Faucism

[Speaking about an acquaintance still defending Fauci] Why Fauci, and why now? I think the answer is that Fauci, and Faucism, represented the apotheosis of what the managerial/academic/journo class desires: An excuse for sweeping power, based on (alleged) expertise, in which they could ride roughshod over those stupid proles and flyover people while preening about the allegedly superior moral and intellectual qualities that justify their rule. Then it turned out that they were wrong about nearly everything and — as Fauci’s diaries demonstrate — knew it at the time, at least at the top. And their overreach is one of the things that gave us Trump 47. -Glenn Reynolds Instapundit substack.

Instapundit nailed it.

The mainstream media is now fiercely ignoring both Anthony Fauci’s appalling diary revelations and his pathetic pleading the Fifth before Congress. How many journos are among the suckers who bought Fauci votive candles or still believe that he saved any lives? Where are the fawning interviewers who foisted this world-class media whore on us for two years?

The same people who have been wrong about climate change, about the biological realties of sex and sexuality, or that Derek Chauvin’s knee strangled George Floyd all instantly formed a national Blockwart to enforce utterly wrong COVID-19 policies. In its infancy, the Nazi Party was slower to deploy ideological enforcement tools than the American narcisso-groupthink left was during COVID.

The people with “We Believe in Science” yard signs and believe in The Consensus (Peace Be Upon It) on climate change don’t realize that they are not at the cutting edge of inexorable progress but are instead the same people who rejected Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin and Einstein solely on the basis of a comfortable group identity as part of a supposedly well-informed elite whose herd thought patterns Tom Wolfe wryly encapsulated as tout le monde.

The journalistic invention of a division between Trump and Fauci instantly made Fauci the official scientific champion against those troglodyte, anti-science MAGA types. And he reveled in his new role as the anti-Trump in this utterly false narrative. Trump’s real failure was not dumping the clown show that was the White House Task Force headed by Fauci, Birx and Collins.

Fauci is symbolic in another way. He is the uber-bureaucrat. He reportedly turned down more than one appointment to head the National Institute of Health, in theory the highest position in the federal science establishment. The head of NIH has to deal with a huge array of committees and applicants for $40 billion in grants with considerable scrutiny and process. In contrast, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for years, Fauci had achieved direct influence and control over $8 billion, and considerable input on the rest of the NIH dollar output with far less scrutiny and accountability than the head of NIH. Crossing Don Anthony could be career-killing. Not surprisingly, awards and speaker fees flowed.

Controlling public resources to direct the lives, speech and work of people dependent on those resources is apparatchik nirvana.

The three scientists tasked with penning the infamous paper to deny the lab origin of COVID-19 were on an infamous preliminary conference call that included Fauci and his British counterpart—men who together controlled or directly influenced probably $50 billion or more in research funding. That careers were on the line was made clear. That paper instantly became the shield to deflect initial scrutiny of Fauci-funded research gone horribly wrong. And a media excuse to attack and deny the more obvious origin of the virus for over a year.

Intellectually lazy but highly self-regarding groupthink twits are just an annoyance unless and until they get power and money, in which case they become the worst kind of totalitarians, a phenomenon becoming evident in New York City and California. Then, like Communism or Islam, inevitable failures will be attributed to not deploying the "real" [fill in the blank with the name of the failed ideology to be tried again here], which has never really been tried. (If only Fidel had been a true communist, Cuba would have been a paradise; Pakistan just needs a fuller implementation of shariah... )

Absurdly, like those who were right about COVID policy, the people who are increasingly being proven right to reject catastrophic climate change scenarios are still wrong because they did not accept The Science and the faux moral imperatives it engendered. They are thus cognitively and morally deficient, for all the right sorts believe The Narrative, whatever it may be. The herd is never wrong because history and reality itself are not binding on the enlightened. Conscience and cognitive consistency and integrity come from the herd, and Fauci's self-regard belonged to the herd.