Darn Right There Needs To Be An Investigation

In this morning's news,

Georgia GOP Representative Barry Loudermilk, chairman of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, said on Wednesday that his panel is launching an investigation into the January 6 Committee to find out if important information about the day’s events was hidden by the panel.

Let me put in a plug for one of my favorite TV shows of all time, On Patrol: Live on the REELZ channel, a clone-reboot of Live PD. which was paused but never revived by A&E in the wake of the BLM riots. If you want to check it out, it's on at 9PM Eastern tonight.

As a shameless OP: Live/Live PD junkie, given the photo above, which is just one vignette from the Tucker Carlson footage of QAnon Shaman's progress through the Capitol on January 6, I've become familiar enough with police procedure to have a whole bunch of questions about this scene. And we'll drop any issues of context, for instance, what hundreds of screaming rioters may have been doing outside the building -- let's just focus on the officers and Mr Chansley in the photo.

First, the guy is dressed in a bizarre outfit, he's behaving strangely, and he's carrying a flag on a four-foot spear, which many observers have characterized as a weapon. He's also weaing a horned headdress that could easily turn into a weapon as well. Normally, police officers would interview a subject like this to assess what's going on -- the guy could well pose a danger to himself or others. At the bare minimum, they would, as politely and courteously as they could, separate him from his potential weapons, for their safety as well as the subject's.

This is standard procedure that OP: Live viewers see maybe half a dozen times on a given episode. There are two officers with Mr Chansley. Separating him from potential weapons would be a first step for even Barney Fife of the Mayberry police, leaving aside Mr Chansley was headed for the Senate chamber. It didn't happen in this case. This nut job could presumably turn on either officer and attack him with that spear or the horned hat at any time, but apparently they trusted him not to do this.

In fact, under the circumstances we see in the vignette above and throughout the rest of the Carlson footage, leaving aside even the riot outside the building, a pair of officers investigating a bizarre dude carrying a spear wearing body paint and a horned headdress would place him in handcuffs -- as OP: Live viewers frequently see, the officers would be saying words to the effect, "You're not under arrest, you're just being detained, we're placing you in cuffs for our own safety while we investigate. These cuffs come off as quickly as they go on."

Didn't happen. At minimum, as far as I can see, Barney Fife would get a stern talking-to from his sergeant over neglecting the training he's been given for his own safety.

Next question: these officers had radios. Barney Fife would have called his dispatcher to report, "I'm at Route 15 and Main. Stopping a subject in body paint and a horned headdress carrying a spear. Can you send another unit?" In fact, there would probably have been an ongoing radio exchange between the patrol officers and their supervisors throughout the incident. For that matter, I would almost guess the officer on the left in the photo is holding a radio microphone in his right hand and communicating with someone as they walk along.

I would assume these radio exchanges are recorded. Rep Loudermilk, I hope, is already on this. And this goes to the question of why, in another vignette, Mr Chansley walks past seven other Capitol Police officers, escorted by two of their brother officers, under riot conditions (why would seven officers be in a small group in the hallways otherwise?), in body paint, carrying a spear, wearing a horned headdress that looks kinda dangerous in itself, unrestrained.

Sounds to me as if there was radio traffic informing the force that this was nothing to get excited about. Otherwise, wouldn't one of the seven watching the little parade say something at minimum like, "Fred, what's up? You need any help with this guy?" Not a peep, at least in the footage we see.

Politifact claims to have debunked the Carlson footage:

Carlson claimed Capitol Police officers "helped" Chansley and "acted as his tour guides."

Available evidence rebuts this claim. Chansley was among the first rioters to force their way into the building through a door other rioters had broken. Officers repeatedly asked Chansley to leave the building. This is corroborated by the plea agreement Chansley signed and an officer’s account of the events.

The Capitol Police chief called Carlson’s claim "outrageous and false," and said officers used de-escalation tactics to try to talk rioters into getting each other to leave the Capitol.

While there's no sound with the Carlson footage, the scenes we've seen don't appear to show any verbal exchange between the officers and Mr Chansley. As an OP: Live viewer, I see de-escalation tactics all the time -- that's pretty much what patrol officers have to do their whole shift with domestic disputes, raving homeless people, or violent offenders resisting arrest. De-escalation involves a lot of talking. It involves the cop putting his body between the subject and what the subject wants to attack. It involves disarming the subject, first and foremost for officer safety.

On the face of it, Mr Chansley was carrying a dangerous sword-like item, and he was wearing a horned headdress that could quickly have become a weapon. De-escalation would have involved the two officers who were with him throughout the Carlson footage at minimum disarming him and, given the circumstances, restraining him, especially since for much of the time, they were alone with him, and such a scene wouldn't have provoked the crowd.

There are lots of questions that still need answers.

Is A Comparison With The Reichstag Fire Overblown?

According to Wikipedia,

The Reichstag fire (German: Reichstagsbrand) was an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on Monday 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch "council communist", was the apparent culprit; however, Hitler attributed the fire to Communist agitators. He used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the German government, and induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties, and pursue a "ruthless confrontation" with the Communists. This made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.

. . . Shortly after 9 p.m. on 27 February 1933, the Reichstag building was reported as on fire, and firefighters were dispatched. Despite their efforts, most of the building was gutted. By 11:30 p.m., the fire was put out.

. . . Walter Gempp was head of the Berlin fire department at the time of the Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933, personally directing the operations at the incident. On 25 March he was dismissed for presenting evidence that suggested Nazi involvement in the fire. Gempp asserted that there had been a delay in notifying the fire brigade and that he had been forbidden from making full use of the resources at his disposal. In 1937, Gempp was arrested for abuse of office. Despite his appeal, he was imprisoned. Gempp was strangled and killed in prison on 2 May 1939.

. . . In July 1933, Marinus van der Lubbe, Ernst Torgler, Georgi Dimitrov, Blagoi Popov, and Vasil Tanev were indicted on charges of setting the fire.

. . . The Leipzig Trial was widely publicized and was broadcast on the radio. It was expected that the court would find the communists guilty on all counts. The trial began at 8:45 on the morning of 21 September, with [v]an der Lubbe testifying. Van der Lubbe's testimony was very hard to follow as he spoke of losing his sight in one eye and wandering around Europe as a drifter and that he had been a member of the Dutch Communist Party, which he quit in 1931, but still considered himself a communist. Georgi Dimitrov began his testimony on the third day of the trial. He gave up his right to a court-appointed lawyer and defended himself successfully. . . . During the course of his defence, Dimitrov claimed that the organizers of the fire were senior members of the Nazi Party and frequently verbally clashed with Göring at the trial.

The outcome of the trial was that only Lubbe, the incoherent drifter whose knowledge of German was limited, was found guilty and sentenced to death. The presiding judge acquitted the others on the basis of insufficient evidence.

The result of the fire was the near-destruction of the German parliament building, equivalent to the US Capitol, and use of the episode as the basis for suppressing civil liberties, all of which worked to the benefit of the Nazis. While the historical record still isn't completely clear, it's certainly possible to surmise that the fire was in fact organized by "senior members of the Nazi paty", which clearly benefitted from the whole event, with Lubbe as a convenient patsy.

This brings me back to the problem of Jacob Chansley, the QAnon Shaman. The image from the Tucker Carlson January 6 footage that sticks in the mind is, as law professor and criminal defense attorney Jonathan Turley puts it,

Chansley being escorted by officers through the Capitol. Two officers appear to not only guide him to the floor but actually appear to be trying to open locked doors for him. At one point, Chansley is shown walking unimpeded through a large number of armed officers with his four-foot flag-draped spear and horned Viking helmet on his way to the Senate floor.

Yet the highly selective and now clearly orchestrated accounts of January 6 portray Chansley, again in Turley's words,

to the Capitol riot what Rosie the Riveter was to World War II. Howling and “chanting an unintelligible mantra” on the Senate floor, he is the embodiment of the unhinged rage that led to one of the most disgraceful attacks on our constitutional process in history.

In other words, January 6 was something maybe not as severe in its historical impact as the Reichstag fire, but certainly a highly publicized and heavily exploited attack on democratic values. And it's starting to look as though Chansley is a scapegoat functionally equivalent, mutatis mutandis, to Marinus van der Lubbe. Given the somewhat more humane values of the contemporary US, he wasn't sentenced to death, but he's doing 41 months, partly in solitary, for an offense, obstructing an official proceeding, for which most others aren't even prosecuted, much less jailed.

I have two problems with the narrative as it's unfolded this week. In addition to the odd consideration that the Capitol Police give Chansley, there's the question of how disorganized the force was elsewhere while these events took place. Tucker Carlson's Tuesday show carried an interview with former Capitol Police Lieutenant Tarik Johnson, a supervisory officer on the scene that day:

Johnson told Carlson that his bosses had failed them, saying the Capitol Police commanders were ill prepared and did not answer when he radioed seeking guidance.

'Around 2 o'clock I hear an officer say the Capitol was breached. So I ran inside to assist,' said Johnson, adding that he locked doors to keep the political leaders safe.

He then radioed his bosses for help.

'I said something to the effect of, we need direction,' Johnson said.

'"What do you want me to do?" Nobody responded.'

Johnson continued: 'I was requesting permission to evacuate the senate side, the senate chambers, because I had a clear line of sight to get them out the senate door, and I didn't get permission.

'The dispatcher called a couple times to see if I could get permission.

'No response.'

So the picture we're beginning to get is on one hand, complete disorder, the senior management of the department AWOL as the crowd threatens to overrun the Senate chamber, while a mid-level supervisor, Lt Johnson, feels compelled to exceed his authority to order the chamber evacuated -- which is what took place.

As far as I can tell, very soon after the chamber was evacuated on Johnson's order, two other Capitol Police officers escorted Chansley into that same chamber, which by that time was empty of senators. But what would have happened if the senators had still been inside? At best, Chansley -- quite possibly with the assistance of the same two officers -- would have reached the vice president's seat in an atmosphere of much greater confusion, and the visuals would have been even more compelling, with the tall and bizarre QAnon Shaman presumably ranting right at both sitting senators and the presiding vice president. At best. It could have been a lot worse, and indeed, with Capitol Police senior management AWOL, it might well have been without Johnson's unauthorized order. Was the nonfeasance of Capitol Police management deliberate?

The odd thing, as Prof Turley implies several times, is how well cast Chansley was for his role.

An out-of-work actor, Chansley instantly became a sensation by appearing in his animal headdress, horns and red-white-and-blue face paint.

Had he merely worn a MAGA hat and chinos, he would likely have been given a fraction of this sentence.

Chansley did not appear to be a leader of any group that day as he wandered about the Capitol. The only people with him were often two attending and remarkably attentive Capitol police officers.

I think we have more to learn. But if a high-level cabal organized a QAnon Shaman tableau with Chansley as a mentally handicapped patsy, I think their mistake was to portray him as a hippie type. They needed to find someone much more like a brown shirt.

A Closer Look At QAnon Shaman

Much of the up to now suppressed January 6 Capitol footage that Tucker Carlson ran Monday night features Jacob Chansley, aka QAnon Shaman. There's been remarkably little commentary on Chansley's legal situation, although he's currently in federal prison serving a 41-month sentence on one count of obstructing an official proceeding, for which he pleaded guilty on September 3, 2021. The severity of the sentence was explained by the judge:

Judge Royce Lamberth has had Chansley held in jail since his arrest, despite his multiple attempts to gain sympathy and his release.

Other judges are likely to look to Lamberth’s sentence as a possible benchmark, since Chansley is one of the first felony defendants among more than 660 Capitol riot cases to receive a punishment.

. . . “He made himself the image of the riot, didn’t he?” Lamberth said to Chansley’s defense attorney. “For good or bad, he made himself the very image of this whole event.”

The release of the January 6 footage that depicts his role more clearly during the Carlson broadcast raises questions about whether this was Chansley's actual intent (a record of the whole show is here.) According to the New York Post,

For several minutes, the video shows, Robishaw and another officer follow Chansley as he tried to enter the Senate chamber. At one point, Robishaw tried a locked door with the Senate seal etched on its frosted glass.

At another point, Chansley and the officers pass a group of seven other cops, who seem to pay them no mind.

Chansley and the two officers eventually find an unlocked door and one of the policemen holds it open after Chansley lets himself onto the Senate floor. The DOJ timeline confirmed that Robishaw followed Chansley into the chamber as the “Shaman” took the seat on the dais recently occupied by Vice President Mike Pence.

The most obvious conclusion I can draw from the footage is that Chansley's own behavior appears to be disorganized and unfocused, irrespective of any other judgment that might be applied to it. He was wandering the halls at random, with no apparent objective in mind, and the police simply followed him, making no attempt to stop him or detain him, and in at least one case, trying to open a door for him, although it isn't necessarily clear if that was what Chansley himself wanted done.

In other words, with only a layman's understandiong of mental health, adding this to his bizarre dress and reported ranting, I've got to wonder if Chansley was all there. The incomplete record we have suggests he wasn't:

Chansley's defense lawyer Albert Watkins said that it's possible his client could cut a plea deal after officials at the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) diagnosed him with transient schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety.

. . . Watkins said his client has expressed some delusions including 'believing that he was indeed related directly to Jesus and Buddha.'

. . . Watkins says Chansley's 2006 mental health records from his time in the U.S. Navy show a similar diagnosis to the BOP's.

Watkins said authorities will need to determine how Chansley can get access to the treatment he needs to 'actively participate in his own defense.' Pleading guilty to a charge negates the need for a trial, but defendants still have to be declared mentally competent to do so.

Chansley was discharged from the US Navy after two years in 2007:

A Navy official told Task & Purpose Chansley was booted from the service after he refused to take the anthrax vaccine. Citing privacy regulations, officials declined to provide the characterization of his discharge.

Chansley's attorney Watkins referred to some type of Navy psychological evalutation, but as is routine, this would be confidential. Nevertheless, given his public conduct on January 6 and the evaluation by the US Bureau of Prisons, it's certainly credible that he'd been displaying symptoms of mental problems throuhout at least the prior 14 years. For whatever reason, Watkins seems not to have pursued an effort to have had him declared mentally incompetent to plead guilty.

On November 30, 2021, only three months after his guilty plea, Chansley appealed his 41-month sentence:

Chansley’s appeal came a day after the federal judge who accepted his plea and who sentenced him in U.S. District Court in Washington signed off on his move to replace his defense attorney Albert Watkins with a new lawyer, John Pierce.

. . . It is extremely difficult to get a guilty plea and subsequent sentence in federal court reversed on appeal, particularly because judges are careful to have defendants confirm that they understand that they are waiving their rights to appeal the plea or sentence in most cases.

However, a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel — essentially an argument that a defense lawyer badly botched the case — is one potential way to win a reversal of a guilty plea.

A legal nonprofit group founded by Chansley’s new attorney last week said ineffective assistance of counsel may be a ground for Chansley to appeal his conviction. A legal filing Tuesday by Pierce did not lay out Chansley’s grounds for his appeal, which will be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Another problem that isn't yet clear is whether Chansley's counsel, either Watkins or Pierce, was aware of the January 6 footage that shows Chansley's actual conduct on that day. He entered the Senate chamber and sat in the vice president's seat only after being escorted there by Capitol police, who made no effort to restrain him and appear to have given him the impression that they were there to assist him. According to this report from Julie Kelly,

Capitol Police and the Justice Department designated the recordings as “highly sensitive” material in March 2021; the trove remains under tight protective orders and defendants must agree to strict rules before gaining access to clips entered as evidence against them.

Capitol Police turned over to the FBI roughly 14,000 hours of video covering the hours of noon and 8:00 p.m. on January 6 but the full 24-hour reel has been in the hands of House Democrats for two years—reportedly the footage that Carlson’s team was authorized to view.

If prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence in the January 6 recordings from Chansley's counsel, or if Watkins made ineffective use of them, that would be highly problematic for the government's case, and it would certainly support a claim that Watkins had been ineffective as Chansley's counsel.

The response of the Capitol Police to questions about the new footage also doesn't seem to match the depiction of actual events:

The footage appears to show officers walking with the horn-hatted Chansley through the halls of the U.S. Capitol Building.

Capitol police were asked for their response to the footage and the argument that an effort was not made to stop the Jan. 6 demonstrator from reaching the Senate floor.

"Before this video was recorded, a violent group of people fought through multiple police lines and illegally broke into the U.S. Capitol, which was closed for a Joint Session of Congress," the police force said in a statement to Just the News.

. . . The police force statement also reads: "Moments earlier, our officers and agents had to evacuate the Senate chamber, which was closed to the public, to rush elected officials and staffers to safety. After that, multiple people snuck into the chamber. The officer was vastly outnumbered by rioters. At this point, it is clear the officer is trying to get everyone out of the chamber."

However, this refers to an entirely separate event, quite possibly involving a different officer or officers who were with Chansley in the Carlson footage, and who in one scene were with seven other officers, none of whom made any attempt to detain or restrain Chensley. Chensley throughout many minutes in the Carlson footage was never with more than one or two others, and the officer or officers with him and his companions never seem even to have remonstrated with them.

There are many unanswered questions. This story, ostensibly a "major update" following the Carlson show, isn't entirely credible:

A former federal prosecutor representing J6 clients revealed that Chansley very well may be released from custody soon.

“My client, Jake Chansley, was a big part of Tucker’s first big rollout of video tonight,” said his attorney on Twitter. “There is a story beyond just the fact that the Govt had video Jake’s attorney never looked at. Jake is set to be released from custody soon.”

But the story refers only to a Twitter thread by someone going under the name shipreckedcrew. I've been trying to figure out who "shipreckedcrew" is -- possibly Chansley's new attorney, Pierce -- but I've got to say that he isn't acting like defense attorneys I usually see as a true crime fan. His statements on Twitter still leave it unclear whether the Justice Department or the January 6 Committee withheld evidence from the defense.

As a retired guy with nothing else to take priority, I spent maybe three hours off and on researching this case on the web over the past day or so. So far, I haven't seen a single full-time paid reporter or commentator who's done even that much work in the wake of the Carlson Monday night show.

Judge Lamberth says he "made himself the image" of January 6, but it seems to me that the depiction of him was something much more like the exploitation of a mentally handicapped individual to suit the media's purpose.

Let's Revisit An Old Story

The photo above is of the avuncular Dr Francis Collins, former director of the US National Institutes of Health, who also happens to be a prominent Evangelical who has periodically argued that "rigorous science" poses no conflict with religious belief. But I suppose that depends on what the meanings of "rigorous science" and "religious belief" are -- and they certainly haven't stood in the way of Dr Collins getting the prestigious Templeton Award, notwithstanding his direct subordinate Dr Fauci has constantly insisted that the anti-religious COVID lockdown policies involving church closures are based on "science".

In the context of the recent revelation that Dr Fauci in February 2020 commissioned an academic study that he then cited to refute the lab-leak theory of COVID's origin, it's worth revisiting a story that I first covered here last August, wherein Collins effectively ordered his subordinate Fauci and a colleague to stir up an equivalent academic takedown of another strain of COVID dissent:

The memo first came to light due to a freedom-of-information action by a public interest group in December 2021. At the time, informed medical opinion said,

This week, emails released through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Institute for Economic Research revealed what I see as worrisome communication between Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci, and others within the National Institutes of Health in the fall of 2020. At issue was the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter written in October 2020 and eventually signed by thousands of scientists. It argues that Covid-19 policy should focus on protecting the elderly and vulnerable, and largely re-open society and school for others.

. . . Collins appeared on television this week to confirm that the email was authentic, and that he stood by the message. At the time, he believed the Great Barrington Declaration idea of focused protection would result in more deaths than the alternative view of one-size-fits all restrictions. Collins also confirmed that he believed the three authors of the declaration were “fringe” scientists.

. . . What concerns me about the NIH director’s email and his interview on television is that he appeared unwilling to have this dialogue. Collins’s day job does not make him arbiter of scientific truth, the Pope for all scientists. On questions of unprecedented pandemic policy, he is surely entitled to his opinion — as we all are — but his is just one opinion of many.

. . . Collins’s response to a memo signed by thousands of scientists should not have been to call for an immediate and devastating take down, but to use his pulpit as NIH director to hold a series of public discussions and dialogues.

I think the memo, and the overall tone of Collins's response to the problem, is a good indication of Collins's actual management style, which seems to have been anything but avuncular. He was saying, in tones that I well recall from my days as an Ivy Leaguer, that there had better be a quick and devastating public takedown of these guys, if Fauci knew what was good for him. In other words, Fauci had better get on it and find a presigious stooge in a lab coat to write it, stat. (I would also suggest that the implication there included the availability of generous NIH money to pay the prestigious stooge.)

I strongly suspect that Fauci's commissioning of the February 2020 study that discounted the lab-leak theory had the precise same origin -- he was following orders from Collins, both to sponsor the study and to use it to support the NIH agenda.

What we're beginning to see as the Morning After phase of the COVID panic continues to unfold is that there was an inner circle that didn't just influence public opinion but micromanaged it.

[I]n the early months of the pandemic, then-CNN president Jeff Zucker would not allow his network to chase down the lab-leak story because he believed it was a "Trump talking point," according to a well-placed CNN insider.

"People are slowly waking up from the fog," the insider told Fox News Digital. "It is kind of crazy that we didn't chase it harder."

But what was Collins/Fauci's problem with the lab-leak theory? As House Judiciary Chairman Jordan put it,

"Why was Dr. Fauci so consumed with making sure the narrative wasn't about the lab?" the Ohio Republican told Fox News's "Sunday Morning Futures" host Maria Bartiromo. "I think it's because they were doing gain of function research there, he didn't want that out, and that was the narrative that everyone on the left bought into."

I think the path to an answer lies in questions that have been around since at least December 2021:

The National Institutes of Health allowed a U.S. nonprofit it funds to police its own controversial research on bat coronaviruses in China, raising new concerns about insufficient oversight at the agency.

. . . In December 2017, the funding for some gain-of-function research was resumed under carefully constructed guidelines for “Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight,” or P3CO — but the language suggested by Daszak helped the group evade this oversight as well. In July 2018, NIAID program officers decided that the experiments on humanized mice — which had been conducted a few months earlier — would get a pass from these restrictions as long as EcoHealth Alliance immediately notified appropriate agency officials according to the circumstances that the group had laid out.

. . . In a written response to questions submitted in September and October, an NIH spokesperson told The Intercept that the rule that was supposed to trigger a stop to the research was added “out of an abundance of caution.” Similarly, in a letter sent to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform last month, NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak called the rule “an additional layer of oversight,” implying that the agency had devised the rule itself. But the notes reviewed by The Intercept show that the language was inserted at Daszak’s suggestion and that the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance worked together to evade additional oversight.

It's hard to avoid thinking that the circumstances that led to what's looking more and more like the origins of the pandemic were exceptional, a violation of existing NIH policy, and the result of some sort of deal at the policymaking level, which is to say, at the level of Dr Francis Collins. What were the incentives for the deal? Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance got money. What did Dr Collins get? I'll bet it was something, and it wasn't something Dr Collins, prominent Evangelical, wanted to be made public.

Templeton Award indeed.

Looks Like We Just Got A New Overton Window

One intriguing indicator that we've reached the Morning After phase of the COVID moral panic is how the Overton Window, the permissible range of opinion on public issues, has changed almost instantly over roughly the past week. At the peak of the panic, the idea that the virus was the result of a lab leak in China wasn't just a minority view, it was a pariah view associated with racists and conspiracy theorists. But as of this past Saturday,

FBI Director Chris Wray told Fox News' Bret Baier this week that COVID-19 "most likely" came from a Chinese lab.

. . . The Energy Department, which had been undecided on the origin of the pandemic, concluded that the coronavirus most likely spread due to a mishap at a Chinese laboratory, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited a classified intelligence report provided to the White House and "key members of Congress."

. . . Beyond the FBI and Energy Department, the National Intelligence Council and four other unnamed agencies assess at "low confidence" that the COVID-19 pandemic originated due to natural transmission from an infected animal, according to the Journal.

The CIA and another unnamed agency are reportedly still undecided.

At the same time, we might also conclude that respectable opinion is beginning to entertain the idea that the panic was manufactured by public health officials who were fully aware of what they were doing. Recent revelations suggest that this was the case in both the US and the UK. In the UK,

Matt Hancock wanted to “deploy” a new Covid variant to “squeeze the pants off” the public and ensure they comply with lockdown, leaked news from The Telegraph has revealed.

. . . Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, said that “the fear/guilt factor” was “vital” to “boost messaging” during the third national lockdown in January 2021.

The previous month, Matt Hancock, then Health Secretary, appeared in a message to suggest that a new strain of Covid that had recently emerged would help prepare the ground for the looming lockdown by scaring people to comply.

In almost so many words, these officials agreed that the way to influence the public was to incite panic. In the US, Dr Fauci commissioned an academic paper using his power to approve research funding and then used the paper he'd commissioned to support his official line on the lab leak theory:

New emails uncovered by House Republicans probing the COVID-19 pandemic reveal the deceptive nature of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

They show he “prompted” or commissioned — and had final approval on — a scientific paper written specifically in February 2020 to disprove the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.

Eight weeks later, Fauci stood at a White House press conference alongside President Donald Trump and cited that paper as evidence that the lab leak theory was implausible while pretending it had nothing to do with him and he did not know the authors.

What's changed? Matt Hancock was UK health minister, apparently equivalent to Dr Fauci in his influence, from 2018 to 2021. He had a role in starting the panic, but he left office well before the panic began to subside in mid-2022. On the other hand, Dr Fauci didn't retire from all his public roles until the end of 2022, while his boss, Francis Collins, retired as director of the US National Institutes of Health at the end of 2021. Both Fauci and Collins appear to have been in full agreement on how to handle issues like the lab leak theory, and records have already shown that together, they closely coordinated the COVID strategies of the public health estabilshment.

It's likely that the Overton Window shifted so quickly in the US, if not in the UK, due to the narrow Republican win in the 2022 midterms, though the retirements of both Fauci and Collins, as well as the difficulty Dr Rochelle Walensky had in establishing a credible public profile, also enabled the shift. Thus we have a Republican House leader stating flat out opinions that only weeks before would have been unacceptable:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said Sunday he wants to get to the bottom of one "fundamental question" concerning the ongoing investigation into the origins of the COVID-19: pandemic: Why was Dr. Anthony Fauci trying to hide the narrative that the coronavirus was leaked from China's Wuhan Institution of Virology?

. . . "With this virus, they have told us all kinds of things that turned out to be false," said Jordan. "They told us it didn't come from a lab, now it looks like it sure did because the Department of Energy, FBI, everyone says it came from a lab. They said it wasn't gain-of-function research, but it sure looks like it was. They said it wasn't our tax dollars used at that Wuhan Institute of Virology, yes, they were. Then they told us the vaccinated couldn't get it, couldn't transmit it, there was no such thing as natural immunity, so time and time again they told us things that were not accurate."

In June 2021, Forbes reported,

“Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” Fauci said Wednesday. “All of the things I have spoken about, consistently, from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science. Sometimes those things were inconvenient truths for people.”

Fauci is no stranger to criticism. The nation’s leading infectious disease official was a frequent target of former President Donald Trump, who called Fauci “a disaster” and floated the idea of firing him. “People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” Trump told reporters in October.

Indeed, Fauci said at the time the idea of firing him and putting him in jail was "totally preposterous".

WATCH: Dr. Anthony Fauci says growing Republican attacks on him are "painfully ridiculous." #MTPDaily

Dr. Fauci: "People want to fire me or put me in jail for what I've done. Mainly, follow the science. ... It's preposterous. Totally preposterous." pic.twitter.com/Koq10aIajF

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) June 9, 2021

But times are changing. As Ed Morrissey wrote in the Hot Air link I cited yesterday,

[T]he conclusion that COVID-19 leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology sets up an accountability tree that threatened those in power during the pandemic. NIH chief Francis Collins reversed the previous ban on gain-of-function (GOF) research on pathogens over the prophetic warnings against it from the Cambridge Working Group. That decision by Collins in December 2017 allowed funding to flow through the NIH and NIAID headed by Anthony Fauci to groups like the Eco Health Alliance, which funded the Wuhan lab — even while the State Department warned the next year that their Level 4 biosafety practices were “sloppy,” and also predicted disaster as the Cambridge Working Group had in 2014.

. . . [T]he people who made those choices avoided accountability for them, and were protected by news organizations, social-media platforms, and the government’s law enforcement and scientific bureaus by suppressing any questions about it.

What's interesting is that we aren't looking at new facts at all. Much of the information on the Wuhan lab has been available since before the COVID panic began. The question is how and why relevant information was suppressed and public panic was stoked -- and questions on whether people should have been fired, and whether people should still be sent to jail, are a lot less preposterous.

On the other hand, if Trump was saying in October 2022 that he should have fired Fauci, it's worth asking him again why he didn't.

Cat Prohibitionism And The COVID Moral Panic

As I reflected on yesterday's post about the deliberations in the UK over rounding up everyone's pet cat, it suddenly occurred to me that cat prohibitionism isn't a new phenomenon. There's been a long-term movement in the UK that insists that pet cats kill songbirds, which is thought to be something that must be curbed if not halted entirely, but more recently, a body of literature has grown in the US that insists that pet cats are an environmental hazard. At the link,

Free-ranging domestic cats Felis catus, from owned pets to feral cats, impact biodiversity through predation, fear effects, competition, disease and hybridization. Scientific knowledge regarding these impacts has recently increased, making it timely to assess the role of nature conservation legislation in this connection.

. . . Many national authorities around the world are currently required, under international law, to adopt and implement policies aimed at preventing, reducing or eliminating the biodiversity impacts of free-ranging domestic cats, in particular by (a) removing feral and other unowned cats from the landscape to the greatest extent possible and (b) restricting the outdoor access of owned cats.

Factors that can influence or impair the application of these obligations include considerations of feasibility, scientific uncertainty, the interests of cat owners and the (perceived) interests of domestic cats themselves. Even if such factors may to some extent explain why many authorities have hitherto failed to take effective action to address the threats posed by free-ranging domestic cats, from a legal perspective these factors provide little ground for justifying non-compliance with international wildlife law.

Although this particular link dates from February 2020, just as the COVID panic was starting, this link from 2015 says,

Free-ranging domestic cats are an environmental disaster. They may be the most destructive invasive species, the “single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for U.S. birds and mammals” according to a study (pdf) co-authored by scientists at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. These authors found that domestic cats annually kill from 1.4-3.7 billion birds and 6.9-20.7 billion mammals in the U.S.

For radical environmentalists, a world without domestic cats would be a big improvement, the only obstacle to which would be legions of cat ladies that would make an effective solution unfeasible, at least in the short term. But enlightened public policy, just as it can eliminate environmental hazards like SUVs and gas stoves, requires only deliberation and fortitude in its implementation.

Yesterday we saw the testimony of Lord Bethell, a former deputy health minister in Her Majesty's government, that it was at least briefly considered that all pet cats in the UK be rounded up, ostensibly because they might carry COVID, but it's hard to avoid thinking that, COVID or not, it would be a good idea just because. After all, feral cats are an invasive species, but the problem isn't just feral cats, because not all pet cats are indoors-only, not all pet cats are spayed or neutered, and pet cats can create feral cats just like that. So round up all the cats. Check with your local animal control office for the day you must turn yours in, or we'll come for her. Past that date, harboring a cat wird schwer bestraft.

The problem is that cats aren't the only species that thrives around humans, and not just pets. Raccoons. rats, and possums thrive on human trash, as do crows and ravens in suburban areas. Lots of bird species eat seeds and fruit from lawns, gardens, and fields. Mice live in barns. And from a radical environmentalist standpoint, humans themselves are an invasive species. and even if we can't exterminate them all, the theory is that the planet has already far exceeded its capacity. An effective solution to that problem is unfeasible in the short term.

But hey, getting rid of all the cats is a good start. If the authorities can stir up a good panic, the short-term feasibility barrier might be overcome. After all, even the cat ladies are huddled in their homes in fear of the virus, right? This Ed Morrissey piece at Hot Air is a pretty good status check on the current phase of the morning after phase of the COVID moral panic, and it concludes,

The government and the media establishment weren’t interested in science. They were interested in compliance. And they imposed on us exactly what Thompson correctly identifies as an anti-science regime in which priors are never re-evaluated, conclusions never questioned, and the higher functionaries are protected from any criticism or dissent. That isn’t science; it’s a religious cult with white lab coats. And all of these institutions that are supposed to serve the people turned into its enforcement arm instead, a mass of corruption that the media still won’t address.

In some ways, the whole COVID episode was an experiment in feasibility. It sounds as though in the UK, certain feasibilities were entertained that might piggyback on the manufactured COVID crisis, but at least for now, however close the call may have been, they were quietly dropped. I very much doubt that the people who wanted those things done will drop them for good, though.

It Could Have Been A Lot Worse

Via Instapundit,

THIS ERA WILL BE LOOKED BACK ON AS ONE OF MASS HYSTERIA AND OFFICIAL INCOMPETENCE: The U.K. Briefly Considered Killing All Pet Cats Early in the Pandemic.

To be fair, that’s only because it was an era of mass hysteria and official incompetence.

Plus: “The revelations have sparked astonishment from some on social media, with users sharing images of their own cats and vowing they would have put up a fight.” Meh. Most of them would have gone along. Many would have bragged about their compliance and shamed those who resisted.

The link is to a story in TIME:

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when little was known about the virus, the U.K. government briefly considered asking the public to exterminate every cat amid fears that the pets could spread the disease.

Lord Bethell, a former deputy Health Minister from 2020 to 2021, revealed the news Wednesday during an interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News.

. . . Bethell added in the Channel 4 News interview that there was a moment where evidence suggested there was merit in taking the extraordinary measure but it was investigated and ultimately dismissed.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, animals do not appear to play a significant role in spreading COVID-19 to humans, but cases of animals have been documented and most of them were “infected after contact with people with COVID-19.”

I posted not long ago about the hospital ships sent to New York and Los Angeles that, with the field hospitals that were sent as well, remained mostly empty and unused for weeks until they were quietly recalled. I noted that this was during the early days of the panic, stoked by the Imperial College London model of COVID spread that was almost immediately discredited -- but it nevertheless served as the justification for continued lockdowns, closure of houses of worship, shutdown of businesses, schools, playgrounds, beaches, and the rest, for which the talking heads are only now reluctantly and tardily acknowledging there was never medical justification.

Thus it would have been only a very small step for Dr Fauci to have convinced President Trump that indeed, all cats would need to be euthanized, and Drs Fauci, Birks, and assorted other stooges in lab coats would have stood in a line at his shoulder nodding their heads in agreement. Then for all I know, the cat owners would have complained that dogs weren't included in the extermination order, and after days of public kerfuffle, dogs would have had to be rounded up as well, with Dr Fauci insisting we follow the science.

And Trump would have been on board.

This is one reason I'm skeptical of a Trump reboot. He was the one responsible for ordering the hospital ships and endorsing the national lockdowns, and he didn't utter a peep when "15 days to slow the spread" lasted for months. Someone at some point needs to ask him what he should have done in hindsight, and there's no question that even without the benefit of hindsight, Gov DeSantis maintained a much saner public policy perspective as events unrolled. Trump let himself be bullied by Fauci and Birx, two unlikely figures, and my instinct is that this severely diminished his stature in advance of the 2020 election.