State of Wednesday: DR. FAUCI AND MR. DRUMPF
Nobody is as important as Dr. Fauci, said Dr. Fauci
Greetings, Dear Reader,
I’d have done this sooner, but to be frank, running a journalism training program takes up most of my time and the trove of Anthony Fauci docs Rand Paul released was like 1000+ pages.
So yes, I’m late to the party.
Good thing for you, Dear Reader, my one and only rule about showing up late is to show up dressed to the nines.
Then everyone forgets you’re late!
DR. FAUCI AND MR. DRUMPF
Dr. Anthony Fauci is the Donald Drumpf the left always imagined Trump to be.
The trove of documents Rand Paul described as Fauci’s “diary” – really just notes for an eventual memoir – show that Fauci’s inner monologue was so self effusive, self congratulatory, and hyperbolic it would make Trump’s outer monologue blush.
Discussing Trump’s eventual turn on him, Fauci referred to himself as “the most credible scientist in the world.” He called himself “the most famous and talked about person in the world.” He recounted with bizarre self aggrandizement finding prayer beads with a picture of himself depicted as a Catholic saint.
We always knew Fauci was duplicitous. We’ve known for years that he lied about the lab leak, his role funding the Wuhan lab, his role in gain of function research and his role in the misinformation campaign — and so on. While I think it’s quite worthwhile to make hay out of all that – especially his concession that most scientists believed the virus was engineered from the start – none of that is news to me.
Should he go to jail for all of it? Absolutely. Nevertheless, the most revealing element of all these new documents to me is just how psychologically deranged Anthony Fauci the man is on the inside. He believed himself to be godlike. He had no business leading anything. We had every reason to be skeptical, aggressively so.
He noted that American university students “illegally sitting” on a campus lawn “enjoying themselves” applauded him when he walked onto campus. The “and then everyone clapped” meme was real life for Fauci. He noted applause he got at restaurants and standing O’s he received before speeches. He gleefully recounted talking to Barbara Streisand and then butt dialing her later. He recounted all the praise he received from celebrities and celebrity media personalities, just like Trump is known to do on stage, saying “people” “call” him all the time to say what a great job he’s doing.
Except … Fauci is not Trump giving a campaign speech. This is a “diary.” He’s talking to himself about himself. It adds another dimension to the profoundly disturbed inner person of Anthony Fauci. Trump is often just boasting. Fauci is looking in the mirror like Marky Mark at the end of Boogie Nights.
“I’m a star … I’m a star, I’m a star, I’m a star,” Mark Wahlberg says while his (prosthetic movie) genitals are exposed.
“Press is going wild with me,” he wrote on March 22, 2020. “Front page in Washington Post yesterday and Op Ed by Maureen Dowd in NY Times today about me and my relationship with the POTUS. Profile by Peter Nicholas on me in The Atlantic.”
Chris Wallace at Fox gave him advice. Chuck Todd gave him advice. Jake Tapper gave him advice and invited him to dinner. The press more generally comes out of all this looking like a useless boob. They gripe about Trump threatening “Democracy” but serve no clear interest of the people in their approach to Fauci, an unelected bureaucrat who recalled with self reverence closing schools in New York and California with a couple of phone calls.
Mob bosses who end lives with phone calls are more self aware than Fauci, whose notes give off a sense of marvel at his own influence. I can shut down schools! I can shut down entire states with phone calls!
Noting with meticulous detail the “swag” exploding around his image, the mugs, bobble heads, bottle openers, magnets and St. Fauci imagery, he concluded unconvincingly, “I do not like this one bit.”
Fauci was lying even to himself in his own diary!
He recalled his travails in high society frequently. “I was totally swamped,” he wrote with no sense of irony, “all night by people wanting to say hello, shake my hands, and take pictures with me. I could not get away from it … some people may think that this is great to have people treat you like Elvis Presley.”
Again, at the end, he calls it “unnerving” as if he didn’t actually find attending parties with “the highest level of AAA list you could imagine in Washington DC” so great.
“Super A list at party,” he recalled to himself. “Senator Mark Warner, Kellyanne Conway, Andrea Mitchell, David Ignatius, David Frum, Zeke Emanuel, etc., etc.”
And if there’s one party that looks in particular like the sucker of the bunch, it’s the media.
I know it’s an old drum for a conservative to beat, but my god do they all look like total boobs now. The so-called defenders of big D Democracy. If an umpire in the bigs got as many calls as consistently wrong as the media over the last two decades, they’d be out on their asses, unemployed.
Iraqi WMDs, DEI, illegal immigration, toppling dictators, gender affirming care, Joe Biden’s brain melting one might think would be the worst of all, but really, it was covid and Fauci.
That pitch was up in the stands and Jake Tapper, Andrea Mitchell, Meet The Press, CBS, the NYT, Atlantic and Wapo were looking right into America’s eyes and calling a strike.
The cult of Anthony Fauci, beginning in his own damned head and heading outward in concentric circles to overtake the brains of the most powerful people in DC, has arguably been the most damaging subversion of the American Republic in US history.
We’ve only just begun to understand the damage done. The learning loss. The universal scars on American childhood. The death and destruction. Businesses annihilated. 20+ million dead. China unaccountable. Risky science unaccountable. US taxpayer funded WMD research run by the PLA. People locked in their homes. Mostly liberal adults turned clinically neurotic, shrieking about mask use in 2022.
All of it sourced to the truly bobbled noggin atop Anthony Fauci’s torso.
Now we know. Dr. Fauci was the Mr. Drumpf the political left always accused Trump of being.
And they welcomed him in. Destroy democracy, Dr. Fauci, do it harder. Wreck our credibility worse than Trump ever could. Wreck our economy. Empower China. Ohhh yeah, St. Anthony, to you we pray.
I guess the bright side of it all, Dear Reader, is that our side had him pegged from the start.
Yes, the hapless rubes the media scorns so frequently. They had the real conman pegged from the absolute get.
At least we know there are real stewards of the American spirit out there, who will resist the power hungry dorks and science nerds to the very end.
Amen.
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Fauci bobbleheads are still available. They would make good targets for the range except they cost more than a $0.25. Maybe Rand Paul could arrange for disaffected Americans like myself to get one at no charge because we've already paid the price.