The Week in Review

Eli Lake Takes Apart St. Fauci

An honest leftist is like an intellectually modest Jesuit: unicornish. But only “ish.” Occasionally, you find one, like Eli Lake.

And Eli knows Fauci was the bandleader of our country's wicked and stupid Covid response.

This is a man who privately told colleagues that he had doubts about restrictions on everyday life during the pandemic, while assuring the public that the new rules that shut down schools, closed restaurants, and mandated an experimental vaccine were all based on the best available science.

Pleading the Fifth Won’t Spare Fauci from the Truth

He claims his Senate hearing was a witch hunt designed to entrap him. But his record convicts him on its own, writes Eli Lake.

The Free PressEli Lake

Nellie Bowles piles on. She's no leftist, but I struggle to call the lesbian mom of two a "conservative." She ain't exactly Orestes Brownson, including, fortunately, in the humor arena where she excels:

[W]hen you see lockdowns in the context of a power-drunk elf getting turned on by the idea of canceling Easter—he’s typing so fast he can barely keep up—you can understand better what we all lived through. For him, the pleasure was canceling things, especially things he felt gave power to the right (sports, family gatherings, religious events). We can never forget the freaks who gain power in a centrally controlled system.

That last line is worth a brain tattoo. Ink it on there: central government spawns freaks like Hollywood spawns perverts.

The economics of keeping tribe members in their respective silos continues

It's too bad none of this is going to reach the Left. They can't possibly trust radical fascists like Eli Lake and Nellie Bowles, right?

Hudge and Gudge 2026

Please, repeat and repeat and repeat: big government is for big people. If you're rich and powerful, you can use big government to get more money and power. If you're not, well, then intrusive government becomes the biggest parasite in your life, the thing that should send you to your Fear Journal every evening just so you can get to sleep without morphine.

It is not a coincidence that socialism is more popular among people with high social and educational capital and less popular among the working class––both cohorts understand who is best able to game centrally planned systems.