The Final Four of Villainy

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) Woodwards and Bernsteins. Of course anybody who has connected the dots in a pre-K coloring book already figured out those stories years ago.

Take Jake Tapper, who is doing his star turn as the 21st Century equivalent of the local Gestapo 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 catastrophic 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 specific 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, it really isn’t the West. The West does include several non-European countries such as South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.

The other stipulation for “most destructive” is that the mayhem already needs to be on 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 that the key thing about the COVID phenomenon 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 operation at the Wuhan lab.
2) He was part of the bureaucratic cabal that promoted the lockdowns, a 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 NIAID to crush dissenting opinion, such as Jay Bhattacharya’s Great Barrington Declaration.

Fauci not only had a role in each of these operations, his role 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 and 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 who helped to unleash the virus on us in the first place. Yet he said nothing.