Ron Unz finally seeing the light.


Posted On: Tuesday - December 7th 2021 8:58PM MST
In Topics: 
  Websites  Pundits  Kung Flu Stupidity



We've gotta realize that, even though most of us here are Unz Review readers, it's is doubtful that 1% of Americans have ever clicked on the site, or maybe less than 0.1%. I believe it was either commenter Adam Smith or Mr. Hail of the Hail to You blog who did a few calculations to get an idea on the readership. Suffice it to say, Ron Unz is no Tucker Carlson or Ann Coulter as far as his number of followers go.

Maybe some of the bigger pundits or big wigs of sorts are readers though. Mr. Unz's site is still very important though, as one of what must be very few well-organized and prolific websites that allows such a wide variety of opinion to be offered, both of the many writers and the commenting crowd. I admire the man for keeping it going.

That doesn't mean the man himself can't be completely full of shit, however. I have a problem with his anti-all-things-Americanism. I don't mean big criticisms of most policies of the US Feral Gov't. I'm completely on-board with that. Mr. Unz just seems to see all problems of the world as caused by Americans. I strongly disagree.

That's all fine, but it was Ron Unz's panicked stance on the Kung Flu, with his (recall your best Carl Sagan voice here) MILLIONS and MILLIONS of Americans going to die from it bit, and his contempt-ridden disparagement of commenters and writers on his own site* that has had me scratching my head about him. How can a guy this smart not see the big picture here on this PanicFest with its resulting big increases in Totalitarianism? On this point, see our post Where have you gone, Ronald Unzio, ... for more. Additionally, the Hail to You blog has some recent discussion of that in the comments section of this article (on Florida lead Panicker Daniel Uhlfelder).

Well, Ron Unz's latest American Pravda article/column shows he is slowly but surely starting to see the light. Yesterday's article, American Pravda: Vaxxing, Anthony Fauci, and AIDS, contains his latest opinions on the Covid vaccinations mostly taken from his reading of Robert Kennedy Jr.'s new book The Real Anthony Fauci. It's the 2nd part of the title that tells us where Mr. Kennedy is going with the book - "Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health". I have not read the book. I think it would be well worthwhile for me to do so.

I won't go critiquing the whole column, as the reader can find 435 comments as of right now that do that very thing. Give yourself 10 - 15 minutes for the article and I suppose 2 - 3 hours for the comments. Enjoy!

I will give a summary of Ron Unz's changing position on the matter of the vax and those (formerly) crazy "wild-eyed anti-vaxxers" - yes, that's Unz phraseology in quotes, still from this article. Here's the deal: When it comes down to it, the guy is very reasonable about the vaccine, as we noted 3 months back in Ron Unz comments with some comment-sense. He's got a whole paragraph in this one with that same reasonableness (I'll start with one sentence earlier too.):
Moreover, the vaccination of children or the youthful seems very misguided given mildness of the illness for those age-cohorts.

Mandatory vaccination efforts enforced by serious legal or employment sanctions are the explosive flashpoint of the anti-vaxxer movement, but these never made any sense to me. The vaccines appear ineffective in preventing infection or transmission, and their main benefit is to greatly reduce the risk of serious illness or death. So the vaccinated have little to fear from those who reject the needle, while the latter can make an informed—or perhaps emotional—choice in weighing the risks of a relatively untested vaccine against those of severe Covid illness. Given the extreme paranoia of a considerable slice of anti-vaxxers, heavy governmental pressure may even be proving counter-productive.
Right on, Ron Unz! The question I have is "just who do you think these wild-eyed anti-vaxxers are?" I haven't read many who are against every vaccine ever given, and not a whole lot against ANY other particular vaccine. It's about the experimental vaccine for the Kung Flu.

Not only that, but I've not read a thing by wild-eyed anti-vaxxers on Mr. Unz's own site that are for banning this vaccine completely. We've been angrily against the application of this vaccine being mandatory BY ANYONE and FOR ANYONE. Oh, well, hey, that's pretty much Ron Unz's opinion, as one may readily read above or in that previous Peak Stupidity post linked-to just above!

Therefore, ipso facto, Ron Unz himself is a wild-eyed anti-vaxxer. Yes, his eyes are kind of wild, come to think of it, and I'm sure they'd be wilder after a couple of shots... wait, I mean whiskey or vodka... no, not those other kinds of shots. They just cause pilots to drop dead in the cockpit, young soccer players to keel over during the 2nd period... stuff like that.

You gotta love this guy though. No, really, I like people with lots of intensity and spirit. I haven't minded Ron Unz's personal insults to me due to being so sensitive. It's more that I couldn't believe the guy could miss the big picture. I couldn't believe a guy who goes far down many rabbit holes in American history to tell us the real story could just go with the Establishment, Big Gov, Lyin' Press, all of them, on this huge issue of the Kung Flu PanicFest.

In the comments I pointed out above on the Hail to You blog, Mr. Hail refers us to what Mr. Anon wrote about how Ron Unz operates:
Ron Unz himself is still in character with the basic line he took in early 2020, though as someone, I think the commenter Mr. Anon once wrote, Unz will probably come out with a long essay in about 2025 which starts with these words: “I never paid much attention to the Corona Virus, busy as I was at the time with various software projects, but recently I was shocked to find out that…………… [insert Corona Anti-Panic side’s basic points from 2020].”
I do remember that from before, and smiled at that take the first time too. It turns out that Mr. Anon's comment was from right here on Peak Stupidity under the "Where have you gone, ..." post linked-to above. Nice future impersonation there, Mr. Anon!

Yes, I am glad to see this important pundit see the light. I don't expect any "I was wrong, people" out of him. It'd be nice, though if he could learn from this and possibly have just a little more respect in the future for commenters on his own site who may have a lot more common sense than he does.

Yes, Ron Unz, there's been a lot of lies and BS out of the Globalists and Big Pharma about this vaccination. It may indeed be part of a nefarious plan. Even if not, mandatory vaccination is Totalitarianism. People have been telling you for a year that this is wrong and we have to fight it all, so, as the man said "Welcome to the party, pal!"



* He's nothing if not a very stalwart, fair man when it comes to not blocking much (commenter-wise) commentary and keeping on writers whose opinions he disparages.

Comments:
Moderator
Thursday - December 9th 2021 4:07PM MST
PS: There are over 200 comment already on this Mike Whitney article:

"Operation Extermination--the Plan to Decimate the Human Immune System with a Lab-Generated Pathogen"

https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/operation-extermination-the-plan-to-decimate-the-human-immune-system-with-a-lab-generated-pathogen/
Moderator
Thursday - December 9th 2021 4:05PM MST
PS: Mr. Hail, I had no idea about how to get the data for that list. It's probably pretty easy and on the site in plain view. Could you give me some details on how you got it.

It's very encouraging, BTW. I have nor read Mike Whitney's latest. As I keep saying, there are not many guys with the fairness that Ron Unz has, as far as keeping on writers who disagree with him completely.

BTW, I think that Raches guy got sort of demoted from blogger to regular unz columnist. Raches really was pretty much in agreement with us on this PanicFest, but damn if he doesn't have a style that is pretty sickening to read for me. I couldn't do it.
Moderator
Thursday - December 9th 2021 4:02PM MST
PS: Thanks for providing those estimates again, Mr. Hail. Yes, Mr. Unz would have been a help to, if nothing else, our spirits, if he had understood that the PanicFest IS the story, not the virus itself.

The commenters (over 600 comments right now) under that new article don't seem to overlap too much with the iSteve crowd, excepting a few of us here. You have a lot of discipline, having quit commenting there cold turkey, to not jump in. Often, I'll get too pissed off not to.

You can see that I was fairly polite about it. That doesn't seem to matter usually, as far as how the guy responds (civilly or un-civilly). Per my first comment on THIS thread, I expected an insult but got politeness. However, that was not in reply to a number of other comments in which I tried to say nicely that he should have given his commenters who knew then what he's only starting to know now more respect.

Thanks for your letter here. I'd paste it in for you as "coming from a friend" if you want, but I think that's asking for trouble!
Moderator
Thursday - December 9th 2021 3:54PM MST
PS: Mr. Corrupt, I wouldn't say "he lost me", because after getting in an argument with him about some details, I just quit reading his articles on that (to me) non-worthwhile subject, even if he's right about it. Your argument against his view makes sense to me, too.

Mr. Unz is particularly pro-China, in that he thinks they can do no wrong. He's never been there, and I don't know if he has any other info from sources there.
Hail
Thursday - December 9th 2021 3:12PM MST
PS

Of interest:

List of UNZ REVIEW most-read items for the past one month:

(1) (most-read on entire website) MIKE WHITNEY -- Research "Game-changer": Spike Protein Increases Heart Attacks and Destroys Immune System

(2) MIKE WHITNEY -- Lethal Injection; Frontline E.R. Doctor gives chilling account of unusual vaccine-induced illness

(3) MIKE WHITNEY -- Excess Deaths point to Depopulation Agenda

(4) RON UNZ -- American Pravda: Giants Silenced by Pygmies

(5) LINH DINH -- Mass Child Sacrifice in Plain Sight

(6) ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. -- Introduction to The Real Anthony Fauci

(7) LAURENT GUYÉNOT -- Jack Ruby: Israel's Smoking Gun

(8) PEPE ESCOBAR -- Fauci as Darth Vader of the Covid wars

_________

Six of the top eight are Corona Anti-Panic including (especially) anti-Vaccine Mandate. One of the top eight is by Ron Unz, whose items are (naturally) most promoted and often get on the top-read list, and whose article on this list was in part speaking up for a partial Corona-dissident.

Most interesting is that now-rather-hardline Anti-Panicker Mike Whitney has the top three slots. I don't think this is common, for one Unz-published author to have all three spot popular slots for the month.

Probably these huge view-counts influenced Unz towards his current line.
Hail
Wednesday - December 8th 2021 7:37PM MST
PS

For all the link-dropping to Peak Stupidity in Unz comment sections done by that prolific commenter Achmed E. Newman, maybe Mr Unz will ne day see this. In that event:

An improvised OPEN LETTER TO RON UNZ:

Mr. Unz, I can echo Mr. Anon in that we appreciate you and your efforts, and the forum you have provided for years. Thank you. I mean no personal offense when I call the US military bio-attack theory "a dumb idea from the start." Maybe that hypothesis was worth bringing up early on, even if on the level of the moon-landing-hoax article you published in 2019 (which you disavowed at time of publishing but said it's worth letting even quacks air their theory, per Unz Review mission statement).

Perhaps I've already lost you here, but I hope not. Because there is something important left to say. There is no way to say this without perhaps risking offense, so I'll just say it without embellishment:

You were wrong on the Corona-Panic. You were wrong in really all its key aspects. This was the biggest failure in your entire career as a published, editor, and sometime-researcher/writer/commentator. Your biggest failure.

You were not alone in getting the Corona-Panic wrong. But you have done a disservice to the world in not allowing yourself to have yet published a "mea culpa" on the Corona-Panic Question. Others have done so. Not a partial one, nor one making readers read between lines, but a flat-out attack on the evil beast that is Corona-Panic, head-on.

The sooner the better that you join the majority of your own writers (as published at the Unz Review, some of whom you name as Mike Whitney, Paul Craig Roberts, Linh Dinh, Gilad Atzmon, and Israel Shamir) on turning against the Corona-Panic beast.

What is the purpose of political discourse? At its best it is the coming to grips with getting things wrong, and adjusting them. This is the running theme of many of your articles over the years. It's time for a full-form, root-and-branch rejection of the Corona-Panic, the social phenomenon which has further disempowered the already weak while empowering the big players and those who already hold the cultural heights. In due time this became obvious to most of your own core writers whom you clearly admire and respect. The power is in your hands to do the honorable thing and turn your rhetorical sword and shield against the evil beast that is the Corona-Panic. Not one or two tentacles--the main body.
Hail
Wednesday - December 8th 2021 7:10PM MST
PS

RE: Al Corrupt:

"Unz kind of lost me proposing the US intentionally released Covid in China"

Yes, it was a dumb idea from the start; none of it made much sense; it was comic-book land. It is the kind of thing a second- or third-rate North Korean or old-line Maoist propagandist would have come up with for an anti-US novel or movie plot.
Hail
Wednesday - December 8th 2021 7:04PM MST
PS

Ron Unz wrote (under date Dec 6, 2021):

______________

"I’ve never paid any attention to vaccines and my own views on the role they might play against Covid were entirely mainstream and conventional, ...." (end quote)
_______________

Yes! There he is, right on time, actually ahead of Mr. Anon's predicted schedule, at "CoronaPanic outbreak plus two years," with a line remarkably similar to Mr. Anon's parody, almost as if parodying the parody.

One funny thing is in the 6000+ word main entry, in which Ron Unz names many of his main writers, and in the hundreds of comments amounting to I presume the high tens of thousands of words, I find only ONE hit for "Sailer"!

It is from SunBakedSuburb:

________________

(quote from SunBakedSuburb):

Made it most of the way through Ron’s article and, whilst he accurately describes COVID 19 as being within the bioweapon genre, he fails to see that the vaccines themselves serve a bioweapon purpose as many researchers and epidemiologists not associated with Western Scientism fear an epidemic of immune disorders that will surely shorten the lives of many who got the jab.

Also, both Ron and Steve Sailer wave away any suspicion pointed at the strange and sinister Sweater Boy Gates. Both Sweater Boy and his father are vocal herd-cullers. The idea that Gates has any role in global vaccine distribution is disturbing.

Ron has built one of the best sites on the internet. And his self-penned articles on other subjects are loaded with insight and unconventional takes. So his conventional take on the mRNA vaccine administered for what is essentially a weaponized cold virus that replicates like crazy might be worth a second look. Although, admittedly, I did take a hit off the pipe before I read the article and wrote this comment.

(end quote)

_________________

From what I have seen and gathered, Steve Sailer retreated into a world in which there was no Corona-Panic or brutal lockdownist thugs heading governments or vaccine mandates or any of it, and no longer talks about it, now therefore being guilty perhaps of omission and commission as in much of 2020..
Hail
Wednesday - December 8th 2021 6:53PM MST
PS

"even though most of us here are Unz Review readers, it's is doubtful that 1% of Americans have ever clicked on the site, or maybe less than 0.1%."

***Warning: Unzology incoming,*** Mr Dieter Kief may stop reading here.

The best estimate for unique-human-being visitors (not page-clicks or visit-sessions) to Unz.com per month was estimated at 500,000 in late 2019. Perhaps more now, but not by too big a factor. And maybe on net the same because of censorship, e.g. the Facebook link ban.

According to data once revealed deep in a comment section, we can class these into four groups, with most being in effect one-time-only visitors.

Generously assuming +50% readership growth since the last Pre-CoronaPanic months, the number may now look something like:

At any given moment in time, Unz.com readership:

(a) Heavy-user Daily Regulars: 15,000

(b) Semi-Daily Regulars: 100,000

(c) Sporadic Visitors: 200,000
(e.g., may click on a link and are sort of aware of the site but are not in a daily habit of visiting, reading, or sinking the time to be comment-regulars)

(d) Newbies: 300,000 or 400,000 or 500,000+, depending on what happens and how much Big Tech is applying soft-censorship pressure that month.

(e) Non-users in a given month: Everyone else.

The heavy commenters that drive comment-section activity are of course driven by (a) and (b) people, and very few of the (d) group ever leave a comment. Extrapolating from what Ron Unz has made, (a) comments probably outnumber (d) commenters despite number 30x or so less.

These are also not lifetime totals but just snapshots in time. Some people fall away and others join in, and people can shift between groups, even moving from (e) to (a) in some cases, or more likely (a) to (c), or (c) to (b), as time commitments or interest dictates. The number who have ever been in one of (a) or (b) is many times the 115,000 there calculated, and moreso still if adding the bigger but softer (c) group.

(Another criticism of this sorting mechanism is it doesn't say much about who's reading what. There is far too much content on the site for even the so-called "heavy user daily regular" from consuming it all, in the way a subscriber to a magazine might read its content cover to cover or nearly so.)

How many of these are Americans? 60%? 70%? So adding (a) + (b) + (c) that's maybe 225,000 unique US individuals in a given month...(and sadly not all of them of the same quality as the Sailer commentariat).

If our numerator is (a) + (b) + (c) and if our denominator is crafted as follows: "English native-speaker North Americans age 16 or older who do any kind of Internet-based political reading whatsoever" --- a number which probably doesn't exceed 100m, I think --- that comes to 0.2%, which is not bad.

We know the Sailer material (but seldom general-purpose Unz material) gets magnified far beyond its limited reach, by merit of regular or semi-regular or at least sporadic readers in right-wing media like Tucker Carlson's people, Newsmax people, some talk radio people, Ann Coulter, and even some elsewhere on the spectrum. If Sailer's actual core readership is in the low tens of thousands (which it is), its impact is in the high hundreds of thousands by this long-observed filtering-up process...

(...which is why it was so painful when he embraced flu-virus-panic when it mattered most, as it the Panic itself was such an info-contagion and contaminated many normal streams of info, including the Sailer-to-mainstream info-pipeline, disarming many would-be early-wave Anti-Panickers.)
Al Corrupt
Wednesday - December 8th 2021 5:33PM MST
PS Unz kind of lost me proposing the US intentionally released Covid in China. Considering the CCP shut down inter-China travel, but let their people travel to the rest of the world, I’m pretty sure I know who’s responsible.
MBlanc46
Wednesday - December 8th 2021 2:43PM MST
PS It stretches the imagination to suppose that the large military powers are not engaging in bioweapons research. Even if they’re sensible enough to prefer not to have to use them, they’re going to be prepared to make them, because they know that the other guy is doing the same thing. I don’t know whether or not the Wuhan lab was doing weapons research or some other sort of enhancement research. If the virus came from the Wuhan lab, that is. One hopes that the MAD doctrine comes to be applied to bioweapons, as it has been to nukes. At least, so far.
Moderator
Wednesday - December 8th 2021 11:46AM MST
PS: I agree, Mr. Blanc. I think when you really given him the definition of what a vaccine is SUPPOSED to do, anyone would be disingenuous to say these vaccines have worked as advertised.

Yeah, Mr. Unz will come around with guns blazing if he finds conspiracies. That's why he has been so into his Covid American-lab-origin theory. (I must have seen 5-8 articles by him on it.) I personally think, no matter where the virus came from, it's the PanicFest as used to implement Totalitarianism that's the story here. I suppose if the creation of the virus was part of the plan, then that IS part of the big story. All of Mr. Unz's and other's writings that I've read note that the biowarfare business has been going on a long time. That was all out in the open.

Anyway, Ron Unz, insults to commenters aside, has a reasonable "you go your way, and I'll go mine" stance on the vaccine.
Moderator
Wednesday - December 8th 2021 11:39AM MST
PS: Alarmist, that was a great Penthouse Forum-based take-off on the intro's to Mr. Unz's "American Pravda" articles! I did LOL, honestly.

Regarding the anti-Americanism, if it were just against the present (let's say arguably last 30 or so years) US Feral Gov't, I would be in full agreement with him. It may be just my impression, but Ron Unz comes across to me as thinking Americans (the people) are all ignorant, incompetent, stupid, you name it. I've not read much of anything in which he had anything good to say, even about the old America, a place that has been the freest and likely best place for ANYONE to have lived in history for a great many years of the duration from its founding through the 1980s.

Maybe that's just because that's all he writes about - not many "feel-good" stories are on The Unz Review!
Moderator
Wednesday - December 8th 2021 11:34AM MST
PS: Dieter, it may do some very very Kung Flu-vulnerable people some good, but for anyone else, I'd say it's a really bad bet now. There are two many unknowns with the vax, and quite a bit of known scary stuff, while Kung Flu mortality has been studied out the ying-yang, so it's pretty well known to not be a problem for most of us. Another known with about the Kung Flu is the many non-Big-Pharma remedies that they have tried to suppress for the last 21 months of all this.

Yeah, Unzology, haha, I guess it's because I spend so much time on that site, WAY WAY too much... I've fallen back off the wagon, or whatever they say about alcoholics who got out for "just one pitcher"...
MBlanc46
Wednesday - December 8th 2021 10:41AM MST
PS By this time, anyone who is at least partially rational, can see that the vaccines aren’t working as advertised. It might be worse than that, but it’s at least “not working as advertised”. (This shouldn’t be a big surprise, as there has never been a successful vaccine for a coronavirus.) Ron Unz is at least partially rational, although he has never met a conspiracy theory that he doesn’t embrace. Therefore, it’s not surprising that he would eventually see at least part of the anti-covid-19-vaccine argument.
The Alarmist
Wednesday - December 8th 2021 10:02AM MST
PS

Mr. Unz’s American Pravda pieces always sound like those famous “Penthouse Letters” of years ago ...

“Dear Penthouse, I never in my life knew [name your sexual fantasy] was possible, but then one day I bumped into the girl next door, who looks remarkably like Mary Anne in Gilligan’s Island, and out of the blue, she not only told me it was possible, but told me she always wanted to do it to me, and completely opened my eyes to a whole new world of wonders when she began to give ot to me like I would have expected from a somewhat tipsy but fully-prent and enthusiatic Ginger.”

I don’t think Ron is so much Anti-American as he might be Anti-American-Government. I can tell you after experiencing Uncle Sugar reaching into my pocket continually across multiple borders for multiple decades and insisting numerous domestic laws should still apply to me abroad, that I can quit easily cut him some slack. I love America and the American people (for the most part), but I can do without its ruling classes.
Dieter Kief
Wednesday - December 8th 2021 12:36AM MST
PS
Nice. The vaccination is no mass killer and it even does some good. Yeah. And don't make the vaccination mandatory, because that .w.i.l.l. make people wild. That's close to stating the obvious but again: Yeah, right.

The rest is - öh: Unzology. An obviously interesting new disipline - just not for me that much.
I'm still in the camp of those who say no matter .w.h.o. says what, it would be nice if it were right / reasonable / disputable - or fun (that's me as a P. J. O-Rourkeist, hehe).
Moderator
Tuesday - December 7th 2021 10:31PM MST
PS: Haha, right here, OK. I didn't even try searching here and didn't notice this comment when I quickly linked to that post.

I didn't directly write "I told you so", but there were plenty of comments that say as much, some nicely and some not.

Oh well, at the end of that thread I wrote him back on something that had nothing to do with Covid-19, just plain old Libertarianism. I expect an insult back, but I've been surprised before.
Mr. Anon
Tuesday - December 7th 2021 9:42PM MST
PS

"If this was you, Mr. Anon, please help me get to the comment in question on the unz or Hail site."

It was here actually, from last February:

https://www.peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=1827

"A few years from now, if any of these dissident websites are even permitted to exist (doubtful, in my view), I wouldn't be surprised to see a column by Mr. Unz over at his review that begins: "I never paid much attention to the Corona Virus, busy as I was at the time with various software projects, but I am surprised to find out that..............."

I didn't expect the beginning of the epiphanny so soon however.

Everybody likes to say "I told you so", but I wouldn't want to make a point of it in this case. Mr. Unz is uncommonly decent in allowing views with which he disagrees. He is a stalwart defender of free speech and free inquiry and I commend him for it.
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