August 2, 2026

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

AND THEN HE SHOUTED, CAMBRIDGE IS MAGA COUNTRY! Cambridge Can — but Evidently Won’t — Catch Jason Arday.

Arday is one of the U.K.’s newest academic superstars, a true success story as the youngest black scholar ever to become full professor at the University of Cambridge, Britain’s second-best institution of higher learning. His life story is truly impressive, an inspiring tale of a man rising to a prestigious position from severe disadvantages in life — Arday claims to suffer from an autism so severe that he was entirely nonverbal until the age of eleven, and wholly illiterate until learning to read at the age of 18. Now, not only is he a national pseudo-celebrity, as a “high-functioning neurodivergent,” he’s at the top of the academic hierarchy.

The devastatingly thorough report by Nathan Cofnas, a scholar at Ghent University (and a former research fellow at Cambridge), summarizes Arday’s remarkable vault up the academic ladder after claiming to have achieved literacy only after he started attending Sixth Form:

Under the influence of a white high school teacher who “gave [him] agency,” Arday pursued higher education. After receiving a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University, he rocketed up the academic ladder as a scholar of racism, education, and inequality. In three years he went from senior lecturer at Roehampton (2018) to associate professor at Durham (2019) to professor at Glasgow (2021). Ivy League universities (plural) tried to recruit him, but he had his heart set on Oxford or Cambridge. In 2023, at age 37, he became the youngest black full professor in the history of Cambridge. He is one of the youngest people of any race to ever hold a chair professorship at Oxbridge.

But by gum, it gets even more inspiring than that. Arday also claims that before becoming a full professor at Cambridge, he raised over £5 million for charity. And built clean-drinking-water facilities for South American and African peasants. While becoming an ultra-marathoner who ran 600 miles in six days (only 50 miles short of the world record) — all without any formal documentation of said feat. He has a heartwarming memoir about his triumph over adversity, with the glurgy, quotidian title of Great and Unfortunate Things, due to be released on August 11. Is there anything this heroic autist can’t do?

As it turns out, the answer is scholarship. If something seems a little too good to be true about Arday’s life story — from nonverbal illiteracy to the halls of Cambridge — then perhaps that’s because it was. Arday may be a fabulist. But according to Cofnas, Arday quite clearly is a serial plagiarist, having stolen enormous chunks of others’ scholarly work — pages upon pages of it, usually almost verbatim — for his Ph.D. thesis. In academia, one’s thesis is essentially one’s professional calling card as a budding academic. Plagiarizing it was once a death penalty offense; just ask Claudine Gay.

And much like Gay, he apparently has kept on plagiarizing well into his (remarkably thin) academic career, up to and including seemingly stealing clinical data (in other words, interview responses) from others for his own pieces. He didn’t do the work himself — he simply rewrote someone else’s work; the approach leaves more time for marathoning, one supposes. Needless to say, the sort of academic work he is vulturing from others is itself largely worthless, which is its own irony — the inevitable decay of “remix culture,” imported into scholarship.

Even the Grauniad has spotted Arday veering into Jussie Smollett territory: Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor.

In an open letter to the government minister Jacqui Smith in July 2025, which outlined Arday’s experiences, he claimed to have been “threatened with a knife, physically assaulted and spat on; [had] rape and death threats being made to him and his family; bananas and bullets being posted to him via the university campus; and corrosive substances and mutilated animals sent to his family home”.

In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Arday claimed to have been confronted at his faculty building on two separate occasions by a masked man threatening to harm him if he did not resign, and evading detection both times. On the second occasion Arday said the intruder produced a knife and threatened him with it.

The Guardian understands that after Arday reported the first intrusion to the university, enhanced CCTV was placed in the faculty and a panic alarm was installed in his office. The professor said he hit the panic alarm during the second confrontation, but that no one responded. It should have triggered an alarm alerting the faculty’s security team, all of whom were present at the time of the alleged incident.

The intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Arday did not report either intrusion at the time, telling the Guardian that after the second incident he continued his working day and even conducted a PhD viva for a student less than two hours later.

He did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.

Arday confirmed in an interview with the Guardian that the “mutilated animals sent to his family home” mentioned in the open letter was a severed pig’s head, delivered in a large cardboard box to his parents’ home address in south London. He claimed to have intercepted the package and immediately thrown it away, only telling the police several months later.

In a subsequent interview he claimed the police investigated, checking with butchers in south London if they had sold a pig, eventually finding one that had sold a “whole hog” on the morning the head was left outside the family home.

When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said “that’s the kind of thing we’d remember”.

When the details Arday gave about the pig’s head investigation were checked by London’s Metropolitan police, the Guardian was told they were “categorically” incorrect and no investigation had taken place.

Arday had contacted the Met to lodge a complaint of harassment against Harris after his plagiarism allegations and, because he was based in Plymouth, the case was handed over to Devon and Cornwall police. Correspondence seen by the Guardian confirmed that the force declined to pursue a case against Harris.

Arday took no photographs of the bullet, the banana, the corrosive substance or the pig’s head. The only other people who saw any of the items were close family members, who told the Guardian Arday had shown them the bullet and the “poison”. Arday could produce no messages from the time in which he discussed any of the items with friends, family, colleagues or the police.

Exit quote: “When Arday was asked about his claims by the Guardian, he stood by them. ‘To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,’ he said. ‘Why would I lie?’ He would be jeopardising his career.”

UPDATE: I understand the “no enemies to the left” rule, but if you’re going to mention the pig’s head in the article’s, err, subhead, why bury those details so deeply into the article?

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

GOOD: A Fifth Circuit Case Could Jeopardize the Feds’ Commerce Clause Grip on Guns. “The court has agreed to rehear United States v. Squire en banc, reopening a major fight over whether Congress can use the Commerce Clause to criminalize firearm possession simply because a gun or ammunition once moved in interstate commerce. The Fifth Circuit’s rehearing order even drew a warning from Judge Stephen Higginson that the court had ‘welcomed the possibility’ of holding that Congress’ Commerce Clause power can’t support § 922(g).”

Posted at 4:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

MY DOC IS SUSPICIOUS OF THIS CHANGE: Considering statins? New US cholesterol guidelines may change your decision. “An estimated 21.5 million additional adults in the United States may now be eligible for statins under updated cholesterol treatment guidelines, according to a new study. The researchers aimed to estimate how many adults in the US would be considered eligible for statin therapy under the new 2026 blood cholesterol guidelines issued by the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology and nine partnering medical societies, compared with the previous 2018 guidelines.”

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IT’S A MYSTERY:

Posted at 1:53 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D PLANNED: A 4,000-year-old disease is on the rise in this state thanks to armadillos. “Leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, is an illness many often relegate to the history books. Florida, however, has recorded 17 infections this year as of July 18, according to state health data. Of the 174 cases recorded nationwide in 2025, 36 occurred in the state, including 27 that were contracted locally rather than abroad.”

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

“PAY ATTENTION,” YES:

Posted at 1:10 pm by Stephen Green

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:

Posted at 12:52 pm by Stephen Green

HEINLEIN’S “CRAZY YEARS” WEREN’T MEANT TO BE AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL:

Posted at 12:41 pm by Stephen Green

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

Posted at 12:05 pm by Stephen Green

I SUSPECT THIS IS LITERALLY TRUE:

Posted at 12:01 pm by Glenn Reynolds

LOOK AT HER EXPRESSION:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

HAHA:

Related:

Plus:

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds