On April 15, Kenneth Silber wrote an essay for Splice Today headlined “What I Got Right And Wrong,” which was intended to be a reckoning of how the views he's voiced have held up over time. To his credit, he admitted being wrong in a February 12, 2024 article, in which he speculated that Joe Biden “might be a “cognitive super ager,” one of those people who markedly defy expectations of cognitive decline.” “Markedly,” despite the fact that the poor guy had already been stumbling and bumbling about in public for a few years, sometimes wandering off like a child the adults needed to retrieve.
In the comments section, I added one more thing Silber has gotten wrong—his claim, in Splice Today comments several months ago, that I once called Noah Smith, an economist who used to be a Twitter bigshot, “a commie.”
When I called out Silber on April 15 about his weird, false claim about me, he replied, “I was entirely correct in what I wrote.” What he wrote, after his initial claim that I’d called Smith a “commie,” was that I had referred to Smith's “commie perspective” in my conversation with the economist.
That conversation can be found at this link. Anyone can read the entire thread and see that it was Smith who called me a commie, and that I never called him one. Here's his exact quote to me: “That is exactly my argument. Get the hell outta my grill, commie weirdo!”
My response to Smith: “My argument isn't even from the commie perspective, but you go with that one! Yours is, however.” While Silber claims I’d referred to Smith’s “commie perspective,” in fact I was denying that I was arguing with him from the commie perspective. I was defending myself from his slur that I was a commie.
I've had a few disagreements with Splice Today contributors over the years, especially Noah Berlatsky. There's nothing wrong with airing out differences in opinions in this forum. As I recall, Noah has called me, among other insults, a fascist, which didn't bother me. He's entitled to expressing his opinion in a public forum. I'm not friends with Berlatsky, to say the least, but he hasn't ever made stuff up about me as Silber has.
Why Silber, whose LinkedIn profile describes him as a “fact checker,” wrote such an non-factual thing about me (and keeps denying it, despite undeniable evidence against him) is a mystery. I'd never had even the slightest disagreement with him until he said I'd called Smith a commie. He came to that conclusion by combing through my Twitter account (after writing for Splice Today on December 17, 2024 that he’d already deactivated his Twitter account) like internet cops have done for years to get someone cancelled. And it's laughable that anyone would think that me allegedly calling someone a commie was a big deal that was going to reflect on my credibility.
This is creepy and unprofessional behavior. When I asked Silber, in the comments section, why he stalked my Twitter account, he said, “I too have had enough of your antics.” When I asked what those antics were, he didn't have the courtesy to reply. Instead, he’s continued to spread falsehoods about me online.
I’ll say to Silber, “You were not ‘entirely correct’ in what you wrote about me. Not even close. Have I hurt you in some way? The ball is in your court now. Try not to dig yourself any deeper in the hole. I've given you plenty of chances online to take back your falsehoods, yet you persist. You've forced me to address the issue this way.”
