Dr. Anthony Fauci has announced his upcoming retirement. His office is not supposed to be political, but we see hagiographies on the left, and scorn on the right…everywhere.

I’d sure like to know why the liberals are swooning over him. I mean, of course I know the real reason; Fauci finally got rid of Trump. But of course that’s not supposed to be the reason. The reason they’d give, I imagine, is that he’s the nation’s #1 infectious disease expert and “saw us through the crisis.” Kinda like FDR saw us through the Great Depression, which, in actuality, lasted as long as it did because of his policies. So now, like then, they’ve got their figurehead and they’ve got their narrative, and we know from long decades of past experience that those two things are all they need to build their shrines and break out the candles and prayer rugs.

I think what a lot of people miss on both sides, is that Dr. Fauci’s best advice, by which I mean the stuff that has held up with the passage of time — didn’t require a “Number One infectious disease expert.” You could have gotten the same counseling from your nearest CVS pharmacist. Certainly, we would have heard the same things from the nation’s #2 through #5 infectious disease experts: Stay home if you show symptoms, avoid large crowds, test if in doubt. Fauci’s contribution was the creation of an environment in which we couldn’t hear from #2 through #5. There’s something about modern liberalism, they’re just suckers for this. They want a single point of control. I think, maybe, they like him because he took sides. He claimed to “represent science” but he never showed the tolerance for a dissenting viewpoint a real science practitioner should show. Conservatives noticed his advice seemed tailor-made to get rid of Trump. After awhile, Fauci came out and admitted it, he wanted Trump gone.

In addition to discussing whether Fauci was giving us the right advice, we could also have realized a benefit from discussing Fauci’s culpability in creating SARS-Cov-2 in the first place. Maybe this would have established his innocence; maybe not. Fauci made sure we never got started on it.

Our response to this hundred-year outbreak event, overall, has not been good. It’s been a model for how not to do it, and Fauci has led the way. He stifled the dissenting viewpoint at every turn. He pretended to be 100% sure of what he was saying, when he wasn’t. He politicized it when it wasn’t at all necessary for him to do so. He preened in the public eye to build up his image. He conspired against the sitting President of the United States.

He didn’t represent science. To me, he represented the people who ask complicated questions but demand simple answers. People who want one answer, and only one, and can’t cope with uncertainty. That’s who Fauci represented. God forbid we should ever see this happen again, but if we do, it’ll be a good thing Tony the Tyrant is gone. We need to handle that next one in a wholly different way from how we did it this time. We need different and better leadership next time. That’s our one saving grace in this, that our country is now experienced in how to do it the wrong way.

Haven’t got much to add to this.

“Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared,” Harris recently told the Triggernometry podcast. “There’s nothing, it’s Hunter Biden, it’s not Joe Biden. Whatever the scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is…it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in.”

“It’s like a firefly to the sun,” he added.

“It doesn’t even stack up to Trump University. Trump University, as a story, is worse than anything that could be in Hunter Biden’s laptop, in my view,” Harris continued.

Harris then acknowledges—and defends—the censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story by the New York Post published in October 2020, just over two weeks before the presidential election.

[snip]

“Now that doesn’t answer the people who say ‘it’s still completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the New York Post’s Twitter account,” Harris explained.

“‘Like that, that’s a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump.’ Absolutely it was,” he admitted. “But I think it was warranted.”

He then replies to the accusations that this was a left-wing conspiracy to deny re-election to the sitting President, and his candor evaporates. Oh no, not left-wing…Liz Cheney isn’t left-wing…oh no, not conspiracy…this was out in the open…

Here’s what I think a lot of people are missing about this.

One. This wasn’t really “out in the open.” Experts confirmed, we were told, the whole laptop story was simply Russian disinformation. How did they determine that? I dunno. You dunno. It was just a thought from “experts,” meaning everyone else was supposed to echo it. With the benefit of hindsight, we see it wasn’t Russian disinformation after all, so this must have originated either from benign wishful thinking, or a malevolent…uh…what’s the word…conspiracy.

Two. To the extent this was “in the open” — so what? Had the “laptop thread” been pulled from the sweater, we don’t know how much of the sweater would have been wrecked. Today it looks like a whole bunch. If it’s in the open, but the questions aren’t being answered because no one’s asking them, then even that much isn’t so much out in the open. This is a power our “free press” has always had that people don’t think about much. We allow them to determine, in large part, what we as free citizens discuss. If they decide something like this is not to be discussed, and a bunch of us disagree, they pretty much win. We go off and exercise our right to free speech over on blogs or discussion forums or whatever…the citizenry in large part discusses what’s printed in the mainstream press. For just a few moments. Before turning the page to sports and entertainment.

Three. When the subject turns to the integrity, or lack thereof, of the 2020 election we know how that all works. We’re to presume the integrity was there, by default, and “there’s no evidence” of fraud. At least, not any fraud sufficient to change the result. And any of us who don’t follow along, or think of something to disrupt that train of thought, are to be mocked. Well gee; when those ballots got shot out to all corners of each state in this ramshackle “vote by mail” scheme, and when they were collected again, and counted, all of that was done by, and subject to the whims of, handlers. It’s a legitimate question to ask: Are those handlers like Sam Harris?

I guess I’ll just leave that there, and allow the reader to ponder the ramifications.