For the past 15 months, the American people have been treated to the constant invocation of “science” by elected officials and supposed medical experts any time questions have been raised about the justification for lockdowns, mask mandates, and etc.
“Trust the science!” they automatically say in response, even though opinions among scientists have varied since the start of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., though one wouldn’t know that if they’d only read mainstream news publications like the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Even now, after the media’s sudden about-face on the Wuhan lab leak theory as well as the release of thousands of pages of Fauci emails from the early days of the pandemic – all of which further call into question the leadership of Fauci and others, the argument is still being made by the Usual Suspects that any questioning of what the “experts” say is “attacking science.”
In other words, shut up.
This very argument was made by Fauci during an appearance on Rachel Maddow’s program Friday night where predictably, she hit him with softball after softball, including introductory commentary that talked about his long career in government, his involvement in AIDS research, and the opposition he faced at the time from AIDS activists. Maddow also alleged people “appear to be mad at him for the fact that there’s an epidemic at all” and “mad at him for trusting expertise” and are upset because others supposedly “trust him to tell the truth and do the work.”
Here’s how her “questioning” of Fauci started, and his response:
Maddow: First of all, let me just ask if I’m being fair. Am I building you up to be thicker-skinned about this than you are? You’re actually worried about this new sort of re-upping of attacks on you?Fauci: Well, I’m concerned about that more because it’s really very much an attack on science, I think, Rachel. You know you spoke and I think accurately depicted the growing extraordinarily productive relationship that I had with the [AIDS] activists when they came to me with legitimate concerns that the federal government, the scientists, the regulatory enterprise, didn’t fully appreciate that you needed to involve them in everything you do because it was their lives that were at stake. So I did reach out to them. And it turned out to be an extremely productive relationship. They got my attention in a very theatrical, confrontative, iconoclastic way, but they were fundamentally good people. They were not anti-science.What is the thread going through, what’s happening now, is very much an anti-science approach. So that’s a big, big difference. I mean, it is what it is, I’m a public figure, I’m going to take the arrows and the swings, but they’re just, they’re fabricated.
Watch:
Um, no. Firstly, is it “an attack on science” when other scientists are raising questions? No, it isn’t. Also, are scientists supposed to be above reproach, unquestionable? No, they’re not. Imagine using the “this is an attack on science” excuse in the following scenario:
We’ve got problems—big problems—in this country when not just media outlets but elected officials and their “trusted” advisors like Fauci keep demanding people just trust them and stop asking questions, no matter the issue.
Where I come from, telling people to not ask questions and instead obey are big, flashing warning signs that encourage me to do just the opposite. I suspect Fauci’s more prominent critics, like Sens. Rand Paul and Tom Cotton, view things from a very similar perspective.
In other words, if Fauci thinks he’s going to shame his critics into going quietly into the night after his latest diatribe, he’s got another thing coming.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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