Getting closer to pinpointing the Problem of the Berensonite Wing

My term the "Berensonite Wing" refers to that dominant wing of the Covid Dissenters movement (such as it is) -- named after Alex Berenson, their unofficial leader -- who tend to play it safe, double-virtue-signalling both to their Team Reality members and to the Mainstream at large ("look at us, we're not wild-eyed Conspiracy Theorists!"), thereby unwittingly reinforcing the very same damned Mainstream narrative they purport otherwise to oppose.

Over the months what I've adverted to here on this blog represents a small fraction of what the Berensonite Wing has been up to in this regard.  Even my Twitter feed is not the whole story, since probably more often than not, I'm too weary to tweet my protestant response.  At any rate, here are a couple that reflect my theme today.  So we have today Alex Berenson tweeting this:

I know some of you feel overwhelmed at this moment. I hear from you everyday.

But this will not be the future. Not for you, Sarah, not for your kids, not for ours.

Not if we stand up for the truth.

Sounds bracingly encouraging in a Churchillian way, eh?  Well, as I tweeted in response:

Depends on what "the truth" is. If the truth is what Dr. Elke de Klerk of Doctors for Truth says -- namely, that there is no pandemic nor epidemic at all -- then Alex is not standing up for the truth.

Naturally, my tweet received only 1 lonely like.  And what was my "Doctors for Truth" reference about?  Well, as I tweeted on Alex's Twitter page a few days ago:

Has Alex ever featured "Doctors for Truth"?  Why not?

And I then quoted what their founder, Dr. Elke de Klerk, said at a recent press conference, flanked by her medical professional colleagues:

"I want to state that we do not have a medical pandemic or epidemic. We also state that Covid-19 should not be on 'list A' for any longer, because we now know that it is a normal flu virus..."

On that same note, in another tweet on another day, I responded to Alex's typical mainstream-reinforcing double-virtue-signaling:

I hate fighting about masks with people like Dr. Gawande. But he is wrong. The papers he offers barely rank as hypothesis-generating. The national data is impossibly confounded, the Harvard hospital paper doesn’t even have a control group, and the others are mostly care reports.

Alex was responding to a Mainstream doctor, who had tweeted:

Masks work? YES. This is appalling. [Dr. Scott] Atlas offers no explanation for the increasing mountain of evidence in support, and instead offers only a bizarre and incoherent paper. I don't know why the administration wants to die on this hill. 

To which I responded:

And I don't know why Team Reality wants to die on the hill of arguing about masks at all -- when the real issue is that what we are supposedly protecting from (or not), is virtually harmless and not really a pandemic or an epidemic, as Dr. Elke de Klerk of Doctors for Truth, says.