In A Forest Of Liars, A Man Who Cares About Truth

My friend Professor Norman Fenton is one of the world’s leading statisticians. Unlike the likes of dishonest number crunchers and computer modellers like Professor Ferguson, Norman did not chase funding from Bill Gates or lie about what the statistical evidence reveals.

Instead, using the skills he has honed as a decent, old fashioned academic with a respect for the truth, Norman was appalled by the misuse of data, statistics and scientific evidence during COVID. He and his closest academic colleagues bravely opposed COVID measures and pointed out how the statistics used in support of them were being manipulated.

Norman risked his career to tell the truth.

He describes all this in a fascinating book called Fighting Goliath, which I highly recommend.

Norman is also Jewish, one of the many wonderful Jews I am proud to call friends. He’s a living example both of what real scholarship and decency looks like, and of the kind of incredible good that smart, proud Jews add to this world.

I don’t believe in the racial superiority of any group, of white people, black people, Jewish people or Asian people. But I do believe in the superiority of cultures and values. How could any sane person not believe that values that teach honesty, decency, truthful conduct and courageous conduct are not superior to the lack of values, or to values which encourage violence, crime and tyranny?

Norman embodies the best of both English and Jewish values, and their similarities. And he does so in a world, the academic world, where both are mocked and hated. He does so because he’s a decent person and a credit to his faith, his ethnicity and his country.

There’s a short but powerful piece he has written on how even the remembrance of the Holocaust can be used to erase Jews. I noticed the other day that Labour politicians calling for a Holocaust memorial were doing it just as cynically as they use calling their opponents antisemitic or Nazi, a tactic of course also employed constantly by the US Democrats.

The standard distortions now are 1. Labelling people who aren’t Nazis as Nazis, making the term more and more meaningless and 2. Appropriating Jewish suffering to talk about something else, about other groups or about modern ideologies you actually care about.

When you look at trans and open border activism masquerading as Christianity, or when you look at promoting Diversity and mass migration and leftist politics as honouring the Jewish victims of Nazism, what you see is the most breathtaking disregard for the people these leftist voices claim to care about. You see Christians who don’t really care about Christianity, and Jewish alleged advocates or champions who don’t really care about Jews.

Because Marxists will use anything. There’s no morality there to stop them thinking ‘this is not my tool. This is not my weapon. I must respect it for itself’.

So often it’s like a person watching a guy get beaten up, perhaps backing the attackers, and then saying ‘that other guy did it’ while pointing at an innocent. At the very least it’s like using the attack to talk about YOURSELF instead of the real victim.

Norman cared about truth and the real victims during COVID, and from what I’ve seen and known of him he brings that to everything.

Anyway, check out this article and Norman’s book. They are both exactly what I have come to expect from him, which is total honesty.