Here, we are all falling over in shock:
The trials and tribulations of COVID-19 in America have dealt an irreparable blow to the credibility of America’s ruling class and the ruling class’s implicit appeal to its authority as a coterie of highly trained and capable experts. No single person exemplifies this more than Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has attained celebrity status during the pandemic as the nation’s leading immunologist and forward-facing spokesman for our public policy response. As Steve Deace and Todd Erzen detail in their new book, Faucian Bargain: The Most Powerful and Dangerous Bureaucrat in American History, Fauci has repeatedly contradicted himself throughout the pandemic, waffling on what the “science” demands at any given moment while still always seeming to err on the side of draconian overreaction.
Recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by BuzzFeed and the Washington Post only underscore the point. Perhaps most damningly, the FOIA requests revealed a February 2020 email to former Obama-era Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell explaining that store-bought face masks are “really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.” He also added that the “typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material.”
Of course, barely over a month after Fauci’s unearthed email to Burwell, Americans were required to wear masks pretty much every time they left their house—and mask-skeptical posts were censored or deleted by the ruling class’s preferred private-sector enforcement arm, Big Tech.
Josh Hammer, “COVID-19 Has Forever Destroyed Americans’ Trust in ‘Experts’” at American Greatness (June 3, 2021)
Learned:
- Many bureaucrats relished enforcing rules that made no sense whatever. Dying aged people couldn’t see their young relatives. Bars were open but churches were closed. Some places had curfews; others did not. In some places, schools were closed; in others, they were not.
- The main effect of Big Tech censorship was to make discussing the problems difficult.
- Far more of our fellow citizens than many of us would have thought possible simply accepted the crazy, then cowered, and hid. For no reason other than rank, irrational fear.
- Among more thoughtful people, the term “science” has taken one heck of a beating. When this is all over, we hope it still means something other than “whatever bureaucrats enforce.”