Vaccine Harm

This piece is not about canceling Scott Adams.

I am not dancing on his grave.

It is not about denying his intelligence, his cultural impact, or the genuine insight found in his work on persuasion. I was a longtime fan. I laughed at Dilbert in a cubicle at Apple Computer in the 1990s. I own his books. I followed his thinking for years. I believed we shared a skepticism of institutional power and a commitment to clear reasoning.

This is about a documented exchange, what it reveals about ego and persuasion, and why so many people—especially men in liberty-adjacent movements—reacted to defend Adams come what may.

I’m going to walk through the facts carefully, because precision matters.

The Exchange (What Actually Happened)

On October 12, 2022, Scott Adams reacted publicly to a Pfizer executive video suggesting that key COVID vaccine data—specifically transmission-related data—had not been collected prior to rollout.

Adams tweeted (paraphrased):

“Um, we are just hearing this now?????????”

I replied directly to him:

“Dude. If you were independently following the data, this was 100% clear. But I am really glad you are coming around. Now help us get #Nuremberg2 going. Heads must roll. (I’m speaking mostly metaphorically. Mostly.)”

This reply is important to parse accurately.

“Dude” was used in a casual, colloquial, gender-neutral, we-got-this way.

I acknowledged his shift in understanding (“glad you are coming around”).

I invited him to leverage his platform toward accountability.

The call for “heads must roll” was explicitly framed as metaphorical.

This was not a personal attack. It was an attempt at alliance-building.

Adams responded with sarcasm:

“You were independently following the data that was not collected. Good for you.”

This framed my point as “guessing,” rather than as a valid inference drawn from the absence of safety data—a standard analytical practice in law, risk assessment, and scientific skepticism.

I replied:

“Yes, Big Bulb. It’s called extrapolating conclusions from the lack of data. If they tell you it’s ‘safe,’ but there’s no data to prove it’s safe, one may conclude they cannot prove their claim. We critical thinkers also call that ‘a tell.’”

At this point, the exchange escalated sharply.

Adams began using direct personal insults, including (as captured in screenshots and later documented on my blog):

“Look, bitch”

“cunt”

“fucking idiot”

“asshole”

He accused me of starting the exchange with a “sexist, dismissive insult” (“dude”) and of being “horrible and wrong.”

Two representative Adams tweets from later in the thread (verbatim):

“You’re surprised that starting a conversation with an insult didn’t go your way? Fucking idiot.”

“You started with a sexist, dismissive insult and then proceeded to make an uninformed point that showed no understanding of my views. Then you face-planted by being both horrible and wrong at the same time in public. Own it.”

I pushed back, defending “dude” as neutral and pointing out the substance of my argument. The exchange ended with Adams dismissing my reasoning as equivalent to guessing:

“In the same way guessing is science.”

Shortly thereafter, Adams blocked me and deleted several of his most explicit insult tweets.

This sequence is not disputed. Screenshots exist. The deletions occurred.

Why This Matters: Adams Failed His Own Framework

This matters because Scott Adams was not just any public figure.

He explicitly positioned himself as an authority on persuasion.

In Win Bigly, Adams lays out several core principles:

By his own criteria, Adams failed—completely.

1. No pacing

I explicitly acknowledged his shift and welcomed it. He responded with mockery.

2. No leading

Instead of steering toward shared goals (accountability, skepticism of power), he escalated into personal abuse.

3. No high ground

He abandoned principle for insult, focusing obsessively on whether “dude” was sexist rather than addressing the underlying claim.

4. Ego collapse

Rather than engaging with the argument—that absence of safety data is itself meaningful—he reframed disagreement as a personal affront to his intelligence.

This is not persuasion. It is status defense.

Mad Scientism and the Messenger Problem

Many defenders of Adams argue that he was “playing the odds”—that vaccination was a rational risk/reward calculation given available information at the time.

That argument is coherent.

But notice what happens next.

When a woman points out that the lack of data itself was the red flag—something many skeptics, especially mothers and caregivers, had been saying for decades—the response is not curiosity. It is dismissal.

This is where mad scientism enters.

Mad scientism is not science. It is faith in authority masquerading as rationality.

It privileges credentials over inference, institutions over lived evidence, and compliance over skepticism. And like all belief systems, it reacts aggressively to heresy.

Women who question medical authority are not treated as skeptics. We are treated as emotional, intuitive, paranoid, crazy, or rude—even when we are correct.

If a man revises his position later, it is called growth.
If a woman is right early, it is called guessing.

When Disgust Becomes Casual — and Dangerous

This isn’t just an online tone problem.

We’re seeing a broader cultural pattern in how men in positions of power react when a woman resists or questions authority — a pattern that shows up across contexts, from trivial to lethal, with the same reflexive contempt.

In Minneapolis in January 2026, cellphone footage from a fatal ICE enforcement action captured a federal officer uttering the words “fucking bitch” immediately after shooting a woman. That language wasn’t private. It was recorded, published, and then debated by institutions more focused on narrative management than reckoning.

I’m not equating an X exchange with a shooting.

I’m pointing to a shared cultural reflex:
the reflex to reach for demeaning language when a woman resists
the reflex to justify power after the fact
the reflex to argue tone instead of conduct

What makes this moment especially strange for me is that the Minneapolis footage exists at all in part because of work I did years earlier.

In 2014, I was the plaintiff in Gericke v. Begin, a First Circuit case that affirmed the First Amendment right to record police in public. That precedent helped normalize the idea that state power should be observable — that encounters like this don’t belong solely to official narratives.

Which makes the reactions to my Adams essay revealing.

Defending the right to film authority is widely praised. Using that same right — and the same analytical posture — to document misconduct or name a pattern? Suddenly that’s “too much,” “unnecessary,” or “beneath you.”

The reflex is the same.

The woman who insists on seeing clearly becomes the problem — not the behavior she’s pointing to.

That reflex didn’t start with Scott Adams. But it showed up there too — on a smaller scale, without physical violence, and without consequence.

The Deeper Pattern

Our X exchange was not unique. It was simply more visible.

For decades, women—particularly mothers of vaccine-injured children—have raised concerns about safety, liability shields, and lack of long-term data. They were dismissed, mocked, and punished long before COVID.

COVID didn’t create this dynamic. It exposed it.

And when someone like Scott Adams—brilliant, influential, accustomed to being the smartest guy in the room—was confronted with that reality, ego won.

Not just ego.
Deletion. Blocking. Erasure.

The Redemption Arc That Never Happened

There’s one more detail that matters, especially for those accusing me of bad faith.

Before Scott Adams died, I reached out—quietly—to his biographer. Not publicly. Not performatively. Privately.

I suggested the possibility of a redemption arc.

Not a gotcha. Not an apology. Just an acknowledgment that sometimes, near the end, people soften. Sometimes they realize that being unyielding isn’t strength. Sometimes they unblock. Sometimes they listen. Sometimes they model what growth actually looks like.

I wasn’t trying to humiliate him.
I was offering a way to end well.

There was no response.

And that matters, because it exposes something uncomfortable for the people who are angry at me now.

Why the Anger Is Misplaced

Let’s be honest about what’s happening.

Scott Adams was in the wrong in that exchange. Not morally complex wrong. Not tragically misunderstood wrong. Just… wrong.

He insulted. He escalated. He blocked. He deleted evidence.

And yet the fury isn’t directed at that.

It’s directed at me, the woman who names it.

That’s the pattern.

People are mad at me not because I was inaccurate, but because I refused to help preserve a comforting illusion: that brilliance excuses bad behavior, and that calling something out is more offensive than doing it.

Pointing out wrongdoing disrupts group cohesion.
Especially when the wrongdoer is admired.
Especially when the truth-teller is inconvenient.

Instead of asking, “Why did he react that way?”
The group asks, “Why couldn’t she let it go?”

Instead of grappling with ego, power, and persuasion failure, they ask me to be quieter, softer, kinder, more forgiving.

That displacement is not accidental.

Why This Feels Familiar to Me

This is, in many ways, the story of my life.

Seeing something early.
Saying it plainly.
Being punished for naming it.

Whether it’s vaccines, censorship, regulatory capture, government overreach, power dynamics, or bad behavior dressed up as brilliance—the response is often the same: attack the messenger, preserve the hierarchy, move on without reckoning.

Those who benefit from that hierarchy want the view without the accountability required to stand there.

And when the reckoning finally comes—after damage is done, after positions quietly reverse—there’s an unspoken hope that no one will remember who said what, or when.

That hope depends on silence.

I’m not interested in that bargain.

The Real Work (Still Unfinished)

If this essay (or my previous one) makes you angry—if your instinct is to correct me rather than examine Scott Adams’ behavior—that’s not my work to do.

That’s yours.

The work is noticing why accountability feels like an attack.
The work is asking why a woman pointing out a clear failure feels more threatening than the failure itself.
The work is asking why admitting error feels like annihilation instead of growth.

Scott Adams is gone.

But the pattern that protected him—and turned on me—is very much alive.

And until that changes, we’ll keep losing allies we could have had.

The Takeaway (For the Living)

This isn’t about condemning a dead man.

It’s about deciding what kind of movement we want to build.

Movements that survive learn to hear inconvenient truths—even when they come from people who aren’t supposed to be right.

Ego kills persuasion.
Status defense kills coalitions.

If we want allies instead of echo chambers, we have to get better at listening—
even when it stings.

Especially then.

Dude, that’s the work.