Why Anthony Fauci's Past Decisions Are Sparking New Outrage
Greetings, Dear Reader,
We’re going to keep this one short. Homie’s got tons to do and little time to do it.
It was a little more than 100 years ago that Walter Lippmann referred to the media as a “spotlight.” According to Lippmann, there was so much going on in the world that a media functioning properly as a steward of the people would “spotlight” those issues and happenings of most pertinence to its respective audience, leaving most everything else in the dark.
Among intellectual elites in the world of mass communication, Lippmann would go on to become the godfather of both modern journalism and public relations. There is, more times than not lately, little difference between the two.
Lippmann would also coin the term “manufacture of consent” – often attributed to Noam Chomsky – and while so doing, at least admit that institutions most relied upon to reveal and “spotlight” truth could also be used for the purposes of propaganda. He was 100 years ahead of the wider public in pointing out how individual reporters would feel compelled to construct “narratives.”
A collection of anecdotal stories could and would reasonably be cast into a much larger story, regardless of whether the whole was as true as the parts. The most recent glaring example of this penchant gone awry was Washington Post’s series on police killings of unarmed black men.
It was of course happening on a case-by-case, but the wider trend was never really there, as Harvard’s Roland Fryer would definitively prove not once but twice, but far too late to prevent the damage of the misinformation.
There was at least some hope in Lippmann’s writing. He was an optimist. He was also a bit of a scientist, at least on the social level, and his writings fortified a burgeoning “scientific” approach to journalism that many elite journalism schools had already been adopting. It’s not enough to point out that something is happening, we must teach writers and reporters the best ways to present the information so that the ignorant (through no fault of their own) masses will actually believe the story.
If a lot of this sounds familiar, it’s because after 100 years of near unanimous support, the population is waking up to the tricks of the trade just when they seem to be at the peak of their most skulduggerous and ethically void deployment.
The media wants you to care about Trump’s efforts to fix the reflecting pool in Washington, DC. Hundreds of column inches (Chomsky’s idiosyncratic method for judging how much the media cared about an issue) and thousands of minutes of broadcast have been dedicated to Trump spending taxpayer money on the reflecting pool.
The bombardment of the population with this coverage has led to now at least dozens of average citizens who have sought to deface the reflecting pool.
The coverage and resulting outrage led one conservative commentator to marvel at what the media could get done if it focused on immigrant fraud rings. It’s an eminently more pressing and more expensive issue and one that almost certainly affects average Americans – as they attempt to procure health care, housing and the like – more than Donald Trump spending $15 million on cleaning up a national monument.
Stop any of these people taking time out of their day to rip the new sealant off the reflecting pool and ask them what’s most likely to bring on the apocalypse, and they’ll undoubtedly say oil companies. Some might say Elon Musk. Most, though, would be likely to cite fossil fuels and “climate change.”
In one of her final acts as Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard released a trove of documents on Anthony Fauci and so called “gain of function” research.
Reporters, like me, who had already done the work were not really surprised by any of it. Fauci shunted taxpayer funds to risky research and he helped those grants avoid oversight they were legally bound to receive.
To characterize the risk properly, I should say that the folks who pioneered this research seriously thought they could feasibly kill 99 out of every 100 humans on earth with its products. Highly infectious, highly fatal strains of bespoke viruses designed specifically to infect and kill humans.
In many ways, COVID-19, which we’re now almost sure was a direct product of Fauci’s decision-making, was a godsend. It was merely a cold and even as it locked up much of the modern world, it wasn’t all that fatal. Just 20 million or so people died. Really a drop in the bucket compared to the potential of the technology.
Still, in a world of madmen charting high scores, that would put old Anthony somewhere in between Hitler and Mao, but still below Stalin.
Mystifying yet still is that we found out China wasn’t the only one. There were in fact biolabs like Wuhan’s in places like Ukraine and many other post-Soviet states. You know, the ones most well known for political instability.
This was all done under the umbrella of “Threat Reduction,” which should be a giant sign that the threat was not actually reduced.
In a fairer world, with more honest reporters, this story would demand a response. Fauci is currently outside the statute of limitations for lying to Congress, which he definitely did multiple times.
He also conspired with institutions and individuals to mislead the public about his role in all this. Twenty million people died and our investigative arms were looking for pangolins and red haired rat dogs instead of at the funding for risky research.
There must be some crime there, no?
But no, they want you to freak out about Trump’s reflecting pool. Or some MMA guy saying Michelle Obama has a penis. Incel mass shooters in Montreal. Elon Musk is a trillionaire and somehow that’s a threat to my well being that must and can only be addressed by a flat 5% wealth seizure.
Look at anything besides the Wizard behind the curtain who will collect $400,000 in government pension payments every year until he is dead.
Until he joins the 20 million people he helped kill.
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Thank god we did that.
Gross.
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