August 3, 2026

August 2, 2026

JOHN LUCAS: Negotiating with the Iranian scorpions. I think Trump is stringing them along, the way they’ve traditionally strung U.S. negotiators along. He knows they’ll break any agreement.

Posted at 9:39 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

TOM ELLIOTT: The Fauci Files: A Megalomaniacal Egomaniac Milking Covid for Everything It’s Worth.

Page 13 of the diary covers two important events from January 31, 2020.

The first is that Fauci is handed the mic to serve as Covid’s point person. He writes:

“White House is now fully convinced that I be the science/health spokesperson for the USG. Bob Redfield just does not come across very weel. He takes forever to say something and it is usually wondering. This drives the WH and HHS comms people crazy and so they are putting me out on all the requests.”

The director of the CDC was not sidelined for being wrong, but for being slow on camera. The selection criterion was not who’s the most credible scientist, but who performs best on TV.

Redfield’s own account of that period, given under oath in 2023, is worth recalling. Asked why he had been excluded from the origins discussions, he pointed to ideological differences: “Because it was told to me that they wanted a single narrative, and that I obviously had a different point of view.”

The second thing happens after he gets back to his office. Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust calls, sounding “very concerned,” with Kristian Andersen of Scripps conferenced in and Eddie Holmes in the background from Sydney. Fauci writes down what they told him:

“The people on the phone felt that the mutations around the furine cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally since it would require an evolutionary ‘jump’ that they found nowhere in bat isolates.”

Deliberate insertion, they said, followed by release — accidental release being the most likely.

The next day Fauci convened a larger call of twelve experts in epidemiology. His entry characterizing it (p. 14) is the probably the single most consequential paragraph in the whole diary. There was “not total agreement about the likelihood of deliberate insertion,” he writes. Ron Fouchier was certain it could have arisen naturally and said they shouldn’t waste time. Christian Drosten agreed with Fouchier. And then, in Fauci’s own words:

“the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible.”

Ten of 12 thought it must be manmade. And he admits the person driving the zoonotic theory perspective, Ron Fouchier, was “expected of him since he was the original GOF [gain of function] person with Yoshi Kawaoka.”

* * * * * * * *

The most revealing aspect of these pages are how Fauci worked with compliant “journalists” to shape media narratives. On July 26, 2020, while watching Brett Giroir — the assistant secretary for health and a fellow member of the White House task force — be interviewed on CNN’s State of the Union, Fauci writes that Giroir was “talking bullshit about testing with Jake pressing him.” Then (p. 263): “I gave Jake some questions to ask him.”

So, a senior federal official is trying to undermine a rival federal official, using a CNN anchor as his conduit.

Related: RFK, Jr. DESTROYS CNN’s Dana Bash Over Media Handling of Covid, Fauci.

UPDATE: What the Fauci Diary Reveals About Washington. “April 17, 2021 Dana Bash sent me a text: ‘I just watched the whole Jordan thing. Again, you’re a better man than I…. As our friend Wolf Blitzer said to me yesterday – no one would have blamed you if you said simply ‘Mr. Jordan, go f— yourself’’ Presumably, this referred to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio. Also, presumably, Fauci refrained from telling him this.”

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

THEY’RE PLAYING FOR KEEPS:

Posted at 6:23 pm by Stephen Green

HEH, INDEED:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

PEGGY NOONAN: Anthony Fauci Unmasks Himself. His diaries make clear that he saw the pandemic less as a historic emergency than a media opportunity:

Looking back on the public-leadership aspect of the pandemic—while we were in the trauma and fear of the first months, while we were banging pots at 7 p.m. to thank hospital workers, and scientists were zooming to find out more about treatments and protocols, and earnest medical officials were showing up on cable explaining what they believed to be true—a lot of people tried to do a lot of good things. But it all became pretty political pretty fast, pretty insidery and groupthinky, and pretty smug as the previously obscure became famous overnight.

It all came together and yielded a little societal Chernobyl.

The reactor blew, causing a calamity. The politicians lied and couldn’t be trusted, the bureaucrats lied and couldn’t be trusted, the government scientists lied about the data in front of their eyes, the national press was a propaganda machine. As much as anything, Chernobyl contributed to the toppling of the Soviet Union.

Looking back on the Covid crisis, a lot of professionals were trusted beyond the point they deserved. So were many politicians. As people on the ground in America rose up against lockdowns, closed schools, mask mandates, closed churches, they were often unheard, or heard slowly, reluctantly and disrespectfully. The medical and scientific establishment didn’t seem to be a part of the public anymore, but handling the public.

And by the end, a lot of people thought they couldn’t trust the politicians and couldn’t trust the scientists.

My fear is that next time, and there likely will be a next time, regular people will think: There’s no one to trust. We’re on our own.

That won’t be a good thing.

Noonan writes accurately that Fauci’s diary “screams Seven Deadly Sins—he gave in to his pride. But it also makes the history in which he took such a big part look banal and inhuman: Your historic emergency is his media opportunity.” But she writes little about the media that made Fauci such a superstar in the first place. In February she wrote a “A Lament for the Washington Post” that concluded:

I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it. Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information. Reliable information—a way to get it, and then to get it to the public. That is what journalism is, getting the information.

But of course, as Mary Katharine Ham responded, something bad did happen on a national scale, and now we can measure how superstar journalists responded both in their public performance and how they were eager to be Fauci’s lapdogs:

Tweet concludes, “I delivered the AJC at 4 am every day of my freshman year of college. I’m sad we don’t have local Metro dailies now instead of the Columbia Journalism School-to-NYT pipeline, which gives almost no journo any exposure to normal people. But acting like these institutions haven’t EARNED distrust is just missing the story.”

And the DNC-MSM are still thrilled to protect Fauci. We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which RFK Jr. is a voice of sanity: CNN Got Absolutely Wrecked By RFK Jr. Over Their COVID Coverage Today.

Related:

Posted at 4:53 pm by Ed Driscoll