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Back in 2024 and even well into 2025, people were saying to me “Yeah, might be bad for those who work on vaccines and at NIAID…” with the implication that WE—other kinds of scientists—would be ok. But that’s not how fascist attacks work. Fauci is just a vehicle for 1/

a media event. He’s just Scientist Emmanuel Goldstein for today — for the Trumpists to deflect and distract from the corruption, to be an enemy to gin up anger at. en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Solidarity is needed. The attacks on vaccines and public health are coming for the rest of us eventually, just as they came for asbestos science, smoking science, and climate science before vaccines. Fixing democracy requires fighting against the attacks on science. And the converse. /end

“The political purpose of the Two Minutes Hate is to allow the citizens of Oceania to vent their hatred towards a political enemy. In redirecting the participants' emotions away from the Party's governance of Oceania…” Yes. Hard not to see an effort to redirect attention in Rand Paul’s hrng today.

The comparison is imprecise. But Orwell was right that finding trumped up “enemies” to blame is a way authoritarians try to distract from their own failed policies and governance. And Fauci is a trumped up target—which has worked well for them.

Ok THIS is very much a straight distraction. The Republican elite wants to destroy public schools full stop—via adding layer after layer of testing, religious (unconstitutional) charters, vouchers, defunding, destroying the Dept of Ed… I could go on. And they’re trying to hide the ball with this.