Drew Holden, who does more than almost anyone on Twitter to hold pundits, media members and news organizations accountable for intellectual hypocrisy and inconsistency, joins the podcast to discuss the coverage of COVID, the failures of government communication and his favorite examples of the media’s rush to judgment. Follow Drew on Twitter and check out a list of his articles here. ***Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble*** Past episodes of the Podcast are available here on Substack, or also available on Spotify or Apple Podcasts Full transcript is below: Ian Miller: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the unasked podcast. We have a very special guest today drew Holden, who is a a maker of threads and, and defender of intellectual consistency in those threads. He's also a freelance commentary writer who is written for a lot of major publications, New York times, Washington post Federalist Fox news, et cetera. So welcome drew. Thanks so much for doing this, Drew Holden: Ian. Pleasure's mine, sir. I appreciate you having me on. Ian Miller: Yeah. so I wanted to ask, and you might have answered this previously, but I'm curious what, what got you started making these threads? They're so, you know, brilliantly simple, but incredibly important. And to me, especially, what was it that made you start putting these together? Drew Holden: Well, I, I appreciate that. So the first time I remember the, that I ever put together a thread was it was, it was back around the time when general Soleimani, the, the Iranian general was killed. And the reason I had put it together was because I, I remember the coverage and I looked at a lot of it and I was like, man, this is, this is weird. And I don't know that we always get these honorifics for for, for these sorts of titles, but who knows, maybe, maybe there's some new trend where we're trying to be nicer to people when, when they die. So wash forward a couple weeks and Don, I miss the bomb throwing radio host, who famously made a, a racist comment about the Rutgers women's basketball team back probably about a decade ago. So he passed away a couple weeks later and just got slammed his obituaries, the, the headlines across all his corporate press were just really trashing this guy hours after he had died. Drew Holden: And I saw them and I was like, you know, I, I get it. People had issues with, I miss. Obviously he made some, some really indefensible comments, but there's no way on any sort of moral playing field. Is he worse than a guy who is the leader of a terrorist organization, right. Who has, who has an enormous amount of innocent blood on his hands? And so I went through for a bunch of different outlets and I posted the two side by side and I didn't even, I didn't think I even said anything, right. There was no real analysis. It was just the pictures. And I looked at them and they jumped off the page to me. And I was like, whatever, I'm, I'm gonna string six or seven of these together and see if folks like it. And you know, I got, I had a pretty good response. And then I started thinking about it and I was like, man, there's, there's definitely a lot to say here, and I should figure out how to do that. And then from that, that kind of moment, the, the thread, the at least as a concept was born. And then I've had to tinker and refine a little bit on the format to, to try and get the point across a little bit better. And I'm, I'm sure I'm still learning too. Ian Miller: Hmm. Do you have a, a favorite example of an issue? I mean, obviously that one kind of jumped out at you, but what, you know, after you started making them has been going down through this, through the process, was there something that came up where you're like, oh, this is, this is it. This is gonna be perfect. I've already got, I know, I already know the examples are coming for this one. Drew Holden: Yeah. So this, I think the one that, that comes to mind, it's not so much the side by side, but it's the the takes that were preposterous in the moment. And people didn't realize that until they saw the light a day, a little bit later. And it was the, the coverage around Michael Anot, I think was really, you know, what I end up doing is when, whenever I see something that just doesn't pass the sniff test for me, I end up going through and taking a whole bunch of screenshots. Sometimes they pan and, you know, whatever, whatever I thought was gonna happen happened, sometimes they don't, sometimes it's not close enough. And so they just kind of sit in, in my phone forever. But I remember during the heyday of Michael Ave, when CNN was speculating about what his primary strategy was going to be as a potential democratic nominee for president 2020, I was watching. Drew Holden: And I was like, man, the fever on this is, is just unbelievable. And eventually all of these people are going to regret these just really preposterous takes about Anot, not just in terms of his political future, but in terms of his intellect and his savvy and his morality and everything else. And I, I remember I just, I kept collecting and collecting and then, you know, the, the trial started and I was like, well, eventually these I think are gonna have to come back around. And so that, that to me was probably the most egregious example of, you know, the, during the Trump era. I think there were a lot of people who were made in the heroes for really no conceivable reason other than they were in opposition to Trump. But I think he was probably the most dramatic now in, in hindsight where I think he's in prison now. Right. Or if he's gone through his whole trial, yet he, he is either in or headed to prison. Ian Miller: Right. Yeah. You hit on a, a very important point though, which I think has become increasingly relevant over the past couple years with the, with the pandemic as well, which I I'll get into it later a bit. But so speaking of COVID, I, you know, I wanted to get your, you know, everybody comes out from a different, different point of view and, and so I was kind of curious what your initial reaction was to it. Were you concerned about COVID? Were you, what did you think of the policies lockdowns, all of that stuff as it rolled out? Drew Holden: Yeah. Good question. Good question. So I think when it first happened, I, I was pretty much your standard 20 something living a blue city who was, was definitely concerned and was handling the ambiguity of it as something where we should have a, a strong and urgent response. So, in retrospect, I remember, I think I put, I posted something on Facebook that I, I ended up coming to regret that that was about how all we need to do is, is just be quiet and trust the experts on this one. And so my knee jerk first couple of days, first couple weeks were, were very much that. And I remember part of that was, you know, my my, my girlfriend works on Capitol hill and she had gotten sick in the first couple of weeks. And we were like, oh, I mean, I'm sure it's not connected at all, but who knows maybe. Drew Holden: And then it turned out that, you know, the district she was working in was one of the first that that had cases. And so she might have been, you know, one of, one of the first cases here in DC of, of COVID. And so my first thought was, eh, you know, if it, if it's maybe already here, we should really kind of clamp down and, and be, and be, and be cautious with this. And I think that probably for the first week, week and a half, I, I stuck to that. And then that started eroding. I think, you know, when I, when I look back and I try and think through how I would've done it differently, I think I probably just wouldn't, I wouldn't have responded with a a level of fear that was inconsistent with what we knew at the time. And I think the time I really did do that is that I really, I really kind of jumped and got spooked and scared and, and was calling for policies that have had really, you know, calamitous long-term impacts. I certainly wasn't, wasn't I think pushing too hard on them early on. But I think I, I wasn't, I wasn't as clear out as some other folks were right outta the gate. Ian Miller: Well, don't blame yourself too much because just by, by saying that you've already exceeded the, how everybody that you you know, post on your, your Twitter threads, what they're willing to say about anything that they ever post on the internet, but that's fair. And, and also to be fair, you know, the world health organization initially was saying that like three and a half percent of people that got COVID were gonna die. So, you know, I think the expectations were, you know, wildly overstated early on by, by the experts and yep. But it did, it did influence opinion. Speaking of early days of COVID you, your pin tweet is still about the origins of, of COVID in, in Wuhan from a couple years ago. It, to me at this point, I, I mean, it, it feels pretty obvious. It's very likely it came from the lab. So, you know, why do you think so many of the media have been kind of desperate to avoid coming to terms with that or, or have been unwilling to examine that at all? Drew Holden: Yeah, that's a good question. So, yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this one lately, cuz there was a new, I think maybe two studies in pre-print that came out recently that claims to fully debunk the lab league hypothesis, which, which just isn't true. And so to me, there's, there's a few factors. I think one is, you know, when it first came up, there was enormous resistance to the idea because the people who were suggesting it were the media's bad guys. And so it was Donald Trump, it was Tom cotton, it was Republicans. It was, you know, the, the, the people who the corporate press saw as not just the fringe, but kind of morally compromised, right? You've got all of these people who are GNED up with these racist or at least racialized intonations who are, are
