The Self-Sabotage of Alex Berenson

Unreported Truths was a must-read Substack publication last fall. My how the mighty have fallen.

When the hysteria around COVID jabs hit a fever pitch in the second half of 2021, there was seemingly no voice in the mainstream press that was willing to question the “safe and effective” line that had been parroted by every single jOuRNaLiSm institution. Even after “sponsored by Pfizer” became one of the more compelling internet memes last year, mandate dissent was not allowed by anyone writing for one of the anointed legacy newspaper outlets like the New York Times or the Washington Post. Facebook and Twitter were banning people for questioning “safe and effective.”

This widespread policy to control narrative and push big pharma products led to a surge in independent writers and analysts on platforms like Substack. Alex Berenson’s Unreported Truths became a must read for anyone questioning the true efficacy of vaccinations that lacked long term clinical trials and that were coming from companies with deeply concerning track records of product failure and fraudulent marketing.

Berenson, while not a scientist, was a former New York Times writer and an Edgar Award winning novelist. He was a New York liberal who found a niche writing to middle America conservatives and centrists. Those middle America conservatives and centrists helped him become one of the leading vax-skeptics on Substack. But as the public discourse around jabs and jab mandates has largely shifted from one of mainstream acceptance of efficacy models to one where efficacy failure is now widely understood, the market need for voices previously branded as “vaccine deniers” is shrinking.

Strike 1

Trust in Berenson’s commitment to the truth started to wobble in January of this year when he inexplicably challenged Robert Malone’s claim to have been the inventor of mRNA vaccines in a live conversation on FNC. I want you to actually watch this clip all the way through because it’s even more fascinating 6 months later:

This conversation was supposed to be about censorship and speech freedom. Yet, Berenson took the opportunity to spend more time trying to discredit Robert Malone than actually talking about censorship. Berenson’s strongest commentary on censorship didn’t come until the very last 15 seconds of this video:

Right or wrong censorship is wrong… this drive to try to get people banned must stop. It’s un-American.

This quote is an important comment for two reasons:

1. The sentiment is dead-on accurate.

2. We can now question whether he actually believed any of it.

It would be easy to give Berenson a second strike for his repeated assurances that Ivermectin hasn’t shown effectiveness in treating COVID infection but we can probably just lump that in with the Malone attack under strike 1 because they both relate to the virus.

Strike 2

The war with Twitter is wild and I’m not sure we’re ever going to know what happened. Here’s what we do know:

• Alex Berenson sued Twitter for getting banned last year

• Alex Berenson raised six figures from his followers for his legal battle with Twitter

• Alex Berenson raised that money under the pretense that he would get discovery and that he would not settle with Twitter

• Alex Berenson settled with Twitter and there has been no discovery that we’re yet aware of

Alex Berenson is refunding people their money when they ask for it. That said, many of Alex’s subscribers left after the settlement with Twitter. I gave him one more shot. It didn’t take long for Strike 3.

Strike 3

Last night was the last straw for me. After engaging in a days long quote-tweet battle with a Twitter user named Robert Barnes over Alex Jones, Berenson tweeted this:

Alex Berenson @AlexBerenson

Let me be clear: I hope Alex Jones winds up destitute. He deserves to lose everything for the lies he told and encouraged about the Sandy Hook families. He is a poisonous grifter who is terrible for the country. Anyone who defends him is equally disgusting. Is that clear enough?

You can’t tell from the metrics, but the tweet was ratio’d. The top comment ended up getting more likes than Alex’s original tweet:

Joshua Fontanilla @joshfontanilla

@AlexBerenson No one should be bankrupted for having an opinion. I don’t care how crazy it is. People defended you under the exact same arguments, which you don’t allow for others. Gross. Unfollow and unsubscribe.

That’s generally an indication that the tweet missed the mark. But what Berenson’s take on Alex Jones shows us is who Alex Berenson really is. I don’t like Alex Jones either. But this sentiment is such a far cry from what Alex Berenson expected when the freedom of expression in question was his own. You can literally replace the words “Jones” and “Sandy Hook families” with “Berenson” and “vaccines.” Then Berenson’s tweet reads like this:

Let me be clear: I hope Alex Berenson winds up destitute. He deserves to lose everything for the lies he told and encouraged about the vaccines. He is a poisonous grifter who is terrible for the country. Anyone who defends him is equally disgusting.

Could that hypothetical variant not be mistakenly attributed to numerous NYT, WaPo, HuffPo, or Atlantic authors last fall? In my view it could. It likely wouldn’t be very difficult to find something similar IRL. That kind of rhetoric is bad whether it’s about Alex Jones, Alex Berenson, or Julian Assange. How could the man who insinuated that cancel culture is wrong in January call for someone to live in poverty for the rest of his life because of what he says? Is he not calling for the man’s financial cancellation?

This All Feels Like Self-Sabotage

As one commenter put it on Alex’s awful take last night, you can take the man out of the New York Times but you can’t take the New York Times out of the man. The following is 100% my opinion but I don’t think I’m wrong even if his motivations are subconscious; Alex probably misses his old life. Alex probably wants to get invited to dinner parties again. There has to be some level of discomfort when you’ve been generally liberal in your adult life and you’re suddenly getting paid by a bunch of people who likely vote republican. And this is equally problematic when your writing niche is losing relevance.

In one of Alex’s more painfully sad personal reads from last October, he described how he was kicked off the board of food service charity City Harvest; even though he was the charity’s longest active donor at the time. The reason? His ‘Rona shot coverage was becoming a problem for larger donors. He detailed how he was also not invited to a PEN American event despite being a member. In that post he dropped this nugget:

Are you starting to see why describing me as a “conservative author” may fail to capture some essential truths?

And then closed with this:

Have fun tonight at the museum, PEN attendees. If there’s any leftover food from your million-dollar shindig, let me know - I’ll tell City Harvest. In the unlikely event they still take my calls.

So I don’t think I’m off-base in assuming that Alex misses being included in “the club.” He literally wrote about it just a couple months before losing his mind on Robert Malone. Alex has never truly identified with his Substack readers and there are numerous examples of him intentionally needling them here and here. Now that he’s back on Twitter, I can’t help but wonder if Berenson is trying to turn over his base in an attempt to carve out a readership that he doesn’t find personally deplorable.

This feels like a grown man having an identity crisis online in real time. That’s the only conclusion I can come to other than the possibility that he’s never really believed anything that he’s been saying about free speech over the last year. I don’t know what happened to Alex Berenson but the person I’m seeing online now is not the writer who I originally supported monetarily in September of 2021; monetary support that is no longer being renewed, for full disclosure. And I actually feel slightly bad about that.

Last year, Alex sent me an autographed copy of Pandemia when he didn’t have to. I wasn’t a Founding Member of his service but he sent me one anyway. I’ll always appreciate that and I’ll always appreciate the work he did in 2021. It helped me stay sane when I was given the shot or no job ultimatum by a media company that still has a Pfizer executive on its board of directors.

But there are varying levels of hypocrisy and I think there’s a threshold for what is tolerable. Alex is now beyond that threshold for me. And I’m fully aware that I’m certainly guilty of going back to Twitter and opening a Google account after publishing so publicly how much I loathed the behavior of each of those companies. All I can say is I have reasons for going back that make sense for me but that may not for others. That’s fine. I accept that.

What I can’t comprehend is a person who sues Twitter under the guise of anti-censorship and free speech advocacy only to wish a life of destitution for a man who has opinions that differ from his own less than a month after getting reinstated. At a certain point, a pattern forms and I don’t like what I’m seeing. I admired and supported Alex Berenson for standing up for what I thought he believed in. Now, I’m not sure what he believes in. Given his behavior on Twitter last night, it’s possible even he doesn’t know.

UPDATE 8/12/22

Alex Berenson just shared some of what he learned during his Twitter lawsuit. TLDR: the Biden administration specifically targeted Berenson for de-platforming. You can read the whole thing here:

The White House privately demanded Twitter ban me months before the company did so

Special cap tip to Horsey for sharing. Does this change how I feel about Berenson? Difficult to say. I think he’s been right more than he’s been wrong and I hope he continues to shine a light on the censorship. Let’s see what else he releases… That said, I have apologized for “strike 2” which you can read here:

Let’s Talk Speech Freedom… Again