And in five minutes, Kennedy put paid to the now-infamous quote from Dr. Fauci earlier this week.
Oh, you didn’t hear this one?
“A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science because all of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science,” Fauci said Wednesday on MSNBC. “People want to fire me or put me in jail for what I’ve done — namely, follow the science.”
Kennedy wasn’t having much of that, and what came next was absolutely brutal.
1. “Dr. Fauci Needs to Cut the Crap.”
We’ve been building up to this, through weeks of confrontations in congressional hearings, releases of emails and other documents and scientific studies making a liar out of a man who not long ago was treated as the deity of public health bureaucrats (and still is, in some rapidly declining circles).
It just took Kennedy, who has built a reputation as the most quotable member of the Senate for his various Twain-esque witticisms but who implants some quite incisive real points within them, to put it all together. His Hannity appearance thoroughly debunked Fauci’s narrative, which clobbered him as the father of the Wuhan virus without making the explicit accusation.
All that’s left is for Fauci to bleed out. And he will. The Biden administration wants to cling to him in hopes the furor will boil over, and that’s a fatal mistake. All it’s going to take is someone pointing a few things out to the black community, for example, which saw a disproportionate number of its members die from a virus Fauci helped to fund, and while Fauci dismissed hydroxychloroquine as an effective treatment when study after study shows it worked and his own emails show that he knew, and it’s going to be pretty damned impossible to carry him much further.
2. The PRO-SPEECH Act Won’t Pass, But It Ought To Be a Rallying Cry
In another example of some rumblings of instability around the government/tech/corporate/cultural edifice, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and a few others on the Senate Commerce Committee put out a piece of legislation with a cute name. The Promoting Rights and Online Speech Protections to Ensure Every Consumer Is Heard (PRO-SPEECH) Act seeks to “prohibit Big Tech from engaging in unfair, deceptive, or anti-competitive practices that limit or control online speech.”
Wicker and the Republicans on the committee put this out Thursday:
“The big social media companies continue to abuse their market power by censoring content, suppressing certain viewpoints, and prioritizing favored political speech,” said Wicker. “My bill would put safeguards in place to preserve internet freedom, promote competition, and protect consumers from these blatantly biased practices. It is time for Congress to act to ensure the internet can be an open forum where diverse views are expressed.”
The PRO-SPEECH Act would:
Preserve consumers’ ability to access lawful content, applications, services, or devices that do not interfere with an internet platform’s functionality or pose a data privacy or data security risk to a user;
Prohibit internet platforms from taking any actions against users based on racial, sexual, religious, partisan, or ethnic grounds;
Prohibit large internet platforms from blocking or discriminating against competing internet platforms by declaring such actions presumptively anti-competitive;
Require an internet platform to disclose to the public accurate information regarding the platform management practices, performance characteristics, and commercial terms of service of any app store, cloud computing service, operating system, search engine, or social media network it owns; and
Authorize the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the Act under Section 5 of the FTC Act notwithstanding any other provision of law.
It’s good stuff, and honestly it ought to be a bipartisan bill.
This is the kind of legislation the GOP should be able to take to the public and say, “The corporate goons at these Big Tech companies want to make America like China, but you don’t want that. Help us get a governing majority, and we’ll use legislation like this to rein them in.”
Of course, our fledgling little social media app The Speakeasy, which we’ll talk a bit more about below, is in full compliance with the spirit of Wicker’s bill. Check it out here if you want, and be of good cheer since it’s very PRO-SPEECH.
3. The Root Causes of Kamala Harris
Tucker Carlson, who has abjectly eviscerated Vice President Kamala Harris all week, isn’t the only one letting her have it. After a week like this, the men and women behind the Joe Biden curtain are probably scratching their heads and wondering what they’re going to do when Biden’s cognitive state becomes so deficient that they can’t prop him up anymore.
Because America isn’t going to put up with a President Kamala Harris for very long. Not if this week’s cataclysmic trip to Guatemala is any indication of what she can do.
Everything about Harris this week has been wrong. She began it with a bizarre interview with NBC’s Lester Holt in which she repetitiously claimed, “We’ve been to the border,” only to be interrupted when Holt pointed out that “You haven’t been to the border.” She then dismissed that by saying she hasn’t been to Europe, either — which didn’t convey a message that going to the border isn’t important but rather that she comes from a provincial and incomplete worldview and isn’t fit to serve as a world leader.
Remember, this is the woman Biden’s handlers put in charge of the border, and she still hasn’t been there.
Instead, she leapfrogged the border and went to Guatemala. She said she was going there to address the “root causes” of the cascade of illegal immigrants coming through our southern border.
Everybody knows what the root causes are. The countries to the south of our border are poorer, less safe, more corrupt, and less free than we are, and the administration Harris serves has signaled to the people living in those countries that our border is wide open and that they’ll be taken care of with free health care and welfare payments if they come here.
Put those things together and we’re now being invaded by the world’s poor, which is exactly what the American Left wants. They think it’s a matter of time before they can make all those illegal immigrants Democrat voters and essentially replace the current electorate with one that likes them better.
Harris thinks the people who run those countries in Central America are as unsophisticated as those prospective new Democrat voters swimming across the Rio Grande. But they proved her wrong this week. She was greeted with protesters and politically incorrect “Trump Won” signs when she landed in Guatemala City, and Guatemala’s president Alejandro Giammattei told Fox News’ Sara Carter in an interview that “this border crisis is one of your own making. Don’t put the blame on us.”
Giammattei understands that if you guard your border people won’t come across it, and if you don’t, they will. He’s a man without much time for equine scatology from Willie Brown’s old mistress.
Then Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who has gotten very good at dropping truth bombs on the administration, really let her have it in a Laura Ingraham Show appearance.
“You know, Laura, Kamala Harris didn’t have to go all the way to Guatemala and Mexico to find the root causes of this border crisis because they’re not there,” he said. “The root causes are in the White House.”
The Left loves to talk about “root causes” rather than address problems. It’s what they do with crime, for example — claim you’re addressing the “root causes” of crime when those aren’t complicated — some people think it’s easier to be a criminal than a law-abiding citizen, usually because they see left-wing policies proving out the case, and so they act accordingly.
And the illegal aliens see that it’s easier to come to America illegally than wait their turn as immigrants or to fight to make their home country livable, and so they act accordingly.
You don’t have to be a genius to see this. You just have to be a bit smarter than a moron. Kamala Harris thinks everyone is a moron but her, and that’s very off-putting whether you’re a Guatemalan pol or a swing-state American voter. The guess here is in a few years she’ll be talking about the “root causes” of President DeSantis or President Trump’s election in 2024, and those will involve lots of excuses.
4. The Suicide Squad
Perhaps it’s tempting for some people to see the presence of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley in the House of Representatives, rather than on some declining city’s school board or city council, and conclude America is on the rocks. The things coming out of their mouths resemble something out of Mike Judge’s unintended semi-documentary Idiocracy, and that’s disturbing.
But don’t assume all is lost. It turns out that even in the idiocracy (or perhaps more to the point, a kakistocracy) that is the modern Democrat Party, The Squad aren’t the sharpest tools in the drawer.
They’re at war with their own party, and it’s starting to look like the party bosses aren’t as afraid of them as they were a couple of years ago:
Members of the far-left “Squad” defended Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) on Thursday after a dozen of her Democrat colleagues condemned her for comparing the U.S. and Israel to the Hamas terrorist organization.
“Squad” frontwoman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), along with Reps. Cori Bush (D-MO), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), demanded a halt to the criticisms against Omar.
“Enough with the blackness and Islamophobia,” said Cori Bush, who’s like the Billy Preston to the Squad’s Fab Four.
But the 12 Democrats who had kicked up the fuss in the first place are all Jewish. And they “went there” because Omar had regaled the world with a pretty vicious dose of anti-Semitic content.
She isn’t fooling anyone, you know. And it’s getting harder for the Democrats to continue playing this double game where they act as though they’re edgy and woke taking up the Palestinian cause when to do so is to defend child murderers and terrorists against civilization. That might play on campus, but everywhere else it’s old and tired. And the grownups in that party, or at least those Democrats cynical and pragmatic enough to look at what the polls clearly tell them, are now telling the Squad to shut up.
But nobody tells these entitled morons to shut up. That only makes them squawk louder.
Let the civil war inside that party begin, and let there be no survivors.
5. Did We Mention The Speakeasy? Well, There’s More on That
We’ll close with some pretty cool news, which is that at The Speakeasy there’s a brand-new American Spectator Channel. There you’ll find links to lots of content from The American Spectator, cool things like Dan Flynn’s daily newsletter, podcasts, chats, and lots of other stuff. It’s a bit of a proof-of-concept exercise, because The American Spectator‘s channel is the first of many such offerings planned at the app (we’ve had a channel for my site The Hayride in the app for a while).
The new American Spectator channel is just getting started, and we’re very much open to suggestions for things you guys want to see in it. So come on in, download the app, and sign up, and make sure to join our channel!
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