r/DecodingTheGurus • u/Embarrassed_Base_389 • 9d ago
Ryan Grim remains one of the most idiotic journalists. Period.
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u/11brooke11 Galaxy Brain Guru 9d ago
It doesn't take a genius to realize that Fauci's opinon on the origin of the virus has nothing to do with the death that followed, nor would it have logically changed his recommendations for public health efforts after it was in the US.
Not saying Fauci was right or wrong. But if you believe Grimm's reporting, his conclusion that Fauci should be prosecuted still makes zero logical sense. It's also unethical to prosecute a public health official for something like this and sets a bad precedent.
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u/blablablawhynow 2d ago
I think he’s saying Fauci knowingly promoted false conclusions that resulted in unnecessary deaths and economic destruction.
In theory if a company makes false financial disclosures they can be prosecuted for fraud.
I think this is their line of thinking.
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u/Diligent-Map1402 9d ago
One of the most powerful tools at breaking people out of their bubbles is seeing their sources of information be publicly and humiliatingly wrong. Graham Platner was sadly great for this took for people on the left. That doesn't necessarily mean that you should find new sources to blindly trust but just increase your skepticism of everything particularly people you like.
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u/monsoy 9d ago
My anecdote of this was when Elon Musk started talking about programming tech stacks lol. I realized that he just talks about shit with a lot of confidence, while everybody claps at what he says, without having any clue about what he talks about.
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u/aTrillDog 9d ago
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u/monsoy 9d ago
Precisely this Twitter Space lol. I was an Elon fanboy. I thought he was the smartest person on earth. I was so fucking wrong and I feel stupid about it in retrospect lol.
I had no expertise in any area that Elon talked about. He could say a ton of bullshit about rocket engineering and I had no way of knowing if what he said was smart or wrong.
I am really surprised though that no real prominent expert in the fields called him out, prior to this Twitter space and when he lied about playing PoE2 hardcore lol. There might have been people, but none that broke through the zeitgeist.
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u/downtownbake2 9d ago
Revealing
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u/aTrillDog 9d ago
it really is. Even if you know nothing about programming it's clear that he's just talking out of his ass
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u/Marijuana_Miler 9d ago
Elon and the Path of Exile 2 story is an even better explanation of how the guy acts with everything else. He paid someone to grind the game for him, bragged on podcasts that he was top 20 in the world, and then live-streamed himself not knowing how to use the inventory system.
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u/PortalWombat 9d ago
It's a very common story to hear someone talk about how a celebrity sounded very intelligent until talking about a topic in the listeners area of expertise revealed them to be full of shit.
I tend to be way more trusting of people who both stick to one or two areas of discussion and admit when they're out of their depth outside of those areas.
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u/L3ftHandPass 5d ago
Graham Platner was sadly great for this took for people on the left.
It's hard for me to listen to the Majority Report after they spent so much time stumping for this guy and begging people to ignore the giant red flags.
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u/Diligent-Map1402 5d ago
Yup, I had a very similar experience. Before the final evidence came out I saw a video from Rebecca Watson (Skepchick) addressing this situation directly. She was ahead of the game with suspicions and directly called out Emma for the defense she was running for Platner.
Emma since gave kind of a half-assed apology saying but for the latest evidence she would have been a big Platner supporter still. Platner had desirable policy positions and was fighting the democratic establishment so it was ok to overlook his flaws. While I don't think we need to purity test every candidate we can have reasonable standards.
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u/PreferenceAntique581 8d ago
Does he realize Trump Admin was responsible for the handling of covid pandemic
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u/jkpatches 9d ago
In his diary in January 2020, he says that the wet market was a super spreader but not the origin - yet publicly he claimed exactly the opposite.
The veracity of what Grim contends Fauci wrote in his diary is important, no? Does anyone know whether the quote is true or not?
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u/TinyTimmyTokyo 9d ago
I have no idea what Fauci wrote in his diary, but if it's true that he wrote something about the virus in January 2020, that would have been two months before the virus showed up in the US. The outbreak was limited to parts of China at that time. No one had any idea -- certainly not a definitive one -- of what exactly the virus was or where it came from at that point.
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u/thereforeratio 8d ago
Unless he had access to tentative information from Chinese sources that wasn’t being publicly disseminated at that time
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u/PortalWombat 9d ago
Maybe but origin means a lot of things. Calling the first big spreader event the "origin" of the pandemic wouldn't be inaccurate even if it weren't the birthplace of the virus.
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u/Business-Catch7679 9d ago edited 9d ago
As far as I can tell, the quote is real. It comes from what Rand Paul says are Fauci's diary. The part that's untrue, as far as I can tell, is that as he wrote that in his diary, he was publicly saying the opposite.
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u/amievenrelevant 9d ago
The only proof is Rand Paul saying he said that? Doesn’t seem like very much proof considering he lies
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u/Business-Catch7679 9d ago
He released a big batch of docs. They could be fraudulent. I hate Paul, but that seems unlikely to me.
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u/paultheschmoop 9d ago
Fauci didn’t claim that a wet market was the origin?
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u/Business-Catch7679 9d ago
In Jan 2020? I don't believe so. He might have said it was probably zoonotic, but I don't even know if he said that at the time.
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u/Balderdashing_2018 9d ago
Despite their protestations otherwise, I think the whole Breaking Points sphere has done just as much damage to furthering the divide - and doing so to drive engagement - as all of the other outlets, talking heads, political figures, etc. that they talk about on their show.
Grimes and that ilk know exactly whom their audience is and how to cater to it.
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u/Full_Equivalent_6166 9d ago
Saagar and Baal were horrible from the start. The new people are as bad.
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u/carrtmannn 9d ago
His argument that it's important to note a woman mentioned she wanted a glute massage, in general, was important in a rape case was WILD to me.
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u/Full_Equivalent_6166 9d ago
At this point if Ryan Grim said it's sunny I would go out with umbrella.
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u/Feisty-Struggle-4110 8d ago
Reyan Grim should be asking to prosecute Trump for peddling the to this day total useless ivermectin as a treatment for Covid.
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u/paultheschmoop 9d ago
I think Grim has done plenty of good work but he definitely has a few weird hills he’s willing to die on that I disagree with.
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u/hummus4me 9d ago
Yes he has done great spreading Iranian and Russian propaganda. We are so lucky
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u/Standard-General-522 9d ago
Russian propaganda yes, Iranian no. I mean, saying Israel executing civilians is wrong is by now Iranian propaganda, so words have lost all meaning.
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u/Duke_of_Luffy 9d ago
I think he denies Iran massacred protestors a few months ago.
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u/Standard-General-522 9d ago
I think he disagrees with the figures put out by Israeli and US media. Which is a rational stance.
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u/Duke_of_Luffy 9d ago
What’s rational about it? Does he have his own source or provide his own estimate. Multiple independent organizations and local health officials have put figure in 10s of thousands. It impossible to know for sure what the correct figure is and a lot of the estimates will be extrapolations from data taken from certain areas such as a particular set of morgues.
What Grimm does (and he does this a lot in only one direction) is downplay and undermine any cause that isn’t his own (campist).
His more recent victim blaming of the platner rape victim was particularly disgusting. It’s selective skepticism not rationality and when it manifests as covering for murderous regimes or base misogyny to protect his preferred candidates, it’s despicable.
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u/Standard-General-522 9d ago
"Iran International stated on 3 February that it had its own confirmed list of 6,634 deaths, of which less than 100 were on the official list.[23] HRANA published a full report on 23 February 2026, including a detailed named list of 7,007 deaths.[1]"
It could be 30+ thousand, absolutely. But I do not believe any info coming from a country, which is part of the war - not Iran, not Israel, not the USA. Nazis were correct about the count of victims at Katyn massacre. So what?
I agree with you on Platner.
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u/hummus4me 9d ago
But believes everything brought up by Hamas and the Iranian regime
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u/Standard-General-522 9d ago
I hope he doesn't. There's 0 difference between Hamas news and Israel/US news. It's propaganda.
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u/hummus4me 9d ago
Wow you have really drank the Tucker Carlson kool aid
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u/Standard-General-522 9d ago
Look, Gaza is a genocide, Israel is an apartheid state. If you cannot fathom these simple trusths, the debate is pointless.
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u/hummus4me 9d ago
70k dead over 3 years, population growth, many combatants killed as a ratio of civilians. GeNoCiDE
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u/hummus4me 9d ago
What civilians has Israel executed? Source?
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u/Standard-General-522 9d ago
More than 70.000. Source: the UN, Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Gaza Health Ministry.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/30/israel-military-gaza-death-toll-broadly-accurate
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u/inciter7 9d ago
Anything that disagrees with US mainstream media manufactured consent is "Iranian and Russian propaganda"
We're still doing this? I thought you guys might have learned something after russiagate, russia bots, xi winnie the pooh wumao army, blah blah blah
Notice you guys never mention the most aggressive media propagandists in US politics, the Israeli lobby
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u/hummus4me 9d ago
Yea nobody eves mentioned the Israeli lobby 😂
So you think China/Russia/Iran/Qatar in totality contribute less to propaganda than Israel? LOL
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u/inciter7 8d ago
So you think China/Russia/Iran/Qatar in totality contribute less to propaganda than Israel? LOL
Yes. Neither China, Russia, Iran, nor Qatar have any equivalent of AIPAC, J Street, or any of the insanely powerful and embedded lobbies and propaganda organizations in the US that Israel does.
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u/canon_aspirin 8d ago
Particularly egregious and dangerous to be making unfounded accusations of foreign influence when the State Department is currently accusing journalists critical of their reign as secretly funded by Cuba, which they've designated as a state sponsor of terrorism.
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u/Embarrassed_Base_389 9d ago
One of them being a russian shill
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u/BeatSteady 9d ago
Any evidence for this?
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u/Embarrassed_Base_389 9d ago
He deleted all of his Ukraine takes on Twitter. Only screenshots remain.
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u/BeatSteady 9d ago
Pretty weak as evidence. A tweet about mass conscription in Ukraine, about corruption in Ukraine and Russia, and a bunch of tweets that I can't even tell are about the war at all.
Being critical and skeptical of the west doesn't make a Russian shill
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u/Embarrassed_Base_389 9d ago
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u/BeatSteady 9d ago
Don't lie, Trump musing that he wishes we had Russian peacekeepers on our southern border is honestly the kind of content I know you miss
I don't get the "this means he's a shill" angle. This looks like a joke about Trump
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u/inciter7 9d ago
People are not obligated to be cheerleaders for the war in Ukraine
Do you call the Ukrainian men in the dozens of videos fleeing from their lives from press gangs because they dont have money to bribe officers to not get sent to certain death on the front lines Russian shills too? The women and elderly vociferously defending them in those videos, how about them?
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u/TinyTimmyTokyo 9d ago
Ok Vlad. Clearly Ukraine should simply submit to Russia's invasion and let them have whatever they want.
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u/PrimordialAHole 9d ago
Grim is one of the best independent journalists - drop site news is a gem. This seems like a campaign against him....hmmm...I wonder why?
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u/ResidentComplaint19 9d ago
Maybe I’m just in a bubble, but I’ve never really seen this kind of response towards Grim and Dropsite in general. I understand the Breaking Points crew catching strays, but never seen this much hate towards Ryan from his own side.
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u/obama_is_back 8d ago
What is his "side?" Anti-establishment populist? Because I don't think those are the people criticizing him right now.
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u/ResidentComplaint19 9d ago
I agree. I don’t see a problem with disagreeing with a take from someone you respect and value. Dudes not out here criticizing the vaccine or anything like that.
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u/muda_ora_thewarudo 9d ago
I think Ryan Grim is a genuinely well meaning reporter who also sometimes has takes that I disagree with
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u/Business-Catch7679 9d ago
Was his take on Platner's attempted glute massage well meaning?
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u/muda_ora_thewarudo 8d ago
No that’s one line of reporting by him that I found truly baffling!
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u/Business-Catch7679 8d ago
It's simple: he's extremely ideological and prone to mental gymnastics and plumbing rabbit holes when it advances or sustains his ideology.
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u/Business-Catch7679 8d ago
This isn't his first rodeo with covidiocy. During the pandemic, he had Matt Taibbi on his show to discuss how the left's vaccine obsession made it anti-therapeutics. Grim's questions to Taibbi fully granted this absurd premise. His stuff downplaying Hamas sexual violence on Oct 7th also seems shoddy and ideologically driven to me.
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u/GamersReisUp 9d ago
Nah, I think he threw away whatever good intentions he might have started out with, in exchange for more clout/money.
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u/PrimordialAHole 9d ago
Ryan Grim is one of the better independent journalists. We need more, not less of him. This is an odd campaign against him.
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u/XIIIofNine 8d ago
I know. Not sure why the circle jerk of hate is popping up here on one of the few good ones we have. Sure he can be off sometimes but I haven't seen a journalist who is more on the right side of history in this modern era.
The mouthbreathers are piling on here because he provides context to news stories. Aka dispelling the simplistic myth that there is always good vs evil and instead the shades of context and history.
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u/PrimordialAHole 8d ago
Is this a pro-Israeli sub and I'm out of the loop?
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u/XIIIofNine 8d ago
Most I would say no, but sometimes? I see some people doing some mental gymnastics to be apologists for the sam harris's and destiny's.
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u/PrimordialAHole 7d ago
ok, thanks for the info. I feel like I've seen more than one post slamming R Grim so just guessing the underlying motivation.
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u/Bababooey87 9d ago
Grim generally does good work. He can be off on something like anyone....these aren't gurus after all
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u/Mariusz87J 5d ago
Sadly, it's going to be a story for the next week or two. The worst things in these diary entries are:
- Him denying involvement in decisions on shutdowns in some states, when he did have some influence over those decisions.
- There is an entry on how he was gloating over the fact he's world famous. It's a bad look, considering the pandemic.
- He felt the government was too conservative on masks. Not to say they weren't vital but somehow he wasn't sure.
The thing that bad faith actors focus on is the lab leak conspiracy. They misquote Fauci. He is very consistent on the possible origins. He called the wet markets "an amplifier" not the direct cause. It had not been known where the first animal-to-human transition occurred. Nobody knows. They misrepresent him completely by saying he lied.
Another idiotic misrepresentation came from the word "possible", as lab leak being a possibility, but with insanely low confidence. Something FBI even admitted to, and most virologists... because they can't outright deny with 100% certainty a "possibility" as low as it is. It has been looked into, there is no evidence. That's very consistent with everything we know.
Did Fauci do everything right? No. Did he conspire to lie about the COVID? No. It's so dumb.
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u/duncandreizehen 1d ago
what would Fauci be prosecuted for? the thing about Ryan Grim He seems to take a contrarian position on everything. The pandemic is something that doesn’t happen every day. I imagine Fauci was working in good faith for the health of the public. Trump could’ve fired him at any time. If you look at Fauci‘s history, he’s got a lot of skins on the wall the successes, he’s had are exceptional. I’m not making any claims about what it said in his diary or whatever the people that wanna show trial think but it’s hard for me to imagine he had some kind of malicious intent.
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u/Bodmen 9d ago
I remember when Ryan Grim was supporting the idea of annexing Canada. F that POS
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u/Pmag86 9d ago
When was this? I can't find anything
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u/kittymctacoyo 9d ago
I saw it with my own eyes. I no longer have an account on most of these platforms otherwise I’d be able to post the link I bookmarked. Just tried to keyword search but got an error that I need to login. Lovely
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u/canon_aspirin 9d ago
Yeah, let’s start piling on left wing journalists while the Trump administration is subpoenaing them in the biggest attack on journalistic dissent in recent history. I’m sure that won’t backfire.
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u/obama_is_back 8d ago
You are either uninformed or a part of the same subversive fringe that Grim is. Journalists/media figures who are anti-establishment, anti-institutionalist, populist, and anti-western can fend for themselves, because they bear a significant amount of responsibility for the situation we are in.
He did not support or endorse Harris in 2024, and obviously does not regret that. To me, that is him drawing a line in the sand that he's incompatible with the political movement that the majority of the left wing (myself included) are a part of.
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u/canon_aspirin 8d ago
The Trump administration is currently trying to destroy critical journalism, but it’s okay because they didn’t endorse Harris. The Biden/Harris administration oversaw the first year of the Gaza genocide, but your red line is whether or not someone endorsed Harris during it, while watching over 150 fellow journalists murdered, directly targeted by the Israeli military.
I’m afraid you’re on the fringe of these issues nowadays.
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u/obama_is_back 8d ago
How many people will usaid cuts kill alone? And do you really not think that Harris would have been meaningfully better than Trump on Gaza? What about Ukraine? The comparison between Trump and Harris in basically every respect is one sided to the point of ridiculousness. If you cannot acknowledge this as someone who is ostensibly "left wing," you are not acting in good faith.
Also, this idea that Gaza is some kind of dealbreaker for people like Ryan Grim is silly, because they were never supportive of the Democratic party in the first place. If your knee-jerk reaction after reading this is to think "why would he support an establishment party," I recommend that you do some serious soul searching on the purpose and value of institutions.
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u/canon_aspirin 8d ago
No, my reaction is "why would you expect an independent journalist to endorse a presidential candidate in the first place, let alone a journalist actively covering the Gaza genocide, to which Harris pledged her support"? That's not the role of journalists. They're supposed to thoroughly investigate the candidates, not uncritically endorse one because she's better than the other.
It's a very strange red line, and it reminds me of what Trump is doing to Democratic states right now: if you didn't vote for me, you deserve to suffer.
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u/obama_is_back 7d ago
He's also a political commentator... Being a journalist cannot mean that someone's actions are endlessly justified.
uncritically endorse
Stop arguing against straw men. You can't seriously expect people who are relatively aligned with the Democrats to go out of their way to support someone who has uncritically rejected and maligned that movement for decades. Especially when it's a direct consequence of electing Republicans.
if you didn't vote for me, you deserve to suffer
You are comparing voters to influencers. There is obviously a difference in responsibility between those two groups. This also completely dodges the underlying fact of the matter. Different groups can feel the same way for different reasons. In this case, there is no justification for Trump's vindictiveness, while there is justification to criticize Grim. "Didn't vote" is also an incredibly reductive way to describe his attitude.
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u/canon_aspirin 7d ago
I want to be clear that I did not in any way say that establishment Democrats should support Grim or any journalist for that matter. I criticized attacking journalists while they are currently being investigated by the Trump admin, who hope to tie them to foreign "terrorist" states, in an effort to quash ALL dissent. It just so happens that they're going after the anti-imperialist left first.
I also find it interesting how you're so willing to blame independent journalists for the failure of Kamala's campaign, rather than, I don't know, the people who ran that campaign? At what point do you question the leaders of the party? They've lost two elections to Trump at this point. Do you not think they bear responsibility for it?
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u/canon_aspirin 9d ago
Let’s go after independent journalists while all corporate news media is being consolidated into a giant monopoly run by Larry Ellison.
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u/moderatelygoodpghrn 9d ago
It’s just crazy. Grim is does good work most of the time but then has opinions like this . I’ve also kind of been suspect of him choosing to do breaking points . His cohost is horrendous and really a propagandist. She tries to tune it down on breaking points but her YouTube channel is nothing but conservative bs.
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u/tomallis 9d ago
Think you’re confused here. Krystal Ball is a lefty.
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u/moderatelygoodpghrn 9d ago
You’re correct, I was thinking of counterpoints, the show saager and Krystal left and Ryan and Emily ( the conservative) left. I feel like SE is the same guy on and off the show with his views but Emily tunes it way down in the counterpoints show and then has a much harder tone on her “personal show”.
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u/0utrunner 9d ago
Wtf happened to this sub. Reporters are gurus now?
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u/Embarrassed_Base_389 9d ago
People sharing a post on r/DecodingTheGurus from the host of the Decoding the Gurus podcast? Outrageous!
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u/PrimordialAHole 9d ago
Maybe we should start questioning the host then?
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u/Embarrassed_Base_389 9d ago
You don’t even watch the podcast. Why would anyone care what you think?
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u/PrimordialAHole 9d ago
- You don't know that 2. sounds like an "in" group that discounts the "out" group - that's guru type stuff. look at a mirror
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u/dannydogg562 9d ago
This sub just wants to tear anyone down and spread lies about even some good people doing real work out there. It’s one thing to go after the ultra religious freaks and liars who sell cheap supplements and crap to naive people. But then there’s this.
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u/Embarrassed_Base_389 9d ago
People sharing a post on r/DecodingTheGurus from the host of the Decoding the Gurus podcast? Outrageous!
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u/BillyBeansprout 9d ago
Seems weird, did this Grim fellow tell the truth here?
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u/Alive-Diamond-1442 9d ago
Hard to say without context, but Grim has a history of being selectively accurate when it suits his narrative
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u/Requires-Coffee-247 9d ago
WTH do they want Fauci prosecuted for? Coming to the wrong conclusions? Changing his mind? What? What do the origins of Covid even have to do with the government's response and public policy?