William
Briggs is a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute, former visiting professor of
statistics in the Department of Mathematics at Central Michigan University and
self-declared “epistemologist”, which is … an interesting assessment not
exactly supported by his publications. Briggs does have some genuine
credentials in statistics and even atmospheric science, but seems to have left
science behind because academia has been corrupted by wokeness and the tyranny
of facts evidence expertise. Scientists don’t, in general,
agree with Briggs’s conclusions about what they are doing, and evidence
suggests that Briggs has some trouble with, well, evidence that doesn’t fit the
narrative he wishes to tell (he does love good narratives, though). He
has authored a number of books and posts defending intelligent design creationism, climate change denialism, stop
the steal conspiracy theories, COVID contrarianism
and various anti-gay nonsense, and he seems to be somewhat popular – at least
the Discovery Institute and associated anti-science venues
like Evolution News and Views consistently praise his work – for his vehement
attacks on science, which he tends to represent as being a somewhat nebulous
and shapeless conspiracy against zeh people (i.e. against religion and
conservatism).
Indeed,
Briggs usually formulates his attacks on science as criticism of experts,
an amorphous group of people whom he disagrees with and who are, accordingly,
in some sort of conspiracy to stamp out freedom and free thinking. An example
of the kind of evils scientists are up to, according to Briggs: in 2017, some
scientists published a (pretty poor, it seems) study suggesting that they had used
transcranial magnets to
target and temporarily shut down
regions of test subjects’ brain in a way that altered the subjects’ behavior
and opinions. Briggs and Joe Miller went into deranged panic mode, with Briggs imagining, with no
foundation in anything, that the study
would lead to “eugenics” targeting conservatives: “Basically what
they’re doing is they’re trying to bring back eugenics even, in a way. Because
they’re identifying what they say are biological constituents for belief.
Therefore they’re able to test for these biological constituents” (all of
which is a stunningly dumb thing to say). (Miller, by the way, suggested that transgender
people would use magnets against people of faith: “The whole transgender
crowd, they see their main opponent as being those of faith and so obviously
they’re going to use any aggressive tactics they can to move forward that
agenda.”)
Climate
change denialism
As a
climate change denialist, Briggs appears to have helped
draft the Realist Catholic Climate
Declaration, which claims that “earth’s climate has always changed, is changing now”, that we cannot know (only “surmise”) the human contribution to current
climate change, and that “[t]he salvation of souls is of more pressing
concern than the air temperature,” which must count as one of the feeblest
non-sequiturs we have ever encountered. Briggs’s
primary position, however, seems to be to claim that “the climate of the
earth has never stood still, and never will. That means efforts to ‘battle’ or
‘stop’ climate change are futile”, just like the fact that you will die
some day means that medical treatments for anything is pointless.
Briggs was
featured in Marc Morano’s film Climate Hustle 2: Rise ofthe Climate Monarchy, produced by the industry-funded climate change denialist
organization CFACT, where he tried to argue that what
environmentalists really want is “everything that’s against freedom” and
tried to explain how climate change could be used as a pretext for
authoritarian political goals – Briggs characterised environmentalism as a
eugenicist and racist movement. He was also featured in CFACT’s original Climate Hustle film.
Indeed,
according to Briggs, climate change is not at all a dire issue: “Not only
are things not as bad as we thought, they are much, much better. And they’re
improving. Crop output is up, the world is greener, storms are down in
frequency and number, and on and on […] But why are things better? Because of
the beneficial effects of releasing carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere”,
which some might consider a surprising claim giving his skepticism elsewhere
that human emissions can affect climate. But hey: know your audience and so on.
Briggs has,
in fact, published on climate change-related topics, both with Christopher Monckton and with David R. Legates and Willie Soon (of Soon-and-Baliunas fame). With the latter, he wrote e.g.
“Learning and Teaching Climate Science: The Perils of Consensus Knowledge
Using Agnotology,” according to which students
should be exposed to climate science skepticism: “All sides must be covered in
highly debatable and important topics such as climate change, because
authoritarian science never will have all the answers to such complex problems.” Yes, it’s the teach the controversy gambit, no less. The paper itself
relied heavily on misrepresenting data and arguments from other authors in the field.
LGBT
Briggs has
written extensively about LGBT+ issues – often as a “senior contributor”
to The Stream – and his writings run the whole gamut of paranoid silliness. Briggs claims for instance that bans
on conversion therapy are a product of a “corrupt democracy” and that
instead “pro-transgender, pro-sodomy, pro-perversion speech of any kind is
hate speech and must be condemned, expunged, ridiculed, excoriated, punished”.
He has also tried to connect the Paris Climate Accord to conspiratorial efforts
to promote transgender rights – “the undead corpse of global warming” is
apparently currently mostly a ploy for diversity advocates (= sexual perverts)
to gain power over freedom-loving conservatives and Christians.
2021 Capitol Insurrection
Briggs has
long been pushing Trump’s stop the steal conspiracy theories, and posted
several … interesting tweets (since deleted) during the 2021 Capitol
insurrection (scroll down here) voicing his support for a violent
takeover of government. Explaining himself, he afterwards stated that “the
Capitol protest was only to be expected the way the government [who? Trump’s?]
has treated its people. Voting fraud, like when Nixon had his election stolen, was real and provably significant” … since if you assert, very
firmly, that it was, you don’t need evidence – and Briggs offers none of the
latter. (It was, for the record, neither real nor provably significant.) Also, “Masks in the general
public don’t work, a well-known fact” – again, if you don’t like the facts, state the opposite as assertively
as possible, and the facts will hopefully recognize that
they’re not welcome and go away.
COVID Contrarianism
Oh, yes.
Briggs is a major contributor to COVID denialism and associated conspiracies,
such as the thoroughly debunked myth that the coronavirus was created
in a laboratory and engineered to kill – by a conspiracy Chinese and American
scientists (it can’t be exclusively Chinese … otherwise, how could you combine
it with the conspiracy theory that Anthony Fauci had a hand in it?)
An early promoter
of the casedemic myth, Briggs has long and erroneously
claimed that increased testing for COVID would “make a dead epidemic seem
still alive” and lead to “mak[ing] coronadoom zombies” – experts
(Briggs hates those) who use corona alarmism to justify measures that threaten
Briggs’s freedom. Many of his views are laid out in his post “A People’s
History of COVID-19” (no link), which is a good example of how to tell a
narrative by wilful misrepresentation, quote mining and lying by omission. The
target is, of course, those darn scientists – zeh experts – who are
confused airheads who always change their minds in the face of new evidence and
use whatever means they have to scare people in an attempt to subjugate them. “early
on, the healthy were touting the benefits of vitamin D, zinc, quercetin and even drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). This angered Experts,
perhaps because they didn’t think of it first,” says Briggs. Yes, it’s all a conspiracy by
SCIENCE to hide the truth: the CDC, the media, the libruls, and in particular
the experts: hide the fact that ivermectin is efficacious (it isn’t), that “natural immunity”
is better than vaccines [it isn’t], and that masks don’t work [they do] – notably, Briggs constantly
point to suggestions that masks didn’t protect very significantly from contracting
the disease, which most reasonable people probably knows was never the point.
And those
same experts are, of course, hiding the huge numbers of vaccine injuries (yes,
Briggs is of course antivaccine – what did you expect?). But take his argument
in full, for it really reveals so much that Briggs doesn’t really get (or that
he lies about): “There was an enormous rise in VAERS (the Vaccine Adverse Events
Reporting System) reports. Critics scoffed that COVID received more “scrutiny”,
therefore the increase in VAERS reports . . . was not real [indeed, those are the facts], It was a conspiracy theory
to say, for instance, that myocarditis rates were rising because of
vaccinations among the young. Who didn’t really need to be vaccinated anyway,
because they suffered least from infections. And then it was acknowledged myocarditis could
be caused by the vaccines, but that myocarditis wasn’t serious. Except in ‘rare’
cases.” The experts
are of course right about the explosion of VAERS – it’s not hard to find clear
evidence of overreporting. That is no conspiracy theory, of
course; nor is it a conspiracy theory to criticize antivaccine conspiracy
theorists who misuse the database (like Del Bigtree). But no one ever downplayed myocarditis
– Briggs only wants you to think they did. Myocarditis was noticed, and taken
seriously. Indeed, looking at the details about and concern shown for myocarditis sort of undermines Briggs’ VAERS
point; but his is ‘the people’s story’ – you are not supposed to look at
the details. And of course Briggs lies when he says that young people ‘didn’t
really need to be vaccinated anyway’. They do, and the risk of COVID is
vastly higher than the risk of serious myocarditis if they get the vaccine. There is no mischief here; Briggs,
though, will spin it until it looks that way. No surprise there. Do you think
Briggs knows the science? Of course he doesn’t.
Or take his
comment that: “Your lack of a vaccine negated mine. The vaccinated needed to
be ‘protected’ from the ‘epidemic of the unvaccinated.’ Nobody ever explained
how a vaccinated person’s vaccine failed when they came near an unvaccinated
person. Again, it cannot be explained except by magical thinking.” One
wouldn’t think intelligent people needed such an explanation, but it was provided anyways – virtually everywhere anyone
talked about vaccines, also long before COVID. Apparently, Briggs thinks that ‘Experts’
at one point thought the vaccine was gonna be 100% effective (and quote-mines a meticulously
selected series of quotes from early on to suggest that such a view was
prevalent). No one actually ever thought that. But this is not about actual
facts.
It’s
interesting, though, that his book – coauthored with Intelligent Design creationist heavyweight Douglas Axe – is all about accusing his
opponents of alarmism and panic-mongering. Self-reflection is not his strong
suit: this is the guy who used a small nonsense study to go utter apeshit
hysterical about how trans-people would initiate eugenics programs against
Christians using brain magnets. And he calls himself an “epistemologist”,
no less.
Diagnosis:
It is easy to get proof of conspiracy when any case of anyone changing their
mind in light of new information is interpreted as mask slipping. Briggs is in
epistemic hell: his credence in evidence from science is 0, and in his own
story 1. From those priors, there are no updates available – any input is
evidence for what he already believes; nothing could change his mind, and any
piece of evidence that doesn’t fit his narrative is just evidence for how
stupid everyone else is; also conspiracies. But he does, indeed, have a
significant audience. That is scary.
