PETER HITCHENS: “Covid ‘denier’ is a disgusting, dog-whistle slur:”

[I]t’s a revolting, dog-whistle slur, designed to suggest the person involved is equivalent to those who deny the Shoah took place. One of the first principles of political argument is that if you are explaining, you are losing. So my response to this is not to explain. If anybody actually thinks I am a denier of the Holocaust, let them say so somewhere public, where we can deal with it.

He’s not wrong — it’s simply an extension of the old “climate denier” slur: In January 2007, CBS’s Scott Pelley “was asked why he refused to include global warming skeptics in his reporting. He responded, ‘If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?’”