This headline should win a prize for evil

Friday, May 1, 2026

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Yesterday on Twitter/X, someone posted what he described as the worst headline during all of Covid, on the sixth anniversary of its publication in The Atlantic:
That's a blast from the past for my longtime readers who have been with me since at least back then.

Those readers know that none of the useless government measures did a thing to help anyone, because I showed you all the charts. You cannot tell one state from another.

And if you look within a state, you cannot label on a chart when things like the George Floyd riots occurred, or when a mask mandate was introduced, or when Thanksgiving was.


All of those things, and others besides, should have been glaring on a chart, but they were not.

I told the person who posted that headline from The Atlantic that I consider this headline from the Washington Post, immediately after Iowa repealed its useless statewide Covid restrictions, to be a close runner-up:
Later that year, a chart of health outcomes in the Midwestern states did not show Iowa to have been any kind of outlier, and in fact if the lines representing the various states of the Midwest had been unlabeled, it would have been impossible to tell which state was Iowa.

Needless to say, no apology was ever forthcoming from the Post.

After all those newsletters I wrote to you back then, and all the times we exploded the official myth-making, I couldn't let it all vanish into the ether. Thus I wrote Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania, which features a foreword by the current director of the National Institutes of Health.

I could have hired someone to narrate the audiobook, but I needed my contempt for the insanity to come through the audio, not to mention the sarcasm that accompanied so much of my writing on this.

Treat yourself:

 
Two notes for you:

(1) I've had a cancellation, 
so I have a single female role available for my Philadelphia murder mystery dinner party on May 20. If you’d like to take that role, you may attend the event for free, as my guest. Just reply to this email to let me know you’d like the role and it’s yours. First come, first served!

(2) My old friend Mark Monoscalco -- he was one of the participants in the Family Feud event at the 2000th episode of the Tom Woods Show, and who introduced himself as being from "the Union of Soviet Socialist Islands," by which he meant Hawaii -- has just written a book on the history of the idea of freedom: The Forbidden Idea.

This book lays out the philosophy and history of that idea, and its subsidiary ideas, in a clear, compelling way. If you want to better understand the principles of a free society, and how they can be advanced in your own life, this book is for you. If you already are confident in your knowledge, it’s a perfect gift for someone who isn’t -- yet.

Check it out: TheForbiddenIdea.com

Tom Woods





 






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Obama, Mamdani, other Democrats throw ugly tantrums after SCOTUS strikes racial gerrymander

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