One Thing I've Noticed About Dr Fauci

He has a history of misspeaking, but every time he's caught at it, he does what narcissists do -- he tries to convince you that he didn't tell a lie, he was actually doing you a favor, but you just didn't see it.

Just before Christmas, he explanied that his latest whapper was because we aren't ready for the truth.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has long cited 60% to 70% as the level of COVID infection/vaccination the country would need to achieve herd immunity — for the disease to fade and life to return to normal, writes the New York Times' Donald G. McNeil Jr.

"I n a telephone interview," McNeil continues, "Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goalposts."

"He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks." Fauci's confession:

"When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, "I can nudge this up a bit," so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here .... We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say 90 percent."

This is consistent with his remarks in July, when he said he'd earlier told us we didn't need to wear a mask, but it was for our own good:

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, says he doesn't regret advising Americans against wearing masks early on in the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell published in InStyle, Fauci defended his credibility and decision-making in response to recent attempts from the White House to undermine him.

"I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs," he said.

Fauci's main problem seems to be that, at the bitter end of his career, he's stumbled into 15 minutes of fame, and it's going to his head. The reporters fawn over him, he blurts without having anything to say, and cetainly without any reflectioni on how his renmarks may be understood. So, when he needs to, he just finds a reason to justify whatever ill-advised statements he'd blithered before.

The problem is that what he's doing now is consistent with what Newsom and other authorities are doing, which is, faced with lockdown measures that have been completely ineffective, he's throwing out entirely new sets of bogus numbers to justify sticking even more strictly with what's not working. .

And he'll have Biden's ear.

Christmas Message From The Civil Authorities

Notwithstanding, the Heritage Foundatioin has a constantly updated page with links to stories covering all known incidents of moral entrepreneurs and politicians violating their own orders.

Merry Christmas to all!

A Moral Panic Runs Its Course

I mentioned yestrday that the bad-clown-in-the-day-care moral panic, which began about1983, didn't end until the Waco massacre ten years later. This is because Janet Reno, who was Bill Clinton's attorney general from 1993 to 2001, built her career as Florida state attorney by bringing well-publicized day care toddler rape cases, and she approved the FBI's disastrous final raid on the Branch Davidian compound when she was told children were being abused inside.

The McMartin preschool case in California sticks most prominently in memory of that period, but the moral entrepreneurs and prosecutors in that case never prospered. Janet Reno was a different matter. According to Wikipedia,

During Reno's tenure as state attorney, she began what the PBS series Frontline described as a "crusade" against accused child abusers. Reno pioneered the "Miami Method,""a controversial technique for eliciting intimate details from young children and inspired passage of a law allowing them to testify by closed-circuit television, out of the possibly intimidating presence of their suspected molesters." Bobby Fijnje, "a 14-year-old boy, was acquitted after his attorneys discredited the children's persistent interrogations by a psychologist who called herself the 'yucky secrets doctor'." Grant Snowden was acquitted, retried, convicted, and eventually freed by a federal appeals court after 12 years in prison."

Reno's "model case" was against Frank Fuster, co-owner of the Country Walk Babysitting Service in a suburb of Miami, Florida. In 1984, he was found guilty of 14 counts of abuse and sentenced to prison with a minimum of 165 years. Fuster was convicted based in large part on the testimony of his 18-year-old wife, Ileana Flores, who pleaded guilty and testified against him, after allegedly being tortured. In a 2002 episode of Frontline, Flores maintained that she and her ex-husband were innocent, and that Reno personally pressured her to confess. But the number and timing of Reno's visits are in dispute. As of 2020 Fuster remains imprisoned.

In 1989, as Florida state attorney, Reno pressed adult charges against 13-year-old Bobby Fijnje, who was accused of sexually molesting 21 children in his care during church services. The charges were driven by the testimony of children interviewed by mental-health professionals using techniques later discredited. Fijnje refused plea-bargain offers. During the trial, the prosecution was unable to present any witnesses to the alleged abuse. After two years of investigation and trial, Fijnje was acquitted of all charges.

Accounts of the process by whch Reno was induced to approve the final FBI assault on the Waco compound suggest that FBI actors were aware of Reno's very recent history of exploiting child abuse and were able to use this as a lever to secure her approval. According to The Hill,

Janet Reno, the nation’s first female attorney general, approved the FBI’s assault on the Davidians. Previously, she had zealously prosecuted child abuse cases in Dade County, Fla, though many of her high-profile convictions were later overturned because of gross violations of due process. Reno approved the FBI assault after being told “babies were being beaten.” It is not known who told her about the false claims of child abuse. Reno’s sterling reputation helped the government avoid any apparent culpability for the deaths of 27 children on April 19, 1993. After Reno publicly promised to take responsibility for the outcome at Waco, the subsequent Justice Department investigation was so shoddy that even the New York Times denounced the “Waco whitewash.”

The Wikipedia article on the McMartin case indicates that by 1990, the media was having second thoughts about how it handled things, since by then the prosecution had experienced acquittals and hung juries, and the DA lost his bid for reelection. But nothng like this happened in Florida, possibly because those cases weren't as well publicized. Efforts to raise the issue during Reno's confirmation hearing as US attorney general were ineffective.

But after 1993, there were no more bad clowns killing rabbits in secret rooms. Nevertheless, a number of people had their lives destroyed in the panic, and a few remain in prison.

The McMartin and Reno toddler rape cases have provided a paradigm in discussions of recent moral panics. As I've said already, a feature of moral panics is that the perceived threat is disproportinate to the actual threat in some measurable way. But even when the perceived threat is absurd and easily disproven, like Satanic sacrifice on the altar of a local Episcopal parish, the story is remarkably stubborn and enthusiastically endorsed by media. (The rector of that parish, despite forensic tests showing no blood on the altar, had to go on disability retirement, another life destroyed by the moral entrepreneurs.)

Again, I think the COVID crisis is a moral panic with parallels to the day care toddler rape panic. In the 1980s, people drove around with "I Believe The Children" bumper stickers. Face masks amount to a similar, and much more compulsory, virtue signal, when statistics available every day show that in the affected states, well over 90% wear masks, while "cases" increase at exponential rates notwithstanding.

COVID statistics are generally acknowledged to report hospitalizations and deaths due to other causes if the patient either tested positive for COVID or was even a "probable" infection -- this includes drug overdoses, suicides, auto accidents, and deaths in hospice. Thus it likely will never be possible to make comparisons with earlier epidemics -- and this leaves out the question of how many "cases" are false positives or asymptomatic.

A very powerful indicator that this is a panic promoted in many ways cynically is the number of moral entrepreneurs, including credentialed "experts", who disregard their own draconian prescriptions. The most recent case is Dr Birx:

The infectious disease expert, 64, was outed on Sunday for not following her own travel guidance when she was joined by three different generations of family at one of her vacation properties on Fenwick Island in Delaware the day after Thanksgiving.

She was roundly criticized for not following her own orders after publicly urging Americans in the days leading up to Thanksgiving to limit gatherings to “your immediate household.”

As in all these cases, we must assume that if Dr Birx, a credentialed infectious disease expert, seriously believed that her elderly mother would be infected with COVID if she traveled to see her, she would not have done this. But violations of COVID protocols by the moral entrpreneurs and politicians are ubiquitous -- and somehow, none of them, nor the others with whom they associate, while traveling, while maskless, while partying inndoors, ever contracts COVID. If they had, the media would report it as eagerly as if it were the boy who skipped Sunday school to go swimming and drowned.

As was the case in the 1980s, panics persist stubbornly for years even after the measurable discrepancies between the perceived threat and reality become increasingly absurd. And many more businesses, careers, and lives will likely be destroyed in the current crisis than were in the 1980s. But it's encouraging that the crisis now does appear to be running its course.

A New, More Contagious Strain Of COVID In The UK!

News of new regional lockdowns in the UK has begun to reach US outlets. I'm even less able to talk insightfully about the UK than I am about Canada, so I don't intend to go into detail, except insofar as the UK situation gives what I think is a comparative view of the global moral panic.

But as a distant observer, it does seem to me that the UK public throughout the 20th century was willing to take a lot more abuse from its political class, from the First War, through the Depression, Second War rationing, and postwar socialist austerity than the US public would ever have allowed, and apparenly this now continues. Just sayin'.

A vistior forwarded to me a message from someone in the UK who isn't with the program:

Greetings from Tier 4. We had the body bags delivered yesterday with instructions. We have to hang a white sheet out of the window when someone dies and they will be collected. Another 5 neighbours died yesterday. The rest have left for the country. We’re holding on. The army are still delivering food parcels. They have to be disinfected and left in the garage for 24 hours before using. The schools have closed and are now temporary mortuaries. We daren’t go out now. Letter boxes have been sealed up and armed guards are stationed at the end of each road. Apparently someone tried to get through yesterday and was shot dead. Well you can’t be too careful. The electricity is now only on 3 hours a day because of the lack of staff at the powerplants. Just a matter of time I guess. I’ll update you when I can but I can’t promise. God Bless you all and for heavens sake stay safe

A UK YouTuber whom I follow ties the new lockdowns to Brexit, which confirms for me the theory I've had that COVID is a moral panic, and moral panics reflect an underlying social tension. She doesn't use the term "moral panic", but the symptoms are there as she describes them, and she definitely identifies the social tension as Brexit -- in recent posts, she's also associated those tensions with a newly nationalist northern working class that's left the Labour reservation and is demanding respect from the southern elites.

But the COVID moral panic is a global phenomenon, so it can't be reduced just to particular national issues. The Germans are locked down, too, though they seem to be taking the abuse a little bit better. Huh.

What interests me is that the US -- and not just the sansculottes and descamisados, but institutions as well, like the observant churches and synagogues, law enforcement, and the courts -- have begun to put limits on the panic. The civil authorities have simply acknowledged at this point that churches can't be shut down, and that's a major concession, since Catholics, Evangelicals, and Orthodox Jews represent "deplorable" values that are held by the folk devils of this moral panic cycle.

When the Orthodox Jews were able to show that the moral enforcers Mayor DeBlasio and Gov Cuomo were blaming the epidemic specifically on the Jews, it was game over.

I've had an inkling for a while that the moral entrepreneurs everywhere intended to renew and extend the COVID panic with a second wave over the coming winter. They've faced a conundrum, in that over the past year, they've imposed lockdowns, social distancing, and mask mandates as a remedy for the epidemic, but those have proved utterly ineffective, and blaming Catholics and Jews is no longer an option, either.

But if "cases" are surging, skyrocketing, record-breaking, or whatever they're doing, what do the moral entrepreneurs propose if the most draconian proposals already haven't worked? At least in the US, a range of options for the political class has now been foreclosed, which to me is a sign that the panic will run its course, at least here. But the course of moral panics is inevitably destructive, and they end destructively, too. The McMartin preschool panic ended only with the Waco massacre, which I'll discuss tomorrow if nothing intervenes.

So, What Happened?

After mass yesterday, I asked our pastor if, in response to the LA County relaxation of its prohibition on indoor worship, there were any plans afoot to resume it at our parish. (There had been no announcement about any change at mass itself.) It turns out that he was completely unaware of the situation, which is partly understandable, since the press release was issued only late Saturday. But he also said, "There's been nothing from the archdiocese."

That strongly suggests to me that the process was anything but consultative. Our pastor said, "We keep lobbying, but. . ." This seems consistent with remarks by Abp Cordileone in San Francisco that his archdiocese keeps submitting plans for safe reopening but never gets a reply. So it seems safe to assume that the county revised its decree without any sort of discussion with religious leaders, and it apparently gave them no heads-up about the change. So they could plan for Christmas, after all.

Does "Dr" Barbara Ferrer, the county health director whose portrait is above, look like someone who'd want to help churches plan for Christmas?

So this leads me to that strangely passive-aggressive press release from late Saturday. It begins with the usual hysterical headlines:

L.A. County Surpasses 600,000 COVID-19 Cases as Hospitalizations Continue to Soar

60 New Deaths and 13,756 New Confirmed Cases of COVID-19 in Los Angeles County

Then three full paragraphs follow saying

L.A. County is experiencing the fastest acceleration of new cases than at any other time during the pandemic. . . . Today, Public Health has confirmed 60 new deaths and 13,756 new cases of COVID-19. . . . Hospital capacity across the county is limited, and healthcare workers are hard-pressed to keep up with the need for care. And the only means available to improve the situation at the hospitals is to reduce the number of people becoming newly infected with COVID-19.

Then there's a paragraph favorably noting the appeals court's overruling the San Diego judge's injunction against the state and county for enforcing the restaurant closure.

A recent decision by the Court of Appeal affirms Los Angeles County's duty to prevent disease transmission and protect public health through existing Health Officer Orders, and the suspension of outdoor dining remains in effect. Public Health reminds all sectors and businesses that all other requirements, safety directives, and temporary business closures also remain in effect.

In other words, the county health department's ability to govern by decree continues unabated. Except when it doesn't. Finally, after four paragraphs, the release gets to the heart of the matter:

The Los Angeles County Health Officer Order will be modified today to align with recent Supreme Court rulings for places of worship. Places of worship are permitted to offer faith-based services both indoors and outdoors with mandatory physical distancing and face coverings over both the nose and mouth that must be worn at all times while on site. Places of worship must also assure that attendance does not exceed the number of people who can be accommodated while maintaining a physical distance of six feet between separate households.

Ferrer most definitely did not want to issue this modification. You can tell from the tone and the need to preface it with paragraphs full of hysteria -- everybody's dying, but the Supreme Court does this???

We can be pretty sure that this decision didn't come from consultation with Catholic authorities, or any other religious leaders. Those people are the enemy. Nor did it come from any particular court order. The federal judge in the Harvest Rock case is slow-walking the process in his court, and in any case, the city of Pasdadena, which is in LA County, has its own health department enforcing separate orders and is not under Ferrer's jurisdiction. Although Grace Community Church is a thorn in the city and county's side, there's been no major court action in recent weeks in its case.

So the county health department is responding to domething that isn't so specific. But whatever it was, it made Ferrer do something she didn't want to do.

My guess is that it was pressure from Mayor Garcetti, the county supervisors, and even Gov Newsom, who nevertheless are all blue and bluer. And I would put it to the Recall Newsom movement, which is gaining enough traction that it's made national news.

LA County Relaxes Church Restrictions; Pols Send Newsom A Message

Buried in a hysterical press release yesterday on "soaring" COVID hospitalizations, this appeared midway down:

The Los Angeles County Health Officer Order will be modified today to align with recent Supreme Court rulings for places of worship. Places of worship are permitted to offer faith-based services both indoors and outdoors with mandatory physical distancing and face coverings over both the nose and mouth that must be worn at all times while on site. Places of worship must also assure that attendance does not exceed the number of people who can be accommodated while maintaining a physical distance of six feet between separate households.

LA County's has been among the most stubborn lockdown regimes, but it's becoming plain that the US Supreme Court's Diocese of Brooklyn order is forcing civil authorities to pull back. The wording in yesterday's modification is vague, saying that churches "must also assure that attendance does not exceed the number of people" who can social distance indoors. I'm assuming that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles will be developing policies to implement the revised order, maybe even by Christmas.

Luckily, the weather so far has been mild. Our parish installed propane heaters on its patio for outdoor masses, but it hasn't always had to use then.

Meanwhille, two California political veterans, Democrat Willie Brown and Republicn Darrell Issa, have warned Gov Newsom that a recall petition will succeed, and he'll be removed from office, unless he finds a solution to the COVID crisis. Brown said,

Right now, Newsom’s chances of survival are tied to the pandemic. If California can get the coronavirus under some semblance of control and counties can lift economic restrictions — and here’s the big if, if Newsom can lean on teachers unions and school districts to reopen classrooms — he’ll survive any recall and all but guarantee his re-election.

If not, Newsom will be in a fight for his political life.

Brown has been pretty accurate in calling elections over the past couple of decades. Certainly schools are a big issue, as Brown says, but right now, bars and resturants are closed, and you can't get a haircut. Churches will now let you inside out of the rain, but you still can't sing or exchange the peace. As with the Viet Nam war, the only viable strategy to end it is to declare victory and get out. Since the COVID crisis is essentially a moral panic manufactured by moral entrepreneurs like Dr Fauci and maintained for the benefit ot media and politicians, Newsom's path is fairly clear.

He basically needs to announce, "The science, the data, and the models say we've beaten this thing, thanks to my foresight and leadership" and declare an end to the lockdowns. The media will then find much encouragement in the bending curves and declining case mortality.

Free Exercise Updates

Liberty Counsel has announced that the State of Colorado has dropped its suit against Andrew Wommack Ministries, which I covered as the case was under way on the old blog, back in October. This came in the wake of Gov Polis's, removal of numerical caps on worship services, which in turn was a direct result of the US Supreme Court's action in the Diocese of Brooklyn case on November 24.

On December 16, District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser relaxed the attendance cap on churches in the District following the Archdiocese of Washington's suit.

On Wednesday D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser removed the 50-person limit for religious gatherings and allowed houses of worship to welcome up to 250 people or reach 25% capacity. The Mayor’s office made the adjustment five days after the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington sued the mayor over attendance caps.

While the order eases restrictions on religious gatherings, its language emphasizes the increasing severity of the coronavirus pandemic and discourages large gatherings.

“The larger the gathering, the more the exposure,” the order reads. “A recent lawsuit appears to insist on a constitutional right to hold indoor worship services of even a thousand persons or more at the largest facilities, which flies in the face of all scientific and medical advice and will doubtlessly put parishioners in harm’s way.”

The problem continues to be that with mask and social distance orders in place over much of the US, and other draconian restrictions like restaurant closings, COVID cases increase notwithstanding. Yet the experience of California megachurches, which defy health orderw with thousands of people each week, has been that infections are minimal, and no symptoms are reported at all.

On December 15, the US Supreme Court handed down a writ of certiorari before judgment in the case of SSPX priest Kevin Robinson and Orthodox Rabbi Yisrael Knopfler, who had been attempting since last May to remove New Jersey Gov Murphy's restrictions on church attendance. I covered the original case on the old blog here. As reported here,

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court upheld the petition for an injunction and ordered the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals to decide the case in line with a 5-4 ruling the Supreme Court issued in late November in a New York lawsuit.

In that case, the court barred authorities from enforcing attendance restrictions at churches and synagogues in the midst of the pandemic.

The ban on religious gatherings in New Jersey has been a contentious one going back to before Easter. One gathering broken up in Lakewood during the initial days of Murphy's stay-at-home order in March was of a group of men who gathered for religious studies. Knopfler was arrested in mid-May following a religious gathering that drew about 20 men, in violation of what was a 10-person limit at that time.

Also on December 15, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

ruled in favor of two Nevada churches that say the state’s COVID-19 restrictions violate their First Amendment rights.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agrees with the churches in Las Vegas and rural Lyon County that the state's limits are unconstitutional because they place harsher attendance limits on religious gatherings than casinos and other secular businesses.

. . . It instructed the district judges to preliminary enjoin Nevada from imposing attendance limits for churches stricter than those for other gatherings or businesses.

However, as reported here on December 8, on December 3, the US Supreme Court sent the case of Harvest Rock Church back to the Ninth District and the circuit court for recnsideration based on its order in the Diocese of Brooklyn case. But this left room for delay.

At this point, the circuit judge appears to be slow-walking the process.

On Saturday, December 5, the district court set a hearing for December 8. However, the court then granted Gov. Newsom more time so he could file yet another brief on December 14, followed by a hearing on December 18.

As I reported in the earlier post, it could take months to get the case back to the Supreme Court.

So far, there's been no news in the case of South Bay United Pentecostal Churches' petition for writ of certiorari before judgment, which I reported here on November 29.

The reality is -- and this will be the case no matter who is president -- the moral entrepreneurs are out to extend lockdowns indefinitely. Dr Fauci is now saying things could possibly get back to normal by Christmas 2021, or maybe 2022. This is going to be a long and difficult fight.