Two threads….
The first is that through the years I have, without quite realizing it, become a student of political anthropology. Much like an intrepid explorer in the depths of the Amazon observing the strange rituals of local tribesmen, I observe the strange rituals and habits of the Left and their various auxiliaries.
Right now the media is playing its “French Resistance” card. No I don’t mean by being brave and fighting the “Orange Hitler” as if it was 1942. I’m talking about finally coming out after years of kissing up to the Left and “breaking” stories as if they were mythical (and I’m quite serious about mythical) Woodward and Bernstein. Of course anybody who has connected the dots in a pre-K coloring book had already figured out those stories years ago.
Take Jake Tapper, who is doing his star turn as the 21st Century equivalent of the local Getsapo officer’s girlfriend who has decided to greet Patton by yelling “Vive De Gaulle!” In his upcoming book, Original Sin, Tapper will reveal to the world the untold story that… Biden wasn’t in the best mental shape. Sacre bleu!
This month we are observing the five-year anniversary of the COVID lockdowns and just as impressively the media has come to life, revealing to the world things that we figured out… well, five years ago. That COVID leaked from a lab, that the lockdown policies were a 180-degree turn in long-established policy, and that it all stunk to high heaven.
You want to tell them, “Welcome to the party pal!” except the party’s been over for a while now. Might have been nice for them to “reveal” such truths back when it was inconvenient for them to do so.
Perhaps as a consolation we can shave Jake Tapper’s hair and march him through the streets in shame.
These of course aren’t innocent oversights. Not only were they apparent to everyone, but they had catatrophic effects that will be felt for decades. It’s doubtful that Biden was ever mentally competent to be president and between that and an autopen, his entire presidency was basically a Mafia-like bust-out for leftist special interests. COVID? A human-engineered virus that not only killed millions but was the excuse to engage in the most destructive social experiment since the Bolshevik Revolution.
I’m going to rent a billboard and in my best injury lawyer cadence place on it “If you were ever called a racist for believing COVID came from a Chinese lab call 1-800….”
The second thread is “March Madness” for the NCAA Tournament which has become (for various reasons) a sort of American civic holiday giving grown men an excuse to skip work and drink during a weekday. The fact that the first round occurs the same week as St. Patrick’s Day just adds to the debauchery.
Well to be fair it also gives us the chance to apply “Final Four” bracketology to all sorts of different phenomena: ice cream flavors, ammunition types, Simpsons quotes.
I propose to apply it something else, the most destructive individuals of the 21st Century Western World (so far). Let’s face it things are a bit of a mess on our side and a lot of it is due to not just a failure of leadership, but actual malice on behalf of individuals. So I think it would be cathartic to get this all out in the open.
First some definitions. We are dealing with the Western World and that excludes Russia; I take Bismarck’s view that while Russia might be partly in Europe, but it really isn’t the West. The West does include several non-European countries such as South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.
The other definition is that by “most destructive” is that the mayhem already needs to be in the books.
While George Soros or Obama are definitely Final Four contenders, their body of work is not yet clear. Obama could have been a real contender, but he was too lazy; that’s the whole reason behind Bernie Sanders in 2016.
Angela Merkel? Her chancellorship was so destructive to Germany, with her open borders and energy policy, that I wonder at times if she ever truly shed her East German roots. I can envision Erich Mielke on his deathbed holding a picture of Merkel, smiling, and as he closes his eyes for the last time muttering “Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand, blood and revenge are hammering in my head.”
However most of the carnage she caused was isolated to Germany, which isn’t what it used to be when it comes to destruction.
My Final Four winner is Anthony Fauci.
I have been thinking a bit about old Tony lately, what with his autopen-signed pardon and the aforementioned five-year anniversary of the COVID lockdowns in the US. He’s also retired so the books have closed.
Let’s remember the key thing about the COVID phenomena is that all the death and disruption it caused weren’t the result of an impersonal act of nature, but rather a deliberate creation of mankind and Fauci was in the middle of it all.
1) He helped to fund, through a subgrantee, the virus engineering at the Wuhan lab.
2) He was part of the bureaucratic cabal that promoted the lockdowns, an 180-degree pivot on the previously accepted wisdom of how to deal with an influenza pandemic
3) He used the bureaucratic power accumulated from decades of running NIAD to crush dissenting opinion, such as Jay Bhattacharya’s Great Barrington Declaration.
Fauci not only had a role in each of these, but his was both sufficient and necessary. In fact part of his schtick was that he was the indispensable man. The COVID crisis was the man’s star turn, a time that called supposedly for the best in scientific expertise to deal with the emergency and as Fauci liked to tell us any criticism of him was a criticism of Science itself.
Back in 2020-21 when I would drive around DC and its various suburbs, I used to see the signs “Thank You Dr. Fauci!” (now of course those signs are gone, replaced by “For Sale”) I wonder what those people think of him now, understanding that Fauci was not leading the country to deal with the great unknown but rather dealing with a world that he helped to create and desperately wanted to hide.
This was all apparent back then. As a side note regarding managing in an uncertain time 1) never hire someone you cannot fire 2) understand that you may find out tomorrow that today’s solution is wrong. It is difficult for people to change, you usually have to change the people. No one was bigger than COVID and the country, except for Fauci.
One final reminder, every time Fauci got up there and told us what to do and took the accolades for “saving us” with the votive candles and other hagiography, he knew he was the one helped to unleash the virus on us in the first place. Yet he said nothing.
I would love to know what the publicity campaign for Tapper’s book is going to look like. They really aren’t going to stick him in front of someone who is going to ask why he thought he could get away with writing a book about the scandal of things he covered up, are they?
I’m still curious as to why the NY Times and other outlets are breathing oxygen back into COVID let alone ripping on how it was handled. It sort of puts a stop to another “pandemic” but I don’t think their limited hang-out works because it provides the thread for non-sympathetic outlets to pull. Putting the “unanswered questions of COVID” back into the news cycle is just begging for say a Joe Rogan to have someone who can describe how those same media outlets were busy 5 years ago covering up the issues that now want to discuss. Besides isn’t this distracting them from the Orange Hitler?
The one thing that won’t be discussed is that how COVID was the linchpin event for what turned out to be an attempted coup of American society. COVID, with the hysteria generated, is what gave spark to the Summer of Floyd and of course laid the ground for the 2020 Election.
That coup was launched by the Left, but mostly from the technocratic wing of it. These are the progressive technocrats that you find in DC and on the coasts who believing in a re-ordering, rationalizing of American society and to perhaps oversimplify it would love an invitation to Davos for WEF.
It;s sort of like a real-life version of the Legion of Doom.
There is a biography waiting to be written about Fauci. I do think he was the most destructive man of the 21st Century but he is also fascinating of how someone could wield such bureaucratic and then societal power for decades.
The thing about a “coup” was to determine who he was actually speaking to when he was on TV and it was those people I mentioned above who want to reorder American society. That was his fan club, his base, and they just happened to have all the institutional levers of power.