Posted on July 25, 2020

 

 

Starring Anthony Fauci

As Lonesome Rhodes

by

Daniel Clark

 

 

In the movie A Face in the Crowd, celebrity con man and political powerbroker Lonesome Rhodes, played by Andy Griffith, feels it's safe to say what he really thinks about his audience once he assumes the microphone is off. "You know what the public's like?" he says. "A cage full of guinea pigs. Goodnight, you stupid idiots. Goodnight, you miserable slobs." Only afterward does he learn that "those morons out there" had heard him, and that his spell over them had been broken. If there's any justice, the same thing should now be happening to Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The leading medical authority of the White House Coronavirus Task Force is enjoying a degree of fame that has created a conflict of interest, in that prolonging the coronavirus panic has become a means of maintaining his stardom. For that reason, it was unseemly that Fauci be invited to throw out the first pitch at this year's Major League Baseball opener, which he did (sort of), while wearing a cloth mask bearing a Washington Nationals logo. The biggest news he made that night was about his comically bad throw, which was as far off-target as most of his remarks over the past four months have been. By the next day, more attention was being paid to the far greater error he committed while watching the game from the upper deck.

Seated between his wife and another spectator, Fauci was seen yukking it up with his mask pulled down under his chin. When asked about it, he claimed he was only rehydrating himself, but one picture shows him with both hands on his phone, and another with his fingers tented like a scheming villain in a bad movie. In neither shot is a beverage present. Moreover, he had a whole empty section in which to take a hydration break, rather than sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with two other people.

Might this have been an excusable moment of absent-mindedness? Well, no. We know this because he did something similar during congressional hearings in late June. The instant the news cameras were shut off, Fauci pulled down his mask, not realizing there was still somebody recording him. Just like at the ballgame, once he assumed he was out of sight from us stupid guinea pigs, he saw no need to keep up the charade.

Remember that Fauci had initially told us that masks are ineffective against the coronavirus. Now he tells us that they're essential to combating it. This reason for this reversal is evident from a series of mid-March TV interviews in which he repeatedly said that it's a good thing to overreact. On ABC's This Week, he said, "if it looks like you're overreacting, you're probably doing the right thing." Here and elsewhere, he made a point of employing that buzzword without any prompting from the interviewer. Clearly, the message he wanted to drive home to the viewers was that panic is good. So to connect the dots, Fauci first said masks don't work, then he said it's good to panic, and then he said we should all wear masks.

Cloth masks are designed to screen out bacteria, which vary in size, but are always larger than viruses, often many, many times over. A coronavirus particle is 0.1 microns wide, or one-ten millionth of a meter. The spaces between the threads of a cloth mask tend to be 200-300 times larger than that. Expecting a cloth mask to contain the coronavirus is like trying to catch a fistful of ball bearings with a lacrosse stick.

This point has never been contradicted by Fauci or any of the other experts. They've simply taken an opposing rhetorical position, by telling us that wearing a mask is vitally important. How can that be, if what they used to say about the masks' inefficacy stands unrefuted?

This is how liberals, of which Fauci is surely one, have attempted to redefine science. The way they tell it, science is no longer a process by which conclusions are reached by interpreting data. Their conception of science is whatever the Royal Smart Person is willing to say on camera. Anyone who questions him is presumed to be living in the Dark Ages.

If the purpose of wearing a mask is to persuade us miserable slobs to overreact, then Fauci must conclude quite rightly that he is succeeding. Whether or not he actually follows the advice he prescribes for others must therefore be irrelevant in his mind. Except when he gets caught, that is.

 

 

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