Though Dr. Anthony Fauci perhaps fancies himself a god, he nonetheless had to accept that omnipresence would elude him and settle for mere media ubiquity. But even this has now changed, as the man whose last name means “jaws” has disappeared from mainstream media like a baby elephant seal down a Great White’s gullet.
It’s not because Ukraine is dominating the airwaves, either, as Fauci’s vanishing act predated the Russian invasion.
Filling in on Tucker Carlson Tonight Friday, guest host Will Cain noted this demotion. “Tony Fauci was everywhere, no matter what happened in America,” he said — “BLM riots, January 6, presidential election — Tony Fauci was still on television around the clock.”
For sure, the mainstream media made him a staple despite his ever-shifting positions (and perhaps because of them as it always provided a “new story”). In fact, Cain pointed out via a clip of Tucker Carlson’s commentary (expanded version of which is below), the diminutive doctor was worshiped as “a living god” in D.C., with politicians erecting little shrines to the Grand Mufti of Branch COVIDianism.
But no more. A ’90s TV show asked children, “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” but even she’s easier to find than Fauci now on mainstream media. In fact, the bureaucrat has been reduced to appearing on shows such as the “Woke AF Podcast” (the “F” actually does stand for the f-word), where two budding rocket scientists asked Fauci why we don’t we vaccinate bats instead of people. (Apparently, they still haven’t gotten the memo that the coronavirus likely emerged from the Wuhan lab.)
It all must be quite deflating for the, as many characterize him, “narcissistic” Fauci. But the doctor just can’t say no to a media invite unless it’s from someone who’ll actually ask tough questions. This is even as Democrat politicians now say no, tacitly, to him.
For example, Cain showed two side-by-side video captures from different time periods of Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.), erstwhile Branch COVIDian extraordinaire. They show Whitmer in the same room with the same background, except for one notable difference: The older capture shows a picture of Fauci prominently displayed to her right.
In the recent one, though, just like Stalin airbrushing fallen-from-commie-grace characters from history, it’s gone — poof.
So now it’s “two weeks to flatten Fauci’s ego,” as Cain put it (video below).
What’s not funny at all is why this is happening. Democrats have seen the polling for the November midterms and realized that their “woke” policies have them poised to take a shellacking. Hence did Joe Biden’s handlers have him sounding a bit like Trump at the State of the Union speech. Gone were the (Odd) Squad talking points, replaced with utterances about border security, how we have to “fund the police!” and once again build products in America (the MAGA hat was missing, though). And hence, also, have the Democrats decided to run from masking, vaccine mandates and passports, and all China virus restrictions various and sundry.
Some wondered how the leftists were going to effect this transition from COVID tyranny to post-COVID blarney without being held accountable for visiting on America scientifically obscurantist policies that wreaked economic, social, psychological, and health-oriented havoc. But apparently they’re just going to tout Omicron’s relative mildness and past policies’ purported effectiveness, claim victory, and then distract us with the Ukraine war (which is a big deal — but it’s also a convenient deal.)
That is, until and unless they retain power in November, in which case they can use the regular winter season respiratory illness phenomenon to resume the scam.
More interesting, however, than Fauci’s (temporary?) fall is how not just the whole political sphere, but also the entire mainstream media, act as a monolith in freezing the doctor out as much as Star Trek’s Borg “Collective” ever could. My, it’s almost as if they get marching orders.
Apropos to this, citizens with memories a bit longer than demagogues might like may remember the JournoList scandal in 2010. It had emerged that 400 left-wing journalists, academics, and others had been meeting since early 2007 in a private Google Groups forum — and shaping the news was part of the discussion. Put differently, they were behaving like gangsters agreeing on what concocted tale they’d tell the authorities.
JournoList was shut down after the scandal broke, but this didn’t alter the establishment collective’s character. In fact, that it is a collective is the point: Not very much has to be stated explicitly when all members constitute a hive mind, bound together by simpatico passions and ideology. They’ll all act in essentially the same way, quite naturally, because they’re as conformist politically as they boast about being diverse superficially.
This doesn’t mean upper-echelon Democrats and media moguls don’t communicate. One could just imagine Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer casually remarking to ABC president Kim Goodwin on the cocktail-party circuit, “Yeah, we’re de-emphasizing COVID — Fauci’s job is done. We’ve moved on.” That’s all that need be said.
Meanwhile, some theorize that Fauci’s days at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of which he’s been a part since 1968, are numbered. He’s 81 years old now, so the case for new blood can easily be made. So he may find out that, as with the Soviets’ dispatching of Leon Trotsky, there’s no more honor (or loyalty) among leftists than there is among thieves.
