The Covid Diaries. Fame-Infatuated Scientist Told Diary Stuff He Didn’t Tell Us. At National Cathedral: Senator Lindsey Graham’s Funeral Today. Mamdani Publishes Names & Addresses of New Yorkers. Ogre on a Pike & More
While Americans suffered under a draconian regime imposed ostensibly to combat Covid, one man was having the time of his life. His name: Anthony Fauci, the federal scientist who led the U.S. Covid response.
“Fauci’s diary reveals his thoughts on a ‘rambling’ Trump and his own fame,” the Washington Post reports. The Fauci diaries were released by Fauci nemesis Senator Rand Paul. Paul, who is investigating the origins of Covid, will question Dr. Fauci before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee tomorrow.
Fauci’s infatuation with his own fame and his basking in media approbation jump out at the reader. The more serious aspects of Fauci’s tenure are addressed in a Wall Street Journal editorial on “The Revealing Diaries of Dr. Fauci.” The diaries “tell a different story from” what Fauci told the public:
The diary reads as if it was intended to be an aide-mémoire for an autobiography Dr. Fauci might write one day, so it pays to read with care. He might have shaded the truth with an eye (or two) on history. Yet that possibility makes what’s in it all the more remarkable.
One conclusion is that on important points Dr. Fauci was both wrong and dishonest. For instance, he and allies in the government-science industrial complex still cling to the theory that Covid-19 evolved naturally in animal populations before spreading to humans. …
Liberals lionize Dr. Fauci now for his antagonism toward President Trump. But early in the pandemic the diary suggests the doctor was besotted with Mr. Trump—mainly, it appears, because Mr. Trump said nice things about him. He’s similarly susceptible to the flattery of celebrities.
Conversely, Dr. Fauci gloated to himself about his viciousness toward critics. July 14, 2020, saw him trying to quash a skeptical memo about his policies by Journal contributor Stephen Moore. “I told [White House aide Alyssa Farah] that the White House (either Meadows or the POTUS) need to shut up Stephen Moore and stop his publication of ‘Dr. Wrong’ paper. If he does not the entire academic community will dump all over the POTUS.”
He attempted to freeze lockdown skeptics out of policy-making roles. He refers to Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff, authors of the lockdown-critical Great Barrington Declaration, as “the 3 stooges.”
The Covid record shows that his advice was often wrong, and in the case of the lockdowns catastrophically so. This is why voters increasingly rebel against rule by “experts.” After reading the Fauci diaries, the real question is why we’d ever allow such a person to rule over us in that way again.
In “The Damning Fauci Diaries,” National Review editors refute (among other things) Fauci’s claim that he was not responsible for the lockdowns. What I found most fascinating was Fauci the man—fatuous, fixated on his own fame and celebrity. Read the Washington Post story (first link) for this—you’ll laugh and gag.
The diary shows Fauci fed questions to a chummy press, and so it is not surprising that the Washington Post appears to be the rare MSM outlet that isn’t dragging its feet and trying to minimize this story. The Free Press editors write that the diaries “reveal a fame-obsessed official—and a mainstream media complicit in his untruths.” The Federalist says Fauci publicly toadied to lab-leak theory while privately shutting it down. See “The real and lasting harm of Fauci’s ego” in the Washington Examiner.
President Joe Biden gave Fauci an extensive pardon, so the hearing is just a fact-finding mission. But the pardon does mean Fauci can’t plead the Fifth Amendment.
Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral takes place today in Washington, D.C. President Trump will deliver the eulogy at the funeral at the National Cathedral. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are expected to attend. This will be preceded by a ceremony at the Capitol Rotunda.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota said upon announcing the special ceremony in the Rotunda that “it seems fitting for his friends and colleagues to give back to him through this special Capitol honor.”
“For so many of us in the Senate and the House, myself included, Lindsey was more than a colleague, he was a friend,” Thune said in a statement. “From the military to state politics to decades of representing South Carolinians in Congress, Lindsey dedicated his life to giving back through public service.”
Pied-a-Terror: New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is posting the names and addresses of “the rich to be taxed” because of owning a part-time residence in New York. It’s dangerous for those on the list, of course. The A-Listers on the pied-a-terre list include Mamdani backers: Anna Wintour, Woody Allen, and Cynthia Nixon made the list. However, a New York Post editorial notes that some on the list “are the primary residents of the homes they own, which can be a condo or coop that would sell at $1 million or more — which includes a ton of one-bedroom pads in today’s market.” The editors write:
Too bad for you if your modest residence is now a target for some anarchist disgruntled about his own poor station in life.
Worse yet, the whole thing is slapdash, blatantly generated with no human bothering to examine it.
This Mamdani stunt strikes Ms. Must as pure Saul Alinsky: Don’t debate the issues; target the people. Isaac Schorr argues the pied-a-terre hit list reveals Mamdani’s true colors.
Mamdani’s $70 million “free grocery” stores plan could purchase one million Costco memberships instead. Mamdani says the “free” grocery stores will actually feature a 30% discount:
Folks interviewed by The Post have a list of questions about how the discount would work, what few items they’d have to choose from, and how much it would cost taxpayers to subsidize the lefty mayor’s scheme.
Everybody should watch or read Shannon Bream’s interview with Megan Romer, co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review reprints it. Cooke comments:
They are Jacobins. They are wreckers and despoilers and iconoclasts, who, if left unchecked, would wipe the United States from the face of this earth. To be “scared” by such figures is not only rational, it is imperative.
Victor Davis Hanson writes that “the socialist monster” is the “inevitable offspring of years of Democratic radicalization [that is now] turning against the party that created it.”
The debate for the Michigan Democratic primary was last night. Dems need Michigan if they are to take the Senate, and USA TODAY columnist Sara Paqueno believes they could win with the radical progressive Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed came under attack for his “ogre on a stick comment“:
“If I win … well y’all came at me so now I get to come at you, and you know, primarying people like John Fetterman, I have no problem to do that,” he said, according to audio of a Zoom meeting obtained by POLITICO. “Ideally you put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message, and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different,” El-Sayed added later, referencing how he could help propel the progressive moment.
El-Sayed clarified that his opponent, the Big Gretch-endorsed Rep. Haley Stevens, is not an ogre, for which she thanked him.
“Iran Is a Hedgehog, Trump Is a Fox” is the headline of international affairs guru Walter Russell Mead’s column. Iran is the hedgehog, with one fixation: surviving. But Trump is the fox:
If the war has brought Mr. Trump some unpleasant surprises, it has also demonstrated his resourcefulness. The president’s mix of unorthodox diplomacy and tactical flexibility has let him conduct an extended campaign against Iran without precipitating a global economic crisis. He isn’t the first wartime leader to discover that limited supplies of critical materials can force awkward changes in timing and tactics, and he probably views his decision to suspend the offensive against Iran less as a major setback than as one more move in a long campaign.
Iran may be a hedgehog, but Donald Trump is a fox, and he’s unlikely to give up until he’s tried every trick in the book.
One for the Road. Hugh Hewitt takes on the White House Correspondents’ dinner, where President Trump spoke Friday night.
