How Alex Berenson Became A Self-Owned Joke
From investigative journalist to preening punchline in a few short years
As a journalist, it is so much easier to make things about yourself rather than your story. Indeed, it is epidemic (pun intended) among journalists these days to seek their own celebrity over and above the story they report. I guess this is unsurprising in a social media age of relentless “look-at-me”- ism. But the old school maxim still applies: If you make the story about you, you are done as an investigator and a journalist.
Alex IS done as a journalist, because he crossed this line a long time ago. The present, real, unflattering story behind his empty and inconsequential “victory” to get himself reinstated to Twitter, confirms Berenson’s final moral and journalistic defeat. It has been a long time coming. One can hardly find any actual “stories” left from Berenson amid the incessant teases, spins, false scoops, and massive letdowns.
In short, Alex Berenson is now just one big self-own. His picture deserves to be next to this Dictionary.com explanation on “What is a self-own?”:
(W)hen someone inadvertently embarrass(es) themselves, especially by doing something that backfires on them. Maybe they contradict themselves in some spectacular way. Maybe they boast or claim something big, only to be met with some serious receipts otherwise. Maybe they are trying to take someone down, but splat—they metaphorically throw the pie in their own faces.
Berenson used to have some investigative capability, sprinkled in between his self-inflated junk. He stepped out to oppose vaccine mandates and he came armed with data. I have even used some of his sourcing, like his screen shots and graphs of the Ontario Covid infection and death rates after vaccination. I bought the $2.99 version of his book, Pandemia, and I even paid to subscribe to his Substack blog, Unreported Truths, until I found smarter, more committed, analysts and activists like Toby Rogers, Jessica Rose, El Gato Malo, Igor Chudov, Eugyppius, and Darby Shaw.
Perhaps his growing irrelevancy touched off Alex Berenson’s downfall. It is hard to say. But the result is indisputable. He is now humiliatingly claiming that his failings are actual successes and that his self-congratulatory enfant terrible act has helped humanity. As with a drunk at a party who thinks that wearing a lampshade on his head is both hilarious and intellectual, it is time to put Alex metaphorically into a taxicab and send him on a mercy ride home to his wife and his spy novel-writing, before he injures himself again or bores the hell out of another guest.
“Embarrass” “throw pie in their own faces”
Berenson has a gift of owning himself, while trying to own others. No place is this better demonstrated than in his rant and self-humiliation at the hands of the acknowledged, multi-patent verified inventor of mRNA technology, Robert Malone. As the interaction was described in Virg’s Boomer Bastard Newsletter:
Dr. Robert Malone (is) one of the inventors of mRNA vaccine technology and a proponent of early treatment for Covid… Along with a number of other real MDs, there are very few people with more credibility than Dr. Malone in this area, if any. Berenson is a journalist with no medical credentials…
Malone and Berenson were on a Fox News program about the Twitter censorship. Looking at the clip, it was obvious that Berenson was nervous and just waiting to speak. He wasn’t listening to the host; he was waiting to pounce with his pre-planned attack. When he did speak, it was totally off-topic and an attack on Dr Malone and Ivermectin… it was completely a blindside attack and uncalled for. It startled the host and the producer later apologized to Malone. Dr Malone was quite eloquent in responding to it. Alex came across as a complete ass.
Malone was calm in the news clip referenced above, and he dispatched Berenson’s childish charges in a few sentences. The remaining image is one of a man, Malone, patiently dealing with a boy-man (Berenson) wading in WAY over his depth.
Berenson’s a-hole-ishness has gotten so frequent and pronounced, I’ve taken to using his name for rude, humiliating self-owns by someone who had done formerly decent work: “Wow, he was doing some good work until he pulled a Berenson.” “He sure em-Berensoned himself with that humiliating walk back.”
“Backfire” (credibility self-own on arguments about ivermectin and marijuana)
And it is not just with Dr. Malone. Alex Berenson seems to be as adept as the CDC at cherry picking data to support his aim no matter what the subject. To show what an “independent” commentator he is (read “uninformed and wrong”) Berenson went after ivermectin, completely ignoring the significant array of controlled, randomized, placebo-controlled studies and meta-analyses (the gold standards in scientific truth) supporting ivermectin as an effective therapeutic. He also chose to ignore the country-level and province-level success of ivermectin against Covid-19 in places like India.
Again double standards run rife in Alexworld. Alex calls out the CDC, WHO, FDA vaccine manufacturers, mask proponents, and health agencies for cherry-picking data to support their argument (and intentionally ignoring, erasing, and censoring anything that doesn’t fit the approved “narrative”), and then he does the exact same thing when it suits his narrative.
[If you want to escape the haze created both Berenson and the corporate news, Regina Meredith and I have released a recent video bringing together the latest data on Covid and the lack of both shame and science in the current discussion.]
German Lopez of Vox skewered Alex Berenson’s “Reefer Madness 2.0” tear against marijuana in his 2019 book Tell Your Children asserting a causal link between marijuana use and psychosis. Again, Alex Berenson engages in the classic scientific misstep of conflating correlation (two things going together) for causation (one of those two things causing the other).
This was not only pointed out by German Lopez but rightly criticized by a sizable and diverse band of experts.
Lopez:
(Berenson’s) central argument is best summarized in a few brief lines later in (his) book (Tell Your Children): “Marijuana causes psychosis. Psychosis causes violence. The obvious implication is that marijuana causes violence”… (The book) is essentially an exercise in cherry-picking data and presenting correlation as causation. Observations and anecdotes, not rigorous scientific analysis, are at the core of the book’s claim that legal marijuana will cause — and, in fact, is causing — a huge rise in psychosis and violence in America.
“Letter from Scholars and Clinicians who Oppose Junk Science about Marijuana”:
In his book, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence, reporter and novelist Alex Berenson attempts to stir up public fear over marijuana legalization. This sort of alarmism has been around since the earliest days of prohibition. Rather than contributing to thoughtful debate, his work is a polemic based on a deeply inaccurate misreading of science… (including) attributing cause to mere associations… cherry pick(ing) data… selection bias… (and) outright ignor(ing) most of the harms of prohibition.
“Maybe they contradict themselves in some spectacular way.”
Alex Berenson on abortion:
Becoming a parent makes you understand viscerally what everyone knows intellectually, that abortion is the murder of a human being… Roe v. Wade is a terrible decision, invented law that has barely a flicker of Constitutional support.
Conclusion in the same article, as stated in the sub-headline: “abortion should be legal”
Huh?
Alex Berenson on his suit against Twitter for banning him “permanently” (He has since been temporarily re-instated.):
HOWEVER. I want to make this clear. I want to be on the record and commit to it.
Judge William Alsup’s discovery order requires Twitter to give me everything it has about me, including “nonparty complaints or inquiries about plaintiff.” The language is unambiguous. If people inside the government - or drug company executives, or anyone else - talked to Twitter about me, Twitter has to tell me.
When I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING: “all texts, emails, voicemails, statements, and other documents pertaining to plaintiff.”…
As we debate the power and political influence of social media companies, this discovery offers a unique opportunity to see how Twitter and the federal government and others may have colluded… And I am not going to give it up.
Not for reinstatement, not for money, not for all the viruses in China. I will NOT agree to any settlement that does not preserve my discovery rights about third-party communications AND give me the right to publicize them. There are other things I will (and have) given up, you have to give to get, but this is the reddest of lines.
Turns out it weren’t even the lightest blue of lines. The italicized Berenson quotes were completely unambiguous promises, and he broke Every. Single. One. Talk about breach of trust! Alex completely sold out his “contract” with his audience. He buckled, capitulated, surrender-monkeyed under his own unequivocal stated commitments. That’s called SELF-OWNING. Twitter didn’t do this to you, Alex. YOU did this to you.
“Maybe they boast or claim something big, only to be met with some serious receipts otherwise.”
Did Alex Berenson actually achieve a big victory over Twitter and potentially over Big Pharma as he claims? Nope. It is clear from Berenson’s own tweets, he not only settled for NO DISCOVERY and NO PUBLICIZING of communications, but he isn’t even allowed to talk about it. He settled for his own silence! (Which at this point is a blessing in disguise given his bloviating.)
In fact, Berenson’s own play-by-play seems to confirm if it weren’t for some emails he received from Twitter executives seeming to constitute breach of contract “at that time,” his case might have been dismissed. However by Berenson’s own words, “if Twitter's position is that it can ban anyone for any reason, fine, Section 230 allows that...”. In other words, all Twitter would have to do is to change its policy to give itself unlimited power to kick anyone off for any reason, and that includes Alex Berenson. Way to go, Alex. The only thing your obtuse legal confession provides is a blueprint for complete legalized tyranny at Twitter.
But Alex doesn’t give up on his pretend virtue. Instead he persists with his increasingly worthless “commitments”:
Except I need to add one thing. The settlement does not end my investigation into the pressures that the government may have placed on Twitter to suspend my account. I will have more to say on that issue in the near future. I made a promise to readers last month, and I take my promises to readers seriously.
Methinks he promises to much. No less than Elon Musk called Mr. Berenson on this, tweeting: “can you say more about this: ‘….pressures that the government may have placed on Twitter…’”
Alex’s reply. “Nope, they paid me too much to shut up, and I want to leave town with a token victory.” Nah. I made that up. That’s my BS translation version. Berenson actually said: “I wish I could, @elonmusk, but the settlement with @Twitter prevents me from doing so. However, in the near future I hope and expect to have more to report.” Yeah, right. Fool me an infinity of times, shame on me. You ain’t doing crap, We all know it, and our eyes and ears show it.
If their comments on his Substack essays are representative, even Berenson’s coterie of Alexheads doesn’t want him back on Twitter . So, where is the substantive victory? There isn’t one, and there won’t be.
If you want to do good, don’t make it about yourself
In his “Okay, this is getting out of hand” post, Alex Berenson must have slipped and allowed non-subscribing readers to comment on this journalistic three-card Monte (“Is it under this cup? NO! Is it under that cup? No! Follow the pea. Someone is going to win!”) Here is what I wrote as a response:
Listen, I stopped going paid subscription when I realized Alex was about Alex. Any attention he could generate was going to have the upper hand. He went against Ivermectin unwisely but he is entitled to his selective facts. Then abortion? Okay, whatever, but Alex claimed in his own posts he would not settle and he would insist on discovery. That turns out to be a lie or a changed mind which voids his word. I am sure he got hundreds of thousands if not millions out of this in order to not imperil a (Twitter) sale to Elon Musk, so yeah, where is the respect here? People have a right to call him out. This was not integrity. It was pure, unadulterated self interest and it exposes who Alex (i)s at heart. I will accept an apology or an explanation of his decision making process which he can legally offer without disclosing details of the settlement. But I suspect he is too proud to offer that.
Real investigative journalists (my friend Andrea Simakis is a good examples), always let the story speak. The story is never about them. It is about the craziness, the torment, and often the ultimate triumph of human struggle to glean a deeper truth in a confusing, contradictory world.
The “story” can also be about broader injustice and how this plays out in policy and power. This latter terrain is the one chosen by Alex Berenson, until he decided to make his own social media presence more important.
Too bad Alex Berenson is not the hero he projects but a straight up carnival barker, endlessly hinting at all the revelations “just behind that door,” some key elusive hook that will bring down the corrupt. But where are these revelations? Alex can’t talk about any of them. He took hush money by his own admission.
In so doing, Alex Berenson becomes just another self-owned joke, another sellout that puts him in the very same class as the apologist doctors and government personnel he attempts to eviscerate.
Enjoy your hollow victory, Alex, and, no doubt, the pile of cash that comes with it. What, exactly now separates you from the problems and the people you attack? Answer: Nothing.
You, Alex, have been revealed as one of them. You have met the enemy, and it is you. Good luck winning that battle.
Thank you, Zeus. I used to try to fit Alex into my space of "writers I take seriously." Then it got to be like I needed some new glasses: something was seriously wrong with the view, the focus: what's wrong with this picture? But I've started deleting my substack subscription after looking at only the first lines. Basically, my experience is a match for yours, Zeus, so I am going to wish him well and let him "go". It is a good thing for all of us that you have written this critique. AND given us the names of others to read. Thank you, Zeus.
Thank you for writing this Zeus. It confirms my increasing disillusions with him. I found him to be a great resource for those of us in the anti-covid narrative camp, but thought he was way off the mark with regard to Ivermectin, Ukraine, abortion and marijuana. I remained a subscriber (longer than I should have) just to see how his Twitter saga played out, which was also very disappointing. That was the last straw, and I have since unsubscribed from 'Unreported Truths.'