There’s no mystery in why Dr. Anthony Fauci strove to silence discussion about the origins of COVID-19 – he was in full CYA mode because the agency he led had helped fund the Wuhan lab that apparently created the deadly virus. It also seems clear that others in the government and many powerful business interests enabled this deception for fear that fingering China rather than a rabid bat might lead Americans to demand some accountability.
This makes President Biden’s decision to grant Fauci a “preemptive pardon” all the more troubling. Biden apparently believed that the doctor who equated himself with science itself needed to be shielded from prosecution “for any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon.”
This stinks of a cover-up. It raises the question: why the start date six years before the pandemic erupted? It suggests that Biden or someone in his administration knew or at least suspected that Fauci may have engaged in criminal activity connected to the emergence of the virus.
Even if one accepts the Democrats’ argument that Fauci was singled out as a fall guy by President Trump, Rand Paul, and much of the Republican Party, it’s hard to understand why shielding one man from scrutiny is more important than holding a possible wrongdoer accountable. Given that some 1.24 million Americans have died from the virus, including several thousand this year, one might expect that Fauci’s defenders in the Democratic Party and the legacy media would themselves want answers about Fauci’s Biden actions – and the backstory of the pardon. Who advised Biden to protect him? Why? What did they know and when did they know it?
Instead, when Sen. Paul and other Republicans forced Fauci to testify before the Senate last week, Democrats and the legacy media remained committed to throttling discussion of the most consequential event in recent history.
Despite his pardon, Fauci refused to answer questions, invoking his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination (though that may not be the end of his legal troubles). Instead of assailing this lack of candor, Democrats praised Fauci for resisting Republican efforts to catch him a lie.
“It must be enormously frustrating to know that this hearing is designed to entrap you,” Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire told him. Isn’t the truth supposed to set you free?
It apparently occurred to none of the committee Democrats who regurgitated the talking point about a “perjury trap” that it was only a trap for Fauci if he lied to the committee.
Without a tinge of irony Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut argued that even asking Fauci about clear discrepancies between his public and private statements (especially those in he made in recently released personal notes suggesting he knew that virus might have been manufactured in a lab) was an assault on the truth.
“Dr. Fauci is just one part of this larger campaign against science and facts – a campaign that has made Americans less safe,” Blumenthal said. “It is shameful that a dedicated public servant like Dr. Fauci has experienced persistent threats to his life since the pandemic because of the lies that are told about him.”
The New York Times’ opinion pages went even further, publishing an op-ed by one of its contributing writers comparing Sen. Paul to the controversial anti-communist crusader of the 1950s, Sen. Joe McCarthy, and described the Senate hearing as a Soviet style “show trial.” Perhaps the writer and the paper’s editors aren’t aware that defendants were not allowed to plead the Fifth in Stalin’s Russia.
More significant was the Times’ effort in its news pages to rewrite the history of the COVID era. In its lead article on the hearing, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported that “The pandemic was a fast-moving crisis, and Dr. Fauci’s diary makes it clear that he and scientists like him were dealing with an unknown virus in which the science was evolving quickly.”
Depicting Fauci as an open-minded fact-finder erases the mountains of evidence documenting his strenuous efforts to discredit those who questioned the pandemic’s origins, including current NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. If Fauci knew the fast-moving crisis was a massive grey zone, his black-and-white public statements are even more damning.
In the left’s telling, the pandemic was not a period of unfettered government intervention based on dubious evidence that cost millions of people their businesses, jobs, education and access to their loved ones – unless they wanted to meet them at massive BLM protests. It was simply a trying time when faithful public servants were just doing their best in uncharted waters. Nothing to see, move on.
This dubious narrative is not an outlier, but part of a larger push to expunge their egregious excesses from the record. Although Democrats and their media stenographers spent years promising the nation that Trump had colluded with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election, promising that a presidential arrest was always just a day away, they now pretend they had only blandly claimed that Russia had tried to interfere in the race. Rather than examining how and why vast levers of power – from government agencies such as CIA, FBI, and the State Department to major media outlets and social platforms – colluded to topple a president on bogus claims, they have worked to erase these facts from memory and gaslight the public. In recent years they have done the same to dismiss the Obama and Biden administrations’ aggressive efforts to censor views it didn’t like, including the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The same dynamic is going on right now as they cast avowed socialists such as Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as mainstream populists fighting for the people. While a few Democrats have called out these far-left figures, noting that have more in common with Vladmir Lenin than George Washington, most party members – with help from legacy media outlets – have erased these hard edges. They portray them, instead, as exciting new voices in softball interviews.
After the radical Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday, the AP, New York Times, NPR, Wall Street Journal, and all the rest described him as a “progressive” – a label most every Democrat has embraced since the term liberal became toxic. This strategy is a two-fer because it allows them to describe less radical party members as moderates. Meanwhile, of course, most every Republican, in their telling, is far-right; some are even fascists.
Trump-hatred explains some of this behavior – all is fair in war. But the command-and-control policies they enforced during COVID are the real prize. For all their talk of the people, the Democrat elite and legacy media believe they should run everything because they know best and the rest of us know nothing. Fauci’s lockdowns gave them a taste of this power; socialism promises more.
It can happen here.
