would be very difficult to know with any certainty how much influence each known factor exerted on infectious disease mortality rates, how much influence unknown factors exerted, and how various factors in combination affected infectious disease mortality rates.

Therefore, skepticism is warranted when dealing with the claims of vaccine apologists who confidently assert that pre-vaccine infectious disease mortality declines are due to medical care.

What you would logically need to do to substantiate Gorski’s medical care claim

If Gorski and other vaccine apologists wish to go about confidently asserting that pre-vaccine mortality declines are due to medical care, it should be noted that A – even if true that would not change the fact that vaccines are being given undue credit for those declines, and B - the burden of proof rests squarely on the vaccine apologists’ shoulders to demonstrate their bold claims about modern medicine.

At minimum they would need to demonstrate that changes in the quality and availability of medical care accounts for a greater portion of the infectious disease mortality decline than all the other factors. They would need to demonstrate that medical care accounts for more of this decline than changes in the quality and availability of food, and drinking water. They would also need to take into account changes in air quality, living and working conditions, and so forth.

When it comes to attempting to identify what caused the majority of the major historical infectious disease mortality declines, it is delightfully ironic that in many cases, vaccines are one of the few factors that can be ruled out. Most of the other factors were at play throughout the time periods in question and cannot be easily ruled out.

The vaccine apologist’s sweeping assertions that medical care played the primary role in pre-vaccine infectious disease mortality declines are unsubstantiated. To substantiate these claims they need to provide compelling and sufficient evidence.

5. The Swedish vaccine warning story is an own goal for the vaccinationists

To illustrate the grave results of not vaccinating, vaccinationists will often point to the horror that unfolded when pertussis vaccination rates fell in the 1970s in various countries. In Gorski’s article “Vaccines didn’t save us” (a.k.a. “vaccines don’t work”): Intellectual dishonesty at its most naked he shares the following excerpt from the CDC:

“Finally, we can look at the experiences of several developed countries after they let their immunization levels drop. Three countries – Great Britain, Sweden, and Japan – cut back the use of pertussis vaccine because of fear about the vaccine. The effect was dramatic and immediate. In Great Britain, a drop in pertussis vaccination in 1974 was followed by an epidemic of more than 100,000 cases of pertussis and 36 deaths by 1978. In Japan, around the same time, a drop in vaccination rates from 70% to 20%-40% led to a jump in pertussis from 393 cases and no deaths in 1974 to 13,000 cases and 41 deaths in 1979. In Sweden, the annual incidence rate of pertussis per 100,000 children 0-6 years of age increased from 700 cases in 1981 to 3,200 in 1985. It seems clear from these experiences that not only would diseases not be disappearing without vaccines, but if we were to stop vaccinating, they would come back.”

That is from an article where the CDC does its own version of misdirection from the mortality argument by studiously ignoring the matter of vaccines being given undue credit for mortality reductions and focusing exclusively on morbidity. The CDC does, though, in that same article invoke deaths when they want to illustrate the seriousness of not vaccinating as seen in the above paragraph, even though they will not so much as acknowledge the matter of undue credit given to vaccines for mortality reductions in their supposed rebuttal of anti-vaccinationist talking points.

Another article on Science Based Medicine published a year before Gorski’s article also invoked the Swedish example.

Here, below, we see a commentator bluntly invoking the Swedish example in the comments to an article on the Boston University School of Public health website:

“The ‘no pertussis vaccine’ experiment has been done repeatedly and results in dead children. This is exactly what happened in Sweden and Japan. About whether these vaccines save lives, there is no reasonable debate whatsoever.”

In the article Vaccines are Necessary by Vincent Iannelli, MD, we are reminded of the grave consequences of not vaccinating:

“pertussis – yes, some of our pertussis outbreaks are because of waning immunity and occur in fully vaccinated children, but there were even larger outbreaks in Japan, Sweden, Italy, Ireland, Australia, and other countries in the 1970s and 1980s when immunization rates dropped, cases soared, and children died.”

There are many nations where pertussis vaccination rates fell in the 1970s.

In many of those nations pertussis vaccination rates started to pick back up shortly after dipping low in the 70s.

Here is where Sweden was very different: Swedish vaccination rates did not head back up throughout the 80s as they did in Britain. Sweden did not introduce a new pertussis vaccine in 1981 as they did in Japan. Sweden instead abandoned their pertussis vaccination program altogether in 1979, had no pertussis vaccination program at all in the 1980s, and did not resume their pertussis vaccination program again until 1996.

In terms of a natural experiment showing what would happen if we stopped vaccinating against pertussis, the Swedish example is as good as it gets.

Whooping cough mortality in Sweden

We’ll start our examination of what happened in Sweden by looking at the mortality data.

Presented below are two graphs of whooping cough mortality in Sweden with nearly 160 years of data shown - all the way back to 1861. Progressively closer views are provided in the next graph with just one century worth of Swedish whooping cough mortality data in Figure 53 and also an inset which is an even closer detail starting right at 1953, the year Sweden introduced the whooping cough vaccine.

These graphs progressing from the big picture all the way to close detail will allow the reader to take it all in while maintaining historical perspective.

The data sources are the historical series of the Official Statistics of Sweden, and the WHO’s mortality database.

Figure 52

~

Figure 53

As you can see in the graphical presentations of the data above: almost all the whooping cough mortality decline occurred before the introduction of pertussis vaccination in Sweden in 1953.

Since whooping cough mortality had been declining for at least ninety years, with almost all the whooping cough mortality decline having occurred before the introduction of pertussis vaccination in Sweden in 1953 we can reasonably infer that the last bit of mortality decline would have happened regardless of whether or not Sweden had introduced whooping cough vaccines and that therefore pertussis vaccination contributed little or nothing to the whooping cough mortality decline in Sweden.

But in the case of Sweden we are not left with just a reasonable inference, we have additional confirmation: when Sweden suspended pertussis vaccination, the mortality rate did not climb back up to the already relatively low pre-vaccine 1950s level. Whooping cough mortality stayed low, averaging less than one death every other year. When vaccines were reintroduced and very high vaccination coverage reached in a very short time, whooping cough deaths didn’t go lower still but actually increased ever so slightly.

Now let’s look at cases.

Pertussis cases in Sweden

Presented below are the number of reported pertussis cases in Sweden from 1980 through the present. (1980 because for cases I’m using just the WHO immunization data portal which does not contain pre-1980 data).

Figure 54

There it is; the substantial drop in reported cases after the reintroduction of the pertussis vaccination program in Sweden.

In the 16 years of 1980 through 1995, without a pertussis vaccination program, Sweden had 141,158 reported pertussis cases.

In the next 16 years beginning in 1996 and continuing through 2011, throughout which time pertussis vaccination rates were very high, Sweden had 22,059 reported pertussis cases.

In other words Sweden had 6.4 times fewer reported cases with high pertussis vaccination rates.

If we stopped our analysis here it would appear to be a draw, with one data set supporting the anti-vaccinationist contention that pertussis vaccination had little or no positive effect on pertussis mortality, while still allowing the vaccinationists to wax eloquent about fewer reported cases.

So, something for everyone! – If that is, we were to stop our analysis here. But we have no reason to stop now: we can use the mortality data and the reported cases to calculate the case fatality rate. And the case fatality rate is the fatal blow to the Swedish whooping cough warning story.

Coup de grâce: cases divided by deaths equals . . . the case fatality rate

For the16 years of 1980 through 1995, without a pertussis vaccination program in Sweden the case fatality rate works out to 1 death per 20,165 cases. We could also express the case fatality rate as about five deaths per 100,000 cases.

For the next 16 years beginning in 1996 and continuing through 2011, throughout which time pertussis vaccination rates were very high in Sweden, the case fatality rate works out to 1 death per 2,451 cases. We could also express that as a rate of nearly 41 deaths (40.8) per 100,000 cases.

So the case fatality rate went up 8 fold with the reintroduction of pertussis vaccination.

Figure 55

The reintroduction of the pertussis vaccination program brought a 6-fold reduction in cases and an 8-fold increase in the case fatality rate -- plummeting cases and skyrocketing case fatality rates.

That is to say, six times fewer patients were recorded as having pertussis in Sweden but each of those patients was eight times more likely to have a fatal outcome after the reintroduction of the vaccine.

That’s no victory at all:

If you had a fishing boat fleet that implemented a new set of safety procedures which over the years resulted in 6 times fewer man overboard incidences, but when a man did go over board they were 8 times less likely to be successfully rescued and instead they drown – that would not be a net success.

From end to end then the Swedish whooping cough warning story is an own goal for the vaccinationists. It is a demonstration of net nothing lost by ending vaccination, net nothing gained by resuming it.

But that still leaves us with the mystery of why did the cases plummet and the case fatality rate skyrocketed?

I will offer my speculation on what happened and I invite readers and critics to provide evidence that supports or contradicts this speculation if they have any on hand.

I propose that the drop in cases coinciding with a jump in case fatality rates was most likely a statistical artifact caused by confirmation bias. What I propose is that health care professionals would be confident that the vaccines work. They would not be as worried about patients with a cough, and less likely to diagnose patients with pertussis. What before were mild cases of pertussis became just plain old coughs and colds.

Parents who believed in vaccines enough to have their child vaccinated (almost all the Swedes) also would not be as worried about bringing their child to a doctor for a cough as they would figure that their child had a high degree of protection, and so between these factors the case rate falls. But severe whooping cough – severe enough to be fatal – still catches the attention of both parents and health care professionals and so is less likely to be brushed to the side, hence the mortality rate doesn’t fall.

This would explain why the case rate plummeted and the case fatality rate skyrocketed. This scenario would involve no change in prevalence of actual sickness, only a change in the attitude of parents and health care providers towards kids with a cough.

6. Summary of of my critique of Gorski’s arguments.

I mentioned that I would use this deconstruction of Gorski’s arguments as a point of departure for hitting subjects of particular interest such as pertussis in Sweden. So much so have I done this that perhaps the critique of Gorski’s arguments has almost gotten lost amongst all the excitement of reviewing deceptive pro-vaccine graphs, and examining what really happened in Sweden. So here I will summarize my critique of Gorski’s arguments in his two articles that directly deal with (or I should say appear to deal with, but studiously avoid) the matter of undue credit given vaccines.

Principal criticism

My first and foremost criticism of Gorski’s arguments presented in the articles:

“Vaccines didn’t save us” (a.k.a. “vaccines don’t work”): Intellectual dishonesty at its most naked and J.B. Handley versus vaccine science. Again. Not surprisingly, J.B. loses

Is that Gorski avoids acknowledging that vaccine evangelists are regularly making claims that give undue credit to vaccines for lives saved, deaths averted, and mortality reduced (as I have extensively documented in Part 1 and 4 of this essays series).

As I demonstrated Gorski does this by explicitly conflating the question of:

Have vaccines saved the lives, averted the deaths, and reduced the mortality that the vaccine evangelists claim them to have done?

With the question of whether or not vaccines work.

Gorski did this right at the very beginning of his writing on these matters with the title itself “Vaccines didn’t save us” (a.k.a. “vaccines don’t work”).

Gorski consistently misdirects from what is a fundamentally historical question to a question of vaccine efficacy.

This, my first and foremost criticism of Gorski’s arguments, is the only one I’m going to note in this summary.

The review of all the deceptive graphs, and the examination of what really happened in Sweden, is subject matter I wanted to cover anyway, and deconstructing Gorski’s arguments was simply a nice opportunity to do it.

But for Gorski’s writing specifically, my principle criticism is that he uses conflation and misdirection to altogether avoid acknowledging the undue credit given vaccines, and gaslight his audience into thinking that:

“No one ever said that vaccination did account for the impressive declines in mortality seen in the first half of the 20th century. Antivaxers like Handley like to make that claim, either explicitly or implicitly, but that doesn’t make it so.”

I will close this essay installment with a meme that I welcome you to share if you see fit to do so. When sharing this meme it would pair well with any of the death rate graphs we’ve been reviewing in this series or with the cover drawing, with which it is already paired at the beginning of this essay installment. (you’re welcome to share any of the graphics that I have created for this series. Bystrianyk and Humphries, and Greg Beattie each also give permission on their respective websites to share their graphical presentations).

A Couple Ideas for Those Who Would Like to Support my Work

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1. Making a small single, or recurring donation to me through the donation page on my website (or a paid Substack subscription which is effectively a donation as all my essays are freely available), or making a purchase of a small print, mug, or greeting card, through my art prints website.

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Up next: Part 6: The Apologists Continued

→ Read Part 6: The Apologists Continued

Jordan Henderson lives in Washington State in the Northwest of the United States. He works in oil paints, and charcoals. A portfolio of his works can be viewed at either of his websites: Original Paintings – Fine Art Prints

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Brief recap (skip if the previous essays are fresh in your mind)

We’ve reviewed in this essay series historical infectious disease mortality, and the introduction (or lack thereof) of widespread vaccination for various diseases in England and Wales, in Australia, and in the USA (we reviewed this in Part 2: Apostasy).

We’ve seen how the historical data available for these countries directly contradicts the messages preached by the Vaccine Evangelists (we reviewed their preaching in Part 1: The Evangelists).

We went on to explore the major differences between mortality and morbidity data, and we deconstructed our first case example of Vaccine Apologetics in Part 3: The Red Herring a Tour of the Motte.

Here in Part 4, we’ll broaden the picture even further and add another country to our analysis. We’ll look at historical infectious disease mortality for Spain.

~ End of Recap ~

Spain has national, detailed cause of death data from the year 1900 onward. As with the other countries we have looked at, a drastic plummet in deaths attributed to infectious disease occurs in Spain in the 20^th century. For Spain too, we can see that clearly vaccines could not have been the primary reason, nor one of the primary reasons for this decline. The central misconception of the Doctrine of Salvation Through Vaccination* is preached in Spain just as it is almost everywhere else, yet it is just as untrue for Spain as it is for the English speaking world.

For many of the major diseases, including the deadliest diseases in Spain during the 20^th century, there was no vaccination. For many other diseases the vaccine came after almost all the decline in mortality had already occurred; only for a small portion of the diseases are the relevant vaccines introduced in Spain before the majority of the decline in mortality had yet to occur.

An interesting feature of the Spanish data is that many vaccines were introduced later in Spain then what they were in the English speaking countries (especially compared to the USA and Australia which were early adopters of many vaccines). For example: routine whooping cough and diphtheria vaccination began in Spain in 1965; that’s around 17 years later than in the USA; measles vaccines were introduced in Spain in 1978; that’s 15 years later than when they were introduced in the USA. This means, as we will see, that an even greater portion of Spain’s 20^th century reduction in mortality for certain infectious diseases occurred before widespread vaccination.

For those short on time feel free to scroll through this essay and peruse the many graphical layouts of the Spanish mortality data to take it in at a glance.

Introductory Notes:

1. Numbering of figures in this essay installment starts at Figure 26 as the last essay installment left off at Figure 25. Labeling of exhibits of Vaccine Evangelism starts at Exhibit M in this installment, as our first exhibition of Vaccine Evangelism in Part 1: The Evangelists left off at Exhibit L.

2. I previously stated that this fourth installment of this essay series would review mortality data across multiple countries in mainland Europe, but have decided to focus this installment on just one country, Spain, so that the analysis presented can be more methodical without being overly long (by covering more diseases in one country rather than fewer diseases across multiple countries).

Links to the other essays in this series for easy navigation

Part 1 - The Evangelists

Part 2 – Apostasy

Part 3 - The Red Herring: A Tour of the Motte

Part 4 – Spanish Death Data (you are here)

Part 5 - The Apologists

Part 6 - The Apologists Continued

Part 7 - The Apologist’s Playbook

Table of Contents for Part 4 – Spanish Death Data

1. Putting the Spanish Data Into Perspective

• Should we look at the data as the actual number of recorded deaths or as the death rate per 100,000 - what gives us a clearer picture for Spain? Plus population and yearly number of births over time for Spain.

• Infant Mortality Rate for Spain.

• The diseases ranked from most to least deadly for 20^th century Spain.

2. Vaccine Evangelism in Spain

• Whooping Cough Mortality and Vaccines in Spain – Exhibits M through P

• Child Mortality in Spain + a Lifespan Lecture – Exhibits Q through T.

3. Graphical profile of 20^th century mortality in Spain for individual diseases, and coverage of their respective vaccines or lack thereof

• Diarrhea and Enteritis

• Tuberculosis

• Pneumonia

• Bronchitis

• Meningitis

• Flu

• Measles

• Typhoid Fever

• Diphtheria

• Whooping Cough

• Scarlet Fever

~

This article was originally published on Winter Oak, Nevermore, Activist Post, and Valerie Kochmann.

~

1. Putting the Spanish Data Into Perspective

I want to provide the reader a big picture view of Spanish mortality and mortality data before we look at the details. These are some basic things I myself wanted to know in order to paint a bigger picture to provide context and perspective when viewing the mortality trends of the individual diseases.

Should we look at the data as the actual number of recorded deaths or as the death rate per 100,000 - what gives us a clearer picture for Spain? Plus population and yearly number of births over time for Spain. (Nerd Warning! This is a fine point that matters to me, but might not to you; If this question you find dull, go ahead and skip ahead to the Infant Mortality Rate for Spain)

For some of the Spanish data, source documents provide the data in two forms giving us the option of looking at it as the actual number of recorded deaths, or we can look at it as the rate of death per 100,000 living people.

In certain cases the rate per 100,000 gives us a more accurate picture because the population of Spain more than doubled during the 20^th century, from 18.6 million in 1900 to 39.4 million in 1999.

Figure 26

But in other cases the rate of death per hundred thousand could distort the picture slightly, because while the population of Spain doubled in the 20^th century, the number of children did not. The graph below, figure 27, shows us the number of births per year in Spain over the 20^th century.

Figure 27

From 1900 through the 1970s between 600,000 and 700,000 children were born in Spain each year (with the exception of the Spanish Civil War [1936-39] and the years immediately after it).

The rate of death per hundred thousand living would slightly distort the picture for diseases that primarily affected children because the growing adult population would dilute the death rate even though the number of children being born each year was holding relatively steady across an 80 year period.

So, for diseases that were primarily associated with child mortality, we will look at the actual number of recorded deaths per year over time.

For diseases that were associated with mortality in adults, as much or more so then children, we will look at the death rate per 100,000 living over time, as this will take into account the doubling of the population.

Infant Mortality Rate for Spain.

Figure 28

In figure 28*, I included the historical infant mortality rate for the United States so as to give us a point of comparison for the Spanish infant mortality data (Though the US birth data isn’t as old because the United States birth registration area wasn’t established till 1915).

We can see that the infant mortality rate was substantially higher in Spain than in the United States in the early and mid 20^th century, but also that Spain appears to have surpassed the United States and had a notably better/lower infant mortality rate by the end of the 20^th century.**

The plummet in the 20^th century Spanish infant mortality rate is interrupted, and reversed in a major way twice; the first interruption and reversal is concurrent with World War I. I’ve read that despite Spain’s neutrality Spain’s population experienced hardship and a subsistence crisis due to World War I.

The second interruption and reversal of the plummet in the infant mortality rate is during the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939) and the years of famines and food shortages following it.

Notes for figure 28

*That spike in the infant mortality rate for Spain in 1975 is probably not reflective of an actual spike in 1975; the source document mentions that one-day-old deaths had previously not been included in the infant mortality data for Spain and had instead been grouped with stillbirths, but were included in the infant mortality category beginning in 1975.

**Taken at face value the USA has a surprisingly high infant mortality rate compared to Western Europe, but when you get to such overall low infant mortality rates slight differences in recording between countries could account for most the difference. See this paper for an argument that the USA’s infant mortality rate being higher than Western Europe is primarily due to differences in categorization of deaths in the grey area between infant death and stillbirth.

It would require a fairly sophisticated analysis of the data to know with some certainty what percentage of Spain’s lower infant mortality rate is real vs an artifact of different recording practices. I have not had time to carefully investigate this and Spanish Infant Mortality vs the USA’s is not at all of critical importance to this essay series, I’m just adding this note to acknowledge the uncertainty in these areas. I do think it probable though that Spain does ultimately have a better infant mortality rate than the USA when we consider that Spain also has a lower maternal mortality rate, which suggests healthier pregnancies, and Spain has a longer life expectancy suggesting overall better health.

Major diseases arranged from most to least deadly in Spain for the first five years of the 20^th century

To aid in visualizing the comparative deadliness of each major disease in Spain for the early 20^th century, I added up the deaths attributed to each disease during the five years 1900 to 1904, (and 1901 to 1905 for dysentery for which 1900 data was unavailable) and lined them up side by side in the graph below.

Figure 29

Here we can see in figure 29 the deadliness of the major infectious diseases relative to one another for the first five years of 20^th century in Spain. Deaths attributed to diarrheal diseases, tuberculosis, and pneumonia top the list, which are the same three (though in different order) that topped the leading causes of death list for the USA in 1900 (which we reviewed in Part 2: Apostasy). Here, though, we see bronchitis* also at the top, right after diarrheal diseases and before tuberculosis and pneumonia.

*Bronchitis is divided into acute bronchitis which is conventionally considered to have an infectious cause, and chronic bronchitis which is generally not considered to have an infectious cause. So preferably only acute bronchitis would be included here, but the only continuous series of data that I could find for bronchitis mortality in 20^th century Spain was for both types of bronchitis combined.

However we can see that in early 20^th century Spain, for the years 1912 to 1920 over two thirds of the recorded bronchitis deaths are for acute bronchitis. Having a list for only acute bronchitis would move bronchitis down the list of leading causes of infectious diseases deaths, though it would still be near the top; it would probably come right after pneumonia and before meningitis.

Let’s now look at the single worst year for each major infectious diseases in the 20^th century (please note; I don’t intend to endorse the belief that all these diseases necessarily have infectious origins - I refer to them as infectious diseases simply because that’s what they are conventionally considered and categorized as).

Figure 30

The year 1918, dominates the chart with the deaths attributed to the flu of 1918, but it is also the highest 20^th century year for the mortality of four other major infectious diseases in Spain.

To get a picture of how mortality from these diseases stacks up relative to one another outside of the anomalous years of 1918 and 1919, let’s look at one last comparison; same graph as figure 30 but this time excluding the years 1918 and 1919.

Figure 31

This concludes the overview. After a brief review of some vaccine evangelism in Spain we’ll look at death data attributed to each disease so that we can view the trajectories of mortality from each disease individually in Spain. We won’t hit every single one; specifically I won’t be going over smallpox or polio which as I noted in Part 2: Apostasy each demand separate at length discussion to the point that they could easily hog the whole essay series if I didn’t intentionally set them to the side.

2. Vaccine Evangelism in Spain

In the first installment of this essay series (Part 1: The Evangelists) we reviewed numerous examples of Vaccine Evangelists in the English speaking world in which Vaccine Evangelists preached messages that promoted the central misconception of the Doctrine of Salvation Through Vaccination.*

Before we look at the mortality profiles of the major infectious diseases in Spain, let’s first immerse ourselves in some Spanish Vaccine Evangelism, and compare the impression that we get from these Vaccine Evangelist messages with the historical mortality data that we are about to look at.

Spanish Vaccine Evangelism is hardly any different then English Vaccine Evangelism, save that, of course, Spain is more often used as the case example for Spanish Vaccine Evangelists.

(* The central misconception of the Doctrine of Salvation Through Vaccination being:

The belief that vaccines played a primary role in causing the drastic decline in deaths attributed to infectious disease in general, and many major diseases in particular, that occurred in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, especially as this relates to the plummet in infant and child mortality rates; and also the corollary belief that, these diseases would return with comparable devastation if we stopped vaccination against them.)

Whooping Cough Mortality and Vaccines in Spain – Exhibits M through P

Here we have a selection of examples in which a specific, iconic disease is being discussed, in this case whooping cough, and in each example the implication is given that vaccines are the primary reason for whooping no longer being a major cause of child mortality in Spain.

The statements that we are about to review are not fabricated lies, they are lies by omission.

In each one of these examples the authors do not inform the reader that more than 98% of the 20^th century decline in Spanish whooping cough mortality occurred before whooping cough vaccines were added to the Spanish vaccination schedule in 1965 (as we will see a little later in this essay); they leave you to think that a vaccine was the primary reason for the reduction in whooping cough deaths in Spain.

Exhibit M

“Whooping cough was one of the most common childhood diseases and one of the
most important causes of mortality in children before the introduction of
vaccination programs in 1965.”

-That’s from the 2009 Situation of Whooping Cough in Spain, by the National Epidemiology Center: Carlos III Health Institute.

Exhibit N

“Pertussis is an acute bacterial infection of the upper respiratory tract caused by Bordetella pertussis. It was one of the most common diseases and one of the most important causes of mortality in children before the introduction of vaccination programs. In Spain it has been a notifiable disease since 1904. The vaccine was included in Aragon’s children’s calendar in 1965.”

From a 2023 article Public Health detects an outbreak of whooping cough in Zaragoza with at least 24 cases from the Spanish newspaper paper Heraldo de Aragón.

Exhibit O

“Whooping cough was one of the most common childhood diseases in Spain and one of the most important causes of mortality until the introduction of systematic vaccination in 1965 against Bordetella pertussis, the bacterium that causes the infection.”

Whooping Cough is not Child's Play – a 2014 article in El Mundo – a large newspaper in Spain.

Exhibit P

“In Spain, following the introduction of the whooping cough vaccine in 1965, mortality was reduced until the decade of the 90s, deaths from whooping cough were barely reported; going from approximately 130 deaths annually before the introduction of vaccination to 4 deaths annually in recent seasons.”

That’s from the 2020 - Study of Seroprevalence in Spain, page 110, by the Spanish government’s Ministry of Health.

Child Mortality in Spain + a Lifespan Lecture – Exhibits Q through T.

Here we have three examples which give the reader the idea that vaccines are the main reason for infectious disease no longer being the main cause of infant mortality in Spain and developed countries in general (exhibits Q, R and S respectively), followed by a Lifespan Lecture in which vaccines are credited for nearly forty years of increased longevity (exhibit T).

Exhibit Q

“Before the introduction of vaccination schedules in Spain, infectious diseases were
the main cause of infant mortality (Table 1) and epidemics were
frequent.”

That’s from Important Reasons to Vaccinate Children which is the title of a four page vaccine promotional by the Spanish government’s health ministry.

They back up this assertion with two infographics; a polio notification of incident graph and a table that shows you the number of deaths for one year for selected diseases during a time before vaccination for that disease in Spain, and then they show you the number of deaths for each disease in 2008. Evidently we are supposed to assume that the difference is attributable to the vaccines, and that vaccines are the reason for infectious disease no longer being the main cause of infant mortality.

Exhibit R

“Before the introduction of vaccination schedules in Spain, infectious diseases were the main cause of infant mortality and epidemics were frequent.”

That excerpt is from a 2015 Europress article concerning HPV vaccine coverage in Spain with a section on vaccines in general. This was also reported by Redacción Médica, and there they list the Spanish government body, the Council of Ministers as the source.

The only attempt they make in this article to defend their implication that vaccines are to thank for infectious diseases no longer being the main cause of infant mortality is this paragraph which immediately follows the excerpt above:

“As an example, the year of maximum incidence of pertussis occurred in 1985 with 60,564 cases, in 2010 cases dropped 722; diphtheria cases had their highest incidence in 1940 with 27,517 cases registered; in 1983 there were more than 301,319 cases of measles and more than 161,772 cases of rubella, in 2010 there were 274 cases of measles, while only 10 cases of rubella were counted.”

How does that prove their point? The pertussis example is especially counterproductive to the point that they are trying to make; the year of maximum incidence they give as 1985. 1985 is 20 years after widespread pertussis vaccination in Spain.

Exhibit S

“Prior to the introduction of vaccination schedules in developed countries, infectious diseases were the leading cause of infant mortality (tetanus, polio, diphtheria, pertussis, measles, measles). rubella, parotitis) and epidemics were frequent.”

That’s from the 2018 article Reasons to Vaccinate Children, written by a pediatrician, for the Spanish magazine Guía Infantil.

Exhibit T

“The reality is that people can afford to be anti-vaccine because vaccines have been very successful. A century ago, life expectancy in Europe was 47 years. People died of diphtheria, tetanus, smallpox and cholera.”

“Anti-vaccinationists exist because, thanks to vaccines, they have never seen these diseases. Our life expectancy is 85 years and they take it for granted, but if we live 40 more years it is because we have conquered these microorganisms.”

“This is one of the greatest conquests that human beings have ever made. We are the luckiest generation ever on this planet, the first in three million years to have the luxury of living 85 years. We have failed to communicate and educate about this conquest. Young people should be aware that these microorganisms are not gone, save for small smallpox, and if we stop vaccinating they will return. We can go back and live again for 47 years.”

These excerpts in Exhibit T are from a 2017 article Opponents of vaccines have forgotten that before vaccines we lived 47 years which is the title of an interview with Rino Rappuoli, published in the Spanish digital newspaper El Confidencial.

This is of course yet another example of the Vaccine Evangelists’ Lifespan Lectures, such as those we reviewed in the first essay installment of this series (Exhibits I through L).

Rino Rappuoli is a prominent vaccine developer. Here are just the first two paragraphs of his biography on the Royal Society to give you an idea of his accomplished career developing vaccines:

“Rino Rappuoli is Chief Scientist and Head External R&D, GSK Vaccines. A PhD in Biological Sciences he has served as visiting scientist at Rockefeller University and Harvard Medical School. His past roles comprise Head R&D, Sclavo, Head Vaccine Research and CSO, Chiron Corporation, and Global Head R&D, Novartis Vaccines.

Major achievements include development of CRM197 used in H.influenzae, N.meningitidis, and pneumococcus vaccines; an acellular pertussis vaccine containing a genetically detoxified pertussis toxin; the first conjugate vaccines against meningococcus; MF59 adjuvant for influenza; the meningococcus B genome-derived vaccine.”

3. Graphical profile of 20^th century mortality in Spain for individual diseases, and their respective vaccines or lack thereof

Let’s now view the trajectories of mortality from each major and iconic infectious disease in Spain beginning with the deadliest.

The leading cause of death in the infectious disease category in early 20^th century Spain was diarrhea and enteritis (enteritis is inflammation of the small intestine; can have multiple causes but is commonly attributed to pathogens) so we’ll start our review there.

Diarrhea and Enteritis

Figure 32

Here we are looking at the single biggest category of infectious disease death for 20^th century Spain and there are no vaccines to speak of for it during this time.

According to the authors of Analysis of Health in Spain Across the 20^th Century, of the 75,000 diarrheal deaths in Spain in the year 1900, 40,000 of those deaths were in children under the age of two.

Notice how the mortality profile of this disease category is very similar to the overall profile for infant mortality in Spain (Figure 28).

Tuberculosis

The chart below is the pulmonary and non pulmonary tuberculosis deaths expressed as a rate per hundred thousand, and the BCG vaccine (the vaccine for tuberculosis) doses per year in millions, using the tables from ANÁLISIS DE LA SANIDAD EN ESPAÑA A LO LARGO DEL SIGLO XX.

Figure 33