Alex Berenson > Quotes

“Rosette disappeared onto the dance floor. Wells sat in silence for a minute, watching the dancers. The worldwide cult of fast money spent stupidly. The worldwide cult of trying too hard. Moscow, Rio, Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York, London, Shanghai--the story was the same everywhere. The same overloud music, the same overpromoted brand names, the same fake tits, about as erotic as helium balloons. Everywhere an orgy of empty consumption and bad sex. Las Vegas was the cult's world headquarters, Donald Trump its patron saint. Wells had spent ten years in the barren mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He never wanted to live there again. But if he had to choose between an eternity there or in the supposed luxury of this club, he'd go back without a second thought.”
― Alex Berenson, The Silent Man

“Always wrong but never in doubt.”
― Alex Berenson, The Faithful Spy

“Afternoon. I’m Rick. What can I do you for today?” “Put the preposition in the right place.”
― Alex Berenson, Twelve Days

“Marijuana use was more likely to be linked with the death of children than almost any other factor, including domestic violence or mental illness. Once again, researchers who weren’t looking for evidence that cannabis was linked to violence found it anyway.”
― Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

“humans can build as easily as destroy,”
― Alex Berenson, The Faithful Spy

“Marijuana causes paranoia and psychosis. That fact is now beyond dispute. Even scientists who aren’t sure if marijuana can cause permanent psychosis agree that it can cause temporary paranoia and psychotic episodes. The risk is so obvious that marijuana dispensaries advertise certain strains as less likely to cause paranoia. Paranoia and psychosis cause violence. Overwhelming evidence links psychotic disorders and violence, especially murder. Studies have confirmed the connection, across cultures, nations, races, and eras. The definitive analysis was published in PLOS Medicine in 2009. Led by Seena Fazel, a psychiatrist and epidemiologist at Oxford University, researchers examined twenty earlier studies on people with schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis. They found that people with psychosis were 5 times as likely to commit violent crimes as”
― Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

“Dixie cup” was agency jargon for someone disposable, someone who could be arrested or killed without consequence.”
― Alex Berenson, The Faithful Spy

“Everything depends which side of the shotgun you’re on,”
― Alex Berenson, The Faithful Spy

“Wells played God in the most elemental way: Who shall live and who shall die, who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not, who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast . . . But snatching the world’s secrets from their graves gave Shafer his own taste of absolute power.”
― Alex Berenson, Twelve Days

“Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.”
― Alex Berenson, Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives

“Marijuana users generally start smoking between 14 and 19; first-time psychotic breaks most often occur from 19 to 24 for men, 21 to 27 for women. In other words, almost no one develops a permanent psychotic illness the first time he uses marijuana—or even after a few months. The gap between when people start smoking and when they break averages six years, according to a 2016 paper in the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry that examined previous research. The Finnish paper showing that almost half of cannabis psychosis diagnoses convert to schizophrenia within eight years is more evidence of the time lag. A problem that seems temporary becomes permanent.”
― Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

“If stupid people didn’t insist on thinking they were smart, the world would be a lot simpler.”
― Alex Berenson, The Counterfeit Agent

“In August, Dr. Jerome Adams, the United States Surgeon General, warned about the risks of cannabis for young adults—explicitly noting the cannabis-schizophrenia link.”
― Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

“In August 2020, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 25 percent of adults ages eighteen to twenty-four said they had seriously considered suicide during the month of June. That figure was more than double the percentage who had reported doing so in a similar survey in 2018. These young adults are at essentially no risk from the coronavirus.”
― Alex Berenson, Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives

“Tarik reappeared from room 104 carrying a soft-sided blue travel bag, large enough to hold a week’s worth of clothes, small enough to fit in an airplane’s overhead bin.”
― Alex Berenson, The Faithful Spy

“But other countries have gone the other way. Australia is now building internment camps for Covid quarantine. It calls them “centers for national resilience.”14 George Orwell would be proud.”
― Alex Berenson, Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives

“The psychosis-inducing effects of synthetics offered one last, crucial piece of evidence about the risks of cannabis. And so, in January 2017, the National Academy of Medicine examined the thirty years of research that had begun with Sven Andréasson’s paper and declared the issue settled. “The association between cannabis use and development of a psychotic disorder is supported by data synthesized in several good-quality systematic reviews,” the NAM wrote. “The magnitude of this association is moderate to large and appears to be dose-dependent . . . The primary literature reviewed by the committee confirms the conclusions of the systematic reviews.” But almost no one noticed the National Academy report. The New York Times published an online summary of its findings—in May 2018, more than a year after it appeared. It has not changed the public policy debate around marijuana in the United States or perceptions of the safety of the drug.”
― Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

“In fact, the CDC would later implicitly acknowledge the system’s value when it admitted in June that the mRNA vaccines could cause myocarditis—a potentially serious heart problem—in young men. Side effect reports from VAERS formed the core of the agency’s analysis.37 Yet even after that finding, the stories dismissing the value of the VAERS reports went on.38 I am not an “anti-vaxxer.”
― Alex Berenson, Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives

“Almost no one—not even the police officers who deal with it every day, not even most psychiatrists—publicly connects marijuana and crime. We all know alcohol causes violence, but somehow, we have grown to believe that marijuana does not, that centuries of experience were a myth. As a pediatrician wrote in a 2015 piece for the New York Times in which he argued that marijuana was safer for his teenage children than alcohol: “People who are high are not committing violence.” But they are. Almost unnoticed, the studies have piled up. On murderers in Pittsburgh, on psychiatric patients in Italy, on tourists in Spain, on emergency room patients in Michigan. Most weren’t even designed to look for a connection between marijuana and violence, because no one thought one existed. Yet they found it. In many cases, they have even found marijuana’s tendency to cause violence is greater than that of alcohol. A 2018 study of people with psychosis in Switzerland found that almost half of cannabis users became violent over a three-year period; their risk of violence was four times that of psychotic people who didn’t use. (Alcohol didn’t seem to increase violence in this group at all.) The effect is not confined to people with preexisting psychosis. A 2012 study of 12,000 high school students across the United States showed that those who used cannabis were more than three times as likely to become violent as those who didn’t, surpassing the risk of alcohol use. Even worse, studies of children who have died from abuse and neglect consistently show that the adults responsible for their deaths use marijuana far more frequently than alcohol or other drugs—and far, far more than the general population. Marijuana does not necessarily cause all those crimes, but the link is striking and large. We shouldn’t be surprised. The violence that drinking causes is largely predictable. Alcohol intoxicates. It disinhibits users. It escalates conflict. It turns arguments into fights, fights into assaults, assaults into murders. Marijuana is an intoxicant that can disinhibit users, too. And though it sends many people into a relaxed haze, it also frequently causes paranoia and psychosis. Sometimes those are short-term episodes in healthy people. Sometimes they are months-long spirals in people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. And paranoia and psychosis cause violence. The psychiatrists who treated Raina Thaiday spoke of the terror she suffered, and they weren’t exaggerating. Imagine voices no one else can hear screaming at you. Imagine fearing your food is poisoned or aliens have put a chip in your brain. When that terror becomes too much, some people with psychosis snap. But when they break, they don’t escalate in predictable ways. They take hammers to their families. They decide their friends are devils and shoot them. They push strangers in front of trains. The homeless man mumbling about God frightens us because we don’t have to be experts on mental illness and violence to know instinctively that untreated psychosis is dangerous. And finding violence and homicides connected to marijuana is all too easy.”
― Alex Berenson, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

“A luxury once tasted becomes a necessity.”
― Alex Berenson, The Midnight House

“Yet despite the enormous cost of these measures, despite their intrusion on our civil liberties, none of them been shown to slow the spread of Covid.”
― Alex Berenson, Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives

“In a democracy, a politician who didn’t know where he stood might lose an election. In Russia, he’d lose everything.”
― Alex Berenson, The Deceivers

“Doctors sometimes joke that if patients get good medical care, they will recover from the flu in a week. Without help, they’ll need seven days.”
― Alex Berenson, Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives

“one of these fancy houses. But Dale might show up at the Kermex lot with the cops, and nobody could risk that. Least of all Wells. He tossed the box of fried chicken on the lawn – maybe the smell would attract raccoons. They walked for miles down Mount Vernon in rain that turned into a full-on thunderstorm. Wells forced himself to stick with Eduardo and the others, though he worried that a cop might pick them up. Sandy Springs was the richest suburb in Atlanta, and its police didn’t look kindly on brown men wandering the streets. For long stretches, the road had no shoulder or sidewalks, and twice they were forced to jump into brush to avoid speeding SUVs. Finally they reached 285 and waited interminably for a bus. From now on Wells was bringing twenty bucks and his cell phone on these jobs, so he could call a cab if he got ditched. He had been colder and hungrier plenty of times, but he couldn’t remember being quite so furious. He expected more from his country. Beside him the Guatemalans chattered away until finally Wells tapped Eduardo’s shoulder. ‘You speak English?’ Wells said. Eduardo smiled. ‘Good as you speak Spanish.’ ‘Then can I ask you something? You like it here?’ ‘Every month I send my family seven hundred dollars. They building a house in Escuintla, where I’m from,’ Eduardo said. ‘When it’s done, I go home.’ ‘You don’t want to stay?’ ‘You”
― Alex Berenson, The Faithful Spy

“But no one was indispensable. These guys, they lost a step and the game moved past them. The teams were eternal, but the players came and went. One”
― Alex Berenson, The Silent Man

“But having just lived through the bubble and bust, Graham believed that investors put too much weight on short-term earnings trends, especially if they were strongly positive. “We cannot be sure that a trend of profits shown in the past will continue in the future,” Graham wrote. “The law of diminishing returns and of increasing competition . . . must finally flatten out any sharply upward curve of growth. There is also the flow and ebb of the business cycle, from which the particular danger arises that the earnings curve will look most impressive on the very eve of a serious setback.”18 Further, Graham warned, “There is no method of establishing a logical relationship between trend and price. This means that the value placed upon a satisfactory trend must be wholly arbitrary, and hence speculative, and hence inevitably subject to exaggeration and later collapse.”
― Alex Berenson, The Number

“the reason he had known about Islam long before he studied the religion at Dartmouth. He was one-quarter Muslim by birth. Noor had”
― Alex Berenson, The Faithful Spy

“Even more importantly, the media has largely failed to report that the Sunbelt spike in hospitalizations is over. Arizona, Florida, and Texas have all seen big drops in hospitalizations in late July.”
― Alex Berenson, Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 2: Update and Examination of Lockdowns as a Strategy

“Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Those words are as true now as they were in 2006. We have forgotten them once already this year. We can’t afford to make that mistake again.”
― Alex Berenson, Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 2: Update and Examination of Lockdowns as a Strategy

“California has about 40 million people. Since the epidemic began almost five months ago, the state has had about 9,000 deaths from the virus, none in anyone under 18. That’s correct: Not one person under the age of 18 has died in the largest American state from Sars-Cov-2. Yet California’s economy and society remain crippled.”
― Alex Berenson, Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 2: Update and Examination of Lockdowns as a Strategy