Why Is Dr Fauci Unhappy?

Dr Fauci had an extended interview yesterday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” where he displayed irritattion at his critics in a pattern that emerged last week when he said of Tucker Carlson and others, "I'm trying to save lives and the people who weaponize lies are killing people." Yesterday, he expanded on this:

BRENNAN: Senator Cruz told the attorney general you should be prosecuted.

FAUCI: Yeah. I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?

BRENNAN: Do you think that this is about making you a scapegoat to deflect–

DR. FAUCI: Of course-

BRENNAN: –From President Trump?

FAUCI: Of course, you have to be asleep not to figure that one out.

BRENNAN: Well, there are a lot of Republican senators taking aim at this. I mean–

FAUCI: That’s OK, I’m just going to do my job and I’m going to be saving lives and they’re going to be lying.

BRENNAN: It just, it seems, another layer of danger to play politics around matters of life and death.

FAUCI: Right, exactly. Exactly. And to me, that’s- that’s unbelievably bad because all I want to do is save people’s lives. Anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this. So if they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about. But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people could recognize there’s a person there. There’s a face, there’s a voice you can recognize, you see him on television. So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science.

This is all about. . . President Trump? The elephant in the room now is that over roughly a year since Biden has been in office, with vaccines available over that entire period, there will have been about the same number of COVID deaths by January 20 as occurred under Trump. And the visible face of the COVID crisis since it began, under both presidents, has been Tony Fauci. who's been doing his job and just trying to save lives, except that his record shows he hasn't been especially good at precisely that.

But his version is that he's a scapegoat to deflect from Trump's failures, except that Biden's have been precisely the same. But criticizing Tony Fauci in any of this is criticizing science.

The problem is that hypothetical 2024 matchup polls show Trump beating Biden handily. Fauci sees sentiment against him as a surrogate for pro-Trump sentiment. He's got that right. I've seen surmise from a few poll watchers that the Delta COVID variant fed dissatisfaction with Biden's handling of the crisis.

But this means that hyping the new Omicron variant now will simply compound the problem. And scolding the plebs for not wearing masks or being unvaxxed, or worse, imposing new lockdowns, will only increase resentment and won't fix the problem.

At some point, even Biden will have to recognize that one good way to stop his slide will be to fire Fauci. He's long overstayed his 15 minutes. Even if nothing improves, it will buy Biden some time.

Remember The Scary Red Circles?

The map with the scary flashing red circles was all the rage in early 2020, and it was on the news shows along with predictions of mass graves in public parks. It was based on the Imperial College model, which was almost immediately discredited, and even the media got tired of it around the time the hospital ships in New York and LA harbors were sent back to port.

All of a sudden, it looks like the lizard people want to bring back the old panic. And a panic, or an attempted stampede, is what the Omicron variant appears to be.

What a small world we live in. The “Nu variant” scare you keep hearing about is coming from the same people and institutions that spawned the last COVID scare, and the one before that, and the one before that one, dating back all the way to the onset of COVID Mania.

. . . Just as with previous ruling class-fomented bouts of Hysteria-19, there is no statistical cause for alarm over this new strain, which is one of over 100,000 mutations of the coronavirus.

The “new strain” has hardly produced any lab confirmed cases, but a panicked narrative has already been seeded in the public. The U.K. in particular has driven the fear to new levels. The country has already added several African nations to its travel ban list, citing the new strain.

The same applies to the US:

United States' top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on Sunday that Americans should be prepared to do "anything and everything" to fight the spread of the new COVID-19 variant Omicron.

It is "too early to say" whether we need new lockdowns or mandates, Fauci told ABC News.

"You want to be prepared to do anything and everything," he said.

But the lizard people who are whispering in President Biden's ear have overlooked a change in the political alignment -- or maybe more accurately, they're misreading it. Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins sees this, if not very clearly,

Mr. Biden, with the benefit of vaccines, has presided over more deaths now than Donald Trump, whom Candidate Biden practically labeled a murderer. He will be lucky not to see midterm ads reminding him of this. Unraveling here is a White House strategy that counted on Covid going away before the next election so it could claim its handwaving delivered us.

Two things are happening. The moral panic of 2020 was fed by the social uncertainties that put Donald Trump in the White House -- or maybe more precisely, the fear among those who profited from the post-1960s social settlement that this stability could be reversed. But the realignments are still taking place irrespective of Trump; for instance, the recognition among Latins that class identity is more important than racial identity; that the Latin working and middle classes have the same interests as the Anglo working and middle classes, and they're voting Republican like the Anglos.

Worse, Trump was never dead, and he's starting a comeback. But even there, he was only a talented amateur who took advantage of trends that had begun without him, and they'll continue no matter his individual political fate. Thus the current effort to reboot 2020 is going to be feckless.

The new Omicron attempted panic comes amid important US political developments: the January 6 commission, that was supposed to drive a final stake through Trump's heart when two impeachments couldn't, has tapered off into a joke that will end Liz Cheney's career. The jury system, with events like the Rittenhouse verdict, is refusing to knuckle under to the received narrative -- and the courts, in continuing to resist unconstitutionial COVID restrictions, are continuing to do the same.

The basic conundrum right now is that the prevailing strategies haven't worked. The graphs I showed yesterday indicate pretty clearly that no lockdowns, no mask mandates, and no vaccine mandates. work just as effectively as having them. Wearing two masks, as Dr Fauci briefly advocated, worked just as well as wearing no mask. People are catching on. Three shots will work about as well as four. Two will work about as well as three. None, it's starting to seem, works about the same as any. That which cannot continue must stop.

Color Me Skeptical

Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, we all got an emergency alert on our cell phones: "City of LA: COVID cases are spiking. Get vaccinated/tested now." My immediate thought was to ask if I'd missed something -- as far as I knew, cases in the county had been slowly declining for months. I went to my computer and pulled up the graph above. Yup, same old same old. Somebody at emergency management decided maybe they could panic half a dozen people into getting the shot that way, huh?

This is a completely irresponsible way of abusing the emergency alert system, which should be used only to notify people of wildfires, flash floods, and the like. If you cry wolf once too often, people don't take you seriouly.

So over the holiday and yesterday, the big headline at all the aggregators was WORST EVER MUTATION! VACCINE RESISTANT! STOCK MAKET DRIOPS 1000 POINTS! This is panic porn pure and simple, and I guess the world was ready for it if LA City was broadcasting stale alerts about spiking COVID the night before.

I've kept checking the COVID stats. Nobody's asking some obvious questions. Below is Florida's graph:

It could hardly be more different from LA County. Its spring-summer 2020 surge was more severe than LA, but LA had an enormouss peak in late 2020, much sharper and taller than Florida. But LA had a much smaller summer 2021 Delta surge, which has now largely faded. Florida's Delta surge was the highest yet, but it'd also largely faded.

In contrast, look at Michigan:

It had no spring-summer surge in 2020, but it had a surge late that year -- but then it had a big surge in spring 2021 that neither LA nor Florida saw, while it had no Delta peak last summer, but it now has its biggest peak yet. Why is there such wide regional disparity? Shouldn't someone be looking at this? Might there be answers here? At minimum, it's hard to avoid thinking that Florida shows doing nothing is about as effective as vaccine passports, mask mandates, social distancing, and lockdowns.

I've had my two jabs and a booster. I'm not anti-vax. I just don't think any of this is working, and I think the new variant is overhyped, just like everything else.

Looking At David French

The other day, I ran into a piece by David French on Jonah Goldberg's Dispatch newsletter, "The Moral Collapse of America's Largest Christian University". Up to now, I haven't given David French much thought. All I knew about him was that, as a writer for National Review, he briefly mulled running against Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in 2016, making him a never-Trumper. Poking around the web, I saw that he's now, like David Brooks, a contribuing writer for The Atlantic, as well as Senior Editor for Goldberg's Dispatch and a columnist for Time.

Yet Wikipedia says of him,

David Austin French (born January 24, 1969) is an American political commentator, theologically conservative traditional Christian, and former attorney who has argued high profile religious liberty cases.

The "theologically conservative traditional Christian" part puzzles me. Here's what he has to say about "Christians" in the Dispatch story at the link:

A few days ago I was eating dinner with a small group of students at a Christian university, and the subject of post-liberalism came up. A person directly asked me why I seemed to object to formally seeking Christian governance in the United States. I answered his question with a question, “Why do you think it would be better than what we have?”

I was thinking both historically and presently. Historically, one could arguably locate the apex of Protestant power in the United States as somewhere around the time of Prohibition. After all, Christians were powerful enough to pass a constitutional amendment banning alcohol, all as part of an effort to improve public morals and public health.

Yet what was the state of American righteousness at that time of apex Christian power? Lynch mobs roamed the South. The entire region was an oppressive nation-within-a-nation, largely cut off from the rule of law. Anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments proliferated across the United States. Not even religious liberty was safe when Christians ruled.

And what about the present? Its largest institutions reel from scandal. A great mass of its members have succumbed to conspiracy theories. Its “religious” anti-vaxxism is claiming lives by the thousands.

So he's essentially conflating Christianity with Protestantism and then saying "Christians" are Prohibitionists, segregationists, anti-vaxxers, and conspiracy theorists. Though he doesn't mention it here, they're probably Trumpists, too. (He also doesn't mention that Prohibition was an anti-Catholic measure aimed principally at Irish and Italian immigrants.)

But wait. I'm not aware of any movement that is "formally seeking Christian governance in the United States". This would require a repeal of the First Amendment, something I just don't see on the horizon. This sounds an awful lot like a straw-man argument to me. It sounds like some people thought he "seemed to object to" something that as far as I can tell just doesn't exist. Well, I strongly object to space aliens invading the planet to steal our oxygen. Maybe he and I can join forces.

What was that about conspiracy theories?

In reality, especially in a world where Donald Trump has expanded the possible range of activism, at least some Christians, especially Catholics, have adopoted a stance of advocacy, and indeed political alliances, on a case-by-case basis. Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas recently said,

The Catholic Church should feel free to criticize the government when necessary and “shouldn’t be captive to one party or another[.]”

, , , “The Church has to have an independent voice to say we agree when we can agree, and when we can’t agree we’re going to say something,” Bishop Flores told Crux, an online Catholic news outlet.

“And that’s the way it works. I mean, the church is free to speak, and we shouldn’t be captive to one party or another,” he added.

Flores is the new head of the doctrine committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which is charged with assisting the bishops “in areas of faith and morals, providing expertise and guidance concerning the theological issues that confront the Church in the United States.”

This is consistent with recent statements I've noted here from Abp José Gómez, USCCB President, whose view is that there's currently a great deal about which to speak out. Does David French think this is "Christian governance"? I think it's more like the right of petition for redress of grievances, also in the First Amendment.

French isn't much of a legal mind if this is any indication. He certainly isn't much of a writer. I guess that's why he's at Time and The Atlantic.

Let Them Buy Electric Cars!

President Biden channeled Marie Antoinette yesterday:

"For the hundreds of thousands of folks who bought one of those electric cars, they’re going to save $800 to $1000 in fuel costs this year,” Biden said, referring to the $112,595 electric Hummer pickup he test drove at a General Motors factory in Detroit earlier this month.

The least expensive new electric car is the 2022 Nissan Leaf, with a starting price of $28,375. You can get a used Leaf cheaper, but they're still more expensive than comparable gas-driven cars. But not many people currently suffering from high gas prices will come out better, since trading in a gas-driven car will bring a new, higher car payment no matter what.

Another issue is vehicle range. Available models start at about 100 miles, which for many commutes is a single round trip. Recharging can take from 30 minutes to 12 hours, so you can't just swing by the corner gas station to fill up. Longer trips other than commutes are problematic. Conversion just isn't a practical option for most people given current costs and technology..

Beyond that, there are other questions like the need to upgrade the electrical grid if significantly more people are charging those electric cars. If that isn't done, the grid becomes less reliable, so that there are tradeoffs in social costs as well as family budgets. These issues can't be dismissed with a wave of the hand.

But there's a bigger question here -- what is the formal cause of President Biden's remarks? In Aristotelian terms, what's the plan behind them? Joel Kotkin has the most insightful take I've seen so far, which matches my own view that Marx had nothing to say about climate change or gender dysphoria, and he didn't think the Lumpenproletariat was a reliable working class ally:

[U]nlike the social democracy movements that followed World War Two, the New Socialism focusses not on material aspirations but on climate change, gender, and race. While the old socialism sought to represent the ordinary labourer, many on the Left today seem to have little more than contempt for old working-class base and its often less than genteel views on issues such as Critical Race Theory.

Yet perhaps the most critical difference between traditional socialism and its new form relates to growth. The New Socialism’s emphasis on climate change necessarily removes economic growth as a priority. Quite the opposite, in fact: the Green agenda looks instead towards a shrinking economy and lowered living standards, seeking to elevate favoured groups within a stagnant economy rather than generating opportunities for the general population.

. . . But there can be little doubt that the biggest change is taking place on the Left. Historically, the British and Australian Labour Parties, the French Socialist Party, America’s Democrats and Canada’s Liberals evolved from a strong working-class base. But in recent years, for both economic and cultural reasons, these parties have become dominated by professionals, academics and government workers increasingly bent on introducing paternalistic, puritan policies.

I don't think he pays enough attention to the actual political dynamic. Most "professionals, academics and government workers" are still middle class -- they're computer programmers, community college instructors (increasingly untenured), administrators, and paper pushers. They have to fill the gas tanks on their older cars like everyone else. They're faring no better than UPS drivers or construction workers, unionized or not.

There's a separate class of elites, the Dr Faucis, Speaker Pelosis, or Al Gores who fly to climate conferences on private jets and go blithely unmasked at lavish parties. (Why didn't Prince Charles ride to Glasgow on the all electric royal train, by the way? Why doesn't Biden tell the secret service to get him an electric presidential limo?)

The current de facto policy objective is actually to punish the working and middle classes by reducing their liviing standards, subjecting them to ever increasing levels of crime, and implementing pansexualist policies that, via discouraging marriage, allowing men into women's toilet facilities, and allowing men to compete in women's sports, reduce the status of women.

Kotkin concludes his piece by hoping the left can rediscover its working-class roots, but the utopia envisioned by the current elites has nothing to do with traditional leftism. The policy the elites seem to be aiming at is a new aristocracy that consumes the resources of subordinated, demoralized middle and working classes.

President Biden is fully on board with this -- this isn't a cognitive issue. His refusal to answer questions even from a generally sympathetic press is an inevitable passive-aggressive strategy forced on him by his insistence on continuing unpopular and unworkable polcies.

We Agree This Is Happening -- The Question Is Why

As an Aristotelian, I look for causes. We don't have a whole lot of insight for now into the "final" cause of Darrell Brooks Jr's crashing a very snazzy red Ford Escape into a Waukesha, WI Christmas parade on November 21. It sounds as though he may have been fleeing another crime scene, or a fight, and it's hard not to speculate that drugs may also have been involved. But that's less important for now than the "efficient" cause, for which we have some informed insight. Brooks is

the entirely predictable product of a political- and social-media driven effort to address crime by pretending that it doesn’t exist.

To present criminals — particularly black criminals — as victims. To pay no meaningful attention to actual victims — who overwhelmingly are black themselves.

. . . Brooks, however, is a depressingly familiar type.

He had been released on nominal bail Friday after being charged Nov. 5 with domestic abuse, resisting an officer, second-degree recklessly endangering safety, disorderly conduct and felony bail-jumping.

More specifically,

Just two days before the horror on Sunday, he was released from jail on $1,000 bail following an arrest for allegedly deliberately running over the mother of his child at a gas station.

As I said yesterday, this is the effect of a national campaign sponsored most visibly by George Soros to raise the felony threshold for crimes like retail theft, elect district attorneys who decline to prosecute career criminal offenses, and abolish cash bail. A recent book by John McWhorter, Woke Racism, nibbles around the edges of the problem:

"The people who are calling themselves black people saviors don't understand this, but they're hurting black people because what they're caught up in is more about virtue signaling to one another than helping people who actually need help."

At the link,

Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with the 56-year-old McWhorter about what white people get out of cooperating with an ideological agenda that casts them as devils, what black people gain by "performing" victimhood, and what needs to change so that all Americans can get on with creating a more perfect union.

But judging from reviews, I get the impression that McWhorter, a linguistics professor, sees the issue mainly in rhetorical and linguistic terms. Rhetorical virtue signaling may be satsifying, but it isn't a perceived good that can "efficiently" cause deadly social policy, which is what we see in the Waukesha case. The virtue signaling rhetoric of wokeness is only a byproduct of the policy's "formal" cause. Elsewhere, McWhorter gets closer to the issue:

I have no doubt that Martin Luther King would have understood what I'm saying in terms of helping people who actually need help. It's not an accident that at the end of his life, he was beginning to focus more on poverty in general than on the race question.

The idea is to help people who need help. The modern idea that microaggressions and how white people feel in their heart of hearts is what we should be thinking about to me is a detour.

But what, specifically, are we detouring away from here? If virtue signaling isn't the point, what is? It looks to me as if the subtext of some of McWhorter's remarks is that the civil rights movement had effective goals and achieved partial success up to about the time of Martin Luther King's death, after which elites seized on side issues that emerged from the 1960s ghetto riots to redefine the movement's goals, placing blame on law enforcement as a means of imposing a tacit policy of resegregation and continuing to keep poor African-Americans in isolated communities sustained by destructive subsidies and misdirected social services.

This would be the "formal" cause of the Waukesha tragedy and a great deal else. McWhorter is right in saying wokeness is a distraction, but the question is the actual "formal" cause of the curent dilemma. So far, I haven't seen much insighful discussion of that.

The Lumpenproletariat And Class Consciousness

I was doing some research into the Weimar Republic (Germany 1919-1933) and ran into this passage at Britannica:

Because of the hopes aroused in 1918–19, the fact that no far-reaching plan for securing public control over industry or for breaking up the big landed estates was carried through had two consequences. First, although the German working class undoubtedly improved its political and economic status under the republic, a considerable portion of it was embittered by the failure to effect drastic reform of the social and economic systems. This disenchantment was to provide the left-wing opposition with strong working-class support, which weakened both the Social Democratic Party and the republic.

This brought to mind Whittaker Chambers's observation that as of the 1920s, German was in fact the language of international socialism, and Germany was the locus of the movement. My takeaway from the link above is that the German working class at the time had clearly articulated interests that it systematically pursued, if utterly without success.

I was looking up Weimar because I've been seeing references to a contemporary "Weimar America", but a few minutes' thought brings me to the conclusion that any parallels are superficial at best. Consider that the class interests that have been advanced most visibly since 2020 are those of the Lumpenproletariat, the urban underclass, not the working class, whose interests have been more clearly bourgeois and Republican at least since Nixon's 1972 landslide defeat of George McGovern.

But now let's look at the puzzling case of the SUV that crashed into a Waukesha, WI Christmas parade yesterday evening. The circumstances so far aren't completely clear, but the SUV driver appears to have been identified:

Darrell Brooks Jr. is the man who was taken into custody in connection with the Waukesha Christmas parade tragedy on November 21, 2021, according to police. When Brooks was detained, police found a Ford key on him, according to scanner audio obtained by Heavy.

His social media accounts and online court records show that he is an aspiring rap singer with a lengthy criminal history and two open felony cases for which he was released on $500 and $1,000 bail, the latter just days before the parade deaths.

At 39, he's had a lifetime career as a petty criminal, which places him clearly in the Marxist Lumpenproletariat. But Waukesha and Kenosha, although both in Wisconsin, aren't all that close at about 55 miles distant. It's hard to conclude that the attack, if that's what it was, had any connection with the Rittenhouse trial, in which the defendant was acquitted in charges relating to the deaths and injury of three white Lumpenproletariat:

The motive is not clear. David Begnaud of CBS News tweeted that, according to a law enforcement official, the parade suspect was “fleeing another scene – possibly a knife fight” before injuring 40 people in the parade. “Several LE sources say preliminary: Wisconsin incident appears to be vehicle fleeing a separate crime scene (stabbing) when it plowed into parade. One person in custody. Investigation ongoing but so far no initial link to terror or the recent Rittenhouse verdict w/@tom_winter,” NBC reporter Jonathan Dienst wrote on Twitter.

This strikes me as, if anything, confirmation of the Marxist theory that the Lumpenproletariat, unlike the working class, lacks class consciousness and is not a reliable ally -- Brooks, as far as we can tell so far, was fleeing his personal demons and not acting for or against anyone else's interest. That he should plow through a Christmas parade in Waukesha was unplanned, undirected, and has no similarity to, say, the 2016 Islamist truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market.

This raises the open question of why US elites have allied themsleves with the Lumpenproletariat, who are unreliable, disorganized, and not capable of returning favors even if they wanted to. It's been wealthy elites, from George Soros to Laurene Powell Jobs, who have sponsored ballot measures to raise the felony threshold for crimes like shoplifting, supported the election of district attorneys who decline to prosecute career criminal offenses, and abolish cash bail. The criminals themselves can't organize and pursue that agenda themselves.

In fact, the most organization the criminals themselves can undertake is planning mass smash-and-grab attacks, three of which occurred in the San Francisco area over the weekend. This helps only the criminals on a short term basis, but it hurts the working and middle classes when the stores they patronize close in response, and indeed it hurts the shareholders and managers of those stores as well. The only benefit is to the wealthiest, who are insulated from the effects of their policies and feel virtuous in enabling the Lumpenproletariat.

This is an odd alliance. I'm not sure if it has any historical parallel.