Rachel Maddow on Fauci

People actually listen to this woman??

Just ahead of today’s release of Dr. Fauci’s memoir (which I won’t be linking; you can find it I’m sure if you so desire), Rachel Maddow took to her show on MSNBC to frame Dr. Fauci’s “heroism” in light of his bravery in standing up to the big, bad orange man. Here is the clip:

Maddow: Dr. Fauci exemplifies the Trump Republican war on expertise

She opens with a monologue about how Big Orange is likely to be a dictator if elected, which I won’t bother summarizing; that opening statement exists merely for the segue into how under Big Orange, there will be “no room for subject matter experts” such as Fauci. The segment on Fauci starts with Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene telling him in a congressional hearing that he is guilty of crimes against humanity and that he belongs in prison. Maddow’s somber analysis is that “In the Trump era, in the Republican party, this is what it’s like to be the nation’s most esteemed public health official.” I wonder if Ms. Maddow is aware that criticisms of Fauci are not limited to those who vote red. Given RFK Jr’s involvement, she must be, but that fact is not convenient to the narrative she is pushing here.

She then moves on to discuss his work on the HIV AIDS fairy tale, including quotes from his book about how horribly mistreated he was and how he got so much hate mail from “homophobes” and “white supremacists.” I find it hard to believe that those are the only types of people sending him hate mail. He then discusses the hate mail he got during Ebola, and, of course, the “torrent of hate mail” he got during Covid.

There is also a short clip of Alex Jones being unhinged, as he is wont to do, then Maddow proceeds to review Fauci’s book, and by extension his legacy, in the most sycophantic manner possible. She laments that even now, two years after Fauci’s retirement, people are going after him even more aggressively than ever, because, in her words, “one of the things they [Fauci detractors] are going after, that they are trying to destroy [..] in their revolutionary war against the American system of government. It is not that they disagree with him. It is not that they misunderstand. It is that he represents expertise; authority, earned by expertise. The way we sort of short hand that in life is that he’s a person that knows what he’s talking about. And that is toxic to their political movement. And that cannot be allowed to stand.”

Oh good LORD. No, Ms. Maddow, you have this all the way backwards. Most of us that have known the truth about Fauci for some time absolutely do disagree with him. We disagree with how he handled HIV AIDS, which set the disastrous precedent not only for the AZT and Truvada disasters, but for the Covid pandemic and its bungling as well. The absolute decimation of clinical endpoints in trials in favor of “surrogate markers,” the abandonment of placebo controls, and the fast-tracking of toxic “drugs into bodies” happened as a direct result of Fauci’s decisions, and the decisions of others, and the results have been disastrous, from AIDS to Covid. Fauci is at best the United States’ answer to Neil Ferguson. They both certainly oversaw the unnecessary abuse and killing of animals.

She then reads an excerpt about a time Fauci thought that anthrax had been sent to him in some “fan mail.” It’s vaguely ridiculous, and I won’t summarize it, although I’m sure it was horrifying and I almost feel sorry for him. The second half of this segment is essentially a defense of the Fauci/Birx Covid management model. There is a dig at Trump’s scientific knowledge, in which Maddow claims he doesn’t know the difference between a treatment and a vaccine. (Neither did the public health authorities, including Fauci, that falsely claimed the mRNA shots to be true vaccines, I might point out.) This part of the show goes on for a very long time, and its intention is obvious, and we all know what it is.

She concludes with the ominous statement: “Dr. Anthony Fauci is in the bullseye of the Trump movement.” “This is a movement that cannot abide public health expertise at all.”

Again, no, Ms. Maddow, this is not the case. We do not criticize Fauci because we want to destroy the American system of government. We do not criticize Fauci because we support Trump—many of us, including me, are not planning on voting for him. We do not criticize Fauci because we fear expertise—to the contrary, we look at his reign over the NIAID as a horrifying case study of how a man who is effectively a medical con artist with middling intelligence has managed to so effectively brainwash a huge portion of our population. We criticize him not because he represents expertise but the opposite; he represents how dangerous it is to give any one man so much power—which was, ironically, the point Maddow was trying to make about Trump.